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Submission + - Police arrest five over Anonymous attacks (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Five people have been arrested in the UK, accused of taking part in Anonymous' DDOS attacks in support of WikiLeaks. The five men — aged from 15 to 26 — are still being held by police for questioning. Met Police said the investigation was a collaborative effort between forces in the UK, EU and the US.

Submission + - Met Policarrest five Anonymous Wikileaks defenders (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by E5Rebel
E5Rebel writes: The five males, who range in age from 15 to 26, will be charged with offenses under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. The arrests were carried out by the Metropolitan Police's Police Central e-Crime Unit on Thursday morning. If convicted, each of the five could face up to 10 years in prison and a £5,000 fine.
News

Submission + - Trading systems not cause of 2008 crash - official (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: High speed trading systems were not the cause of the 2008 economic crash, according to the results of a two-year US government investigation .

“The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,” said a leaked copy of the report’s conclusions, seen by the New York Times. The investigations...
Intel

Submission + - Intel's Security 'Game-Changer': End Of Zero-Days? (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Computerworld on Tuesday that Intel is working on security technology that will stop all zero-day attacks. While he gave few details about it, he said he hopes the new technology will be released this year. 'I think we have some real breakthrough ideas about changing the game in terms of malware,' Rattner said. 'We're going to see a quantum jump in the ability of future devices, be them PCs or phones or tablets or smart TVs, to defend themselves against attacks.' He said it was 'radically different,' and not based on signatures. It will be hardware-based, but it's not clear if there is a software component. Analyst Dan Olds said that 'if they can pull this off, it would give them quite a competitive advantage vs. AMD.' Rattner said Intel researchers were working on the new security technology before it moved to buy McAfee. However, he said that doesn't mean that McAfee might not somehow be involved.
Java

Submission + - The future of Java - Oracle & inventor's dilem (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by E5Rebel
E5Rebel writes: Oracle and its close Java partners are in a classic "innovator's dilemma." It may take a decade, but the bottom-up innovation the open source community drives will find expression elsewhere, and smaller companies that Java's high-end capabilities do not serve well will gravitate toward a new "good enough" open platform — likely based on a combination of LAMP and HTML 5 open standards.
Interesting blog post from analyst group Forrester

Comment E5rebel (Score 1) 1

by E5Rebel (#34937932) Attached to: UK government chooses new head of IT
No matter how good the government CIO is, they have no real power. Who would believe that in 2011 people who can barely send an email have more control over billions of pounds worth of spending than people who understand business and IT...
Government

Submission + - UK government chooses new head of IT (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: Joe Harley, Director General of Corporate IT and CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions, is expected to become the new Government CIO after the departure of John Suffolk, ComputerworldUK has learned.

Although no announcement has been made, I understand that Harley will keep his job at the DWP while taking on the role of Government CIO. It will save the salary of outgoing Government CIO John Suffolk who earned about £205,000 last year. Harley is among the highest earning civil servants though he has taken a pay cut from about £260,000 a year in 2009/10 to about £248,000 now.

Senior civil servants deny that Harley will be a cut-price part-timer as Government CIO. They say that he’ll confront with flair, experience and determination the waste and unnecessary duplication in government IT and commodity applications — inefficiencies which have been highlighted repeatedly by Suffolk.
Announcements

Submission + - Tech salaries remain flat 2 years running (networkworld.com)

Submitted by jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: Tech workers pulled in an average of $79,384 last year, an increase of 0.7% over 2009. It was the "second straight year of nearly flat salaries," according to Dice.com, the online job site which surveyed nearly 20,000 tech pros in North America between Aug. 31 and Nov. 15. Silicon Valley is making a comeback, though, with average salaries approaching six figures. While overall tech salaries improved slightly, technology professionals just entering the field now can expect to make less than if they got their first jobs a few years ago. "For the second straight year, the average salaries of technology professionals with less than two years' experience have declined, and are six percent below their peak average wages in 2008," Dice said. Silicon Valley is a bright spot, with tech workers getting a 3% salary increase to $99,028, after a decline the previous year. Several fields within high-tech are offering average salaries in the six-figure range. Advanced business application programming, for example, clocks in at $105,887. But the most in-demand skills are Oracle; J2EE/Java; and C, C++, C#.
Government

Submission + - Private UK health records on sale for £4 (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: Tony Collins covers this sickening trade in the most intimate private data:

ITV1's Tonight programme revealed that undercover reporters were able to buy health records for as little as £4 each from a private hospital in London. The records had been processed by IT companies in India, said the ITV programme. It did not name any of the companies.

In a separate expose, the Sunday Times (paywall) reported last April that "the oeNHS is sending millions of patient records and confidential medical notes to India for processing despite a pledge by Labour that personal information would not be sent overseas."

It continued: "oeIt is the first time that databases of names, addresses and NHS numbers of patients have been sent abroad, along with private information about medical appointments."
Privacy

US Twitter Spying May Have Broken EU Privacy Law 342

Posted by samzenpus from the playing-nice-with-others dept.
Stoobalou writes "A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users' account details."
Open Source

Submission + - LSE delayed Linux system finally launches Feb 14 (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: The London Stock Exchange’s delayed Linux-based trading system has finally been given a go-live date of 14 February, for the exchange’s main cash markets.

The launch date announcement comes as the LSE put the highly-publicised December outage of the system — which already runs on its Turquoise anonymous trading venue — down to “human error”. It declined to give more details.
Businesses

Record Labels To Pay For Copyright Infringement 235

Posted by Soulskill from the of-pots-and-kettles dept.
innocent_white_lamb writes "Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. 'The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies "exploited" music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called "pending list" of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.'"
Government

Submission + - Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse (informationweek.com)

Submitted by matty619
matty619 writes: An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration which were deployed in 1979 may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half $Billion upgrade which won't be ready until 2015.
One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to the report. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center (NCC) — built in 1979 — as the SSA's "primary IT investment" in the next few years.
The agency has received more than $500 million so far to replace the outdated center, which is now so severely strained by an expanded workload over its time of operation that it may not be able to function by 2012, according to the report.
News

Submission + - BP oil spill IT systems lacked key alarms - US gov (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BP's monitoring IT systems on the failed Deepwater Horizon oil rig relied too heavily on engineers following complex data for long periods of time, instead of providing automatic warning alerts.

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