All posts by Paul Stradling

News

Tech News : Fewer Cookie Pop-Ups – But At What Cost?

A government Bill has laid out a new UK data protection regime (which diverges from EU regulations) and which the government says will ease the burden of compliance on businesses.

Data Reform Bill 

The government says that the ‘Data Reform Bill’, announced in this year’s Queen’s Speech, and outlined as part of London Tech Week, has been designed to:

– Strengthen the UK’s data protection standards while replacing ‘unnecessary’ paperwork to deliver around £1 billion in business savings.

– Modernise the Information Commissioner’s Office (the data regulator), so it can better help businesses comply with the law.

– Give tougher powers to crack down on nuisance calls.

– Minimise the number of annoying cookie pop-ups people see on the web.

– Give researchers more flexibility to conduct life-saving scientific research.

– Empower the UK to strike new data partnerships.

– Fuel the responsible usage of data for innovation by providing clearer definitions about how consent is obtained for research.

Diverging From The EU Data Laws 

Following Brexit, the UK introduced its own version of GDPR (UK GDPR) which essentially mirrored the EU’s GDPR. The EU recognised Britain’s standards in a process called adequacy, which enables the seamless flow of data to continue.

What Changed? 

Back in August 2021, the UK signified its intentions to diverge from the EU’s data protection model by saying that would reform the data rules it agreed as an EU member by adopting a “common sense” approach. This approach included trying to secure data partnerships with the United States and other nations.

This led to the EU Commission saying that it would closely monitor any developments to the UK’s rules in case the level of data protection became inadequate, and the adequacy decision needed to be “suspended, terminated or amended”.

The UK government has blamed its need to seek a change to its data regulations on a “lack of clarity” in the EU’s data regulation standards leading to “an over-reliance on ‘box-ticking’ to seek consent from individuals to process their personal data to avoid non-compliance” , resulting in a “one-size-fits-all approach”.

The UK has also now appointed a new Information Commissioner who is reported as saying that he shares the support and ambition of the reforms.

Criticism 

Although the UK government is pitching the Bill as a way to reduce costs and beaurocracy for businesses, it has nevertheless received some criticism. For example:

– The Law Society have said that: “The fundamental right to protection of an individual’s privacy is underpinned by broad international consensus that personal data belongs to the individual, not to businesses. Any perception that the scales may start to tip in favour of businesses being allowed to use personal data for wider reasons at the cost of respect for (and effective measures to preserve) that privacy runs the risk of the UK no longer being seen as a global leader in data protection”.

– Criticisms from the ICO challenging the idea that data privacy laws stifled innovation, saying: “It is crucial we continue to see the opportunities of digital innovation and the maintaining of high data protection standards as joint drivers of economic growth. Innovation is enabled, not threatened, by high data protection standards.” 

– Some commentators noted that no longer requiring businesses to appoint a data protection officer (DPO) or to conduct data protection impact assessments (DPIA) when developing new tools or services, appears to be less stringent and more of a laissez-faire approach.

– The Open Rights Group said that the Bill is “a natural product of poor proposals being discussed in a rigged consultation process”, and that “the Government are boldly taking the side of the abusers and the law-breakers: the UK Data Reform Bill will make it the default setting to spy on us, and your burden to opt-out of something you never wanted in the first place”. Also, Mariano Delli Santi, a data protection campaigner at Open Rights Group, said the proposals would “risk leading to a massive and expensive rupture with the EU, making data transfers costly for UK businesses, costing jobs during an economic downturn”. 

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

It was inevitable that Brexit would result in more changes to UK data regulations as time progressed. The government is keen to emphasise savings in costs and ‘red tape’ to businesses that the new Bill could bring and how, as Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries says, it could “make it easier for businesses and researchers to unlock the power of data to grow the economy and improve society.” Critics, however, are uneasy about the consultation process for the Bill, a possible weakening of data protection standards, giving businesses the scope to use our personal data for their wider usage and, as the Open Rights Group says, making a default setting “to spy on us” and shifting the burden of responsibility to users to “opt-out of something” they didn’t opt-into in the first place. It remains to be seen how the Bill progresses through the next stages.

News

Tech News : Regulations Dictate More Action Needed On Fake Content

A Strengthened EU ‘Code of Practice on Disinformation’ will require big tech companies to take more action to ensure that purveyors of disinformation do not benefit from advertising revenues.

Broader Range Of Commitments 

The strengthened ‘Code of Practice on Disinformation’ will aim to achieve the objectives of the European Commission’s Guidance presented in May 2021, by setting a broader range of 44 commitments and 128 specific measures to counter online disinformation.

What Commitments? 

The bolstered code aims to galvanize (via the threat of penalties for non-compliance) more action from tech companies to tackle online issues including:

– Transparency of political advertising, i.e. introducing better transparency measures, allowing users to easily recognise political ads by providing more effective labelling, committing to reveal the sponsor, ad-spend and display period.

– Ensuring the integrity of services by measures such as acting to reduce manipulative behaviour used to spread disinformation, e.g. fake accounts, bot-driven amplification, impersonation, and malicious deep fakes.

– Empowering users by protecting them from disinformation, giving them enhanced tools to recognise, understand and flag disinformation, to access authoritative sources, and through media literacy initiatives.

– Empowering researchers by providing better support to research on disinformation, e.g. by ensuring automated access to non-personal, anonymised, aggregated or manifestly made public data.

– Empowering the fact-checking community across all EU Member States and languages, ensuring that platforms will make a more consistent use of fact-checking on their service.

– Setting up a Transparency Centre, accessible to all citizens, and a permanent Taskforce to keep the Code future-proof and fit-for-purpose.

– A Strengthened Monitoring framework.

Which Tech Companies Have Signed Up? 

34 signatories have already joined the revision process of the 2018 Code. The EC has noted that they come from a broad area of the online environment and include companies from the advertising ecosystem, advertisers, ad-tech companies, fact-checkers, emerging or specialised platforms, civil society, and third-party organisations with specific expertise on disinformation.

Specifically, and significantly, they include Google, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft, Twitter, and Clubhouse. Twitter is reported to have the updated code.

Penalties 

The penalties for companies that do not comply with the strengthened code could be anything up to 6 per cent of their global turnover.

Part Of A Broader Framework 

The 2022 strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation will become part of a broader regulatory framework, in combination with the legislation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising and the Digital Services Act.

Deepfakes : A Growing Problem 

Deepfakes have been a growing problem in recent years. For example, in April 2022, researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory reported finding more than one thousand deepfake ‘virtual’ employees on the LinkedIn platform.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has also emphasised the threat posed by deepfakes. For example, in March 2022, deepfake videos of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky started appearing online, with the President Volodymyr Zelensky designed to distort public perception of the invasion

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Disinformation and deepfakes have plagued big tech (social media platforms) in recent years and the effects may have influenced political outcomes and (as demonstrated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) could be used to distort facts in a way that could have serious implications. The events of the Trump era and Capitol Hill in the U.S. also emphasise some of the dangers of disinformation and deepfakes. It is no surprise, therefore, that governments (especially in the case of the EU) are keen to introduce more regulation to put greater pressure on big tech and social media companies to act and be more proactive to tackle this threat. The significant fines for non-compliance may also give it the teeth that it needs to have a chance being more effective. Social media companies especially will have expected this strengthened code and are likely to be all-too-aware of the greater focus upon them and how they police their platforms and protect their users in recent years.

News

Tech-Insight : What Is ‘Data Gravity’?

In this insight, we look at what ‘data gravity’ is, what challenges it creates, and some ways in which businesses can tackle data gravity challenges.

What Is Data Gravity? 

Working with (larger) datasets means the need to collect, store and manage the data and move it around to different applications. The data then accumulates (builds mass), attracts services and applications which need to be close to the data to improve the latency and throughput, and leverage high bandwidth. As more data collects and grows at a specific location / a central data store (on-premises or co-located), the process accelerates, to the point where it’s difficult or impossible to move data and applications anywhere else. This affects workflows, creates higher costs, and results in lower system performance, and management overheads.

The term for this cumbersome, dragging effect of a central store data of costly, difficult to manage data on a business was, therefore, first dubbed ‘data gravity’ by IT researcher Dave McCrory in 2010.

Can Occur In The Cloud Too – Artificial Data Gravity

So-called ‘artificial’ data gravity can also occur when attractive forces are created through indirect or outside influence, such as costs, throttling, specialisation, legislation, or usage.

For example:

– With cloud storage, although the cloud allows fast scalability, large and growing datasets stored there also attract analytics and applications, and more cloud storage egress fees (charged when applications write data out to the network or repatriate data back to the on-premises environment).

– Usage, e.g. Dropbox charging each individual user for use of Shared Data (Artificial Usage), so each person pays for the data consuming their storage, but Dropbox only stores and directs authorised users to a single copy.

In essence, therefore, artificial data gravity is a product of cloud services’ financial models, not technology.

Tackling The Data Gravity Challenges 

Ways in which businesses and organisations can try to tackle data gravity challenges include:

– Separating data storage, by utilising event-driven architectures.

– Investing in new storage solutions, e.g. solid-state storage or tiering, and storage management tools.

– Using hyperconverged systems, i.e. consolidating resources and reducing costs by combining computing, storage, networking, and management in one unified system. This, however, can have scalability challenges.

– Using cloud-based solutions. This can require the use of Cloud Architects (cloud management specialists), using Cloud-native applications such as Amazon QuickSight, or using cloud gateways and cloud-native technologies (container-based environments) e.g., object storage.

– Opting for a multi-cloud strategy (to reduce vendor dependency), using cloud-native storage tiers, e.g. on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure and matching then them to performance and access frequency of different types of data processing.

– Scaling public cloud computing for batch processes and large-scale analysis.

– Closely monitoring costs to ensure there are no data gravity cost hotspots.

– Making greater use of analytics (analysing data at the edge) and developing better data management and data governance strategies.

What Does This Mean For Your Businesses? 

For businesses that collect large amounts of datasets, managing that data in a cost-effective way, and in a way that maintains workflow is a serious issue. Keeping a close eye on costs and analytics, making better, smarter use of the cloud, taking specialist cloud advice, and using cloud-native applications are some of the ways that businesses can avoid falling victim to the effects of costly and cumbersome data gravity. Although a proportion of the data collected may generate value for businesses, too much data in one location can reduce that value by attracting costs and creating an issue that can affect competitiveness. Recognising and understanding what data gravity is and how it occurs, coupled with more of a focus on data management and planning can prevent data gravity problems in the future.

News

Featured Article : Internet Explorer is Dead. Long Live The King?

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has been retired after 27 years and here we take a brief look back over its history and why it fell behind competitors before being succeeded by Microsoft Edge.

It Came From ‘Mosaic’ 

Microsoft first launched its Internet Explorer (IE) browser in 1995. The browser was built under license to Microsoft using the code from the ‘Spyglass Mosaic’ browser, an early forerunner to modern Internet browsers which had been developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1992/93. The Mosaic browser was discontinued in 1997.

Explorer was originally introduced to the market in two paid-for packages, in Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and via the simultaneous OEM release of Windows 95. It wasn’t until August 95 that Microsoft Explorer version 3 was bundled free with Windows 95, and this led to Microsoft having to pay Spyglass US$8 million because Spyglass’s minimum quarterly licensing fee had been cut-off. There were 11 versions of Internet Explorer between 1995 and 2013.

Early Competitors 

Early strong competitors in the browser market included Netscape Navigator (beta versions introduced in 94/95) which was also based on the Mosaic browser code. This was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s and it included new features such as cookies, frames, proxy auto-config and JavaScript which became the open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers. Netscape Navigator’s decline came, however, as a result of the ‘browser wars’ and a combination of factors such as the release of IE version 3.0 in 1996, an agreement with Apple to make IE its default web browser in new Mac OS distributions, Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and the introduction of browser-specific extensions in web pages which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.

The Growth of Explorer 

IE’s early growth (i.e. Explorer 2.0) was really a product of it being integrated with Windows 95 OSR 1 in 1996, i.e. bundling Explorer with its Windows operating system, and this growth accelerated with version 4.0’s release.

Antitrust Case 

In the US in 1998, following the ‘browser wars’ which ended Microsoft’s main competitor, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft was the subject of an antitrust case where it was accused of making it difficult for consumers to install competing software on computers operated by Windows. Part of the argument against Microsoft was that the bundling of IE with the Windows 95 operating software had restrained trade in web-browsing software. Microsoft lost the case and although this wasn’t the end for IE, it facilitated the rise of competitors.

New Competitors 

Fast forward into the 2000s, and although IE had a massive 95 per cent of the browser market in 2004, new browser market players moved in and nudged out IE. Some of IE’s challenges were that it was regarded by many users as being clunky, buggy, suffering from security issues, and having fewer add-ons, extensions, and plugins than its new competitors.

After Netscape opted for open source code and launched its not-for-profit Mozilla, which released Firefox in 2002, and Google released its browser for Microsoft Windows (now Chrome) in 2008, things got a lot tougher for IE. In fact, by 2010, IE’s previously dominant market share fell below 50 per cent, and Google’s Chrome browser finally knocked Microsoft’s browser off the top spot in 2012. Apple’s Safari browser, first introduced in 2003, also rose as a competitor to IE, and now to Edge, and in May of 2022, Apple’s Safari dropped to the third most popular desktop browser (behind Edge) and is used by 9.61 per cent of desktop computers worldwide (StatCounter).

Edge Replacing IE 

Over time, the incremental improvements to Internet Explorer couldn’t match the general improvements to the web at large and this led to the introduction of Microsoft Edge with Windows 10 in 2015 and the phasing out and retirement of IE.

Retirement 

As of June 15, 2022, Microsoft has announced the final retirement of IE for certain versions of Windows 10. This will mean that:

– Over the next few months, opening IE will progressively redirect users to Microsoft Edge with IE mode. Here, users will still see the IE icon on their devices (e.g. on the taskbar or in the Start menu) but if they click to open IE, Microsoft Edge will open instead with easy access to IE mode.

– As part of the redirection process, Microsoft users will have their data (favourites, passwords, and settings) imported from IE to help the transition and, if a user wants to delete or manage their data at any point afterwards, Microsoft says they can do so in Edge from the Settings menu.

– IE will eventually be disabled permanently as part of a future Windows Update, at which point the IE icons on users’ devices will be removed.

– The first versions of Windows from which IE has been retired are Windows 10 Home, Pro, Enterprise, Edu and IoT (there is no IE in Windows 11) but IE will not be immediately removed on all these versions. Instead, there will be progressive re-directs to Microsoft Edge over the next few months.

– For some versions of Windows, currently in-support and used in critical environments such as in-support Windows 10 LTSC releases (including IoT) and all Windows Server versions, as well as Windows 10 China Government Edition, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 with Extended Security Updates (ESUs), Microsoft will continue to support until further notice.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Microsoft’s IE played a key role in the development of the web and bundling it with Microsoft Windows, as well as defeating its early competitor Netscape Navigator in the browser wars helped to deliver its dominance in the browser market. However, the antitrust trial, the introduction of strong market competitors like Google Chrome and Firefox, the rise of smartphones with pre-installed browsers, i.e. Apple with Safari, and Android with Google Chrome and Mobile and tablet internet usage overtaking desktops saw Chrome rise to the top. This effectively signalled the end for Microsoft’s IE. With IE no longer up to the demands of the modern web, and Microsoft switching its efforts to a better version – Microsoft Edge – and then Edge for Chromium In 2020, IE was finally left high and dry and put into retirement. For many people, the ease, clean and modern look, and the quality of search engine results in Google outshone anything IE could produce, and Edge, IE’s successor, has needed to use Chromium and take on a similar clean look to try and compete and claw back some of the ground lost by IE.

News

Sustainability : Renewable Cement Made Entirely From Waste Materials

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have created renewable, sustainable ‘biocement’ made entirely from waste materials, making it a greener and more sustainable alternative to regular cement.

How? 

The NTU scientists have used two common waste materials, industrial carbide sludge (the waste material from the production of acetylene gas) and urea (from the urine of mammals) to create the biocement.

Making the biocement involves creating a reaction between urea and the calcium ions in industrial carbide, which then forms a hard solid, or precipitate. The carbide sludge, combined with acid, produces soluble calcium. Urea is then added to the soluble calcium to form a cementation solution. Finally, a bacterial culture is then added to this cementation solution which breaks down the urea in the solution to form carbonate ions.

These ions react with the soluble calcium ions to form hard calcium carbonate, just like that naturally found in chalk, limestone, and marble. The reaction takes place in soil, so that the precipitate bonds soil particles together and fills the gaps between them, creating a compact mass of soil. This results in a strong, sturdy and less permeable block of biocement.

Advantages 

The advantages of creating a biocement this way include:

– Biocement production is greener and more sustainable than the methods used to produce traditional cement. For example, unlike traditional cement-making (which involves the burning of raw materials at extremely high temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius and producing a large amount carbon dioxide) the biocement can be produced at room temperature without burning anything. This makes the process greener, less energy demanding and carbon neutral.

– Carbide sludge is seen as waste material (in Singapore) and is abundant, adding to the sustainability of biocement production. This means that there’s no need for the mining of limestone (which is a finite resource) and, therefore, there’s less of an impact on the natural environment and ecosystem.

– If scaled-up, the process would cost less than traditional cement making.

Added Advantage – Restoring Monuments And Strengthening Shorelines

The NTU scientists have also highlighted the fact that the colourless nature of the bacterial culture and cementation solution means that when applied to soil, sand or rock, their original colour is preserved. This could make the process ideal for restoring old rock monuments and artifacts, and even strengthen the sand on the beach to prevent erosion, road repair, sealing gaps in underground tunnels to prevent water seepage, or even as cultivation grounds for coral reefs as coral larvae like to grow on calcium carbonate.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation?

Considering that 4.4 billion metric tons of cement was produced worldwide in 2021, and how much carbon is produced in the process, and how many materials are used in it (and the impacts of mining them) – calcium, silicon, aluminium, iron, and others – biocement could be a real breakthrough. The fact that it’s cheaper (at scale) as well as being much greener and more sustainable could mean that it is a widely accepted substitute that benefits us all in terms of helping to tackle global warming as well as creating more buildings for a growing population. Biocement is still in its early stages, but it certainly looks like a sustainable substitute for traditional cement making. It could also create other business opportunities and be useful in a wide variety of environmental projects.

News

Security Stop-Press : Facebook Phishing Scam

Security company PIXM has warned of a Facebook scam, active since Q4 2021, which has ensnared nearly 10 million users. The credential harvesting scam uses a fake Facebook login page. When a user logs in, the threat actor gets their credentials and can then use an automated program to send out the link to the user’s Friends via Facebook Messenger. The advice is to take extra care with any messages received through Facebook Messenger.

News

Tech Tip – Sending WhatsApp ‘View Once’ Messages

If you want to add an extra layer of privacy to sending a photo or video in WhatsApp (e.g. a photo of a password), adding a “view once” designation before sending the message means that the photo or video will disappear as soon as the recipient has opened the message and exited the media viewer. Here’s how to use this feature:

– Open an individual or group chat.

– Tap Attach (the paperclip symbol).

– Either take a photo or video with WhatsApp or select one from your phone gallery.

– Tap on the view once symbol (a number one inside a half dotted out circle).

– Tap ‘Send’.

– You’ll see an ‘Opened’ receipt in the chat once when the recipient has viewed the photo or video.

News

Featured Article: How Good Are Chatbots Now?

Following the recent story about how a Google Bot was reported to have said things that a sentient being may say, we take a brief look at how good chatbots are now.

What Happened? 

Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, recently reported that The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA ) AI system bot may have feelings and said things that a sentient being would be expected to say. For example, Mr Lemoine reported that after asking if it was true that the AI bot was a sentient being, the bot replied “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” 

Among other similar comments, the bot is also reported as saying that “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” 

Before being placed on paid leave after publishing his conversation with the bot on social media, Mr Lemoine requested that Google recognise the needs of the bot, treat it as an employee of the company, and ask for its consent before using it in experiments.

What Is A Bot?

A bot is a computer software program that people can interact with using Artificial Intelligence. For example, chatbots can answer questions and chat in a way, online, that resembles human conversation.

What Is A Sentient Being? 

Sentient beings can perceive or feel things, feel emotions, form attachments, and have different personalities. They have a consciousness and have or show realisation, perception, or knowledge and are aware.

Is It Likely Or Possible That The Google LaMDA Bot Is A Sentient Being? 

Critics have been quick to dismiss the idea that the LaMDA bot is sentient. For example:

In a tweet, Prof Erik Brynjolfsson, of Stanford University said that claiming that the LaMDA system and those like it are sentient “is the modern equivalent of the dog who heard a voice from a gramophone and thought his master was inside”. 

Also in a tweet, Prof Melanie Mitchell, from the Santa Fe Institute, noted that “humans are predisposed to anthropomorphise even with only the shallowest of signals” and that “Google engineers are human too, and not immune.” Anthromorphisising means attributing human characteristics or behaviour to other things, e.g. a god, animal, or object.

Google spokesperson, Brian Gabriel, said that systems like LaMDA  “imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic. If you ask what it’s like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about melting and roaring and so on.” He also said that “LaMDA  tends to follow along with prompts and leading questions, going along with the pattern set by the user.” 

Sandra Wachter, a University of Oxford professor (working with AI) has been reported as saying that “we are far away from creating a machine that is akin to humans and the capacity for thought.” 

Postdoctoral researcher in computer science at NYU, Laura Edelson, has been reported as saying that the subject matter of the conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA does little to show proof of life and the editing of conversation makes it even more difficult to prove.

What Can Bots Do? 

Bots are now used in many industries and have many different purposes, but tend to be deployed performing automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. Additionally, bots save time and money doing these types of tasks, plus bots can carry out functions faster, work 24/7 without breaks, don’t require pay or holidays, and can free up human resources to do other jobs, thereby improving productivity. Examples of jobs that bots do include search engine spiders (Googlebot and Bingbot), customer service e.g., answering popular questions online (chatbots), being deployed on social media platforms (social bots), shopping around online to help find the best price for products (shop bots). Others include Web scraping crawlers, knowbots (collecting information), monitoring bots (for outages etc.), download bots (automatic downloading of software or apps), and ticketing bots (buying and reselling tickets).

Bots can also be used for disreputable / dishonest purposes, e.g. malware bots, malicious chatterbots, credential stuffing bots, click fraud bots, vulnerability scanners, DoS or DDoS bots, file-sharing bots, and traffic monitoring bots (used to overload mail servers or steal data).

Chatbots

Although it may not be the case that the LaMDA system is anywhere near advanced enough to be ‘sentient,’ using chatbots has a number of advantages including:

– Saving time and money while freeing up other resources.

– Reducing the need for people-to-people interactions (with customers).

– Stopping human staff from having to do repetitive, time consuming and tedious tasks (improving job satisfaction).

– Enabling 24/7 customer service all year round.

– Removing the need for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems which can be slower, can frustrate customers, and can feel like a less human barrier.

– Enabling instant responses, a smoother customer journey, and seamless live communication.

– Enabling customer service improvements and better responses over time (machine learning).

– Answering common questions, freeing up more time for staff.

– Improving productivity, marketing, and profits.

The Most Advanced Chatbots 

Some examples of some of the more innovative and advanced uses for chatbots include:

– Chatbots such as Google Assistant and Siri.

– Mitsuku (from Pandorabots), five-time Lobener Prize winner and thought to be the best conversational and most humanlike chatbot in the world and is leading icon in the field of AI.

– The ‘Endurance’ companion chatbot, developed to help sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease.

– The Casper’s Insomnobot 3000, a conversational bot designed to give insomniacs someone to talk to.

– The UNICEF U-Report chatbot which sends out polls about urgent social issues, so UNICEF can use the feedback to develop policy recommendations.

– The MedWhat bot, used to make medical diagnoses faster and easier for patients and doctors.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

We may be a long way from creating a bot that could be anywhere near ‘sentient,’ but bots are now commonplace because they offer many time and money-saving, efficiency, and productivity advantages. Customer service is a popular area where bots have proven their worth but, as some of the more innovative examples mentioned here show, they can have a wide variety of uses and / or can deployed for very specialised purposes. As AI technology improves, so will the capabilities of bots and some will be able to become even more human-like in their interactions.

News

Tech Insight : What Is ‘Edge’ Computing?

In this insight, we look at what edge computing is, why it’s necessary, the benefits it delivers, and some examples of how it’s being used.

What Is It? 

Edge computing is a computing architecture and distributed computing framework which means the computing and data storage is done near the source of the data. The idea is that it improves response times, gives faster insights, saves bandwidth, and doesn’t need remote servers (data centres and the cloud).

Why The Name ‘Edge’? 

The ‘edge’ part of the name comes partly from the old edge servers for CDNs in the 90s that were deployed close to users, and the fact the computing happens near the source of the data – i.e. on the edge of a network and not at the data centre.

Why Is It Growing? 

The massive and fast growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has meant that the cloud, AI, and the network and infrastructure capabilities can’t effectively or efficiently manage the volume and complexity of the data that’s being produced by all the devices. Trying to send all that data to a main data centre of the cloud simply slows everything down (bandwidth and latency issues). Customers/users would also be frustrated by waiting and any real-time insights may suffer by a reliance on passing data backwards and forwards over a network to a cloud and data centre where there is a latency issue

Also, much of the vast amount data being produced is not being analysed and, therefore, isn’t providing insights that could help businesses to make savings or create new sources of competitive advantage or create new business opportunities. Edge computing can also help where a business has a need to personalise customer experiences, generate rapid insights and actions, and maintain continuous operations.

There could also be some environmental and sustainability benefits from reducing reliance on power-hungry data centres.

Edge Computing : Faster + Better Insights 

Using an edge computing architecture (and mobile edge computing on 5G networks), therefore, can deliver faster response times and improved data analysis and insights, which may lead to happier customers and more potential business opportunities.

Challenges 

Some of the challenges to edge computing are:

– Security issues, e.g. IoT devices can have poor security, so edge computing deployment must fully address security.

– Possible connectivity issues, e.g. poor, or erratic connectivity issues at the edge.

– Limited capability.

Examples of Edge Computing 

Examples of where edge computing is used include:

– Remote monitoring and real-time analytics at oil and gas facilities, and mining companies getting more from their data through edge computing, helping to optimise operations and improve safety.

– Smart grids to help with energy consumption and the lowering of business costs.

– Farming – using sensors to help improve crops and yield.

– Patient-monitoring in hospitals.

– Network optimisation.

– Predictive maintenance, e.g. on manufacturing production lines.

– Traffic management.

– Gaming and content delivery, e.g. having edge servers close to gamers and caching content at the edge.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Edge computing can be a way to tackle several different issues for businesses, improve customer satisfaction and create new opportunities from better data insights. Deploying edge computing can help where certain operations need autonomy and personalised results, where real-time insights are essential, and can avoid any cloud security issues, as well as helping with data sovereignty. The widescale use of sensors, e.g. in manufacturing, facilities, vehicles, and more lends itself to edge computing, and with the number of IoT devices and the data sent from increasing all the time, edge computing is set to grow even more.

News

Tech News : Internet Explorer … Explores No More

Microsoft has announced the retirement of its famous Internet Explorer browser which is now officially out of support as of June 15, 2022 for certain versions of Windows 10.

Why? 

First announced in May 2021 and after 25+ years) Microsoft has announced that “Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022”. Microsoft’s blog on the subject points to how the web and other browsers have evolved to the point where incremental improvements to Internet Explorer couldn’t match the general improvements to the web at large. This led to introduction of Microsoft Edge with Windows 10 in 2015 and the phasing out and retirement of IE. Although IE had had 95 per cent of the browser market back in 2004, new dominant players in the browser have emerged – Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla Firefox (and Microsoft’s own Edge as just mentioned).

Redirected To Microsoft Edge 

Microsoft says that over the next few months, opening Internet Explorer will progressively redirect users to Microsoft Edge with IE mode. Here, users will still see the Internet Explorer icon on their devices (e.g. on the taskbar or in the Start menu) but if they click to open Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge will open instead with easy access to IE mode.

What Is IE Mode And Why? 

IE mode has been added to Microsoft Edge because some websites only work with IE. For instance, they may have been built with old technology and may not function properly with modern browsers.

Also, for some users, IT businesses that may be using legacy sites as part of their normal business processes, IE mode can be automated so that those pages launch in IE mode automatically for users.

Details Imported To Edge From IE 

As part of the redirection process, Microsoft says that users will have their data, such as favourites, passwords and settings imported from IE to help the transition. If a user wants to delete or manage their data at any point afterwards, Microsoft says they can do so in Edge from the Settings menu.

Future Windows Update Will Mean A Permanent End 

Microsoft has said that IE will eventually be disabled permanently as part of a future Windows Update, at which point the IE icons on users’ devices will be removed.

Not All Immediately 

The first versions of Windows from which IE has been retired are Windows 10 Home, Pro, Enterprise, Edu and IoT (there is no IE in Windows 11) but IE will not be immediately removed on all these versions. Instead, there will be progressive re-directs to Microsoft Edge over the next few months.

Also, for some versions of Windows currently in-support and used in critical environments such as in-support Windows 10 LTSC releases (including IoT) and all Windows Server versions, as well as Windows 10 China Government Edition, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 with Extended Security Updates (ESUs), Microsoft will continue to support IE on those versions until they go out of support.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Internet Explorer played an important part in the development of the web, nevertheless the web and the browser market have changed dramatically over time. Notably, the rise of smartphones with pre-installed browsers – Apple with Safari, and Android with Google Chrome – and Mobile and tablet internet usage overtaking desktop saw Chrome rise to the top and Microsoft’s IE (and now Edge) fell behind. As Microsoft pointed out, IE was no longer up to the demands of the modern web, and Microsoft had already invested in Edge as the successor. In 2020, Microsoft upped its game in the browser wars by releasing a version of Edge based on Chromium. This may be one of the reasons why Edge has just pipped Safari to second place in the browser market with 9.65 per cent share, but this is still a long way behind Google’s Chrome. Some businesses (IT) that still need IE in some critical environments will, of course, be glad that support continues for some versions, and the use of IE mode is useful way to help with the transition from IE to Edge for many users.