Reports of the first job interviews conducted in the UK using Artificial Intelligence and facial analysis technology have been met with mixed reactions. The Software The AI and facial analysis technology used for the interviews comes from US firm HireVue. The main products available from HireVue for interviewing are Pre-Employment Assessments and Video Interviewing. For the Pre-Employment Assessments, the software uses AI, video game technology, and game-based and coding challenges to collect candidate insights related to work style, how the candidate works with people, and general cognitive ability. The Assessments are customisable to specific hiring objectives or ready to deploy [...]

A recent ruling by the High Court that an email containing an automated signature is legally binding proved costly to the lawyer who sent such an email on behalf of his client that included the wrong price for a land sale. £25,000 Below The unfortunate lawyer, Daniel Tear, who sent an email to another lawyer setting out the terms for an owner’s land/property sale (but with the sale price listed as £25,000 lower than the asking price) the ruling about his email signature at the County Court in Manchester proved to be very costly. In the case, which related to [...]

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide on Azure and will include Windows 7 free Extended Security Updates for up to three years. Windows Virtual Desktop Windows Virtual Desktop from Microsoft, which was announced last September but has just been made generally available worldwide, is a Cloud-based ‘virtual’ version of Windows that can be accessed by employees from any device from anywhere, provides full multi-session, and is always up to date.  The Virtual Desktop has been designed with modern working practice in mind where not all employees sit in an office, use just one [...]

Microsoft has announced that the ‘Personal Vault’ security features for its OneDrive storage service are now available worldwide on all OneDrive consumer accounts. What Is Personal Vault? Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that can only be accessed with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification.  These methods include a fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to the OneDrive user via email or SMS. The idea of Personal Vault is to add another layer of protection to important files, photos, and videos e.g. copies of documents such as a passport, driver’s licence, or [...]

The £240,000 of cryptocurrency confiscated from a teenager who was jailed for hacking ISP TalkTalk has been auctioned by police with the proceeds going towards fighting crime. TalkTalk Hack Elliott Gunton, (now 19) was jailed for 20 months in August this year for hacking offences, money laundering and for the breach of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order that was issued to him in 2016 for another offence.  The hack on ISP TalkTalk took place when Gunton was 16 years old, and he is reported to have sold the stolen customer data on the dark web to other cybercriminals for £2,469 [...]

If you need to sign PDFs and return them (e.g. as part of your sales or buying processes) there is a way to do it without having to go to the time and trouble of printing out the PDFs, signing them, scanning them, and then emailing the scans back. To sign the PDF’s electronically using Adobe: - Open Adobe Reader. - Open the PDF file you want to sign. - Select ‘Fill & Sign’ and use the tools to create your signature - 'Add Text', 'Add Checkmark', 'Place Initials', and 'Place Signature'. Other tools there include 'Send or Collect Signatures' [...]

Multinational IT security company ‘Trend Micro’ has highlighted the future threat of cybercriminals making and posting or threatening to post malicious ‘deep fake’ videos online in order to cause damage to reputations and/or to extract ransoms from their target victims. What Are Deepfake Videos? Deep fake videos use deep learning technology and manipulated images of target individuals (found online), often celebrities, politicians, and other well-known people to create an embarrassing or scandalous video such as pornography or violent behaviour. The AI aspect of the technology means that even the facial expressions of those individuals featured in the video can be [...]

The new cloud market report from the Synergy Research Group shows that cloud-associated markets, such as the public cloud, are growing at rates ranging from 10% to over 40% and the annual spending on the cloud may double in four years. IaaS & PaaS Biggest Growth Synergy’s half-yearly report shows that, across the seven key cloud service and infrastructure market segments, revenues for operator and vendors in the first half of 2019 exceeded $150 billion, which is a rise in growth of 24% from the first half of 2018. The biggest area of growth in the cloud infrastructure sector was [...]

  Two security specialists who performed a physical break-in on the US courthouse that hired their company for a penetration test have claimed that their break-in was part of their assessment of security. What Happened? Dallas' State Court Administration (SCA) is reported to have hired security company Coalfire Labs to conduct testing of the security of the court’s electronic records at the Dallas County Courthouse in the town of Adel, around 20 miles west of Des Moines. The police were called to the courthouse just after midnight on the 11 September where two men, who had been seen walking around [...]

IBM has announced that it is opening a Quantum Computation Centre in New York which will bring the world's largest fleet of quantum computing systems online, including the new 53-Qubit Quantum System for broad use in the cloud. Largest Universal Quantum System For External Access The new 53-quantum bit/qubit model is the 14th system that IBM offers, and IBM says that it is the single largest universal quantum system made available for external access in the industry, to date. This new system will (within one month) give its users the ability to run more complex entanglement and connectivity experiments. IBM Q [...]