The failure of Scottish policing bodies to record the ethnicity of arrested people it takes DNA samples from means there is no way of establishing whether minority groups are over-represented in policing databases, warns Scottish biometric commissioner Brian Plastow. Following a Joint Assurance Review into the use of DNA for criminal justice and policing purposes,…
Scottish police fail to record ethnicity in DNA database Read More »
Millions of unlawfully retained custody images could still be used for facial-recognition purposes by UK police, says biometric commissioner of England and Wales Tony Eastaugh in wider warning about the rapid expansion of surveillance tools. In 2012, a High Court ruling found the retention of custody images in the Police National Database (PND) to be unlawful on…
UK police continue to hold millions of custody images unlawfully Read More »
Retailers have told the House of Lords that live facial recognition (LFR) would be of limited use in tackling shoplifting due to the associated safety and ethical concerns, but that working with police to automatically identify offenders after the fact with retrospective versions of the technology should be standard practice. In May 2024, the House…
Retailers question using live facial recognition for shoplifting Read More »
It would seem that the adoption of cloud databases – those delivered via a cloud consumption model – is ramping up. Referred to as dbPaaS (database platform as a service) by analyst Gartner, the market for cloud databases is dominated by public cloud providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Alibaba are among…
The cloud holds a large – and growing – percentage of enterprise data. While much of this growth comes from unstructured information, such as documents and media files, enterprises also still depend on structured data, stored in databases. The global market for databases grew by 12.8% last year, according to analysts at Gartner, and…
A group of NHS clinicians responsible for registries holding health information on millions of patients are warning of the risk of a major data breach through an NHS England project they claim has neglected basic IT security measures. The programme to set up an Outcome Registries Platform (ORP) has received little attention outside the NHS,…
NHS experts raise warning over patient data breach risk in registries project Read More »
The UK government is investing £55m in expanding the police’s use of facial-recognition systems, including a fleet of vans to scan crowded high streets, as part of a crackdown on shoplifters. Announced alongside plans to give tougher punishments to serial or abusive shoplifters in England and Wales, as well as a standalone criminal offence for…
Facial recognition to play key role in UK shoplifting crackdown Read More »
The Post Office has extended a controversial agreement with IT supplier Fujitsu that will see it support two datacentres to the end of March 2025, at a total additional cost of £36m. Combined with an announcement earlier this year that a services contact with Fujitsu to support the Post Office’s branch accounting system, Horizon, was…
Controversial Fujitsu contract with Post Office extended again Read More »
Insufficient disk space on database servers was the cause of Toyota car production grinding to a halt for 36 hours at 14 plants in Japan late in August. But just how does such a situation arise? What’s pretty likely here is a failure in database capacity planning and to provide for sufficient storage. That’s an…
Toyota car plant outage shows database capacity planning is vital Read More »
Ahead of next week’s Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, Oracle and Microsoft have announced Oracle Database@Azure. This is said to give direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and deployed in Microsoft Azure datacentres. It also opens up Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI services to Oracle customers. “Our expanded partnership with Oracle…
Microsoft to offer Oracle cloud database on Azure Read More »
