UK businesses are being urged to join a six-month trial of a four-day working week, as organisers aim to sign up at least 30 companies by June.

Organised by the 4 Day Week Global organisation and the Autonomy thinktank, the pilot programme will be monitored by Cambridge and Oxford Universities in order to measure the four-day working week’s impact on staff productivity and wellbeing, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality.

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Participating employees will receive 100% of their usual pay for only four days at work, in exchange for their commitment to maintain «at least» 100% productivity.

Autonomy co-director Kyle Lewis said that organisations taking part in the trial will benefit from “unparalleled access to the expertise, tools and resources they will need to run a smooth and successful trial”.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for organisations who want to be pioneers and trial a four-day week as a way of supporting and empowering workers, enhancing organisational productivity and having a positive impact on our society and the environment,” he added.

In 2019, prior to the mass shift to remote working, Autonomy authored a report which found “strong indications that reducing the working week can help reduce air pollution and our overall carbon footprint”.

According to Brendan Burchell, professor in the Social Sciences at Cambridge University, with the rise of technology allowing to maintain productivity, “the time has come for more organisations to take the leap and unravel the practicalities”

“This scheme has tremendous potential to progress from conversations about the general advantages of a shorter working week to focussed discussions on how organisations can implement it in the best possible way,” he added.

One of the businesses taking part in the pilot programme is the Edinburgh-based Canon, which found that the work-life balance of its 140 employees had changed “substantially” during the pandemic.

“As a responsive employer we are always looking at how we can adapt our working practices to ensure that employees find their time with us is meaningful, fulfilling and productive. For this reason, we’re keen to pilot a four-day week to see if it can work for us,” said president Ken Sutherland.

Last year, UK-based fintech Atom bank garnered headlines for introducing a four-day working week for all its employees with no change in salary. Prior to that, UK supermarket Morrisons also announced plans to shift to a four-day working week, keeping employee pay the same. However, this was only made available to head office staff in Bradford, who also had to work one Saturday per month to recoup the lost time.

Businesses can sign up for the trial until the end of March. 

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Nvidia has announced the acquisition of high-performance computing (HPC) systems management provider Bright Computing for an undisclosed sum.

The deal will see Nvidia open new markets for Bright Computing, which in turn will help expand Nvidia’s accelerated computing portfolio with its Bright Cluster Manager product.

The two companies had been collaborators for more than a decade, with Nvidia integrating Bright’s Cluster Manager with its CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, and most recently its deep learning-focused DGX systems.

Commenting on the acquisition, vice president and general manager of DGX Systems at Nvidia, Charlie Boyle, said that Bright Computing’s software and expertise will enhance the company’s growing DGX and data centre businesses,

“Now we see an opportunity to combine our system software capabilities to make HPC data centres easier to buy, build and operate, creating a much larger future for HPC,” he added.

Bright Computing CEO Bill Wagner said that “Nvidia is changing the world as we know it”, adding that the company “couldn’t be more excited for our team and software to play a part in that”.

Founded in 2009 and based in Amsterdam, Bright Computing services are used by more than 700 organisations worldwide, including Microsoft,, Samsung, Boeing, NASA, and Tesla.

The acquisition will see Bright’s workforce transferred to Nvidia. The company wasn’t immediately available for comment regarding the future of Bright’s employees or its Amsterdam office and didn’t disclose the financial details of the deal. Nvidia’s current Netherlands headquarters are based in Delft.

The news comes weeks after the UK government ordered a «phase two” investigation into Nvidia’s $40 billion (£30 billion) acquisition of Cambridge-based ARM. Over a period of 24 weeks, the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) will consider evidence whether the acquisition of the Cambridge-based semiconductor company by the US chip giant is a threat to competition and national security.

The first phase of the CMA’s investigation, which concluded in August and covered competition and jurisdictional issues, determined that the deal could lessen competition across four markets: data centres, Internet of Things, automotive, and gaming.

​The Home Office has spent an estimated £37.7 million on over 53,000 new laptops, tablets, and phones in the last three years.

Nearly half of these devices (24,253) were purchased in the last 12 months, in order to aid remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This data, retrieved using a Freedom of Information (FOI) act by the Parliament Street think tank, revealed that the number of purchased devices increased by 148% from September 2019 to September 2020, with an additional 18% increase between September 2020 and September 2021.

Laptops were the most common purchase, having risen from 6,940 in 2019, to 16,889 in 2020 and 16,586 in 2021.

However, mobile phone purchases had the biggest increase over the past three years, up from 1,361 in 2019, to 7,638 in 2021 – marking a 461% increase since the introduction of remote working.

The data also showed that Zoom has remained the video conferencing platform of choice for the UK government since the start of the pandemic, allowing the House of Commons to resume work during lockdown restrictions. This was in spite of the widespread security concerns that prompted the Ministry of Defence (MoD), US Senate, and Germany’s Foreign Office to ban its staff from using Zoom. The Home Office is said to have spent £6,716 on Zoom licenses alone, across 142 unique users.

By contrast, the number of new Office 365 accounts acquired by the Home Office had fallen from 3,804 in 2019 to 513 by 2020, before rising again to 2,415 in 2021. The most recent purchases could have been made in order to avoid the Office 365 price increases that are set to come into effect in March 2022.

The data comes weeks after a similar FOI revealed that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) had invested in almost 40,000 new devices for its employees since October 2020 in a bid to facilitate hybrid and remote working. This hardware investment was a 366% increase year-on-year, with HMRC purchasing 37,624 laptops, tablets and phones in the last 12 months. However, the cost of this investment wasn’t revealed.

​Australia has signed an agreement with the United States that will make it easier for the two countries to access and exchange data for investigations of serious crime, such as terrorism, child sexual abuse, and ransomware attacks.

Known as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, the legislation was passed in 2018 and allows law enforcement agencies to simplify the process of obtaining electronic data from communications service providers operating in another country.

This allows for authorities to reduce the time of gathering evidence in ongoing investigations, especially in time-critical scenarios such as terrorist attacks.

However, the CLOUD Act also promotes international collaboration in order to crack down on electronic data-driven crimes, including ransomware attacks and activities involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Commenting on the announcement, US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said that the agreement will allow US and Australian governments to “more effectively counter serious crime, including terrorism, while adhering to the privacy and civil liberties values that we both share”.

Australian minister for Home Affairs, Karen Andrews, praised the work of US and Australian authorities, which in June arrested hundreds of suspected criminals that were tricked into using an encrypted messaging app created by the FBI.

“As we saw in Operation Ironside – known in the United States as Operation Trojan Shield – the Australian Federal Police and the FBI are already capable of smashing serious, organised crime networks using sophisticated digital techniques,” said Andrews.

“By strengthening both nations’ ability to fight crime, and giving our law enforcement agencies more efficient access to evidence, we’re ensuring the safety, security and prosperity of our citizens,” she added.

Prior to being implemented, the CLOUD Act agreement between the US and Australia will now undergo Parliamentary and Congressional review processes in both countries.

The news of the agreement comes after the Australian government passed legislation in September granting extensive new surveillance powers to law enforcement agencies in the country. This includes allowing police to disrupt data by modifying, copying, adding, or deleting it and allow the AFP and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) to collect intelligence from devices and networks.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has also suggested it may introduce a «more aggressive» cyber division in order to disrupt terrorism, drug importations, and CSAM distribution.

LastPass has announced a new integration with Google Workspace in a bid to provide a seamless login process for business users.

Employers can now automatically provide employees with a LastPass account through Google’s directory integration, allowing them to store all their passwords for seamless logins without compromising on security.

The integration allows users to access LastPass using their corporate Google Workspace credentials without any additional passwords, minimising password reset frustrations and time spent on logging into accounts.

The Google active directory also allows for employers to easily add and remove users, simplifying management and ensuring the security of the organisation.

Dan DeMichele, VP of Product Management at LogMeIn, said: “Between this new integration with Google Workspace, and the combination of zero-knowledge infrastructure and multi-key approach, this security model that is unique to LastPass offers a level of security uncommon with such a simple login experience.” 

According to DeMichele, “this ensures the keys used to unlock a user’s vault only reunite locally on the end user’s device”.

“LastPass is the leading password manager on the market, providing this level of security authentication for federated login integrations with identity providers,” he added.

The integration with Google Workspace comes months after LogMeIn, LastPass’ parent company, announced that users on the service’s free tier would no longer have unlimited access to their stored passwords on both desktop and mobile devices. Since 16 March 2021, users are only able to view and manage passwords on either desktop or mobile, being forced to choose which platform they want to use to access their password vaults and being locked out of the other. 

LastPass’s Premium and Family subscriptions start at £2.60 and £3.40 per month, respectively, and include additional features such as expanded multifactor authentication support, dark web monitoring and improved password sharing. 

LastPass’s business offerings start with Teams, priced at £40.80 per user, per year, and intended for SMEs or workgroups with up to 50 users, although this is a recommendation rather than a hard limit. This provides each user with an industry-standard password storage vault with optional two-factor authentication, shared folders for your team, and a dashboard to administrate everything.

The next tier up, Enterprise, has no recommended ceiling on user numbers and adds Single Sign-On support, personal customer support, API and app integrations and customisable security policies. 

The UK’s largest property market website, Rightmove, has announced that it is migrating a number of its systems to Google Cloud.

The move will see Rightmove’s more than 1,000 containers being managed by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), as well as the creation of a more centralised alternative to its BigQuery data warehouse.

Rightmove’s head of technology operations Andrew Tate said that one of the main reasons why the property website selected Google Cloud as a partner was because of the tech giant’s commitment to run solely on carbon-free energy by 2030.

The goal, which was first announced by CEO Sundar Pichai in September 2020, aligns with Rightmove’s “own commitments to reduce (…) carbon emissions, and will ensure that our platform is consuming the minimum amount of power that is needed to support the maximum number of users each minute of the day”, said Tate.

Google Cloud will also assist Rightmove in simplifying its technology platform, while also “building and delivering new products even more quickly”, which was described as a “key focus area” by Tate.

“We are continuously striving to provide a better experience for consumers on the Rightmove website and better products for our customers. We release over 2,000 updates a year to our applications, so a key focus area for us is reducing time to production and, in turn, time to market,” he added.

By using GKE, Rightmove will be able to streamline the delivery of new services, automate upgrades, as well as scale in line with traffic peaks – which, in the UK, is at 8:48 pm on Wednesdays. 

The pandemic has had a significant impact on the UK’s property market, with many city-dwellers choosing to relocate to more rural areas of the country as offices closed and remote working became the norm. This had resulted in an uptick of traffic to property websites, with Rightmove alone recording more than 100 of its busiest ever days for visits in the last 12 months.

Commenting on the news, Google Cloud UKI director Adrian Poole described Rightmove as “no stranger to innovation” that “has already developed a smart platform that is the go-to for property”. 

“Having recognised the need to take its platform to the next level to stay agile and continue innovating, it is now going to be able to iterate and accelerate time to production. We’re delighted to support Rightmove in their mission to make home moving easier,” he added.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are being urged to update their software ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to avoid financial and reputational damage.

The warning comes after the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) identified 4,151 online shops that had been compromised using a vulnerability within the e-commerce platform Magento. With 250,000 clients, the Adobe subsidiary is the third-largest e-commerce system globally, after WooCommerce and Shopify.

NCSC alerted the affected retailers of the vulnerability in late September, with Magento issuing a security patch on 12 October. 

All online businesses are being urged to update their software, as the mass shift to e-commerce since the start of the pandemic has caused more customers to shop online than ever before, increasing their risk of falling victim to online scams.

Hence, the NCSC has issued guidance on running a secure website and avoiding threats including skimming, which has been described as “a threat to all retailers” by British Retail Consortium assistant director Graham Wynn.

The trade association has urged “all retailers to follow the NCSC’s advice and check their preparedness for any cyber issues that could arise during the busy end of year period”.

NCSC deputy director for Economy and Society, Sarah Lyons, said that the agency wants “small and medium-sized online retailers to know how to prevent their sites being exploited by opportunistic cyber criminals over the peak shopping period”.

“Falling victim to cyber crime could leave you and your customers out of pocket and cause reputational damage. It’s important to keep websites as secure as possible and I would urge all business owners to follow our guidance and make sure their software is up to date,” she added.

Last year, Check Point’s security researchers observed a sharp increase in the number of phishing exploits in the run-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with phishing emails having increased by over 13 times in early November 2020. In December 2020, RiskIQ security researchers discovered around 37,000 fake retail websites set up to scam holiday shoppers, with 208 domain infringement events containing only “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday,” “Boxing Day,” or “Christmas”.

​Windows 10 users can now expect half the amount of updates, with Microsoft announcing that the operating system is shifting to an annual release cycle similar to Windows 11.

The move is expected to minimise the time spent downloading, restarting, and configuring the updates, which is often seen as troublesome and time-consuming by users.

Coinciding with the release of the Windows 10 21H2 update, Windows Servicing and Delivery VP of Product Management, John Cable, stated that Microsoft “will transition to a new Windows 10 release cadence to align with the Windows 11 cadence, targeting annual feature update releases”.

Following the release of Windows 11 on 4 October, it was announced that the latest iteration of the flagship operating system would move to an annual feature update system similar to that of macOS.

As a result, rather than spring 2022, users can expect the next Windows 10 feature update “in the second half of 2022”, Cable announced in a company blog post.

“As a second half (H2) of the calendar year release, Home and Pro editions of the November 2021 Update will receive 18 months of servicing and support, and Enterprise and Education editions will receive 30 months of servicing and support beginning today,” he stated.

Windows 10 updates are to be supported until the operating system’s end of life date, which is scheduled for 14 October 2025. After that, Microsoft will not be providing technical support, software updates or security updates or fixes for Windows 10. 

The latest Windows 10 update, which is available to download now from the Windows Update settings, includes stronger security to prevent attacks while using Wi-Fi networks, as well as an enhanced Universal Print feature that allows enterprise clients to handle print jobs of up to one gigabyte. Moreover, Microsoft announced that its users will now be able to use the Azure Virtual Desktop service to provision apps to cloud-based Windows 10.

“We continue to listen to customer feedback to adapt Windows to meet your needs as part of our ongoing support for Windows 10, and have scoped the November 2021 Update to focus on productivity, management and security,” said Cable, adding that Microsoft “will be throttling up availability over the coming weeks to ensure a reliable download experience for all”.

​LinkedIn has rolled out a new feature designed to help freelancers access new job opportunities, akin to services like Fiver and Upwork.

Service Marketplace, which was previously only available as a beta to select LinkedIn users in the US, can now be accessed by freelancers all over the world, including the UK.

The feature allows users to find freelancers or project providers through a vast variety of 250 job categories, with opportunities ranging from accounting and consulting to information technology and software development.

Freelancers and project providers can find each other through the Search function, or by exploring the project categories, with all projects described in the Details. If interested, freelancers and project providers can then communicate through messages to find out more about the job, and after it’s finalised, they can rate each other through a five-star system.

Service Marketplace is based on LinkedIn’s pre-existing ProFinder tool, with the Microsoft subsidiary having started integrating “the best elements of Profinder into the LinkedIn platform” in 2020, according to LinkedIn senior communications manager Amanda Purvis.

“We’ve begun helping our service providers integrate their Profinder data to Service Pages and this will continue over the coming months. This will be an incredible opportunity for providers to increase their reach and gain more visibility to the LinkedIn community. Providers can expect to get regular updates from us as we evolve our service provider experience,” Purvis told the AIM Group last month.

Service Marketplace can be seen as LinkedIn’s response to freelance-focused platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork, which have capitalised on the growing number of workers joining the so-called gig economy.

Although severely hit by the financial downturn during the pandemic, freelancers constitute approximately 4.3 million out of the 32.4 million people employed in the UK, down from just over 5 million in January 2020, according to Statista.

In the US, where Service Marketplace was first trialled and rolled out, the pandemic fuelled the popularity of the gig economy, with the growth of temporary contracts attributed to the mass shift to remote working. In April 2021, the US saw a 25% increase in the number of gigs completed per day, raising questions about the sustainability of the type of work post-pandemic.

The news follows LinkedIn’s quarterly earnings report, with the company announcing this week that its revenue for Q3 was up 42% year over year.

Zoom users will now be able to benefit from a new live transcription tool, the video conferencing giant announced today.

The feature, which automatically generates speaker subtitles on Zoom video meetings or webinars, is now available across all free and paid Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars accounts.

However, the tool is currently only available in English, the company stated, with plans to expand live transcription to other languages in the future. Zoom also supports third-party captioning services which might offer auto-generated captions in other languages.

Zoom’s live transcription can be enabled by users through the Zoom web portal, or privately requested during a meeting session using the toolbar.

The feature not only has the potential to make communication easier but is also a crucial tool in making video conferencing more accessible to those with hearing impairments.

Zoom Meetings and Chat product marketing manager, Theresa Larkin, said that it’s important that “everyone can successfully connect, communicate, and participate” using the video conferencing platform.

“Without the proper accessibility tools, people with disabilities face tremendous barriers when using video communication solutions. That’s why we are focused on building out a platform that is accessible to everyone, and features such as auto-generated captions are an important part of that mission,” she added.

Zoom has also set its sights on enabling real-time, multi-language translation capabilities for its users in an effort “to deliver happiness to our users and improve meeting productivity”. In June, the company announced the acquisition of Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions (Kites) – a startup focused on the development of real-time AI-powered translation technologies.

Prior to that, Zoom also unveiled a new range of desk phones fit for the office and the home that includes high-definition video as well as built-in collaboration software. The new offerings, with live transcription being the latest, are part of the company’s efforts to retain users as lockdown restrictions are eased and more workers return to the office.