Google has launched the second build of the Android 12 Public Beta with participating Pixel users able to make use of a swathe of widely-anticipated privacy features.

Android 12 Beta 2 adds several features that were announced at the Google I/O developer conference in May but weren’t included with the first beta. 

Chief among these is a privacy dashboard that gives users insights into the various permissions that apps request, including access to location, the microphone, and the camera.

“Today we’re releasing the second Beta of Android 12 for you to try. Beta 2 adds new privacy features like the Privacy Dashboard and continues our work of refining the release,” said Android’s VP of engineering, Dave Burke.

“End-to-end there’s a lot for developers in Android 12 – from the redesigned UI and app widgets, to rich haptics, improved video, and image quality, privacy features like approximate location, and much more.”

The dashboard, accessible from the settings menu, also comes packaged with quick toggles so users can cut an app’s access to hardware components. There’s also an indicator in the status bar to show when either the microphone or camera are being accessed.

The latest beta version also adds functionality to manage network connections, replacing the Wi-Fi widget in the notifications centre with the Internet panel. This panel helps users switch between providers and troubleshoot connectivity issues.

Much of the changes with Android 12, in this latest beta as well as the last, aren’t set in stone and are subject to change based on feedback from Pixel users testing the operating system. There’s set to be at least one more beta release before Android 12 achieves ‘platform stability’ in August. There may then be one final beta release ahead of the final release later this year.

Android 12 will instigate a complete refresh of the UI, bringing a new set of colours, shapes, and animations to the way that users navigate the system. The design language, dubbed Material You by developers, will make Android more “expressive, dynamic and personal”.

As detailed at the I/O conference, the development team has made significant investments in upgrading performance in the new operating system. These comprise improvements to foundational system performance, battery life efficiencies, changes to foreground services, media quality, as well as new tools to optimise apps.

Zoom has unveiled a new range of desk phones fit for the office and the home that includes high-definition video and built-in collaboration software.

These are the first two products to come from the firm’s ‘Zoom Phone Appliance’ programme, which combines its conferencing software with hardware from electronics specialists Poly and Yealink.

Both are fairly traditional-looking desk phones, but also feature a large touch screen and webcam, though the Yealink version also comes with physical keys. Zoom suggests these devices are a “new category of hardware”, optimised for the so-called hybrid workforce that mixes home and office working.

“The traditional workplace is evolving and adapting, and our goal is to empower the workforce to accomplish more by blurring the lines between voice and video,” said Graeme Geddes, head of Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms. “The new Zoom Phone Appliance program boasts a selection of purpose-built Zoom Phone hardware from Poly and Yealink, streamlining communications, removing friction, and enabling a powerful communications experience.”

The devices have been designed for simple installation and low maintenance, so that they are just as easy to use at home as they are in the office. The desk phones also feature ‘Zero-touch provisioning’, which Zoom claims minimises the need for IT support with a centralised management system and regular updates. What’s more, the phones will work with your regular Zoom account, so no additional licensing is required.

Both the Poly and Yealink devices include ‘always-on’ Zoom capabilities, where meetings can be scheduled and joined instantly, and more traditional desk phone functions such as audio calls and voicemail.

The touch screen display also includes an interactive whiteboard that can be shared with colleagues and exported to other devices. The system can also be synced with the user’s calendar – which includes Google Calendar.

These are the “inaugural class” of Zoom Phone Appliances, the firm said, with other products and features to follow, potentially from other partners.

Cisco has unveiled an all-new suite of services for its Webex platform with features it hopes will serve as the foundation for “inclusive” hybrid work environments.
 
The cloud firm’s research estimates that 98% of future meetings will include at least one remote participant and that this requires more broad investment into non-traditional conference rooms. 

Its new suite of services, which also sees the introduction of a new Webex logo, includes an end-to-end events platform, an analytics tools to track audience engagement, speech optimisation, machine learning software to improve video quality, data-loss prevention and collaborative hardware to enable use either in the office or at home. 
 
“Cisco’s collaboration business is incredibly essential to our customers,” said the company’s CEO, Chuck Robbins. “With all the integrations the team has added – 800 new features and devices since September – we truly have the most comprehensive meetings, calling, messaging, and event management solution on the market powering the future of hybrid work.
 
The analytics tools will include functions for polls, Q&As and an audience engagement service which Cisco calls an “industry first”. This will be integrated across all collaboration experiences with the polling feature available now in Meetings.
 
The Camera updates include a “People Focus” function whereby machine learning and AI technology is used to individually reframe meeting participants who are spread across a room. This will remote participants to feel more connected, according to Cisco, with everyone in the meeting able to benefit from seeing body language, facial expressions and more. 
 
The suite will also come with security features to prevent loss of data for Webex, which automatically blocks and removes confidential information and prohibits users from posting classified content rather than redacting or deleting content after it is posted. Additionally, European Webex customers will be able to host and process their content within the EU.
 
The new suite is available now and is priced at 40% lower than “a-la-carte”, according to Cisco. Webex Desk, a desktop video device option for home offices and small meeting spaces, will be made available for order later in June for $1,249.

Digital transformation should be a constant process, not just a project to get your business through the pandemic, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The tech giant has released a report into cloud adoption ahead of its 2021 AWS Summit event, which suggests that pandemic has accelerated organisations’ digital transformation plans by an average of two years and five months. 

The firm surveyed 10,000 senior business and IT decision-makers across France, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the UK, with the aim of understanding digital transformation at speed and how it could continue beyond the pandemic. 

IT Pro spoke to the company’s head of operations in the UK and Ireland, Darren Hardman, who joined the tech giant not long after the outbreak of COVID, about the post-pandemic businesses that we can expect to see. 

“I think the key thing that I’ve learned is that a new breed of enterprises is emerging post-pandemic that is confident about responding to change, more agile in managing that change, and more secure and resilient,” Hardman told IT Pro. 

Enterprises that have experimented during the COVID pandemic are experiencing a “reinvention dividend”, according to Hardman, with these organisations now more resilient and better placed to succeed in the so-called ‘new normal’. 69% of the business leaders surveyed said they have a clear strategy to seize opportunities, and 60% agreed they will need to adjust their business model again once lockdown measures lift.

“It has been interesting actually trying to understand which of the companies were reacting to a short term issue with no intention to carry on, versus those that were actually just accelerating their strategy, because in the data 64% of them have told us that they intend to adopt more cloud technologies post-pandemic,” Hardman explained. 

“And 54% of them are now dependent on their cloud to service their customers. Which is interesting, isn’t it? Because it shows that their journey to the cloud, even if it started during the pandemic, is something they expect to continue.” 

However, the report also suggested that there were plenty of warning signs when it comes to sustaining agility and transformation, including internal challenges. Half of the decision-makers said their organisations still lack an understanding of how to link business problems to technical solutions, 47% said employees were resistant to change, and 42% said a lack of skills could hold them back.

“It’s about having the leadership and the leadership muscle to drive this culture of change in your organisation,” Hardman added. “So constantly, as a leader, am I relentlessly trying to seek out the truth to see what competitors are doing in my space to see what customers think about my product or my service, and am I creating the right culture to challenge my own organisation to continually reinvent?”

Oracle has extended its work with the UK government by updating its existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS).

The update aims to foster stronger working relationships between Oracle and the UK’s public sector by enabling better use of secure cloud technologies and includes support from Oracle’s Centre of Excellence.

Oracle’s original MoU was penned in 2012 and the update will push more of its services into public sector bodies, such as NHS Trusts and local and devolved governments. Critical public services will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Cloud applications, secure infrastructure services and also autonomous technology.

“This enhanced Memorandum of Understanding will continue to deliver savings and benefits for new and existing public sector customers using Oracle’s cloud based technologies. It will continue delivering value for money whilst supporting public sector customers’ journey to the cloud”, said Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer, Crown Commercial Service.

With the enhanced Oracle Centre of Excellence, the UK government will enable better use of secure cloud technologies to support long term innovation and transformation of public services.

Oracle provides a dual-region sovereign cloud that is used by public sector customers, such as the Home Office, Office for National Statistics, the NHS NEP, the Ministry of Defence and West Midlands Police. Its updated MoU will expand on these relationships and allow more public sector organisations to use cloud technologies.

While Oracle is an existing customer, the UK’s list of cloud providers has grown during the pandemic, with the likes of Microsoft and Google Cloud all signing MOU. However, earlier in the year, MPs questioned the number of cloud contracts that had gone to AWS, claiming the government had given too much to one provider.

Amazon, GitHub and the UK government’s online portal were among countless websites taken offline by the outage of cloud computing provider Fastly.

The outage, which started just before 11am on Tuesday, impacted a variety of websites, ranging from governmental portals and news outlets to IT and code-hosting services.

Among those which have been affected are payment websites PayPal and Shopify, internet forums Quora and Reddit, streaming sites Spotify, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max, and Vimeo, and developer portals GitHub and Stack Overflow.

The Fastly outage has also taken down gov.uk, as well as numerous online newspapers and news outlets. These include the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, CNN, the Guardian, Bloomberg News, and The Verge, with the latter opting to take its reporting onto Google Docs.

The precise number of affected sites is at this time unknown. Fastly reportedly has 2,084 paying customers who could all be impacted by the outage. The average Fastly customer reportedly spends $136,000 (£96,125) per year.

The gov.uk Twitter account stated that it’s “aware of the issues with http://GOV.UK which means that users may not be able to access the site”. 

“This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency,” it added.

On its status information site, Fastly described the issue as a “global CDN disruption”, noting that it’s “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”. Fastly’s own website was also down, displaying an “I/O error” message, while other websites showed a “503 error“.

At 11:44 am BST, the company announced that it had identified the issue and that “a fix [was] being implemented.

A Fastly spokesperson told IT Pro that the company “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” across its POPs “globally” and has since “disabled that configuration”.

“Our global network is coming back online,” they added.

Gov.uk’s services were brought back shortly after Fastly’s announcement, and most of the affected sites appeared to come back online at around noon BST.

At least half of Salesforce employees will continue to work from home after the pandemic, according to the CRM services provider’s CEO Marc Benioff.

In an interview with CNBC, Benioff said that “maybe 50%, 60% [of staff] are going to be working at home”, which is considerably more than prior to the pandemic.

“Before this all started, 20% of our workers worked at home,” he said. 

Salesforce has had a notably lax attitude towards its employees returning to the office, with the company’s president and chief people officer Brent Hyder recently stating that “the 9-to-5 workday is dead”. 

In February, the company announced that it would provide its employees with the choice of three working models; flex, fully remote and office-based. Those opting for the ‘flex’ model will spend between one and three days a week in the office, mostly for collaborative projects, customer meetings and presentations.

Although Benioff said that he “won’t be ringing any bell saying: alright everybody get back in the office”, he expects staff to “come back” eventually. However, he noted that the working experience has been inadvertently changed over the course of the pandemic.

“The past is gone,” he said. “We’ve created a whole new world, a new digital future, and you can see it playing out today.”

Other tech companies embracing remote working include Dropbox, Panaseer, HomeHero, and 3RSP, with the latter’s business development director Stuart Melling telling IT Pro that he “can’t imagine why we’d force people to return just for the sake of it”.

However, not all companies seem to agree. Last week, Apple employees received a company memo requesting their presence in the office for at least three days a week from September, which was met with protest. According to an internal letter obtained by The Verge,  staff responded by asking the company to reconsider its stance and let the workers experience the same level of flexibility as during the pandemic.

“We would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues, that Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit,” they said in the letter.

“Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”

​Welcome to issue 17 of IT Pro 20/20, our sister title’s digital magazine that distills the most important themes of the previous month into an easy-to-read package.

In this issue, we once again look at how regulations are shaping the development of technology. Our lead story is a deep-dive into the EU’s recent attempts to create a GDPR-like framework for AI, and what this might mean for businesses across the bloc.

Keeping with that theme, we also explain how altcoins work and how they fit into a market likely to face tough new rules in the coming years, and also examine the ways in which businesses can walk that fine line between privacy and personalisation.

Also in this issue, you’ll find an in-depth analysis of IBM’s recent pivot to the cloud, and a look at why Formula 1 teams are so enamoured with big tech.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on 30 June – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

Google is planning to migrate parts of YouTube away from its internal on-premise data centre infrastructure to its public cloud division, Google Cloud.

Although Google Cloud has carved a solid reputation through the years, its overall market share still languishes behind the likes of  Azure and AWS. With the cloud market continuing to expand at pace, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm is therefore hoping to exploit the potential for higher revenues.

Moving parts of YouTube’s operations to Google’s own public cloud division may serve as a spark the company needs to stay competitive, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaking with CNBC. 

Doing so would also allow the company to fight alongside the likes of AWS and Azure, with parent companies Amazon and Microsoft each moving their core services to their own public cloud divisions through the years.

“Part of evolving the cloud is having our own services use it more and more, and they are,” Kurian told the network. “Parts of YouTube are moving to Google Cloud.”

This migration will be the latest Google service to be powered by its public cloud arm, alongside its Google Workspace suite of productivity apps and services, as well as the DeepMind research division. 

YouTube, however, is one of the largest and most widely-used platforms on the internet, and migrating its operations to Google Cloud may, the company hopes, encourage other businesses to follow suit.

Google Cloud has been in a state of transition since Kurian took over from Diane Greene a couple of years ago. The division recorded losses of £4.1 billion in 2020, which were attributed to investment in new data centres, with Google Cloud intent on vastly expanding its operations in the coming years.

In 2020, the cloud giant launched four cloud regions in Indonesia, South Korea and the US, alongside another four which are set to be established in Qatar, Spain, Italy and France.

The New South Wales (NSW) Police Force is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to speed up investigations by automating manual tasks.

The force’s AI-infused platform, called Insights, gives police access to a wide array of critical information and automates many tasks such as transcribing recordings of audio interviews or poring through petabytes of CCTV footage.

A 20-minute recording of a statement can take a police officer two to three hours to manually transcribe, but through the Insights platform, this is now completed in seconds or minutes, according to Gordon Dunsford, CITO and executive director of digital technology and innovation at the police force.

In one investigation, NSW Police collected 14,000 pieces of CCTV footage that would have previously taken detectives months to analyse. With the AI/ML technology, the platform ingested all the CCTV for the analysis in around five hours. 

Insights is currently hosted internally but is expected to migrate to the cloud soon. NSW Police is using a containerisation strategy to parcel up data that needs to be interpreted rapidly and sends it to Azure for processing. Dunsford said Microsoft Azure’s security credentials are highly valued by NSW Police, helping it to de-risk its modernisation program.

Microsoft and NSW Police claim the system has been designed with ethics front and centre, and in consultation with privacy experts with a particular focus on avoiding bias. In June 2020, Microsoft confirmed it would not sell or deploy facial recognition to police services, and stated that the Insights platform aligned with that commitment and brings significant value to the NSW Police in their pursuit of justice.

NSW has the largest police force in Australia, with over 22,000 members. Since 2017/18 it has been pursuing a new Digital IT Strategy, with one of the landmark programmes being the Integrated Policing Operating System (IPOS), a modern cloud-based platform replacing the force’s 27-year-old central database. The NSW Police is working with Microsoft Consulting Services on the build of the IPOS application with Protected level security in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Following a fortnight of Black Lives Matter protests, IBM decided to “sunset” its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software over ethical concerns last June. The cloud giant declared it would no longer distribute these systems for fear it could be used for purposes that go against the company’s principles of trust and transparency. 

Microsoft followed in the footsteps of IBM and Amazon and declared it would not sell facial recognition technology to police departments in the US until a national law was in place that could govern the technology.