A US Federal Claims judge has refused a request from Microsoft and the US Department of Justice to dismiss Amazon’s claims that the Trump administration interfered with the bidding process for the Pentagon’s JEDI contract.

Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith decision on Wednesday paves the way for further review of a lawsuit filed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019, which has maintained that the deal to provide cloud services was unfairly awarded to Microsoft.

The cloud giant claimed that the bidding for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise and Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud migration contract was flawed and that the then president, Donald Trump, had used his position to influence the final decision.

“The record of improper influence by former President Trump is disturbing, and we are pleased the Court will review the remarkable impact it had on the JEDI contract award,” an AWS spokesperson said. “We continue to look forward to the Court’s review of the many material flaws in the DoD’s evaluation.”

The claims against Trump have been widely reported but, until now, haven’t been considered in a legal setting. According to a book written by Guy Snodgrass, ‘Holding The Line‘, former Pentagon secretary James Mattis claimed that the president directed him to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on the JEDI contract.

In response to the decision to reject its motion, Microsoft said that it “changes little” and that professional procurement staff at the DoD chose the tech giant after a thorough review.

“We’ve continued for more than a year to do the internal work necessary to move forward on JEDI quickly, and we continue to work with DoD, as we have for more than 40 years, on mission-critical initiatives like supporting its rapid shift to remote work and the Army’s IVAS,” said Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s CVP of communications.

Judge Campbell-Smith had previously ruled that the DoD had “improperly evaluated” a price scenario, stating that part of Microsoft’s bid was not “technically feasible”. As a result, the tech giant has not been able to start working on the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI project.

The Department of Defence (DoD) has previously suggested that it would scrap the project entirely if AWS was successful in its legal challenge.

The Walt Disney Company has extended its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it continues the global rollout of its Disney+ streaming service.

Since it was revealed in 2017, AWS has been heavily involved in the development of Disney+, providing a range of services from data analytics to storage.

The extension will see Disney tapping into more than 50 different AWS services, such as machine learning, content delivery, and serverless computing, as it continues to launch in new regions.

The service has been built on a flexible, secured cloud video infrastructure powered by AWS with the two firms collaborating “closely” to balance loads and handle usage spikes with viewing peaking during premium content like The Mandalorian and the WandaVision. When it launched in November 2019, there were more than 10 million new sign-ups within the first 24-hours.

“Disney+ has completely reinvented what’s possible in content delivery by challenging convention and using cloud technology to build a streaming product from scratch that had never been launched and marketed before on such a global scale,” said Joe Inzerillo, the executive vice president and CTO, direct-to-consumer, of the Walt Disney Company. 

“AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+.”

Amazon Kinesis, which is a data analytics platform, and Amazon DynamoDB, a database that helps manage metadata and enables content to be watched on different devices, have both been extensively used by Disney to create and deploy Disney+. The company also uses Amazon Timestream to monitor the streaming platform and ensure that users continue to have access to the highest quality video content.

With the assistance of AWS, the Walt Disney Company has been able to rapidly expand Disney+ to 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and South America and there are plans to continue pushing its service around the world.

Microsoft Teams has suffered a global outage for the second time this month that is preventing users from sending messages and logging in to the service. 

The tech giant confirmed the issue on Twitter and said it was currently investigating the root cause. 

The issue, which is throwing up a 401 error code, is preventing users from accessing the service via the web and blocking messaging systems on the app itself. Some have managed to log in, but Microsoft has warned that they might experience “degraded performance with multiple features”. 

“We’ve confirmed that this issue affects users globally,” says Microsoft’s 365 status account on Twitter. “We’re reviewing monitoring telemetry and recent changes to isolate the source of the issue.”

The problems began around 10:30am BST, according to DownDetector, with login and server issues the most commonly cited by users. Other Microsoft services, such as Azure and Xbox have so far been unaffected, but with the pandemic still lingering and many still working from home, the outage is causing trouble for many in the UK and around the world – including Doncaster’s local planning committee.

“Unfortunately due to global issues with Microsoft Teams today’s scheduled Planning Committee is cancelled,” the organisation said on Twitter. “The meeting will be rearranged in due course, we will share details of the new date once it becomes available.”

Since, Microsoft has said that it’s identified the root cause of the issue and “performed mitigation actions”. 

“We’re seeing signs of recovery and will continue to monitor the service,” the company added. “Users still experiencing impact should restart their clients to expedite recovery. Further details can be found under TM252802.

This is the second outage Teams has suffered in April and the third its experienced in the past two months. In March, users lost four hours of usage after an authentication change knocked out access to the comms platform. That coincided with an Azure Active Directory outage that impacted Office web apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other Microsoft services. 

IT Pro has approached Microsoft for details and will update this article when more information is released. 

Zoom has rolled out a video background feature called Immersive View that aims to make its video calls feel more like physical, in-person meetings. 

The feature was unveiled last year at the firm’s Zoomtopia conference but has this week rolled out to both free and paid-for accounts for meetings and webinars of up to 25 participants. 

Zoom already has virtual background options, but Immersive View – which is available on Zoom desktop for Windows and macOS – adds functions to select and move participants into more realistic scenarios. It can be enabled via the dropdown menu where you can find ‘Speaker’ and ‘Gallery’ view.

From there, users will have the choice to either automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes, such as a boardroom or auditorium, or do so manually. 

Each attendee can be resized by the host and moved around a chosen scene, and users can even upload their own. It’s possible to use any image as an Immersive View background, but Zoom recommends that matching up file type, aspect ratio and resolution, as it has with its choices, will produce the best results. 

“Whether you want to create the feeling of being in a classroom, a boardroom, a conference auditorium, or your favourite place to catch up with friends, Zoom’s Immersive View assembles up to 25 participants in one fun, consistent meeting environment,” Zoom product marketing specialist, David Ball, said in a blog post.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations; calls over 25 people will see remaining guests in a strip of video thumbnails at the top of the scene. Worse, participants that are not using the latest version of Zoom will simply see the standard grid. Recordings are also subject to these limitations; they’ll be recorded in the standard Speaker or Gallery View, rather than a fun virtual scene.

Embattled Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is pivoting towards software and cloud services in a bid to attract more developers.

The firm launched six new cloud products over the weekend, further expanding its ambitions to take on the likes of Alibaba, Amazon, and Google, according to CNBC. 

The six cloud products include containers, artificial intelligence (AI) programming assistants, databases, computing services and infrastructure software. Each was launched at the company’s three-day developer conference in Shenzhen, which has cloud, AI and open source as its main theme.

The announcement also included a $200 million investment in Huawei’s developer programme, which aims to boost its software ecosystem and cloud services. 

Huawei’s cloud efforts have paid off, according to Canalys Research, with revenues jumping 168% year on year in 2020. However, the firm is still far behind the likes of Amazon and Alibaba in China. Huawei Cloud is currently the second-largest player in China with a 17.4% market share, compared to Alibaba’s 40%, according to Canalys.

“By 2025, 100% of enterprises around the globe will be utilising cloud technology,”  said Richard Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei. “Cloud is the future of the ICT industry and the foundation for enterprises digital transformation. Developers are the soul of the industry.”

The cloud update comes after a tough year for Huawei, with its hardware unit struggling in the face of US sanctions. Its 5G equipment and services have been shunned in the US and UK over security fears and its smartphone sales have declined swiftly. It is widely believed that the lack of Google services on its Mate and P series of handsets is a big turn off for Western customers – although reports also suggest a decline in China too. 

The firm has been rapidly building out its own operating system, pivoting Harmony OS from an IoT-focused platform to one that can work on high-end smartphones. It is due to be released on Huawei handset in the coming weeks, but it’s still in need of development and is a far cry from Android. 

Google has released a diagnostic app for Chrome OS that lets users initiate a scan for hardware faults within a Chromebook.

The app is part of a recent update to Chrome OS that also aims to reduce the number of tabs you open by giving the launcher more instant capabilities.

The diagnostic app will be accessible from the launcher so users can instantly scan various parts of their device for issues. This can be used on their Chromebook’s CPU, memory, and battery and give quick insights on what might be slowing their device down.

The Chromebook launcher, which is where users can normally find apps, local files, or Google search, will now also include a calculator, weather updates, stock prices, and even quick word definitions in an attempt to create a single source for all of a Chromebook user’s needs.

For example, if the battery is draining faster than one would normally expect, the app can run a ‘discharge test’ to see if the hardware is the cause of the problem. The app will also offer up links to relevant support articles and save the test results in a session log that can be shared with customer support teams if the problem is severe enough. There will also be a list of standard troubleshooting advice for more minor faults.

In the coming weeks, Chrome OS will also receive the ‘Live Captions‘ feature that was recently added to the Chrome browser. These are automatic, real-time captions for any media that has audio, and will be an option on “most” Chrome OS devices inside the Accessibility menu.

The updates come as Chromebook sales continue to increase, according to recent Gartner research, which suggests that shipments reached “triple figures” for the first quarter of 2021. This follows on from strong sales in Q4 of 2020, where Canalys suggested demand was “through the roof“.

Google has unveiled a host of new functions for the web version of its video conferencing platform Google Meet.

The updates mainly focus on hosts with new options that aim to make presentations more engaging, but there are also AI-based video quality enhancements that aim to make participants feeds clearer.

These updates are a refresh for both the service and its users, with Google looking to reduce “meeting fatigue“. Users can choose to have their video feed in a standard tile in the grid or as a floating picture, which can be moved and resized or even minimised completely. Google says it’s also planning that will enable users to turn off the self-feed across all Google Meet calls.

“The new Meet enhancements are largely inspired by customer and user feedback,” the tech giant said in a blog post. “Beginning next month, desktop and laptop users will see a new, richer user interface with an array of easy-to-access features that make meetings more productive and inclusive.”
 
Meet’s new user interface, which will be available in May, will include easy-to-access features for more productive and inclusive meetings. Presenters will be able to pin and unpin content midway through a presentation and make the content tile the same size as participant tiles. While they will still see the full presentation, the presenter will have a better view of reactions. 

Controls are also getting a rejig, with an update to the bottom navigation bar. Dial-in codes, attachments, call lists, chat and other functions will all sit along the bottom for ease of access, with Google also aiming to increase screen space for more participants. 

Participants might also look a little better thanks to some automated light adjustments. This feature, due to arrive on Meet in the coming weeks, will detect users that appear underexposed and enhance the brightness for them. The same software will also zoom in if a participant needs it and position them squarely in front of the camera.

Charles “Chuck” Geschke, the co-founder of Adobe and the co-creator of the portable document format (PDF), has died at the age of 81. 
 
Together with John Warnock, Geschke set up Adobe in 1982 and helped to develop many software innovations that are still in use today, almost 40 years later. 

​

The current CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, sent an email to employees announcing Geschke’s passing. 

“It is with profound sadness that I share that our beloved co-founder Dr Chuck Geschke, has passed away at the age of 81, leaving an indelible mark on our company and the world,” Narayen wrote. “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades.”

Imaging Science Laboratory

Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939 and enjoyed a successful career in maths and technology long before co-founding Adobe. He taught mathematics at John Carroll University in the 1960s before completing a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1972. 

After his studies, Geschke began working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), building a mainframe computer and developing programming tools for the Xerox Star workstation. In 1978, he started the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at PARC and researched graphics, optics and image processing. While working at the labs he hired a computer scientist called John Warnock with whom he formed a strong working partnership.

Warnock and Geschke developed interpress – a paged description language (PDL) – but were unable to convince Xerox management of its commercial value. The two men left to form their own company, with PDL eventually forming the basis of PostScritpt. 

Adobe Creek

Like a number of today’s biggest tech firms, Adobe was founded in a garage – John Warnock’s, to be precise – but the startup was originally called “Adobe Creek”. PostScript was developed on Apple computers and resulted in one of the first desktop publishing systems – users could see their documents on screen, exactly as they would appear in print. This was known as WYSIWYG, an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and helped to create a whole new industry within printing and has led to one of the most popular software suites of all time. 

Geschke was Adobe’s COO from 1986 to 1994 but retired in 2000. In 1992 he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held captive for four days by two men who tried to demand ransom from his wife, Nancy “Nan” Geschke. He was found, unharmed, and the two men were sentenced to life terms in state prison. 

In 2009, Geschke was awarded the National Medal of Technology by Barack Obama, but despite this and his contribution to the modern world, Geschke remained a very grounded man. 

“He was really a humble, humble man – I can say that, as his wife,” Nan Geschke told Mercury News. “He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that.”

​

Charles “Chuck” Geschke, the co-founder of Adobe and the co-creator of the portable document format (PDF), has died at the age of 81. 
 
Together with John Warnock, Geschke set up Adobe in 1982 and helped to develop many software innovations that are still in use today, almost 40 years later. 

​

The current CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, sent an email to employees announcing Geschke’s passing. 

“It is with profound sadness that I share that our beloved co-founder Dr Chuck Geschke, has passed away at the age of 81, leaving an indelible mark on our company and the world,” Narayen wrote. “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades.”

Imaging Science Laboratory

Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939 and enjoyed a successful career in maths and technology long before co-founding Adobe. He taught mathematics at John Carroll University in the 1960s before completing a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1972. 

After his studies, Geschke began working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), building a mainframe computer and developing programming tools for the Xerox Star workstation. In 1978, he started the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at PARC and researched graphics, optics and image processing. While working at the labs he hired a computer scientist called John Warnock with whom he formed a strong working partnership.

Warnock and Geschke developed interpress – a paged description language (PDL) – but were unable to convince Xerox management of its commercial value. The two men left to form their own company, with PDL eventually forming the basis of PostScritpt. 

Adobe Creek

Like a number of today’s biggest tech firms, Adobe was founded in a garage – John Warnock’s, to be precise – but the startup was originally called “Adobe Creek”. PostScript was developed on Apple computers and resulted in one of the first desktop publishing systems – users could see their documents on screen, exactly as they would appear in print. This was known as WYSIWYG, an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and helped to create a whole new industry within printing and has led to one of the most popular software suites of all time. 

Geschke was Adobe’s COO from 1986 to 1994 but retired in 2000. In 1992 he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held captive for four days by two men who tried to demand ransom from his wife, Nancy “Nan” Geschke. He was found, unharmed, and the two men were sentenced to life terms in state prison. 

In 2009, Geschke was awarded the National Medal of Technology by Barack Obama, but despite this and his contribution to the modern world, Geschke remained a very grounded man. 

“He was really a humble, humble man – I can say that, as his wife,” Nan Geschke told Mercury News. “He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that.”

​

IBM’s first-quarter earnings for 2021 beat analyst expectations with modest revenue growth of 0.9% ending four consecutive quarters of decline.

The company’s revenue for the first three months of the year came in at $17.73 billion, still some way off the $21.8 billion it recorded in Q1 of 2020 just before the pandemic spread to Europe and the US. 

For the first three months of 2021, IBM’s Global Technology Services – the unit that handles managed services and outsourcing – brought in revenues of $6.37 billion. Its Cloud and Cognitive Software Division, which includes Red Hat, was up 4% with revenues $5.44 billion, with Red Hat on its own reporting impressive growth of 17%.

IBM’s Global Business Services, which includes consulting, contributed $4.23 billion in revenue, a 2% increase year-on-year. System sales, such as mainframe computers, was also up 4% with revenue coming in at $1.43 billion. 

“Strong performance this quarter in cloud, driven by increasing client adoption of our hybrid cloud platform, and growth in software and consulting enabled us to get off to a solid start for the year,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. 

“While we have more work to do, we are confident we can achieve full-year revenue growth and meet our adjusted free cash flow target in 2021.”

Krishna has now completed a full year at the helm of IBM and this is the company’s best quarter under his leadership. While a number of other cloud firms have seen revenues increase throughout the pandemic, IBM turned out to be one of the few that saw consecutive declines. In the fourth quarter of 2020, its revenues dropped 6%, its sharpest fall for five years. 

IBM is currently undergoing a major shift by splitting its business in two; IBM is transitioning into a full cloud firm and its infrastructure segments will fall under a new company called Kyndryl. With more and more companies turning to the cloud or accelerating digital transformation plans, IBM hopes its two units will be better placed to capitalise.