A satellite station has opened the UK’s first green high-performance computing platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning on demand.

The Cornwall-based Goonhilly Earth station is one of the first organisations in the UK to deploy a liquid immersion cooling system to mitigate the power demands of high-performance computing.

Its green platform consists of an onsite array of solar panels that can support the data centre’s full power requirements of 500KW, with local wind power to be added in the near future, according to the company. The system has been designed to particularly target the data-intensive needs of the automotive, life sciences and aerospace marketplaces.

“There are people working on some clever algorithms to save our planet from climate change,” said Chris Roberts, head of data centre and cloud at Goonhilly. “The irony is that these models require heavy processing power.

“Fortunately, new technology is helping, such as immersion cooling which is 45-50% more efficient than air cooling, cuts electricity demand in half, and also allows us to use the exhaust heat elsewhere.”

According to Goonhilly, the platform delivers high-performance GPU-based compute and storage for decentralised and centralised AI and machine learning applications. By provisioning both compute, AI and machine learning resources on demand, customers can reduce the cost of deployment and accelerate the launch of products.

Goonhilly has also joined the Nvidia Inception programme for businesses, furthering its AI work and granting it access to Nvidia’s DGX-1, the world’s first supercomputer purpose-built for enterprise AI and deep learning.

To mark the opening of the data centre, and also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Goonhilly is hosting an event on-site on Thursday 18 July for space industry partners, academia, customers and prospects. It includes a panel discussion on trends in AI, cloud and edge computing.

“Through our strong partnerships with industry and academia, we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of innovation. Our new green data centre is no exception. It is satisfying to open our doors to the many businesses and organisations with data-intensive applications who can benefit from this facility and the community we are creating,” said Ian Jones, the CEO of Goonhilly.

The European Union’s satellite navigation infrastructure, used by businesses and government agencies across the continent, has been offline for more than 100 hours following a network-wide outage.

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA), which runs the £8 billion Galileo programme, confirmed this weekend the satellite system has been struck with a “technical incident related to its ground infrastructure”.

As a result, all 24 satellites in orbit are non-operational.

“Experts are working to restore the situation as soon as possible,” the GSA said in a statement.

“An Anomaly Review Board has been immediately set up to analyse the exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.”

Galileo is used by government agencies, academics and tech companies for a wide range of applications, from smartphone navigation to search-and-rescue missions.

The programme offers several services including a free Open Service for positioning, navigation and timing, and an encrypted Public Regulated Service (PRS) for government-authorised users like customs officers and the police.

Its business application spans multiple sectors; used by fishing vessels, for example, to provide data to fishery authorities as well as by tractors with guidance for navigation. According to the GSA, 7.5 billion Galileo-friendly apps are expected by the end of 2019.

However, the satellite system, developed so European organisations aren’t wholly entirely reliant on GPS, has been offline since 1 am UTC on Thursday 11 July.

The GSA said at the time that users may experience “service degradation” on all Galileo satellites. A further update then issued two days later claimed users would be experiencing a total service outage until further notice. Neither update offered a concrete explanation for the mysterious outage, which has persisted at the time of writing.

The root cause, however, may lie with a ground station based in Italy, known as the Precise Timing Facility (PTF), according to Inside GNSS. This facility generates the Galileo System Time, which is beamed up to the satellites to enable user localisation. It is also often used as an accurate time reference.

In June, GPS services were also hit by a similar outage which affected a host of Middle-Eastern countries. According to Isreali media, that outage was linked to state-sponsored attacks from Russia.

The government and UK businesses have played an integral role in helping to develop Galileo since its pilot launch in 2016. The continental service is expected to be fully operational by 2020, with 30 satellites in total.

But the UK’s withdrawal from the EU has threatened to fully cut off access by British agencies and companies, should no deal be agreed.

The government has already set aside £92 million to develop an independent satellite system, although it’s unclear how long this would take to implement.

The number of individuals using Microsoft’s flagship workplace hub has soared in the last few months to leave its key competitor – Slack – in the dust, figures released by the firm show.

Two years after Microsoft launched its Teams platform, which is part of the firm’s Office 365 suite of apps and services, the company is boasting the digital workspace has more than 13 million active daily users.

This is one-third more than Slack’s 10 million daily user count according to the latest figures the company has disclosed. Active weekly users for Microsoft’s service, meanwhile, stand at 19 million.

The feat is more staggering considering that Microsoft’s platform was lagging behind its rival as soon as April this year, according to a chart the company produced.

Microsoft Teams owes its recent success to auto-inclusion with the 365 suite of apps and services

The pace of growth has been sharp but will not come as a surprise considering the number of organisations that are reliant on Microsoft Office 365, of which Teams is an integral component.

Distributing Microsoft Teams to its pre-existing customer base has likely been a huge factor in its growth since it was first launched two years ago.

The company says Teams now boasts a user base of 500,000 organisations. Slack, meanwhile, has more than 85,000 paid-for organisations, according to its latest figures, but the total number of businesses signed up to the workplace hub has not been disclosed.

Microsoft has also used this opportunity to introduce a raft of additional features for the workplace app, including priority notifications and read receipts for private chats.

Announcements can allow team members to flag important news in a channel, while cross-channel posting saves time on copy-and-pasting the same message to different audiences.

IT administrators are also being helped to deploy the Teams client and manage policies for every member within an organisation. Pre-defined policies, in areas like messaging and meetings, can be applied to employees based on the needs of their individual roles.

Slack itself recently announced a number of updates to its functionality and user interface. These span shared channels with customers and vendors, as well as added integration between email and calendars.

Commenting on Slack’s IPO a few weeks ago, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester, Michael Facemire, said Slack’s success will be determined by how well it can penetrate enterprises.

“Can Slack prove to the enterprise buyer that it is more than a chat app, more than a collaboration tool, but instead an enterprise collaboration platform? If Slack can do this, expanding out of a tech-savvy user base and into all parts of the business become much easier, as it starts to do work for everyone.

“The next challenge is selling its service into the enterprise. Many companies have multiple instances of free Slack in use. But this group of users face their first hurdle when these free accounts need enterprise governance (single sign-on, message retention rules, etc).

“Will Slack be able to prove the value of both paying the fee and doing the work to integrate with existing systems? This question will also signal how quickly it can succeed in an enterprise market.”

Cloud Pro approached Slack for comment and an update on its active daily user count, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

More than 17,000 domains have been compromised in an attack launched by the prolific hacking group Magecart, according to attack surface management firm RiskIQ.

The attack preys upon websites with leaky Amazon S3 buckets, an attack method seen all too often despite them now being protected by default. The researchers said that anyone with an AWS account could read or write files in the affected buckets.

The attackers scanned the web for misconfigured buckets to see if they had any Javascript files they could download and add their skimming code, overwriting the script on the bucket.

Magecart was trying to run scripts on websites to glean and make off with payment information that can then be sold on for profit. It wasn’t just smaller websites affected by the attack, some of the 17,000+ compromised websites fell into the top 2,000 Alex rankings.

The problem with the attacker’s methodology is this type of skimming attacks rarely works on payment pages of websites, which makes the chance of a successful attack low compared to a more considered, targeted approach.

But the Magecart group could still enjoy “a substantial return on investment” due to the range of the attack. “The ease of compromise that comes from finding public S3 buckets means that even if only a fraction of their skimmer injections returns payment data, it will be worth it,” said Yonathan Klijnsma, threat researcher at RiskIQ, in a blog post.

“Perhaps most importantly, the widespread nature of this attack illustrates just how easy it is to compromise a vast quantity of websites at once with scripts stored in misconfigured S3 buckets,” he added. “Without greater awareness and an increased effort to implement the security controls needed to protect the content stored in these buckets from theft or alteration by malicious attackers, there will be more – and more impactful – attacks using techniques similar to the ones outlined in this blog.”

Exploiting misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets is a common attack method used time and again by opportunistic cyber criminals.

Earlier in the year, Facebook apps Cultura Collectiva and At the Pool became victims of a similar attack, with the cyber criminals making off with 540 million records, including users’ names, IDs and comments made through Facebook’s social integration.

“Like any other security procedure, security policies are a good mechanism for protecting the access to your S3 Bucket, but it needs to be used the right way,” said Boris Cipot, senior security engineer at Synopsys. “It has to be understood, and the user needs to know what they are doing when applying those policies to their buckets.

“Unfortunately, misconfigured policies then can lead to examples like those where the attacker can identify buckets with those misconfigured policies and modify the content on them,” he added. “Every user should have a good understanding of what they’re doing, but if this is not possible, leave it to professionals that know how to handle security.

“On the other hand it would be nice to see if Amazon could make a policy screening functionality were they could identify such misconfigured policies and warn the user – or in some cases even forbid the usage of loose policies.”

Other notable examples of devastating attacks made possible by leaky buckets include the leak of data belonging 120 American households by Experian. The NSA, WWE and Accenture also suffered similar attacks.

The future looks bright, however. According to reports, since Amazon enabled encryption for buckets by default, the number of exposed files has plummeted to less than 2,000 whereas the number was in the region of 16 million beforehand.

File hosting platform Dropbox has launched a file-sharing service called ‘Dropbox Transfer’, as a form of alternative to email.

According to the company, which recently reinvented itself with a new design, email has limitations. You can only attach files up to a certain size and its not always clear if your recipients have received them.

“Transfer offers the convenience of email, without the 25 MB limit on attachments,” the company said. “With Transfer, you can send up to 100 GB of files – five times what some other services allow – in just a few clicks.

With Dropbox Transfer, users will have the option to drag and drop files to upload from their computer or skip the wait by adding items stored in Dropbox. Once they’ve created a transfer, they’ll get a link that can be pasted anywhere. This link can be sent to anyone, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account, the company said.

Recently an email platform called Superhuman hit the headlines after it was revealed it used ‘read receipts’ which tracked when and where emails were opened – without consent. Dropbox seems to have added a similar feature – sans the location tracking – where users can customise their transfers with notifications for when they’ve been opened – and also how many times.

There’s also a set of tools to create bespoke designs for a more professional look, where logos and branding can be added, rather than just a simple shared file link.

Dropbox Transfer opens today as a private beta, regardless of whether you’re using a free or paid account. There’s a beta waiting list on the company’s website for those that want to try the new service out.

Like the 20-goal-a-season striker who turns up in the manager’s office asking for a new contract, Dropbox is good – and it knows it. That’s why it’s turning the screw on free users, enforcing significant price rises on subscribers and doing its level best to turn the red ink on its profit-and-loss sheet to black.

The warning signs literally started appearing in March, when free users suddenly received alerts that they couldn’t install Dropbox on new devices because the company had imposed a strict three-device limit. Any devices you had linked to Dropbox prior to March would remain so, but if you subsequently tried to add a new one, you couldn’t just swap one of the old devices out – you had to reduce the number of devices on your account to two and then add the new one.

Want the freedom to install Dropbox on as many devices as you like again? Well, step right over here and take out one of Dropbox’s subscription plans, from the bargain price of £5.99 per month. Except that price didn’t last long. Last month, Dropbox imposed 20% price rises across the board, meaning the cheapest subscription plan now costs just shy of £100 a year, or £7.99 per month. If you don’t want to pay a year’s subscription in advance, that’s hiked up to £9.99 per month or £120 a year.

To be fair to Dropbox, it has increased the amount of storage available to paid-for subscribers. Plus users have seen their storage quota double from 1TB to 2TB, and the service has rolled out several new features, including the ability to “rewind” your entire Dropbox should ransomware encrypt all your files and demand you immediately shuttle £500 to Sergei in Moscow to get them back.

That Dropbox is brilliant is not in question. I’ve used it for personal and business files for years and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times it’s let me down. And because I’ve managed to harvest chunks of extra storage by recommending Dropbox to friends and buying certain devices over the years, I’ve not had to pay for it.

But now I feel like I’m being boxed in by Dropbox. The three-device limit will eventually bite me (I currently have it installed on no fewer than 21 devices, although a good chunk of them are sitting unused in my kit cupboard) and Dropbox is so firmly integrated into my work and personal life that I’d struggle to get by without it. Almost any app or productivity software you can think of integrates with Dropbox – no other service offers the same carefree file syncing.

So at some point soon I’m going to be faced with a choice. Do I pay up and tether myself to Dropbox and its price rises for the foreseeable future? Or jump ship before I’m in too deep? You might reasonably argue that I’ve had a good run on a free service, and I should be prepared to pay for something that’s so valuable to my business. But there’s something about being strong-armed into subscribing that leaves a bad taste. It’s nowhere near as malicious as the ransomware it guards against, but it’s not entirely dissimilar, either: it’s got my data, now it wants my money.