Antivirus software pioneer John McAfee has reportedly been found dead in a Spanish prison, hours after the country’s highest court approved his extradition to the United States.

The Catalan police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, confirmed a report in El País that the 75-year-old had been found dead in the Brians 2 prison, just outside of Barcelona, late on Wednesday.

McAfee was wanted by American authorities for alleged tax evasion and was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport while boarding a flight to Istanbul, shortly after an indictment was made public by prosecutors in Tennessee.

In a statement, the Catalan justice department said that prison officers and medics tried to save McAfee’s life, but were unsuccessful. Judicial staff have been dispatched to the prison to investigate the cause of death, but the statement said that “everything points to death by suicide”.

US authorities claim McAfee failed to report income made from consultancy work promoting cryptocurrencies, public speaking gigs, and the sale of the rights to his life story for a documentary. McAfee, who originally made his name and fortune as a pioneer of antivirus software in the 1980s, claimed his work as a cryptocurrency ‘guru’ earned him $2,000 per day.

His namesake company quickly became a household name and still operates under ‘McAfee‘, despite his departure in 1994. However, since leaving the company, McAfee the man has became notorious for his erratic behaviour and strange lifestyle. This includes two attempts at running for the US presidency, production of herbal medicines, multiple arrests – one for possession of a weapon – and lengthy spells as a fugitive.

Most recently, he was charged by a Manhattan federal court over a ‘pump and dump‘ scheme relating to cryptocurrency he was promoting to his large social media following.

IBM has announced a set of new AI-based fan experiences for this year’s Wimbledon Tennis Championships, which are set to start on Monday.

The tech giant has a 30-year history with the competition, providing innovative features through its Watson AI service.

For the 2021 tournament, three new tools have been launched to help fans to engage with the action, including a ‘Power Ranking’ player leaderboard and personalised guides for spotting new tennis talent. These will be available through the Wimbledon website and official mobile apps.

“With reduced capacity on-site at Wimbledon this year, that digital engagement is more important than ever, and by leveraging AI and hybrid cloud technologies, fans can get the experiences they are used to – no matter where they watch the tournament,” said Kevin Farrar, IBM UK’s sports partnership lead.

The Power Rankings tool uses IBM Watson to analyse player performance and provide a daily update in the form of a leaderboard. It will focus on a player’s most recent match history, combining advanced statistical analysis, the natural language processing of IBM Watson, and IBM Cloud to analyse daily performance data, mine media commentary, and measure player momentum tournament to tournament and match to match.

A series of predictive insights will then be generated, such as a “Ones to Watch” feature, an ‘upset alert’ where the Power Rankings favour a lower-seeded player, and win probability for each match.

In a similar fashion, there is also a Watson-based feature for pre-match insights, which has already been used at the 2020 US Open. This will include a ‘fact sheet’ for every main draw singles match with AI-generated content for player insights that inform fans on current player performance stats ahead of each match. The fact sheet will also feature an ‘In the Media’ section that leverages IBM Watson Discovery to create a custom news archive, and natural language processing to extract key details about each player from trusted news sources.

The final innovation is ‘Personalised Recommendations and Highlights Reels’ which are created through a Rules-Based Recommendation Engine integrated seamlessly across Wimbledon’s digital platforms. This will feature ‘picked for you’ recommended players, to help fans discover newer players by making suggestions based on their current favourite players.

The recommendations will evolve over the course of the tournament and alert the fan to newly recommended players, the company confirmed.

Oracle is launching a rewards programme that promises to help customers speed up their migrations plans, while also reducing their software licensing costs. 

The programme is aimed at existing customers, who might be enticed into adding to their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) plans with rewards that reduce or even “eliminate” on-premise tech licensing support bills. 

The terms of the scheme promise that all Oracle technology license support customers will earn at least 25 cents of Support Rewards for each dollar of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ‘Universal Credits’ they purchase and consume. These are a form of pay-as-you-go subscription.

More savings can be had for Oracle’s ‘Unlimited License Agreements (ULA)’ customers, who can earn rewards at a 33% rate and potentially eliminate their bill completely by migrating $1.5m of workloads to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

“OCI is Oracle’s fastest-growing business because we built a unique Generation 2 cloud infrastructure platform capable of running the most demanding mission-critical workloads faster, more reliably, and more securely than our on-premises systems,” said Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison.  

“We want to enable more customers to take advantage of our Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle Support Rewards gives customers an easy way to simultaneously reduce their software support spend as they increase the speed of their cloud adoption.”

The rewards scheme has been launched to help CIOs and IT organisations under pressure to drive company-wide innovations under tight budget restrictions. Oracle has compared them to frequent flyer miles, as a customer’s Support Rewards are automatically added in their OCI Console every month, with Rewards applied anytime.

The support programme has also been praised by IDC’s cloud and edge VP Dave McCarthy, who said its transparent pricing was essential in attracting new business and accelerating the adoption of OCI.

HPE has announced GreenLake Lighthouse, a new element of its GreenLake portfolio that aims to reduce complexity when provisioning cloud services.

Launched during HPE’s virtual Discover conference, Lighthouse is described by the company as a “secure, cloud-native platform” that will allow customers to provision new cloud services easily in just a few clicks, reducing the time they wait between ordering and availability to just a few minutes.

The offering is built around Ezmeral, the software portfolio that formed last year’s big announcement at HPE Discover, which the company says will “autonomously optimise different cloud services and workloads” depending on business priorities, be that the best performance, lowest cost, or a balance between the two.

Lighthouse will also allow customers to run cloud services across a number of environments, including their own data centre, a colocation provider, or at the edge.

While this is being positioned as a new product, it’s not going to be a standalone service. Instead, it will be fully integrated into GreenLake Central, the console launched in 2019 that now forms the heart of the GreenLake project.

Project Aurora

Unveiled alongside GreenLake Lighthouse was Project Aurora, a new set of security capabilities that will be fully available at the end of the year.

Aurora will bring zero trust security to GreenLake, extending its existing silicon root-of-trust technology to the operating system or hypervisor, the platform the workload is running on, and the workload itself.

Keith White, GM of HPE GreenLake, described it as a “holistic security offering”, adding: “We’re really excited about making sure that all these things are connected for our customers so that they have confidence that they’re secure from that supply chain.”

Kumar Sreekanti, HPE’s CTO and head of software, added: “What we are providing is a chain of trust from Silicon to the workload all the way up. That’s the most important thing. And it is very, very hard for attackers to evade any of this.”

Silicon on Demand

The final big product news from this year’s conference was Silicon on Demand, a partnership with Intel that brings consumption-based provisioning and billing to individual cores. 

Speaking to journalists ahead of the first day of Discover, CEO Antonio Neri said: “What that means is that with a single click, I can turn cores on and off. If I need more cores, I turn it on, if I need less cores, I turn it off. 

“Today, [the consumption-based model goes to] the virtual or the container level, now I’m taking it to a silicon level.”

Neri said this was a significant development in helping combat the problem of excess hardware capacity “trapped in [customers’] infrastructure”.

GreenLake Lighthouse and Silicon on Demand are both available immediately through GreenLake cloud services and GreenLake Cloud Platform respectively. Project Aurora is scheduled to become available in HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, HPE GreenLake cloud services and HPE Ezmeral software platforms later this year.

IBM has expanded its agreement with the New South Wales (NSW) government which will see the company continue offering services to its departments and agencies for another three years.

The vendor has revised the whole-of-government agreement, which was originally signed in 2019, claiming it would deliver cost savings to the NSW government over the next three years, according to IT News. It will also reportedly provide a more streamlined process for agencies to access emerging technology, including IBM hybrid cloud, AI, and security.

“When the agreement was signed in 2019, it was limited to IBM technology hardware and software, and has now expanded to include IBM professional services and IBM cloud services,” IBM said. 

In addition, the NSW government can now use IBM Garage as part of the professional services offering, which is a network of physical hubs that aims to help customers quickly turn ideas into products

“With access to this, government agencies will be able to explore impacts of new technology such as blockchain, IoT and AI computing on government services,” the IBM spokesperson continued. 

Furthermore, Katrina Troughton, IBM’s Australia and New Zealand managing director, said the partnership would create job opportunities and advance the skill profile of the state.

“After more than 30 years of working with the NSW government, this is an important milestone for our relationship and we look forward to collaborating on solutions that impact the lives of the more than eight million people who call NSW home,” she said.

In May, DCI Data Centers announced it would invest AU$70 million (£38 million) into South Australia and construct a new data centre to meet the needs of local business and government. The funds were destined to be used in the region’s first purpose-built Tier-Ready III/IV secure cloud edge data centre which came with defence-grade security requirements.

Moreover, the Australian government announced at the start of May it was investing $1.2 billion AUD (£670 million) in its digital future as part of a strategy to transform the country into a modern and leading digital economy by 2030. The investment included over $100 million to support digital skills and the launch of a $124.1 million National Artificial Intelligence Centre.

Intel’s executive vice president of the Data Platforms Group, Navin Shenoy, is to resign his role next month, after over a quarter of a century in the company.

The move is part of a wider restructure at Intel, which involves the creation of two new business units focused on software and high-performance computing (HPC) and graphics.

The Software and Advanced Technology Group will be led by former VMware SVP & CTO Greg Lavender, while the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group will be led by Apple and AMD veteran Raja Koduri.

Intel also announced that its Data Platform Group will be restructured into two new business units: Datacenter and AI as well as Network and Edge. The new groups are to be headed by Intel’s chief people officer Sandra Rivera and Stanford University professor Nick McKeown, respectively.

Lavender, Koduri, Rivera, and McKeown will report directly to CEO Pat Gelsinger, who said that, despite being “impressed with the depth of talent and incredible innovation throughout the company”, Intel “must move faster to fulfil our ambitions”.

“By putting Sandra, Raja, Nick and Greg – with their decades of technology expertise – at the forefront of some of our most essential work, we will sharpen our focus and execution, accelerate innovation, and unleash the deep well of talent across the company,” he added.

In an internal company memo, Gelsinger asked Intel employees to join him in “thanking Navin for his service and leadership at Intel over the past 26 years”. 

“We wish him well as he starts his next chapter,” he added, without further describing the reason behind Shenoy’s departure. 

Shenoy, who ran Intel’s PC business until 2017, will formally leave Intel on 6 July, which will also be the day that McKeown will assume his role as SVP and general manager of the new Network and Edge Group. Prior to this, McKeown has served as a part-time Intel Senior Fellow, having joined the chipmaker in 2019 following its acquisition of Barefoot Networks, which he co-founded in 2013.

The mass reorganisation is the first of its kind under the leadership of Gelsinger, who re-joined Intel earlier this year. However, the restructuring shouldn’t come as a surprise, as he said that his decision to return to the chipmaker was partly due to the attraction of leading one of the “great turnarounds” in tech. 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired open source artificial intelligence (AI) startup Determined AI.

The four-year-old company, which only brought its product to market in 2020, specialises in machine learning (ML), with the aim of training artificial intelligence (AI) models quickly and at any scale. While it hasn’t been around long, the startup has managed to secure customers in a number of sectors, including defence contracting, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and biopharmaceuticals.

Determined AI will be brought into HPE’s high-performance computing (HPC) and mission-critical solutions (MCS) business unit, and the deal will see the startup’s technology combined HPE’s AI and HPC offerings. 

Justin Hotard, SVP and GM of HPC  and MCS said: “Determined AI’s unique open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family.”

Determined AI’s founders Neir Conway, Evan Sparks and Ameet Talwalker, described the acquisition as “a massive accelerant for our mission to empower users to efficiently build cutting-edge AI applications”.

The three added that the platform will remain open source, saying “HPE shares our vision that driving an open standard for AI software infrastructure is the fastest way for the industry to realise the potential of AI.

“Consequently, HPE is committed to investing in and rapidly growing the Determined Training Platform as an open source project. Our customers and open source community members will continue to receive the same high level of service and support that they always have, from a team of experts who are intimately familiar with the challenges they’re facing.”

The five largest cities in the UK could lose as much as £322 million a month if offices move to hybrid working long-term, according to new research. 

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has estimated that London, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Cardiff could all see revenue from shops, pubs and office-adjacent eateries fall significantly. 

A total of £11.9 billion has already been displaced from city centres during the pandemic, the organisation said, which would have otherwise been spent on inner-city retail and eating out. 

London appears to be the hardest hit, with a total of £8.2 billion lost between March 2020 and May 2021, according to the CEBR. What’s more, the capital is predicted to lose £234 million per month, should businesses maintain a hybrid working strategy for the foreseeable future.

Manchester will see the next biggest loss at £1.8 billion, with an estimated loss of just £48 million per month expected by the CEBR.

The research pulls in Google mobility data which shows that in April 2020, the number of people going to places of work on a weekday was 69% lower than before the pandemic. That figure had only recovered by half at just 34% in May 2021.

Of the five cities, Cardiff had the lowest share of returning workers, at 50% lower than pre-pandemic levels, while Newcastle had the highest share at just 34% lower. 

The popularity of hybrid working environments is rapidly growing as businesses look for realistic ways to manage COVID restrictions and the demands of their employees. Over the weekend, financial giant Deloitte announced that it would allow its 200,000-strong workforce to choose where they work, with its offices set to be transitioned into collaboration spaces. 

What’s more, the UK government is reportedly set to begin encouraging hybrid approaches, according to leaked documents seen by the CEBR.

The Conservative Party had previously sent out muddled messages on remote working, suggesting people should come back into the office after the first lockdown, citing concerns around the loss of footfall traffic to shops and eateries. Despite the expected losses in revenue, the document reportedly suggests the government is actively looking at ways to help people to continue working from home if there is no ‘need’ for them to be in an office. 

HPE GreenLake now supports Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server.

The announcement of the new integration came just ahead of the company’s annual HPE Discover conference, held virtually for the second time in a row, where GreenLake is expected to take centre stage.

According to the company, the expansion of GreenLake to include support for Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server will enable customers to take advantage of a cloud-like experience for their applications and workloads even as they remain in a private environment, such as their own data centre.

This is no small amount of customers, either; according to research from IDC, some 70% of critical production applications remain outside the public cloud, in a secure single-tenant environment and at the edge.

In addition to providing a cloud-like experience, HPE said customers will benefit from a cloud-like operating model as well, as GreenLake is a consumption-based service.

This is not the company’s first foray into working with Microsoft Azure via GreenLake, which has been able to support public cloud deployments on Azure, as well as private cloud infrastructure via Azure Stack, since 2018. However, it’s the first time the relationship has focused on hyperconverged infrastructure in particular.

Speaking about the new offerings, Keith White, GM of HPE Greenlake cloud services, said: “The world is becoming hybrid and that’s why we are so excited about this collaboration with Microsoft, especially as we see significant growth in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure area. 

“By combining Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with offerings like the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, customers benefit from a unified, automated experience. The solution means customers can determine their own right mix of hybrid cloud and workload placement, with flexibility but also control. We continue to deepen our collaboration with Microsoft to develop comprehensive solutions that help customers transform to modern cloud-driven organisations.” “

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has been appointed chairman of the board following a unanimous vote by the company’s independent directors.

It’s the first time in more than 20 years that the tech giant has had the same executive in both CEO and chairman roles, with co-founder Bill Gates the last to hold the titles simultaneously.

Although we won’t know how this will specifically change Nadella’s day-to-day workload, the chairman is usually tasked with ensuring the board is effective in setting and implementing the company’s direction and long-term strategy. In this regard, it appears Nadella has been given more responsibility and more scope to shape the company’s future, having gained the support of the directors during his time as CEO.

John Thompson, who Nadella is replacing as chairman, will take on the role of ‘lead independent director’ with a mandate to head up the performance evaluations of the CEO. Thompson has played a significant role in Nadella’s rise at Microsoft, leading the team that appointed him CEO in 2014, not long after Thompson, himself, originally took over as chairman. Prior to this, Bill Gates held the chairman role, alongside Steve Ballmer as CEO.

Although he had stepped down as CEO in 2000, Gates still retained control of Microsoft, and its technological vision, as chairman. He also kept a position on the board long after relinquishing that role to Thompson, finally fully departing the company in 2020 to focus on his charity work.

The partnership of Nadella as CEO and Thompson as chair has seen Microsoft pivot towards cloud computing, with its hugely successful Azure platform, which Nadella originally headed up.

The firm is now one the biggest companies in the world, matching the likes of Apple and Amazon, which were all valued at around $1 trillion in 2019.