The government has conceded it needs to do more the protect personal data held by services and research bodies. It has agreed to set up a Council of Data Ethics, which it calls an “ethical framework for government data science”. The government has stopped short of introducing criminal penalties for serious data breaches. Instead it …

Read full article: Data protection forced up the agenda by IoT

e2v has signed a supply agreement with gallium nitride power transistor manufacturer GaN Systems which will see the UK firm supplying power transistors to the aerospace and defence sectors. e2v has signed a supply agreement with gallium nitride power transistor manufacturer GaN Systems which will see the UK firm supplying power transistors to the aerospace …

Read full article: e2v signs GaN deal to cut weight in hi-rel designs

136 years ago one of the agents employed to work on the 1880 US Census possessed a genius for inventing and innovating machinery. He figured out that if the information was put on cards by punching holes in certain positions then the counting process could be performed by machines. In 1884 he set up a …

Read full article: Fable: The Man Who Built Machines

There was an interesting apercu from Stefan Dykerhoff, CEO of SiFive the RISC-V start-up, reported by Don Dingee in SemiWiki earlier this week. “Although SiFive isn’t targeting ARM specifically, Dyckerhoff says there was a definite uptick in developer registration activity after the SoftBank acquisition of ARM,” writes Dingee, adding, “both Dyckerhoff and Kang (Jack, SiFive …

Read full article: Armless or Legless?

The Dutch giant says that it and the UAE city have leaped way ahead to 200 lumens per watt, with LED lamps available this year.

Amazon CloudWatch announces the availability of an open source collectd output plugin to simplify sending custom metrics to CloudWatch. collectd is a popular, open-source daemon that gathers system statistics for a wide variety of applications. The CloudWatch collectd plugin can be used on both AWS and non-AWS environments to gather host and application metrics such as memory and disk usage for a variety of applications such as Apache, NXGINX, MySQL, etc. The metrics gathered by collectd will be published as custom metrics to CloudWatch. These collectd metrics can then be used to set up alarms for triggering notification and auto-scaling actions or saved to dashboards for quick viewing in CloudWatch. 

You can now use aws-serverless-express , an open source Node.js library, to simplify the migration of your Express web applications and REST APIs to a serverless architecture. The library is built using features from Amazon API Gateway that allow you to preserve your API routes in your existing web application frameworks without having to redefine API methods or their integration behavior on API Gateway.

You can now allow AWS CloudFormation to assume service roles which determine what CloudFormation is allowed to do with your stack. A service role is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role which can be assigned permissions that determine which AWS resources CloudFormation can create, update, or delete. For example, you could create a service role that only allows CloudFormation to perform actions with Amazon EC2. Previously, CloudFormation would use the default permissions from the user credentials you used to access CloudFormation. Using service roles with CloudFormation, you can now more easily set granular permissions to CloudFormation for different AWS accounts or IAM users. To get started, you can set a service role when creating, updating, or deleting a stack. You will also need permission to pass the role to CloudFormation. Learn more about this feature in the documentation .

With this launch, administrators and developers can create users in an Amazon Cognito user pool. A user pool is a fully managed user directory that makes it easy to add sign-up and sign-in to your mobile and web apps. Use the new AdminCreateUser API to set up accounts for new users and send them a customized invitation with their user name and a temporary password. You can also use this feature to control membership in a user pool by only allowing administrators to create users or also allowing users to sign themselves up.

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a new version of the Internet Protocol that uses a larger address space than its predecessor IPv4. With IPv6 support, you will be able to meet the requirements for IPv6 adoption set by governments, remove the need for IPv6 to IPv4 translation software or systems, and benefit from IPv6 extensibility, simplicity in network management, and additional built-in support for security