Common Platform, a revolutionary digitalisation of the UK criminal justice system, has recently been made live at courts in Chester, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Cannock and Stafford.

The digital system appears to have come out of the early adopter phase with the roll out widening to a national scale across England and Wales.

The most recent sites to go live on 29 March 2021 with Common Platform are Chester Crown Court, Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court, Warrington Magistrates’ Court, Newcastle-under-Lyme Magistrates’ Court (North Staffordshire Justice Centre), Cannock Magistrates’ Court, and Stafford Crown Court.

The UK and Germany have met at the first virtual roundtable to discuss the role of innovation and technology in the battle against online crime.

The UK’s Department for International Trade (DIT), the North Rhine Westphalian Cyber Crime Agency ZAC, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) invited UK and German stakeholders in March 2021 for the virtual roundtable. The aim was to goad the two countries into collaborating and fighting the harm that arises from online crime, together.

Hosted by the UK consul general Rafe Courage, the roundtable was opened by North Rhine Westphalian Minister for Justice Peter Biesenbach and DCMS director general Susannah Storey.

The Government has announced details of pilot events to be held in Liverpool, as the city follows in the footsteps of Amsterdam and Barcelona by participating in a science-led research programme to reopen the cultural and business sectors.

The Events Research Programme (ERP) will be used to provide key scientific data into how events for a range of audiences could be permitted to safely reopen as part of Step 4 of the roadmap out of lockdown, commencing no earlier than 21 June 2021.

It will be crucial to how venues, from major sport stadiums to comedy clubs, theatres to live music spaces, wedding venues to conference centres, could operate this summer.

Pilots to take place in Liverpool include an outdoor cinema, a club night and a business event, which will gather evidence associated with different settings and approaches to managing and mitigating transmission risk.

The pilots will explore how different approaches to social distancing, ventilation and test-on-entry protocols could ease opening and maximise participation, including the use of lateral flow tests, but not so-called ‘vaccine passports’.

Data collected also includes people’s names, location details, identification numbers and online identifiers.

Capgemini has a history of providing the force with day-to-day technology services, and will now deliver its infrastructure services under the Pegasus programme

Your Wi-Fi device could soon become a sensor that’s capable of collecting all kinds of useful information, a new project has said.

The 802.11bf Task Group (TGbf) is working to leverage the ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi to extend its use from a communications-only standard to give it enhanced sensing capabilities.

“As Wi-Fi becomes more and more present in public and private spaces, it becomes natural to leverage its ubiquitousness to implement groundbreaking wireless sensing applications such as human presence detection, activity recognition, and object tracking, just to name a few,” says Francesco Restuccia, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, in a paper.

As expected (or feared) Openreach (BT) has today announced a series of wholesale price increases for UK ISPs that use certain legacy copper line broadband, FTTC (VDSL2, G.fast, SOGEA) and phone products, which are intended to help the operator to afford their £12bn roll-out of 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

The move follows the recent publication of Ofcom’s Wholesale Fixed Telecoms Market Review 2021-26 (summary), which among other changes saw the regulator move away from cost-based charge controls on copper line services. As part of that Openreach also gained the ability to spread the cost of investment in FTTP across a wider group of consumers (e.g. allowing them to recover some investment costs from both copper and fibre products).

Connectivity infrastructure provider SSE Enterprise Telecoms will now be known as Neos Networks. The company said the rebrand is part of its wider business transformation journey, which began in 2019 when Infracapital acquired 50 per cent of the business. SSE Group retains the other 50 per cent.
Neos Networks was the company’s trading name prior to its acquisition by SSE Group in 2003. ‘Neos’ is a Greek word meaning ‘new’, and the company said the rebrand embodies its vision to continue developing a new network, purpose built for the specific high capacity, high resilience needs of UK businesses.
Colin Sempill, CEO at Neos Networks, said, “Our new name embodies our mission to build a new network for UK businesses that has the specific high capacity, high resilience that they demand.

UKCloud, the multi-cloud experts dedicated to making transformation happen across UK public sector, has today announced its latest iteration of its Platform-as-a-Service offering, enabling UK Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to develop and deliver compelling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to the UK Public Sector. In turn, public sector organisations can maximise their efforts on delivering outcomes for the citizen, rather than spending resources on developing and maintaining applications.

Digital transformation is undeniable, and has been further accelerated and exemplified by the pandemic. All organisations face new operational challenges, driven by government initiatives to contain the spread of the virus with greater uncertainty added by Brexit. The only constant throughout this difficult period is the increased dependency on technology and applications to ensure the smooth running of society. As UK Public Sector organisations seek the adoption of digital technologies to adapt to these unprecedented times, they face a choice between the cost and risk of building new software applications or the convenience and flexibility of buying into specialist SaaS solutions to power a new generation of digital-enabled public services.