Welcome to our latest round-up of news from the technology and hosting world. Here’s what we’ve discovered this week.
Website update glitch kills off the Queen
Website owners are reminded of the need to thoroughly check their websites following a migration or major update after a French radio station site erroneously published an obituary of the queen.
The radio station, RFI, had just completed the process of migrating its website to a different CMS platform and had gone live without looking for glitches. Unfortunately, around one hundred articles and pre-written obituaries that had been saved as drafts on the old CMS were published by default on the new platform.
Aside from Queen Elizabeth II, other well-known names to be pronounced as prematurely expired included Hollywood legends Bridget Bardot and Clint Eastwood and former US President Jimmy Carter. All, we are glad to say, are still with us.
Game maker ransomed
A customised ransomware attack on Japanese video games developer, Capcom, has compromised the personal data of 350,000 individuals and resulted in the theft of company information. The maker of world-famous games like Resident Evil and Street Fighter saw data on its servers digitally scrambled with some files becoming unviewable and others corrupted beyond repair. The attack was carried out by the Ragnar Locker hacker group which has demanded payment to undo the encryption.
According to Capcom, the compromised data included its sales reports and financial information, as well as the personal data of 350,000 customers, business partners, job applicants and employees. This included names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and, in some instances, staff photographs.
Let’s Encrypt users face issues
Websites using the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate may be blocked by a third of all Android devices from September next year, the certificate authority warns. As the SSL’s original root certificate expires next year, older versions of Android that have not been updated since 2016 will not recognise its new root certificate or continue to accept the one that’s expired.
As a result, the 850 million smartphones and other devices still using Android version 7.1.1 or older will no longer be able to connect to websites that use Let’s Encrypt. Instead, users will be shown a warning that the site is insecure. Let’s Encrypt estimate this will affect between 1% and 5% of traffic for the websites that use their certificates.
Although the authority is looking for a workable solution, website owners concerned about the impact on traffic and reputation may wish to consider alternative SSL certificates that won’t be affected by this issue. Details of these can be found on our SSL Certificates page.
Supermarket robots sent packing
Robots looking for work in supermarkets have received mixed news over recent weeks. Those in the US will have been disheartened by Walmart’s decision to retire its fleet of 500 stock checking robots that have been used to scan the aisles of its stores for the last five years. According to Walmart, the decision was made because humans are more flexible, being able to shift from checking shelves to serving on a checkout, something that machines can’t do. From an ROI perspective, this, for once, made robots less attractive than people.
On the other side of the pond, job opportunities look a little brighter for our friends electric. Ocado Technology, a branch of the Ocado grocery delivery company, is looking to develop robots that can pack items more densely into individual delivery boxes than human packers in a bid to increase the number of deliveries each van can make on a single run. As part of the project, the company has paid almost £220M to acquire two US robotics firms, Kindred Systems and Haddington Dynamics.
Ocado is already heavily invested in robotics with hundreds of robots being used to collect products and take them to human packers in their warehouses. Aside from using these systems for its own benefit, Ocado Technology sells them to other supermarket chains around the world.
Allied Irish banks on cloud migration
Allied Irish Bank (AIB) has completed the major migration of its Irish and UK receivables finance operations to the cloud. The move gives it access to advanced financial platforms and provides it with a new web portal for its SMB customers. The portal offers a better customer experience and improves the company’s capacity to offer funding, the lack of which has been identified as the biggest challenge to SMBs during the pandemic.
With the Central Bank of Ireland identifying that Irish SMBs need greater liquidity to ride out the pandemic, it is envisaged that AIB’s migration to the cloud would put them in a better position to provide the wider bank support that the country’s businesses need.
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