Author: Eternity Lab

As a result of a trial the concerned parties said exemplified the possibility of significantly expanding spectrum capacities, and making even better use of existing frequency bands and supplementing them with additional resources, operator A1 and technology partner Nokia have claimed to have undertaken pre-6G video stream in the upper 6 GHz spectrum for the first time in Central Europe.

The companies said the trial they carried out at the A1 Technology Centre in Vienna has demonstrated the next step in the evolution of mobile communications.

A1 said the mobile ecosystem was growing rapidly, and included technologies and services such as the internet of things (IoT), extended reality (XR), autonomous vehicles, robots and artificial intelligence (AI).

It added that – just like with other operators in Europe and the world – the combination of new services and devices and a sharp increase in usage have sparked significant growth in data traffic, thus making it necessary to continuously develop existing networks. As part of this development, A1 said a special focus was placed on efficiency, sustainability, safety and the interaction with new technologies.

A1 was of the view that the results of the tests at its technology centre showed the great potential of mobile communications for future 5G-Advanced and 6G applications, and underlined the company’s commitment to the sustainable development of the digital infrastructure.

“I am pleased that we can demonstrate the possibilities of future wireless technologies here at the A1 Technology Centre,” said A1 Austria chief technology officer Christian Laqué.

“After all, we will continue to provide the basis for rapidly advancing digitalisation in the future and take into account the increasing demand for secure connectivity. Today’s pre-6G transmission shows that we can build on existing infrastructures as we continue to develop our networks and make them even more efficient.”

As part of the trial, a Nokia 128TRX Massive MIMO transmitter and a MediaTec test terminal were used as receivers. Under practical conditions, it was shown that the spectrum used in this process could be used in existing macro networks and is compatible with the range of current mobile radio cells.

The test results were also said to have showed possibilities to increase urban capacities significantly, while maintaining an unchanged network of locations. A1 and Nokia were also of the opinion that at the same time, transmission speeds in suburban and rural areas could be significantly improved.

“We are just at the beginning of a long journey, but with this proof of concept, we have demonstrated that 6G will not only meet the growing demand for data traffic, but also unlock groundbreaking possibilities, such as network sensing and the transformative role of AI in the networks of the future in an efficient, sustainable and secure way,” said Christoph Rohr, country manager at Nokia.

Nokia has been at the forefront of 6G development since it was considered, and in 2020, was appointed as the project leader for Hexa-X, the European Commission’s 6G flagship initiative for research into the next generation of wireless networks, and the first official research initiative across the industry ecosystem to accelerate and foster 6G research and drive European leadership in the 6G era.

The company also has a significant presence in the University of Oulu in Finland, which is one of the leading technical facilities for research into the next generation of communications.

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During a discussion at the recent KubeCon + Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Europe 2025 event in London, panel members discussed one of the big criticisms of modern software development: why is code deployment still fraught with problems?

Shifting left, where developers take on more responsibility for putting their code into production appears to have stalled in some organisations.

Kendall Roden, tech product lead at Diagrid, said that among the big challenges is the rise of distributed systems. According to Roden, this means developers now have a lot of what she called “additional cognitive load”. “There’s a lot of new responsibility, such as how to do resiliency when [the code] no longer runs as a single process,” she said.

In Roden’s experience, a lot of organisations don’t have the platform team to help take on these responsibilities. “Developers are less productive; the DevOps experience has become a little bit bloated and there’s not clear delineation of responsibility,” she warned.

While some organisations may adopt platform engineering to support developers, it still remains a challenge for developers to put code into production. Randy Bias, vice-president of open source strategy and technology at Mirantis, said the goal of DevOps and practices like platform engineering was to break down the walls between developers and operators “so that everybody could operate like Google”.

Platform engineering’s role is to sit between IT operations staff and software developers, where a team provides a platform, which is usually built on top of Kubernetes. This, he said, adds a layer of abstraction and provides developers with a path to production. 

However, Bias added: “If you look at the average enterprise, they have no chance in hell of operating like Google. The silos are as siloed as ever, and there are huge barriers between developers and operations people.” He pointed out that developers don’t want to know about IT infrastructure. “They don’t care about it,” said Bias. “They want to develop their applications and have them magically deployed.”

Kubernetes’ relationship with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads represent something entirely new for the Kubernetes committee, according to Jago Macleod, director of engineering at Google Cloud. “This new round of AI and ML workloads is really different to what the CNCF and KubeCon communities have built so far,” he said.

AI and ML are large training workloads. In the world of Kubernetes, workloads are deployed in pods but given the size of AI and ML workloads. Macleod said this means using one pod per node. “If any one of the nodes stops, you need to get another one in place and then restart [the workload] from a checkpoint,” he said. “These new kinds of workloads are not very fault tolerant.”

According to Macleod, another challenge is the fact that AI researchers who work with AI foundation models tend to program using Python.

“Many come from academia and they write Python code, which is not what we would call elegant code in software engineering, and there’s no source [code] control,” he said, adding that the AI researchers then try to distribute these Python workloads across tens of thousands of nodes.

“It’s a completely different mental model compared to our preferred way, with IT operations, and you check it into the source and then that blasts out in a controlled manner; it’s a very different world,” said Macleod.

AI and ML present very different problems to other Kubernetes workloads. Roden said that in the AI space, there needs to be a shift in mindset among developers to improve their understanding of how they can work with AI. “I don’t necessarily know if the scale of usage from the average enterprise developer is actually there, because it is quite complex and it does require a different skill set, a different approach and a different set of infrastructure,” she added.

Bias went further, adding: “People don’t realise that these are HPC workloads,” referring to the fact that AI and ML share similar problems to supercomputing. He said the problem of AI and ML resiliency was the same kind of problem that supercomputing centres have been tackling for decades. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” said Bias. “We just need to go back and take that knowledge that’s been in the HPC niche.”

Global pressure

Beyond writing and managing code, among the questions asked during the panel discussion was one looking at how geopolitical tension was impacting open source and the Linux Foundation. “There’s a tonne of perils and pitfalls in front of us,” said Bias.

At the CNCF event in Hong Kong, he said the presenters were all Mandarin speakers discussing projects being developed in China. “There is a danger of regional fractionalisation,” said Bias.

But while, from a geopolitical perspective, open source tends to be neutral and the community tries to operate across international boundaries, politics can influence this openness.

“There are geopolitical realities for an organisation like the Linux Foundation because it operates primarily inside the United States,” he said, referring to the Linux Foundation’s decision in November 2024 to exclude a cohort of Russian Linux kernel maintainers.

Bias suggested that given it’s based out of the US, the Linux Foundation is no longer well-placed to oversee the global open source community. Instead, he said what is needed is a United Nations for open source that operates in a geographically neutral region.

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Mobile virtual network operator Pelion has launched Pelion Plans, a managed internet of things (IoT) product and service proposition.

Established in 2000, Pelion serves more than 1,000 enterprise clients across a range of industries, including transport, healthcare, energy and utilities, industrial IoT, asset tracking, and logistics. The business has received investment from technology giants including Arm and Softbank, and became an independent company backed by Scottish Equity Partners in 2022.

Pelion said it has now refreshed and revitalised its brand identity, and launched Pelion Plans as part of its growth strategy to target domestic and international growth.

Explaining the go-to-market strategy, Pelion CEO Dave Weidner said: “At Pelion, we’ve focused on developing flexible, multi-carrier connectivity which has, in turn, enhanced reliability for our clients deploying in a single country or across the globe. We have less than half an hour of downtime per year, compared with the industry average of 87 hours. The cost of that downtime is significant – in the US, that 87 hours costs the average enterprise $22.8m per year – so bringing that as low as possible is key.”

The downtime cost figure cited was based on a study from Berg Insight – Achieving reliable connectivity for scalable cellular IoT deployments – which noted that across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and transport and logistics, businesses were increasingly dependent on reliable connectivity to ensure smooth operational processes and preserve efficiency.

Moreover, it warned that downtime can have far-reaching effects that extend beyond temporary inconveniences, impacting revenue, productivity, customer outcomes and reputation.

Mobile network operators (MNOs) generally assure a specific level of operational support and uptime via service level agreements. The study examined the impact of downtime and how multi-network connectivity, embedded subscriber identity modules (eSIMs) and thoughtful hardware selection can help businesses maintain high levels of service availability for their cellular IoT device deployments.

Pelion Plans to use Pelion IoT eSIMs to provide organisations with different levels of technological deployment and managed service, helping businesses scale IoT investment in line with deployment and connectivity needs.

The Pelion IoT eSIM is an embedded universal integrated circuit card, eUICC-enabled IoT SIM that provides future-proofed connectivity, and eUICC is a software offering that provides the capability to store multiple MNO profiles on a single SIM so that eUICC-enabled SIMs can switch seamlessly between MNOs.

This provides Pelion enterprise customers with the flexibility to change the MNO profile based the location, quality of service or cost profile they are trying to achieve wherever they are deploying. If an MNO is experiencing an outage, the customer’s deployment is quickly switched to a new provider, minimising downtime.

“The last two years have been a period of really fine-tuning our offer to provide the most reliable and secure service,” said Weidner. “Now that we’ve done that work, we’re moving into growth mode, looking to expand our work with enterprises large and small in both domestic and international markets. Our evolved brand and Pelion Plans are the starting point for setting us apart.”

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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has rejected government demands for complete secrecy over Apple’s legal challenge against a Home Office order requiring the tech giant to give UK law enforcement “backdoor” access to encrypted data stored by users of its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) service.

The tribunal today rejected arguments from the Home Office that public disclosure of even the “bare details” of the involvement of Apple or the Home Office would be damaging to national security.

Following weeks of government officials refusing to confirm or deny the court action, the IPT confirmed that Apple has filed a complaint challenging the secretary of state’s powers to issue technical capability notices (TCNs) under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.

The existence of the order, which was first reported by the Washington Post, has raised tensions between the UK and the US, attracting criticism from Donald Trump and US lawmakers that the order will allow UK law enforcement access to the encrypted data of US citizens using Apple’s ADP service in the US and other countries.

The tribunal’s decision follows legal submissions from Computer Weekly jointly with nine other media organisations, PA Media, members of US Congress, and civil society groups Big Brother Watch, Privacy International and Liberty, “strongly arguing in favour of open justice” and against the case being heard in secret.

“There has been extensive media reporting to the effect that the United Kingdon government has signed a technical capability notice requiring the claimant to be able to maintain access to its users’ data in decrypted form, so that such data is available to be passed to the intelligence agencies,” the tribunal said.

In the ruling issued today, tribunal chairman Lord Justice Singh and Justice Johnson rejected Home Office arguments that disclosing the “bare details of the case” – including publicly acknowledging the identity of Apple and the Home Office – would damage national security or prejudice the public interest.

They did not rule on whether future hearings in the case would be held in open court but left open the possibility that it “may well be possible” for some or all future hearings into the case to incorporate a public element with or without reporting restriction.

Apple brought the case against the Home Office after it received a technical capability notice from the Home Office requiring it to extend existing UK law enforcement powers to access encrypted data stored by users on Apple’s iCloud to users of its Advanced Data Protection service.

Apple responded to the order in February by withdrawing ADP from users in the UK, in a move that was criticised as exposing UK citizens to greater cyber threats. “As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will,” Apple said in a statement at the time.

According to the ruling, the Home Office wrote to the tribunal asking it not to disclose the existence of a planned tribunal hearing on 14 March into Apple’s complaint in court listings “so that the hearing would take place entirely in secret” for national security reasons.

Apple told the tribunal on 6 March 2025 that there was no reason not to list the fact that a hearing was taking place, even if Apple and the Home Office were not named, and that open justice required judicial proceedings to be published in the absence of compelling reasons to the contrary.

Tribunal president Lord Justice Singh and Justice Johnson agreed. “It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place. That would be the most fundamental interference with the principle of open justice,” they said in the ruling.

The IPT listed a closed-door hearing on 14 March, without publicly disclosing the role of Apple or the Home Office. 

The court heard arguments from the Home Office that the “bare details of the case would be prejudicial to national security”. Apple, with some support from the Counsel to the Tribunal, argued that the Home Office’s concerns were “overblown and unjustified”.

Singh and Johnson found in favour of Apple: “We do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security.”

Claims from Privacy International and Liberty

Civil society groups Privacy International and Liberty have filed separate complaints, along with two individuals challenging the Home Office’s powers to issue technical capability notices against Apple and other technology companies. They have asked for their claims to be heard together with Apple’s claim in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

The tribunal judges found that there was no need to rule on Privacy International and Liberty’s application for the proceedings to be made public or to make a decision on whether or not to allow them to intervene in the Apple case before the Home Office had submitted a defence.

The tribunal said it was at least possible that the early stages of the litigation would involve the resolution of issues of law, which would mean, by implication, that the early hearings could be heard in open court. It was also possible that Apple’s claim could be stayed behind the Privacy International and Liberty case.

The court also acknowledged the receipt of a letter from US senators and members of Congress, but did not consider it necessary to rule on the issues raised. The letter seeks permission to discuss the technical capability notice issued by the Home Office with US Congress, but the court said it had no power to grant that request.

Public hearings may be possible

A submission from PA Media asked the tribunal to impose the least prescriptive measures possible, including holding a public hearing with reporting restrictions.

“It may well be possible for some or all future hearings to incorporate a public element, with or without reporting restrictions. It is not possible to rule on that at this stage,” the court said.

Commenting on the ruling, a Home Office spokesperson said the government could neither confirm nor deny the existence of the TCN.

“The Investigatory Powers Act and technical capability notices allow the UK to maintain existing and long-standing counter-terrorism and serious crime investigative capabilities in the face of fast-changing technology, especially when we know that terrorists and child abusers organise and seek to hide evidence of their crimes online,” they said.

“TCNs themselves do not directly provide access to data – relevant targeted warrants and authorisations must also be in place. Nor do TCNs extend powers to obtain access to data; their purpose is to ensure that those existing powers can continue to be exercised effectively,” the spokesperson added. 

The Home Office’s order to break encryption represents a massive attack on the privacy rights of millions of British Apple users, which is a matter of significant public interest and must not be considered behind closed doors Rebecca Vincent, Big Brother Watch

Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, said the judgment was a welcome step in the right direction and “effectively chipped away” at the pervasive climate of secrecy surrounding the case.

“The Home Office’s order to break encryption represents a massive attack on the privacy rights of millions of British Apple users, which is a matter of significant public interest and must not be considered behind closed doors,” she said. 

Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, said the case was bigger than the UK and Apple, and would have implications for millions of people around the world. 

“Such an important decision cannot be made behind closed doors and we welcome the IPT’s decision to bring parts of the hearing into the open so that there can be some public scrutiny of the UK government’s decisions to attack technologies that keep us safe online,” he said.

Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, said the judgment did not “stipulate that the case will be held in the open moving forward – as it should be – only that we can know the ‘bare details’. We welcome this news, but we continue to fight for full transparency here.”

The media companies jointly challenging the secrecy of Apple’s appeal in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal are Associated Newspapers Ltd, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Computer Weekly, Financial Times Group, Guardian News & Media, News Group Newspapers, Reuters News and Media, Sky News, Telegraph Media Group and Times Media. PA Media has filed a separate challenge.

According to the judgment, neither Apple nor the Home Office have confirmed or denied that media reporting of the technical capability notice issued against Apple is accurate. “This judgment should not be taken as an indication that the media reporting is or is not accurate,” it said.

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A new Chinese-made cable capable of 8K wired connections could soon make your Thunderbolt cable seem like a VGA cable. Designed to handle ultra-high-resolution content and serious power delivery simultaneously, the 8K-capable cable could simplify setups for gamers, streamers, and power users alike.

The new standard from China is called the General Purpose Media Interface, or GPMI. It comes from the Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance, a group made up of over 50 Chinese tech companies. It’s designed with 8K video in mind, and the group says the cable should help reduce clutter by combining high-speed data and high-wattage power into a single cord.

The 8K cable currently comes in two versions: a Type-C version, which uses the latest USB-C standard. This variation supports 96 Gbps bandwidth and up to 240 watts of power, which more than doubles the speed of Thunderbolt 4 and matches USB4’s power output. Thunderbolt 5, which launched in 2024, also supports up to 240 watts of power and tops out at 80Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth (120Gbps with bandwidth boost.)

However, the real showstopper is the Chinese group’s proprietary Type-B connector, which delivers up to 192 Gbps of bandwidth through the 8K cable and 480 watts of power. That’s more than enough power to support an 8K display and could even charge a high-performance gaming laptop at the same time.

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The new cable is a massive leap over other standards available right now. HDMI 2.1 tops out at 48 Gbps with no power output, while DisplayPort 2.1 reaches 80 Gbps. Thunderbolt 4 caps out at 40 Gbps of bandwidth and 100 watts of power. As such, nothing currently in wide use matches the capabilities promised by this Chinese 8K cable, but Thunderbolt 5 is slowly spreading.

Beyond speed and power, GPMI also includes features like unified control—similar to HDMI-CEC—allowing a single remote to manage all connected devices. In theory, this means fewer wires and fewer power connectors. Of course, the cable’s high power ceiling won’t power your entire gaming PC just yet.

But, reports say it should be enough to power a portable workstation running dedicated graphics. For those who prefer to keep their more powerful setups portable, this Chinese 8K cable could be the exact thing we need to usher in the next generation of computer power and display cables.

Whether GPMI will expand beyond China is still uncertain, but based on specs alone, the Chinese 8K cable looks very promising, though the use of a proprietary connector for the best speeds undoes a lot of the work that has been done in recent years to standardize power connectors for electronics—especially since even Apple has ditched its proprietary connectors in favor of USB-C.

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ChatGPT’s image generation tool is now available to free users—and with that, OpenAI may be taking steps to clearly label what’s AI-made. According to early tests spotted by researchers, a new chatGPT image watermark may be rolling out to mark images created using ChatGPT’s image generation model.

The watermark, which appears subtly on AI-generated images from the free version of ChatGPT, is currently in testing and hasn’t been officially announced. If it does happen, it would be a deviation from some strange responses OpenAI Ceo Sam Altman has made on X about ChatGPT infringing on copyrights with its image generation tools.

However, AI researcher Tibor Blaho and others have reported seeing the watermark mentioned in the code for ChatGPT’s image generation model. It only mentions free generation, though, so it is possible the watermark won’t apply to premium ChatGPT subscriptions.

This change could be significant if it goes through, especially given how viral ChatGPT’s ImageGen model has become in recent days. We’ve seen some crazy images generated by ChatGPT since the update dropped in late March.

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The image watermark is likely OpenAI’s response to concerns about authenticity and user-generated content from ChatGPT. As more users create and share AI-generated art online, the ability to distinguish between real and synthetic content becomes critical—not only for artists and developers but also for the general public. Watermarking is a simple way to indicate that AI generated the image without interfering too much with the end result.

Under the hood, OpenAI says its image generator is trained on a massive dataset of online images and text. This dual training helps the model produce visuals that are both relevant to the prompts and surprisingly coherent—we’ve seen so many Studio Ghibli-styled images in the past week alone.

The company has also confirmed it’s developing an API for the image generation tool, which would make it easier for third-party developers to build their own tools around it. Whether the image watermark will extend to the API, or only to ChatGPT users is unclear, though.

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Myriota, a provider of direct-to-orbit satellite connectivity for internet of things (IoT) and small power-constrained devices, has launched a further four satellites to its UltraLite LEO constellation.

Founded in 2015, Myriota’s space-based network is designed to deliver scalable, affordable IoT data services and energy-efficient hardware in sectors such as agriculture, logistics, water management and environmental conservation.

The company’s network is designed specifically for the IoT industry, supporting applications such as logistics, utilities and agriculture to monitor and collect critical sensor data.

It has a mission to democratise satellite IoT access, delivering critical field-based monitoring services to a global market.

Delivered in partnership with global provider of space infrastructure Spire, the four new satellites are designed to bolster Myriota’s UltraLite LEO constellation, strengthening its set of global IoT connectivity options, which includes its 3GPP-aligned HyperPulse GEO satellite service.

The combination is attributed by Myriota as allowing the company to service a broad spectrum of IoT sensor use cases around the globe, with performance, capacity and coverage requirements specifically tailored to individual customers. These are said to range from power-limited, deployment-challenged customers to those seeking seamless terrestrial to non-terrestrial network roaming.

Myriota added that the expanded capacity provided by the new satellites will ensure customers in industries such as logistics, utilities and agriculture can securely monitor and collect data globally, using long-lasting and low-cost IoT sensors.

The nanosatellites are in the process of being onboarded following their launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-13 mission, which took off on 14 March from the Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, with more launches set to further expand the constellation throughout the rest of the year.

“We are maintaining a regular cadence of satellite launches, adding ever more capacity, coverage and resilience to our UltraLite constellation of LEO satellites as we invest in continuous upgrading of our service offerings,” said Myriota CEO Ben Cade.

“Our networks can now support tens of millions of IoT connections around the globe, ensuring access to low-power, cost-effective sensor networks to more countries and industries, ready for our partners to further expand their  solution deployments in 2025 and 2026.”

In December 2024, Myriota announced a $32m funding round led by the Australian Federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and venture capital partners Main Sequence, with support from other investors including Inter Valley Ventures.

The Saudi project – in partnership with CST, the Saudi Telecom Company and system integrator Giza Systems – has already seen Myriota deploy a cohort of connected smart water meters in remote locations on behalf of the Saudi Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture. The devices, which remain live in the field, are designed to enable remote monitoring of water meters that are in areas with limited or no cellular connectivity.

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The United States’ national metrology institute, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is to cease providing updates to tens of thousands of older common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) held within its National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

In an announcement posted last week, the standards body said that every CVE with a published date prior to 1 January 2018 would now be marked as deferred within the NVD dataset.

“We are assigning this status to older CVEs to indicate that we do not plan to prioritise updating NVD enrichment or initial NVD enrichment data due to the CVE’s age,” NIST said in a statement.

NIST’s announcement comes as the organisation struggles to deal with a backlog of thousands of CVEs that need to be analysed and processed. At points last year, this backlog hit 18,000 records as new submissions surged by 32%. It has been exploring the use of new technologies, including machine learning, to try to automate its way out of its dilemma.

Like most other authorities on the matter, NIST expects that vulnerability submission volumes will continue to rise in 2025.

NIST said it would continue to accept and review requests to update the metadata it provides for its CVE records, and it will “continue to prioritise” this work subject to time and resource availability should new information come to light that indicates an update to said data is appropriate.

It will also continue to prioritise any CVEs added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA’s) Known Exploited Vulnerability catalogue, regardless of their age.

Tim Mackey, head of software supply chain risk at Black Duck, said: “While it may be concerning to see older CVEs, particularly those associated with prominent vulnerabilities, be triaged to a lower priority, the reality is that the CVE remains in the NVD with a recognition that updates to older CVEs are infrequent.

“For practical purposes, I would view any organisation that hasn’t patched or mitigated something now labeled as ‘Deferred’ as having an underperforming patch management or DevOps cyber security programme. Let’s make this event a call to action for product security incident response teams to inventory all software and then triage all vulnerabilities with a Deferred status,” he said.

US cuts

In recent weeks, NIST has additionally been subject to a series of cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the new body led by Elon Musk that has been tasked with making thousands of redundancies across the federal government, and it is understood that it plans to fire 20% of the workforce at NIST’s parent, the Department of Commerce.

Last week, a number of US politicians pressed commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on these cuts and warned that they may threaten NIST’s work on developing standards and pose a danger to both industrial and consumer safety and security, as well as damaging American leadership and soft power on the global stage.

According to Computer Weekly’s sister title Cybersecurity Dive, CISA has lost at least 170 roles through DOGE’s cuts to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while many other staffers at the US’ national cyber agency – which was established by president Trump during his first term – have resigned amid cratering morale.

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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) throughout the UK are losing £3.4bn every year as a result of inadequate and unfit-for-purpose cyber security measures, with more than 30% of businesses having no form of security protections in place whatsoever, and over a quarter being targeted multiple times every year, according to a report produced by Vodafone Business.

Vodafone’s report, Securing success: the role of cyber security in SME growth found that the average cost of a cyber attack for a small business was around £3,400, rising to £5,000 for organisations that employ more than 50 people.

Vodafone acknowledged the difficulties SMEs have in addressing the torrid threat environment, with budget constraints, skills gaps and competing business priorities all taking their toll on their ability to implement comprehensive security strategies.

For example, over a third of the businesses surveyed do not give their employees security training, more than a third spend less than £100 in total every year, and just under two-thirds allow employees to work from home using their own equipment, massively increasing their risk profiles.

“Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, and SMEs are increasingly in the crosshairs of cyber criminals. Investing in robust cyber security is no longer optional – it is a business imperative for protecting sensitive data, maintaining customer trust and ensuring long-term resilience,” said Nick Gliddon, Vodafone Business UK CEO.

“SMEs cannot tackle this challenge alone. Greater collaboration between businesses, industry leaders and government authorities is essential to providing these businesses with the resources, education and support they need to strengthen their cyber defences. By working together, we can create a safer, more secure digital environment that empowers SMEs to grow with confidence in an increasingly connected world,” he added.

Vodafone today urged the government to do more to make security tools affordable and, crucially, scalable for SMEs. It called on Westminster to beef up its Cyber Local initiative, which is supposed to offer tailored support to SMEs based on size and location, but is limited to certain areas of England and Northern Ireland and only has a funding pot of £1.3m.

It also recommended updates to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Essentials programme, which it claimed is not sufficiently reaching SMEs with many remaining unaware of its existence, and suggested that financial tools such as tax credits, or a dedicated capital allowance, could be deployed to incentivise security investment.

Vodafone is also offering SMEs a one-month trial of its human risk management platform, CybSafe, including access to education and training sessions to help SME employees gain confidence in recognising potential threats.

Matthew Evans, TechUK chief operating officer, said the report clearly set out the significant impact of cyber incidents on the UK’s SME community.

“TechUK has called for government’s Industrial Strategy to have a greater focus on raising technology adoption across the UK’s SMEs to increase productivity and to recognise cyber resilience as integral to growth,” he said.

“The findings and recommendations of this report only further underscore the need to give SMEs the attention they deserve, and to support them in implementing robust plans to build and increase their cyber resilience.”

Dan Bridges, Cyware technical director, added: “Vodafone’s policy recommendations – particularly calls for improved access to intelligence sharing, tax incentives and stronger public-private partnerships – are well-aligned to motivate impactful changes.

 “We see a major opportunity to democratise threat intelligence through collaboration and low-code automation, enabling SMEs to benefit from the same level of threat awareness and response capabilities as larger enterprises.

“Ultimately, cyber security is a growth enabler. Protecting digital assets builds customer trust, fuels innovation and unlocks new markets. As SMEs continue to digitise, investing in intelligence-driven security solutions isn’t just about defence – it’s about ensuring long-term success.”

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The government is turning its attention to ensuring its commitment to positioning the UK as an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower does not come at the expense of the environment or the nation’s energy security.

It is a balancing act the UK’s newly formed AI Energy Council will be tasked with managing, while also exploring ways that AI can be deployed across the UK’s energy network itself during its inaugural meeting today (8 April 2025).  

The council will be co-chaired by technology secretary Peter Kyle and energy secretary Ed Miliband, with the first meeting geared towards establishing how industry and government can work together to build a sustainably powered AI economy.

“The work of the AI Energy Council will ensure we aren’t just powering our AI needs to deliver new waves of opportunity in all parts of the country, but can do so in a way which is responsible and sustainable,” said Kyle.

“This requires a broad range of expertise from industry and regulators as we fire up the UK’s economic engine to make it fit for the age of AI – meaning we can deliver the growth which is the beating heart of our Plan for Change.”

On that point, it is expected the meeting will be attended by representatives from various energy market stakeholders, including the National Grid, regulator Ofgem, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Scottish Power, to name a few.

“AI can play an important role in building a new era of clean electricity for our country, and as we unlock AI’s potential, this council will help secure a sustainable scale-up to benefit businesses and communities across the UK,” added Miliband.

Representatives from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft and Nvidia are also expected to attend, to share their views on how to build hyperscale AI datacentres that are energy- and water-efficient.

Alison Kay, vice-president for the UK and Ireland at AWS, said the public cloud giant’s views on sustainably meeting the growing demand for AI technologies very much align with what the AI Energy Council is looking to achieve.

“As the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the fifth year in a row, we share the government’s goal to ensure the UK has sufficient access to carbon-free energy to support its AI ambitions and to help drive economic growth,” she said.

News of the council’s creation was first announced in January 2025, as part of the government’s response to the AI opportunities action plan, which included a pledge to create AI growth zones that would become home to datacentres housing AI workloads to accelerate the pace of developments in this field.

However, as reported by Computer Weekly at the time, concerns were raised about the green impact of ramping up the UK’s AI datacentre footprint, as well as how the National Grid would cope with an influx of facilities drawing power from it.

In response, the UK government has now confirmed that the AI growth zones will be sited in areas with access to at least 500MW of power.

“AI will play an increasingly important role in transforming our energy system to be cleaner, more efficient and more cost-effective for consumers, but only if used in a fair, secure, sustainable and safe way,” said Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley. 

“Working alongside other members of this council, Ofgem will ensure AI implementation puts consumer interests first – from customer service to infrastructure planning and operation – so that everyone feels the benefits of this technological innovation in energy.”

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