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Nvidia’s new next-gen GPU benchmarks cause concern among PC gamers, particularly with the RTX 5080 – but don’t panic yet

  • Nvidia has provided some new benchmarks for RTX 5000 graphics cards
  • Two of them don’t involve DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation
  • However, the gen-on-gen uplifts shown here are modest – but we still shouldn’t get carried away

Nvidia has released some more game benchmarks for its next-gen Blackwell GPUs, and we’ve caught a couple of results that don’t use DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation (MFG) feature.

The trouble with the in-game benchmarks that use MFG – which is a big upgrade on Nvidia’s original frame generation, inserting more artificial frames to up the frames per second count – is that they aren’t a fair apples-to-apples comparison with RTX 4000 graphics cards using DLSS 3 frame generation (the latter can’t use DLSS 4 MFG, as it’s exclusive to RTX 5000). And that’s the case for most of the benchmarks aired thus far.

So, PC gamers are hungry to see generational comparisons that don’t use DLSS 4, avoiding this skewing of the results, and we’ve got two games where this has happened in this fresh benchmarking – reported by ComputerBase (via VideoCardz) – namely Horizon Forbidden West and Resident Evil 4.

Resident Evil 4 doesn’t use DLSS at all – but does have ray tracing turned on – and Horizon Forbidden West gives us a glimpse of rasterized (non-ray tracing) gen-on-gen performance, but with DLSS on (with no frame generation, though, crucially, so MFG is removed from the equation).

Going by the bars in the bar chart provided – estimating their relative lengths, as Nvidia doesn’t provide hard figures – it looks like the RTX 5090 is about a third (33%) faster than the RTX 4090 in these two games. However, there’s a much leaner 15% or thereabouts jump with the RTX 5080 versus the RTX 4080.

With the RTX 5070 and its 5070 Ti sibling, we’re looking at more like a 20% jump compared to their respective predecessors, again just in those two games.

The Nvidia GeForce 5090 GPU on display at CES 2025

(Image credit: Future)

Analysis: Fake frames outcry part umpteen

“See. Nvidia’s new graphics cards are a big con – without ‘fake frames’ they are going to be rubbish!”

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Fake frames meaning frame generation, and this is the kind of vitriolic comment that’s popping up a fair bit following this revelation (and indeed before it, to be fair). But we do have to bear in mind that this is just a couple of games, in certain specific configurations.

Still, I concede the general point. On the one hand, Nvidia will obviously want to show off DLSS 4 and MFG as it’s a big leap forward (well, in theory at this point for all of us outside Team Green) for its GPUs. But on the other hand, it doesn’t feel great that most of the benchmarks shown thus far use MFG, and as noted, aren’t fair or direct comparisons with RTX 4000 graphics cards. These benchmarks show at least 30% to 40% gains (in previous airings), or a doubling of frames rates (as seen here with some games, and indeed a 2.9x gain with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Of course, this isn’t what you’ll see outside of games that support DLSS 4 with MFG.

Gamers would like to see a broader range of benchmarks, including pure rasterized performance without any DLSS – which we haven’t seen at all, as Resident Evil 4 above, the only game not to have DLSS turned on in Nvidia’s testing, is ray-traced performance.

Nvidia’s job is, at the prerelease stage, to stoke excitement for its graphics cards, obviously enough, but the slant towards that aim feels too skewed for gamers (and myself, I should add) in the way the RTX 5000 GPUs have been shown off so far.

Even so, the shakier-looking gen-on-gen performance of Horizon Forbidden West and Resident Evil 4 should not be used as a springboard to reach a conclusion along the lines of the (fake) fake frames rant I introduced this section with – that’s unfair, and going too far in the other direction

That said, to some extent, a lesser generational uplift is expected with Blackwell compared to Lovelace (RTX 4000), outside of the software plus AI tricks (neural texture compression) and the new trump card of MFG. After all, RTX 5000 is made on the same process as RTX 4000 (TSMC 4N, albeit an improved version, 4NP, for Blackwell), and so there’s no process drop to facilitate beefy generational gains there – that side of the equation relies purely on architectural enhancements.

Before we get too bogged down in the details here, one thing is clear enough – we need to wait for reviews before we get anything approaching a fully rounded picture of RTX 5000 performance. Which, of course, is always the case.

Still, there remains an inescapable feeling Nvidia is hiding something with the heavy slant towards MFG in this generation’s prerelease buildup – a lesson for Team Green to be more even-handed with its marketing efforts next time, perhaps. And of course, we don’t know how MFG is going to pan out in its execution and smoothness yet, either, for those PC games that do use the shiny new tech.

There are still a lot of unknowns, although all these questions will be answered soon enough. In theory the RTX 5090 review is coming next week, if the rumors prove to be correct.

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AWS and Microsoft could face ‘targeted intervention’ from CMA over UK cloud competition concerns

The competition watchdog has published the provisioning findings from its long-running investigation into the inner workings of the UK cloud infrastructure services market, which shows that competition in the sector is not working as well as it could be. For this reason, Kip Meek, chair of the CMA’s independent inquiry group, said it is advising the regulator to “consider investigating the largest cloud service providers using its new digital markets powers”.

This is because its findings suggest end-user organisations could be paying more than they need for cloud services, and are possibly at risk of being locked into using platforms that do not meet their “evolving” needs.

In a seven-page report, detailing the provisional findings of its investigation, the CMA said the lack of competition in the cloud market could mean UK customers are collectively paying hundreds of millions more per year than they need to for services.

It went on to state that UK cloud users can be locked into their “initial choice of provider” due to technical and commercial barriers that prevent customers from seeking out the services of other cloud suppliers who might have better-priced or a more innovative portfolio of services.

“We have provisionally found that AWS and Microsoft have been generating sustained returns from their cloud services substantially above their cost of capital in cloud services for a number of years,” the report said. “Customers say that cloud services offer both quality and innovation to them. However, we consider that a more competitive market would have sustained better market outcomes, including more consistently competitive prices, as well as further improvements in quality and innovation.”

Controversial licensing practices

The report also called out Microsoft’s controversial licensing practices, which typically see it charging customers more for running its software in its competitors’ cloud, as impacting on the competitive position of AWS and also Google by “partially foreclosing” them from the market.

As well as being in-scope of the CMA probe, Microsoft’s behaviour on this front is also the subject of a European Commission complaint, filed by Google in September 2024.

“[The licensing piece] exacerbates the harm we have provisionally found arising from high market concentration and barriers to entry and expansion in relation to Microsoft’s significant unilateral market power,” the report added.

To remedy the situation, the report suggests the CMA board should use powers conferred on it through the roll-out of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) on 1 January 2025 to mark AWS and Microsoft out as suppliers with “strategic market status”.

This would mean the CMA could impose legally binding conduct requirements or pro-competition interventions on both firms to limit and remedy the toll their activities have allegedly had on the market.

As detailed in the report, such powers are “specifically designed to be effected in digital markets … that share a combination of characteristics that can cause them to ‘tip’ in favour of one or a few firms” by allowing the CMA to take a “targeted and iterative” approach to tackling the behaviour of such providers.

“We consider that measures aimed at AWS and Microsoft would address market-wide concerns by directly benefiting the majority of UK customers and producing wider, indirect effects by altering the competitive conditions or other providers,” the report stated.

Before any action can be taken by the CMA, a consultation on the provisional findings of its investigation needs to take place, with cloud market stakeholders now invited to share their feedback on the conclusions raised so far. The final report from the CMA’s investigation is due to drop by 4 August 2025.

In the meantime, AWS has responded to the CMA’s provisional findings by describing its proposed intervention under the terms of the DMCCA as “not warranted”, and urged it to think about the long-term impact of such a move.

“We urge the CMA to carefully consider how regulatory intervention in other areas will stifle innovation and ultimately harm customers in the UK,” a spokesperson for AWS said. “We will continue to work constructively with the CMA as they work on their final report.”

Rima Alaily, corporate vice-president and deputy general counsel in the competition law group at Microsoft, seemed to suggest in a statement to Computer Weekly that the contents of the CMA report are mistargeted. 

“The draft report should be focused on paving the way for the UK’s AI-powered future, not fixating on legacy products launched in the last century,” she said. “The cloud computing market has never been so dynamic and competitive, attracting billions in investments, new entrants and rapid innovation. What could be better for UK businesses and government?”

Meanwhile, Chris Lindsay, vice-president of customer engineering for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Google Cloud, said the company was pleased to see the impact that restrictive licensing practices have on cloud customers feature in the CMA’s provisional findings.  

“Restrictive licensing harms UK cloud customers, threatens economic growth and stifles innovation, and we are encouraged that the CMA has recognised the harm of these practices,” he said.

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Over 40 journalists and lawyers submit evidence to PSNI surveillance inquiry

Over 40 journalists and lawyers have submitted evidence to an independent review into allegations that the Police Service of Northern Ireland unlawfully spied on journalists and members of the legal profession.

The review, commissioned by the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland Jon Boutcher, is inquiring into allegations that the PSNI collected the phone data of lawyers, journalists and NGOs, breaching journalists’ confidential sources and legal privilege between lawyers and clients.

The inquiry follows disclosures by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police had unlawfully carried out surveillance operations against journalists Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney.
 
It comes as MPs in the Northern Ireland Affairs select committee are preparing to take evidence next week from the two journalists as part of a one-day hearing into press freedom in Northern Ireland.

Angus McCullough KC, who is leading the review into allegations of PSNI surveillance over 14 years between January 2011 and December 2024, disclosed in a progress report today that 50 individuals and two organisations have submitted evidence to the review. Some 80% of the responses came from journalists and lawyers. A small number, representing 5%, raised issues that fell outside McCullough’s terms of reference.

There was a presumption, he wrote in a progress report, that individuals who were subject to improper or unlawful surveillance would be informed “subject to legal constraints”.

McCullough, assisted by Matthew Hill, who took part in the Post Office Horizon inquiry, and Rajkiran Arhestey, said he was confident that the review team had been given unrestricted and unsupervised access to PSNI documents and computer systems.

According to the progress report, investigators said they were keen to understand what scope there may be for police officers to bypass the proper statutory processes and whether there was a likelihood of “off the books surveillance”. 

McCullough said that surveillance need not be targeted directly against journalists or lawyers for it to have a tendency to reveal legally privileged or journalistic material, including journalistic sources.

The review team has been able to use information in submitted evidence to identify keywords or specific names and contact details to conduct searches of PSNI computer systems to identify cases of surveillance.

“We have also taken steps to ensure, so far as it is possible, that the PSNI are not able to see what we have been searching for,” the report states, in order to guarantee the anonymity of people who have submitted evidence to the review.

Searches of the PSNI systems were “considerably more time consuming” than predicted. Legislation on surveillance and the PSNI’s systems and processes, and repositories for storing data had changed considerably over 14 years. 

McCullough said that he rejected proposals to expand the review to assess the PSNI’s monitoring of its own police officers and staff, and could not consider surveillance by MI5, the British Military, or other police forces.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found in December 2025 that a former chief constable of the PSNI, George Hamilton, acted unlawfully by signing off on a directed surveillance operation to identify the suspected source of the two Northern Ireland journalists.

Birney and McCaffrey were unlawfully arrested and their property seized after they produced a film exposing police collusion with a paramilitary group that killed 6 innocent people in Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994.

Court received 60 complaints on PSNI in 3 years

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has been referred in complaints UK’s surveillance court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) nearly 60 times between 2022 and 2024.

The tribunal has ordered the PSNI to disclose internal documents 28 times, and has made 4 adjudications in cases involving the PSNI over the same period, according to figures disclosed by the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Chief constable, Jon Boucher, admitted in a report published during the course of the legal proceedings that it had placed over 500 lawyers and 300 journalists under surveillance. Those targeted included more than a dozen journalists working for the BBC.

The IPT is considering a claim that the PSNI unlawfully spied against former BBC journalist, Vincent Kearney, during his work on a 2011 Spotlight documentary investigating the independence of the police watchdog in Northern Ireland.

Campaigners have claimed the McCullough review does not go far enough and have called for the government to set up a public inquiry into police surveillance of journalists in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Computer Weekly has submitted evidence to the McCullough review.

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Sir Alan Bates has ‘serious concerns’ over Post Office scandal compensation budget

Sir Alan Bates has “serious concerns” that the government’s budget for Post Office scandal compensation will be stretched to cover the legal costs of those making claims.

This comes as he welcomed a “very positive and quite insightful” report from the parliamentary business and trade select committee.In its report, the committee called for legally building deadlines for subpostmaster redress with financial penalties for failure.

In its Post Office and Horizon scandal redress: Unfinished business report, the committee also demanded the Post Office be removed from administering any of the redress schemes, up-front legal advice to be offered to claimants, and the appointment of independent adjudicators.

It said lawyers being paid by taxpayers should be instructed to speed up payments to subpostmasters, reduce delays, give the benefit of the doubt to claimants and publish figures on government spending on lawyers.

In February 2024, during a mammoth five-hour business and trade select committee hearing, MPs heard that the complexity and unfairness of schemes for the financial redress of former subpostmasters is leading to slow and often unfair settlements. Witnesses, including Bates, called for a legally binding deadline on when payments should be made.

A year on, and payments are still too slow. In her Autumn Budget statement in October, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced Post Office Horizon scandal compensation funding of £1.8bn.

As of November, just £499m of the £1.8bn has been paid out across four redress schemes, with 72% of the budget for redress still not paid.

Lawyers’ fees

In the report, the committee referred to oral evidence provided by Carl Creswell, director for Post Office policy and business engagement at the department of business and trade, which states that the Budget 2024 allocation of £1.8bn to settle redress costs includes claimants’ lawyers’ fees.

“I have very serious concerns about subpostmaster legal costs being taken out of the financial redress pot,” said Bates. “That money should be ring-fenced for financial redress for victims, not paying their legal costs.”

The business and trade committee said it is “imperative” that claimants are offered legal advice up-front, at no cost to themselves but paid for by the scheme administrators.  

“Years on from the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, thousands of Post Office Horizon victims still don’t have the redress to which they’re entitled for the shatter and ruin of their lives … we can’t go on like this,” said chair of the committee Liam Byrne MP. “Justice delayed is justice denied.

“Victims should have up-front legal advice to help make sure they get what’s fair,” he said. “We need hard deadlines for government lawyers to approve the claims with financial penalties for taking too long. Crucially, we need the Post Office, which caused this scandal in the first place, taken out of the picture.”

Bates said the committee report shows that “at least the politicians involved can see the problems, although the civil servants in the department are blind to them”.

Recommendations welcome

Neil Hudgell at Hudgell Solicitors, which represents hundreds of former subpostmasters seeking compensation, said: “We welcome any recommendations to speed up redress, and many of these seek to remove unnecessary obstacles to justice we have seen over the past few years, repeated across hundreds of cases.

“We have repeatedly said claimants should have access to up-front legal advice in all scheme claims, that they should be given the benefit of the doubt where written evidence is limited given the timeframes we are talking, and that offers should be made at the top of the range for each category of loss. Sadly, we’ve not seen that across most schemes to this point, certainly not with any level of consistency.”

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).

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Corporate cover-up behind world-beating cyber security record in Middle East

Only two of the top 100 listed companies in the Middle East reported cyber security incidents last year, according to defence vulnerability scanning firm SecurityScorecard, but most incidents in the region went unreported, it said. 

SecurityScorecard’s findings highlighted an impressive record in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) when compared with Europe, where 18 of the top 100 firms had security breaches, and to the US, where 21% of firms in the S&P 500 stock market index were hit. 

Gulf states in particular have invested heavily in cyber security to deter rampant attacks in the region as they transform from central, state-controlled petro-states to diverse economies more dependent on vulnerable information communications. But experts said it still lagged EU and US in laws required to guarantee open reporting deemed necessary for resilience. 

Ryan Sherstobitoff, vice-president of research at SecurityScorecard, said he believed most security breaches that large MENA corporations suffered last year went unreported. 

“I would say probably 80% is not reported,” he said. “The Middle East isn’t exactly required to report breaches in the same way as North America, or even some locations in Europe. So, it’s never going to be recorded.”

When a MENA security breach did become public, it was usually because hackers had hit the subsidiary of a foreign corporation whose home rules required it to report the incident, said Sherstobitoff. Moreover, the geopolitical situation spawned more attacks than elsewhere. Four-fifths of the top 100 MENA corporations are in Gulf countries – usually state-owned banks, energy firms and utilities. 

The would-be ratings agency noted a correlation between firms that reported no breaches and those it scored ‘A’, after assessing detailed scans it did of their security vulnerabilities, along with incident reports. Breaches diminish a firm’s rating significantly, but only briefly, according to its methodology. 

It gave half the top 100 MENA firms A ratings – twice as many as Europe, and a fifth more than the US S&P 500. SecurityScorecard rated 84 of the 100 as either A or B. The strength of MENA cyber security, widely attributed to massive investment, was confirmed in the ITU global index, with Gulf economies ranked among the most secure in the world. 

MENA incident reports that appear more reliable involve indirect attacks, with 84 of the top 100 firms admitting they suffered breaches caused by the mistakes of their suppliers, according to SecurityScorecard. Almost every single top EU firm reported the same. A spokesperson said that it has not produced comparable third party breaches of US firms. 

Ross Brewer, an expert with deep experience of high-level security in the region, said MENA’s immense spending on cyber resilience was not as good in reality as on paper. “In Western societies, bad news travels fast. In the Middle East, if the government has anything to do with it, bad news does not travel at all. When you are building a utopian future that will attract global tourists, you want to present the absolute best image,” he said. 

Firms “in these pretentious countries” did not report incidents because the culture encouraged dignified face-saving, said Brewer. Intense government control of all communications in and out of the region, and internally, was effective at catching attackers. But MENA investment in cyber defences, according to Brewer, had been hasty, shoddy and done piecemeal by expats who left behind them a fractured and vulnerable security architecture. People were afraid to speak out, he claimed. 

Bharat Raigangari, board adviser to Dubai security consultancy 1CxO, a company which large firms in the region, said an independent security ratings agency was just what the region needed to address the security problems implied by its third party breaches. Raigangari said was trying to create one, with the backing of the UAE cyber security Council, “but it is much easier said than done”.

It was true MENA had fewer reported incidents because firms were not inclined to report them, he said. But the region’s security, and its regulations, were maturing fast and catching up with the West. 

Experts in the region applaud state authorities for their progress in building cyber defences and enacting legislation. 

Yedhu Krishna Menon, head of third-party cyber security at a MENA bank, who asked for his employer to remain anonymous because it is culturally unacceptable to reveal it, said that reported incidents were low because the region’s defences were particularly good. 

Whereas hiding security breaches to save face was not limited to MENA, a bigger concern is “reputation damage, fear of negative publicity, of stigma – it’s a global thing”, he said. 

“They don’t report the majority because they don’t want to lose business,” he added. MENA culture had also progressed. “It’s not like 10 years back.” 

Attackers, aiming to bring down economies and exploit vulnerabilities introduced by the region’s transforming economies, had merely prompted MENA countries to implement regulation to drive investment in security. The regulatory impetus had been momentous and like nowhere else in the world, said Menon. 

Munir Subor, a partner at law firm Taylor Wessing in Dubai, said that it was common practice for firms in the region not to report incidents. Those reported to government would remain secret. 

Nick Loumakis, MENA managing director at Obrela, a Greek firm working closely with UAE cyber security authorities, believed the region’s low incident numbers were correct. 

Government was “always in the room” whenever he had dealt with an incident, but he knew of only one large firm hit in the past two years. He didn’t think saving face played a factor. “It’s not easy to keep this information hidden,” he said, believing that government control of large firms and an oligarchical economy has allowed MENA countries to stamp out attackers more effectively. 

MENA state authorities contacted by Computer Weekly were unavailable for comment. 

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US Treasury incident a clear warning on supply chain security in 2025

A major state-sponsored cyber incident that targeted the United States Department of the Treasury in the weeks prior to Christmas 2024 appears to have begun as the result of a compromise at a third-party tech support supplier, serving as a warning on the precarious security and vulnerable nature of technology supply chains for IT firms and their customers alike.

The cyber attack was allegedly the work of an undisclosed China-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) actor and, according to The Washington Post, it targeted among other things the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a department of the Treasury that administers and enforces foreign sanctions against individuals, organisations and countries.

Due to its involvement in sanctions and enforcement actions against malicious cyber actors – it has played a key role in multinational operations against financially motivated ransomware gangs – OFAC presents a very obvious target for threat actors.

In a letter to senators Sherrod Brown and Tim Scott, who sit on the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs – a copy of which has been reviewed by Computer Weekly – Treasury assistant secretary for management, Aditi Hardikar, confirmed the department was notified by a third-party software services provider that it had been compromised on 8 December 2024.

The organisation in question, BeyondTrust, said the APT gained access to a key that it was using to secure a cloud-based remote tech support service.

“With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users,” wrote Hardikar.

“Treasury has been working with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Intelligence Community, and third-party forensic investigators to fully characterise the incident and determine its overall impact.

“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored APT  actor. The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and at this time there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury information,” wrote Hardikar.

The Chinese authorities have denied the Americans’ allegations, with a spokesperson for Beijing’s embassy in Washington DC describing them as “irrational” and part of a “smear campaign”.

BeyondTrust vulnerabilities

The tech firm at the centre of the incident, BeyondTrust, is a US-based supplier with roots dating back to the mid-1980s. It specialises in privileged identity management and privileged access management (PIM/PAM), privileged remoter access and vulnerability management services. It claims more than 20,000 customers in 100 countries, including the likes of tech firms such as Axians and ServiceNow.

It is also particularly well-used in the public sector, with multiple customers in local government, healthcare and utilities, including a number of NHS bodies in the UK.

In a statement posted to its website, BeyondTrust said it identified an incident impacting a “limited number” of Remote Support SaaS customers that arose through the compromise of an application programming interface (API) key. It revoked the key immediately on concluding a root cause analysis into a remote support SaaS technical issue on 5 December 2024, and began notifying affected users, including the Treasury.

It has since identified two specific vulnerabilities within the Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access product lines – one of critical severity and one of medium severity. These have been assigned designations CVE-2024-12356 and CVE-2024-12686 respectively. Both have been patched for both cloud-hosted and on-prem versions as of 18 December 2024.

According to BeyondTrust, the issues are both command injection vulnerabilities that, successfully exploited, enable an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user.

A BeyondTrust spokesperson told Computer Weekly: “BeyondTrust previously identified and took measures to address a security incident in early December 2024 that involved the Remote Support product. BeyondTrust notified the limited number of customers who were involved, and it has been working to support those customers since then. No other BeyondTrust products were involved. Law enforcement was notified and BeyondTrust has been supporting the investigative efforts.”

Security supply chain still a big issue in 2025

With this incident, BeyondTrust unfortunately becomes the latest in a long-line of cyber security specialists to find themselves making headlines after the compromise of products and solutions designed to keep end-users safe.

Avishai Avivi, CISO at SafeBreach, a supplier of breach and attack simulation tools, explained how the breach likely unfolded. “BeyondTrust, unironically, provides a secure method for IT support personnel to provide remote support to end users,” he said. “This method involves establishing a trusted connection between the support person and the end-user.

“This trusted connection punches through traditional perimeter security controls and gives the support person full access and control over the end-user workstation. Once inside, the support person can send documents back over that secure channel or masquerade as the end-user and send the same documents directly.

“The security controls protecting the US Treasury network have no way of knowing something nefarious is happening, as the trusted connection is, well, trusted.

“Was there something that the US Treasury could have done to prevent this? The sad answer appears to be yes. Again, referring to the technical information BeyondTrust provided, the system administrators at the US Treasury, or the vendor likely to provide support services, failed to configure trusted locations from which the support agents could connect. We refer to this as IP whitelisting [allowlisting].

“This failure is a critical risk with any such service [and] the same issue led to notable breaches in 2023 and 2024. This oversight is why we urge all service vendors, especially trusted ICT vendors, to follow the CISA Secure-by-Default guidance.”

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Saudi Arabia calls for humanitarian AI after tightening screws on rights protesters

Saudi Arabia (KSA) has called for a global agreement to govern artificial intelligence (AI) with humanitarian and democratic values, earning the incredulity of rights activists campaigning to free people imprisoned for decades for criticising the Gulf state on social media. 

Using the diplomatic honour the United Nations (UN) bestowed on it by allowing it to host the annual UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Riyadh, its capital, in December 2024, the oppressive state opened the vast meeting by calling for a global agreement to make AI accountable, transparent and fair, and ensure it was used to increase the well-being of all people.

States should make AI trustworthy as well, it said, by creating a global digital identity system, putting it at the core of AI, and taking steps to make sure everyone in the world used it. 

Groups campaigning for digital, political and civil liberties said it was hypocrisy for KSA to host IGF 2024, a primary theme of which was human rights, while it continued to prosecute people, imprison them for decades, and “forcibly disappear and intimidate them into silence for expressing themselves on social media”.

While making IGF host preparations in September last year, Saudi Arabia commuted to 30 years imprisonment a death sentence it placed on Saudi citizen Nasser al-Ghamdi under a terrorism law for writing X posts criticising the regime, according to Amnesty International.

Saudi Arabia is among the 20 most oppressive countries in the world, alongside Myanmar, Belarus and Somalia – and worse even than Iran, Russia and China – according to data compiled by campaign group Freedom House. Its repressions of internet users make it the eighth-worst country for “internet freedom” among 72 nations whose digital rights the organisation studied.

Freedom House accused it and other autocratic regimes of wrangling the chair of international fora to “normalise” their extreme surveillance, censorship and prosecution of dissent. They used such positions to design international treaties that would bring “global … internet governance closer to their own authoritarian worldviews”. KSA was using IGF to do this, and to “sanitise its track record”, by hosting IGF, the campaigner group said in a statement on the forum’s eve.

Riyadh AI Declaration

KSA opened IGF with a diplomatic showpiece it dubbed the Riyadh AI Declaration, in which it said it wanted to build “a world in which technology is equitable and accessible to all”, in which people were “empowered”, nobody was excluded, and discrimination, bullying and abuse were banished online. 

It called for a global agreement to stop AI being used to spread misinformation and disinformation, “especially on social media”, where it was already rife. A global digital ID system would meanwhile make sure AI worked “in the public interest”. It wanted a global consensus on ethics that protected people from “unauthorised surveillance” powered by AI, and guarded their privacy. 

KSA’s calls for equitable access to AI included a demand that the highly contested, valuable and scarce resources that power AI – its data, compute resources and algorithms – were distributed equally among all nations, echoing statements calling for a global redistribution of wealth between rich and poor nations by the autocrat-led Brics group of nations, with which it has been flirting. 

The humanitarian aspect of the Gulf state’s stance conflicted with accounts of campaigners, who said many were afraid to attend the conference for fear of being detained and prosecuted. 

“Saudi Arabia uses technology to maintain power, not to benefit humanity,” said Duaa Dhainy, a researcher at the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights, who was aghast at the Saudi Declaration. 

“We fear [KSA] will use AI to pursue human rights defenders,” she said. “They have been using many [software] programs to spy on activists. We are afraid of using technology. So, how can they call for this agreement?

“It is a country where there is no transparency at all, where you can be punished just for asking for information to be published,” said Dhainy. “In Saudi Arabia, transparency is from the government’s perspective. When we ask for numbers of people on death row, we get no response. Human rights defenders can be arrested when they ask for information, so how can [KSA] ask for transparency?”

Calls for political freedom

Many rights campaigners did attend the conference and held meetings addressing repression in the Middle East and Africa, using their platform to cite state abuse and call for political freedom. Some said it was the first time they had been in KSA for a decade. But protests emerged during the event of sessions being hacked as they were streamed to audiences online, and of Saudi authorities censoring campaigners. 

Dana Ahmed, a researcher at Amnesty, said flyers publicising the plight of Manahel al-Otaibi, who KSA jailed in January for 11 years under terrorist charges for tweeting on women’s rights and posting photos of herself not wearing traditional Arabic dress, were confiscated from its IGF exhibition booth. Likewise, leaflets publicising the similar treatment of Neth Nahara, a mother who Angola jailed for criticising its president on TikTok. 

Campaigners used the event to publicise others they said were victims of Saudi digital oppression, including Osama Khalid, jailed for 32 years in 2020 for “violating public morals” by writing on Wikipedia; Salma al-Shehab, jailed for 34 years in 2021 for social media posts on women’s rights; and Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who they said KSA disappeared in 2018 after detaining and sentencing him to 20 years for posting satirical tweets. 

“They took over the Zoom session and started streaming adult content,” said Adeboye Adegokem, in a message relayed to Computer Weekly by African rights group Paradigm Initiative, who he represented on the panel. 

“It happened two times. We had to end the session abruptly as it seems [the] tech team couldn’t keep them out. [It was] concerning because it happened after someone mentioned the journalist’s case,” he wrote, apparently in reference to Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Saudi agents murdered brutally in 2018.

Lina al-Hathloul, head of advocacy at Saudi rights group ALQST, said the conference platform gave her the opportunity to speak in KSA for the first time since 2018, when her sister Loujain was arrested, tortured, imprisoned for three years, and put under a travel ban that has been extended to her whole family, because she campaigned for women to have a right to travel. But she spoke via video link for fear she would be arrested if she went in person, she said. 

“So many things happened to others that I cannot speak about yet because they are still inside and it’s not good for their safety,” said Al-Hathloul. 

The UN Secretariat told Computer Weekly it removed the video because it believed it violated a rule in the IFG code of conduct that forbade “personal or ad hominem attacks”. “The IGF manages its records according to technical needs and internal mechanisms, not on the advice of a particular host government,” a spokeswoman for the UN Secretariat told Computer Weekly by email.

She confirmed Adegokemn’s account of the IGF session that was hacked with pornography, but said the interruption caused by this “Zoom bombing” was “momentary” and “promptly neutralised”. Preventing this was impossible because IGF meetings were left open to online participation. One other session suffered a minor interruption. 

Saudi Arabia had not tried to get other countries at the UN to back its AI Declaration, she said. The UN Secretary General had no intention of backing it either. 

The UN had been justified in hosting IGF 2024 in Saudi Arabia, it said, because it demonstrated its belief that to wrest a global consensus on digital governance based on human rights, as it aimed to do, required constructive dialogue “with all countries” as equal stakeholders, said a UN spokesman, also by email.

Saudi authorities were not prepared to comment.

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Former subpostmasters invited to take part in Post Office Capture compensation scheme development

Former users of a pre-Horizon Post Office accounting system, who suffered as a result of its errors, are being invited to tell their stories to the government as it attempts to ascertain common themes that will help in the design of its compensation scheme.

The government has recognised that problems with the Post Office’s Capture software caused discrepancies and said it will offer financial redress and review criminal prosecutions.

The first invitations – to people who suffered financial losses and criminal convictions – were sent out by Hudgell Solicitors, which represents about 80 former Capture users.

The case studies will help establish “key themes which will help shape how the compensation scheme will look”, according to Hudgells.

The Capture software was used before the controversial Horizon system at the centre of the Post Office scandal, but unknown to the subpostmasters using it, errors in the software were causing the account shortfalls they were blamed and punished for.

Since the Horizon problems became mainstream news in January last year, after 15 years on the fringes of public debate, former subpostmasters who had experienced similar problems with Capture came forward with their stories.

After former MP and now peer Kevan Jones highlighted their problems, things escalated quickly as the government didn’t want to be seen to be ignoring the issue – as it did with Horizon for two decades.

A forensic investigation commissioned in May 2024 found a “reasonable likelihood” that the Post Office Capture software caused accounting losses, and in December, the government officially recognised that Capture users experienced shortfalls caused by errors in the system.

Jones said it was agreed with the government that Hudgells would bring forward about a dozen cases with a variety of experiences to help develop a redress scheme. “We do not have to reinvent the wheel, but there are some aspects of Capture which are different to Horizon,” he said.

Jones said there was also a lack of information due to the length of time that has passed since the subpostmasters had problems with Capture.

Former subpostmaster and Capture user Steve Marston has been invited to take part. “I am more than happy to take part and I am glad to see things are moving quickly. The sooner this is sorted out, the sooner we can come out the other end,” he said.

Marston, who was a subpostmaster in Bury, Lancashire, was prosecuted in 1996 for theft and false accounting following an unexplained shortfall of nearly £80,000. He said he had never had any problems using the paper-based accounting system, but that changed when his branch, which he ran from 1973, began using the Capture system.

“We were pushed into using it by the Post Office in 1996,” he told Computer Weekly last year. He added that he felt pressured into using the system at a time when many branches were being closed by the Post Office.

“It was a choice of moving to this system or remaining with the manual system and risk closure. I had no problems for 20 years using manual accounting processes, but within two years of using Capture, I ran up a debt of £79,000,” said Marston.

After an audit revealed a loss that he couldn’t fully cover out of his own pocket, Marston was advised to plead guilty to theft and fraud to avoid jail. The judge took into account two bravery awards Marston had received for standing up to armed robbers, saving him a jail sentence. He received a 12-month suspended sentence, lost his home and business, and went bankrupt.

An estimated 2,000 branches used Capture, but the extent of problems is difficult to ascertain because many used it over 30 years ago. As a consequence, information is scarce and some users have passed away.

Under extreme public scrutiny, the government and the Post Office acted quickly to listen to Capture users, in contrast with the Horizon problems, which took almost 20 years and hundreds of millions of pounds before the Post Office and government acknowledged there was a problem. 

A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “Last month, we officially recognised Capture could have created shortfalls affecting postmasters. That’s why we are working with postmasters who suffered losses as a result of Capture to gather information to help design a redress process.”

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which started reviewing subpostmaster convictions that were based on evidence from the flawed Horizon system in 2015, is now looking into Capture-based prosecutions. It took until 2021 for the first Horizon-based convictions to be overturned in Southwark Crown Court and the Court of Appeal.

Horizon and Capture are poles apart in terms of technology. Capture was software, available in the early 1990s, that subpostmasters could buy and download onto a PC to do their accounts. Horizon is a major enterprise system that connects to Post Office systems and is used in all branches, of which there are about 12,000.

But the treatment of subpostmasters who experienced unexplained shortfalls while using Capture had the same hallmarks. For example, data on Post Office prosecutions of subpostmasters revealed worrying similarities in the way it treated Horizon and Capture users who suffered unexplained losses.

Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered as a result of the Horizon system, and has investigated ever since.

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Nato membership boosts Finnish civil and military tech startups

Finland’s fast-expanding defence sector is witnessing a surge in tech startups chasing new business opportunities on the back of the country’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) in April 2023.  

The so-called Nato dividend is causing the country’s defence sector to experience accelerated growth as more companies capitalise on membership to innovate, grow sales and pursue new avenues of opportunity.  

Buttressed by Nato membership, Finnish tech startups that offer civil and military services are generating comparatively higher growth rates and stronger investor appeal than more traditional defence companies, said Keith Bonnici, investment director at Suomen Teollisuussijoitus (Tesi), a state-owned agency that takes equity-linked financial positions in tech startups and growth companies.  

“The rise in demand for growth capital among startups is tied to the boom in sales in this sector, as well as the sharp increase in export licences,” he said. “As a result, production needs to keep pace with higher demand. Finland remains competitive in the defence industry domain. Our indigenous players have some of the world’s largest defence contractors as customers, as well as Nato members’ defence forces.”  

A Tesi survey released in September 2024 described 144 of the 368 companies currently operating in Finland’s defence sector as “rapidly growing startups and growth companies”.

“We estimate that the annual revenue growth rate of technology companies that offer civilian and military products is as high as 30% to 40%,” said Bonnici. “This clearly exceeds growth rates being achieved by traditional defence companies. The level of growth we are seeing explains why private equity and venture capital investors favour these dual-use companies. Over one-third of the dual-use firms surveyed are owned by private equity and venture capital investors.” 

The Tesi survey found that venture capital financing was the largest individual source of capital investment for companies offering dual-use defence products during the first three quarters of 2024. Moreover, the survey identified the Finnish state as a significant player in the sector, with state-affiliated companies having invested in over 40 defence industry firms since 2014.

Record sales forecast

Buoyed by the “Nato dividend” and bolstered confidence among dual-product tech startups, Finland’s defence sector is on course to deliver a record surge in export sales by 2030, said Bonnici.    

“Finland’s total defence related exports amounted to €2.6b in 2023,” he added. “Based on the latest data and trends, there is every confidence to believe that total annual exports may well reach the €10bn milestone by 2030.”

Helsinki-based Varjo Technologies has expanded development of dual products to reflect a heightened demand for its virtual reality (VR) pilot flight training wares.

Finland’s new status in Nato has substantially improved its ability to achieve stronger international growth, said chief executive Timo Toikkanen. “Nato membership has created new opportunities to grow sales of our VR flight training products,” he said. “It makes it easier to build a presence in the civilian and defence aerospace sectors.”

The Nato factor came into play for Varjo in August 2024, when the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved the use of its VR headsets to support helicopter pilot training. VR technology is being more broadly tested by Nato-aligned air forces that view it as a cost-efficient option to supplement or replace traditional pilot training in aircraft and large simulator room environments.  

In advance of certification by the FAA, Varjo’s VR-headset hardware had been previously authorised for dual defence and civilian use by the European Aviation Safety Authority, in connection with Swiss group Loft Dynamics’ helicopter pilot flight simulation training device.

Historically, dual-product startups faced serial hurdles trying to generate significant levels of investor interest from defence-shy private equity funds and venture capital firms, said Toikkanen. “Being a dual-product tech company and supplier to the defence industry is nowadays seen not only as acceptable, but even a good thing from the perspective of investors,” he added.

VR investments

Toikkanen attributed the €34m operating loss reported by Varjo in 2023 to the company’s need to make large upfront investments to develop its fourth-generation VR headset. Varjo is hoping to raise next-stage funding of €8m in 2024–2025.   

The dual-product business opportunities flowing from Nato membership are also boosting sales confidence at Saab, the Nordic region’s largest defence technology group. 

Saab reorganised a number of core units under new leadership after Sweden’s membership of Nato was ratified in March 2024. Sweden’s accession to Nato has enhanced the company’s belief in sustainable growth through technology-led projects and capital investments, said Micael Johansson, Saab’s CEO. “We are moving towards establishing a production presence in Ukraine in collaboration with defence and technology companies there. It may be a year or more before this plan takes shape,” he said.  

Saab is hoping to find technology partners in Ukraine to develop and produce a wide range of defence and security wares, including next-generation sensors to leverage Ukraine’s existing drone capabilities. 

Ukraine is exploring the possibility of partnering Saab to produce a range of high-grade military equipment, including Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) and AI/GPS battle management systems in addition to advanced data fusion technologies.

Saab’s new generation of AI and machine learning (ML) product offerings have attracted interest across the Nato member countries. In September last year, it secured a contract to deliver Near Real Time (NRT) AI/ML models to US cyber security and cloud group ECS Federal.

ECS is deploying Saab’s NRT AI/ML technology as part of its input to the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Maven Program, which is designed to process imagery and full-motion video from drones and automatically detect potential targets.

Joint defence

The growth path to Nato contracts for dual-product firms in Finland and Sweden was greatly enhanced in September 2024, when Nordic governments launched a Regional Joint Defence Concept.  

The agreement, which is managed by the Nordic Defence Cooperation (Nordefco), will synchronise key areas of military cooperation including capacity building, linked military operations, defence technology development and joint products procurement schemes, on a regional level.

Established in 2009, Nordefco serves as a coordinating agency for cross-border defence cooperation between the five Nordic states.

Regionally, the future growth potential of dual-product and defence tech startups across the Nordics is further boosted by Finland and Sweden’s Limited Partner status in the Nato Innovation Fund (NIF). The NIF is financed by 24 of Nato’s 32 member states.  

Capitalised at €1bn, the NIF primarily invests in deep tech defence and security companies across alliance states, while taking a special investment interest in firms developing AI, ML and space technologies.  

“The Nato Innovation Fund is a hugely influential tool to drive technological innovation and development throughout Sweden’s defence and security industries,” said Pål Jonson, Sweden’s defence minister. “For Sweden, it’s an additional benefit of being part of Nato.”

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Black mothers seek ‘total agency’ over perinatal healthcare data

A group of black women in Birmingham have initiated a community-led research project that aims to give black mothers “total agency” over how their perinatal healthcare data is gathered, interpreted and ultimately used.

Drawn from Maternity Engagement Action (MEA) – an organisation that provides safe spaces and leadership for black women throughout pregnancy, birth and early motherhood – the women came together over their shared concern about the significant challenges faced by black women when seeking reproductive healthcare.

Through a process of qualitative data gathering – entailing discussions, surveys, workshops, trainings and meetings – the women developed a participatory, community-focused approach to black perinatal healthcare, culminating in the launch of MEA’s See Me, Hear Me campaign.

“We want policy-makers to see the benefits of community-led research and community driven data and use it in policy development. For there to be real change to the current statistics that black women are 3.7 times more likely to die than white women during perinatal period we need data from the community affected,” they said.

“Our vision is to work collaboratively with research bodies and the black perinatal community to create a model where the intersectional voices of black maternal women are centred, included and amplified in creating and implementing solutions to the issue of black maternal mortality and morbidity.”

Ultimately, the initiative aims to shift from the current top-down approach that defines black perinatal healthcare, to one where community data and input drives systemic change in ways that better meet the needs of local women instead.

Inequitable outcomes

Initially motivated by media reports that black women were five times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts during the pandemic, the women started to speak about their own traumatic experiences of seeking perinatal support within Birmingham’s public health system.

In recounting their stories to one another, a number of common experiences emerged. This included facing a lack of continuity and consistency in their care, undermining black women’s agency and resulting in staff making assumptions about their birth plans; receiving less quality time with caregivers; being regularly denied pain relief when it’s requested; not being believed when they raise an issue; and being coerced into unwanted medical interventions, such as C-sections or inductions.

Speaking with Computer Weekly, Tamanda Walker – a sociologist and founder of community-focused research organisation Roots & Rigour – said it was common for women to feel like they were being passed from one part of the service to the next without any say in their treatment, leaving them feeling powerless in the face of it.

“Many of the women involved were making the very basic point that if they encounter trouble and raise it during the perinatal period, they often don’t feel seen or heard by medical professionals,” she said, adding that in one case, a woman with a prior mental health condition had to bite her tongue because any expression of distress was perceived as an indication of her mental health problem.

“That was exacerbated for her because she came from a poorer background, so her fear was, ‘If I show too much distress, my children will be taken away, because I’m already known to social services’, all the while she’s struggling in this labour situation and isn’t being heard.”

In an attempt to reverse these “unjust and inequitable” healthcare outcomes for pregnant black women, the group collated their experiences into a qualitative data set to use as the basis for further analysis and action. The entire process has been documented in a report published by the MEA.

The research process

Walker initially connected with the campaign at the Black Thrive Birmingham (BTB) Community Assembly in March 2022, an event focused on exploring how black-led research and data initiatives can put power directly in the hands of black communities.

She said the event largely revolved around exploring what it would mean for black communities to own their own data and interpret it for themselves, as well as what it would mean for them to be in a position where they had the power to design solutions in collaboration with the health system to ensure needs were better met.

Walker added this led to two years of work that involved the women from MEA gathering their own data on the experiences of local women who had gone through the health system: “One of the benefits has been, rather than women holding their own single stories in isolation, feeling as if they’re the only ones experiencing these problems, they’ve come together to look at how their stories map onto each other, and to see that they’re not alone and that there are numerous people going through these same experiences.”

She added while the datafication of people’s lives often risks reducing complex experiences to “objective outputs” – ultimately taking power away from people who are represented by that data and “putting it in the hands of who will make those decisions for them and without them” – melding the data already held by the healthcare system with the qualitative data generated by the campaign “gives people the power to tell their own stories”.

As it developed, the See Me, Hear Me campaign partnered with Connected By Data’s Catalysing community campaign initiative, which seeks to act as an startup-style accelerator for organisations or groups looking to leverage data in their social change efforts.

“Over that six-month programme, they incubated us, they did some upskilling for community organisations in understanding what data is, how you might think about a data cycle within community campaigning and organising, how you might design data work that’s about social change or certain kinds of interventions, and use that to add rigour and credibility to the change one’s pushing for,” said Walker.

“What I’ve found in my experience is that when community members that I work with – and I work with quite a lot of them beyond this – hear the words ‘research and data’, they’re like, ‘That’s complicated, that’s not for me’. As soon as you sit down and get them to tell their stories and get them to click that their story is a kind of data, a load of pennies start dropping, and a load of things become possible.

“It’s just about making what can feel like quite complex topics accessible to people, so that they have an understanding of how they can influence and shape their own realities.”

Next steps

Walker noted that because the See Me, Hear Me group were only able to gather a small data sample, the next step is undertaking work to expand the qualitative data set and match it with existing NHS systems data.

“One of the problems we have is that the system isn’t always collecting data, and they’re not always collecting data on ethnicity or more in depth qualitative data about the experiences of women in general, but black women in particular,” she said, adding that the plan is to build relationships with the local health system, and negotiate data sharing agreements so that the campaign can make sense of that data themselves.

“We need to know if ethnicity data is even collected, and then how we marry that with the qualitative data we’ve collected. If there isn’t appropriate collecting of that data…then we need to…work together and think about how we can use that data to drive change together.”

Walker added that this qualitative, community-led approach will only become more important with the further proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in healthcare settings, given their propensity to reproduce existing social biases.

“We know AI reproduces bias if it’s being used in diagnostics or other things. Some of the problems we identified in the current system was a lack of continuity and a lack of human empathy to it, so what does it mean to exist in a world where those kinds of changes might occur and we might be left behind?”

She added that while AI is great at crunching numbers, “there’s something about interpreting that data which is intimately tied to who you are, your position, and your power in society that needs to be unpacked”. She noted that the technology should be used to free up people’s capacity “to do the actual caring, the human piece of the exercise, rather than become the whole exercise”.

Through her organisation Roots & Rigour, Walker said she is already involved in other projects that are taking a similar community data approach to other issues that affect black communities in the UK, including around disproportionality in the rate of stop and search, and the health risks associated with commercially available black hair products.

“The idea is to think about how can we secure funding to develop these – and we want to build up to a national level the ones that are successful [so] you can begin to get a bigger picture and story of what’s going on.”

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