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Redmond shrugs, says PC would already need to be thoroughly pwned

Flaws in Microsoft PatchGuard create a means for hackers to plant rootkits on Windows 10, 64-bit OS devices.…

He'd have been aiming higher than the top of London's Shard to hit his mark

A Canadian sniper has reportedly shot dead an Islamic State terrorist from the astonishing distance of 3,450 metres – more than two miles away.…

Organised crime coppers cuff young men

Detectives of the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit arrested two UK men this morning in connection with an international "conspiracy" to break into the Microsoft network.…

Data on flash or disk? Er, it's complicated, says Reduxio

Reduxio, the startup that stories data in unique indexed, tagged and timestamped chunks, has introduced v3.0 software with unified primary and secondary storage.…

Government opens Industrial Strategy linked funding call

The UK government's long-promised Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is open for business.…

All rights reserved. Credit: Greenpeace

Oh the irony. As part of a millennial-focused marketing strategy to associate Coca-Cola with beach holiday fun and sunkissed selfies, Coke last month launched its summer campaign. This year’s gimmick? Coke bottles labelled with exotic beach destinations and a competition to win glamorous holidays every day.

Why ironic? Because it's these very plastic bottles that are polluting the beaches and rivers of many of these holiday hotspots.

Plastic bottles are a major part of the problem of plastic in our oceans. Over 1.5 million plastic bottles were recovered as part of an international beach clean-up last year. Plastic bottles and bottle caps combined make up the top beach polluter globally.

We know that Coca-Cola sells over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles every single year - that’s over 3,400 every second.  

And the problem is getting worse. Over the past decade the company has actually increased its use of single-use plastic as a proportion of its global packaging mix.

Of course Coca-Cola aren’t the only culprits. Greenpeace revealed this spring that the five other top soft drinks brands sell a combined total of 2 million tonnes of plastic bottles every year. But Coca-Cola are the world’s largest soft drinks company, and set standards across the soft drinks sector.

Coke bottles are also a particularly distinctive shape - making them easy to spot on beaches. The Plastic Tide project, which is using drones to map rubbish on Britain’s coastlines, found earlier this year that single-use plastic bottles are the most common plastic polluters on UK beaches, singling out Coca-Cola bottles as the worst offender.

Loads of you have been snapping pictures of Coke bottles polluting your local environment, subverting their #ShareACoke and #CokeSummer hashtags on social media to reveal the grim reality of where Coca-Cola’s plastic ends up. 

Greenpeace volunteers have even found Coca-Cola bottles on some of the UK’s most remote beaches, which we visited during our recent expedition to document plastic pollution in hotspots for iconic seabirds and amazing marine life.

Previous Coke summer campaigns have put their customers’ names on bottles. We bet Coca-Cola is now wishing its name wasn’t emblazoned across the billions of plastic bottles washing up on shorelines across the world. That’s why we’re not going to let them continue shirking their responsibility for polluting our oceans.

Whenever you see a Coke bottle in the environment – on the beach, in a river, anywhere it shouldn’t be – share it with the hashtags #EndOceanPlastics and #ShareaCoke, and call on Coke to stop choking our oceans. 

Flash? It's all flash, mate

NetApp has introduced an all-flash SolidFire-based FlexPod.…

Researchers finger trojan-slinging AdGholas group

Security researchers have suggested that the ransomware attack on University College London last week was spread through a "malvertising" campaign.…

More speakers join MCubed Lineup

Events Ethics, algorithms and finance are all key areas for machine learning and AI, which is why we’re chuffed to announce three more excellent speakers who will be joining us at MCubed London in October.…

Alt-net providers call for ads to be reviewed

Adverts using the word "fibre" to describe services deployed over copper lines are leaving consumers baffled, according to research commissioned by alternative network providers.…

UK and Ireland boss nowhere to be seen

UK and Ireland boss of Fujitsu Lucy Dimes has gone on gardening leave just one year into the job, according to multiple well-placed sources.…

We've already got one tried and tested system, huffs MoD

The Ministry of Defence has insisted it has made “no decision” to install the US Navy’s JPALS aircraft carrier landing system aboard HMS Prince of Wales, the second of the Royal Navy’s two new 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers.…

Clash with tech titan continues

Trouble struck British chip designer Imagination Technologies has confirmed it is for sale amid an ongoing dispute with Apple that has crushed its valuation on the London Stock Exchange.…

'Dragon'-owned biz shifts focus to B2B market

Mobile gadget souk Expansys shuttered its digital doors to consumers – a natural conclusion for a business that lost direction under the ownership of lanky Dragons' Den badass Peter Jones in a commoditised space.…

NVMe over Fabrics box bashes Dell EMC, Pure and Infinidat

NVMe over Fabrics flash array startup E8 says its box out-performs Dell EMC and Pure arrays by up to 20 times.…

Not all figures are equal

If you want to develop your ML and AI skills, you will need to pick up some statistics and before you have got more than a few steps down that path you will find (whether you like it or not) that you have entered the Twilight Zone that is the frequentist/Bayesian religious war. I use the term "war" advisedly because war, by definition, has moved beyond debate and discussion. "Religious" because the war is based on belief systems, not information.…

Strapline on van: 'Where your vote is your choice'. Meow!

Pic A rival of the reseller who threatened to sack Labour-voting employees hired a billboard van to drive past their HQ with the words “we’re hiring – where your vote is your choice” emblazoned on its side.…

If LINPACK would pack wood... and other computer sports posers

HPC Blog As part of our continuing coverage of the most exciting events in the computer sporting world, Student Cluster Competitions, we like to meet each team individually.…

Curiosity Rover's autonomous operation experiments have been a great success, say astro-boffins

In late 2015 NASA gave the Curiosity Mars rover a software upgrade to let it operate autonomously. The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) code was uploaded because the rover can't be told what to do during the long periods communication with Earth is not possible. A little autonomy, NASA reckoned, could mean Curiosity could do more and perhaps better science.…

Troll your WebEx-loving execs with a crafted recording file

We all know the only thing more fun than a WebEx conference is a recorded WebEx conference, which is why WebEx Network Recording Player exists – and if you use it, you need to patch it.…