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A man has pleaded guilty in America to a single felony count for his role in a $3m tech support scam operation.…

Aussie media claims Silicon Valley giant used surveillance tool to torpedo competitor

Uber has once again been accused of using spyware tools to help it undermine a competing ride-share business.…

No joke, that's what they've genuinely named a 'fighter-like' military drone project

Rise of the Machines The American government is trying to buy military drones in a programme it has named Skyborg, with a US govt spokesman comparing the madcap project to both Star Wars’ R2-D2 and IBM Watson.…

Calls for global action against white nationalism and tech giants that spread its message

New Zealand police have started arresting people who shared a livestreamed video of the mass murder of 50 people in Christchurch last week.…

Good luck, says anti-virus pioneer, I have no assets

John McAfee has been ordered to pay $25m for the wrongful death of Gregory Faull, his former neighbor in Belize, but refuses to pay and claims he has no assets.…

Come for the on-demand servers, stay for the sweet documentation

On a rainy Wednesday morning in San Francisco, Google pitched its Cloud Platform (GCP) to power games, and brought friends along to sing its praises at the annual Games Developer's Conference.…

Kit-Kat API whacked, don't give hackers your phone. This WebView came rolling home

Smartphones and other gadgets running Android 4.4 or later contain a bug that can be exploited by rogue apps to steal website login tokens and spy on owners' browsing histories.…

'We can replace it but we have no idea what the config is on the device'

An IT department is pulling its hair out this month after realizing a coworker who died last year was the only person who could log into a crucial network switch.…

The Last Emporium

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi isn't all scooters, knickers and formaldehyde-free mattresses. It also makes smartphones, and sales of those in Europe helped grow international revenues by 118 per cent year-on-year, booking almost ¥174.9bn overall, or £20bn in calendar 2018.…

In-house or in the cloud? Right Mix Advisor will tell you

HPE has pulled the sheets off a service designed to advise punters on the bits of their IT infrastructure to keep in-house, and the workloads to offload to public cloud data centres.…

And will spend the rest of 2019 working on his stripey suntan

An irate sacked techie who rampaged through his former employer's AWS accounts with a purloined login, nuking 23 servers and triggering a wave of redundancies, has been jailed.…

Play fair, chaps

The European Commission has concluded its third probe into Google's business practices by whacking it with a €1.49bn fine. The third investigation dealt with advertising broker services that Brussels said foreclosed competition and raised prices for website operators.…

Political Lobbying Network member Fi Radford in Bristol shares her top tips on lobbying your MP…

By Fi Radford

Put yourself in their shoes! That would be my key piece of advice for anyone wanting to successfully lobby their MP on any issue. Imagine a huge inbox that never empties, umpteen people wanting to bend your ear about their particular concerns, the ongoing and very real needs of your local constituents (known as casework), not to mention the demands of the Party and the House of Commons and, (if you are not in government) all without Civil Service support. I really don’t know how the good ones cope!

So, to lobby successfully you need to be friendly, clear and succinct in your ask, and able to back it up with reliable and well researched information. If you and your MP share common values and interests, you can become a useful resource over time, as trust grows. However, this all changes if you have very little in common, and you have to start from square one even to try and convince your MP of the science of climate change, as my Greenpeace friend had to do with the member for the 18th century. (No prizes for guessing!)

I first met Thangam Debbonaire (Labour MP for Bristol West) when a group of us travelled up to Westminster to greet her just after she had been elected in 2015.  I remember giving her a copy of ‘This Changes Everything’ by Naomi Klein, which at the time she did not seem too thrilled to receive. Later she told me she had read it whilst convalescing from breast cancer, which assailed her early on in her parliamentary career, but from which I am glad to say she has fully recovered.  Then in 2016 and 2017 I organised two one-hour sessions with other Environmental Groups to ask her questions on a variety of green issues. These went really well, and it was clear that with the exception of the big ‘N’ (Nuclear energy) there was a high degree of agreement, especially since Labour changed their policy and withdrew support from fracking.

Over time we’ve built a strong relationship and I consider her an ally. I recently went to meet her at her ‘surgery’ with a shopping list of three requests on plastics, fracking and a fierce watchdog in the new Environment Act meant to replace EU regulations and in every instance she concurred and gave me good advice to pass back to Greenpeace UK. I always follow up our meetings with a letter of thanks and listing what actions have been agreed. It is also a good idea to make a friend of her Parliamentary Aid too.

Between meetings I follow her on Facebook and theyworkforyou.com, which does not cover all the questions she raises, but most of them. I often write and thank her for a particular question she has raised on an environmental topic. Very occasionally I will send her articles which I think she will find useful, as she is keen to learn much more about renewables. I always try not to send her petitions having heard her heartfelt plea as the MP who always receives the most!

It helps to be part of the Greenpeace Political Lobbying Network as advice and information is always there to give you confidence and support. I would definitely encourage anyone with an interest in politics to get involved in lobbying, as even though our democracy is flawed, it is only our MPs who nationally have the power to change things for the better and even in opposition they have soft power and influence. I am very lucky with my MP and I know others may prove harder to convince, but if they like you and you can back up your arguments, then it is well worth persevering.

Feeling inspired? The Political Lobbying Network is made up of hundreds of Greenpeace supporters who contact MPs and other elected representatives about our campaigns and broader environmental issues. Thanks in part to lobbying from members of the Network, Government committed to backing the creation of an Antarctic Ocean Sanctuary.

Sign-up here to get more info and training. We’re running training on talking to your MP in London on 30th March and in Manchester on 27th April and you’re more than welcome.

The post A guide to getting your MP to take action appeared first on Greenpeace UK.

Merger so fresh, gabfest freebies had old logo

Logowatch Now that star-crossed Hadoop-flinging lovers Cloudera and Hortonworks have ended their years-long competition-cum-courtship with a merger, what better way to seal the deal than visiting the Strategy Boutique?…

Cloud Foundation makes debut on Dell EMC VxRail systems

VMware's Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud stack has hit version 3.7 and is available from April as a component of a pre-built private cloud appliance running on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) kit.…

Trump's exec order 'doesn't go nearly far enough', though

GTC 2019 The US government needs to strengthen its commitment to AI with concrete funding, favourable immigration policies and better education if it's serious about remaining competitive, Democrat Congressman Jerry McNerney said on Tuesday.…

There's no place like Chrome, but... here are the other guys

Google has offered to remind Android users in Europe that Chrome isn't the only game in town – similar to the "Web Browser Ballot" measure imposed on Microsoft a decade ago as part of a competition remedy.…

Go off-cluster if you wanna, plus 'batteries-included' Kubernetes containers

Cloudera, fresh from the uneven merger with former Hadoop distro competitor Hortonworks, used its first major public event to thrust a new data platform hard at the enterprise.…

Customers spared from buying an iPhone while credit scoring system had a lie-down

UK phone-slinger The Carphone Warehouse has received a slap on the wrist from the Brit advertising watchdog after an offer proved a tad too popular.…

Offsite specialists offer to take the strain

Promo End-users often judge the efficiency of your IT by their first contact with your service desk. Do you have the resources to keep them happy and provide the fast and reliable support they need?…