Robots armed with UV-C ultraviolet light beams that can effectively disinfect surfaces in a hospital room in 10-20 minutes are helping in the fight against COVID-19.

UVD Robots, Denmark

The robots, which are reported to have been shipped in considerable numbers to Wuhan in China, Asia, and parts of Europe are manufactured in Denmark’s third-largest city, Odense, by the UVD Robots company.  The manufacturers say that if used as part of a regular cleaning cycle, they could prevent and reduce the spread of infectious diseases, viruses, bacteria, as well as other types of harmful organic microorganisms.

Breaks Down DNA

These smart robots, which look a little like a printer on wheels with several light-sabres arranged vertically in a circle on top, can autonomously clean traces of viruses from a room by ‘burning’ them from surfaces using UV-Wavelength: 254NM (UV-C light) in a way that breaks down the DNA-structure of the virus.

Research and Testing

The UVD robots are the product of 6 years research, design, development, and testing by leading, reputable organisation Blue Ocean Robotics, and the Danish Healthcare Authority (supported by leading microbiologists and hygiene specialists from Odense University Hospital).

How?

The Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) method of disinfection, which has been in accepted use since the mid-20th century, involves using short-wavelength ultraviolet (UV-C) to disrupt the DNA of microorganisms so that they can no longer carry out cellular functions.

Features

The features of UVD’s cleaning robots include 360-degree disinfection coverage, a 3-hour battery charge, and software and sensor-based safety features.  The operating time per charge for the UV module is 2-2.5 hours (equal to 9-10 rooms).  It is claimed that these units can kill up to 99.99 per cent of bacteria.

HAIs

The primary purpose of the robots is to help and improve quality of care for hospitals and healthcare facilities around the world by providing an effective, low human risk, 24-hour available way to eradicate the kind of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs) which affect millions of patients (and kill several thousand) each year.

The COVID-19 outbreak which has led to many healthcare environments being overwhelmed with large numbers of patients has, therefore, made the need for this kind of cleaning/disinfecting system seem very attractive.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Now, more than ever in living memory, having a device that can simply, automatically, quickly and effectively get on with the cleaning of hospital rooms on-demand, without worrying about infection (as may be the case for human cleaners), and without putting more human resource demands on hospitals must be invaluable, and would account for the increase in orders internationally. Devices like these show how a combination of technologies can be combined to create real value and tackle a problem in an effective way that could benefit all of us.

Facebook and Instagram have reduced the quality of videos shared on their platforms in Europe as demand for streaming has increased due to self-isolation.

Lower Bitrate, Looks Similar

The announcement by Facebook that a lowering of the bit-rates for videos on Facebook and Instagram in Europe highlights the need to reduce network congestion, free-up more bandwidth, and make sure that users stay connected at a time where demand is reaching very high levels because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The move could have a significant positive impact when you consider that Facebook has around 300 million daily users in Europe alone, and streaming video can account for as much as 60% of traffic on fixed and mobile networks.

Although a reduction in bit-rates for videos will, technically, reduce the quality, the likelihood is that the change will be virtually imperceptible to most users.

Many Other Platforms

Facebook is certainly not the only platform taking this step as Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney+ and Netflix have also made similar announcements.  For example, Netflix is reducing its video bit-rates while still claiming to allow customers to get HD and Ultra HD content (with lower image quality),  and Amazon Prime Video has started to reduce its streaming bit-rates as has Apple’s streaming service.

Google’s YouTube is also switching all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default.

BT Says UK Networks Have The Capacity

BT’s Chief Technology and Information Officer, Howard Watson, has announced that the UK’s advanced digital economy means that it has overbuilt its networks to compensate for HD streaming content and that the UK’s fixed broadband network core has been built with the extra ‘headroom’ to support evening peaks of network traffic that high-bandwidth applications create. Mr Watson has also pointed out that since people started to work from home more this month, there has been a weekday daytime traffic increase of 35-60 per cent compared with similar days on the fixed network, peaking at 7.5Tb/s, which is still only half the average evening peak, and far short of the 17.5 Tb/s that the network is known to be able to handle.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For Amazon, Apple TV, Netflix, Facebook and others platforms, they are clearly facing a challenge to their service delivery in Europe but have been quick to take a step that will at least mean that there’s enough bandwidth for their services to be delivered with the trade-off being a fall in the level of viewing quality for customers.  Many customers, however, are likely not to be too critical about the move, given the many other big changes that have been made to their lives as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and the attempts to reduce its impact.  Netflix has even pointed out the extra benefit that its European viewers are likely to use 25 per cent less data when watching films as a result of the bit -rate changes. However, with online streaming services being one of the main pleasures that many people feel they have left to enjoy safely, the change in bit-rate should be OK as long as the picture quality isn’t drastically reduced to the point of annoyance and distraction.

It has been reported that the surge in the use of streaming music and video services has been accompanied by a surge in the number of user accounts being taken over by cybercriminals.

Entertainment During Isolation

Self-isolation and the instruction to stay at home during the next few weeks in the COVID-19 crisis has meant that many people have turned to streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Spotify and Apple Music. In fact, the demand has been so high that many streaming and social media platforms have reduced the bit rate of videos in order to make sure that services can still be delivered without taking up too much bandwidth.

Stealing and Selling Your Credentials

Security company Proofpoint has now warned that cybercriminals are taking advantage of this increase in demand for streaming services by stealing the valid credentials of users and selling them online.  This means that someone else may be piggybacking off a user’s streaming account without them even knowing it.  When the account credentials are sold online (for a much lower price than normal accounts), the seller gives instructions to the buyer not to try and change the login details of the account.

How?

For cybercriminals to hijack streaming accounts, they first need to steal the legitimate credentials of existing users. Proofpoint has reported that this is achieved by using methods such as:

Keyloggers and information stealers – software that has been unwittingly downloaded, that is able to record keystrokes to discover logins and other valuable personal data.

Phishing attacks – convincing emails from bogus sources that have made users click on a link/ to re-direct, which has led to login credentials and financial information being stolen and/or malicious software being loaded onto their computer/device.

Credential stuffing – where logins are stolen in cyber-attacks on other sites/platforms and sold on to other cybercriminals are tried in other websites in the hope that a user has been password sharing (using the same login for multiple websites).

How Do You Know?

The ways to tell whether your streaming account is being piggybacked include checking the settings to view which devices are connected to the account, checking previous activity on the account and activating the options that notifies you each time a new device connects to your account.

Protection

Since the ability to hijack a streaming account relies on the ability to steal login details, following basic data security and hygiene can dramatically reduce the risk to users. For example, using strong and unique passwords, not sharing passwords between different websites/platforms, using a good password manager, keeping anti-virus software and patches up to date, keeping systems and browsers up to date, and not clicking on links or attachments in emails may help protect against this and others similar crimes.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Cybercriminals are quick to take advantage of a crisis or a trend and are always keen to find easy, low-risk ways to get money and personal details.  In this case, adhering to relatively basic security best practice can prevent you from falling victim to this and many other cyber-crimes.

Sadly, this is not a new situation.  For example, a CordCutting.com report from last year suggested that around 20 per cent of people who watch a paid-for video streaming service are using someone else’s account.

Now that streaming services are experiencing a surge in users and are very much in the spotlight, it may be a good time for those services to tackle some of the long-running security concerns and to reassure users that they are taking some responsibility to make it much more difficult of others to piggyback accounts.

With the whole of Italy’s 60 million population in lockdown and other countries taking drastic measures to control the coronavirus outbreak, the tech-giant companies are now asking their employees to work remotely.

Google

Due to fears of COVID-19 spreading through large numbers of staff, Google had already announced last week that it was temporarily closing its office in Dublin and asking the 8,000 employees to work from home.  Google has more than 70 offices in 50 countries and back at the end of January, Google also temporarily closed its offices in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan when the outbreak was still mainly based in China.

Amazon

Amazon, which restricted all nonessential travel in the U.S for employees as of last month has, after an employee tested positive for coronavirus, asked workers from its Seattle and Bellevue, Washington, offices to work from home until the end of the month.

Facebook

In addition to cancelling its annual developer conference which was due to be held on May 5 and 6 in San Jose, California (which attracted 5,000 people last year), Facebook has closed its Seattle office and asked all 5,000 of the office’s employees to work from home until the end of the month. Facebook has also closed its three London offices after an employee was diagnosed with COVID-19 and all 3,000 employees from those offices have been asked to work from home.

Slack

After an employee of Slack returned from travel and was suspected to have contracted COVID-19 (which turned out not to be the case), Slack closed its offices in San Francisco at the end of last week and a deep clean of the premises took place at the weekend.  Meanwhile, employees were encouraged to work from home.

Others

Microsoft has advised its Seattle and San Francisco employees that they can work from home until March 25th, Twitter has encouraged its employees to work from home, and Apple CEO Tim Cook has encouraged employees at several global offices to “work remotely from March 9th to 13th”.

One piece of positive news for Apple, however, is that all but four of Apple’s stores in mainland China, which is a vital market for Apple, have now reopened after being closed there during the main coronavirus outbreak.

Musk Sceptical

Some scepticism about closures and reactions to the coronavirus outbreak has been expressed by Elon Musk who tweeted that the “coronavirus panic is dumb”, a tweet that was liked by around 2 million people.

Pay

In the UK last week, prime minister Boris Johnson announced in parliament that new rules will mean that statutory sick pay (SSP) will come into force on the first day of absence in order to make those who feel they may have the virus and want to self-isolate, by staying at home rather than coming into the office and potentially infecting others.

Tech Industry, Work From Home

On the plus side, the nature of many tech industry jobs means that working from home is perhaps more possible than for many other industries, and for the UK as a whole, a 2019 CIPD Job Quality Index survey reported that 54% of the UK’s workforce works flexibly.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For those businesses that can’t easily allow employees to work home e.g. manufacturing, bricks and mortar retail, construction, events and entertainment, transport and logistics etc, the threat of a shutdown of work for what could be an unspecified period creates a real threat to the life of the business. The situation also presents a threat to many small businesses, sole traders, and self-employed people who may not have resources to last-out ‘lockdowns’, self-isolating, disruptions and complications caused by the spread of the coronavirus.

For companies that are forced to close offices, they now need to make sure that relevant staff can access company systems and intranets remotely, and that they have VPNs installed.

This situation is also a reminder of how business continuity planning and disaster recovery plans should have disease epidemic and pandemic scenarios built-in to them for the future, and this situation is likely to expose what work needs to be done by many companies in this areas of planning.

Six years after the personal data of 87 million users was harvested and later shared without user consent with Cambridge Analytica, Australia’s privacy watchdog is suing Facebook for an incredible £266bn over the harvested data of its citizens.

What Happened?

From March 2014 to 2015 the ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ app, created by British academic, Aleksander Kogan and downloaded by 270,000 people which then provided access to their own and their friends’ personal data too, was able to harvest data from Facebook.

The harvested data was then shared with (sold to) data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, in order to build a software program that could predict and use personalised political adverts (political profiling) to influence choices at the ballot box in the last U.S. election, and for the Leave campaign in the UK Brexit referendum.

Australia

The lawsuit, brought by the Australian Information Commissioner against Facebook Inc alleges that, through the app, the personal and sensitive information of 311,127 Australian Facebook Users (Affected Australian Individuals) was disclosed and their privacy was interfered with.  Also, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook did not adequately inform those Australians of the manner in which their personal information would be disclosed, or that it could be disclosed to an app installed by a friend, but not installed by that individual.  Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook failed to take reasonable steps to protect those individuals’ personal information from unauthorised disclosure.

In the lawsuit, the Australian Information Commissioner, therefore, alleges that the Australian Privacy Principle (APP) 6 has been breached (disclosing personal information for a purpose other than that for which it was collected), as has APP 11 (failing to take reasonable steps to protect the personal information from unauthorised disclosure).  Also, the Australian Information Commissioner alleges that these breaches are in contravention of section 13G of the Privacy Act 1988.

£266 Billion!

The massive potential fine of £266 billion has been arrived at by multiplying the maximum of $1,700,000 (£870,000) for each contravention of the Privacy Act by the 311,127 Australian Facebook Users (Affected Australian Individuals).

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Back in July 2018, 16 months after the UK Information Commissioners Office (ICO) began its investigation into the Facebook’s sharing the personal details of users with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, the UK’s ICO announced that Facebook would be fined £500,000 for data breaches.  This Australian lawsuit, should it not go Facebook’s way, represents another in a series of such lawsuits over the same scandal, but the £266 billion figure would be a massive hit and would, for example, totally dwarf the biggest settlement to date against Facebook of $5 billion to the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy matters.  To put it in even greater perspective, an eye-watering potential fine of £266 billion would make the biggest GDPR fine to date of £183 million to British Airways look insignificant.

Clearly, this is another very serious case for Facebook to focus its attention on, but the whole matter highlights just how important data security and privacy matters are now taken and how they have been included in different national laws with very serious penalties for non-compliance attached. Facebook has tried hard since the scandal to introduce and publicise many new features and aspects of its service that could help to regain the trust of users in both its platform’s safeguarding of their details and in the area of stopping fake news from being distributed via its platform.  This announcement by the Australian Information Commissioner is, therefore, likely to be an extremely painful reminder of a regrettable and period in the tech giant’s history, not to mention it being a potential threat to Facebook.

For those whose data may have been disclosed, shared and used in a way that contravened Australia’s laws, they may be pleased that their country is taking such a strong stance in protecting their interests and this may send a very powerful message to other companies that store and manage the data of Australian citizens.