British readers who have only recently packed away the bunting commemorating the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II have been offered reason to get it out again by Crown Commercial Services, which is offering up the 10-year anniversary of G-Cloud as a cause for celebration.

The procurement wing of the Cabinet Office has also said that the commercial arrangement for aggregating demand for public-sector cloud consumption had netted £1.5 billion ($1.83 billion) in benefits for public sector customers.

Crown Commercial Services did not show its working on how it arrived at the calculation, and has yet to respond to The Register's questioning on the matter.

According to the announcement, more than 5,000 suppliers offer over 38,000 services to public-sector organizations through 10 years of the agreement "to aid their digital transformation," Crown Commercial Services said.

Total spending via the agreement had hit £11.5 billion ($14 billion). More than 90 percent of all suppliers listed on the G-Cloud framework are SMEs, winning some £4 billion in public contracts, it said.

The next iteration, G-Cloud 13 – a framework which could be worth could be worth up to £5 billion ($6.58 billion) in its three-year lifetime – is due to go live later this year. It is expected that G-Cloud will help deliver around £200 million ($244 million) in commercial benefits this year alone.

But G-Cloud might not be the unmitigated success Crown Commercial Services claims. The plan was to spend 50 percent of public-sector tech budgets on cloud services by 2015. That didn't happen. There are still fears about moving to the cloud model, or so says Brit provider UKCloud.

And while G-Cloud can support deals for a gamut of UK public bodies including central government, local government, the police, and the NHS, those same bodies also have access to memoranda of understanding signed by the big-name cloud providers. Dating back to 2020, Crown Commercial Services has also penned One Government Value Agreements (OGVA), a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.

Still, Cabinet Office minister Heather Wheeler offered praise for the commercial G-Cloud commercial arrangement.

The Conservative MP – who was recently forced to make a grovelling apology after suggesting Blackpool and Birmingham were "godawful" places – said: "It often goes unnoticed but initiatives such as the setting up and implementation of the G-Cloud agreement are exactly the sort of innovation this government is seeking to embed across departments."

It remains to be seen whether the next steps from Crown Commercial Services will provide the piece of procurement engineering with the limelight it clearly thinks it deserves. ®

Spyware developed by Italian firm RCS Labs was used to target cellphones in Italy and Kazakhstan — in some cases with an assist from the victims' cellular network providers, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).

RCS Labs customers include law-enforcement agencies worldwide, according to the vendor's website. It's one of more than 30 outfits Google researchers are tracking that sell exploits or surveillance capabilities to government-backed groups. And we're told this particular spyware runs on both iOS and Android phones.

We understand this particular campaign of espionage involving RCS's spyware was documented last week by Lookout, which dubbed the toolkit "Hermit." We're told it is potentially capable of spying on the victims' chat apps, camera and microphone, contacts book and calendars, browser, and clipboard, and beam that info back to base. It's said that Italian authorities have used this tool in tackling corruption cases, and the Kazakh government has had its hands on it, too.

Something for the Weekend "I have just read your profile. Have you ever thought about becoming a real estate agent?"

This is my own fault for blindly accepting every connection request on LinkedIn. My network of professional contacts is in the hundreds but I know only about a dozen of them. The rest? I honestly haven't a clue who they are. They ask to connect and I accept.

LinkedIn should consider swapping its Accept / Reject Connection Request options for a simple Yeah Whatever button.

Episode 12 So the Boss has quit and we have to replace him.

I suggested a piece of office furniture might achieve the same purpose – and not eat all the biscuits – but the Director would still like to fill the position. So the PFY and I are looking through a veritable mountain of CVs and cover letters while the Director takes a holiday.

HR both pushed the boat out and cast the net wide with a job ad so vague that almost anyone could apply for it – and almost everyone has. 

On Call A tale of theft, fraud and understanding the meaning of "Delete" to end your working week. Welcome to a legally questionable episode of On Call.

Our story is another from a reader Regomized as "Ellen" and once again concerns Digital Equipment Corporation's finest. In this case, DEC's ALL-IN-1 office automation suite of the 1980s.

ALL-IN-1 was quite the thing back in the day. By modern standards it was pretty rudimentary, but with its email and word processing functionality it must have seemed like a whole new world. It was also highly customizable.

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storge appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.

The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.

Tachyum, the outfit aiming to develop a "universal processor" for HPC and artificial intelligence workloads, has joined the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC), a think-tank promoting European HPC research and innovation.

The Slovakian company put out an FPGA prototype last year, which we noted at the time is still a long way away from proving the company's bold claims.

The "Prodigy" chipmaker said it had been accepted as an associated SME member of ETP4HPC, an industry-led non-profit association set up to drive the economic and societal benefits of HPC for European science and industry. The organization counts Intel, HPE, Dell, Atos and Arm among its many members.

A state-sponsored Chinese threat actor has used ransomware as a distraction to help it conduct electronic espionage, according to security software vendor Secureworks.

The China-backed group, which Secureworks labels Bronze Starlight, has been active since mid-2021. It uses an HUI loader to install ransomware, such as LockFile, AtomSilo, Rook, Night Sky and Pandora. But cybersecurity firm Secureworks asserts that ransomware is probably just a distraction from the true intent: cyber espionage.

"The ransomware could distract incident responders from identifying the threat actors' true intent and reduce the likelihood of attributing the malicious activity to a government-sponsored Chinese threat group," the company argues.

NSO Group told European lawmakers this week that "under 50" customers use its notorious Pegasus spyware, though these customers include "more than five" European Union member states.

The surveillance-ware maker's General Counsel Chaim Gelfand refused to answer specific questions about the company's customers during a European Parliament committee meeting on Thursday. 

Instead, he frequently repeated the company line that NSO exclusively sells its spyware to government agencies — not private companies or individuals — and only "for the purpose of preventing and investigating terrorism and other serious crimes."

Cisco has decided it's time to leave Russia and Belarus, almost four months after stopping operations in response to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

The networking giant announced it would halt operations in Russia and Belarus "for the foreseeable future" on March 3 this year.

A June 23 update suggests Cisco sees no future in either nation.

China's government has outlined its vision for digital services, expected behavior standards at China's big tech companies, and how China will put data to work everywhere – with president Xi Jinping putting his imprimatur to some of the policies.

Xi's remarks were made in his role as director of China’s Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission, which met earlier this week. The subsequent communiqué states that at the meeting Xi called for "financial technology platform enterprises to return to their core business" and "support platform enterprises in playing a bigger role in serving the real economy and smoothing positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows."

The remarks outline an attempt to balance Big Tech's desire to create disruptive financial products that challenge monopolies, against efforts to ensure that only licensed and regulated entities offer financial services.

NASA has chosen the three companies it will fund to develop a nuclear fission reactor ready to test on the Moon by the end of the decade.

This power plant is set to be a vital component of Artemis, the American space agency's most ambitious human spaceflight mission to date. This is a large-scale project to put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, and establish a long-term presence on Earth's natural satellite.

NASA envisions [PDF] astronauts living in a lunar base camp, bombing around in rovers, and using it as a launchpad to explore further out into the Solar System. In order for this to happen, it'll need to figure out how to generate a decent amount of power somehow.

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