This Week in Tech - December 17, 2021

Hello all, after a long hiatus, I have returned to bring you some tech news in the final week before Christmas. Chances are this could be the best news you’ll hear for the festive period.

UK governments cyber strategy

Big news this week coming from our trusted and faithful leaders that surprisingly doesn’t seem to be part of their dead catting strategy.

The government has launched a £2.6 billion National Cyber Strategy, which aims to promote the nation's cybersecurity awareness through investment in R&D of AI, blockchain, 5G and 6G, silicon chip design and cryptographic authentication.

The strategy also strongly defines the law's stance on ransomware, that it “does not encourage, endorse nor condone the payment of ransom demands”. At least they can make some of their messaging clear and concise.

AWS outage 

For the second time in two weeks, on Wednesday night AWS servers suffered another outage. Netflix streams stopped, Amazon doorbells were ignoring their owners and Roomba’s ground to a halt. Absolute carnage.

While in reality this is pretty far away from an apocalyptic situation, the incident serves to show the vast amount of society that is underpinned by no more than six big cloud services. Competition is good for everyone, so if you’re evaluating your cloud services anytime soon, it’s worth checking out some smaller providers. They’re just as reliable and secure, and you’ll be doing your part to stop the world resembling a Bezos induced Blade Runner film

Google tells US staff to get vaccinated 

With Omicron surging across the world, Google has told its US staff to get their vaccine or risk losing their jobs. Those without a valid exemption will be placed on leave and later sacked.

The issue of mandatory vaccinations is and will remain a hot button topic over the coming months, and we can expect Big Tech to be at the forefront of this discussion.

That’s all from me this year, I hope you’ve found some joy in my musings and have a lovely Christmas and new year.

See you in 2022!