COVID-19 kicks mobile giant CK Hutchison's '3' twice: Robs operator of roaming revenue, sends data use soaring

Employees at Tesla suffered spotty Wi-Fi and struggled to find desks and parking spots when they were returned to work at the office following orders from CEO Elon Musk.

Most tech companies are either following a hybrid work model or are still operating fully remotely. Musk, however, wants his automaker's staff back at the office working for at least 40 hours a week. Those who fail to return risk losing their jobs, he warned in an internal email earlier this month.

"Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned," he wrote.

For bosses suffering the effects of the Great Resignation, IT decision makers taking part in this survey have a suggestion: go remote and you won't have any trouble hiring people.

That's the overall message from Foundry's 2022 Future of Work study, which examined the pandemic's impact on workplaces and how businesses plan to answer the big question on everyone's minds: do we stay remote, return to the office, or try some mutant hybrid approach of the two?

"[Pandemic-era changes] proved largely successful and once all the benefits of working from home became apparent, businesses began to rethink the structure of how their entire company works," said Foundry research manager Stacey Raap.

More than two years after England launched a COVID data store, keeping details of National Health Service (NHS) patients, the country's National Data Guardian (NDG) remains unsatisfied with who is accessing the data.

The COVID-19 data store was launched in March 2020, and would pull together medical and operational data about the spread of the virus across the country.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

Amazon's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit, brought by one of its senior software engineers, asking it to reimburse workers for internet and electricity costs racked up while working from home in the pandemic, has been rejected by a California judge.

David George Williams sued his employer for refusing to foot his monthly home office expenses, claiming Amazon is violating California's labor laws. The state's Labor Code section 2802 states: "An employer shall indemnify his or her employee for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer."

Williams reckons Amazon should not only be paying for its techies' home internet and electricity, but also for any other expenses related to their ad-hoc home office space during the pandemic. Williams sued the cloud giant on behalf of himself and over 4,000 workers employed in California across 12 locations, arguing these costs will range from $50 to $100 per month during the time they were told to stay away from corporate campuses as the coronavirus spread.

Updated An oral medication designed by scientists with the help of AI algorithms could one day treat patients with COVID-19 and other types of diseases caused by coronaviruses.

Insilico Medicine, a biotech startup based in New York, announced on Tuesday it had nominated a drug candidate for preclinical trials – the stage before you start testing it on humans.

Today's mRNA vaccines boost the body's immunity to COVID-19 by aiding the generation of antibodies capable of blocking the virus's spike protein, stopping the bio-nasty from infecting cells. The small molecule developed by Insilico, however, is used to treat people already infected, and works by preventing the coronavirus from replicating.

China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.

Limited lockdowns commenced in Shanghai during mid-March, before April escalations imposed city-wide restrictions that have remained in place ever since.

Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub, so the lockdowns have caused considerable pain. Cisco, for example, Cisco warned of disruption to supplies of parts it needs for power supplies. The likes of Foxconn, Tesla, and Toyota, have all ceased or slowed production. Chinese chipmaker SMIC kept production ticking over by having staff move either into its plants, or into a COVID-free zone around its plants.

Nvidia exceeded market expectations and on Wednesday reported record first-quarter fiscal 2023 revenue of $8.29 billion, an increase of 46 percent from a year ago and eight percent from the previous quarter.

Nonetheless the GPU goliath's stock slipped by more than nine percent in after-hours trading amid remarks by CFO Colette Kress regarding the business's financial outlook, and plans to slow hiring and limit expenses. Nvidia stock subsequently recovered a little, and was trading down about seven percent at time of publication.

Kress said non-GAAP operating expenses in the three months to May 1 increased 35 percent from a year ago to $1.6 billion, and were "driven by employee growth, compensation-related costs and engineering development costs."

Infosys has extended Salil Parekh's term as CEO and managing director for an additional five years, according to a stock exchange filing made on Sunday.

Parekh, who took on the role in January 2018, will now lead the IT services giant until March 2027, states the letter [PDF] penned by company secretary AGS Manikantha.

Apple has postponed employees' scheduled return to the office for three days a week amid a jump in COVID-19 infections.

Staff at the world's most valuable company were due to up their time in the office from next week, May 23, with Mondays, Tuesday, and Thursdays set as the fixed days each week.

Yet due to the pandemic, Apple confirmed to its workforce that it is delaying the edict for the "time being" with no new date cited, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg.