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Sarah Colburn| Special to the Times

Divergent Stars Theater Company is hosting a Labyrinth-themed masquerade ball that includes live performances of music and scenes from the movie.

Theres not as much entertainment out there for adults that touched on things from our childhood, said Aimee Josephs, president of the company.

The company, which is a year old, is a branch of the Central Minnesota Theater. This particular branch, Josephs said, focuses on entertainment by and for adults, providing local actors and actresses opportunities to perform. Different branches of the theater company each have their own focus.

Re-creating the fantasy of the Labyrinth is something Josephs and her team have been working on for a few months.

Its an opportunity for people to come out and dress in their ball gowns and masks and tuxes or suits, though its not required, she said. Its fun, silly, quirky.

The team has created goblin puppets for the event and performers will be lip synching to the music and performing scenes from the movie. The actors and actresses will all be dressed as characters from the movie. There will also be movie trivia for prizes.

Im hopeful that everybody will have a little bit more fun with it, she said.

The event will be held at The Red Carpet Nightclub and Josephs said theyve upgraded the lighting systems and have been working with the lighting designer to put together a high-caliber show.

The evening will wrap with a time for guests to magic dance and art from local artists will be for sale throughout the evening on the upper floor.

Jim Hensons Labyrinth: A Masquerade Ball, begins at 8 p.m. Feb. 19, the doors open at 7:30 p.m. The show is 21 and up. A raffle will be part of evening and event-goers will receive raffle tickets with their admission. General admission is $10. VIP admission is $15, and while it costs a little more, it includes more raffle tickets for a higher-level raffle. Individual raffle tickets are $1 each. The event is open to those 21 and older.

For more information and tickets go to: https://www.centralmntheatre.com/event-details/dstc-jim-hensons-labyrinth-a-masquarde-ball

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Divergent Stars Theater Company hosting 'Labyrinth'-themed masquerade ball in St. Cloud - SC Times

Last year, Apple announced a controversial plan to install photo scanning software in every device. Apple has long been seen as a pro-privacy companybillboards emblazoned with the slogan What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone were common sights in 2019. A global coalition pushed back, and the company paused the plan.

Now, Congress wants to force Apples handalong with essentially every company that allows users to store or share messages or contentand essentially mandate such scanning.

While Apples plan would have put the privacy and security of its users at risk, the EARN IT Act compromises security and free speech for everyone. The bill would create serious legal risk for business that hosts contentmessages, photos stored in the cloud, online backupsand, potentially, even cloud-hosting sites like those using Amazon Web Services, unless they use government-approved scanning tools.

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The bills proponents claim that this isnt a problem for any service as long as it is scanning files, and then reporting Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) to law enforcement. Internet companies are already required to report suspected CSAM if they come across it, and they report on a massive scale that comes with a lot of mistakes. Facebook is often held up as a positive example by lawmakers, but while new scanning techniques there have produced many millions of reports, many of them are apparently inaccurate. Federal law enforcement has frequently (mis)used the massive number of reports to suggest there has been a huge uptick in CSAM images. They wont stop there.

Nor will the demands stop at the U.S. border. Once U.S. law enforcement agencies are accustomed to getting a constant stream of reports back from nearly every company hosting or sending content online, other democraciesand then authoritarian regimeswill demand the same tools, and use them to root out dissent. The rules envisioned by EARN IT sponsors dont leave room for any company, small or large, to use uncompromised encryption and protect user privacy.

The bill would also create an unelected federal commission headed by the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and dominated by law enforcement personnel. . This commission would be responsible for setting best practices for tech companies to follow. Its very likely some states will use that as a basis to create laws enforcing scanning and reporting, upon pain of criminal prosecution and costly civil litigation. Because online companies operate in every state, theyll be required to follow whichever state law is harshest.

In fact, the lawmakers behind this bill have already made the plan clear: in a Myths and Facts document about the bill, lawmakers take aim at Amazon, of all companies, for its limited reporting of CSAM:

According to NCMECs 2020 statistics on reports of the online exploitation of children, while Facebook issued over 20 million reports that year, in contrast Amazon (which hosts a significant percentage of global commerce and web infrastructure) reported 2,235 cases.

As Techdirts Mike Masnick put it, thats because Amazon and Facebook are in completely different businesses. Facebooks larger number of reports is consistent with its business model of sharing content between users. Meanwhile, Amazon is in the entirely separate web hosting business. Apple, which is also not in the social media business, will no doubt also be in lawmakers crosshairs.

In a 2019 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on encryption, Senator Grahama coauthor of the EARN IT Acttold representatives from Apple and Facebook that encryption was not going to block them from access: Youre going to find a way to do this or were going to go do it for you. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who would have headed the commission under the previous administration, specifically clashed with Apple on its encryption and noted he was searching for a legislative solution to allow investigators access to encrypted materials. The EARN IT Act, originally introduced when Barr was still Attorney General, is just that.

EARN IT doesnt specifically attack encryption, but thats because it doesnt have to. Instead, it allows encryption to be used as evidence against a company in order to find it liable for hosting CSAM.

The end result is clear: state laws will make companies liable if they dont scan and report user content for CSAM, which they cant do unless they break encryption. Apple will likely fold, as will many other companies, in order to protect themselves. EARN IT would thus coerce sites, platforms, and services to do this sort of scanning, not just on messages, but on practically all online content, encrypted or not. Companies that handle online content would have to weigh the benefit to their users of securely encrypting their content against the legal risk of doing so, and encryption becomes a much harder ask when it might put a companys bottom line at risk.

All of the concerns around Apples device scanning are magnified in the EARN It Act. Signalone of the best examples of secure, private, end-to-end encrypted messagingstated in 2020 that they may not be able to operate in the U.S. if EARN IT becomes law. But end-to-end encryption isnt just for messagesit secures much of the internet, keeping you and what you do online private and safe. You cant have a secure internet where all its content is also screened, because you cant have end-to-end encryption alongside mass scanning requirements. This isnt just an attack on encryptionits an attack on the fundamental security of the internet. As experts have said before, this sort of scanning is in direct conflict with privacy and security.

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If EARN IT becomes law, what happens on your iPhone wont stay on your iPhone. It will be scanned by a government-approved tool like everything posted on Facebook. And what happens on your website, in your cloud backups, behind your DMs, and pretty much everywhere else onlinewill be right behind it.

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If EARN IT Passes, What Happens On Your iPhone Won't Stay On Your iPhone - EFF

The UK government's Cabinet Office is seeking to negotiate a new agreement for hosting services for public-sector customers, but appears set to award the contract to its own joint venture with Ark Data Centres.

The rationale is that Ark is the only supplier judged to be capable of meeting the necessary security requirements.

Crown Hosting Data Centres (CHDC) is a joint venture between the Cabinet Office, which owns 25 per cent, and Ark Data Centres Ltd, which owns the rest. It was set up in 2015 for the express purpose of providing hosting services for the government.

Under a voluntary ex ante transparency notice (VEAT), the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) posted details of the Crown Hosting II procurement, which is for rental of managed premises and provision of associated products and services for the ICT of its public-sector customers.

This is the second extension to the original Crown Hosting contract, which was extended for another four years in 2018. Crown Hosting II is to last for seven years, and the proposed start date is scheduled to be on or around 15 March 2023, with the estimated value for the whole contract listed as 250m.

The VEAT reveals that the CCS has reviewed its requirements for this framework and concluded that a direct award to the supplier is permissible because this supplier is the only one capable of meeting the high security classification requirements and support services critical to the national interest.

This kind of direct award is allowed under regulation 32(2)(b)(ii) of the PCR 2015, which permits the contract to be awarded without prior publication where competition is absent for technical reasons.

According to the CCS, the security aspect is important in this case as a result of the UK government's Cloud First Policy, which directs public-sector customers to migrate workloads away from data centres and instead favour public cloud services.

Although this is often easier said than done, the CCS states that the net effect of the Cloud First policy is an overall shrinking of potential data centre business from public-sector bodies, so that a greater proportion of the remaining data centre requirements are those that are critical to the national interest or have higher security classifications.

In other words, the workloads to be hosted under this contract are likely to be those requiring the highest level of physical, operational and electronic security requirements.

CCS also stated that the seven-year framework is justifiable as this will provide ample time for the end user in question to begin and complete their four-year relocation programmes within the timeframe. The alternative of the more common four-year framework agreement, as with the previous two Crown Hosting contracts, would likely prove insufficient for a large data centre relocation programme to start and finish before the framework agreement ended.

While it is easy to be cynical about the government awarding contracts to organisations in which it has an interest, in this case it appears that the national security argument is a valid one, especially when taken with other requirements such as for highly secure premises across at least three locations separated by no less than 15km.

However, we also note that AWS was reportedly given a contract to store data for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ last year.

In its financial statement for the year ended 30 June 2021 [PDF], CHDC reported a turnover of nearly 46m, with profit after tax of nearly 2.5m. This was up on 43m turnover and 2m profit the previous year.

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UK government gifts new 250m hosting contract to its own joint venture - The Register

VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global graph database market size reached USD 1.59 Billion in 2020 and is expected to register a rapid revenue CAGR during the forecast period, according to latest analysis by Emergen Research. Increasing demand for graph databases for digital assets and master data management is one of the major factors expected to continue to drive market revenue growth.

Drivers:

Global graph database market revenue growth is expected to be driven by increasing demand for graph databases for master data management. Data consistency and accuracy can beimproved by connecting all organizational data to a unified repository for a single reference point. For large-scale global businesses, master data management is important. As companies become more customer-centric, it has never been more important than now to use the connections in the data to make quick operational decisions. This needs the use of technology to integrate the master data, which includes customers, products, suppliers, and logistical data, in order to enable the next generation of fraud detection, e-Commerce, supply chain, and logistics applications.

Master data management graph databases allow businesses to create a 360-degree view of the master data that is available in real-time to all business operational applications. The 360-degree perspective can be achieved by maintaining all of business master data in a single repository or by establishing a shared metadata repository to enable operations ranging from e-Commerce to customer service. Thus, increasing demand for graph databases for master data management will drive revenue growth of the market.

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Restraints:

Insights from graph database data require a high level of technical expertise and shortage of skilled professionals are major factors hampering revenue growth of the market. Additionally, lack of standardization is expected to restrain market revenue growth over the forecast period.

Growth Projections:

Global graph database market is expected to register a CAGR of 21.9% over the forecast period and revenue is projected to increase from USD 1.59 Billion in 2020 to USD 11.25 Billion in 2030. Increasing demand for flexible online schema environment is boosting market revenue growth.

COVID-19 Impact Analysis:

COVID19 transformed the global dynamics of business operations and had substantially negative influence on businesses due to lockdowns imposed by governments to curb spread of the virus. However, the COVID19 outbreak provided several opportunities for companies to digitalize and expand operations across borders as adoption and implementation of technologies such as big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), predictive analysis, Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain technology increased during the initial lockdowns. In 2020, retail and manufacturing industries faced significant challenges. However, with the introduction of vaccinations and significant control of the virus, companies operating insuch industries are projected to attract substantial investmentsover the forecast period because graph database solutions have gained more popularity across various business operations.

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Current Trends and Innovations:

Digital content volumes already available and that being generated each day is significantly vast. Graph databases offer a robust and efficient database model for tracking digital assets like documents, assessments, agreements, and others. This is expected to boost demand for graph databases for digital asset management, which in turn will augment revenue growth of the market.

Geographical Outlook:

Europe graph database market is expected to register a significantly steady CAGR over the forecast period. Increasing implementation of Industry 4.0 across industries in countries in the region will drive adoption of graph database, which in turn is expected to drive Europe market revenue growth during the forecast period.

Strategic Initiatives:

Some major companies included in the global market report include Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Oracle Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation, DataStax, Inc., ArangoDB GmbH, TigerGraph, Inc., Cambridge Semantics Inc., BitNine Co Ltd., and Neo4j, Inc.

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Emergen Research has segmented global graph database on the basis of component, deployment, graph type, organization size, analysis type, application, end-use, and region:

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About Emergen Research

Emergen Research is a market research and consulting company that provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. Our solutions purely focus on your purpose to locate, target, and analyze consumer behavior shifts across demographics, across industries, and help clients make smarter business decisions. We offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across multiple industries, including Healthcare, Touch Points, Chemicals, Types, and Energy. We consistently update our research offerings to ensure our clients are aware of the latest trend's existent in the market. Emergen Research has a strong base of experienced analysts from varied areas of expertise. Our industry experience and ability to develop a concrete solution to any research problems provides our clients with the ability to secure an edge over their respective competitors.

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Graph Database Market Size to Reach USD 11.25 Billion in 2030 | Increasing Demand for Flexible Online Schema Environments is a Key Factor Driving...