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...but won’t pay attackers.
Ever since the development of the internet, ransomware has always been one of the pain points of computer networking and particularly over the last decade. Ransomware refers to a type of computer malware which executes cryptovirology attacks after it covertly installs on a computer.
Once the computer is infected, payment is demanded to correct the problem.
Ransomware Attacks
However, ransomware attacks have recently started to attract the attention of mainstream media. The main reason for this is that the attacks seem to be focused on hospitals, clinics, and several other healthcare facilities. The trend started off in the United States but has since moved on to the UK. Over the last 12 months, a large number of healthcare facilities have had their access to important data compromised, and this is a cause for concern for many people.
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NHS England and NHS Improvement set out next steps to implement the NHS Five Year Forward View in 2017/18 and 2018/19
National NHS leaders have set out steps to strengthen collaboration across the NHS and ensure that local health and care areas are successful in delivering their blueprints for the future. Published by NHS England and NHS Improvement, Delivering the Forward View: NHS Operational Planning Guidance for 2017/18 and 2018/19 provides NHS trusts and commissioners with tools they need to plan for the years ahead.
For the first time, the guidance covers two financial years, to provide greater stability, underpinned by a two-year tariff for NHS patients and a two-year NHS Standard Contract.
Read more: NHS England set out next steps to implement the NHS Five Year Forward View
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Jeremy Corbyn has promised to "remove" private provision within the NHS as part of plans to "renationalise" the health service. The Labour leader vowed to make the NHS fully publicly funded and bring services provided privately "back into public hands". A future Labour government would end PFI contracts in the NHS and restore publicly-funded bursaries for nurses.
Leadership challenger Owen Smith plans to boost NHS spending by 4% a year. Setting out his vision for the NHS in England, Mr Corbyn said his priority was to ensure the whole of the health service remains free at the point of use and can operate on a secure financial footing. "The Tories have run our treasured National Health Service into the ground and we need to get serious about stopping them," he said. "The next Labour government would go further than reversing Tory cuts - it would deliver a modern health and social care service that is fully publicly provided and fully publicly funded."
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Our increasing reliance on the Internet and the ease of access to the vast resource available online is affecting our thought processes for problem solving, recall and learning. In a new article published in the journal Memory, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign have found that ‘cognitive offloading’, or the tendency to rely on things like the Internet as an aide-mémoire, increases after each use. We might think that memory is something that happens in the head but increasingly it is becoming something that happens with the help of agents outside the head.
Benjamin Storm, Sean Stone & Aaron Benjamin conducted experiments to determine our likelihood to reach for a computer or smartphone to answer questions. Participants were first divided into two groups to answer some challenging trivia questions - one group used just their memory, the other used Google. Participants were then given the option of answering subsequent easier questions by the method of their choice.
Read more: Cognitive offloading: How the Internet is increasingly taking over human memory
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New research suggests that an electroencephalogram (EEG) could be a strong indicator of the level of awareness of patients in a vegetative state after a severe brain injury.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has repeatedly shown that a significant minority of patients diagnosed as in the vegetative state are actually aware, but unable to show it reliably with their behaviour.
The new research findings, published in Annals of Neurology, suggest a correspondence between a patient's ability to generate an EEG marker of attention to tactile stimulation, and their ability to produce the critical clinical marker of awareness by following verbal commands.
