Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Microsoft has taken legal action to seize web domains being used to launch coronavirus-themed phishing attacks.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 10:07 pm
Video In an attempt to regain market share from Zoom in the pandemic-driven world of video conferencing, Microsoft today launched a “Together” mode for its Teams software.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 8:54 pm
Google has set up an organisation, dubbed the Open Usage Commons, to manage three open-source projects' trademarks – and provide developers advice on handling and using brands.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 8:12 pm
Oracle's new on-premises cloud product has prompted concern among commentators, who've said it requires a strong financial commitment and could shift customers to higher cost deals.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 7:00 pm
Reader survey With anyone who can work from home actually doing so during the pandemic, networking – and therefore network security – has become more business-critical than it was before.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 6:00 pm
Stolen domain admin login credentials can be resold by dark web criminals for up to £95,000 and a total of 15 billion purloined credentials are traded on illicit marketplaces.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 5:26 pm
Europeans and Canadians with busted iPhones will soon be able to swerve the Genius Bar and associated lengthy waiting lists, as Apple expands its Independent Repair Provider (IRP) program to third party technicians.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 4:15 pm
Google has hauled in Canonical to help extend the search giant's Flutter development framework to support Linux desktop applications.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 3:35 pm
Embattled Chinese tech bogeyman Huawei has decried the UK government's mooted plan to ban it from domestic 5G networks over reliability concerns caused by the imposition of punishing US sanctions.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 2:30 pm
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has put O2 on the naughty step after it deemed two of its print adverts for the iPad and Surface Pro tablets misled customers about the overall cost.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 1:54 pm
Exasol, the company behind a distributed in-memory database namesake, has pushed out its latest upgrade, touting support for GPUs and semi-structured data.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 12:55 pm
The hipster entrepreneur in all of us died a little bit today with confirmation that Cereal Killer Cafe, the best place in London Town for overpriced bowls of breakfast foodstuffs and milk, is not going to re-open its doors.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 11:58 am
Citrix has issued patches for 11 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its various networking products.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 10:55 am
Britain is all a-tizzy about Huawei again as talk swirls over the imminent release of an unofficial report into the Chinese company’s influence over prominent Britons and a ban on its telco equipment.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 10:01 am
Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of public whoopsies by customer-facing IT. Today it is the turn of perennial favourite, British Airways.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 9:13 am
Salesforce exec veep and UK GM Paul Smith has quit to join cloud platform rival ServiceNow in the same role but for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 8:30 am
Deep-learning software has singled out a group of 250 stars in the Milky Way that appear to have been born outside our galaxy. That's according to a research paper published this week in Nature Astronomy.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 7:18 am
Webcast It’s been a challenging decade in the financial services sector to say the least. From the global financial crisis to environmental, social, and governance regulation, with digital transformation on top. Now the COVID-19 virus outbreak has provided the impetus to accelerate those digital transformation plans.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 6:00 am
Augmented-reality flop Magic Leap has received an unexpected credibility boost: a top Microsoft exec has jumped ship, and will take over as CEO in August.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 5:02 am
At a press conference on Tuesday, NASA confirmed why Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spaceship failed to hook up with the International Space Station last year. The answer: as expected, buggy code.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 2:57 am
Science and tech leaders, and immigration lawyers, have reacted with alarm to a Trump administration diktat that foreign university students in the US must return to their home countries if their college course is online-only mid-pandemic.…
Posted on 8 July 2020 | 12:29 am
The payment-card-skimming Magecart malware has turned up on yet more websites, this time 570 spanning 55 countries, it emerged this week.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 11:35 pm
Updated Another day and another racist rant in America has gone viral. This time the perpetrator appears to be a British founder of a cloud computing consulting company based in San Francisco.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 10:30 pm
Arm today said it hopes to transfer its Internet-of-Things management cloud to its owner Softbank so that the chip designer can focus on its primarily function – designing chips.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 9:08 pm
Updated The LibreOffice community has protested at the appearance of a "personal edition" label in the forthcoming version 7.0 of the hitherto free office suite, and the suggestion that paid-for enterprise editions are in the pipeline.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 6:19 pm
Motorola today whipped the sheets off its first mid-tier 5G blower: the Moto G 5G Plus.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 5:26 pm
Boffins in Microsoft Research has pulled the covers off Project Freta, a free service aimed at spotting memory malfeasance.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 4:32 pm
Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Micro Focus: its shares took a bath this morning on the back of a $1bn plus loss, largely due to a whopping goodwill impairment charge made to account for uncertainty caused by COVID-19.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 3:45 pm
Microsoft has provided an Azure Functions extension for Dapr - Distributed Application Runtime - but currently it cannot be used with the hosted Azure Functions cloud service.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 3:01 pm
Britain's Ministry of Defence is offering a £400,000 pot of cash to anyone who can develop an autonomous submarine capable of withstanding naval depth charges.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 2:15 pm
Event Depending on where you are, life is slowly returning to normal-ish. Yet it's going to be a while before bringing people physically together again is a good idea.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 2:00 pm
Google, chipmaker Qualcomm and transportation tech firm OpenSynergy have teamed up to create a reference platform for virtualising Android Auto, Google's OS for vehicles.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 1:30 pm
The transport authority for Greater Manchester in northwest England is seeking an IT systems maker to help build a clean air zone scheme and fine drivers of prohibited vehicles in a deal which could be worth up to £235m.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 12:45 pm
Deutsche Bank has snubbed the world's two biggest purveyors of clouds to name Google Cloud in a deal that the German giant said "is as much a revenue story as it is about costs".…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 12:00 pm
In Brief Rubbing salt into wounded British pride over a lack of prime contracts, Thales Alenia Space trumpeted its ESA awards last week.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 11:20 am
Social media businesses are making moves to block Hong Kong authorities from accessing their user data, days after Beijing imposed a new national security law on the territory.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 10:45 am
In Brief Microsoft's browser gang at Edge has said it will take a breather in order to "stay aligned with Chromium Project's release schedule."…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 10:00 am
Review Nokia has traditionally been typified by utilitarian phones* that get the job done — from the legendary Communicator series to the indestructible 3310.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 9:15 am
Column The modern always-on workplace isn't designed for everyone. And that's why a search for a coping strategy for dyspraxia* took me to eBay, where I bought an archaic Apple iBook for the princely sum of £40 (excluding shipping).…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 8:30 am
Eindhoven University of Technology has been told to stop posting women-only job ads as part of a push to diversify its academic workforce.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 7:14 am
Exclusive More than 240 website subdomains belonging to organizations large and small, including household names, were hijacked to redirect netizens to malware, X-rated material, online gambling, and other unexpected content.…
Posted on 7 July 2020 | 6:35 am
Facebook has been formally accused of racial discrimination in a complaint from three Black plaintiffs, one a manager at the social network and two applicants who have repeatedly been rejected by the web giant.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 11:58 pm
An Instagram super-star with 2.3 million followers has been extradited to America accused of conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars obtained via cyber-crime. He faces up to 20 years behind bars if convicted.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 10:35 pm
An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics’ greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 8:42 pm
Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombe, who is currently leading the UK’s coronavirus track-and-trace efforts, has shed light on the nation's human-driven contact-tracing efforts in a meeting of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 5:15 pm
Oracle is being sued by a shareholder who alleges the IT titan has not been truthful and honest in its efforts to create greater racial diversity within its workforce.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 4:30 pm
Fujitsu is to permanently shutter one half of its office real estate in Japan and will ask 80,000 locals to work from home permanently as it redefines work culture internally in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 3:55 pm
Miscreants have been nabbing British supermarket chain Tesco Clubcard discount codes to snap up Hotels.com rewards meant for holders of the retailer's loyalty cards.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 3:15 pm
Upstart rocketeers at Rocket Lab had a bad weekend as the thirteenth launch of its Electron rocket ended in failure.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 2:22 pm
In the light of the 2020 "global reckoning on race relations" the Linux kernel developers have stepped up with proposed new inclusive terminology guidelines for their coding community.…
Posted on 6 July 2020 | 1:30 pm