Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
The bad news bus kept on rolling in calendar Q2 as consumer PCs sold to retailers continued their decline. Business customers’ enthusiasm for pricier hardware did, however, keep tech wholesalers revenues afloat.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 8:13 am
Event The Continuous Lifecycle London 2020 call for papers is open, and we want to hear what you’ve been doing over the past 12 months.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 7:00 am
Pic Panic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 5:58 am
The US government may have trouble regulating Google – but one of its developers has come up with a way to rein in the Chocolate Factory's resource-hungry browser.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 5:28 am
Europe's constellation of positioning satellites is still offline, at time of writing, after six or so days, prompting eggheads to dig into what exactly is going on.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 4:53 am
A pair of vulnerabilities in BMC firmware used in servers built by Lenovo – and in Acer and Penguin Computing boxes using Gigabyte server motherboards – can be exploited to hide malware deep below the operating system, hypervisor, and antivirus.…
Posted on 17 July 2019 | 1:36 am
Sprint has told some of its subscribers that a piss-poor Samsung website exposed their personal details to the internet.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 11:28 pm
Internal hotel biz documents and guest bookings were exposed to everyone on the public internet from an unsecured database managed by tech provider AavGo, it is claimed.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 10:34 pm
With America's trade watchdog on Tuesday hosting a workshop in Washington DC on restrictions that limit the feasibility of repair devices, hardware rehab forum iFixit has penned an open letter to the FTC to complain about Google's ad policies that hinder the mending of machines.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 8:58 pm
SpaceX has posted an update on the investigation into the destruction of its Crew Dragon test vehicle in April.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 8:00 pm
Bernie Sanders will "absolutely" look at breaking up Facebook, Google and Amazon if he becomes president.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 7:24 pm
Amazon Web Services has gone live with an upgrade of its CloudWatch Events service, EventBridge, which has integration with third-party SaaS applications built in.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 7:00 pm
Hats off to Spanish customs at Barcelona Airport who spotted a Baldrick-level attempt to smuggle cocaine into the Catalan capital.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 6:24 pm
Backgrounder The move to hybrid cloud is growing.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 6:01 pm
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has had another busy year trying to disrupt cybercrime.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 5:00 pm
Autonomy Trial London's High Court has seen emails from ex-Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch in which he berated company salespeople for "a massive f***-up" after they bungled a major deal.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 4:00 pm
On 16 July 1969, Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A in Florida on an eight-day mission to the Moon and back.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 3:15 pm
The man who tried and failed to run a not-a-data-protection-class-action-honest-guv lawsuit against Google in England's High Court is having another crack at it in the Court of Appeal.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 2:30 pm
Attention, chip designers. If you want to add CPU and GPU cores, and other technology, from Arm to your homegrown silicon, and have balked at the upfront costs, this may be of interest.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 2:00 pm
IBM is the latest to pile into devops darling Kubernetes, pulling its Kabanero project out the bag at the O’Reilly Open Source Software conference, currently under way in Portland, Oregon.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 1:30 pm
Lenovo is emitting an emergency firmware patch for Iomega NAS devices after the network-attached storage boxes were discovered inadvertently offering millions of files to the internet via an insecure software interface.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 1:00 pm
Smart meters in England are suddenly switching to Welsh language displays, much to the confusion of owners.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 12:13 pm
The German state of Hessen has warned schools not to use Office 365 because the Microsoft suite's cloud storage and telemetry collection are not compliant with the EU's General Data Protection Regulations.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 11:40 am
Microsoft emitted a fresh build of October's Windows 10 last night with tweaks that should bring a smile to the face of Jeff Bezos.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 11:07 am
Roundup While some at NASA may still be obsessing over past glories, other eyes remained fixed on the Moon, Mars and beyond in this week's rocket-bothering roundup.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 10:30 am
Updated A now-patched vulnerability in the Amadeus flight reservation system – used by airlines around the planet – could, or may, have been exploited by miscreants to view strangers' boarding passes.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 10:00 am
The fake-Facebook-ad-spotting service goes live today, backed by a £3m donation to Citizens Advice coughed by the social network as a result of legal action from MoneySavingExpert scribe Martin Lewis.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 9:29 am
Exclusive Wonderful news for some US Medicaid patients: king of the cost-cutters DXC is planning to shunt their data into Amazon's cloud.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 9:02 am
Stob "Hi, I am James Bond (Business Development Manager). We specialize in re-designing and re-developing websites if you are considering any of the following projects. Please let us know in case you are interested." – Spam email received by the author…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 8:05 am
The German parliament has been warned by its official eggheads that Amazon's Alexa digital assistant may not be legal – because it stores voice recordings and overhears things it is not supposed to.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 7:04 am
Event Our offer of discount early-bird tickets for Minds Mastering Machines ends next Monday, so act now if you want to join us to learn how real organisations can exploit machine learning and artificial intelligence and save big.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 6:05 am
A new neural-network can solve a Rubik’s cube twice as fast as the fastest human – though roughly three times slower than the fastest dumb algorithm – according to research published in Nature Machine Intelligence on Monday.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 5:07 am
We may be able to survive and live on Mars in regions protected by thin ceilings of silica aerogel, a strong lightweight material that insulates heat and blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation while weighing almost nothing.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 1:18 am
Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer targeted by a Trump administration trade ban, is expected to dismiss a substantial number of people in the US in the coming weeks.…
Posted on 16 July 2019 | 12:08 am
Back in 2009, Google chose to name its latest programming language Go, a decision that is still giving it a migraine…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 8:54 pm
The US Treasury Secretary today put a big dent into Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plans, by claiming it would be a "national security risk," as well as a likely source of money laundering for – among others – terrorists.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 8:23 pm
On Friday, with tax-return season underway, the websites of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) suddenly went TITSUP (Totally Inefficient Tax Service: Under Performing), causing anguish to thousands of Aussies.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 7:47 pm
Symantec's share price has plunged on reports that its planned merger with Broadcom has fallen through.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 6:55 pm
Goonhilly Earth Station, the Cornish-based satellite comms and space tech hub, has cut the ribbon on a data centre to sell colocation and managed services.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 5:00 pm
Legendary codebreaker and father of theoretical computer science Alan Turing will soon be gracing your pocket on the side of a shiny new £50 note.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 4:15 pm
Autonomy Trial Former Autonomy chief exec Mike Lynch sensationally admitted to London's High Court this afternoon that he has been reading courtroom evidence in advance of being questioned about it.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 3:30 pm
The UK's Science and Technology Select Committee said it can't find any "technical grounds" for chopping Huawei out of the UK's 5G and other telco networks, but said government should consider "ethical" issues and its relationship with "allies".…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 2:55 pm
UK internet service provider Virgin Media has insisted it does not block entire domains "as a matter of course" after it stopped its customers from viewing the whole of Imgur this morning – on the say-so of the Internet Watch Foundation.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 1:55 pm
Updated The battle for ownership of KCOM, the East Yorkshire-based broadband provider and slinger of clouds, has finally ended with private equity investor Macquarie on top.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 1:07 pm
The multibillion-euro navigation system Galileo went dark over the weekend.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 11:49 am
Prospect the union has advised BT employees to approve the so-called People's Framework, a programme of change that includes a revamp of pay and grading structures, following months of discussions.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 11:16 am
Roundup Microsoft was cock-a-hoop over its new London retail presence last week while its resellers were less than impressed with the company's prancing around licensing. However, a whole bunch of other things happened at the company while we were looking at the big stuff.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 10:26 am
AI systems have weird memories. The machines desperately cling onto the data they’ve been trained on, making it difficult to delete bits of it. In fact, they often have to be completely retrained from scratch with the newer, smaller dataset.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 9:04 am
The UK government disregarded a raft of concerns about extending IR35 to the private sector in its response to a consultation over off-payroll working rules, industry groups have said.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 8:10 am
Who, Me? As the weekend disappears with the speed of a Phantom flung off an aircraft carrier, it is time to console ourselves with another tale of decades-old hijinks in The Register's weekly Who, Me? column.…
Posted on 15 July 2019 | 7:06 am