The Register

Alexa, am I having a heart attack? A smart-home speaker device and machine-learning software can be used to pick up a person's heartbeat, and report the results to doctors to analyze, folks at University of Washington reckon.…

'Most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time' The UK's eye-wateringly expensive Test and Trace system has failed to provide any data showing it is effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19, according to a damning report from MPs.…

French outsourcer will handle software, networking, and infrastructure Atos has been selected to run the UK's National Employment Savings Trust occupational pensions scheme in a contract award estimated to be worth £1.5bn over 18 years.…

'For many ... vendors, the BSD license is very important compared to the GPL' It's not as well known as Linux, but FreeBSD has plenty of hardcore fans. In a wide-ranging chat covering licensing, architectures including RISC-V, and a development model that's free of a "dictator", The Reg spoke to members of the project about new release features and more.…

Bare-faced cheek of Barewire using our trademarks, say Redmond legal eagles A multinational tech support scam was operated out of a rural Surrey cottage for years before its Indian call centre was rumbled and gave the game away to Microsoft, the High Court has heard.…

Plus: Where did their original logo come from? Updated Police have issued a tender to replace their CyberAlarm tool following reporting by The Register and infosec researchers revealing security flaws in the logging software.…

Suggestion to hand out shares in new registry dismissed as a non-starter With an extraordinary vote that will define the future of the UK’s internet registry operator just two weeks away, the battle lines between the company's management and those seeking an overhaul have been drawn.…

There’s always someone to blame for bad infosec, but never a willingness to make meaningful change Column Remember the Cold War? For me, growing up in America meant living under the permanent, intangible threat of sudden vaporisation by thermonuclear attack. It added a piquant pointlessness to everything. Ashes, ashes, all burn down.…

Waymo recreated 72 fatal crashes and it turns out its simulated AI driver isn't a careless, distracted jerk Keen to prove that automated cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, Waymo, the robotaxi biz spun out of Google in 2016, set out to simulate 72 fatal crashes that occurred from 2008 through 2017 in the vicinity of Chandler, Arizona.…

SANS Institute lines up webcast guide to managing your cybersec talent Promo You might think not seeing too much of your cybersecurity colleagues is a good thing – it means everything is going smoothly, doesn’t it? Or it could be that your security team is worrying short-handed. In fact, research by CyberSecurity Ventures predicted 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfulfilled globally this year.…

Doesn’t say which law it’s worried about (but if China is cracking down on inspirational infographics that may not be a bad thing) LinkedIn, Microsoft’s social network for professional interactions, has “temporarily paused” signups for new members in China.…

Tokopedia and Gojek deal reportedly close, as Indonesia courts Tesla and wrestles SpaceX Indonesia’s equivalents to Uber and Amazon.com - Gojek and Tokopedia - appear to be closing in on a merger.…

SBG 2 destroyed. SBG1 damaged. SBG3 at risk. SBG4 safe. Customers told to activate DR plans One of cloud provider OVH’s data centres is on fire and services are severely disrupted.…

Plans to build 100,000 servers for 5G industrial edge cloud play China Telecom has announced it will seek a listing on the Shanghai stock exchange, after the US government banned trading of its scrip on the New York Stock Exchange.…

Tardiness by stakeholders, rather than over-optimistic blockheads, blamed India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority has paused the rollout of a national SMS “scrubbing” service and blamed business for the delay.…

Tim Wu, Lina Khan may be internet mega-corps' worst nightmares Analysis In a sign that President Biden is planning to take an aggressive stance toward Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other giants, he has nominated not one but two anti-Big-Tech advocates to key posts.…

Lone Star state and web biz clash over First Amendment rights Twitter has sued the Attorney General of Texas, accusing him of bullying the biz in retaliation for nuking Donald Trump’s account.…

Windows giant's withdrawal leaves market to Amazon, Apple, Google Microsoft has officially exited the smart-home digital-assistant market: the one, lone smart-speaker with its Cortana service built in – Harman Kardon's Invoke – will no longer be able to use Redmond's service.…

Bugs in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code are the least of it Patch Tuesday A week after Microsoft warned that four zero-day flaws and three others in its Exchange Server were being actively exploited and issued out-of-band remediation, the cloudy Windows biz has delivered software fixes to address 82 other vulnerabilities as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday ritual.…

Cloud biz pays $165m to create full file workflow system Dropbox is buying document tracking company DocSend for $165m, it announced on Tuesday.…

There are caveats but deal perfect for the ten Surface Go users out there Software licensing analysts have spotted a rare and elusive price cut for two editions of Microsoft 365 – that is, if you are looking for frontline worker enterprise versions of the license.…

Titbit for domestic consumption looks darn silly from abroad Opinion The US government might have subtly signalled that it likely won't hack Russia this month – by telling credulous journalists it has a "clandestine" plan to, er, launch an attack against its rival before April.…

For those who find wearing the things so damn difficult Microsoft has added mask detection, in preview form, to Azure Cognitive Services.…

Cryptographic software assurance backed by Google, Red Hat, Purdue U The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.…

Also: SaaS provider completes acquisition of employee feedback platform Peakon The northeastern US state of Maine is threatening to cancel a contract with enterprise SaaS provider Workday and request a $21m refund.…

Sales of €950m in shares already agreed as float day looms The Vodafone Group told the market today it hopes to raise between €2bn and €2.8bn from the planned IPO of its infrastructure business, Vantage Towers.…

They're 'much too big' says Musk Elon Musk's satellite internet constellation biz, Starlink, wants to sell its end-user station devices and services for use in vehicles, judging by a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).…

Servers breached but no data 'compromised', claims org The European Banking Authority (EBA) has confirmed it is another victim on the list of organisations affected by vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange.…

As new best bud NVIDIA releases AI on-ramp bundle that only runs with vSphere VMware has unconverged hyperconverged infrastructure with a new cut of its vSAN virtual storage array.…

Here's what you could have won A bumpy 2020 has hit SAP boss Christian Klein in the pocket, wiping millions of euros from his pay packet.…

And for my next trick... an M1 Macintosh Color Classic? The iMac G5 was once a formidable piece of computer hardware. Improbably thin for the time, it packed a 64-bit Motorola PowerPC 970 processor, and had room for a relatively extravagant 2GB RAM.…

The votes have been cast and counted... and it's a landslide Register debate Last week, we argued over whether or not the media, including El Reg, should stop using the word hacker as a pejorative.…

But still some way to go before standards-based tech can match mainstream products Last year Vodafone bet big on OpenRAN, announcing it would shift a huge portion of its tower estate to the standards-based tech. Now Andrew Dona, the telco's director of network and development, has shed some light on how this will work.…

Takes a 'different approach' to YouTube's Vitess to munch complex transactions in microseconds Swedish startup Logical Clocks is launching a new key-value database as a managed service, based on the MySQL derivative MySQL NDB Cluster.…

Quasiparticle eggheads were 'caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment' A paper published in Nature two years ago and spearheaded by a Microsoft scientist has been retracted after it emerged that the data presented simply didn't add up.…

Other fun bits: An 'asteroid patrol', brain:computer fusion, DNA storage, enhanced privacy laws China has put quantum communications networks and a brain:machine interface on its to-do list in plans unveiled at its annual "Two Sessions" parliamentary sittings.…

Is Spain really ready for 50,000 people at one venue? Sounds like a super spreader event ready to happen Mobile World Congress appears determined to run its annual Barcelona super-conference as an in-person event this year, mid-pandemic, posting a safety plan online on Monday.…

Don’t panic: Fewer than 0.001% of sessions compromised through flaw that couldn’t be maliciously triggered If you visit GitHub today you’ll be asked to authenticate anew because the code collaboration locker has squished a bug that sometimes “misrouted a user’s session to the browser of another authenticated user, giving them the valid and authenticated session cookie for another user.”…

Take that, rootkits and other low-level nasties - if they take a crack at fresh VMs, on certain instance types under a handful of OSes Microsoft has revealed that its Azure IaaS platform now offers free a virtual trusted platform module.…

Service options decline starting next year... so there may be a Nexus 9K switch in your future Cisco has in recent days issued a blizzard of end-of-life and end-of-sale announcement for switches in its Nexus 3000 and Nexus 7000 ranges.…

Plus: Chrome also patched, Microsoft and Intel team up for homomorphic encryption, and more In brief Apple on Monday released security patches for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and Safari to fix up a vulnerability that can be exploited by malicious web pages to run malware on victims' computers and gadgets.…

'This is going to be a lot of work ... a reasonable set of mitigation primitives exists today, ready and waiting for use' After the disclosure of the 2018 Spectre family of vulnerabilities in modern microprocessor chips, hardware vendor and operating system makers scrambled to reduce the impact of data-leaking side-channel attacks designed to exploit the way chips try to predict future instructions.…

That's the people who own Bethesda, Doom, Fallout, etc The European Commission and the US Securities and Exchange Commission have approved Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax, a US video game holding biz behind top titles like Doom and Fallout, in a deal worth a whopping $7.5bn.…

While its namesake founder is indicted for fraud and money laundering McAfee will sell off its enterprise business to private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) for $4bn in cash, the venerable security biz announced on Monday.…

And here's us thinking 640KB was enough for anyone South Korea's SK Hynix has started mass production of its first 18GB LPDDR5 memory chip.…

High price and poor upgradability made this an unattractive alternative to the 2019 Mac Pro The iMac Pro is dead. Apple has stopped allowing prospective customers to create their own custom configurations of the premium all-in-one box.…

Buy one enterprise software division, get one sueball absolutely free Micro Focus International has told the London Stock Exchange it intends to appeal judgments resulting from a verdict of a patent infringement against it in the US.…

No obvious replacement yet either Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to customer feedback by, er, shutting down some of its UserVoice forums.…

Paging Mr Heath Robinson A Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 user has solved the premium hardware's heating issues with the aid of elastic bands, a USB fan, and $50 handed over to Amazon.…

Plus: AI Index 2021 report takeaways, Chocolate Factory banished from top ethics conference, and more In brief US government should avoid hastily banning AI-powered autonomous weapons and instead step up its efforts in developing such systems to keep up with foreign enemies, according to the National Security Commission on AI.…