The Register

What to do when companies think they own their customers Column Towards the turn of the century, my girlfriend revealed what she wanted more than anything else: a Tamagotchi. She added, in terms that revealed a good working knowledge of the Lysistrata, that it was my job to get her one.…

'Shambolic', 'unfair', 'wholly incorrect'... all because they wanted rid of their sales manager A UK cloud reseller that tried to fend off an unfair dismissal lawsuit by giving “knowingly untruthful” evidence to a judge has been ordered to pay more than £80,000 by the Employment Tribunal.…

Latest and greatest put Samsung in second, while Huawei risks irrelevancy The launch of the iPhone 12 massively distorted the smartphone market in Q4 2020 with the new 5G-capable mobes sucking oxygen from rival Samsung.…

Big Bang? More like Big Bork thanks to a warning shouted too late Who, Me? This week's Who, Me? is dedicated to that moment when you realise you're about to do something silly but are unable to stop yourself.…

Plus: IBM's lawyers hacked, Kia denies ransomware hit, France declares war on hackers, and more In brief Brave has patched up its privacy-focused web browser after it was spotted leaking its Tor users' dark-web habits.…

Banks given limits to their involvement with web giants’ online lending operations China has set out new rules for lenders that operate online, and they’ll probably make life harder for Alibaba’s financial services limb, the Ant Group, should it consider another attempt at a stock market listing.…

5.9 percent of silicon made at home now, goal is 70 percent in 2025 and the USA's sanctions seem to be biting China-owned silicon manufacturers' domestic market share has slipped below six percent, according to analyst firm IC Insights, suggesting the nation's goal of silicon semi-self-sufficiency in just four years time is in strife.…

Talks continue but pay-for-news law won’t be amended Australia’s finance minister says it is his “expectation” that the nation “will pull back from advertising on Facebook” while The Social Network continues to prevent the sharing of links to news stories in the nation.…

Behaves like a legit software installer and phones home for instructions, but lacks a payload US security consultancy Red Canary says it’s found MacOS malware written specifically for the shiny new M1 silicon that Apple created to power its post-Intel Macs.…

Popular programming language, at the top of its game, still struggles to please everyone Feature February 20, 2021, the 30th anniversary of Python, finds the programming language at the top of its game but not without challenges.…

Brits score vital win against US giant's gig economy model The UK Supreme Court yesterday ruled that Uber’s drivers in Blighty are workers for the app-based taxi service, rather than self-employed contractors, potentially paving the way for more than 40,000 drivers to claim minimum wage and paid time off.…

Goodwood Festival of Speed took a nasty turn in 2019, finds AAIB A “flying car” drone being shown off at Goodwood Aerodrome in England was using unlicensed spectrum for safety-critical radio commands – and when its operators lost control the craft climbed into airspace reserved for Gatwick Airport, an accident report has revealed.…

Doomed bill seems to forget municipal broadband exists due to failures of private sector House Republicans this week proposed legislation that would ban the creation of municipal broadband networks at a federal level, and shutter networks in areas where some private competition exists – purportedly to improve internet access across the US.…

Consistency is key Microsoft is almost as keen to kill off Legacy Edge, Windows 10's original great browser hope, as it is to stomp on the ancient Internet Explorer – because it looks like it'll be sticking around on the Surface Hub.…

First Amendment under the microscope Former NFL player and pro-wrestler Lenwood Hamilton has asked the Supreme Court to revive his suit accusing Microsoft and Epic Games of using his likeness in the Gears of War game franchise.…

Canine friends may not be as dumb as they sometimes like to appear Canine stars of internet videos the world over have another feather in their cap as a scientific study claims they show signs of self-awareness and understanding the consequences of their actions.…

Who wants to live forever? Rationalisation of the Long Term Servicing Channels at Microsoft has led to the firm chopping the support lifecycle of the next LTSC of Windows 10 in half: from 10 to five years.…

Bloke was placed into vulnerable category because of his weight The conflict between imperial and metric reached new heights this week as a man believed by his GP surgery to be 6.2cm tall was invited to be vaccinated against COVID-19.…

Gouging in a pandemic? Shurely shome mishtake... Laptops aren't quite as rare as hen's teeth or rocking horse shit but massive demand means inventories for all vendors are low, and clearly the laws of supply and demand are leading some to raise prices.…

Aria. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? Speaking to the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee last autumn, Dr Peter Highnam, US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) deputy director, said: “Having national security as the mission frames everything. It is not wide open; there is always context and use cases.”…

How about some investment... or at least a tax break? The US semiconductor industry has sent an open letter to President Biden [PDF] asking for support in domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing, arguing the sector's importance to national security and the country's tech dominance demand it.…

Worth a try, eh, chums? Huawei has lost its novel endeavour to use a 1879 law in London as part of its efforts to get CFO Meng Wanzhou out of a US extradition tussle in Canada.…

Office 2021 is on the way and 'the cloud is where we invest' Microsoft has announced plans for its lucrative Office product line, with Office 2021 and a Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version that halves the support given to editions from years past.…

A 48-month, £41m hyperscale cloud service deal done with HMRC The UK's tax collection agency might not have had much luck squeezing money out of Amazon Web Services but the cloud division of Jeff Bezos' empire has managed to convince HMRC to sign off more multimillion-pound contracts.…

Not quite the data dump I thought you meant Something for the Weekend, Sir? The authorities have asked me to send them my poop in the post. Not all of it, mind. That would be ridiculous.…

Miserly? No, they'll throw in a loan for a season train ticket too The UK's Ministry of Justice is hiring a director of technology, offering £130,000 plus a season ticket loan for whoever wins the chance to "fix the basics" of Britain's disintegrating, delay-ridden, semi-digitised justice system.…

Press space or click mouse to continue ...wait, not yet, doh! A judge has ruled that Citibank can't claw back more than $500m (£360m) it mistakenly paid out after outsourced staff and a senior manager made a nearly billion-dollar (£700m) user-interface blunder.…

Wow, this PC is hot stuff... actually it might be a bit too hot On Call Can you smell burning? Is it the Friday morning bacon? Are you having a stroke? Or is it something more sinister? Find out in this week's episode of On Call.…

Singapore's holding a global mega-conf in August, will have 600 no-quarantine-required rooms ready Singapore has created a hotel that makes COVID-19-safe business meetings possible, in an attempt to give long-haul commercial travel a boost. But while the new facility will makes meetings possible, it also makes the fun parts of business travel impossible.…

Little love for a return to the five-days-on-campus week, Blind survey shows Poll It seems workers at big-name technology companies aren't that displeased at last year's pandemic-induced work-from-home rule – and, while popping into the office every so often still has its adherents, the majority of polled techies don't want to spend more than two days a week rubbing shoulders with coworkers.…

Rival atheists accused of not believing in privacy law The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has warned members their personal information appears to have been leaked.…

Reg writer on the spot reports that life without news links on The Social Network™ is just fine Facebook is being flayed in Australia after its ban on sharing of links to news publications caught plenty of websites that have nothing to do with news.…

We’ll be fine, says Redmond security crew. No word on whether you will be too once crims analyse their haul Microsoft has admitted that as a result of installing backdoored SolarWinds tools in some parts of its corporate network, portions of its source code was obtained and exfiltrated by parties unknown.…

Move follows ousting of ethics expert Timnit Gebru Google has reshuffled the management team overseeing its Ethical AI group months after it ousted one its star researchers, a controversial move that sparked public anger and internal revolt.…

Driver-level limitation to favor gamers, coin-crafting hardware to follow Nvidia announced a new line of GPUs solely for mining cryptocurrencies on Thursday – and that it's halving the cryptocurrency mining efficiency of forthcoming GeForce cards in an effort to keep the kit in the hands of gamers when the hardware goes on sale next week.…

Difficult entry, descent, landing process over, now for a search for ancient microbial life NASA just now successfully landed Perseverance, its largest and heaviest rover yet, on the surface of Mars in the Jezero Crater. The machine will conduct the ambitious mission to finding ancient microbial life on another planet.…

Updates for modern code editor hark back to 40-year-old tools Makefile projects, widely used in open source development, are getting an official Microsoft extension in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and a request for built-in VIM support is on the official backlog.…

Also lifts lid on allegations former workers paid staffers of 'state-owned enterprises' Cisco is investigating a “self-enrichment scheme” among several former employees in China, the firm told investors earlier this week. Switchzilla said it had also tipped off the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).…

So says Kenna Security in a refreshing piece of counter-FUD analysis While the infosec industry is used to reading (and pumping out) FUD about software vulnerabilities, eye-catching research suggests about 500 vulns were exploited in 2019 – despite 18,000 new CVEs being created.…

Mountain View sees your kids at home this year, with its devices in their laps The PC industry is expected to release 40 new Chromebook models this year, according to Google. This is almost certainly driven by sky-high demand for the basic computing devices, which are especially popular in classrooms home schooling.…

18 months of dispute over new grading structure and counting... The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is trying to crank up the pressure on Openreach top brass ahead of next week's planned strike action by adding three more days to the protest campaign.…

Spouse to receive $250k over 'loss of consortium' following Arizona incident Intel must pay nearly $1.2m after a ruling in a lawsuit alleging injury caused by a toxic gas emission at one of its facilities.…

Just as legal challenge launched at government for doing the same thing NHS Digital has awarded a £51m IT contract to global consultancy Deloitte without prior notice or competition – just as the UK government faces a legal challenge for doing the same thing with a hugely expensive "management" contract.…

Unified? Kind of, but now there are two .NET runtimes in the official SDK Microsoft has shipped the first preview of .NET 6.0, the first long-term support release of its newly unified application platform, promising native Apple Silicon support, desktop applications on ARM64, and a ton of updates to key frameworks like ASP.NET Core.…

Also: Windows 10 21H1 sent to the beta channel The two sides of Microsoft were on show this week as a major update to the Linux kernel turned up on Windows Update for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2) users and the next version of Windows finally found its way to the company's loyal Insiders.…

Company has a habit of reacting badly to vuln disclosures Updated A parental webcam targeted at nursery schools was so poorly designed that anyone who downloaded its mobile app gained access to admin credentials, bypassing intended authentication, according to security pros – with one dad saying its creators brushed off his complaints about insecurities six years ago.…

If you 'Build It', they will come In less than three decades, Amazon has taken a wrecking ball to dozens of industries from retail and groceries, to logistics and web hosting. And now it's settled on its next victim: the Swiss cuckoo clock industry.…

Better security and application management, but compatibility can be an issue Red Hat's Fedora project is to add a new variant called Kinoite, an immutable desktop operating system alongside the existing Silverblue, which runs GNOME desktop.…

Well, that's a new one Anyone familiar with contacting a tech support helpdesk has heard the groan-inducing line: "Have you turned it on and off again?" For that reason, we can't help but doff our cap to indie ISP Zen Internet, which instructed one customer beset by connectivity drops to contact his MP.…

And the COVID-19 precaution? A negative test 72 hours before In what is either going to be seen as hopeless optimism or a heavily telegraphed super-spreader event, the CEO of the Mobile World Congress has said he intends to run its annual mega tech conference in Barcelona as an in-person event.…