The Register

Tech giants leap between positions, leave policy makers uncomfortable Comment There was supposed to be a protest at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Monday organized by supporters of President Trump furious at the web giant's decision to permanently ban his personal account. It never happened.…

And no, Parler wasn't hacked either. Its public posts were simply scraped Updated Parler, which advertised itself as a place where you can "speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being 'deplatformed' for your views," sued Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday for deplatforming the site.…

Also: Edge on Apple arrives in the Dev Channel, HealthBot goes to the cloud, and Chile to get an Azure Region In brief Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer uploaded another Windows war story to his YouTube channel over the weekend, this time concerning the history of the handy zip folder functionality that has been a feature of the Windows shell over recent decades.…

Microsoft's cross-platform .NET tools get a refresh, but with a relatively short life before newer tools sweep it away Microsoft has flung open the doors to Xamarin Forms 5.0, a major new version of its cross-platform framework targeting iOS, Android, and Windows 10.…

More RAM also on offer for those with deep pockets As the faithful await new hardware in 2021, Microsoft has quietly updated its Surface Pro 7 with a removable SSD and beefier battery life.…

Use it or lose it With 5.10 under its belt, the Linux community is discussing swinging the axe on some elderly platforms and CPUs, including a bunch that are ARM-based. Even the poor old 80486DX/SX has come in for scrutiny.…

Choke chain tightened on 'general warrants' after Privacy International wins judicial review A landmark High Court ruling has struck down Britain's ability to hack millions of people at a time through so-called "general warrants" in what privacy campaigners are hailing as a major victory.…

New, expensive option for nation's notspots Ofcom has given the thumbs-up to SpaceX's Starlink broadband user terminals, opening the door to a UK launch of Elon Musk's satellite-based broadband service.…

8-month suspended sentence for conspiracy to secure unauthorised access to computer data An employee at emergency roadside rescue biz RAC has received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for unsanctioned access to computer systems that saw her sell customers' data to an accident claims management company.…

At last, King Edward's remains found The game is... a potato? That's how it turned out to be for a dogwalker from the Tyne and Wear town of Gateshead in North East England.…

A few improvements and a handy web app utility, but older kernel causes problems for some hardware The Linux Mint team has released version 20.1 - codenamed Ulyssa - with long-term support to 2025 and the usual three variants: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.…

The week's other security news In Brief Embattled and embarrassed network management shop SolarWinds has reportedly hired two of the highest profile security bods in the biz to sort out its woes.…

Crown Commercal Services must be rubbing hands together Many expected an increase in paperwork after the UK left the EU, but £900m on printers seems bit much.…

Plus: US ban on selling AI code to China renewed for 2021, and Jim Keller hired by Canadian AI chip startup In brief The facial recognition company said to have identified antifa members among rioters who ransacked Capitol Hill last week denied that its technology had ever done such a thing.…

Event sponsors: 'They got rinsed' in 2020, says analyst Feature Virtual events are cheaper and more accessible, but fall short in interactivity and networking opportunities, and have limited scope for sponsors to reach their audience. Content can be duller and shallower too - but virtual is here to stay, even when some face-to-face activity returns.…

Good for users and good for you Column As you slide into the driver's seat of your century-old Cadillac Type 53 automobile you'll almost certainly miss something hugely significant: that model's major innovation.…

Careful with that rack, Eugene Who, Me? A reminder to take care when fiddling with the top shelf in today's edition of Who, Me? Especially when "good" has taken a backseat to "cheap".…

Boffins to get express delivery as SpaceX Dragon capsule returning from ISS will be first science payload to splash down near Florida SpaceX will on Monday retrieve the Dragon capsule it sent to the international space station on December 8th, 2020, an event NASA says will bring “significantly more science back to Earth than possible in previous Dragon capsules and is the first space station cargo capsule to splash down off the coast of Florida.”…

Says it'll rebuild in a week, but evidence of DR plan is scant Amazon Web Services (AWS) will shut down servers run by Parler, whose apps have also been removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play. The social network has advised users it will therefore be offline for up to a week while it rebuilds its service and accused big tech of conspiring to shut it down.…

USB-C cable ties electro-glasses to PCs or those Motorola phones everyone is mostly ignoring Lenovo has introduced “enterprise smart glasses” that it says can project up to five 1080p windows onto your eyeballs.…

Defying expectations, kernel devs roared back to work Linux lead Linus Torvalds has labelled his last pronouncement on the state of the kernel "the incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man."…

Software quality crisis made worse by developer shortage, report claims Shoddy software cost the US an estimated $2.08tr in 2020, according to the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ). That's down slightly from a revised 2018 total of $2.1tr but still isn't anything to brag about.…

Ad giant's cookie replacement plan runs into resistance Google's plan to rewire online advertising by phasing out third-party cookies and building a so-called Privacy Sandbox has come under scrutiny from the UK Competition and Markets Authority.…

Don't worry, Mr President, we've found another platform for you: /dev/null Twitter on Friday permanently deleted President Trump's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, over fears the election loser's tweets could incite further mayhem in America.…

Smaller biz terminates deal after Chinese watchdogs dither Optical networking biz Acacia Communications announced today it has pulled out of a $2.6bn merger agreement with Cisco.…

App delivery networking firm wants to solve customers' 'biggest pain points' Seattle-based application delivery networking biz F5 is planning to snaffle edge-as-a-service platform upstart Volterra for $500m.…

Problems for charging spies in future? Probably not, says ex-NCSC chief The SolarWinds hack exposed sealed US court documents – which could have a serious effect on Western sanctions against state-backed hackers.…

Stock prices sitting pretty at an all-time high of $2,020 after earnings guidance Despite missing analysts' forecasts, Samsung Electronics' guidance for its final quarter of 2020 paint a rosy picture, with profits likely up by a quarter year-on-year to ₩9 trillion ($8.22bn/ £6.06bn).…

Also: Another One Leaves the Crust, SLS gets ready to rumble, and SpaceX sets off the 2021 fireworks In brief The European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (ESPRIT) took another step closer to reality this week as the European Space Agency (ESA) inked a €296.5m contract with Thales Alenia Space to build the module for the Lunar Gateway.…

Onward to OpenShift IBM-owned Red Hat is to snaffle container security outfit StackRox and plans to fold the company's tech into its OpenShift platform.…

But what Faculty lies behind the plans for adoption and economic expansion? The UK's AI Council could not have picked a worse week to launch its roadmap. As the world's media was understandably obsessing with the US panto-cum-insurrection season, who would highlight its attempt to put this island nation, newly unshackled from the EU, on a path to a 10 per cent GDP boost from AI by 2030?…

Quadrotech pledges to show you how to get migration right, first time Webcast Getting your business into the cloud is relatively easy. Moving a business around the cloud once it’s there? Well, that can be harder than you think.…

Regulatory hurdles, funding, pandemic, and Huawei have made this a big ask – but industry remains determined The 2025 deadline to deliver UK-wide gigabit broadband is "unreachable", according to a damning report from Parliament's spending watchdog.…

Running an unsupported version? Make a move or face possible outage. You have 11 days to comply Microsoft is about to make a potentially breaking change affecting the Azure Service Fabric runtime - due to an unspecified security issue - that could impact those still running on unsupported versions.…

A gesture of Churchillian solidarity with all they hold dear Faced with a stark choice between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the evil technocracy of the EU's Brussels dictatorship, plucky little campaign group Leave.EU was only ever going to make one choice.…

Don't worry your pretty little head about it or I'll shoot it off Something for the Weekend, Sir? Despite my warnings last week, one of you – yes, you – hexed the New Year.…

Officials instead probe similar levies mulled by UK, India, Europe The US government has decided against slapping import tariffs on French products, which would have been in retaliation to France taxing tech giants three per cent of online service revenues in the Euro nation.…

Real-world CVSS figures are a little variable, or so these folks reckon A German academic is running a study into the effectiveness of vulnerability scores – and is hoping the research will shed more light on the occasionally controversial system.…

Cold comfort for manager at the top of the escalation chain On Call The second On Call of 2021 is a warning not to mix pizza and hashes.…

Cash will go to airlines that bought the danger jets, victims' fund Boeing has agreed to settle a criminal charge that it conspired to commit fraud by deceiving federal aviation officials by withholding safety information about its 737 Max control systems.…

Even ecommerce platform Shopify permanently shutters Don's shops After the trashing of the US Capitol by a mob incited by President Donald Trump on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg found the rampage, which had been planned for weeks on social media, "shocking" and extended the temporary block placed on Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely, or for at least two weeks.…

Initial offer reported to be in region of $10.1bn, no certainty acquisition deal will be done French integrator-cum-outsourcing biz Atos has launched a bid, reported to be in the region of $10.1bn, to buy IT infrastructure services biz DXC Technology.…

Revolving screens, 5G, and an Alexa-based Show Mode Lenovo's IdeaPad and Yoga lineup is aimed at the consumer and prosumer camps, which allows it greater room to experiment than would otherwise be possible with the conservative ThinkPad range. Just look at the new crop of machines announced today in advance of 2021's annual CES trade show.…

R2DBC uses declarative techniques to create 'more powerful, efficient and scalable JVM solutions' MariaDB has released a connector for R2DBC in a bid to make its open-source relational database more friendly to the Java developer community.…

Project wins sponsorship, and Torvalds is interested, but can it succeed without the mothership's cooperation? Japan-based developer Hector Martin has formally kicked off the crowdfunded Asahi project, which aims to get Linux running on Arm-based Apple Silicon Macs.…

Chipzilla joins facial-recog race Intel has gingerly dipped a toe into the face-based authentication market with the launch of its RealSense ID product.…

Hmm, anything happening in the world at the moment? Demonstrating impeccable timing, Microsoft has updated the Dev Channel Windows 10 Insider build with a taskbar widget showing news updates.…

Martin Schroeter gets keys for biz set to launch at end of 2021 IBM has tapped up its former chief beancounter Martin Schroeter to run the breakaway IT infrastructure services division scheduled to launch at the end of next year.…

Human art will still, erm, probably prevail OpenAI released a sneak peak of its latest GPT-3-based neural network, a 12-billion-parameter model capable of automatically generating hundreds of fake images when it is given a text caption, stylized as DALL·E.…

Local authorities' shared Unit4 system is late, overbudget, and only works on Microsoft's cloud Two local authorities in northwest England have awarded reseller Insight Direct a six-year £35m contract for Microsoft licences and cloud services.…