The Register

Dude, where's my unlocked bootloader? It's a sad, pointless, and frankly wasteful cycle. You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another. The old phone goes into a drawer, where it sits until you eventually get around to recycling it.…

Tested.me Ltd broke the PECR, says Information Commissioner's Office The UK's data watchdog has fined a company £8,000 for sending 84,000 direct marketing emails without consent to people who had provided their personal data for contact tracing purposes.…

Hounds can sniff out SIM cards that a human might miss Australia's Federal Police (AFP) is getting more help from some very good boys with four paws, wagging tails, and the ability to sniff out tech equipment with their highly sensitive noses.…

'Constructive comment ranking model' can detect bias, promote respectful contributions, already zaps 20,000 posts a day Yahoo! Japan has flicked the switch on an AI-driven comment-moderation-as-a-service API.…

Guess they'll let anyone in here The trustworthiness of Google's Chrome Store was again called into question after an extension billing itself as Microsoft Authenticator was published by the software souk without the simplest of checks.…

Even World of Warcraft is getting on the RISC-y bandwagon Oracle has teased a further tie-up with Arm server processor aspirant Ampere Computing, perhaps around the latter's upcoming Altra Max silicon that comes in 10 variants packing up to 128 CPU cores and running at speeds between 2.4 and 3GHz.…

Intrusion believed to have entered through email New Zealand's Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has been hit with a strain of ransomware that took down most IT services Tuesday morning and drastically reduced services at six of its affiliate hospitals.…

Who could possibly have predicted that developers would shun two small ecosystems? Samsung and Google have decided to combine their wearable operating system efforts in what looks like an admission that developers don't care about either.…

Without harming the ad business, natch Google IO At Google IO 2021 on Tuesday, the ad giant reiterated its web privacy commitments and talked up technologies aimed at narrowing the performance gap between web apps and their native counterparts.…

Banks told not to transact, web platforms blocked from hosting or advertising, citizens told to look elsewhere for investments Beijing has all but banned cryptocurrencies.…

It was just so good, we're cannibalizing it for parts, says Redmond Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10X, its somewhat streamlined operating system initially designed for a new wave of dual-screen mobile PCs, is being killed off.…

Great, another tech thing that sounds like 'lambda' Google IO Google today opened its developer conference, the aptly named Google IO, with a somber nod to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.…

Hash rate halved for 'LHR' cards in fresh bid to force down outrageous retail prices Nvidia says it will slash the cryptocurrency-mining abilities of newly made RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards.…

Just dealing with the aftermath The Colonial Pipeline is in a bit of trouble again. The oil conduit that shut down this month after its operators were hit with ransomware suffered glitches with its technology on Tuesday while trying to sort out its IT woes.…

Hint: He doesn't care if you personally think it's rubbish, and here's why A Russian spymaster has denied that his agency carried out the infamous SolarWinds supply chain attack in a public relations move worthy of the Internet Research Agency.…

Who's recommending investment? The man who already has a $1bn stake Wikipedia says MicroStrategy is a company that provides business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services, but that wouldn't be the first outdated information on the crowdsourced knowledge repository.…

Oh, and remember when Tim Sweeney himself demonstrated Metal API? Awks Three weeks have passed since the high-stakes California bench trial between Epic Games and Apple commenced. On Monday, it was the turn of Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow and former senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, to take the stand.…

And you're invited to speak your brains on Computer Misuse Act changes +Comment The British government has vowed to create a legally binding cybersecurity framework for managed service providers (MSPs) – and if you want to tell gov.UK what you think, you've only got a few weeks to act.…

Demand growing for scale-y transactional monster, say analysts YouTube-developed distributed relational database Vitess is getting a DBaaS makeover, putting it in the hands of developers without having to worry about engaging with a DBA.…

Tries to tempt penguins with Ring Crypto 1Password has unveiled a full-featured desktop app for Linux, written in Rust and using the ring crypto library for end-to-end encryption.…

'For sophisticated problems, only a human expert will figure it out' A new component of AWS Systems Manager aims to assist with handling incidents.…

Talking up AWS deal as market says: Yes, OK Good old fashioned perpetual licence sales helped Micro Focus turn an unexceptional six months worth of trading figures into something more acceptable by moderating declines in group revenue.…

'Some patients' conditions deteriorated and they had to be admitted to hospital' UK pharmaceuticals supplier Healthcare at Home (HAH) missed 10,000 medicine deliveries from October to December 2020 following a change of IT systems, a mistake that left some patients needing hospital treatment.…

Unlocked firmware and some intriguing design choices – but the price is high With an air of inevitability, System76 - the maker of laptops for Linux users - has produced its first mechanical keyboard. It looks great but cheap it is not.…

Big Red product only went live in 2019, but commissioner is ready to ditch it Cheshire Police has awarded mid-scale ERP vendor Unit4 a £3m two-year contract to replace a troubled Oracle implementation, which only went live on the latest Fusion software in 2019.…

Lessons have been learned – now there's a bucket for Windows to be poorly into Bork!Bork!Bork! A déjà vu of the borked variety landed on our desk today as another automated key-cutting machine housed in a Do-It-Yourself emporium shows its true colours: white on blue.…

That 41% 2020 regional revenue growth lagged US and APAC. Sources claim HQ expected higher returns Exclusive Google Cloud’s global sales president has assumed temporary control of operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) following the exit of Chris Ciauri some 20 months after he took the job.…

Boffins find increasing MAC address randomization protection with mobiles In 2017, US Naval Academy researchers found that MAC address randomization in mobile devices was largely worthless as a privacy defense. Three years later, the same research group took another look and found that while there's been meaningful improvement, many phones still fail to effectively prevent MAC address-based tracking.…

One going all the way from Mumbai to Italy, the other is Singapore-bound Indian telecoms conglomerate Reliance Jio has announced it will build two submarine cables to help it satisfy India’s appetite for data.…

Late to the party, but free tier for multi-person vid chats handily tops Zoom Readers who find themselves performing tech support for friends and family have a new challenge: Microsoft has created a free version of its Teams collaboration tool for home use.…

Paper-thin OLED screens collapse impressively Vid 'n' pics Samsung has revealed foldable and rollable displays at the Society for Information Display (SID) annual exhibition.…

Virtual world ethics and industry development also on the agenda South Korea has created a “metaverse alliance” of local companies to foster the development of a national virtual and augmented reality platform and sort out the ethics of virtual environments.…

No US listing, no worries, for 939-million-customer colosso-telco that’s big on OpenStack Mega-carrier China Mobile has announced its intention to seek a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and spend the proceeds on a cloudy infrastructure refresh and new “information services”.…

'He is the leading beneficiary of the unequal treatment our nation's tax code gives the rich and powerful' Well-heeled protesters gathered outside Jeff Bezos's New York City pad on Monday in support of raising taxes for the mega-rich.…

Top cryptographers open fire on AI, quantum computing, NFTs, and more RSAC Top cryptographers – including Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, the R and the S in RSA – on Monday played down the impact of AI and quantum computing, shrugged off NFTs, and responded to the development of a mathematical technique that allegedly thwarts today's public key encryption.…

All the vitriol still accessible from Android app, website Parler, the social network favored by the far-right, is back up on Apple’s App Store and will apparently rely on AI algorithms to automatically flag hate speech.…

We speak to man who experienced and recorded wild ride first hand Video A Waymo self-driving car got stuck several times, held up traffic intermittently, and departed unexpectedly when assistance arrived. The wayward autonomous vehicle was finally commandeered by a support driver.…

Plus: Biden's order on security, US govt acquiring data on citizens, and more In brief Unlucky owners of Eufycam security cameras were horrified earlier today when they opened their app for the equipment and saw video streams from strangers' homes instead of their own.…

You can't hear the difference anyway Shots have been fired in the audiophile world as Apple announced today that lossless audio was on its way to the fruity firm's entire catalogue of 75 million songs.…

Azure Active Directory's tentacles wriggle into ever stranger places A public preview of Microsoft's Azure VPN Client for macOS dropped over the weekend.…

Office 365 users learn that Microsoft can make or break their productivity every 4 hours Microsoft has published a Preliminary Post Incident Report on last week's events which broke Outlook on Windows for millions of users, making emails impossible to view or create.…

Dept of Health unsuccessfully targeted in same attack against hospitals In brief The murky world of ransomware criminals is all aflutter after it was revealed that Ireland's health services were hit by a second attack hot on the heels of one that took out its hospitals, while ransomware insurance refusenik Axa was itself hit with ransomware after its French branch vowed to stop buying off criminals on behalf of its customers.…

Staff offered doomed handsets at knockdown prices in move reminiscent of HP's Palm episode Following its decision to exit the smartphone biz, LG has reportedly started a fire sale of its unsold and unreleased assets, unloading them to staffers at a cutdown price.…

Gates denies connection The Microsoft board was conducting an investigation into Bill Gates' alleged "inappropriate" romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee when he resigned in 2020, according to two investigative reports that appeared over the weekend.…

Fiscal year end forecast: Cloudy with a chance of litigation Oracle this month filed a lawsuit against Envisage Technologies, claiming the Bloomington, Indiana-based IT firm has been violating its copyrights by running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services in an improper way.…

Firm working with FAA to 'investigate the anomaly' after second stage sputters What was supposed to have been a milestone in Rocket Lab's march toward reusability turned into a mishap over the weekend as a borked second stage sent the payload on the company's 20th Electron launch back to Earth considerably earlier than planned.…

Computer museums set to be unbolted again As the UK enters the latest stage of lockdown easing, The Reg can confirm that The National Museum of Computing and the Centre for Computing History will be reopening imminently.…

Why? It might reveal whistleblowers' names... British infosec accreditation body CREST has declared that it will not be publishing its full report into last year's exam-cheating scandal after all, triggering anger from the cybersecurity community.…

Sitting is as bad for you as smoking, and doesn't look nearly as cool Review Sitting, we're told, is the new smoking. The catastrophic health consequences of hours spent hunched behind a desk are said to include heart disease, colon cancer, and muscle weaknesses.…

No policy shakeup to deal with snatch of info from primary physicians Evidence from NHS Digital's website suggests that patient data held by GPs in England will be available to private-sector companies to help them understand market opportunities in the UK's health service.…