The Register

Agreement puts a stop to Feds' audit, but isn't an admission of wrongdoing Updated Microsoft has agreed to fork out $3,000,000 in back pay and interest to resolve an investigation by a US federal agency looking into allegations it unlawfully passed over qualified Asian, African American, and Hispanic applicants who were looking for work.…

Two audits also hit with combined £750k of personal fines by accountacy regulator Deloitte has been fined £15m by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) for “serious and serial failures” in its auditing of British software company Autonomy prior to the latter’s acquisition by HP for $11bn.…

Alexa-derived chatbot tech allegedly understands 'the British accent', but fails to recognise that there are many It's only taken three years, but the conversational interface tech underlying Amazon's Alexa assistant is now capable of the world's lingua franca in its purest form – "British English".…

Errors had no material effect on the outcome, promises the, er, board chairman Nominet has been forced to admit it wrongly calculated election results for its board of directors in 2018 and 2019.…

Shopping paradise forgot to pay for more support Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft has many operating systems that simply refuse to die. MS-DOS can be found here and there. Windows XP continues to hang around like a toxic airborne emission. And Windows 7? Despite the software maker's best efforts, it lingers on.…

Also: Cygnus named for Columbia 'naut, and Space Shuttle Endeavour dressed up for launch In brief "As we've always said, we expect it to take three flights to make it to orbit," upstart launch vehicle outfit Astra bravely said as its imaginatively named Rocket 3.1 went *phut* shortly after lift-off last week.…

F-Secure gives its take on the first half of 2020 in internet scumminess Coronavirus-themed malicious emails were the standout feature of online naughtiness in the first half of 2020, according to infosec firm F-Secure – though overall volumes of phishing did decrease a touch.…

iOS 14's new MAC scrambling could stop upgraded devices from connecting, Android 10 also a mess Cisco promotes its Identity Services Engine (ISE) as “intuitive network security for the digital age.” But Switchzilla has just explained that it’s not very good at handling the growing practice of MAC address randomization by mobile devices.…

Fasthosts made a mistake, this exhibit is closed The perilous state of the UK's internet space has been exposed once again, as the second largest seller of .uk domain names admitted last night it wrongly sold dozens of valuable internet addresses.…

Biz is not going to make any impact in core areas – but there's much more to life than HR, supply chains, accounting, analyst tells us ServiceNow, the workflow company home to humble-bragging CEO Bill McDermott, on Wednesday launched a package of tools to help organizations scratch an itch incumbent management software suites may not be able to reach.…

Data-harvesting test pilots to roam the streets wearing AR glasses and little lanyards explaining that you’re being recorded By permitting conspiracies and blatant falsehoods to circulate unchallenged, Facebook made denial of reality a nasty feature of actual reality. And now the Silicon Valley juggernaut has decided it wants to figure out how to build a digital layer that overlays the real world.…

And fancies giving mobile carriers a kicking to bust cosy triumvirate and make number-porting less of a nightmare Japan has three dominant mobile carriers and when consumers want to move from one to another and keep their current phone number, they must fill out a paper form, pay about US$30 and wait for delivery of a new SIM.…

Phishers claimed to be from 'National Health Commission', which exists in mainland China but not Taiwan Taiwan's CERT detected cyber-crooks impersonating medical authorities to attack the country's tech industry during the early stages of the COVID pandemic.…

HCI hit, security slugged, UXers axed, solutions peeps’ jobs dissolved Dell has made a new round of layoffs.…

Give that tagging finger a rest While Microsoft has added audio transcription to the premium edition of Word Online, cloud arch-rival Amazon has switched on the ability to identify languages in audio.…

Reality TV has now come to international business deals Comment In a business dance oddly reminiscent of reality TV twists and turns, it appears an offer by Oracle to handle TikTok in the US may have tipped the scales and tentatively gained White House approval.…

Ad giant takes aim at the meeting room – even though nobody's there Keen to remind everyone that Google Meet is still a thing in a world seemingly obsessed with Zoom, the Chocolate Factory has announced hardware for anyone trying to run its video conferencing service.…

Doesn't matter if a computer was in control, responsibility rests with the human, says prosecutor The safety driver who was behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber car when it hit and killed a pedestrian has been charged with negligent homicide.…

Taking away the ability to impose rules on developers 'hugely damaging to the public.' claims iThing slinger Apple has responded to an attempt by Epic Games to get its games back in Cupertino's App Store, as the two tech giants contest the fairness of compelling developers to hand over 30 per cent of revenue for applications in the software souk.…

Disappeared databases since returned with no memory of what happened, speculation of bug abounds Several versions of Amazon Web Services' Aurora PostgreSQL went missing earlier this week, prompting concern among AWS customers.…

Ugly: And it's all about video game robberies at this stage Two people have been arrested in Malaysia as part of America's crackdown on the Chinese government's hackers.…

Please just patch your infrastructure, begs US-CISA Where Chinese hackers exploit, Iranians aren’t far behind. So says the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is warning that malicious persons from Iran are exploiting a slew of vulns in VPN products from Citrix, F5 Networks and Pulse Secure.…

And let me tell you why in three words: Developers! Developers! Developers! Register Debate Welcome to The Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

Fortunately, it looks like Perseverance rover will start digging in the right place Evidence of ancient microbial life in Martian soil will not be easy to find, and some of it may have been destroyed by the flow of liquid acid, according to research published in Scientific Reports.…

Cupertino's subscription bundle favours its own products, says choons slinger Spotify has claimed Apple's new subscription bundle, Apple One, will "disadvantage competitors" and "threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect".…

The new normal is all right for some Disruptions caused by COVID-19 continue to play into Adobe's hands with company execs last night toasting doubles all round as sales went up 14 per cent to $3.23bn year-on-year and pre-tax profit leaped 26.5 per cent to $1.06bn.…

Plenty of time to get your apps through Cupertino's rigorous testing Apple is expected to release the 14th version of its iOS mobile operating system later today, alongside major system updates for the iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.…

The price? 'ridiculous for a company that is still loss-making' - analyst Cloud data warehouse slinger Snowflake has set an IPO price valuing the company at $33bn, making it nominally worth more than US retailer Best Buy or UK supermarket chain Tesco.…

You can bring a horse to water but you can't turn it into a fish Register Debate Welcome to The Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

£150k up for grabs if you can help create the dystopian future of warfare The UK's Ministry of Defence has £900,000 for any companies willing to supply it with weaponised drones capable of flitting around “urban environments” and even poking their electronic noses inside shopping centres and private houses.…

The arrival of .NET 5.0 brings yet another twist Microsoft .NET program manager Immo Landwerth has set out the latest summary of how to write code that targets more than one version of the platform.…

Blighty didn't miss out on ESA award like with Copernicus, it's just more worried about space junk than Hera The European Space Agency (ESA) has let people know where €129.4m of work for its Hera mission will go. The UK is, unsurprisingly, not on the list.…

After wrangling the small print over countless Skype for Business meetings (yes really) The High Court of England and Wales has said insurers should pay up on a raft of key "test" clauses in a ruling affecting hundreds of thousands of UK businesses forced to close during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown.…

Customers clearly looking to simplify buying into supply chains – but the market is tougher than it looks Workday's boss got a chance to flex his jaw muscles this week at Deutsche Bank's 2020 Global Technology Conference, using that platform to talk up his interest in the market for procurement software.…

Inspectors tried to let them off the hook, council managers held firm The local council overseeing the core of the Australian city of Melbourne has been told to refund around 1,200 fines that resulted from drivers making a minor typo.…

ML, analytics connector reduces memory demand, says database firm In-memory NoSQL database Aerospike is launching connectors for Apache Spark and mainframes to bring the two environments closer together.…

Don't mind us just trying to enlighten the mood From the department of what can't Microsoft Teams do comes news of tuition for Buddhist monks and AI slithering into medical workflows.…

National health promotion will pump instructions onto wrists and - if you behave - cover up to 90% of device cost Singapore and Apple have cooked up a scheme that will see the city-state’s citizens rewarded with gift vouchers if they wear the Apple Watch as part of a national health promotion programme.…

It only took five years Europe’s top court has decided that the continent’s network neutrality rules will stand, rejecting challenges from the telecoms industry.…

Erm ... guys ... have you looked at recent patch counts? (We have: you issued 372 this quarter, 54 critical) Microsoft has open-sourced the fuzzing tool it uses to scour its own code for potential security vulnerabilities.…

Radars, aeroplanes, radio: Don't forget the boffins on this 80th anniversary Comment Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, where Britain saw off Nazi Germany's air force and briefly stood alone against Hitler's military might. Yet while the occasion is marked by flypasts and parades, it's important to remember that tech also played a part in Britain's victory.…

Alibaba and Tencent left to offer mediated wallets rather than potentially become private currencies A deputy governor of the People's Bank of China has revealed more about the nation’s plan for a digital currency, and the news isn’t good for alternative payment systems run by the likes of Alibaba and Tencent because it appears they won’t get the chance to go head-to-head with Banks.…

Dot over an X instead of an I ‘illustrates our commitment to empowering every individual’ Logowatch Citrix has “unveiled fresh thinking about what employee experience means” and launched a new logo to prove it.…

And have you tried simply asking hackers to not hack? The NSA has published online a guide for IT admins to keep systems free of bootkits and rootkits.…

Programmers put decade-old package out to pasture, advise devs to find alternatives The maintainers of Moment.js, a JavaScript time-and-date handling library downloaded 12 million times a week, put the project into maintenance mode on Tuesday, and advised developers to consider alternatives.…

We polled you IT pros out there on your info silo plans – and here are the results Reader survey Once upon a time, not so very long ago, relational databases were pretty much the only game in town – for mainstream organizations, at least. As a result, they underpin huge numbers of business applications of all kinds, and when we surveyed readers of The Register recently, it was clear many organisations expect their relational database usage to increase.…

No way to sugarcoat this: New York AG eclairs the 2015 data theft matter settled Dunkin' Donuts today settled a lawsuit in which it was accused of hushing up the fact hackers siphoned its customers' personal information from its systems in 2015.…

OK, fine. Blood-oxygen level monitoring, hexa-core 5nm Arm processors, TV packages... The tagline for today’s Apple product launch event was “time flies.” How ironic given 2020 feels like it's been a decade long.…

'51 billion' active JVMs can't be wrong Oracle on Tuesday marked the arrival of Java 15, known as Oracle JDK 15 among those concerned about formalities and trademarks, in the 25th year of the programming language's existence.…

Also: GitHub and Teams action while Universal Print presses on In brief Windows Insiders, us included, were left a tad bemused last week after a Dev Channel update purported to "not include anything new" was abruptly pulled.…