The Register

US retailers accused of privacy invasion Civil rights campaigners in the US have called on retailers to stop using facial-recognition technology amid worrying privacy concerns and fears that it could lead to people being wrongly arrested.…

Operating system now more flexible in how you get online Privacy and security-focused Linux distribution Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, has announced a major new release completely overhauling how it connects users to the Tor network.…

Meanwhile, Minnesota city authorities evict dozens of monster goldfish from murky local lake Authorities in the US state of Utah have released video of an extreme method they have devised to stock inaccessible lakes in its mountainous regions: a specially adapted aircraft that makes it rain fish.…

Here’s how to not get left behind Webcast Even the most cynical observers have to concede that AI technology is developing at a truly staggering pace.…

Like 'thoughts and prayers' but for web hosting Brit hosting outfit tsoHost has rendered some websites and bits of the company's all-important client area inaccessible since yesterday.…

Nothing to see here, says gargantuan online retailer, thrilled as ever to chat with a union Unite – the UK's largest trade union, with some 1.4 million members – has accused Amazon of inflating prices for items such as hand sanitiser and other health products during the pandemic.…

The good: It's a Windows PC running in the cloud. The bad: It's a Windows PC running in the cloud Microsoft today introduced Windows 365 at its Inspire event: a desktop-as-a-service set for general availability on 2 August.…

Extended version of POCL now supports everything from high-end parts to embedded chips A quartet of computer science boffins have showcased work on bringing the OpenCL programming framework to a wide range of RISC-V chips – improving their suitability for highly parallel workloads in science and beyond.…

Stakes claim for neutral territory after Databricks and cloud vendors make play to manage your data Informatica has launched a SaaS product that aims to manage data governance and catalogues in a single system.…

Procedure on stricken space telescope may be attempted later this week NASA has completed a formal review of what engineers will have to do to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to its backup hardware.…

Ubuntu snatches top spot in 2020 OpenStack User Survey Canonical is cock-a-hoop after Ubuntu snatched first place for OpenStack deployment from the CentOS Linux distribution – but according to some the victory might ring hollow.…

Cellnex already 'largest' phone mast supplier, says UK regulator Two bigwigs in the UK's mobile phone biz have been given just five days to provide "legally binding proposals" that the proposed sale of thousands of phone masts won't damage competition and harm consumers.…

El Reg grabs a moment in time with ExoMars trundlebot's chief engineer Helicopters on Mars have captured the imagination of nerds everywhere, however, an even more ambitious mission to return samples from the Red Planet to Earth is gathering pace.…

An alternative history of the computer revolution Column Looking back over the last 40 years of computing, it's hard to imagine how things could have been different. When Steve Jobs travelled up the Valley in late 1979 to visit Xerox PARC, he found the missing piece of the puzzle that had eaten away at him ever since Woz hacked together the first Apple I: how to make a computer that everyone could use.…

What a whopper Review Most phones are compromised in some way, which makes it all too easy to overlook the good bits. An example of this would be the Huawei Mate 40 Pro, which was near perfect, except for the lack of apps.…

Lessons of Agile still relevant, still not being applied A report on the wellbeing of UK software engineers (developers and DevOps professionals) found 83 per cent suffering from some degree of burnout, with most agreeing that COVID-19 was partly to blame.…

App currently used for 110 government services, more to come Hong Kong’s Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) has revealed that the territory is investigating the use of its digital ID in mainland China.…

If the Chocolate Factory doesn't play ball soon it'll be an extra €1m a day Google was fined €500m ($590m, £425m) by the French Competition Authority on Tuesday for failing to negotiate fees with news publishers for using their content.…

SK Telecom's ‘Ifland’ offers 66 facial expressions, 800 fashion items, plans to offer more serious collaboration real soon now South Korea’s top Telco, SK Telecom, has launched a “metaverse” virtual environment and plans to grow it from a fun place to hang online into a forum for more serious collaboration.…

Four flaws already being abused in the wild to compromise victims Microsoft released an XL-sized bundle of security fixes for its products for this month's Patch Tuesday, and other vendors are close behind in issuing updates.…

Home WiFi was an obvious target, but evildoers also knew to probe cloudy connections Criminals targeted security gaps at financial services firms as their staff moved to working from home, according to a report issued by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) on Tuesday.…

Japanese services giant deepens ties with Microsoft and reckons it can address Japan’s ageing population Japanese tech services giant NEC has struck a “new multi-year strategic partnership” with Microsoft.…

Bad actor likes to work through insecure consumer routers and has form attacking tech companies and military targets Microsoft has attributed a new attack on SolarWinds to a group operating in China.…

Want to know what did get approval? Tencent’s bring-it-home acquisition of search engine Sogou Chinese regulators have refused to approve the merger of two Chinese game streaming services, citing the potential for creating a monopoly in the industry for the part-owner of both companies — tech giant Tencent.…

'An unrealistic attempt to fix what isn’t broken', Big H mutters The FCC has voted to reimburse medium-sized as well as smaller American telcos strong-armed into replacing all of their Huawei and ZTE networking equipment.…

In-person and online in Asia-Pacific with simultaneous Japanese translation Promo No matter where you are in the world, you’re never far from a potential cyber-attack. Luckily, SANS Institute is going to be girdling the globe over the coming months, bringing you top-notch cyber-security events with a personal touch.…

If you need to get your head around the concept of configuration-as-code, start here Systems Approach It’s not hard to form the impression that building and deploying cloud native systems is rapidly becoming a solved problem, with GitOps providing the roadmap.…

Monitoring a person's 'iAge' may provide a means to prolong life, say scientists Buck Institute boffins, with colleagues at Stanford University, claim to have created the first "actionable clock" which can figure out when you're likely to croak it, and even help prolong your life: the inflammatory clock of ageing, or iAge.…

Has the US just had enough, or is it just a strategic retreat? The clear and dark web sites run by the REvil ransomware gang have gone offline, leaving netizens wondering if the extortionists have closed down – or been closed down.…

Long-running legal dispute looks close to settlement The AWS-sponsored OpenSearch project has released version 1.0 of its Elasticsearch fork, an evolution of its former project Open Distro for Elasticsearch.…

Promises better images, improved safety through 'CornerPixel' technology Samsung's ISOCELL imaging sensor line-up is making a shift into the automotive industry as the company pledges to expand into autonomous vehicles and in-cabin camera systems.…

Maybe it's that infamous brain fog The UK government has underscored its attention to detail on the issue of COVID-19 vaccine passports by publishing a report, half of which is made up of pages with no information.…

Liv Tyler-friendly Armageddon-avoidance project won't want to miss a thing with repurposed orbiters Space calamity boffins at Airbus and the European Space Agency (ESA) have come up with a new take on that old "massive, rogue impactor striking the Earth and wiping out all life on the planet" chestnut.…

Teachers and researchers offered workstation, embedded, and data-processing gear instead Nvidia has opened its Hardware Grant Programme, offering those in academia the chance to pick up high-performance processors for their computing needs – so long as they're not after the company's latest RTX 30xx parts anyway.…

Not the only one either; Spread Group admits to even worse pwnage Updated Fashion brands Guess and Spread Group have confirmed data breaches in which crooks walked off with US Social Security Numbers (SSNs), contracts, passwords, payment details, and more.…

Will somebody think of the technical debt this creates? cries Percona 5.0 of MongoDB's eponymous database is now generally available, promising features for time series data, rearranging sharded workloads on the fly, and futureproofing APIs.…

Biometrics could be better but workhorse otherwise does the job Review Samsung's Galaxy A series is the company's midrange workhorse, and although it doesn't generate the same buzz as the Galaxy S series or China's wave of astoundingly well-priced kit, it quietly sells over 100 million units a year – accounting for a decent chunk of all smartphones sold on the planet.…

Imagine how many Print Spooler testers that would have bought Microsoft has loosened the purse strings once again with a substantial purchase in the form of security outfit RiskIQ.…

£200m tender is latest step in never-ending journey toward a paperless utopia The NHS has awarded 17 suppliers a seat on a public sector framework worth up to £200m for paper document storage and digitisation, three years after it missed a self-imposed deadline of going paperless.…

ModiPwn attack gives full control over Modicon programmable logic controllers Updated Armis security researchers have warned of severe and unpatched remote code execution vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric's programmable logic controllers (PLCs), allowing attackers to take control of a variety of industrial systems.…

Impressive Intel-powered ultrabook has plenty going for it Review In November, Huawei bid farewell to Honor, its youth-focused brand that spanned mobile, PC, and wearables.…

You may find that gaffe isn't so embarrassing after all Feature When something bad happens to our systems, our applications or our security, it's almost certain that our organisation is not the first it has happened to. We won't be the first in the world, or in our industry, or in our country, or probably even in our area. Why, then, does it feel like we are?…

If it ever escapes the boot loop, that is Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft has recently taken to inflicting its greatest hits on users in the form of Teams backgrounds, which seem to serve no purposes other than reminding us that things were a bit better in the old days. Before Windows 10, before Microsoft 365, and before the company tried to ram subscriptions down our throats.…

Sync'n'store users have forced migration to conduct within 80 days – enjoy yourselves, Workspaces admins! Users of Google’s desktop cloud storage app Backup and Sync have 80 days to switch to a new client – Drive for desktop – to sync data into the G-Cloud.…

Seeks end to TikTok ban appeal, but this by no means ends US/China worries about citizen data The Biden administration has tried to reverse the Trump administration’s bans on Chinese social media apps.…

What’s another 20 minutes of sudden unplanned downtime between friends? Kaseya has fully restored its SaaS product, then quickly inflicted a little more unplanned downtime on users.…

Open-source revival of Xen Server will target hardware from fabless French manycore kit-maker Kalray Vates, the company behind the open-source XCP-NG project that revived of the Xen Cloud Platform and Xen server, has decided to build a product to run on Data Processing Units, aka SmartNICs.…

Can a Core i9 machine be a workstation? If you think not, Lenovo also has tiny Xeons Lenovo has given the world a workstation that occupies less than one litre of space – less than three cans of beer – an impressive feat if you think a Core i9 processor qualifies as a workstation.…

Inside job? Human error? Social network says it made a mistake Twitter verified a bunch of bot accounts, granting them coveted blue check marks, and then reversed the decision, admitting it made a mistake.…

Every breath you take, every move you make ... The FCC has granted Amazon permission to use 60GHz radar in some future device to monitor people’s sleeping habits and sense gesture commands.…