The Register

Plus: US government's NIST publishes 86-page report investigating algorithmic bias AI algorithms can still come loaded with racial bias, even if they're trained on data more representative of different ethnic groups, according to new research.…

Scientists develop algorithm that decides if your job can just be an algorithm An online index of nearly a thousand jobs may useful in cluing in folks to the automation risk their field of employment faces.…

Also: Occulus virtual reality apps fail to detail info collection Meta's Facebook subsidiary has been collecting hashed personal data from students seeking US government financial aid, even from those without a Facebook account and those not logged into the student aid website, according to a research study published this week.…

Plus: A look at some of the Centre for Computing History's most exciting machines Interview The Register took a road trip last weekend to celebrate the ZX Spectrum's 40th birthday, and visited The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park and the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge in search of the origins (and clones) of the rubber-keyed marvel.…

Plus: He reportedly wants to oust CEO, shake up site features Elon Musk has sold $8.4 billion of Tesla shares over the past few days and reportedly wants to hire a new Twitter CEO, after the company's board accepted his offer to privatize the social media biz.…

Besides files being erased, another thing being deleted: Any sense this is a coincidence Security researchers have detailed six significant strains of data-wiping malware that have emerged in just the first quarter of 2022, a huge surge over previous years.…

Will they WF-other people's-H? Room rental biz Airbnb on Thursday said it will allow its employees to work from anywhere and compensation will remain flat or increase within countries.…

China lockdowns, Apple's homegrown silicon, and more give x86 giant a headache – with an aspirin in reach Analysis Intel promises that a costly ramp in production of 10nm processors, which includes the forthcoming Sapphire Rapids server chips, will pay off in the second half of the year to counter a slowdown in the PC business.…

Final flight of Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy will be in 2022 Even as NASA publishes images demonstrating progress in the commission of the James Webb Space Telescope, preparations are being made to ground the Boeing 747-based Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) for good.…

Customer credits unlikely 'to be material to the financial statements' Atlassian has reported robust figures for its Q3 2022 ended March 31 in which revenues were up, net income was in the red and questions over the recent outage continue to linger.…

Only works with signed-in users, but could lure more into using the browser Microsoft appears to be planning a VPN-like solution for its Edge browser judging by a support page for the upcoming feature.…

Claims new formula reduced carbon emissions by 40%, exceeded strength requirements Facebook parent company Meta has a new project that's grounded in the physical realm: using artificial intelligence to discover new formulas for green concrete.…

The cybercriminals trash files larger than 2MB, forever losing them to the void Ransomware groups in recent years have ramped up the threats against victims to incentivize them to pay the ransom in return for their stolen and encrypted data. But a new crew is essentially destroying files larger than 2MB, so data in those files is lost even if the ransom is paid.…

34% jump shows smaller businesses are catching on and driving investment, says Canalys Sales of cloud infrastructure services are still expanding by roughly a third every quarter – despite the maturing market – and in Q1 they leaped 34 percent to hit $55.9 billion.…

That Mac you ordered? Lead times stretch to June, but Apple warns 'most products affected' over next 3 months Apple is warning that lockdowns of factories in Shanghai due to COVID-19 and industry-wide silicon shortages will hurt its sales by between $4 billion to $8 billion in the next quarter.…

Concerns for Paragon CEO, and head kernel boss Torvalds suggests seeking maintainers There are doubts about the future of the new read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, because its author is not maintaining the code, or even answering his email, leaving the code orphaned, says a would-be helper.…

Cloud shrugs off woes of retail parent while advertising cash also increased AWS shone in an otherwise subdued set of financials from megacorp Amazon last night.…

Especially when gangs are better funded than local police As cybercriminals become more sophisticated and their attacks more destructive and costly, private security firms and law enforcement need to work together, according to Interpol's Doug Witschi.…

Google says it outperforms comparable models despite needing fraction of training data Google's Deepmind has published a paper proposing a family of machine learning models with the aim of doing more work with far less costly and time-consuming training.…

Customer data collection and retention requirements also increased, including for crypto operators India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has given many of the nation's IT shops a big job that needs to be done in a hurry: complying with a new set of rules that require organizations to report 20 different types of infosec incidents within six hours of detection, be they a ransomware attack or mere compromise of a social media account.…

We have bad news: you probably can't... but good luck anyway UK watchdogs under the banner of the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) have called for views on the benefits and risks of how sites and apps use algorithms.…

You thought Zoom was bad? Welcome to the Thunderdome Something for the Weekend The bloke next to me is acting strangely. Sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead, he is holding his hand, palm forward, level with his face.…

Sssshhhh! Nobody tell Elon Musk To the surprise of many users, China's largest Twitter-esque microblogging website, Sina Weibo, announced on Thursday that it will publish users' IP addresses and location data in an effort to keep their content honest and nice.…

Code so clever it is like perpetual motion. In C++ On Call Modes of operation always present a challenge for users. Especially when they invent their own. Welcome to a mysterious On Call with an all-too-obvious solution.…

Ouster of rebel CEO should clear path for planned Arm IPO SoftBank-owned chip designer Arm has reportedly regained control of its Chinese joint venture.…

The walls are alive with the sound of music Video Engineers at MIT have created paper-thin speakers using a plastic film and a piezoelectric layer embossed with tiny domes.…

Second shot after lack of humans to fix simple issue crippled sea vessel The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is attempting to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with no humans on board again, after it failed three days into its first trip last year.…

At least three threat groups are using the loader in malicious email campaigns A sophisticated malware loader dubbed Bumblebee is being used by at least three cybercriminal groups that have links to ransomware gangs, according to cybersecurity researchers.…

Joins open chip standard's international board to show it's really serious this time India's government has announced a plan and roadmap for local semiconductor design and production, based on the open source RISC-V architecture, and set a goal of delivering world-class silicon by the end of next year.…

But it wants server-makers to kick out the option – forever VMware has walked back its decision to end support for non-persistent removable storage as a boot medium for its vSphere suite.…

Tech terms of service dissolve Fourth Amendment rights, EFF warns The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed the 2019 conviction and sentencing of Carsten Igor Rosenow for sexually exploiting children in the Philippines – and, in the process, the court may have blown a huge hole in internet privacy law.…

Some report multimillion-dollar hits while others offer more rosy takes amid component drought Lockdowns in China have been disrupting supply and demand for a variety of semiconductor companies amid broader challenges created by the ongoing global chip shortage.…

Presented by the Wiz team that found the Cosmos DB flaw Microsoft fixed a pair of flaws in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server's authentication process that could have allowed any Postgres admin to gain superuser privileges and access other customers' databases.…

A+ for marketing, F- for blocking aftermarket parts with serial number checks The debut of Apple's self-service repair program has not mended the rift between the iBiz and repair advocacy groups, which continue to see Cupertino's resistance to product repairs as an effort to retain revenue that might otherwise go to others.…

Doing anything Friday night? Fancy watching someone try to catch a rocket with a helicopter? Rocket Lab is to attempt the recovery of an Electron rocket tomorrow night, snagging the booster as it descends back to Earth by parachute.…

Navigate the SALT-y seas of systems-wrangling with the FOSS basis of SUSE Manager The Uyuni project has released a new stable version of its eponymous free enterprise systems-management tool that supports SUSE distros as well as Red Hat (and its many relatives), Ubuntu, and Debian.…

At 15.3 million requests per second, the assault was the largest HTTPS blitz on record lasting 15 seconds Cloudflare this month halted a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a cryptocurrency platform that not only was unusual in its sheer size but also because it was launched over HTTPS and primarily originated from cloud datacenters rather than residential internet service providers (ISPs).…

Lofty, non-binding declaration aims for open, free, interoperable internet in the face of authoritarian threats The United States, along with some 60 other countries, today presented a declaration in which they pledge to "reclaim the promise of the internet" from "a trend of rising digital authoritarianism." …

MongoDB, Couchbase in the crosshairs as Aerospike tries to broaden use cases Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike has added support for JSON documents to a slew of new features included in its Database 6 release.…

Microsoft won, Amazon complained. Amazon won, Microsoft complained. Amazon won... again The US National Security Agency (NSA) has re-awarded a once-secret $10 billion cloud computing services contract to AWS following protests from Microsoft.…

Growth set to continue unabated despite headwinds, CEO says Helpdesk software provider, ServiceNow, has posted revenue of $1.72 billion for the calendar first quarter of 2022, up 27 percent from a year earlier.…

The lines between work and personal life were already blurred anyway Microsoft has taken some tentative steps to make account switching easier in its 365 apps with the addition of a list of signed-in users.…

Closed-loop factories are all the rage as COVID rages on, despite China’s insistence that the virus stop Over 60 percent of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation's (SMIC) Shanghai staff are living around the factory campus, in accordance with the ongoing city-wide COVID lockdown, the Chinese semiconductor foundry confirmed this week.…

Adoption is going so great that growth is barely registering The apparent standstill of Windows 11 adoption is continuing for a second month, according to figures from ad platform AdDuplex.…

Latest LTS release brings a host of welcome changes that feel fast, modern, and powerful US Linux boxshifter System76 has released the new LTS version, 22.04, of its custom Ubuntu remix, Pop!_OS (or "Pop" for short). The Reg FOSS desk took it for a spin.…

UPS giant finds a more permanent solution to a Putin shaped problem, writes off €300m book value Schneider Electric has signed a letter of intent to offload its Russian division to local management, writing off up to €300 million ($315 million) in net book value as a result.…

3-year deal with Toshiba to run tech with customers across the CIty, West End, and Slough BT and Toshiba have announced the trial of a commercial quantum secured metro network in London, set to run for three years to evaluate the use of the technology.…

Not hard to see why Infosys wants to keep staff – rival HCL blames price hikes on pay rises and recruitment costs As Infosys battles attrition that sees more than one in four staffers leave each year, India's Ministry of Labour & Employment has summoned the IT services giant to discuss the legality of a contract clause it uses to stop staff working for rivals or customers.…

Snowball Edge devices needed annual recertification holidays and required LAN-based management Amazon Web Services has made its Snowball Edge devices remotely manageable and finally enabled multi-year deployments of the on-prem data-crunching machines.…

They're currently on 2G – a tactic the government uses to suppress communication India's government has announced it will permit upgrades of mobile networks from 2G to 4G in regions claimed to be hotbeds of a Maoist insurgency.…