The Register

AB 701 takes aim at Amazon and other warehouse operators that prioritize productivity over health California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed Assembly Bill 701, establishing new protections for workers at warehouse distribution centers.…

Tech trade groups argue prohibition on moderation is unconstitutional Two IT trade groups on Wednesday challenged the constitutionality of Texas' new social media law, arguing that it compels companies to host speech they disagree with in violation of their First Amendment rights.…

Partnerships are our future, says tycoon Dell CEO Michael Dell once loved big-ticket acquisitions, but not anymore.…

US company equips cybernetic pooch to help in building inspections, post-disaster assessments Boston Dynamics' creepy robot dog Spot has found another new employer for its unique skillset.…

Cupertino thinks EU plan 'stifles innovation rather than encouraging it' Smartphones, tablets, and cameras sold within the European Union could be forced to adopt a single standard charging port by the middle of the decade if the latest plans from the European Commission get the go-ahead.…

A whole lot of ███ in documents which finger Peter Thiel and execs Facebook is remaining silent over two explosive lawsuits unsealed this week which contain allegations that board members "authorized" the overpayment of an FTC fine by up to $4.9bn in order to protect CEO Mark Zuckerberg.…

It'll take time for desktop environment to make its way into Linux distros anyway The GNOME Foundation has released GNOME 41 - six months after GNOME 40, which was the first to be based on the GTK4 toolkit.…

The Great Gig in the Sky, or a new plan on GigSky? Mobile tech outfit GigSky is to add a data plan to its mobile app, using the Citizen's Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) small cell infrastructure deployed by the Helium blockchain community.…

Mountain View still ducking questions over whether it'll reimburse that Google has again refused to say whether it will reimburse the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for all the money it has spent warning consumers about dodgy financial ads carried on the tech giant’s platform.…

Prosecutors considering evidence for a number of offences Northern Irish prosecutors are pondering whether to charge two police officers with Computer Misuse Act offences after what local reports described as a Twitter trolling campaign.…

But local providers slip in favour of US tech - even at home GAIA-X, Europe's long awaited federated data infrastructure, got a fresh bulding block this week in the shape of the Eclipse Dataspace Connector, an open-source framework for multi-cloud, policy-based B2B data sharing.…

Brit telco says buyout will mean less competition, higher prices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria BT has spelled out its opposition to the proposed takeover of Hutchison’s mobile phone masts and towers in the UK by Spanish towerco Cellnex following the publication of legal documents yesterday.…

This time affecting candidates for potential relocation A second leak of personal data was reportedly committed by the Ministry of Defence, raising further questions about the ministry's commitment to the safety of people in Afghanistan, some of whom are its own former employees.…

Or is it that they're just more inclined to complete surveys about themselves? A report from DORA, that's the Devops Research and Assessment sponsored by Google and other DevOps vendors, says 26 per cent of surveyed technology workers consider themselves "elite performers."…

High Court and Employment Tribunal cases to be heard soon A former IBM general manager who was posted to the United Arab Emirates is being sued by the company for £290,000 after filing an employment tribunal case claiming unfair dismissal.…

Hardware capabilities, latest feature updates? You'll get what you pay for Intel's vision of the computing architecture of autonomous vehicles is similar to that of PCs, with pricey models getting better hardware and the latest software, and cheaper self-driving cars getting the bare minimum.…

Espionage motive mooted in attacks which hit industry, government too Researchers at security specialist ESET claim to have found a shiny new advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed FamousSparrow - after discovering its custom backdoor, SparrowDoor, on hotels and government systems around the world.…

Up above the streets and houses, XP's flying high Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows XP continues to hang in there – quite literally – as the operating system does what it does best some 90 metres above the London's River Thames.…

The Register speaks to Canonical about running the OS in the cloud Interview Developers targeting Android are spoiled for choice with their platforms.…

Deadline came and went, but over 750 'resources' are still hard at work Infosys has admitted it has missed the Indian government's deadline to fix the tax portal it built, but which has been a glitchy mess since its June 2021 launch.…

What tools are available? What are the benefits? Let's find out Systems Approach In 1984, artificial intelligence was having a moment. There was enough optimism around it to inspire me to explore the role of AI in chip design for my undergraduate thesis, but there were also early signs that the optimism was unjustified.…

Forget wiring cities with IoT devices – this could be how wide-scale sensing gets done Imagine an optic fiber that can sense the presence of a nearby jackhammer and warn its owner that it is in danger of being dug up, just in time to tell diggers not to sink another shaft. Next, imagine that an entire city's installed base of fiber could be turned into sensors that will make planners think twice before installing IoT devices.…

Inside the software built to figure out groups of potentially infected, asymptomatic passengers Faced with limited resources in a pandemic, Greece turned to machine-learning software to decide which sorts of travelers to test for COVID-19 as they arrived in the country.…

Between COVID and corvids, locked-down Aussies can't catch a break - or a coffee lowered from the treetops Some of Google parent company Alphabet's Wing delivery drones have been grounded by angry Australian birds.…

Firm says 40 per cent of a server's bill of material costs are tied to memory Prices for DRAM and NAND flash are set to fall, sharply, in the second half of 2022 according to analyst firm Gartner.…

Hopes three availability zones will be hobbit-forming for local businesses and government agencies Amazon Web Services has announced it will build a Region in New Zealand and light it up by the year 2024.…

Laptops added or refreshed, and another go at making dual-screen phones a thing Microsoft has introduced the Surface Laptop Studio, and if you mistook it for a tablet with a trackpad stand, you'd be forgiven.…

Unexplained service issue blamed after customers unable to leave gratuities electronically Square's payment system malfunctioned over the weekend for several hours, a glitch that cost workers at affected businesses a meaningful portion of their earnings during the most lucrative day of the week.…

Vid-chat giant's ties to China under the microscope by AG-led panel Zoom’s ties to China are at the center of a US government investigation into the video-conferencing giant's $15bn plan to take over Five9, a California call-center-in-the-cloud.…

file:// is blocked? Oh OK, we'll just use File:// or fiLE://... Apple's macOS Finder application is currently vulnerable to a remote code execution bug, despite an apparent attempt to fix the problem.…

Apropos of nothing, here's Lionel Ritchie Comment Salesforce execs get so bowled over by Dreamforce, the SaaS org's annual gabfest, that they seem to lose all perception of time and space.…

Aw, look. It wants to be a 'global science superpower' The UK government has published its much-awaited National AI Strategy in pursuit of "global science superpower" status.…

Baltic state's cyber security centre uncovers remote censorship blocklist function in Mi 10T handset Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre has told its citizens to get rid of Xiaomi-made mobile devices amid fears that the Chinese company could remotely enable censorship tools.…

Back from the brink with new features More than three years after X.Org Server 1.20, released in May 2018, a release candidate for 21.1.0 has been posted.…

Break free from the silos at Nasuni CloudBound21 PROMO If you’re running enterprise ops at any scale, you’re likely either using the public cloud or attempting to emulate its best characteristics across your own infrastructure.…

What in the blazes? Two Catholic monks from the Rhône region in southern France have been charged with setting fire to 5G phone masts amid concerns the mobile technology could pose a health risk to humans.…

Hopes to tempt roboticists over to its Jetson platform with new simulation features, drop-in acceleration code Nvidia has linked up with Open Robotics to drive new artificial intelligence capabilities in the Robot Operating System (ROS).…

25-year-strong collection of 2,000 handsets covers 1984 to the present day A very-literally-mobile museum boasting over 2,000 exhibits is to go online and on the streets this year to show off the evolution of the mobile phone from 1984 to the present day - and its founders are looking for donations to fill a few gaps in the collection.…

'Warning: this report contains highly offensive language and discussion of content which may cause offence' NSFW UK comms regulator Ofcom has taken the unusual step of employing survey company Ipsos MORI to swear 186 times at 368 different members of the public and record what they thought about it.…

This could very well be the last release based on 16.04 Ubuntu Touch was Canonical's attempt at a mobile version of its OS, subsequently ditched by the Linux outfit and now maintained by UBports, which has just released the latest update, OTA-19.…

EPAC accelerator runs its first 'Hello, World!' in-silico The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has run the successful first test of its RISC-V-based European Processor Accelerator (EPAC), touting it as the initial step towards homegrown supercomputing hardware.…

Three or four unconnected systems required for casework leading – unsurprisingly – to errors UK spending watchdog the National Audit Office has found that a 34-year-old computer system was one of the causes of a scandal which led to more than £1bn of state pensions not being paid.…

Email clients fail over to unexpected domains if they can't find the right resources A flaw in Microsoft's Autodiscover protocol, used to configure Exchange clients like Outlook, can cause user credentials to leak to miscreants in certain circumstances.…

Mozilla, Apple register dismay as worries surface over privacy, potential crypto mining behind user's back Google has released Chrome 94 for desktop and Android, complete with an "Idle Detection" API to detect user inactivity, despite privacy concerns expressed by Mozilla and Apple.…

Report from the Government Office for Science lays out the hurdles to supercomputing relevance A report from the Government Office for Science has proposed the formation of an in-house team dedicated to large-scale computing, as it bemoans the nation's weak standing in the international supercomputing sector and makes a series of recommendations for improving matters.…

Apple-flavored approach running as test 'for a small percentage of users' Analysis Google has been spotted testing a web technology that a former staffer fears will further undermine the already often ignored choices people make about their browsers.…

Digitisation of the justice system still delivering value for money The public body that runs the courts in England and Wales has awarded Version 1 Solutions a contract valued at £9.6m to build an end-to-end digital service for civil claims and damages.…

Meaconing, loss of position, and the Royal Navy's response Boatnotes II Learning to fix your position without GPS is one thing. Actively jamming it to induce a deliberate system failure aboard your own ship is quite something else, as we found on Monday.…

FlutterFlow is a visual application builder for the popular framework Interview FlutterFlow, a third-party visual application builder for the Flutter framework, now has custom functions for the addition of Dart code, but developers may still find it too limiting.…

Project wins £50k from government The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is drawing up guidelines so that crash-proof cargo containers can be attached to drones to transport medical items such as blood samples and vaccines.…