The Register

'Our proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms may lead to unintentional bias and discrimination,' it told SEC Updated An insurance biz has retracted boasts of how it uses AI algorithms to study videos of customers for “non-verbal cues” that their claims are fraudulent. The marketing U-turn came after the ethics of this approach was called publicly and loudly into question.…

Gentoo and Raku call foul Updated Following the Freenode schism last week that saw most of the IRC network's volunteer staff leave to form rival network Libera Chat, Freenode on Tuesday commandeered hundreds of channels used by various open source software projects and fiddled with their permissions.…

'This is why we can't have nice things' A further indignity has been heaped upon Russia's Buran Space Shuttle as images surfaced showing at least one of the surviving Soviet-era spacecraft was defaced by a graffiti "artist".…

For Bezos, clearly the world is not enough The streaming wars have gone up a notch after Amazon confirmed its intent to acquire veteran filmmaker MGM for $8.45bn.…

Faster WebAssembly, and last stages of trial to test Trust Tokens Google has released Chrome 91, and although there's little new on the surface, there are key changes for developers including WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, a Gravity Sensor API, and read-only access to files on the clipboard.…

If only there were an AI to do what Microsoft's engineers don't seem to be able to As Microsoft's public-facing engineers were basking in the, er, glow of the company's Build event, those in the backrooms were scrambling to shore up the cloud giant's perennially wobbling services.…

Explosive Whitehall testimony also reveals former Faculty data scientist Ben Warner’s influence on decision making during national emergency Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, is said to have been instrumental in convincing the UK prime minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings to “hit the panic button and ditch the official plan” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020.…

Raiding the iPhone's parts bin: $$. Making sure users can't upgrade a desktop computer? Priceless Having ripped into Apple's new M1 iMac, the iFixit gang turned its attention to the device's keyboard and the all-important Touch ID sensor. Sensitive eyes may, however, wish to look away from the final repairability score.…

For now it's full send... but what will things look like when the smoke clears? It’s almost over. On Monday, Epic Games and Apple wrapped up their arguments in the high-stakes bench trial taking place in Oakland’s Federal Court.…

The CIO does not decide how soon you need to respond. 'The person who decides is the attacker' QCon Plus Automated testing and rapid deployment are critical to defending against vulnerabilities in open source software, said David Wheeler, director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation.…

What do I do for a living? I'm a marketing exec. Yeah, didn't think you'd have any questions Like ticket inspectors on a London bus, people who work for MI6 could be anyone, and are #secretlyjustlikeyou. We see no reason why our readers shouldn’t put themselves up for the job (just remember to tip us off securely here when you’re tasked with making Vista work “just one more year” on a dusty PC behind a red door at SIS HQ.)…

Unclear if 'space' is on the green, amber or red list Good news for wannabe Brit rocket operators: regulations have finally arrived before UK lawmakers aimed at allowing commercial operators to launch from local soil.…

Bug-hunting industry wants to know a bit more before doing that, though Businesses operating in the word of infosec have been urged to write to the Home Office and support a public interest defence being added to the Computer Misuse Act.…

Poorly defined business requirements, failure in documentation, independent report finds An independent review of a technology failure that led to the loss of 413,000 records of evidence from the UK’s Police National Computer (PNC) has found a lack of reviews and effective testing contributed to the debacle.…

Pumice-like stuff spotted by Japanese Hayabusa2 probe would float on water Asteroid Ryugu, the rock from which Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe brought home some samples, is home to highly porous boulders that might just have been the stuff of which planets were made.…

24 out of 26 tools vulnerable – with bonus JavaScript attack for Adobe A pair of techniques to surreptitiously alter the content of certified PDFs have been detailed by researchers in Germany.…

Drive looks to be an industrial model, so probably not a wider threat Cisco has named Micron as the supplier of solid-state disks that put themselves to sleep after 28,224 hours of operation.…

Sixth big outage in seven weeks, this time users were unable to access more than a dozen services IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.…

Hasn't said which brands have signed up, but is happy to have them make 2G and 3G kit for a decade Analysis Pakistan has announced it has secured 19 cellphone manufacturers willing to work on its soil, and that their efforts will improve device affordability and availability for locals and help the nation’s prospects as a tech exporter.…

Unauthenticated remote code execution possible thanks to vSphere Client bug VMware has revealed a critical bug that can be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in the very core of a virtualised system – vCenter Server.…

Meanwhile, fans may enjoy Linux GUI apps on Windows Subsystem for Linux Build Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened day one of the company's Build 2021 conference, virtual again this year, with a pitch to be the platform for platform creators.…

It started out as an innocent book store and now it's Barnes & Ignoble The District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday, claiming the internet goliath is illegally abusing its power to manipulate online retail prices and screw over merchants.…

If you want to be happy at work, never meet more than twice a day If you want to make a software developer's day, don't interrupt, minimize meetings, and encourage moments of self-reflection. By doing so you may enhance productivity and promote worker retention, according to GitHub's latest research.…

It will even keep working if Microsoft's cloud has an outage, honest Build At its virtual Build 2021 event, Microsoft has introduced features in Arc, its hybrid-cloud system for centralized management of Kubernetes clusters and other services, that will now run selected Azure services on-premises, including App Service, Logic Apps, and Function Apps.…

Also: Blockchain Ledger for Azure SQL Database Build Microsoft's attempts to bring Cosmos DB to the masses continued at Build 2021 as Redmond threw emulators and freebies at developers, while the more sober world of Azure SQL Database was given the Ledger treatment.…

How low (code) can you go? Build Any souls wondering what Microsoft would do with its GPT-3 investment have been given an answer with a Power Fx update lightly seasoned with the AI tech.…

Iron Oak fails to convince the Feds that Patent Board misinterpreted key phrase in the patent Samsung, Microsoft, and Google have prevailed at US Federal Appeal Court [PDF] in a patent battle with Iron Oak Technologies.…

Says privacy and freedom of expression breached, but upholds sending surveillance product to foreign countries Surveillance laws permitting GCHQ to operate its Tempora dragnet mass surveillance system broke the law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.…

Updated Toolkit, new Developer Portal, custom Together Mode themes ... but not what users ask for most Build Microsoft has introduced new features and developer tooling for Teams, calling it (along with Microsoft 365) a platform for "a new class of apps designed for hybrid work."…

Refund rights for customers The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has reached agreement with antivirus vendor McAfee that means some customers whose software subscription was automatically renewed will be able to get a refund.…

Ampere’s Altra gets the gig at a cent-per CPU hour, with managed K8s for starters, managed MySQL coming soon Oracle has made good on its promise to fire up an Arm-powered cloud by revealing it will offer Ampere's 80-core Altra processors for one US cent per hour per core.…

MPs ignore calls for regulation to help contractors MPs in the UK’s Parliament decided not to select amendments to the 2021 Finance Bill designed to offer contractors protection from rogue umbrella companies accused of skimming off pay and holding back holiday pay.…

Homegrown code spotted in the wild Google’s Fuchsia operating system has started winging its way to real-life devices, with owners of the company’s 2018 Nest Hub the first to get the upgrade.…

Processor core among raft of designs for upcoming devices Arm will today unveil two trinities – a family of three CPU cores, and a family of three GPU cores – for system-on-chips powering future laptops, smartphones, smart home entertainment equipment, and similar gear.…

No alarms, no surprises We’ve crossed the point where teardowns of Apple’s computers cease to be a genuine assessment of fixability, and become an intellectual exercise into seeing how they’re built. iFixit’s preliminary teardown of the 24-inch M1 iMac is a good example of this.…

Hålp, I äm stuck in emergency möde Bork!Bork!Bork! Nature is healing and bork has returned to the wild. Or at least nestled within the plastic greenery in a Birmingham Ikea.…

'The decision was made to return an error message that gave people an ability to contact us' Interview Last December, the Python development team overseeing the Python Package Index (PyPI) temporarily disabled the search endpoint on its XML-RPC API because its infrastructure has been overwhelmed by "abusive clients."…

You've heard of Continuous Integration – how about Continuous Review for your Jamstack? Interview Netlify has acquired FeaturePeek, a system for simplifying the flow of feedback on web application previews and prototypes.…

November scripting error havoc finally fixed Around three weeks late — a fairly good result for anything to do with the UK government's Home Office IT — technology professionals have been able to recover all of the 413,000 records of evidence deleted from the Police National Computer (PNC) in January this year.…

Also steps into future by allowing plug to be pulled on 2G networks The Republic of Korea took two bold steps into the future on Tuesday, by announcing that the last of its 2G networks will go offline in June and that it will initiate large-scale adoption of communications protected by quantum encryption.…

Acquisition expected to complete in April 2022, empty positions can't be filled until then Exclusive Arm has entered an engineering hiring freeze that may last until April 2022 when it expects its acquisition by Nvidia to complete.…

Spanish authorities say there’s no reason to suspect foul play A man has been found dead inside a large model dinosaur in the Spanish municipality of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, on the northern outskirts of Barcelona.…

Brit thrown in the clink for 13 years after 'palm-print' lifted from internet photo A drug dealer's ham-handed OPSEC allowed British police to identify him from a picture of him holding a block of cheese, which led to his arrest, guilty plea, and a sentence of 13 years and six months in prison.…

It’s all about domestic efficiency, and if that helps China to become a bigger player then so be it A former governor of the People's Bank of China has given a speech in which he suggested that China's Digital Yuan is not intended to increase China's influence over global financial systems.…

Action comes amid raging second wave, government pressure on social networks to suppress misinformation Police in the Indian capital Delhi have turned up at Twitter's local HQ seeking evidence about a tweet made by a prominent political figure that the micro-blogging service labelled as including "manipulated media".…

Allows limited on-site registration for jabs India has acknowledged the API it created to facilitate COVID-19 vaccination bookings excludes much of its population and started to allow on-site vaccination bookings to some of its populace.…

Prime viewing in the Pacific Rim Skygazers will be treated to a total lunar eclipse on Wednesday, May 26, when the Moon passes through Earth’s shadow and it’ll appear particularly large and reddish in color.…

Automaker didn't even bother defending itself Tesla has been ordered by a Norwegian court to pay more than 30 customers $16,000 each for slashing the battery life and charging abilities of older Tesla Model S vehicles with a software update.…

Bug can also be abused to record audio and video, access files – and iOS, iPadOS updated, too Apple has patched a hole in macOS that has been exploited by malware to secretly take screenshots on victims' Macs.…

Join us to learn how to frustrate extortionists in the 2020s Webcast On the face of it, blunting a ransomware attack should be straightforward if you’ve got a solid data protection plan in place.…