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The bug: IF Tier = Free THEN PRINT "Can we offer you an upgrade?" Microsoft has had its very own Who, Me? moment after being forced to apologise for a bug that spammed administrators of Teams Free organisations to suggest they should upgrade to avoid imminent deletion of data.…

Neural networks can be aimed to misbehave when squeezed Boffins in China and the US have developed a technique to hide a backdoor in a machine-learning model so it only appears when the model is compressed for deployment on a mobile device.…

Planning a post-lockdown trip to the isle off England's south coast? Don't miss the interesting bits Geek's Guide to Britain Guglielmo Marconi is famous for sending the first transatlantic wireless signal from Cornwall to Newfoundland, with his two radio stations on the Lizard peninsula covered by a previous Geek's Guide. But he worked up to this achievement on the Isle of Wight, the England-in-miniature that lies just off the south coast of Hampshire.…

Which is a lot of money for this crap In the long history of crowdfunding disasters, few stories spring quite as quickly to mind as Retro Computers Limited's ZX Spectrum Vega+. The premise was simple: bring the joy of 1980s 8-bit gaming to a pocketable form factor. Around 4,500 people collectively stumped up £513,000 to bring it to life.…

Redshift, Cloudera among preferred platforms, but after 7 years Big Red's system refuses to die The UK's Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed it no longer runs a single data warehouse after moving analytics products off its Oracle system to a range of services for AWS, Oracle Cloud, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.…

Majority aren't GDPR compliant and Google Play categorises them badly, leading to lax practices Hundreds of millions of women turn to fertility apps to conceive or prevent pregnancy, and according to a new study those apps may leak very personal information including miscarriages, abortions, sexual history, potential infertility and pregnancy.…

Tales from less-conventional bunkers at the height of the pandemic Covid Logfile II Darren Ellis spent eight weeks of 2020 quarantined in hotel rooms. James McParlane spent seven months of the year in a Croatian castle. Bruce Davie and Josh Odgers spent 111 days unable to travel more than five kilometres from home or spend more than an hour a day outside.…

India wanted five global players. And it got only five applications from qualifying companies India has met its target to lure five global server, PC, and tablet computer manufacturers to its shores, but in a slightly unusual way.…

We speak to IT outsourcing giants as human malware grips nation India's big tech companies have mobilized to protect their workforces as the nation experiences a terrifying second wave of COVID-19.…

Government department wants carriers to facilitate testing of homegrown tech for India-specific use cases India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has finally granted approval for service providers to start 5G trials.…

Military coup creates such a nasty environment it’s hung up on $780 million of assets Norwegian telco Telenor has written off its entire mobile business in Myanmar, citing the “deteriorating security and human rights situation,” after the military seized control of the nation’s government in February and imposed rolling internet blackouts.…

Plus: Register.com, Network Solutions DNS down and Cloudflare has a wobble Government and academic websites and IT services in Belgium were down for hours on Tuesday after their internet provider Belnet was hit by a significant distributed denial-of-service tsunami.…

Copper State turns silicon? TSMC is said to be considering building up to five additional chip plants in Arizona as well as the one it announced last year.…

Get used to it, kid The majority of Android and iOS apps created for US public and private schools send student data to assorted third parties, researchers have found, calling into question privacy commitments from Apple and Google as app store stewards.…

Five vulnerabilities lay undetected for almost a dozen years in Windows driver code Dell desktops, laptops, and tablets built since 2009 and running Windows can be exploited to grant rogue users and malware system-administrator-level access to the computers. We're told this amounts of hundreds of millions of machines that can be completely hijacked.…

More goodies for OpenShift, plus Konveyor to Kubernetes in association with IBM Kubecon Europe As Kubecon Europe gets under way, Red Hat has pushed out StackRox, the Kubernetes security product it acquired earlier this year, as an open-source project which will be the upstream for its Advanced Cluster Security for OpenShift.…

Updates designed to ease 'expensive and challenging' software, analyst says Low-code, automation and workflow company Pega is releasing tools it says will help users tweak back-end processes without developers having to worry too much about breaking front-end UIs.…

Goodnight, sweet prince: Awesome life expectancy for an Android, but now it's time to move on Four years after it first hit shelves, Samsung has finally stopped issuing security patches for the venerable Galaxy S8. The phone, first released in early 2017, no longer features on the company's list of supported devices, signifying its end of life.…

Friends don't drop rocket remnants on friends, m'kay? The spent booster stage responsible for placing the first module of China's next space station into orbit is set to make an uncontrolled rendezvous with Earth.…

The race to keep up with AWSs and Microsoft of this world. HPE is trying to up its Greenlake public cloud-like game by launching a storage-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with data service software abstraction layers operating on new Alletra storage arrays.…

'Hello? I would please like Fortnite Mobile back...' Apple and Epic Games met in California federal court on Monday, kicking off a bench trial with potentially radical consequences for how software is distributed and monetised on closed mobile ecosystems like iOS.…

For testing only - but new distro compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux getting close to release The Rocky Linux project, kicked off by original CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer, has released RC1 of its distribution, which aims to be 100 per cent compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.…

How was this allowed to happen? Ah right, food delivery app publicity stunt Scotland is brimming with valuable cultural exports. Among them, whacking wee baws doon a field, offal stuffed in offal, men's skirts, and deep-frying things that have no business being deep-fried.…

Which is good because that's why the audio editing software is so popular Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.…

76.23kWh per-transaction footprint... WTF, people? In the art world this spring, there's just one phrase on everyone's facemasks: the non-fungible token (NFT). When artist Mike Winkelman sold a JPG embedded into a cryptocurrency token for $69m in Ether (he pocketed $53m of it) jaws hit floors. But what is an NFT, exactly, and should you care, or just roll your eyes and go about your business?…

Non-quoted string vest? Don't mind if we do Column Enterprise IT is about solving problems, but for those who work in the field there's an index of irony in that statement. The further you go towards sales and marketing, the more problems are solved; the further towards the engine room of making this stuff work, the more problems appear.…

Hardware supporting ageing system is mired in performance issues East Sussex County Council is set to be at least six months late in appointing a vendor to replace its ageing R/3 SAP system, which is showing its age and struggling with performance issues.…

Find out at the Anywhere Workspace Event Promo The last year has blown apart any pretence of having a perimeter behind which you can corral your users, keeping them both focused on the job and secure.…

Samsung in turn asks for access to clean 'leccy at high-level love-in A high-level meeting between the Vietnamese government and Samsung has seen each party make a mutually beneficial request of the other, highlighting the success of the relationship - and the fact that both see room for improvement.…

Promises personalised services, software-driven networks, all the fun of an SAP migration to Google cloud Vodafone has signed up for another six years of fun with Google and its cloud.…

Tellie-maker Skyworth says it was duped by analytics service Chinese TV-maker Skyworth has admitted that some of its Android-powered smart televisions shared more data than it agreed to send to a third-party organisation.…

2FA hasn’t kept pace with registration and real-world biometric capture The Philippines’ attempt to expand its national ID program has stumbled thanks to scaling issues with its two-factor authentication tools.…

Blue Origin, Dynetics cry foul NASA’s $2.89bn contract awarded to SpaceX for its Starship rocket to send the first American woman and next man to the Moon has been put on ice after SpaceX’s competitors complained to the US Government Accountability Office.…

Plus: Micro-op CPU caches abused to leak data, and more In Brief Apple on Monday patched security flaws in its software said to have been exploited in the wild by miscreants to hijack gear.…

Safari savaged for failing behind in web APIs Epic Games and Apple faced off in an Oakland, California, courtroom on Monday to resolve the gaming giant's antitrust claim that Apple's App Store represents an illegal monopoly.…

We know the pandemic has been tough on relationships but... Bill Gates has announced his marriage has suffered a BSoD – the Blue Screen of Divorce – after 27 years with his partner Melinda.…

They! may! take! the! exclamation! point! but! they! will! never! take! our! headlines! Verizon has sold its media division, including the early internet portals Yahoo! and AOL, to Apollo Global Management, a private equity fund, for $5bn, it announced on Monday.…

Pay-to-play bungs required to do business with video-streaming giant Michael Kail, former veep of IT Operations at Netflix, was convicted on Friday on 28 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering after a federal jury found that he took advantage of his position to demand bribes from vendors.…

Join us and Nutanix online this week and find out why Webcast A year of pandemic has forced momentous changes on how we work and the technology we use to support this.…

Vehicle to enter 'operations demonstration phase'. Meanwhile SpaceX’s first crew return mission also sticks the landing NASA is so pleased with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's performance that it will devise a new “operations demonstration phase” in which the craft will be tasked with “exploring how aerial scouting and other functions could benefit future exploration of Mars and other worlds.”…

When contractors go bored: Stuffing the timesheet with shenanigans Who, Me? Start your week the right way, with a Who, Me? reader confession and an improvement made to some bodice-ripping fiction.…

It’s a cloudy world and Dell has now offloaded almost all its software assets Dell has announced the sale of its Boomi Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) outfit.…

Berkshire Hathaway’s annual Q&A also smashed Robinhood, tweaked Elon Musk, fawned over Apple Bitcoin is "disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization" according to Charlie Munger, vice-chair of holding company Berkshire Hathaway.…

Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu among those in strife China says it has identified 33 apps that illegally collect information not necessary to their services, and has given their operators ten days to perform “rectification”.…

Plus: Deepfake satellite images and Google fails to cite relevant research in its own large language model paper In brief An AI system has bested nearly 1,300 human competitors in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament to achieve the top score.…

You sure have to press 'A' a lot The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. 2021 continues to move slowly for the world's biggest entertainment industry and while we did ask Square Enix for a copy of new looter-shooter Outriders, they blanked us. So instead we are picking up a style of game Square is better known for – Octopath Traveler, originally a Nintendo Switch exclusive now on PC.…

Plus: Workers axed at '$4bn' Patreon, techies walk away from Basecamp The Lambda School, an online coding bootcamp based in San Francisco, on Thursday said it will lay off 65 employees, about a third of the workforce.…

Digidog will be returned to its Boston Dynamics owners The New York Police Department has ended its $94,000 contract testing a robot canine named Digidog and is returning it to its makers, Boston Dynamics, after facing harsh criticism from residents and top politicians.…

'If you think age is an advantage in this job, you are mistaken' A former Intel engineer, laid off in 2015, has sued the chipmaker claiming that he was dismissed because of his age.…

The spotty 13-year old app shack finally growing up? Better late than never Google is warning developers it won’t allow misleading or hyperbolic app descriptions by year-end, in an attempt to make the world’s biggest app bazaar feel less like the feedback section of an eBay profile.…