The Register

And with better repairability than its big brother too Though the iPhone 12 Mini is the smallest device in Apple's newest lineup, it is largely feature-complete when compared with its stablemates.…

Software subscriptions and licence support a must for bidding businesses The UK government's Crown Commercial Services (CCS) has issued a contract for back-office software with an estimated street value of £1.2bn.…

Plus: Uber to sell off its self-driving unit, and pay $200 to spy on anyone you'd like in Russia In brief Thousands of nude images from a popular dataset designed to train machine learning models to create AI-generated adult content are often taken from porn production companies accused of sexual abuse.…

Five more years, five more years... or nothing! A West Midlands town has found out the hard way exactly how much sympathy IT suppliers have for public sector bodies disrupted by the unprecedented circumstances of the current COVID-19 pandemic.…

Time to call time on video. Just NO. No interoperability, no Column As we struggle wearily towards the beginning of the end of the pandemic, we can take stock of what we as a species and as a society have learned.…

The Qt advantage? 'We're a weird by-product of coffee machines and cars' Interview KDE Plasma is a Linux desktop which has just been updated to 5.20 - but why should users consider it instead of GNOME, the default for Ubuntu and Red Hat, or the lightweight Xfce? We spoke to Plasma maintainers David Edmundson and Jonathan Riddell.…

That other 1973 hit: The Dark Side of the Mainframe Who, Me? Modern life is rubbish, so take a trip back to the 1970s with a Who, Me? all about the Master Control Program (MCP).…

Don't hack, don't backdoor, don't hurt the internet … and don't expect rapid adoption because there's still a lot of multilateral work to be done The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC), a group that works to develop policy the world can follow to keep the internet stable and secure, late last week delivered a final report that outlines its vision for how the nations of the world should behave online.…

When recommendation engines promote misinformation during a pandemic, it's a matter of life and death Column My television is trying to radicalise me with an endless stream of recommendations to watch videos from a mainstream media outlet that deliberately inhabits a place on outer reaches of the political spectrum.…

Learn to think like an attacker so you can start fighting back Webcast This year has turned corporate IT upside down, scuppering digital transformation plans as tech teams struggle to keep the lights on and support a suddenly remote workforce.…

First certified commercial crewed spaceflight flies, but fuel heaters are acting up NASA and SpaceX are celebrating the successful launch of the first non-experimental commercial crewed launch.…

Plan calls to link government data across jurisdictions, even sharing airline records to track outbreaks and people who may be at risk of infection Australia will develop the capability to use payment records in the service of coronavirus contact tracing.…

New top trade bloc wants fewer barriers to business across China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia and 11 more countries, but not India 15 Asian nations that together represent around 30 percent of the world’s population and GDP have signed a trade deal that means e-commerce operators in member nations will not be required to store customers’ data in their nation of residence.…

VoltPillager breaks enclave confidentiality, calls anti-rogue data-center operator promise into question Boffins at the University of Birmingham in the UK have developed yet another way to compromise the confidentiality of Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) secure enclaves, supposed "safe rooms" for sensitive computation.…

Ad giant sued after mobile allowances eaten by hidden transfers Google on Thursday was sued for allegedly stealing Android users' cellular data allowances through unapproved, undisclosed transmissions to the web giant's servers.…

Also: Space photos from an analogue age up for sale, more Cygnus In Brief Until 20 November, space fans will have a chance to pick up their own bit of photographic history courtesy of auctioneer Christie's Voyage To Another World: The Victor Martin-Malburet Photograph Collection.…

Controlling? Us? Never! iOS 14.3 will prompt some users to install selected third-party applications during setup, in what is likely an attempt to stifle any allegations of anticompetitive behaviour from regulators.…

Just don't call it a migration Google has launched a SQL database porting service it said will ease the lift and shift of SQL family databases into its managed relational database service Cloud SQL.…

Also copped to RIPA breach after ignoring police demand to hand over passwords The former BAE Systems worker accused of sending details of a UK missile system to hostile foreign powers and of ignoring police demands to hand over his device passwords, has been jailed.…

Data-wrangler previews another lakehouse concept tool Data management and machine learning framework biz Databricks is launching a tool it has claimed will bring SQL-style analytics to the messy world of data lakes.…

'We believe the Agency will be hard-pressed to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024' The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has said the chances of the agency meeting the goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2024 are looking ever slimmer.…

Blow to UK suspects in wake of Franco-Dutch investigation The contents of messages from encrypted chat service EncroChat may be admissible as evidence in English criminal trials, the High Court in London, England has ruled.…

Happy Xmas: So that's GTS, GBS, Systems, Channel and Cloud & Cognitive Software. Insiders say UK and wider Europe impacted IBMers are telling us of widespread job cuts taking place right across the entire organisation in the UK and wider mainland Europe with Big Blue disptching memos warning of a looming 45-day consultation process.…

Own your screwups, growls irate watchdog The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined Ticketmaster £1.25m after the site’s operators failed to spot a Magecart card skimmer infection until after 9 million customers’ details had been slurped by criminals.…

Not easy to Cobol together support for 50 critical 'heritage' apps used by courts, apparently The UK’s Ministry of Justice has handed incumbent supplier CGI a new £90m contract without open competition in a seemingly desperate bid to keep its Cobol, Fortran, and Pascal applications up and running.…

5G ain't free, you know CK Hutchison Holdings, the Hong-Kong based parent of UK network Three, has confirmed plans to sell its European tower business to Cellnex, a Spain-based operator of wireless telecoms infrastructure.…

No-no-no-no-no! I'm going to lose my bid on the £7 horse mask, um, I mean important lockdown things I need Second-hand tat bazaar eBay was unavailable for some UK users this week, after Virgin Media and TalkTalk mistakenly blacklisted the site’s CDN in their parental control filtering software.…

Don't turn on the camera, don't turn on... Oh hi! Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am going to expose myself.…

Remake of noughties classic HMD Global has served up another ladle of Nokstalgia*, with one more remake of a classic mid-2000s phone - a 4G-capable rehash of the corporate-tastic Nokia 6300, which first saw a release in 2007.…

These algorithms identify different types of viruses, we're told Boffins have demonstrated that machine-learning algorithms may be able to help scientists identify viruses, and could even be used to develop more efficient tests for the presence of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the near future.…

Throw in a clipboard and you look like you're the business On Call Welcome to On Call, the The Register's Friday celebration of those called out for the most spurious and silly of reasons.…

But most recent quarter was a bit grim with revenue down nine percent and switching, routing, servers and wireless sales all slumping Cisco has revealed that the first quarter of its new financial year saw a 13 percent fall in product revenue and “weakness” among commercial and enterprise buyers and while execs have forecast a rebound guidance offered to shareholders is for revenue to be flat or worse.…

Learn to think like an attacker so you can start fighting back Webcast This year has turned corporate IT upside down, scuppering digital transformation plans as tech teams struggle to keep the lights on and support a suddenly remote workforce.…

Taxes change all the time, but shifts in behaviour are usually slower than the rush to WfH Deutsche Bank has proposed governments impose a tax on working from home.…

Says Beijing’s internet monopoly and lending laws are nothing to worry about, pledges IaaS bounce-back Tencent has posted quarterly results that feature the usual assortment of very, very, large numbers heading in pleasing directions, but also admitted that its cloud operation was not able to match the surge reported by other hyperscalers around the world.…

Wipes away gore, dials up data protection and finds $100m to boost local gaming industry Super-popular shooting game PUBG has plotted a route around India’s ban on Chinese apps by announcing a version of the game tailored to the local market's moral and legal sensibilities.…

'No evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised' After months of fretting about the possibility that the 2020 US election might be derailed by tampering or foreign interference, nothing notable happened.…

Server problems mar operating system version 11 rollout Apple on Thursday released macOS Big Sur, the latest iteration of its desktop operating system. Designed to support the iPhone giant's new line of Apple Silicon devices, scheduled to ship next week, the operating system upgrade didn't quite go as planned.…

Because they’re military pawns of evil commies, says president de-elect President Donald Trump has issued an executive order "addressing the threat from securities investments that finance communist Chinese military companies," which will bar US-based companies from investing in several notable Chinese technology companies.…

Coincidentally, Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft Python has surpassed Java to become the second-most popular programming language in the TIOBE index, one of several imprecise yardsticks used to rank what's in vogue among coders.…

How the de-Googled phone works Interview The /e/ Foundation has brought a de-Googled phone to market - we got one to try, and spoke to founder Gaël Duval for all the details behind this brave effort.…

Seeking something perpetual for Windows on Arm? You can make do with a 32-bit Intel emulation There were fresh salty tears from Microsoft fans overnight as the company posted an Arm version of its Office suite. For Mac users.…

Tens of millions of usernames and passwords go walkies amid claims of decryption Child-friendly games website Animal Jam suffered a hack that exposed 46 million user records after a staff Slack channel was compromised by malicious people who discovered a private AWS key.…

CSIS policy wonk describes supply chain attack to Parliament The F-35 fighter jet programme’s costs were inflated after China compromised a software vendor in Lockheed Martin’s supply chain, forcing a ground-up rewrite of a potentially affected system, a policy wonk has claimed to UK Parliament.…

Bought 'estimated onomastic data' tagged onto data of millions of Brit voters The UK's ruling Conservative Party has been using personal data in a way that spots an individual's likely county of origin, ethnic origin and religion based on their first and last name.…

Native wit... but let's see what the 13-inch brings Benchmarks highlighting the performance of Apple’s homegrown M1 chip have surfaced, showing Cupertino’s latest (unreleased) MacBook Air handily trouncing the previous generation 16-inch MacBook Pro in both single-core and dual-core tasks.…

Mesa contributor issues a warning: community matters Intel's driver support for Linux is improving, but has raised an eyebrow or two within the open source community as a Mesa contributor noted that Chipzilla's code-sharing development model was not necessarily a win.…

Wider government only told of encryption machine nobbling a year after it ended Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was (quite literally) owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed.…

Detecting deceptive websites as soon as they get registered may help reduce the contagion of misinformation Academics in the US and UK have created a machine-learning tool for predicting when newly registered internet domains will be used to spread false information, in the hope these sites can be blocked or shut down before they pollute online communication channels.…

EFF on the attack as IT giant tries to claim free supplies during 'device lifetime' just an introductory offer HP Inc is under fire for not only ending its promise of free ink for life but also automatically enrolling customers into a subscription plan to continue using their printer ink.…