The Register

Plus: Enormo AI chip gets an upgrade, and more In brief Banks in America are reportedly rolling out cameras with machine-learning software to surveil people, claiming it’ll help reduce fraud, provide a better service to reduce wait times, and monitor homeless people sleeping near ATMs.…

Oops, watchdog doesn't actually have the power to do so, panel unanimously point out The US government's consumer watchdog cannot force scammers to return the money they cheated out of their victims, the Supreme Court declared unanimously this week.…

Watchdog deemed Richard Glenn's conduct 'unacceptable' An IT teacher at an English private school has been banned from teaching for 36 months for "unacceptable professional conduct" that included getting drunk and visiting a strip club with one or more pupils.…

Our plan is better than President Biden's, they claim, with few details A cadre of Republican senators have proposed allocating $65bn to developing broadband infrastructure in America as part of a $568bn five-year spending plan.…

Killer IoT app finally arrives: Keg-tracking tech to tackle light-fingered miscreants Forget all those interminable IoT gadgets gathering dust in the drawers of the world. Brewers may soon be able to breathe easier after signing up to what we're going to call the Internet of Beer.…

US Copyright Office asked to add DMCA amendment Repairs specialist iFixit has urged the US Copyright Office to add exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would allow individuals to legally circumvent digital restrictions in the process of repairing hardware.…

Come for the 'ohana', stay for the massive piles of cash Salesforce has topped a survey of UK executive salaries with median earnings of around £100,000 per annum, beating investment bank Man Group and consultancy Kearney to the top spot.…

Japanese firm has a reckoning to face Post Office employees were wrongly prosecuted by the company as a direct result of it covering up software bugs in its Horizon IT system, the Court of Appeal in England has said as it quashed 39 convictions this morning.…

Also, Dell and HP miss out on expanded board positions Indian IT trade association and advocacy group National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has appointed Rehka Menon of Accenture as chairperson – the first woman to take the position in the organisation's history.…

Second jaunt to the International Space Station for Endeavour SpaceX has launched the second operational Crew Dragon mission, sending another four astronauts to the International Space Station.…

A treat for returning workers as meeting cancelled due to roomful of bork Updated Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft is famed for eating its own dogfood and this week chowed down on a bowl of fresh bork as its consulting boss encountered what we can only assume is the company's latest attempt to deal with Meeting Culture.…

Microsoft's own distro lurks under the covers and applications magically appear in the Start menu Hands on Microsoft has released the first public preview of Linux GUI applications on Windows 10 – so we wasted no time in taking it for a spin around the block.…

Get with the disruptive app design, granddad: meaningless errors are cool Something for the Weekend, Sir? An error has occurred… Of course it did – I'm in a hurry and the login is sensing my urgency. Big mistake. Let's try again, more casually. An error has occurred……

As long as the technical nous is there If you've ever worked in a commercial kitchen, you probably know what a "bump bar" is. These plank-like computerised boards are the organisational force behind every restaurant, enabling sweat-drenched chefs to see pending orders and ensure a steady flow of food to the front of house.…

Practical jokes: just don't On Call Welcome to another entry in The Register's On Call files, where we learn that the hilarious pranks of an IT joker can be enjoyed as much as millionaire actor George Clooney's "fun" leg-pulling.…

Early users get speed, so policy-makers may stop building, but more users means slower speeds ... Elon Musk's Starlink project has copped more criticism, this time from a researcher at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia-Pacific region.…

First, COVID vaccinations, now atmosphere generators for an alien world? We're really cooking on gas now Earthlings have succeeded in creating oxygen away from their lush home world and on the unforgiving dust planet Mars for the first time, using equipment on a robot they have lovingly dubbed Perseverance.…

Sad news: Cupertino seems to think you won’t be comfortable going out until at least the end of the year COVID-19 vaccinations have been administered to hundreds of millions of people, but Apple seems to think that you'll be safest if you don't go out until at least the end of year.…

Expects breakthroughs in design, materials and more. No pressure: Xi Jinping dropped in ahead of launch China's highest-ranked university has opened a new school dedicated to integrated circuits and given it the job of achieving breakthroughs and creating a generation of tech talent for the nation.…

#FOSS4GOV challenge will fund and mentor devs and startups to create govtech code India has challenged local developers to create open-source customer relationship management and enterprise resource management software worthy of use by its government agencies.…

'The system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn’t tell if there was a driver there at all' Tesla vehicles can be tricked into driving in Autopilot mode when no one is sitting on the driver seat nor controlling the steering wheel – as required by the software – according to Consumer Reports.…

Server chip business doldrums blamed on 'digestion' Intel on Thursday reported first-quarter 2021 revenue of $19.7bn, which was better than analysts expected though not enough to prevent Chipzilla's share price slipping, the stock closed down 1.77 per cent and slipped still further in after-hours trading.…

Storage box maker puts customers on red alert after outbreak in ransomware infections QNAP has urged its customers to install and run its latest firmware and malware removal tools on their NAS boxes amid a surge in ransomware infections.…

Tweets linking to source code were fair use, say digital-rights warriors The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Wednesday sued Proctorio, a maker of academic surveillance software, to obtain judgement that a Miami University student's tweets linking to portions of Proctorio source code on Pastebin do not violate copyright law.…

Software fixes available, says FAA American aviation regulators have ordered private jet operators to install software updates for Garmin collision avoidance units after multiple reports of false alarms – raising the risk of a mid-air crash.…

SQL Server optimisations on way too, but 'Hirsute Hippo' not an LTS release so take-up may be tepid Canonical's love-in with Microsoft has continued apace with the arrival of Ubuntu 21.04, replete with Active Directory integration. Optimisations for Microsoft's SQL Server are also inbound.…

Find out how OutSystems and AWS can help you clean up your legacy Promo Moving your applications and data to the cloud give you the opportunity to revamp your existing software and enable you to reach new customers, drive efficiencies and enhance productivity. If you do it right.…

Once again, the cloud makes it rain Adobe shareholders have approved an executive compensation package that handed CEO Shantanu Narayen a $7m pay bump during fiscal 2020, according to SEC documents.…

Noble aim to curb energy-hungry apps, but needs willing souls to trade performance for efficiency Microsoft is previewing a new Windows developer feature called EcoQoS for reducing power consumption, as well as adding Eco Mode to Task Manager.…

Plus: UiPath and Teradata give investors reason for cheer. Yes, plenty of the wrong people happy on a Thursday in lockdown Former SAP biz Qualtrics has beat expectations by posting a substantial revenue and subscriptions rise amongst three bits of upbeat tech-stock news that indicate fair winds for the market, putting smug smiles on the faces of investors.…

Space-saving structures could work well in 'space missions' An applied maths professor and her team have dreamed up inflatable origami structures they say could save time and energy in erecting emergency shelters, such as those vital to refugee camps.…

Lockdown's getting to everyone – even the social media monkeys British domestic spy agency MI5 wants to dispel the idea it is staffed by martini-quaffing layabouts who spend implausible amounts of time lounging around top-end bars and hotels. It has therefore opened an Instagram account.…

Stressing the ex in x86 Canadian AI chip startup Tenstorrent, which is headed by former top AMD engineers, has picked one of SiFive's latest RISC-V CPU designs for its unconventional machine-learning processors.…

Are you really going to replace that battery, though, kids? Whether it's a chilling situation or a welcome one is up for debate, but what started as an attempt to pare down an operating system to just the browser has become something more fully fledged, as the latest update to 10-year-old* Chrome OS demonstrates.…

Fragmented, inflexible estate? Reach for French outsourcers Capgemini has won a £150m contract with the Student Loan Company (SLC) as the non-profit looks to write the next chapter in a troubled history with information technology.…

Our stellar neighbor's biggest-ever belch would frazzle us Earthlings Astronomers have described the most energetic solar flare yet detected from Proxima Centauri, the Sun's closest stellar neighbor.…

One billboard outside Blairsville, Georgia Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows for Billboards appears to be a thing and, judging by this example of the breed, it is a little under the weather.…

He was there the day Steve Jobs moved off Power PC to Intel, and says the Arm transition looks better Review I was three-quarters of the way through the third rewrite of this review before I remembered I was actually at Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference in 2005 when Steve Jobs got up and said: "Yep, we're going to Intel."…

Too bad there's no suggested solution... oh, wait Apple's AirDrop has a couple of potentially annoying privacy weaknesses that Cupertino is so far refusing to address even though a solution has been offered.…

Improves integration and maturity, not quite the new-buzzword-worthy step-change Virtzilla wants Throughout 2020, VMware told anyone who would listen that its end-user compute products enabled work from anywhere, on any device, with marvellous security, and were therefore just the thing to keep your organisation operating safely during lockdowns and whatever came next.…

Come inside, penguinistas, install that WSL GUI preview, yes, open source is totally winning here Video Microsoft this week released a preview version of Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI, or WSLg, which provides a way to run Linux applications with graphic interfaces on Windows devices.…

China already growing even faster than 13% regional acceleration Asian businesses are set for a security spending spree, according to analyst firm IDC.…

Court finds linked 'U' used on Smart Home app can't be confused with linked 'C' used on overpriced tat Logowatch Huawei has had a big intellectual property win in Europe, defeating an action brought by fashion house Chanel over a new logo it introduced in 2017.…

Come 2025, we're Putin this collaboration to bed Russia's space agency hopes to launch its own orbiting science lab by 2030 after entering talks with NASA to pull out of the International Space Station in the coming years.…

More a declaration of war than turning the tables Updated It is possible to hijack and manipulate Cellebrite's phone-probing software tools by placing a specially crafted file on your handset, it is claimed.…

'Our community does not appreciate being experimented on' says Kroah-Hartman Updated Computer scientists at the University of Minnesota theorized they could sneak vulnerabilities into open-source software – but when they tried subverting the Linux kernel, it backfired spectacularly.…

REvil gang starts publishing designs of what appear to be unreleased products Quanta Computer, an ODM laptop manufacturer and prolific Apple supplier, has now confirmed that digital burglars broke into its systems.…

7.0 out second half of the year Redis Labs has announced a slew of new modules designed to enhance consistency, boost machine learning, and bolster JSON document support in its core open-source database.…

AI exposure fiddling and a party video background to remind you of the fun you aren't having Google has pushed through modifications for that thing that isn't Zoom or Teams. Meet is getting a polish.…

IoT security plan suddenly thrusts into the mainstream Phone, tablet, and IoT gadget makers will have to state when they'll stop providing security updates for new devices entering the market, the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) vowed this morning.…