The Register

Nice but still not good enough, says union After years of aggressively fighting any efforts to force it to recognize its drivers as employees, on Tuesday Uber performed a U-turn on the streets of Britain and agreed to recognize all of its drivers as working for the company rather than serving as freelancers.…

Another rough day for Jack Ma as Beijing continues big tech crackdown Beijing has pulled Alibaba’s UC Browser from Chinese app stores amid accusations of unfair play and a government crackdown on tech.…

Foxconn-owned outfit claimed non-existent sales as revenue. Apologies and promises to do better all ‘round Foxconn-owned Sharp has re-issued recent financial results after it found that its subsidiary Kantatsu cooked the books.…

Security precautions held up, but Putin himself signed off on efforts to scare the public with claims of voting system compromise The USA’s Office of National Intelligence today released its previously classified assessment of “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections” and found “some successful compromises of state and local government networks prior to Election Day—as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts”.…

State privacy rules add pressure on lawmakers to craft national standards California has expanded its consumer privacy law to include a prohibition on the use of deceptive messaging and presentation, or "dark patterns," in the limited context of opting out of the sale of personal information.…

Judge Lucy Koh allows legal challenge to move forward Netizens who say Google continued to track them around the web even when using Chrome's incognito mode can proceed with their privacy lawsuit against the internet giant, a judge has ruled.…

Awesome, oh wow, like totally freak me out ... with this unexpected use of AI A 50-year-old mother allegedly used machine-learning software to generate fake footage of her young daughter's cheerleader rivals naked, drinking booze, and vaping in a bid to drive them out of their squad.…

Mukund Mohan invented employees, financial figures in application forms A former Microsoft executive has admitted he tried to rip off the US government by claiming $5.5m in COVID-19 funding for a string of fake businesses.…

America ranks behind China, South Korea and even.... Great Britain in spectrum availability Establishing US supremacy in 5G will require the release of more spectrum, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr claimed in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute this week.…

Epic Games CEO slaps PR move ahead of court case Come July 1, 2021, Google will reduce the service fee it charges Android developers from 30 per cent to 15 per cent, though only on the first $1m in Google Play revenue.…

Zero Touch? Probably the only way to use a Mac keyboard Admins pondering how to manage those shiny Apple Macs that employees keep asking for now have an additional Zero Touch enrolment option courtesy of directory outfit JumpCloud.…

'This is of historical interest. Adobe isn’t really worried about this, it is automation' The chief security officer for F-Secure, Mikko Hyppönen, had a Twitter account suspended after linking to a download of Adobe Acrobat for DOS, first released in 1993.…

Learn how to balance customer experience, transformation, and clients' changing needs Promo 2020 was the year of customer experience (CX) transformation, forcing even the most reluctant customers to rely on digital to interact with companies due to limited in-person interactions and overwhelmed call-centers.…

Complete with nervous warnings: how much chaos is too much? AWS has rolled out its Fault Injection Simulator (FIS), designed to introduce deliberate faults into its cloud services so that users can test the resilience of their applications.…

Baked-in mmWave support may improve figures with more deployments 5G performance on the iPhone 12 range trails that of competing Android devices, according to a report from OpenSignal.…

2022 Snapdragon chipset aimed at high-performance ultraportables Qualcomm said today that its new internally designed CPUs are expected to sample in the second half of 2022 as it completed the purchase of chip designer Nuvia.…

'Other languages may claim that they're vying for the top dog position, but at the end of the day Java is just so prevalent' Oracle on Tuesday plans to release Oracle JDK 16, Big Red's implementation of the Java 16 specification for the Java SE platform, sporting 17 distinct enhancements.…

[Insert benchmark disclaimer here] but the tl;dr is 'shop around' Amid the sound of public clouds tumbling earthwards comes a report that puts AMD chips ahead of Intel in the cloud CPU benchmark arena.…

Google reveals how much personal data' collected in Chrome, Google app. 'No wonder they wanted to hide it' Google's Apple-mandated privacy labels for its Chrome and Search apps on iOS have drawn criticism from tiny search rival DuckDuckGo, which tweeted "no wonder they wanted to hide it."…

It's already a great week at Redmond Microsoft has taken the increasingly normal step of releasing an out-of-band update to deal with the printer issue it introduced last week.…

Researchers to bask in 100+ days of continuous sunlight Russia and China have signed an agreement to collaborate on the construction of an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) on the Moon's south pole.…

'It had nothing whatsoever to do with the claimant's country of birth', rules Employment Tribunal A former asylum seeker with a postgraduate degree in cybersecurity who alleged his bosses were spying on him for MI5 has lost his attempt to claim he was racially discriminated against.…

Tiny golden balls may help unravel mysteries of nature's weakest force at a quantum level It might not have occured to rock lugging early humans in the Stone Age that gravity is a relatively weak force, but it is.…

Bork terminates at London Victoria Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork disappears up its own fundament today with a return to the place where it all began – a BSOD at London Victoria Station.…

Last-ditch effort to win votes comes one week from .uk operator's EGM In what looks like a desperate last-minute attempt to keep his job, Mark Wood, the chairman of .uk internet registry operator Nominet, has claimed that a vote to fire him would cause the British government to intervene.…

Offline access for Virtual Apps and Desktops also in the works Citrix is planning to make its Virtual Apps and Desktop Service (CVADS) more portable under an effort called “Project Bifrost.”…

Microsoft's new browser dials up the release cadence Having hitched its wagon firmly to Google's, Microsoft is to join the four-week and eight-week release cycle cadence that is now in the offing for its Edge browser.…

The best in DevOps, Containers and CI/CD, at a venue of your choice Event Whether the past 12 months has seen you accelerate your organisation’s digital transformation or work flat out just to keep the lights on, it’s time to take stock, share stories and think about what comes next.…

South China Morning Post's ownership up in the air as HK democracy erodes further The Chinese government has asked Alibaba to give up some of its holdings, including Hong Kong's top English daily newspaper The South China Morning Post.…

Say goodbye to the lovely cleaner air we've been breathing for a year The COVID-19 pandemic has passed the one-year mark, and as vaccines roll out, there is light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Here's something to dampen the spirits, though: global air pollution levels are rising, thanks to increased human activity.…

Facebook signs deal to send cash to News Corporation’s Australian mastheads and Fox News wannabe Facebook and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have struck a deal under Australia’s laws that require The Social Network™ to either send money to local news publishers or face the prospect of being dragged into an arbitration process.…

Reportedly dangles same deal as Apple’s for smaller devs, in one of the few markets it doesn’t utterly dominate Google’s South Korean limb is reportedly on the cusp of slashing the cost of selling apps on its Play store.…

In two to four years, and there's no danger, NASA tells The Reg The most massive chunk of junk yet was just ejected from the International Space Station – though, don’t worry, the 2.9-ton crate containing old batteries shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance. It is expected to harmlessly burn up in Earth’s atmosphere two to four years from now.…

Sky Global’s Jean-Francois Eap denies any wrongdoing The CEO of Sky Global – which sold encryption chat software with customized smartphones – has come out fighting after Uncle Sam charged him with knowingly assisting the international drug smuggling trade.…

Chocolate Factory still stomping bugs out of its bird-themed post-third-party-cookie features Updated Google's effort at "building a privacy-first future for web advertising" already looks like it will require some privacy retrofitting.…

Core counts and clock speed about the same though architecture work said to bring performance boost AMD on Monday showed off its family of third-generation Epyc server processors code-named Milan.…

Redmond says gremlin identified tho rollback is taking longer than expected Updated Microsoft's Azure Active Directory (AAD) service broke down on Monday for at least some customers, thereby preventing affected Azure users from logging into and authenticating with the cloud giant's services.…

Spend your cash on real locks, advises Cranfield University Installing a smart doorbell on your abode could actually increase your home's attractiveness to burglars, researchers from Britain's Cranfield University have said.…

Yep. Gadget botherers had to haul out a 'specialist tool' Released in China last year, and about to drop in the UK, the Xiaomi Mi 11 drew attention because of its status as the debut device for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset. Now it has got the interest of right-to-repair campaigners iFixit for different reasons altogether.…

Space: Not all its cracked up to be Bad news for astronauts and cosmonauts alike: The International Space Station (ISS) is continuing to lose pressure after Russian attempts to patch cracks in the outpost's hole have failed to stem leaks.…

Developers adopting latest and greatest will have to tangle with XAML Microsoft has released its second preview of .NET 6, but confirmed there will be no visual designer for WinUI 3.0 when it comes out in November this year.…

But what does this actually mean? Join us to find out Webcast It’s almost a cliché to say that in the past 12 months we’ve seen technological transitions that should have taken years happen in a few weeks, whether it’s a shift to remote working or the embrace of the cloud.…

Market as a whole swelled 7% in 2020, as COVID-smacked nations built out networks, says analyst The global market for telecoms equipment grew 7 per cent during 2020, according to an analyst report, in a year marked by an increased dependence on Internet connectivity and widespread 5G deployments.…

If you want floating Pis, check out the International Space Station Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has dismissed speculation over a possible stock market float, telling The Register: "It's not something we're actively pursuing."…

Go-live deadline of 2019 whooshed by - and that's going to cost taxpayer £173m Stability problems with the UK Border Crossing system meant only 300 staff were able to use the delayed software in December last year, well short of the 7,000 expected to use it by June 2021, according to a report by MPs.…

HMRC shuffles the pork barrel again UK tax collector Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs is looking to have a friendly chat with tech vendors as part of its plan to contract £23.1bn in "mobility services".…

Plus: Verkada flaw finder cuffed and Apple boss may have leaked secrets In brief It's looking like the exploitation of critical Exchange flaws that Microsoft revealed at the start of the month could be much worse than folks first suspected.…

Judge rules 'Communist Chinese Military Company' designation 'arbitrary and capricious' Stocks in Beijing-based electronics outfit Xiaomi leapt today after the firm was given a preliminary injunction removing it from a Trump-era US blacklist targeting "Communist Chinese Military Companies" (CCMC).…

Org was originally supposed to launch in 2022 – then a pandemic happened The UK's £158m Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre (VMIC) has an "urgent requirement" for a £7m SaaS ERP system as the facility's launch is being accelerated due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.…

Can they pull it off? They sure know how to code. Straddling the agnostic position of consultants with the ardor of a vendor may be harder Feature India’s outsourcers grew and grew by working on other peoples’ software.…