The Register

ISP denies wrongdoing, notes how difficult it is to get wires to rural areas ISP Frontier Communications was sued on Wednesday by the US Federal Trade Commission and law enforcement agencies six states for allegedly misrepresenting the speed of its internet service and for billing customers for service it didn't provide.…

And that's why we've let humans take back control Twitter said its AI-powered image-cropping algorithm is slightly biased in favor of White people and women after all, and has taken steps to ditch its reliance on the machine-learning code.…

Crown Prince and network boss Andrew Lee disputes claims made by those leaving the internet chat community Most of the volunteer staff of Freenode, an internet relay chat (IRC) network dating back to 1995, have resigned in protest over what they describe as a hostile takeover of the chat service.…

Honor, iQOO,OPPO, Realme, Xiaomi, Motorola onboard so far Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 778G 5G system-on-chip for next generation mid-to-high-end smartphones at its annual 5G Summit, which kicked off on Wednesday.…

Time to rethink your data protection strategy Webcast We don’t think anyone goes out of their way not to protect their data. But if you’ve embraced the cloud without taking a long hard look at your data protection and recovery policies, you could be doing just that.…

Fortnite maker 'has no factual, expert, or legal support for its theory' Apple is seeking to dismiss one of the fundamental claims in its long-running legal spat with Epic Games.…

'We feel bad about what happened' The sound of rumbling rubber could be heard today as Salesforce threw an engineer responsible for a change that knocked it offline under a passing bus.…

Google Cloud Run envy? AWS has introduced App Runner, with immediate general availability, for quick deployment of container-based applications.…

'Government's got to take responsibility for this,' rages opposition MP A statutory public inquiry will be held into the Post Office Horizon scandal, the UK government said today – and MPs want to know why Fujitsu has largely been out of the limelight in the case so far.…

Google Pixel phone not required Google has flicked "publish" on its Android 12 beta, with the bleeding-edge OS winging its way to enrolled devices.…

Probe's cams show red planet's surface while clips capture descent The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released images and video snapped during the landing process and checkout of its Zhurong Mars rover.…

New MagicBook 14 and 15 include 11th-gen Intel chippery, Xe graphics The Reg hasn't heard much from Honor since it broke away from parent company Huawei last November. Save for a fitness band here, or a China-exclusive phone there, it's been rather quiet on the Western Front.…

Being slow to patch just means you'll get pwned faster Attackers began scanning for vulnerabilities just five minutes after Microsoft announced there were four zero-days in Exchange Server, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Tweak only affects shared runners and new users signed up after 17 May In a bid to tackle cryptocurrency miners slurping free pipeline minutes, GitLab will expect users to provide a valid credit or debit card number to use shared runners on its platform.…

Multi-cloud for data is too complicated Analyst house Gartner has warned users not to mix and match data management products from the three largest cloud hyperscalers.…

The biggest challenge? 'Backwards compatibility of features that we might not even know we have' Interview Python creator Guido van Rossum last week introduced a project to make CPython, the official implementation, five times faster in four years. Now Mark Shannon – one of the three initial members of the project – has opened up about the why and the how.…

But beware the SLA: Just how much would an outage actually cost you? Microsoft has added another 9 to its availability guarantee for Azure Key Vault, taking the service to 99.99 per cent availability.…

Dude, where's my unlocked bootloader? It's a sad, pointless, and frankly wasteful cycle. You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another. The old phone goes into a drawer, where it sits until you eventually get around to recycling it.…

Tested.me Ltd broke the PECR, says Information Commissioner's Office The UK's data watchdog has fined a company £8,000 for sending 84,000 direct marketing emails without consent to people who had provided their personal data for contact tracing purposes.…

Hounds can sniff out SIM cards that a human might miss Australia's Federal Police (AFP) is getting more help from some very good boys with four paws, wagging tails, and the ability to sniff out tech equipment with their highly sensitive noses.…

'Constructive comment ranking model' can detect bias, promote respectful contributions, already zaps 20,000 posts a day Yahoo! Japan has flicked the switch on an AI-driven comment-moderation-as-a-service API.…

Guess they'll let anyone in here The trustworthiness of Google's Chrome Store was again called into question after an extension billing itself as Microsoft Authenticator was published by the software souk without the simplest of checks.…

Even World of Warcraft is getting on the RISC-y bandwagon Oracle has teased a further tie-up with Arm server processor aspirant Ampere Computing, perhaps around the latter's upcoming Altra Max silicon that comes in 10 variants packing up to 128 CPU cores and running at speeds between 2.4 and 3GHz.…

Intrusion believed to have entered through email New Zealand's Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has been hit with a strain of ransomware that took down most IT services Tuesday morning and drastically reduced services at six of its affiliate hospitals.…

Who could possibly have predicted that developers would shun two small ecosystems? Samsung and Google have decided to combine their wearable operating system efforts in what looks like an admission that developers don't care about either.…

Without harming the ad business, natch Google IO At Google IO 2021 on Tuesday, the ad giant reiterated its web privacy commitments and talked up technologies aimed at narrowing the performance gap between web apps and their native counterparts.…

Banks told not to transact, web platforms blocked from hosting or advertising, citizens told to look elsewhere for investments Beijing has all but banned cryptocurrencies.…

It was just so good, we're cannibalizing it for parts, says Redmond Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10X, its somewhat streamlined operating system initially designed for a new wave of dual-screen mobile PCs, is being killed off.…

Great, another tech thing that sounds like 'lambda' Google IO Google today opened its developer conference, the aptly named Google IO, with a somber nod to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.…

Hash rate halved for 'LHR' cards in fresh bid to force down outrageous retail prices Nvidia says it will slash the cryptocurrency-mining abilities of newly made RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards.…

Just dealing with the aftermath The Colonial Pipeline is in a bit of trouble again. The oil conduit that shut down this month after its operators were hit with ransomware suffered glitches with its technology on Tuesday while trying to sort out its IT woes.…

Hint: He doesn't care if you personally think it's rubbish, and here's why A Russian spymaster has denied that his agency carried out the infamous SolarWinds supply chain attack in a public relations move worthy of the Internet Research Agency.…

Who's recommending investment? The man who already has a $1bn stake Wikipedia says MicroStrategy is a company that provides business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services, but that wouldn't be the first outdated information on the crowdsourced knowledge repository.…

Oh, and remember when Tim Sweeney himself demonstrated Metal API? Awks Three weeks have passed since the high-stakes California bench trial between Epic Games and Apple commenced. On Monday, it was the turn of Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow and former senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, to take the stand.…

And you're invited to speak your brains on Computer Misuse Act changes +Comment The British government has vowed to create a legally binding cybersecurity framework for managed service providers (MSPs) – and if you want to tell gov.UK what you think, you've only got a few weeks to act.…

Demand growing for scale-y transactional monster, say analysts YouTube-developed distributed relational database Vitess is getting a DBaaS makeover, putting it in the hands of developers without having to worry about engaging with a DBA.…

Tries to tempt penguins with Ring Crypto 1Password has unveiled a full-featured desktop app for Linux, written in Rust and using the ring crypto library for end-to-end encryption.…

'For sophisticated problems, only a human expert will figure it out' A new component of AWS Systems Manager aims to assist with handling incidents.…

Talking up AWS deal as market says: Yes, OK Good old fashioned perpetual licence sales helped Micro Focus turn an unexceptional six months worth of trading figures into something more acceptable by moderating declines in group revenue.…

'Some patients' conditions deteriorated and they had to be admitted to hospital' UK pharmaceuticals supplier Healthcare at Home (HAH) missed 10,000 medicine deliveries from October to December 2020 following a change of IT systems, a mistake that left some patients needing hospital treatment.…

Unlocked firmware and some intriguing design choices – but the price is high With an air of inevitability, System76 - the maker of laptops for Linux users - has produced its first mechanical keyboard. It looks great but cheap it is not.…

Big Red product only went live in 2019, but commissioner is ready to ditch it Cheshire Police has awarded mid-scale ERP vendor Unit4 a £3m two-year contract to replace a troubled Oracle implementation, which only went live on the latest Fusion software in 2019.…

Lessons have been learned – now there's a bucket for Windows to be poorly into Bork!Bork!Bork! A déjà vu of the borked variety landed on our desk today as another automated key-cutting machine housed in a Do-It-Yourself emporium shows its true colours: white on blue.…

That 41% 2020 regional revenue growth lagged US and APAC. Sources claim HQ expected higher returns Exclusive Google Cloud’s global sales president has assumed temporary control of operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) following the exit of Chris Ciauri some 20 months after he took the job.…

Boffins find increasing MAC address randomization protection with mobiles In 2017, US Naval Academy researchers found that MAC address randomization in mobile devices was largely worthless as a privacy defense. Three years later, the same research group took another look and found that while there's been meaningful improvement, many phones still fail to effectively prevent MAC address-based tracking.…

One going all the way from Mumbai to Italy, the other is Singapore-bound Indian telecoms conglomerate Reliance Jio has announced it will build two submarine cables to help it satisfy India’s appetite for data.…

Late to the party, but free tier for multi-person vid chats handily tops Zoom Readers who find themselves performing tech support for friends and family have a new challenge: Microsoft has created a free version of its Teams collaboration tool for home use.…

Paper-thin OLED screens collapse impressively Vid 'n' pics Samsung has revealed foldable and rollable displays at the Society for Information Display (SID) annual exhibition.…

Virtual world ethics and industry development also on the agenda South Korea has created a “metaverse alliance” of local companies to foster the development of a national virtual and augmented reality platform and sort out the ethics of virtual environments.…

No US listing, no worries, for 939-million-customer colosso-telco that’s big on OpenStack Mega-carrier China Mobile has announced its intention to seek a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and spend the proceeds on a cloudy infrastructure refresh and new “information services”.…