Former UK.gov spin doctor talks of mess in response to crisis The UK’s Health Secretary put plans to create the test and trace system to combat the spread of COVID-19 back by more than month by needlessly introducing his own targets, the Prime Minister's former advisor claims.…

One charger to rule them all … eventually, maybe The USB Promoter Group has announced the completion of USB Power Delivery Specification Revision 3.1.…

$18bn investment plan also calls for 160 million entertainment customers to become a billion Sony has detailed plans to expand its sensors business and make it more relevant to edge computing and the internet of things, while also outlining growth plans in gaming, anime, and electric cars.…

Demand for 'leccy also lifted by dry season that's seen more farmers pumping water Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has declared a four-month moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, a practice the government has encouraged in the past.…

Four of six current bit barn builds by cloud colossus ring the Indian Ocean Amazon Web Services has announced it’s close to bringing a full three Availability Zone region to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).…

It’s a pathfinder for Toyota’s planned self-driving moon buggy, and tiny compared to Optimus Prime Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will send a transforming robot to the Moon.…

Facebook-owned messaging service says – without irony – that people want companies to hold less personal information WhatsApp has sued India’s government in an attempt to strike down some provisions of the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code that requires messaging services to identify “the first originator” of information if called upon to do so by law enforcement authorities.…

M1RACLES flaw looks more embarrassing than dangerous Apple's Arm-based M1 chip, much ballyhooed for its performance, contains a design flaw that can be exploited to allow different processes to quietly communicate with one another, in violation of operating system security principles.…

Wow, we finally found a fan of XML Documents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office should be in .DOCX format starting from next year – and if you want to stick to PDFs, that will cost extra.…

'Our proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms may lead to unintentional bias and discrimination,' it told SEC Updated An insurance biz has retracted boasts of how it uses AI algorithms to study videos of customers for “non-verbal cues” that their claims are fraudulent. The marketing U-turn came after the ethics of this approach was called publicly and loudly into question.…

Gentoo and Raku call foul Updated Following the Freenode schism last week that saw most of the IRC network's volunteer staff leave to form rival network Libera Chat, Freenode on Tuesday commandeered hundreds of channels used by various open source software projects and fiddled with their permissions.…

'This is why we can't have nice things' A further indignity has been heaped upon Russia's Buran Space Shuttle as images surfaced showing at least one of the surviving Soviet-era spacecraft was defaced by a graffiti "artist".…

For Bezos, clearly the world is not enough The streaming wars have gone up a notch after Amazon confirmed its intent to acquire veteran filmmaker MGM for $8.45bn.…

Faster WebAssembly, and last stages of trial to test Trust Tokens Google has released Chrome 91, and although there's little new on the surface, there are key changes for developers including WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, a Gravity Sensor API, and read-only access to files on the clipboard.…

If only there were an AI to do what Microsoft's engineers don't seem to be able to As Microsoft's public-facing engineers were basking in the, er, glow of the company's Build event, those in the backrooms were scrambling to shore up the cloud giant's perennially wobbling services.…

Explosive Whitehall testimony also reveals former Faculty data scientist Ben Warner’s influence on decision making during national emergency Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, is said to have been instrumental in convincing the UK prime minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings to “hit the panic button and ditch the official plan” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020.…

Raiding the iPhone's parts bin: $$. Making sure users can't upgrade a desktop computer? Priceless Having ripped into Apple's new M1 iMac, the iFixit gang turned its attention to the device's keyboard and the all-important Touch ID sensor. Sensitive eyes may, however, wish to look away from the final repairability score.…

For now it's full send... but what will things look like when the smoke clears? It’s almost over. On Monday, Epic Games and Apple wrapped up their arguments in the high-stakes bench trial taking place in Oakland’s Federal Court.…

The CIO does not decide how soon you need to respond. 'The person who decides is the attacker' QCon Plus Automated testing and rapid deployment are critical to defending against vulnerabilities in open source software, said David Wheeler, director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation.…

What do I do for a living? I'm a marketing exec. Yeah, didn't think you'd have any questions Like ticket inspectors on a London bus, people who work for MI6 could be anyone, and are #secretlyjustlikeyou. We see no reason why our readers shouldn’t put themselves up for the job (just remember to tip us off securely here when you’re tasked with making Vista work “just one more year” on a dusty PC behind a red door at SIS HQ.)…

Unclear if 'space' is on the green, amber or red list Good news for wannabe Brit rocket operators: regulations have finally arrived before UK lawmakers aimed at allowing commercial operators to launch from local soil.…

Bug-hunting industry wants to know a bit more before doing that, though Businesses operating in the word of infosec have been urged to write to the Home Office and support a public interest defence being added to the Computer Misuse Act.…

Poorly defined business requirements, failure in documentation, independent report finds An independent review of a technology failure that led to the loss of 413,000 records of evidence from the UK’s Police National Computer (PNC) has found a lack of reviews and effective testing contributed to the debacle.…

Pumice-like stuff spotted by Japanese Hayabusa2 probe would float on water Asteroid Ryugu, the rock from which Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe brought home some samples, is home to highly porous boulders that might just have been the stuff of which planets were made.…

24 out of 26 tools vulnerable – with bonus JavaScript attack for Adobe A pair of techniques to surreptitiously alter the content of certified PDFs have been detailed by researchers in Germany.…

Drive looks to be an industrial model, so probably not a wider threat Cisco has named Micron as the supplier of solid-state disks that put themselves to sleep after 28,224 hours of operation.…

Sixth big outage in seven weeks, this time users were unable to access more than a dozen services IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.…

Hasn't said which brands have signed up, but is happy to have them make 2G and 3G kit for a decade Analysis Pakistan has announced it has secured 19 cellphone manufacturers willing to work on its soil, and that their efforts will improve device affordability and availability for locals and help the nation’s prospects as a tech exporter.…

Unauthenticated remote code execution possible thanks to vSphere Client bug VMware has revealed a critical bug that can be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in the very core of a virtualised system – vCenter Server.…

Meanwhile, fans may enjoy Linux GUI apps on Windows Subsystem for Linux Build Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened day one of the company's Build 2021 conference, virtual again this year, with a pitch to be the platform for platform creators.…

It started out as an innocent book store and now it's Barnes & Ignoble The District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday, claiming the internet goliath is illegally abusing its power to manipulate online retail prices and screw over merchants.…

If you want to be happy at work, never meet more than twice a day If you want to make a software developer's day, don't interrupt, minimize meetings, and encourage moments of self-reflection. By doing so you may enhance productivity and promote worker retention, according to GitHub's latest research.…

It will even keep working if Microsoft's cloud has an outage, honest Build At its virtual Build 2021 event, Microsoft has introduced features in Arc, its hybrid-cloud system for centralized management of Kubernetes clusters and other services, that will now run selected Azure services on-premises, including App Service, Logic Apps, and Function Apps.…

Also: Blockchain Ledger for Azure SQL Database Build Microsoft's attempts to bring Cosmos DB to the masses continued at Build 2021 as Redmond threw emulators and freebies at developers, while the more sober world of Azure SQL Database was given the Ledger treatment.…

How low (code) can you go? Build Any souls wondering what Microsoft would do with its GPT-3 investment have been given an answer with a Power Fx update lightly seasoned with the AI tech.…

Iron Oak fails to convince the Feds that Patent Board misinterpreted key phrase in the patent Samsung, Microsoft, and Google have prevailed at US Federal Appeal Court [PDF] in a patent battle with Iron Oak Technologies.…

Says privacy and freedom of expression breached, but upholds sending surveillance product to foreign countries Surveillance laws permitting GCHQ to operate its Tempora dragnet mass surveillance system broke the law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.…

Updated Toolkit, new Developer Portal, custom Together Mode themes ... but not what users ask for most Build Microsoft has introduced new features and developer tooling for Teams, calling it (along with Microsoft 365) a platform for "a new class of apps designed for hybrid work."…

Refund rights for customers The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has reached agreement with antivirus vendor McAfee that means some customers whose software subscription was automatically renewed will be able to get a refund.…

Ampere’s Altra gets the gig at a cent-per CPU hour, with managed K8s for starters, managed MySQL coming soon Oracle has made good on its promise to fire up an Arm-powered cloud by revealing it will offer Ampere's 80-core Altra processors for one US cent per hour per core.…

MPs ignore calls for regulation to help contractors MPs in the UK’s Parliament decided not to select amendments to the 2021 Finance Bill designed to offer contractors protection from rogue umbrella companies accused of skimming off pay and holding back holiday pay.…

Homegrown code spotted in the wild Google’s Fuchsia operating system has started winging its way to real-life devices, with owners of the company’s 2018 Nest Hub the first to get the upgrade.…

Processor core among raft of designs for upcoming devices Arm will today unveil two trinities – a family of three CPU cores, and a family of three GPU cores – for system-on-chips powering future laptops, smartphones, smart home entertainment equipment, and similar gear.…

No alarms, no surprises We’ve crossed the point where teardowns of Apple’s computers cease to be a genuine assessment of fixability, and become an intellectual exercise into seeing how they’re built. iFixit’s preliminary teardown of the 24-inch M1 iMac is a good example of this.…

Hålp, I äm stuck in emergency möde Bork!Bork!Bork! Nature is healing and bork has returned to the wild. Or at least nestled within the plastic greenery in a Birmingham Ikea.…

'The decision was made to return an error message that gave people an ability to contact us' Interview Last December, the Python development team overseeing the Python Package Index (PyPI) temporarily disabled the search endpoint on its XML-RPC API because its infrastructure has been overwhelmed by "abusive clients."…

You've heard of Continuous Integration – how about Continuous Review for your Jamstack? Interview Netlify has acquired FeaturePeek, a system for simplifying the flow of feedback on web application previews and prototypes.…

November scripting error havoc finally fixed Around three weeks late — a fairly good result for anything to do with the UK government's Home Office IT — technology professionals have been able to recover all of the 413,000 records of evidence deleted from the Police National Computer (PNC) in January this year.…

Also steps into future by allowing plug to be pulled on 2G networks The Republic of Korea took two bold steps into the future on Tuesday, by announcing that the last of its 2G networks will go offline in June and that it will initiate large-scale adoption of communications protected by quantum encryption.…

Acquisition expected to complete in April 2022, empty positions can't be filled until then Exclusive Arm has entered an engineering hiring freeze that may last until April 2022 when it expects its acquisition by Nvidia to complete.…