The Register

Attempts tech fix to solve aging crisis The Japanese government is splashing ¥2bn ($19m, £14m) to fund digital dating services powered by AI technology in an attempt to boost the country’s flagging birth rate.…

Upgraded collab environment offers worthy post-COVID tweaks, also relies on oldies like Presence Cisco has upgraded its Webex collaboration suite in ways it hopes will both boost productivity in the post-COVID age and meet the 2020 moment by "giving everybody a voice" and making online meetings "10x better" than the real world.…

Because freedom, maybe also because it would make blocking their stuff easier Analysis The world’s top tech companies have taken Cambodia to task over its plan to introduce a government-controlled internet bottleneck that would be the sole point of entry to the nation.…

Suggests industry form a task force to do something eventually Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on his nation’s industries to get better at recycling electronics.…

Not a great look Cybersecurity corp FireEye has confessed its most secure servers have been compromised, almost certainly by state-backed hackers who then made away with its proprietary hacking tools.…

Donald-appointed jurist says Uncle Sam 'likely overstepped' authority, 'acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner' The Trump administration has lost yet another legal decision in its efforts to force Chinese video app TikTok to sell off its US interests purportedly for national security reasons.…

For those who want to turn the price tag up to 11, or $549 Apple today embarked upon another skirmish into the world of over-ear headphones with the launch of the AirPods Max.…

Light load from Redmond as everyone else seeks to bury bad news, sorry, align in update cadence Patch Tuesday For December's Patch Tuesday bug bonanza, Microsoft handed out fixes for a mere 58 vulnerabilities while various other orgs addressed shortcomings in their own software in separate, parallel announcements.…

Plus: Yet another UK.gov bod demands end-to-end encryption is broken Tutanota has been served with a court order to backdoor its encrypted email service – a situation founder Matthias Pfau described to The Register as "absurd."…

Don't drop this one It's what's inside that counts. That was the conclusion when we reviewed Huawei's Mate 40 Pro earlier this year, which was spectacular from a hardware perspective, but hamstrung by the absence of the Google Play Store.…

Wenn Sie sie nicht schlagen können, schließen Sie sich ihnen an SAP is trying to take on the upstarts slurping customer spending with sales pitches for workflow, low-code and robotic process automation tech.…

'Adopting these may have legal and policy implications' Web infrastructure company Cloudflare is pushing for the adoption of new internet protocols it says will enable a "privacy-respecting internet".…

Processors are 'critical to future products', set to perform tasks for host systems Seagate says it has, after several years of effort, designed two custom RISC-V processor cores for what seems a range of functions including computational storage.…

Welcome to the GitHub Universe Microsoft's GitHub has revised its financial plumbing to allow corporate customers to contribute cash to favored open-source projects via GitHub's existing billing setup.…

Emotions post-migration among the IT team included 'shock, refusal, rational understanding, and acceptance' A German IT services outfit specialising in the insurance market has migrated 500 IBM Db2 databases to the EnterpriseDB (EDB) iteration of Postgres in a sign of life after proprietary wares.…

Certain ZBook Studio G7 and Book Create G7 models ready to get number crunching out of the box Christmas might have come early for data scientists and analysts as HP is to start selling a selection of its laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything you need to crunch numbers and build AI models.…

Also: Teams Calling, PowerToys and a Windows 95 sweater for the patient In Brief Sadly not an oblique reference to the Val Kilmer 1984 cinematic vehicle, Azure has launched the altogether more serious Azure Government Top Secret: a new cloud to serve customers dealing with Top Secret classified data.…

Developer: 'I find security an insufferably boring procedural hindrance.' Oh dear. Maybe Rust can help? A new survey of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) contributors, conducted by the Linux Foundation and academic researchers, reported that 91 per cent of respondents are male, the great majority has full-time paid employment, and that they spend on average under 3 per cent of their time on security issues, with little inclination to increase it.…

Some of us actually have work to do Updated You'd hope that a gaggle of racist crackpots storming a mountain to push over an innocent sculpture would be the end of it, but no. The cheeky 2020 monolith continues to sprout globally.…

Fears of bias put compsci dept into damage-limitation mode after years of using it to analyze applications A university announced it has ditched a machine-learning tool used to filter thousands of PhD applications – right as the software's creators were giving a talk about the code and drawing public criticism.…

For those teeny, tiny, migraine-inducing nuts and bolts Bork!Bork!Bork! A bork of a different nature today, as we find evidence of the curse cropping up not in the usual places, but instead lurking within digital-based terms and conditions.…

Messsage Center: Call this number. Number: Use the Message Center. Many companies have no mechanism to deal with a common problem: when users open accounts using someone else's email address, either by accident or design. "I have had a barrage of account creation requests that will fail ... also a large number of invoices, warranty emails and so on for purchases, from furniture to electronics," a reader informed us.…

However, this same nitty-gritty ERP stuff is not cloud-ready, and that's the big vendor's weakness Comment Among the fads of the last couple of years have been the bolting on of AI, automation and “user experience” onto enterprise application work-horses. The pressure to follow the trend has been so strong that SAP, Microsoft and Oracle have all jumped on the bandwagon to ensure their products look suitably on-trend.…

He had, and inspired, The Right Stuff Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager has died, aged 97.…

New release of Cloud Pak coming soon, but VMware and Micro Focus are way out in front In October 2020, IBM bet the business on hybrid cloud. But analyst firm Forrester has just rated Big Blue a mere "contender" for hybrid cloud management, well behind market leaders.…

Kicks in $400m to get its hands on future tech and cash in on its contribution Uber has driven its self-driving car operation up an off-ramp that leads to the offices of a startup named Aurora that is building self-driving trucks and plans to eventually get around to the kind of vehicles used by Uber drivers.…

Maybe don't enter unless you fancy reading colossal piles of sanctions rules Iran has asked for bids to provide the nation with a bug bounty program.…

Requires the bleeding obvious to be pointed out,calls for more regulation India is worried about fantasy sports and will regulate their operation and advertising on television.…

Rebekah Jones claimed Sunshine State fudged infection numbers, now she's suspected of hacking Florida's state police on Monday morning raided the home of coronavirus tracker Rebekah Jones, seizing her electronics at gunpoint as part of a computer hacking investigation.…

Nathan Simington not qualified, they claim, and installed to create deadlock Two leading Democratic senators and a range of advocacy groups have condemned a partisan effort to force through confirmation of a new FCC commissioner.…

So, you know, patch it The NSA reckons Russian government hackers are actively abusing a critical security hole in VMWare's software to infiltrate victims' networks. Sysadmins are urged to deploy the necessary patch as soon as possible.…

'Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform' vuln deemed 'important, spoofing' rather than, say, 'aaargh!' Updated At some point since August, Microsoft quietly fixed a cross-site scripting (XSS) bug in its Teams web app that opened the door to a serious remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Linux, macOS, and Windows desktop versions of its Teams collaboration app.…

IAC calls foul over Chrome extensions spat, complicated by antitrust case Google wants to eradicate Chrome extensions it believes mislead and misdirect users toward competing search engine Ask.com, though is wary of doing so because of how it may look to antitrust investigators, according to a report on Sunday.…

Plus: Fault-prone iPhone 11 display? Send it in, says Apple Apple released iOS 14.2 last month, with a laundry list of 24 security updates some of which were being exploited in the wild, leading The Reg to urge users to patch ASAP. Those sensible souls who heeded the call, however, were gifted with 100 new emoji, dark-mode wallpapers, and, according to users of certain older devices, rapid battery drain.…

Only on Windows of course, and only for certain types of deployment Microsoft will add the .NET Core and .NET 5.0 runtimes to the update service built into Windows - but enterprises must opt in, and applications have to be deployed using a shared runtime for this to be effective.…

Also: Orion challenges and a quarter century since SOHO's launch In Brief As the Chinese Chang'e-5 mission sent its precious payload of lunar dirt into space, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin kicked off a fourth thrust chamber test series of the BE-7 engine, which will power the National Team Human Landing System (HLS) for NASA's Artemis program.…

Updates for Chromium, the addition of PulseAudio and printer improvements turn up in Santa's Raspberry sack The Raspberry Pi team has served up yet another reason to prematurely unbox the Pi-under-the-tree with an update to the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS.…

Community service for creepy constable A police constable has been sacked after reportedly tracking down young women motorists through their car numberplates and propositioning them on social media.…

The week's other security news In Brief It looks like the Egregor crew is at it again, and this time the ransomware-flingers have caught venerable but struggling US retail biz Kmart.…

Big screen fondleslab action for 20H2 slides into 2021 Microsoft has applied the brakes to the roll-out of the latest Windows 10 to the Surface Hub 2S after customers reported problems following installation.…

Arriving from a listed at-risk nation? New rules in place mid-December IT pros have joined the elite of high-flying biz execs, sports stars, and celebrity actors in qualifying for UK.gov's exemptions to two-week Covid-19 self-isolation rules when returning to England from listed at-risk nations.…

Agrees to acquire UK outfit IMImobile for $730m US networking giant Cisco has agreed to buy London-based cloud comms business IMImobile in a $730m (roughly £550m) all-cash deal.…

Not sure what it's supposed be saying but it probably isn't 0x00000050 Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork is on wheels yet again as we visit Ireland and a very unhappy bit of mobile signage.…

On the other hand, they're not going anywhere, so it's win-win for Big Red Thoughts of future projects and upgrade paths have given way to more pressing business-wide concerns about Brexit and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, according to the UK Oracle User Group.…

It's just Apple doing what Apple does best. Making loads of money by tending to its Walled Garden Apple Silicon has been the autumn’s hottest news in cool chips. Giving Intel two years’ notice, the first laptop and desktop with the new Arm-based M1 chip have shipped and the benchmarks run. If you believe some of the more febrile headlines, Apple has upended the industry, sparked a revolution and changed the face of computing forever.…

Who is the debugger that took down my mainframe? Who, Me? Take a step back half a century with a cautionary tale of mainframes, student enthusiasm, and a shrinking deck of cards. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Bad design bites as Flight Centre's policy of no credit card or passport numbers in app's free text field was not enforced, therefore ignored Be careful what you wish for when running a hackathon, because one in Australia turned up a data breach in the trove of sample data offered to hackers. And it was probably developers’ fault.…

Catch up on these Intel webinars and learn what AI and 5G mean for you Promo The last 12 months have seen technology leaders grapple with unprecedented change – but only the most naïve would expect things to slow down in 2021.…

Plus: US President signs a new executive order on AI and how JAX is becoming more popular at DeepMind In brief A Canadian security company apparently lied to officials at New York’s Lockport City School District about the accuracy of its facial recognition cameras, when the technology was installed across schools last year.…

Probe now sets sail for further adventures VIDS ‘N’ PICS Japanese and Australian astroboffins have successfully recovered samples taken from Asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa2 probe.…