The Register

'Rigorous' exam first, then take a freebie assessment once a year from home Microsoft is updating its certification system to one that requires an annual renewal as it eyes the rapidly changing tech landscape.…

A special Dunstone-friendly deal, how about that? TalkTalk has agreed to a £1.1bn takeover from Toscafund, its second-largest existing shareholder after company founder Sir Charles Dunstone and private equity fund Penta Capital.…

And police are backsliding on vital legal paperwork, warns body Three UK law enforcement agents blew the whistle about unlawful state surveillance to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s office – and one of those incidents was bad enough for the investigation to still be ongoing today.…

One Government Value Agreement working as intended, we see The UK's Home Office has handed AWS a fresh four-year hosting contract worth up to £120m under the One Government Value Agreement, just weeks after the Department for Work and Pensions renewed its vows with the US cloud biz.…

Is this the spirit of Xmas we've heard of? Well, new customers will have to pay to print 15 pages per month In a classic reverse ferret, HP is going to honour a previous commitment to Instant Ink customers meaning they will, after all, be able to print up to 15 pages per month for free over the lifetime of the printer.…

Er, we mean fighting terrorism and organised crime! The UK's Home Office has handed a £30m contract to engineering and IT outfit Leidos to help government agencies access and analyse communications data for combatting terrorism and organised crime.…

Prepare for two brownouts in July when things get tested properly Microsoft's GitHub plans to stop accepting account passwords as a way to authenticate Git operations, starting August 13, 2021, following a test period without passwords two-weeks earlier.…

A small steppe for probe, giant leaps await science ... and propaganda China has landed its Chang'e 5's probe and its precious payload of Moon rocks.…

And no, we’re not going to prosecute the bloke who found out Dutch prosecutors have confirmed what many already suspected about President Donald Trump: that he’s an idiot. At least when it comes to choosing passwords.…

You’ll need to be more than a solo shop and have proven Pi prowess to score a listing The Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided to offer more support for industrial customers by creating a program that offers them help to build Pis into products.…

Ginni Rometty’s retirement confirmed tho Big Blue’s keeping her on as a part-time $20k/day consultant IBM has announced that recently appointed CEO Arvind Krishna has been elected as chairman of the company’s board.…

Hints at more AI-infused personalisation and automobile integrations in 2021's smartmobes Updated The president and head of Samsung Electronics’ mobile comms business appears to have acknowledged that the Galaxy Note is no more - at least as a unique product.…

Reveals on-prem storage offerings and new push to have consultants sell ‘em As Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent gabfest kicked off a couple of weeks back, Alibaba Cloud told the world it had “revamped” its hybrid cloud offering with a couple of new appliances – but didn’t reveal any details about the devices.…

VC firms say they weren't aware Orion code had been backdoored Two Silicon Valley VC firms, Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, sold hundreds of millions of dollars in SolarWinds shares just days before the software biz emerged at the center of a massive hacking campaign.…

Antitrust legal challenge also claims web giant accessed encrypted WhatsApp messages Google is set to be at the end of another antitrust lawsuit, with Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton announcing on Wednesday he will sue the internet giant for damaging competition in the ad-tech market.…

Small-biz campaign tugs at heart strings, inadvertently promotes how iGiant is improving privacy Facebook is running full-page ads in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post today stating that Apple's privacy permissions overhaul in iOS 14 will be allegedly "devastating to small businesses."…

From preview to release Microsoft is rolling out native Apple silicon versions of its office apps while browser maker Mozilla does the same with its Firefox browser.…

Could this be another sign of more openness from Redmond? MariaDB is cosying up to Microsoft and its army of Power BI platform users with the offer of a query adapter.…

Great, another password manager Microsoft has opened up the public preview of password autofill via its Authenticator app for iOS and Android.…

Join us online next month to open the secrets of SuperPOD with DDN Webcast Supercomputers are one of the wonders of the modern age, offering unparalleled power which can be used to crack the thorniest of problems.…

Error message leads to cancelled emails, unverified accounts, potential email loss A Google Mail outage yesterday saw the cloud giant's server respond with the message "the email account that you tried to reach does not exist," potentially causing the sending server to give up, or remove the email address from lists, rather than trying again later.…

Plus: Managed Grafana service for observability re:Invent Amazon Web Services CTO Dr Werner Vogels has opened up on CloudShell, a Linux environment accessed through the browser which gives users a command-line and scripting environment for all AWS services.…

Revenue from web biz surges 145% A surge in online sales helped push Dixons Carphone into profitability during the first half of 2020 as it reported its results [PDF] for the six months ended 31 October 2020.…

Autothrottle cuts to idle and flight computers fail after latest updates, warns FAA Software updates to Boeing's Jumbo Jet, Dreamliner, and 777 introduced flaws that degraded flight safety and caused the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to publish warnings to aviators.…

Boris can’t manage a US trade deal, so antisocial media giant has done it for him As Brits wake up to Brexit next month, most will no longer find themselves stuck on an island in the Atlantic but ensconced in sunny California, courtesy of Facebook.…

President Donald Trump ████ AWS in the ████ by ████ ████ to ████ A heavily redacted version of Amazon Web Services' latest protest against Microsoft getting the lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract has been unsealed. Unsurprisingly, AWS reckons the decision is total ███.…

Suffered 'loss or damage' as a customer? Get Ofcom's permission and sue away Britain's Telecommunications Security Bill will allow anyone to sue their telco if they suffer "loss or damage" as a result of a system breach – but only if they get Ofcom's permission.…

Dual-screen Android phone released from period of US exclusivity Microsoft will give the Surface Duo an international release, bringing the dual-screen phone to the UK, Canada, France, and Germany in "early 2021".…

Regularised linear and Gaussian process regression thrown into predictive models too Data visualisation big fish Tableau is promising users the ability to get their hands dirty without having to download its seriously weighty desktop client.…

One? Two? Nope. Six CVEs patched after being found in Dualog Communications Suite A software suite intended to let merchant ships’ crews digitally communicate with the world ashore was riddled with security vulnerabilities including undocumented admin accounts with hardcoded passwords and widespread use of Adobe Flash.…

Online Harms draft gets most things right, still gives Facebook and friends too much leeway Analysis Tech giants face massive fines of up to 10 per cent of their annual revenue if they fail to follow new rules aimed at reducing the amount of harmful content on their platforms, the UK government has decided.…

Another nail in the coffin of assuming that airgapped means secure Mordechai Guri, an Israeli cyber security researcher who focuses on covert side channel attacks, has devised yet another way to undermine air gapping – the practice of keeping computers disconnected from any external network for the sake of security.…

Promised it was free and safe, but Facebook’s promises about privacy aren’t worth the mouse you click ‘em with Australia’s competition and consumer commission (ACCC) has hauled Facebook into the nation’s Federal Court for alleged false, misleading or deceptive conduct.…

SMIC in turmoil as TCMS legend reportedly elevated beyond non-exec role China’s largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has advised investors that its co-CEO has “possibly” resigned.…

84-minute brownout and eight-hour VPN vanishment caused by update that left systems unable to access config files Google has explained how it took a big slab of its Euro-cloud offline last week, and as usual the problem was of its own making.…

Predicts massive data centre builds to add 50 million petabytes of capacity by 2025 as 60 percent of workloads run in clouds A key Chinese policy think tank has delivered its full vision for how the nation can build a “smart economy” by the year 2035.…

'solarwinds123' won't inspire confidence, if true Updated SolarWinds, the maker of the Orion network management software that was subverted to distribute backdoored updates that led to the compromise of multiple US government bodies, was apparently told last year that credentials for its software update server had been exposed in a public GitHub repo.…

De-FAAMG'd tech outfits fear being steamrolled The second tier of tech giants have formed a new coalition focused on making sure changes coming to platform liability don’t squash them.…

It's great being king Last week, Larry Ellison wished staff well as his IT giant Oracle prepares to move its headquarters from Silicon Valley, California, to Austin, Texas... though he apparently will be going in the opposite direction, to Hawaii.…

Fellow industry giants shuffle feet nervously Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Twitter €450,000 after ruling a bug in the firm's Android app that allowed users private messages to be publicly viewed infringed the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Nope, it just makes them worse RoTM AI and automation in the workplace risk creating new forms of bias and unfairness, worsening inequalities in the world of work, according to a UK think tank report published today.…

Big Red: This is not some gimmick so that you buy support from us In the wake of Red Hat's decision to end support for CentOS Linux comes a raft of alternatives to fill the void, including Project Lenix - an offshoot of Cloud Linux - and Oracle's free Linux, which Big Red is heavily promoting.…

New Ofcom rules require ISPs to give more personalised measures New Ofcom rules will require ISPs to provide prospective customers with personalised speed estimates specific to their premises, rather than guesses derived from properties with similar characteristics.…

The cloud can make life easier. Here’s how... Webcast Keeping track of your data is always a worry, whether it’s a question of where it is, or, more existentially, what it is.…

Down from original estimate of $60m, and Apple is investigating if supplier guidelines were breached On Saturday workers at an iPhone production facility in India rioted over a pay dispute, smashing windows and damaging equipment. The damage has since been valued at about $7m, according to the facility's Taiwanese owner, Wistron.…

We're not taking cues from Windows now, are we? Updated Hopefully not shooting for parity with Windows, the Linux team followed the weekend release of version 5.10 of the kernel with... an update barely a day later.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before Good news: the UK enjoys cheaper broadband compared to its European neighbours. Bad news: it is slower and poor value for money.…

Google has a better track record but the same issue: when authentication breaks, everything breaks Google has posted more details about its 50 minute outage yesterday, though promising a "full incident report" to follow. It was authentication that broke, reminiscent of Microsoft's September cloud outage caused by an Azure Active Directory failure.…

23,000 Britons' data was among unsecured info, finds research Two thousand servers containing 45 million images of X-rays and other medical scans were left online during the course of the past twelve months, freely accessible by anyone, with no security protections at all.…

Andromeda Strain anyone? Scientists at Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have confirmed they have samples from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in the lab and may have more than they originally thought.…