The Register

It's all in Chinese if you fancy a gander Huawei has launched the first developer preview of its in-house smartphone operating system, HarmonyOS 2.0.…

Plus: EU agrees that security could be better and calls for bigger role for itself Some 5G networks are at risk of attack thanks to "long-standing vulnerabilities" in core protocols, according to infosec researchers at Positive Technologies.…

How to always be on the wrong side of tech fashion Something for the Weekend, Sir? "It will never catch on." The next thing you know, you’re staring at a badly drawn zob scrawled over Shakespeare's shimoneta*.…

Fur the love of god! On Call Welcome to the last On Call before Christmas, and a reminder that furry friends and technology do not always make good bed, or even floor, fellows.…

Now to build over 130,000 little 'scopes in nasty hot places. Also in data centers Amidst the paroxysms of coronavirus and Brexit, the United Kingdom on Wednesday found time to ratify the Convention that formally establishes the SKA Observatory (SKAO), paving the way for the giant radio telescope to be built.…

And that’s not entirely terrifying, because plenty of people have good credit but struggle to prove it Your web search history plus records of the browser and device you use to make those searches could enable financial institutions to calculate you a more accurate credit rating than traditional methods, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the global finance organisation says the ability to use those records might be a good thing rather than a privacy nightmare.…

Repudiates the work, says it was never used by a customer. Which is just what Huawei said Alibaba Group today admitted its cloud business developed what it is described as “a facial recognition technology … that included ethnicity as an algorithm attribute for tagging video imagery,” then vowed it will never again see the light of day.…

Windows giant, nuclear administration play down danger – and kill switch found and activated America's nuclear weapons agency was hacked by the suspected Russian spies who backdoored SolarWinds' IT monitoring software and compromised several US government bodies, and Microsoft was caught up in the same cyber-storm, too, it was reported Thursday.…

Shows why it irks politicians by putting a link to its argument on home page Google has rejected Australia’s plan to force it to pay local news publishers for the right to index their output and present it in search results.…

Silicon Valley titan allegedly screwed rivals with exclusionary agreements On Thursday Google was hit for the third time in as many months in the United States with an antitrust lawsuit, once again focused on the internet giant's alleged monopolization of the search advertising market.…

Yes, Oracle the database giant. 2020 keeps on being 2020 Oracle on Thursday said it has uncovered the largest fraud campaign yet targeting businesses booking advertising in video streams showing on so-called "smart" televisions.…

Financial info swiped for 15 small-biz clients, too Renewable electricity and gas supplier People’s Energy has told its 250,000-plus customers that a “gap” in the security of its IT system was exploited by digital burglars.…

Long-term patching problems still haunt web giant's mobile OS platform Google and Qualcomm have linked arms to extend the lifecycle of new Android devices, meaning future phones could receive as many as three major operating system updates provided they're running the latest Snapdragon silicon.…

It'll be fine, just keep giving Boeing money Those within NASA hoping for some festive treats were in for disappointment this week as the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) administered a kicking over the agency's beleaguered Artemis programme.…

Privacy turns out to be fairly easy GitHub on Thursday said it has removed all cookie banners from its website, a decision the company is making in the interest of privacy, despite the claimed popularity of its disclosure interface.…

Snowflake? We can query that Enterprise data warehouse stalwart Teradata has capped a difficult year with an update to Teradata QueryGrid, which promises to connect customers to a vast array of new data sources – a decidedly underwhelming move, according to some.…

Those bitten by Google Maps price rises in 2018 will welcome alternative – but will the data be good enough? AWS has claimed its upcoming Amazon Location Service for developers building mapping and geographic features into applications is "priced at a fraction of common alternatives," presumably aiming squarely at a company whose name rhymes with schmoogle.…

No new hobbyist projects from January, everything deleted the following year Google is discontinuing its Android Things IoT platform for non-commercial users. The Chocolate Factory will not allow the creation of new projects after 5 January and the entire platform will be nuked the following year.…

'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.…