The Register

For 20 years now, El Reg has been looking for proof – is this finally it? CES It was almost exactly 20 years ago – January 6, 2001 – that Reg reader Erik Trent wrote to us bemoaning the tendency of tech journalists to repeat futuristic nonsense.…

What a time to be alive CES The world is in the grip of a lethal viral pandemic. The technology industry’s response?…

Last four built will be freighters. And mighty freighters at that Boeing has confirmed that production of its 747 aircraft will end in 2022.…

China Telecom, world’s largest carrier, and China’s premier ISP, has accelerated - hard APNIC, the Asia-Pacific’s regional Internet address registry, has noticed a sharp uptick in IPv6 use by China Telecom, the nation’s top provider of internet services.…

Face-recognition biz hammered after harvesting people's pics, videos without permission A California-based facial recognition biz has been directed by the US Federal Trade Commission to delete the AI models and algorithms that it developed by harvesting people's photos and videos without permission, a remedy that suggests privacy violators may no longer be allowed to benefit from ill-gotten data.…

With just a week left of the administration, here we go again The Trump Administration has tried yet again to change the fine print around H-1B work visas, with the Department of Labor issuing a new rule on Tuesday that it said would “help protect the wages and job opportunities of American workers.”…

Redmond keeps us hanging with on-premises Exchange flaw still to be fixed Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday released updates addressing 83 vulnerabilities in its software, which doesn't include the 13 flaws fixed in its Edge browser last week.…

Another year, another study The UK Space Agency and Rolls-Royce have kicked off a study into nuclear-powered space exploration.…

Crowdstrike tech analysts explain how they think it slipped under the radar The malware that was utilised to hack SolarWinds checked to see whether software used to compile the firm's Orion product was running before deploying its payload, according to Crowdstrike.…

See that horse disappearing over the horizon? Time to close the stable door Cloud CRM megacorp Salesforce is the latest tech player to join Amazon, Twitter and Facebook in deciding there is something off about organisations that hype up insurrection against a democratic mandate.…

Tune in and learn how to benchmark your own success Webcast Good intentions are one thing, good data is quite another, and when it comes to implementing DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, it really helps to have both.…

Harmeen Mehta will handle telco's internal rewiring and tech product strategy BT has hired former HSBC exec Harmeen Mehta to head up a newly created Digital unit, overseeing the internal shift to digital systems along with the incubation of tech platforms, products, and services.…

Er, we mean 'distinguished', 'seasoned', 'battle-tested' Smartphones have a finite usefulness before they’re stuffed in a drawer, or shipped to a recycling facility where they’re disassembled and melted down for raw materials. Hoping to extend that short lifespan is Samsung, which was pushing a program called “Galaxy Upcycling at Home” at CES 2021 earlier this week.…

Upstart hopes to do for transactional databases what Snowflake did for data warehousing Even database companies you've never heard of might be worth a billion or two. Take Cockroach Labs, the firm behind the distributed RDMS CockroachDB, for example, which has hit gold in a $160m funding round.…

Easy to use with no big vendor lock-in? Nice idea but it's still early days Red Kubes, a small company based in the Netherlands, has released a free Community Edition of its Otomi Container Platform with the goal of making Kubernetes both easier to use and more portable between cloud providers or on-premises.…

Vendors slammed for 'lack of proper judgement' during the pandemic Software vendors have been targeting hospitals with licence audits while medical units find themselves overstretched with patients due to a surge in global coronavirus cases.…

Endpoint Detection and Response added. For servers, not standalone Linux desktops, mind After a few months in preview, Microsoft has made Defender Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) generally available for Linux servers.…

Analysts predict market to grow to $81.5bn from $68.9bn in 2021 Spending on wearable kit is forecast to jump this year by roughly 18 per cent to $81.5bn, if analyst house Gartner is to be believed.…

Just kidding, you'll totally guess US scientists claim to have developed a method for storing data directly in the DNA of living bacteria cells by using a new electromagnetic technique.…

The more things change, the more they stay the same A batch of UK government Cabinet records from late last century has revealed that difficulties in getting users to accept new systems is nothing new.…

Microsoft's finest suffers decisive defeat Bork!Bork!Bork! You are never far from Windows doing a whoopsie, particularly in a digital-signage heavy hub such as the UK's London Waterloo station.…

Still needs three launches and a dozen spacewalks to install 55kW capacity upgrade NASA and Boeing have announced that humanity's celestial outpost will soon install six new solar panels, each capable of producing 20kW.…

Some software errs on the side of caution too often, it is claimed A number of AI programs trained to detect diabetic eye damage struggle to perform consistently in the real world despite apparently excelling in clinical tests, say scientists in the US.…

And some desktop parts, from 14nm and eight cores to 10nm and four cores CES Intel announced at this year’s virtual CES tech trade show on Monday new clans of x86-64 processors for desktop and laptops.…

The PC is dead, says no one any longer, unless it's a desktop The do-everything-from-home revolution – work, study and play – led to a record 90.3 million personal computers being shipped into the channel in the fourth quarter of last year, up a whopping 25.4 per cent compared to the pre-pandemic final quarter of 2019.…

In a brave move, Russian firm fingers its own govt as one possible source of cyber badness Kaspersky Lab reckons the SolarWinds hackers may have hailed from the Turla malware group, itself linked to Russia’s FSB security service.…

Promises new client ‘within days’ but had years to make the fix Extreme Networks missed the deadline to expunge Adobe Flash from its management tools and is advising users they’ll therefore need to fiddle with their PC clocks to manage their networks.…

Theft-by-a-thousand-cuts flaw fixed Until early last year, Google's YouTube had a security flaw that made private videos visible at reduced resolution, though not audible, to anyone who knew or guessed the video identifier and possessed the technical knowledge to take advantage of the snafu.…

Data describing controversial supplement ractopamine didn’t render online A website that was supposed to offer real time tracking of pork imports to Taiwan has highlighted regional tensions.…

CEO Holmes also accused of funding extravagant lifestyle through fraud Failed blood-testing unicorn Theranos trashed vital incriminating evidence of its fraud, prosecutors said on Monday.…

Salted password hashes, addresses, phone numbers may have been exposed in cloud security snafu Networking vendor Ubiquiti has written to its customers to advise them of a possible leak of their personal information.…

Post-Flashpocalypse, we stumble outside, hoping no one ever creates software as insecure as that ever again Adobe has finally and formally killed Flash.…

Now wouldn't be the time to exploit millions stuck at home, yeah? Maybe restrain the profiteering a little? America’s largest internet providers have been asked to provide details of any price hikes or broadband restrictions they have placed on captive internet users during the pandemic.…

Tech giants leap between positions, leave policy makers uncomfortable Comment There was supposed to be a protest at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Monday organized by supporters of President Trump furious at the web giant's decision to permanently ban his personal account. It never happened.…

And no, Parler wasn't hacked either. Its public posts were simply scraped Updated Parler, which advertised itself as a place where you can "speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being 'deplatformed' for your views," sued Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday for deplatforming the site.…

Also: Edge on Apple arrives in the Dev Channel, HealthBot goes to the cloud, and Chile to get an Azure Region In brief Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer uploaded another Windows war story to his YouTube channel over the weekend, this time concerning the history of the handy zip folder functionality that has been a feature of the Windows shell over recent decades.…

Microsoft's cross-platform .NET tools get a refresh, but with a relatively short life before newer tools sweep it away Microsoft has flung open the doors to Xamarin Forms 5.0, a major new version of its cross-platform framework targeting iOS, Android, and Windows 10.…

More RAM also on offer for those with deep pockets As the faithful await new hardware in 2021, Microsoft has quietly updated its Surface Pro 7 with a removable SSD and beefier battery life.…

Use it or lose it With 5.10 under its belt, the Linux community is discussing swinging the axe on some elderly platforms and CPUs, including a bunch that are ARM-based. Even the poor old 80486DX/SX has come in for scrutiny.…

Choke chain tightened on 'general warrants' after Privacy International wins judicial review A landmark High Court ruling has struck down Britain's ability to hack millions of people at a time through so-called "general warrants" in what privacy campaigners are hailing as a major victory.…

New, expensive option for nation's notspots Ofcom has given the thumbs-up to SpaceX's Starlink broadband user terminals, opening the door to a UK launch of Elon Musk's satellite-based broadband service.…

8-month suspended sentence for conspiracy to secure unauthorised access to computer data An employee at emergency roadside rescue biz RAC has received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for unsanctioned access to computer systems that saw her sell customers' data to an accident claims management company.…

At last, King Edward's remains found The game is... a potato? That's how it turned out to be for a dogwalker from the Tyne and Wear town of Gateshead in North East England.…

A few improvements and a handy web app utility, but older kernel causes problems for some hardware The Linux Mint team has released version 20.1 - codenamed Ulyssa - with long-term support to 2025 and the usual three variants: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.…

The week's other security news In Brief Embattled and embarrassed network management shop SolarWinds has reportedly hired two of the highest profile security bods in the biz to sort out its woes.…

Crown Commercal Services must be rubbing hands together Many expected an increase in paperwork after the UK left the EU, but £900m on printers seems bit much.…

Plus: US ban on selling AI code to China renewed for 2021, and Jim Keller hired by Canadian AI chip startup In brief The facial recognition company said to have identified antifa members among rioters who ransacked Capitol Hill last week denied that its technology had ever done such a thing.…

Event sponsors: 'They got rinsed' in 2020, says analyst Feature Virtual events are cheaper and more accessible, but fall short in interactivity and networking opportunities, and have limited scope for sponsors to reach their audience. Content can be duller and shallower too - but virtual is here to stay, even when some face-to-face activity returns.…

Good for users and good for you Column As you slide into the driver's seat of your century-old Cadillac Type 53 automobile you'll almost certainly miss something hugely significant: that model's major innovation.…

Careful with that rack, Eugene Who, Me? A reminder to take care when fiddling with the top shelf in today's edition of Who, Me? Especially when "good" has taken a backseat to "cheap".…