The Register

Netting £1.35bn for the Treasury Ofcom today wrapped up bidding on its 5G spectrum auction, which made 200MHz of mid and low-band spectrum available to carriers, raising the total amount of mobile spectrum by 18 per cent.…

Any significant improvement in processing times will be a boon to productivity, say analysts Informatica has announced a serverless, Spark-based data integration engine intended to accelerate data engineering for machine learning in the cloud using Nvidia GPU processors.…

Camera and battery are the big upgrades, but the 3.5mm jack is no more In the first quarter of 2020, the world’s best-selling Android smartphone wasn’t a premium device from Samsung or Huawei. Analyst Strategy Analytics' tally had Samsung’s mid-range A51 on top of the pile, with 2.3 per cent market share, ahead of Xiaomi’s Redmi 8 on 1.9 per cent and the Galaxy S20+ trailing with a mere 1.7 per cent.…

Chromium-based browser boasts swifter tabs, and is an Apple M1 native Browser maker Vivaldi today rolled out an update for its eponymous surfing tool, laying claim to some impressive performance gains as well as adding native support for Apple's M1.…

Plus: Stop bigging up these despicable criminals An English college has temporarily closed all eight of its campuses and moved all teaching online after a "major" ransomware attack "disabled" its IT systems.…

Intel's Gelsinger has a decision to make Micron is stopping development of 3D XPoint technology and shifting resources into memory products that use the Compute Express Link (CXL).…

40-year-old data warehousing outfit has its work cut out challenging the new cloud-native kids Interview As Teradata CEO for a little less than nine months, Steve McMillan has outlasted his predecessor, Oliver Ratzesberger, who took over in January 2019 after a period of bumpy financials.…

Financial goals missed but Big Blue's execs were all winners anyway IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec chairman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved.…

Microsoft Mesh? 'I don't think most people want to have a thing strapped to their face all the time' Interview Twilio founder and CEO Jeff Lawson has told The Register that many biz execs still fail to grasp the importance of software developers and do not understand how to work with them, dismissing them as "math geeks" or "digital factory workers".…

The 5G prog rock supergroup nobody asked for Nokia has been busily making deals with the cloud giants to connect their computing platforms to its Radio Access Network (RAN) via the magic of 5G.…

Limiting access is great though 'patching is the only permanent fix' Access management outfit BeyondTrust has urged organizations to remove admin rights from users, arguing that doing so would have at least mitigated more than 100 vulnerabilities in Microsoft products last year.…

Promises free backup of everything, forever, because some customers assumed that's what clouds do Video OVH founder Octave Klaba says the police and insurers have UPSes, batteries and fuses extracted from the remains of its data centre that burned down the other week.…

Dun, dun, duh Cryptocurrency miners found a way to sidestep Nvidia's anti-mining protections for its RTX 3060 graphics card, and craft coins to their hearts' content.…

Claims Graviton2 thrashes x86 on price/performance, touts lowest-priced memory on the Amazonian cloud Amazon has found a new use for its home-grown Graviton2 processors – powering a new EC2 instance type optimised for plenty of memory.…

Nice but still not good enough, says union After years of aggressively fighting any efforts to force it to recognize its drivers as employees, on Tuesday Uber performed a U-turn on the streets of Britain and agreed to recognize all of its drivers as working for the company rather than serving as freelancers.…

Another rough day for Jack Ma as Beijing continues big tech crackdown Beijing has pulled Alibaba’s UC Browser from Chinese app stores amid accusations of unfair play and a government crackdown on tech.…

Foxconn-owned outfit claimed non-existent sales as revenue. Apologies and promises to do better all ‘round Foxconn-owned Sharp has re-issued recent financial results after it found that its subsidiary Kantatsu cooked the books.…

Security precautions held up, but Putin himself signed off on efforts to scare the public with claims of voting system compromise The USA’s Office of National Intelligence today released its previously classified assessment of “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections” and found “some successful compromises of state and local government networks prior to Election Day—as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts”.…

State privacy rules add pressure on lawmakers to craft national standards California has expanded its consumer privacy law to include a prohibition on the use of deceptive messaging and presentation, or "dark patterns," in the limited context of opting out of the sale of personal information.…

Judge Lucy Koh allows legal challenge to move forward Netizens who say Google continued to track them around the web even when using Chrome's incognito mode can proceed with their privacy lawsuit against the internet giant, a judge has ruled.…

Awesome, oh wow, like totally freak me out ... with this unexpected use of AI A 50-year-old mother allegedly used machine-learning software to generate fake footage of her young daughter's cheerleader rivals naked, drinking booze, and vaping in a bid to drive them out of their squad.…

Mukund Mohan invented employees, financial figures in application forms A former Microsoft executive has admitted he tried to rip off the US government by claiming $5.5m in COVID-19 funding for a string of fake businesses.…

America ranks behind China, South Korea and even.... Great Britain in spectrum availability Establishing US supremacy in 5G will require the release of more spectrum, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr claimed in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute this week.…

Epic Games CEO slaps PR move ahead of court case Come July 1, 2021, Google will reduce the service fee it charges Android developers from 30 per cent to 15 per cent, though only on the first $1m in Google Play revenue.…

Zero Touch? Probably the only way to use a Mac keyboard Admins pondering how to manage those shiny Apple Macs that employees keep asking for now have an additional Zero Touch enrolment option courtesy of directory outfit JumpCloud.…

'This is of historical interest. Adobe isn’t really worried about this, it is automation' The chief security officer for F-Secure, Mikko Hyppönen, had a Twitter account suspended after linking to a download of Adobe Acrobat for DOS, first released in 1993.…

Learn how to balance customer experience, transformation, and clients' changing needs Promo 2020 was the year of customer experience (CX) transformation, forcing even the most reluctant customers to rely on digital to interact with companies due to limited in-person interactions and overwhelmed call-centers.…

Complete with nervous warnings: how much chaos is too much? AWS has rolled out its Fault Injection Simulator (FIS), designed to introduce deliberate faults into its cloud services so that users can test the resilience of their applications.…

Baked-in mmWave support may improve figures with more deployments 5G performance on the iPhone 12 range trails that of competing Android devices, according to a report from OpenSignal.…

2022 Snapdragon chipset aimed at high-performance ultraportables Qualcomm said today that its new internally designed CPUs are expected to sample in the second half of 2022 as it completed the purchase of chip designer Nuvia.…

'Other languages may claim that they're vying for the top dog position, but at the end of the day Java is just so prevalent' Oracle on Tuesday plans to release Oracle JDK 16, Big Red's implementation of the Java 16 specification for the Java SE platform, sporting 17 distinct enhancements.…

[Insert benchmark disclaimer here] but the tl;dr is 'shop around' Amid the sound of public clouds tumbling earthwards comes a report that puts AMD chips ahead of Intel in the cloud CPU benchmark arena.…

Google reveals how much personal data' collected in Chrome, Google app. 'No wonder they wanted to hide it' Google's Apple-mandated privacy labels for its Chrome and Search apps on iOS have drawn criticism from tiny search rival DuckDuckGo, which tweeted "no wonder they wanted to hide it."…

It's already a great week at Redmond Microsoft has taken the increasingly normal step of releasing an out-of-band update to deal with the printer issue it introduced last week.…

Researchers to bask in 100+ days of continuous sunlight Russia and China have signed an agreement to collaborate on the construction of an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) on the Moon's south pole.…

'It had nothing whatsoever to do with the claimant's country of birth', rules Employment Tribunal A former asylum seeker with a postgraduate degree in cybersecurity who alleged his bosses were spying on him for MI5 has lost his attempt to claim he was racially discriminated against.…

Tiny golden balls may help unravel mysteries of nature's weakest force at a quantum level It might not have occured to rock lugging early humans in the Stone Age that gravity is a relatively weak force, but it is.…

Bork terminates at London Victoria Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork disappears up its own fundament today with a return to the place where it all began – a BSOD at London Victoria Station.…

Last-ditch effort to win votes comes one week from .uk operator's EGM In what looks like a desperate last-minute attempt to keep his job, Mark Wood, the chairman of .uk internet registry operator Nominet, has claimed that a vote to fire him would cause the British government to intervene.…

Offline access for Virtual Apps and Desktops also in the works Citrix is planning to make its Virtual Apps and Desktop Service (CVADS) more portable under an effort called “Project Bifrost.”…

Microsoft's new browser dials up the release cadence Having hitched its wagon firmly to Google's, Microsoft is to join the four-week and eight-week release cycle cadence that is now in the offing for its Edge browser.…

The best in DevOps, Containers and CI/CD, at a venue of your choice Event Whether the past 12 months has seen you accelerate your organisation’s digital transformation or work flat out just to keep the lights on, it’s time to take stock, share stories and think about what comes next.…

South China Morning Post's ownership up in the air as HK democracy erodes further The Chinese government has asked Alibaba to give up some of its holdings, including Hong Kong's top English daily newspaper The South China Morning Post.…

Say goodbye to the lovely cleaner air we've been breathing for a year The COVID-19 pandemic has passed the one-year mark, and as vaccines roll out, there is light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Here's something to dampen the spirits, though: global air pollution levels are rising, thanks to increased human activity.…

Facebook signs deal to send cash to News Corporation’s Australian mastheads and Fox News wannabe Facebook and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have struck a deal under Australia’s laws that require The Social Network™ to either send money to local news publishers or face the prospect of being dragged into an arbitration process.…

Reportedly dangles same deal as Apple’s for smaller devs, in one of the few markets it doesn’t utterly dominate Google’s South Korean limb is reportedly on the cusp of slashing the cost of selling apps on its Play store.…

In two to four years, and there's no danger, NASA tells The Reg The most massive chunk of junk yet was just ejected from the International Space Station – though, don’t worry, the 2.9-ton crate containing old batteries shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance. It is expected to harmlessly burn up in Earth’s atmosphere two to four years from now.…

Sky Global’s Jean-Francois Eap denies any wrongdoing The CEO of Sky Global – which sold encryption chat software with customized smartphones – has come out fighting after Uncle Sam charged him with knowingly assisting the international drug smuggling trade.…

Chocolate Factory still stomping bugs out of its bird-themed post-third-party-cookie features Updated Google's effort at "building a privacy-first future for web advertising" already looks like it will require some privacy retrofitting.…

Core counts and clock speed about the same though architecture work said to bring performance boost AMD on Monday showed off its family of third-generation Epyc server processors code-named Milan.…