The Register

We'd rather see Dr Nick, to be honest Anyone trying to use OpenAI’s powerful text-generating GPT-3 system to power chatbots to offer medical advice and help should go back to the drawing board, researchers have warned.…

Call for papers for next year's edition of our DevOps, CI/CD, and container summit is now open Event Believe it or not, it has been six years since we’ve started the Continuous Lifecycle London conference series with our friends over at Heise Developer.…

Why not get in early before official 31 December demise? If you'd like to exact righteous vengeance on Adobe's Flash, Microsoft has given us all a tool to expunge the software ahead of time.…

3,000 WiFi access points and 150,000 wired ethernet ports The Pentagon, the colossal office that serves as the headquarters of the United States’ Department of Defence, plans to install 3,000 new WiFi access points and 150,00-plus wired ethernet switches after turfing out old Cisco kit.…

Well, that narrows down the list of suspects to just a few billion people Donald Trump's presidential campaign website was briefly hacked and defaced tonight.…

To get a better view of regional hotspots in case things get kinetic The USA and India have struck a new defence pact that will see the two nations share high-quality spatial data and satellite images.…

The $499 equipment cost and laggy latency give room for pause SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink has finally revealed its pricing: $99 a month for speeds that vary between 50Mbps and 150Mbps... plus 500 bucks to buy the necessary equipment.…

Azure revenue up 48 per cent, pretty much everything Redmond makes is up Microsoft on Tuesday reported $37.2bn in revenue for the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, an increase of 12 per cent year over year and more than investors had anticipated.…

Regulator’s monthly meeting provided an opportunity to argue all over again Analysis The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put the final nail into America's net neutrality coffin on Tuesday, approving an order that ties up loose ends from its 2018 decision to “restore internet freedom."…

Perhaps we can talk about extra security and compromises honestly Zoom has finally added end-to-end encryption to its video conferencing service at no additional cost for all users, whether they are paying subscribers or not.…

Choice of LineageOS and Ubuntu Touch as well as Android UK smartphone developer F(x)tec has rolled out the second generation of its sliding keyboard phones, the F(x)tec Pro1 X.…

We'll see how long it lasts as 20H2 starts doing the rounds While Microsoft celebrates Halloween with scary data deletion stories of Windows past, May's Windows 10 has swiped the popularity prize from its predecessor.…

'I've seen programmes on American prisons' says wife A Briton is reportedly fighting extradition to the United States after deploying webcam malware onto hundreds of women's laptops so he could spy on them undressing and having sex.…

First you could break up by text – next year you can take the phone with you UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom is introducing new rules that will stop phone companies selling carrier-locked handsets.…

Intel rival up 50%+ in profits just a week after Chipzilla 30% plunge Chip slinger AMD celebrated bonzer revenue and profit for its third quarter, ended 26 September [PDF] with a $35bn all-stock acquisition of FPGA outfit Xilinx.…

Which is proof such fripperies are down to the developer, rather than Apple Microsoft has finally introduced trackpad support for Office Microsoft 365 on the iPad.…

PSA: Maintaining the open-source OS can turn your beard grey Open Source Summit Europe It's official. The upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel is destined to become the next "longterm maintenance" release for the open-source operating system.…

Microsoft program outputs ready-to-roll model from image input set Microsoft has built a desktop app called Lobe that can be used to train object-recognition models without having to write a single line of code. Getting that model into an application, though, will require some programming.…

Situation: The New Normal? Bork!Bork!Bork! A train with supernatural powers of prediction features in today's edition of signage behaving strangely. Who would could have known that the electronic information panel was warning passengers of what was to come?…

And Deutsche Telekom's happy with this airborne base station plan A British startup is hoping to strap 5G antennas to liquid-hydrogen-powered high-altitude pseudo-satellites in the hope of replacing mobile base stations on the ground.…

Open-source RISC OS 5.28 brings support for latest ickle 'puter as well as hundreds of fixes An update for open-source Arm operating system RISC OS at the weekend features stable support for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer.…

Get a feel for the gizmo's programming environment If you’ve been thinking about playing with an Nvidia single-board computer for an AI task, but you’re not quite ready to part with your cash for something like the Jetson Nano just yet, here’s an application-level emulator of the hardware you can tinker with.…

Analyst firm asserts coordinated action without central brain is the way to cope with turmoil IT organisations that want to thrive in plague-time need to model themselves on jellyfish, says analyst firm Gartner.…

Hotel Zuckerfornia: You can check in but you can never check out... without losing everything Oculus users, already fuming at Facebook chaining their VR headsets to their Facebook accounts, have been warned they could lose all their Oculus purchases and account information in future if they ever delete their profile on the social network.…

Plus: US govt sanctions Russia for refinery-bothering malware In brief Spanish financial giant Santander has downplayed claims its international money transfer startup PagoFX was compromised.…

Injunction against Trump ban upheld, case to return in January 2021 WeChat will remain in US app stores until at least January 2021 after the Ninth District Court of Appeals denied the US Government’s attempt to have its ban re-enforced.…

Alipay operator prices itself as most expensive IPO of all time Alibaba has announced the initial public offering (IPO) of its financial services arm, Ant Group, and is aiming for the world’s biggest-ever float measured by cash raised.…

Taiwanese president says this is about ‘strengthening Taiwan-US cooperation’ Microsoft has announced that it will open an Azure region in Taiwan.…

Irony overload as social media giant accuses NYU of bulk data collection Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform.…

White House immigration restrictions knock less than half a per cent off The Trump administration's June crackdown on foreign workers with H-1B and other visas wiped $100bn off the stock market value of the largest US companies, according to boffins at The Brookings Institution, Harvard Business School, and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.…

'Hey, you folks heard that there's this virus starting to spread?' – IE, probably Microsoft will forcibly push users off Internet Explorer and onto Edge next month, depending on the websites they visit.…

Fly me to the Moon, let me swim among the stars Water molecules have been detected in soil in one of the Moon's largest sunlit craters, NASA announced on Monday, which means permanent bases on the natural satellite may be potentially a lot easier to support.…

Lawsuit challenges robo-dismissals, Uber insists it manually reviewed cases Four Uber drivers in the UK and Portugal who claim they were dismissed unfairly by the company's anti-fraud algorithm have challenged their account deactivations in a European court, citing GDPR protections against automated decision making.…

Plus: 'Intel is not doing well with disclosures. I’m not happy. It’s not getting better' Open Source Summit Europe Speaking in an "Ask the Experts" session at the online Open Source Summit Europe conference today, Linux kernel's stable branch maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said there are plenty of new contributors to the code though the bottleneck is finding the people to review it.…

SAP: Look at the cloud, look at the cloud... you're under. Market: Nope Europe’s largest software manufacturer, SAP, took a massive hit to its share value this morning cutting its profit and sales outlook for the full financial year, as businesses continued to scale back investments during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Details on 300 reportedly already published to Tor website A Finnish psychotherapy centre was hit by hackers who stole therapy session notes – before threatening patients of the clinic with ransom demands amid selective dark web leaks of stolen material.…

Firm launches cheapest phones yet: £329 5G model, £179 basic handset After a long hiatus, OnePlus returned to the budget category earlier this year with the OnePlus Nord. Now it is following up with two more budget devices: the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, and the entry-level LTE-only OnePlus Nord N100.…

Combined org hoping to attract more industry support LF AI Foundation and Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi), until now two orgs under the Linux Foundation umbrella, are merging to become the LF AI and Data Foundation, a home for projects devoted to AI, machine learning (ML), data, and analytics.…

Also: Teams migration, Windows 10 on Surface Hub 2S In Brief Windows 10 20H2 is out. And yet Windows 10 20H2 also remains lurking in both the Beta and Release Preview Channel for the company's loyal army of unpaid testers. While the latter is understandable, those running the former would be forgiven for hoping that there might be a whiff of things to come in the form of 21H1 (or whatever the next release ends up being called).…

Cloud-first but no 'resilient internet connection'? Oh dear New research into the IT infrastructure of the UK's higher education sectors does not make happy reading for those wishing to cure all ills with the sticking plaster of "digital".…

Procurement limb seeks fully auditable contact channel for reporting crimes, emergencies – what could go wrong? The Police ICT Company, which handles procurement for forces across the UK, has millions in taxpayer cash to spend on a master mobile and desktop platform to "operate and control" all corporate social media channels.…

Next-gen connectivity requires reshuffle beneath the surface The iPhone 12 series is Apple's debut foray into producing 5G-capable devices and the first major redesign since the launch of the iPhone X. But what lurks underneath?…

Plus: Facebook won't get lost in translation, Cruise all set to build fleet of driverless taxis, and more In brief An activist in Portland, Oregon, claims to have trained a facial recognition model that is able to identify one-fifth of the police working in the US city.…

Great, we can't wait for Grand Theft Auto: Brecon Beacons UK map maker the Ordnance Survey is looking to hire £6m worth of game developers.…

And please forget about that 4th industrial revolution because most networks only have NSA 5G Feature 5G iPhones went on sale last Friday and a thousand social media pundits doubtless declared it meant the new network standard had capital-A Arrived and its role as catalyst of a "fourth industrial revolution" will now be realised.…

The site may be getting on a bit, but the Windows fail is bang up to date IKEA may be the master of the flatpack and the neverending check-out queue but it seems to be struggling a bit with Windows 10 if this serving of Bork is anything to go by.…

Only a complete banker would map that to... oh dear... Who, Me? With the weekend gone, like the contents of a file share after a hasty execution of a seemingly innocuous script, pause for a second before tackling the week's shenanigans with another Reg reader Who, Me? moment.…

Next comes all the joy and laughter of the standards process The Internet Engineering Task Force has set November 16th, 2020, as the final date for comment on Quick UDP Internet Connections, the would-be TCP-killer that Google and Cloudflare have offered up as part of HTTP/3.…

Collector is leaking regolith, sparking swift stash plan We’ve all been there: you go on holiday, find lots of fabulous stuff and when the time comes to return home, your suitcase just won’t close.…

Tune in next week to see what VDI can do to help Webcast You’ve got a lot less users coming into the office right now, but what are you doing to bring the office to them?…