The Register

With kill switches to stop the gear going off the rails Canadian boffins are testing semi-autonomous exoskeletons that could help people with limited mobility walk again without the need for implanted sensors.…

More car delays due to chip crunch, Texan weather wipeout hasn't helped either The effects of the global semiconductor drought became more apparent this week amid a rise in purchases brought on by reduced COVID-19 anxieties.…

Python still welcome, though Oracle has updated its cloudy data warehouse and made structured query language harder to find, in the name of having database administrators spend less time working with the product.…

‘You swipe left and right and there’s another option if you want to have intimacy’ says commissioner The police commissioner of New South Wales in Australia has floated the idea of a smartphone app to record consent to sexual activity.…

City-state also deploys new contact tracing boxes at entrances to public places Singapore has announced plans to improve cross-border data flows and increase digitalisation of local industry to combat the economic effects of COVID-19.…

New science challenges theory of liquid lost in space Up to 99 per cent of the water once in the ancient lakes and oceans on Mars is trapped in the planet’s crust and was not lost to space, according to a study in Science this week.…

Looking for a service-level agreement? Have we got a deal for you The Wikimedia Foundation, built over the past two decades with the donated labor of its Wikipedia community, plans to offer corporate enterprises programmatic access to its content through paid API packages.…

Middle Kingdom tests backup plan for when iGiant starts blocking app stalkers The Chinese Advertising Association has developed an identifier called the China Anonymization ID, or CAID, to ensure the continued ability to track iOS users after Apple implements its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework.…

Tune in, join our APAC editor and Malwarebytes – and learn how to start fighting back Webcast The shift to remote working over the last year hasn’t been all bad – it’s forced the pace of digital transformation and encouraged many organisations to rethink the way they operate.…

China Unicom, Pacific Networks, ComNet all due for removal America's telecom market federal regulator, the FCC, today initiated the final step in a booting three Chinese telcos from the Land of the Free, saying they had failed to allay national security concerns.…

Just look at how Microsoft has grown since (but don't look at our results) Google has bitten back at fresh reports that the ad giant had a fortuitous escape nearly a decade ago, when American antitrust regulators opted not to sue. It has also seized the opportunity to take another swipe at its arch-rival, Microsoft.…

Wot?! No new luxury phablet?! Samsung Electronics is contemplating skipping this year's Galaxy Note flagship as the business grapples with an industry-wide shortage of semiconductors.…

Signs up for Cisco, says some encrypted creds were stolen Email security biz Mimecast has dumped SolarWinds' network monitoring tool in favour of Cisco's Netflow product after falling victim to the infamous December supply chain attack.…

Second hot-fire scheduled for (checks weather) tomorrow... maybe NASA has fired up the avionics of the Artemis I core stage ahead of tomorrow's planned redo of the prematurely terminated hotfire test.…

It's all about developers Ahead of its release next month, the Fedora community has posted details of what is coming in Fedora 34, Red Hat's bleeding-edge Linux distro.…

Welcome to the Great Fire sale of old London town Corporate pantomime baddie Capita is again carving up its operations, creating specific divisions for private and public sector customers and a third that will house non-core businesses it wants to sell.…

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.…