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Friends and family tech support meets steam-powered computing On Call It's a friends and family episode of On Call today, dedicated to the moments when one's attempts to render IT assistance are met with bafflement or just plain hostility.…

The walls are closing in on the iGiant The UK's antitrust watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple’s app store after developers complained its strict rules are an unfair stranglehold and may break competition law.…

Netflix and drive is finally here Honda has started selling the first commercial passenger vehicle with level 3 autonomy - the ability to drive in many situations without human intervention, but with the expectation a human is always ready to take control.…

Faster, Sysadmin! Install! Install! The Chromium crew has revved its engines and decided it will soon emit a new stable release every four weeks and create a new type of release for those who are built for comfort rather than speed.…

Tech visa reform pledged, alongside diplomacy to write new rules for tech The Biden administration has named China as the most threatening nation the United States faces, on grounds that it can combine its technological and other capabilities like no other.…

Despite perils of 500PB data trove, 'microservices abuse' and need to rapidly bring Asian tech to the world PayPal says it managed to deliver 30 per cent more features than usual during 2020, a year in which its teams worked from home.…

Software remains pretty much the same... but at twice the price Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server has maintained the same starting price over the past few years. Now, changes to the way the software is licensed have doubled the cost for some self-support customers using virtual machines.…

Assuming your content blocker can scrutinize DNS AdGuard on Thursday published a list of more than 6,000 CNAME-based trackers so they can be incorporated into content-blocking filters.…

Charges filed against head of content as cast and crew apply for 'anticipatory bail' Amazon Prime India has issued a rare-for-Big-Tech apology for material deemed offensive in Bezos's streaming arm's political thriller, Tandav, as legal writs fly.…

Good news for memory makers, not such great news for wider tech world US memory maker Micron Technology expects the chronic shortage of DRAM in the market to continue throughout this year, according to senior veep and CFO David Zinsner.…

Hit the organ-grinder, not just the monkey US payments processing biz Brightspeed Solutions and its founder have been accused of handling $63m on behalf of tech support scammers who preyed on the elderly and less technically adept while posing as reps of Microsoft and Symantec.…

Come to Outlook Mobile. The water's lovely Microsoft issued a reminder during its Ignite shindig this week that for every shiny new service it launches, it nudges an older one aside once the lustre has worn off.…

High-growth hungry investors worrying you? Try hyperscalers! Snowflake has more than doubled its annual revenue in the last year but investors seem unimpressed with the $33bn IPO company's efforts.…

Bit of a pain switching the thing on, but you can't have everything Unwilling to wait the few months until the launch of the first Apple Silicon iMac, a popular retro computing vlogger has retrofitted a 2011 27-inch model with the innards of the latest M1 Mac Mini. And it worked. Sort of.…

Red Hat's State of Enterprise Open Source might have an answer A shift within the enterprise to open source is gathering pace due less to total cost of ownership and more to innovations around infrastructure and container technologies, according to a new report.…

Talk about a hostile environment... It's £70k+ but you'll really sweat for it For the brave – or perhaps foolhardy – senior IT jobs hunters there is an opening at the UK Home Office for a Deputy Director of IT Operations in a lovely '70s era highrise in Croydon.…

Partly chalked up to someone applying a plunger to the supply chain blockage The prospect of a return to office-based work as vaccinations increase has done nothing to dampen PC demand, with IDC forecasting double-digit growth for traditional consumer and business computing devices in Q1.…

We don't want to take 'first past the post' candidates, says contract award notice. Ahem Perhaps learning from the not-insignificant errors attributed to the Army’s efforts at recruitment IT, the UK’s Navy and Airforce have decided to farm out development of their systems with the award of a £9.5m contract to low-code software specialist Pega Systems.…

First test flight saw drone take off, follow orders, land by AI control Boeing this week successfully completed its first official test flight of its autonomous uncrewed military airplane.…

'This tool is not supported in any way. Nobody will be on the hook for fixing any issues with it' Ignite Microsoft has previewed a new upgrade assistant to help developers port .NET Framework applications to .NET 5.0, but it is a long way from a complete solution.…

JavaScript could usurp Python for mathematical programming, claims Deno team The Deno project has released version 1.8, including experimental support for the WebGPU API enabling "out-of-the-box GPU accelerated machine learning."…

And so can you, because its vote-for-code tools are now on GitHub POLL Google has revealed that its internal anti-malware tools include a “social voting” scheme that lets staff vouch for code they want to install won’t do any damage.…

UK targets 100,000 small businesses with up to £5,000 boost The UK government is promising to subsidise new software investment by small and medium-sized enterprises by up to 50 per cent, or a maximum value of £5,000.…

Lyft, Microsoft, Slack, Capital One, Airbnb become bedfellows Twenty-one companies concerned about making and managing mobile apps have come together to participate in the Mobile Native Foundation (MNF), an initiative hosted by the Linux Foundation, to share knowledge and resources.…

It’s not that they lied (which looks likely), it's that they all lied together, says spokesperson Facebook has for the first time deleted accounts associated with the Thai government due to “coordinated inauthentic behavior”.…

In response to complaints about the time taken to scan, not concerns about privacy Hong Kong’s secretary for innovation and technology Alfred Sit has said the Territory is working on a technology that somehow passively scans QR codes.…

DNS oversight body accused again and again of chronic foot-dragging ICANN has finally acted against Net 4 India, terminating its accreditation and so preventing the rogue registrar from registering domain names for customers in most internet registries across the globe.…

14th five-year plan to be revealed, national digital currency also makes the agenda China will today open its annual “Two Sessions” parliamentary meetings, and has said the nation’s technology strategy will be among the top three items up for discussion.…

Far-right sanctuary sues cloud giant for breach of contract after plug pulled on its server hosting Parler this week dropped its case against Amazon Web Services – and filed a fresh lawsuit claiming the cloud giant breached its contract by pulling the antisocial network's hosting.…

Eight plucky applicants will be picked for journey of a lifetime Video Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa this week he opened an application process for eight people to accompany him to the Moon aboard SpaceX’s Starship.…

Dodgy doppelganger not the first, won’t be the last Logowatch Adolf Hitler killed himself in 1945 after being responsible for the death of millions as the leader of Germany's Nazi party. He had a small rectangular mustache.…

Notes an 'erosion of trust' – gee, wonder who could be responsible for that... Google says it will not come up with new ways to track individual netizens as they browse the web once Chrome phases out third-party cookies, commonly used for loosely observing people's online activities.…

Demand will increase, says CEO, as HPC chief heads for the exit Hewlett Packard Enterprise says it is now seeing signs that biz customers are planning to update their on-premises infrastructure as the world slowly recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic... not that this came in time to save its latest quarter.…

Time to go down to Memphis, er, Cupertino, to check for a decree Researchers have discovered language buried in the forthcoming release of MacOS Big Sur 11.3 that suggests Apple may withdraw the Rosetta 2 binary compatibility layer in some regions.…

Azure SQL Data Warehouse Ignite Microsoft has pushed out Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB to general availability in an effort to bring its transactional NoSQL database closer to the analytics workhorse data warehouse.…

The same tech inside Google Pay, Shopping, Analytics, Ads, etc Google on Wednesday announced the release of Flutter 2, an update to its popular cross-platform, open source app development framework.…

Ace infosec biz aware and investigating, we're told Infosec outfit Qualys, its cloud-based vuln detection tech, and its SSL server test webpage, have seemingly fallen victim to a ransomware attack.…

Any user could become root, warns Immersive Labs researcher Proof of concept code has been published for a vulnerability in popular data centre security management tool Saltstack, which was discovered after a developer at Immersive Labs found a privilege escalation bug allowing any old user to become root.…

Spend a little time with our Tim and Nutanix’s Kong Yang – and learn how to crack the conundrum Webcast Upheaval always creates opportunity, and it’s often cyber criminals who are the first to exploit it.…

Ready or not, here I come! The next version of Windows 10 is most definitely inbound after Microsoft began forcing the code onto its loyal band of unpaid testers last night as a "recommended update."…

'Their open licensing model is absolutely one of the greatest licensing models out there' Nvidia has no plans to dismantle Arm's licensing-based biz model, enterprise veep and CFO Colette Kress has said, touching on one of the key concerns voiced by industry as competition regulators probe the proposed $40bn buyout.…

Pitches pro-privacy platform with customizable results filter dubbed Goggles Brave, maker of the identically named privacy-focused web browser, has acquired its own search engine to offer as an alternative to Google Search and competing search engines that exist but aren't all that visible in Google's shadow.…

If he said it on Twitter it must be all above board, right? Cryptocurrency enthusiast Elon Musk has attracted scorn after floating the idea of changing the name of Boca Chica, Texas, to "Starbase."…

For now, you get Dell and Pure Storage-as-a-service and more metallic locations Equinix is weeks away from unleashing Ampere’s 128-core Altra server CPUs in its “Metal” not-quite cloud service.…

One warning email.... then three years of backup gone in a flash, says storage exec Cohesity exec Chris Colotti has said that Kaseya Spanning eradicated years of backup data belonging to him after he unwittingly breached a usage limit for an account that was supposed to have no pre-set limits, and then didn't upgrade his plan within a five-day period.…

Seeing as Google thinks no one cares about location records, we'll remove street addresses from all our sites, says compliance chief Sectigo’s chief compliance officer has hit out at Google for minimizing the visibility of Extended Validation HTTPS certificates in Chrome.…

Hackers are friends not foes, says Alyssa Miller in this opening argument for our latest debate Register debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, the argument for the motion is published today, and the argument against will be published on Friday.…

No broadband or bedroom though, so you'll have to sign up for sats or build your own Stuck in a flat in London, Tokyo, New York or another less lovely urban area for the pandemic?…

Terms of deal not disclosed as Big Blue insists it wasn't wrong, but merely didn't follow design standards British insurer Direct Line has settled a High Court case it brought against IBM for £36m after alleging Big Blue fatally bungled a far-reaching Agile methodology-based insurance platform IT project.…

Pitches 'shared fate' scheme as an upgrade to current convention of cloud sec being your problem Google and insurance colossi Allianz and Munich Re have teamed on a special insurance policy tailored to the G-Cloud.…