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You can't make this stuff up An IBM manager unfairly sacked a third-line IT support engineer despite having a pool of just two people to make redundancies from, a UK employment tribunal has ruled.…

Get your kicks on, er, the A12 Bork!Bork!Bork! A bit of drivethru borkage is on show today, courtesy of regular contributor McDonald's.…

Let's just go back to human-selected cropping, eh? In an attempt to fix Twitter’s problematic automated image-cropping tool, its engineers said the software will in future simply rely less on AI algorithms.…

Be careful what you wish for Who, Me? The end of a damp weekend (for the UK at least) heralds a new instalment in our ongoing series of Register reader confessions. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

This year’s conference is slimmed down, highly practical – just like you Event There’s one thing that hasn’t been disrupted over recent months. Machine learning and AI continue to push their way into the mainstream, and are helping provide answers to the blizzard of tough questions we are all facing right now.…

Plus: IBM shares its ML know-how in schizophrenia fight In brief AI software designed to monitor students via webcam as they take their tests – to detect any attempts at cheating – sometimes fails to identify the students due to their skin color.…

Guess which option this electric truck dreamer chose Video Nikola Motor Company has demanded the removal of videos posted by the embattled electric vehicle maker's critics that incorporate its ridiculed promotional footage of its Nikola One truck.…

Plus: A little reminder to not pay off ransomware crooks In brief LGBTQ dating site Grindr has squashed a security bug in its website that could have been trivially exploited to hijack anyone's profile using just the victim's email address.…

Refresh dukes it out with gear from rival HP Inc has given part of its laptop lineup a bit of a buffing, the result is the HP Spectre x360 14 2-in-1.…

And don't forget the paperwork after, says Chocolate Factory Google is offering bug hunters thousands of dollars worth of compute time on its cloud to hammer away at JavaScript engines and uncover new security flaws in the software.…

We're taking steps to prevent this from happening again, says Redmond Microsoft has blamed a software bug for the service disruption on Monday and Tuesday that affected customers using Azure Active Directory-dependent applications.…

RHEL 7.9 also here – last major version in the 7.x family? Red Hat has released Fedora 33 beta, with the finished article expected at the end of this month, as well as version 7.9 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.…

I don't know why she swallowed the fly... There was good news for administrators of Microsoft's SQL Server 2019 last night as Cumulative Update 8 emerged, fixing the borkage of its predecessor.…

Resource Public Key Infrastructure now, bellows ProtonMail Aussie telco Telstra has apologised after a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing oddity caused traffic destined for encrypted email service ProtonMail to wrongly pass through Telstra's servers.…

Despite Android dwarfing the iPhone ecosystem Consumer spending within mobile apps surged in the third quarter of 2020, according to a new report from app analytics house Sensor Tower.…

Catch up with cybersecurity heavyweights in the comfort of your living room via Rubrik's virtual Data Security Summit Promo After six months of the so-called new normal, are you ready to take a breath? Or are you acutely aware that the real threats to your organization are only now becoming clear?…

Graz University of Tech's Daniel Gruss thinks natural sciences can save us Complexity has broken cybersecurity, but a reappraisal of computer science can keep us safe.…

Also: Scrubtember becomes Abortober, and the worm returns once more to NASA In brief The location of the air leak from the International Space Station (ISS) has been identified. According to Russia's Roscosmos, it is in the Zvezda Service Module transfer chamber.…

Open-source projects aim to give researchers, startups a helping hand IBM has published two open-source artificial intelligence projects it hopes will help astronomers better deal with space junk – and encourage startups to circle Earth with swarms of CubeSats.…

Meanwhile, similar buy Qualtrics continues to enjoy quasi-independence In pursuit of growth beyond its back-office enterprise lair, SAP is forking out for Emarsys, a customer engagement software company.…

Why buy the full-fat version when you can have this? First look The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition (FE) is reminiscent of Apple in the early 1990s. That may not sound like a compliment, but it is.…

And if you're looking to hire techies, send us your job ads for free Job Alert We're back with another banger. This week's jobs run the spectrum of data scientists to Python devs. Scroll down to find out more.…

An open-source project that can't handle pull requests isn't a good look Microsoft has open-sourced many of its developer frameworks but the success of these projects is variable, with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) dubbed "a disaster" by one unhappy developer.…

7.0 release will give devs power to lay out their microservice architecture Interview Document-store NoSQL database biggie Couchbase is promising application multi-tenancy within a single database as part of the next release of its flagship product.…

New era, new weapons needed, says Chief of the Defence Staff Britain's enemies are investing more and more in cyber warfare capabilities, the UK's top general has warned – singling out Russia and its "digital authoritarianism".…

Research finds orgs taking big chances with unpatched email relays Security company Rapid7 reports that there are more than 139,000 Microsoft Exchange 2010 servers with internet-facing services (Outlook Web Access or OWA) despite the application going out of support this month.…

Forty minutes of picture peering slashed to just five seconds NASA says its new crater-hunting AI system has found its first evidence of a previously unseen meteorite strike on Mars, needing just five seconds to clock the potential crash site compared to 40 minutes a human would normally take.…

Playing tug o' war with a 1970s IBM mainframe On Call Is it October? Already? It feels like we still haven't moved on from March. Put such discomfiture to one side in favour of a Friday treat – a tale of brute force and ignorance from those that are forever On Call.…

Kids are being horrible about photo filters, so developers are being asked to help protect mental health Google has revealed it has adopted “value-neutral” language in the interests of improving both selfies and mental health.…

Learn how to get it right with El Reg and Echoworx (...Echoworx) (...Echoworx) Webcast The idea of the paperless office has been with us since, probably, the invention of paper. But like the 15-hour working week and the flying-car commute, it always seems to be just over the rainbow of practicality.…

Properly FOSS version of XenServer promises at least five years of support for next release, maybe more XCP-ng, the crowdfunded effort to deliver an open-source version of XenServer, has matured to the point at which it will offer the world a version with long-term support.…

Big blow to big whistleblower The US government's Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden's Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future related earnings.…

He masterminded $7m scam from halfway house, Feds claim A convicted fraudster was out on parole when he allegedly conned victims into giving him millions of dollars to place surefire sports bets on their behalf using special software that didn't actually exist.…

Fujtisu kit on the floor tho bourse takes the blame for day-long dead zone Tokyo’s Stock Exchange (TSE) went offline for most of Thursday, its longest-ever outage and a very unwelcome one as it is the world’s third-largest bourse, when measured by market capitalisation.…

Earlier ban on H-1B, H-2B, J and L passes ruled an overstep of presidential power, middle-finger to Congress President Trump's proclamation in June that barred companies and other organizations from bringing in foreign workers into the US under various visas like the H-1B has been temporarily, partially blocked.…

'We are on a mission to create as much understanding about algorithms as possible' The City of Helsinki, Finland, and the City of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, have introduced online AI registries that offer a glimpse into the workings of the algorithms and machine-learning systems used for municipal governance.…

The same lot who bought off crooks in May but kept quiet till July +Comment Blackbaud, the cloud CRM provider whose execs bought off ransomware crooks in exchange for a pinky promise that stolen data would not be misused, has now confessed that customers' bank account information may have been taken from its servers by the criminals.…

Rewarding pointless patches with free swag leads to 'DDoS' against projects Updated Hosting biz Digital Ocean kicked off its seventh Hacktoberfest on Thursday – and managed to seriously annoy the very developers the event aims to celebrate.…

You may need to look elsewhere if you want more bang for your buck As well as the updated and costly Surface Pro X, Microsoft has unveiled a cheaper way for users to dip a toe into its hardware waters with the Surface Laptop Go.…

Users fear hack – really the 'processing infrastructure was running behind' Amazon-owned smart home appliance maker Ring has won the world record for biggest game of "ding dong ditch" after a software glitch broadcast erroneous doorbell chimes to countless users yesterday.…

... which Deloitte helped build Salesforce has teamed up with sprawling consultancy Deloitte to peddle COVID-19 contact-tracing software to UK local authorities.…

Online grocer shrugs: We'll see when we actually receive the papers Updated AutoStore, a Norwegian manufacturer of robotic warehouse storage and retrieval systems, says it is suing UK online retailer and tech outfit Ocado.…

This is what you wanted, right? The UK will take a multibillion-pound blow to productivity and economic prosperity should the 5G rollout be held up further, a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) claims.…

'We've made a deliberate attempt to build something that can share source code across all these environments' Interview Google's cross-platform app development framework Flutter marked another quarterly release on Thursday with the debut of Flutter 1.22. The Register had the opportunity to speak with Tim Sneath, product lead at Flutter, about the project's state and ambitions.…

Upgrade will soon come up against Apple's take on the post-Intel world A year after the release of its fan-serving Surface Pro X, Microsoft and new pal Qualcomm have given the Arm-powered fondleslab's chippery a good buffing.…

£5m pot opened to biz and academics who fancy projects with foreign flavour The UK Space Agency has opened a new lunch fund designed foster to "international space collaborations".…

Last year telcos scrambled to plug 'critical user-facing vulns' in network kit UK.gov security researchers examining Huawei source code have so far verified just eight firmware binaries out of more than 60 used across Britain's mobile phone networks, according to the GCHQ-backed agency's annual report.…

Brit firm Bamboo scores cash that can convert to equity. Yup, the government could become a server vendor! The UK's Coronavirus Future Fund has made a biggish bet on Arm server vendor Bamboo.…

Better improve its coverage then Mobile network O2, notable for its occasional outages, has opened the UK's first commercial lab for connected, driverless cars.…

Sounds a bit like what Salesforce denies it worked on Online supermarket Ocado Group has chosen Oracle Fusion Cloud as its main ERP system to help it grow into international markets.…