The Register

Plus: Waymo risks driverless car trial, ML papers now include code, and AI will write your dev CV for you In brief Facebook's computer-vision algorithm flagged an innocuous advert for onions posted on its social media platform for being "overtly sexual."…

Check bank accounts, don't open council emails, you know how this goes Hackney Council in East London has declared that it was hit by a "cyberattack" – but both the authority and officials from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) remain tight-lipped about what actually happened.…

Scratchier touchscreen, less impressive snapper Samsung hasn't made many "Fan Edition" phones. When it has, the rationale was always borne out of necessity. The first (and, until recently, only) device to carry the "FE" name was a Korea-only version of the Note 7, minus the exploding batteries that made an otherwise excellent phone an unmitigated commercial disaster.…

'Train has left the station' for more than half, while 43% delayed indefinitely SAP users from German-speaking countries are seeing sharp declines in corporate revenue as a result of COVID-19 – but half are still pushing forward with projects to roll out S/4HANA, the ERP vendor's core platform upgrade.…

Nothing like servicing an engine mid-flight, huh? Boffins from North Carolina State University and IBM Research have devised a software framework that can automatically repair a majority of the common code patterns that cause Java programs to hang.…

What's another three years amid project delays and Brexit uncertainty? UK tax collector HMRC has awarded Fujitsu a £168.8m contract without competition to ensure critical applications keep running as projects to replace them are delayed and Brexit pressures mount.…

Also new: WebView sidebars, rich JavaScript debugging, accessible settings Microsoft has released version 1.50 of the word's most popular code editor, Visual Studio Code, with enhancements to core features, richer extension support, accessibility improvements, and not forgetting a build that runs on Raspberry Pi.…

16KB RAM becomes 128KB as the Beeb gets down with the kids again As the nights draw in, Auntie Beeb has given schoolkids and hobbyists a much-needed something to look forward to in the next few weeks – an updated BBC Micro:bit.…

If no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The B-Team Imagination will today launch its latest line of graphics processor cores, including one we're told is destined for cloud hardware.…

Minister disowns 'crass' spot that shows American woman as Brit ballerina and seemingly belittles beleaguered arts sector Slightly NSFW The UK government has pulled an ad campaign that encouraged retraining for a job in cyber-security.…

AWS shows you how to fit a week of cloud security learning into just four hours Promo How does the cloud threat landscape look to you? As if security teams weren’t hard pushed already, chances are you’ve heard how bad actors have been taking advantage of 2020’s headlong rush to remote working.…

Adds 100 percent cashback tier if availability dips below 95 percent, removes reference to POWER8 servers IBM has issued a new Cloud Service Description, the formal document that explains what Big Blue considers to be a cloud and how it’s effort will behave.…

Five-year deal to oversee 3.6 million web addresses ... but does anyone actually want it? The European Union has opened up the .eu internet registry for a new owner, offering a five-year contract to oversee its 3.6 million domain names from October 2022.…

Database recording legit handsets appears to have exceeded capacity Indonesia’s cellphone registration scheme – an effort to protect local manufacturers, boost the tax base, and ensure consumers don’t end up with dodgy products – appears to have run aground.…

Pasta la vista, baby Astronomers have watched a star be destroyed by the process of spaghettification, a rare event triggered when a sun strays too close to a black hole.…

Pauses News Showcase rollout while it awaits government capitulation Google has paused the rollout of its News Showcase product in Australia, because it says it could be unworkable under the nation’s proposed pay-for-news plan.…

Minister says more supers will advance society. So why wait to develop silicon, networks, storage and more? India’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” program – a national drive for self sufficiency in just about everything – has added building a supercomputing hardware stack to its to-do list.…

After nearly 20 years, it's time to say goodbye to venerable messageboard Yahoo! is finally killing off Groups at the end of this year, after having launched it almost two decades ago.…

Sorry not sorry, Facebook California’s Attorney General has updated the state's data privacy regulations to outlaw shady semantics designed to confuse folks into handing over their data.…

'Unauthorized access to elections support systems' detected tho 'no evidence to date that integrity of elections data has been compromised' If you're wondering which bugs in particular miscreants are exploiting to break into, or attempt to break into, US government networks, wonder no more. And then make sure you've patched them.…

It was just code left over from a prototype, says hardware maker The Xplora 4 smartwatch, made by Chinese outfit Qihoo 360 Technology Co, and marketed to children under the Xplora brand in the US and Europe, can covertly take photos and record audio when activated by an encrypted SMS message, says Norwegian security firm Mnemonic.…

And so Facebook takes belated principled stance on, um, Nazi genocide Facebook will block posts that deny the Holocaust after CEO Mark Zuckerberg, aged 36, announced on Monday that his “thinking has evolved.”…

Time to get cracking on 5.10 Linux 5.9 has been declared stable, with Linus Torvalds observing "there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here" despite the number of tweaks in the last week.…

Multinational operation is part of election protection effort Microsoft and other global infosec companies have mounted a joint operation to sabotage command-and-control (C2) infrastructure used by the Trickbot malware to inject, among other things, ransomware into victims' PCs.…

Certain business models work better than others when most people avoid human contact Shifts in consumer behaviour could see a handful of companies come to dominate the online food, education and leisure industries, as Amazon has in e-commerce, according to research.…

Also: Getting Edgy in the holidays, AtHoc and Teams, and Azure updates In Brief Microsoft's army of unpaid testers have received their weekly dose of love from the Windows Insider team in the form of Dev Channel build 20231.…

Get cell broadcast tech in, urges onetime Lulzsec white hat Ireland's efforts to keep residents informed about coronavirus has fallen foul of the same basic SMS vulnerability that one of their British neighbours experienced back in March.…

Now, just to wait for some signal... 5G is no longer the preserve of the pricey. Samsung's Galaxy A42 5G is priced at £349 and competes with similarly entry-level devices from the likes of Xiaomi and OnePlus.…

Spending spree continues in the 'customer engagement' space as online sales segment grows and grows Cloud communications outfit Twilio has found a way to spend some of its lockdown money, snapping up "customer data" specialist Segment in a cash-free deal worth approximately $3.2bn.…

But chip biz is 'confident it will hit that target' in time It's crunch time at Arm as the chip designer races to meet a legally binding recruitment goal by September 2021 made during its 2016 acquisition by Softbank.…

Cloud Functions rival flings out preview that enables custom code to handle lifecycle events Cloud computing behemoth Amazon Web Services, has pushed out an Extensions API for its Lambda serverless platform that lets developers write custom code to handle lifecycle events – such as when the environment starts, invokes functions, and shuts down.…

Not a steak, but if you're going midrange there's enough to chew on Review You get a lot of phone for less than £300 these days. Just look at the Realme 7 and 7 Pro, which recently splashed down in Europe. These devices are the OPPO sister brand's latest bid for the middle-tier mobile market. They don't push any envelopes, but they are excellent value for money.…

Response to pandemic elevates simple laptop to centre of universe... Dell only vendor to shrink, says Canalys Canalys Forum 2020 Fuelled by the pandemic, demand for notebooks continued to go through the roof in Q3 as the PC industry grew at its fastest pace in almost nine years - Dell was the only major top five player to report declines.…

Innocent survey UAS brutally smashed into roof by Stranraer seabird An innocent drone has crashed after being attacked by an aggressive Scottish black-headed gull.…

Plus: Bunch of Cisco fixes for Patch Tuesday week, Fitbit kit hit, RAT malware written in Golang, and more In brief NordVPN has hit the go-live button for the first of its colocated server setups.…

The signage may be borked, but the Swedish meatballs are steaming Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows 10 likes an update. Goodness me it likes an update, as any user who has found a workday cruelly interrupted while the operating system treats itself to a jolly good patching can confirm.…

Rhetoric for the post-Brexit era but will actions follow words? Comment A UK government minister has called for the country to "shape the standards of new technology" in a speech aimed at drumming up Commonwealth support for a cyber "leadership" role for post-Brexit Britain.…

Boss has to agree, home time not to exceed 50 percent and let’s talk about salary if you leave town Microsoft has decided its 150,000-plus staff can work from anywhere, anytime, most of the time.…

Beware the wrong tool in the wrong hands Who, Me? If there is one Microsoft product guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of an IT pro more than Excel shoehorned into the wrong place, it's Access inserted into any place. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Bills home-brewed silicon as the upgrade path to better Redis or memcached Amazon Web Services has made its home-brewed Arm-powered Graviton2 CPUs the default for its ElastiCache service.…

Top advice and info from an extraordinary lineup of speakers Event Learn from industry practitioners about model deployment pipelines, testing & monitoring for machine learning, and how to bake explainability into your process…

Bank of England and US Reserve among those pondering own digital dollars China has announced a significant new trial of its digital currency, co-incidentally on the same day influential central banks laid out their plans for a similar effort.…

Warnings to clean up its act went unheeded, but door remains open for a return Pakistan has banned TikTok, citing the service’s slew of salaciousness as insupportable.…

Or as they put it: ‘Embed the safety of the public in system designs … facilitating the investigation and prosecution of offences’ The nations of the Five Eyes security alliance – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK – plus Japan and India, have called on technology companies to design their products so they offer access to encrypted messages and content.…

US military sticks techno-specs on crack canines in command experiment The US Army will give military dogs augmented-reality goggles and walkie-talkies to work out whether the technology can help them better assist soldiers on the battlefield.…

It's Do Not Track II: The Wrath of Ashkan and Sebastian... Caaaaaaaan't you stop stalking us around the internet A coalition of technology companies, publishers, academics and advocacy groups this week proposed a web specification to allow internet users to declare whether they agree to have their personal data shared or sold.…

Unpatched Cisco VPN servers, access to the iOS source code, AWS secret keys – this is weapons grade 'oof' A team of vulnerability spotters have netted themselves a six-figure payout from Apple after discovering dozens security holes in the Cupertino giant's computer systems, some of which could have been exploited to steal iOS source code, and more.…

Pittsburgh workforce erosion, punitive policies cited in labor complaint The US National Labor Relations Board has bundled a series of complaints alleging labor law violations against IT services firm HCL America (HCL Technologies), which supplies contract workers like data analysts to a Google office in Pittsburgh, into a case to be heard in February.…

But as ever, users, you don't need to yell into the phone... it's not the 1970s In a much-anticipated move for Android phone users, Google has tweaked its Assistant to let users interact with third-party apps – including Spotify and Twitter – using their voice.…

Someone's got to wrangle all the automation now Microsoft and pals have joined the act Open source bot orchestration vendor Camunda has rolled out its latest platform update, which includes features designed to centrally wrangle bots from the multitude of vendors currently muscling in on the lucrative market.…