The Register

Plus: Google trains 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model, popular software used for job screenings scraps facial-recognition feature In brief Just days before President Trump is due to leave office, the White House created its National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which will sit under the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

Pat Gelsinger returning to Chipzilla as CEO is another extraordinary stroke of luck for the company Column Intel has been many things. It has been a struggling startup, surfing the sudden successes and near-death experiences of 1970s Silicon Valley. It's been a relentless powerhouse, ruthlessly exploiting its dominance as personal computing rode Moore's Law to commercial and social revolution. Now it's in danger of seeing its supremacy crumble as rivals grab markets and mindshare with better manufacturing and marketing as Moore's Law itself turns to sand.…

Oh good, you fixed it. Now, if you could just put your head on that plate... Who, Me? Beware the perils of being too helpful as we kick the working week off with a Who, Me? starring both DNS and the need of management to put someone's – anyone's – head on a spike.…

Plus: Watch out for NTFS-corrupting folder, Mimecast hack, and more In brief Last week ended with news that the venerable infosec mailing list Bugtraq was being shutdown at the end of the month.…

Not a machine-generated headline, we swear Facebook and its Irish subsidiary on Thursday announced the filing of a lawsuit in Portugal against two people for allegedly scraping Facebook profile data and other browser info using malicious Chrome extensions.…

Idiot faces up to a year in the cooler after FBI tracks him down from SD card found in prang wreckage A man in California faces up to a year behind bars and a fine for crashing his drone into a police helicopter, forcing an emergency landing.…

While the Touch Bar is to be banished Renowned Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo reckons the iGiant is bringing back its beloved MagSafe charging standard with the next generation of MacBook Pro machines.…

We'll drink to that The compatibility layer for Windows applications, Wine, has celebrated the start of 2021 in the traditional manner – with a substantial update.…

Parting shot by Trump – but 'bi-partisan' push against China will continue, says analyst With five days left before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration has delivered a parting blow to China's tech industry by designating Xiaomi as a "Communist Chinese military company" and placing it on a financial ban list.…

A blue day on the Red Planet Hot on the heels of a mission extension comes news that scientists have now given up on attempts to persuade the NASA InSight lander's "mole" to burrow more than a few centimetres beneath the Martian surface.…

Install base explodes following WhatsApp 'privacy' update, Musk endorsement Updated Signal is experiencing a partial outage as tens of millions of netizens flood the free secure messaging service.…

Commercial involvement in open source is essential, says CMS boss Interview Content management system Drupal is 20 years old, prompting its founder to talk to about its evolving role, why it shifted from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release, and concerns about JavaScript bloat causing issues for those with poor connectivity.…

Epic by name, epic (lawsuit) by nature Epic Games intends to file a competition lawsuit against Google in the UK as part of the ongoing Fortnite-kicked-off-platforms saga, according to documents lodged with the Competition Appeal Tribunal.…

Uphill battle shifting business applications to the cloud laid bare SAP today reported preliminary results for 2020, showing the German enterprise software vendor serving up flat revenue and slightly improving profits, along with a worryingly notable drop in licence sales.…

Spoiler: It's quantum. And who knew? 5G isn't for the peasants Dell's global chief technology officer, John Roese, shared his thoughts on where technology will go in 2021 at a roundtable event this week. Short version? Anywhere it likes – so long as it's on Dell kit.…

Hybrid? Multi-cloud? Big Blue has a consultant for that IBM is to snaffle San Jose-based consulting outfit Taos as it seeks to bolster its cloud biz.…

This has got to be the Who Me? story of all time... An "error" in a "standard housekeeping process" on the UK’s controversial Police National Computer (PNC) database has led to the deletion of more than 150,000 DNA, fingerprint and other records, the Home Office has confirmed.…

'Long and complex' saga shifts into next phase as new heroes enter battlefield Games Workshop, the fantasy model maker and table-top wargames retailer, has ingested a dose of reality as it delays its high-risk ERP project and appoints a new integrator.…

But maybe Foveros finest should have been a Duplo kit... *cough* 7nm We can exclusively reveal that any grumbles regarding Intel's Lakefield chippery might be down to it being made out of plastic Lego parts. At least, that's if the marketing kit is anything to go by.…

Have you finished that sandwich? If not, it’s classified as contraband Something for the Weekend, Sir? What was the big story of 2020? With the luxury of two weeks' hindsight, I think we can all agree: it was, of course, the year autonomous vehicles failed to go mainstream again.…

Record low onshore work as pandemic teaches clients they need not fear off-site workers Infosys has revealed “dramatic growth” of its workforce in Mexico and Canada, which are being used as “near-shore bases” for its US operations despite the company last year announcing 12,000 hires in the Land of the Free.…

IT staff can be so... spiky sometimes On Call A seemingly innocent uplighter looms large in today's On Call tale of NetWare nefariousness in which a reader takes observability to new lengths.…

Anti-money-laundering agency says it mis-interpreted info, leading to allegations of unexplained $1.8bn transfer to Australia The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), a government agency tasked with detecting and preventing financial crimes, has admitted that software errors led it to allege that the Vatican had inexplicably shipped AU$2.3bn to Australia.…

Extreme Networks flings flaky Flash-free fix and Cisco all-but-sighs as it reminds users to upgrade Extreme Networks has updated the WiNG-Man software that left some users unable to manage their networks with a GUI after it failed to deliver an upgrade before Adobe’s Flash plug-in reached end of life.…

Outlines $25bn of capex plus plans to expand in China Taiwan’s silicon manufacturing titan TSMC has revealed it should be ready to produce chips using a three-nanometre process in 2022.…

Academic also charged with hiding foreign assets, false tax statements An MIT professor has been arrested and charged with federal grant fraud and failing to disclose contacts with the Chinese government, the US Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts said on Thursday.…

Switchzilla's enlarged offer accepted after smaller biz tried to stall acquisition Cisco’s merger with Acacia Communications is set to go ahead after the Silicon Valley giant raised its offer to $4.5bn, an increase of nearly $2bn or 64 per cent.…

Firmware updates aren't enough to tackle worn-out memory The US Department of Transport has recommended Tesla recall 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles after an investigation found worn-out NAND flash memory can cause the cars’ rearview cameras to fail.…

The Reg speaks to Stanford boffin behind decade-long push for SI prefix In 2010, Austin Sendek, then a physics student at UC Davis, created a petition seeking recognition for prefix "hella-" as an official International System of Units (SI) measurement representing 10.…

One more thing to, er, look forward to when the pandemic ends Around the world, office blocks sit empty. Official government guidance says if you can work remotely, you should. However, it seems like nobody told Logitech, which just expanded its B2B video conferencing portfolio with three new devices aimed at the workplace.…

Great to know they 'remain committed' SAP is trying to tease the market with new features headed to the core database underpinning its enterprise applications.…

Just your Stylus? Pen support moves to latest flagship models It's flagship Thursday at Samsung, which for the better part of a decade has squatted over the premium sector of the Android market.…

You know that update thing? JFDI Out of the top five vulnerabilities for 2020 three dated back to 2019 or earlier, according to infosec firm Tenable's annual threat report.…

A combined total of $575m deleted... and counting A couple of news items about what we'll call "cryptidiots" wriggled into the mainstream media this week, momentarily shedding light on the important topics of e-waste and password hygiene for the masses.…

Join us later this month to see what modern data management looks like Webcast There’s been a lot of talk about resilience lately. But while it’s one thing working through mid-pandemic self-care and wellness prescriptions for the individual, what does resilience mean when it comes to your company and its data?…

It's been sloshing around the International Space Station for a while SpaceX hit another milestone overnight with the return of the upgraded cargo Dragon capsule from the International Space Station (ISS), which splashed down off the Florida coast.…

Security, lack of suitable hardware for testing makes full 32-bit support hard Debian 11, codenamed "Bullseye", has entered the first freeze stage, meaning no large or disruptive changes, or new package transitions (merging, splitting, renaming or removing) are allowed. The 32-bit i386 architecture is part of the release but may not be in Debian 12, codenamed "Bookworm".…

All that counter-China stuff costs a pretty penny, y'know The Ministry of Defence's multibillion budget overrun has been caused in part because of its spending splurge on flashy new "cyber" capabilities, according to the National Audit Office.…

The world's favourite language has complex ecosystem in which build tools are now fundamental The 2020 State of JavaScript report, a survey of over 23,000 developers globally, has revealed growing use of WebPack and Jest, continuing high use of React, Express and TypeScript, and that top of the wishlist is no longer better browser compatibility, but rather static typing.…

Meanwhile, hello Epson drivers? The Raspberry Pi OS plunged another knife into the dark heart of Flash this week while adding drivers for Epson printers.…

Toxic wastewater and resource hungry - wafer-fabbing's a mucky biz South Korean memory biz SK Hynix has issued a $1 billion “green bond” with the funds intended for pay for projects designed to reduce the ecological impact of its manufacturing activities.…

Before you choke on your tea, authority likely won't splash anything near that Eight resellers have been awarded places on a £5bn framework contract led by the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Northamptonshire, a county in England's East Midlands.…

This one is not just written in Rust – its design is based on Rust features Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as "an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management."…

Accused pinched them from employer, sold them on eBay, prosecutors claim A 23-year-old Gloucester IT worker is to stand trial after allegedly stealing more than £30,000 worth of Amazon vouchers before selling them on eBay.…

Juicier payoff for those who do, but employees fear process will become compulsory if numbers aren't met Exclusive Fujitsu is looking for hundreds of volunteers in its UK Delivery organisation to leave with an enhanced payoff, though only employees with at least five years' service can currently apply. At the same time it is running a small redundancy process in other areas of the business where contracts are running off.…

Working from home means lots of us might as well be offshore now, suggests CEO Wipro has both celebrated customers’ use of offshoring for its positive impact on its finances and suggested the concept may have been made obsolete by the pandemic-induced surge in working from home.…

UnArmed to the teeth: Early versions to ship in April, more to follow in September If you’re looking for a modest RISC-V computer capable of running Linux, with AI and other acceleration thrown in, to evaluate the architecture, the people behind the BeagleBoard have teased such a thing: the BeagleV board, starting from $119 (£87).…

‘I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump’ says @Jack Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has posted a long thread in which he laments having to permanently suspend US president Donald Trump’s personal twitter account.…

And can SASE save us? Webcast Last year your bosses embraced remote working because, let’s face it, none of us had a choice.…

Torrent search engine is still up after years of whack-a-mole with copyright cops One of the co-creators of notorious BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay has criticised free speech social network Parler for the lack of resilience that saw it go dark after Amazon Web Services booted it out of its cloud.…