The Register

Bought 'estimated onomastic data' tagged onto data of millions of Brit voters The UK's ruling Conservative Party has been using personal data in a way that spots an individual's likely county of origin, ethnic origin and religion based on their first and last name.…

Native wit... but let's see what the 13-inch brings Benchmarks highlighting the performance of Apple’s homegrown M1 chip have surfaced, showing Cupertino’s latest (unreleased) MacBook Air handily trouncing the previous generation 16-inch MacBook Pro in both single-core and dual-core tasks.…

Mesa contributor issues a warning: community matters Intel's driver support for Linux is improving, but has raised an eyebrow or two within the open source community as a Mesa contributor noted that Chipzilla's code-sharing development model was not necessarily a win.…

Wider government only told of encryption machine nobbling a year after it ended Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was (quite literally) owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed.…

Detecting deceptive websites as soon as they get registered may help reduce the contagion of misinformation Academics in the US and UK have created a machine-learning tool for predicting when newly registered internet domains will be used to spread false information, in the hope these sites can be blocked or shut down before they pollute online communication channels.…

EFF on the attack as IT giant tries to claim free supplies during 'device lifetime' just an introductory offer HP Inc is under fire for not only ending its promise of free ink for life but also automatically enrolling customers into a subscription plan to continue using their printer ink.…

There are no tags today, but there will always be bork Bork!Bork!Bork! One benefit of lockdown in the UK has been a surge of national creativity, be it in the form of rainbows crafted from a variety of materials or the sheer quantity of excuses created when faced with a Joe Wicks* workout. But it seems not even a temple for the arts and crafts is immune to the curse of bork.…

The bad guys looking after the good guys... or is that the other way round? Life's so complicated Cleveland Police in northeast England has handed a £4.2m contract to incumbent IT integrator and outsourcing provider Sopra Steria to host and maintain its Oracle E-business Suite applications in Big Red's cloud.…

More than 100 heads to exit UK division in the New Year, and then there's Scandanavia IBM has almost topped and tailed this calendar year with redundancies in the Global Business Services division - staff across Northern Europe are heading into the Christmas period amid uncertainty about whether they’ll have a job in 2021.…

Just tune in next week and find out more Webcast When it comes to speeding up application delivery, one of the biggest sources of friction can be the security team. And that’s entirely understandable, if unfortunate.…

Gmail, Drive to count toward 15GB of gratis cloud space, caveats abound Google will cap its free online storage to 15GB per person, give or take some caveats, and users will have to pay if they go over that limit – or have their excess data deleted – the search giant said on Wednesday.…

AMD’s Ryzen to the challenge with new embedded CPUs AMD’s taken the wraps off four Ryzen processors aimed at embedded applications, thin clients and mini-PCs.…

Geo-boffin urges fellow scientists to consider again link between supernova and radiocarbon levels Astronomers seeking to chart the history of supernovas that once lit up our skies and flooded our planet with radiation ought to take a look at tree rings, it's been suggested.…

Knox and Google device enrolment now play nice together Samsung regularly tops Android handset sales charts and has arguably done more than any other handset-maker to make the OS. Yet the Korean company did not make the list at the launch of the Android Enterprise Recommended program, a scheme that Google created in early 2018 to point out which ‘Droids are ready to offer enterprise-grade services like remote management and swift security updates.…

Cute animals rendered useless for two hours as streaming site got the wobbles The video locker was slow to load videos and balked when asked to upload new content on Wednesday, from just before midnight GMT. While all but night-owl European users mostly missed the mess, North American users woke up without their favourite early morning streams and some Asian users were also deprived of their favourite vids and top notch strategic content like Reg lectures.…

Best result for seven years comes as tragedy shows tech remains out of reach for many India clocked up its most prolific PC-buying quarter for seven years, with 3.4 million new devices shipped in the country between July and September 2020.…

Another one collared by FBI, indicted One day after an idiot was put behind bars for four years for shining a laser at a police helicopter, the Feds announced they've indicted a man accused of risking the safety of three passenger planes.…

Plus liquid cooling to hit 580k orders/second on record $75bn 11.11 shopping bonanza day Video Alibaba claims its online marketplace coped with a peak load of 583,000 orders per second on this year's Singles Day, China’s internet shopping frenzy event akin to Cyber Monday.…

Plenty of money left to play for Epic Games scored a victory in its ongoing acrimonious legal battle with Apple this week after a federal judge dismissed several of Cupertino’s counterclaims.…

Will Section 230 become the new net neutrality? Analysis The FCC has been sucked further into partisan politics with the nomination of a new commissioner to its panel of five overseers.…

Big battle still raging between Apple, Google, Amazon Roku streaming devices will now support Apple’s AirPlay2 streaming and HomeKit smart home protocols.…

Sending codes over the insecure public telephone network isn't the way to go Microsoft on Tuesday advised internet users to embrace multi-factor authentication (MFA)... except where publicly switched telephone networks are involved.…

Upgrade now on Azure App Service, if you can tolerate a 'cold start' Microsoft has released ASP.NET Core 5.0 as part of the general availability of .NET 5 this week, with new features and substantial performance improvements but also some breaking changes.…

'Like an air conditioner with a graphics card'.... Lessons in heat management from Microsoft As excited players fired up Microsoft's latest take on gaming, terrors of the torx screw, iFixit, were busy pulling theirs to pieces.…

Az Predictor aims to spare little grey cells the effort of tracking thousands of cmdlets The Azure PowerShell team has unveiled Az Predictor, a handy command line helper aimed at easing casual users into the often complicated cmdlet world of PowerShell.…

.NET 5, new Visual Studio, F# updates and more Cross platform open source .NET 5.0 has hit general availability and been joined by new versions of C#, F# and the first preview of Visual Studio 16.9.…

Plus: Naming 'n' shaming doesn't stop hostile countries having a pop the UK The former head of the National Cyber Security Centre has warned that some British government figures have a “profound lack of understanding” of cyberspace, online warfare and information security.…

Survey sees CIOs loosening purse-strings, execs feeling mushy about IT crowd (but there are caveats) As the nights draw in, COVID-19 lockdown restrictions tighten across Europe, and the number of cases in the US accelerates, techies who despair may turn to Gartner - the omniscient overseer of IT trends - for a bit of light relief.…

And why not have a server-grade GPU dedicated to game-streaming to test the new abstraction tool Intel would prefer developers stop talking about CPUs and GPUs and instead target "XPUs".…

Project includes shifting back office IT and replacing thousands of devices Transport for London, the body responsible for public transport and infrastructure in Europe’s largest city*, is set to begin talks with suppliers over a potential £1.1bn deal for collecting money for travel.…

'Unusual for a vulnerability on a modern operating system to be this easy to exploit,' says bughunter GitHub security researcher Kevin Backhouse found bugs in Ubuntu 20.04 (a long-term support release) which enabled any desktop user to get root access. The vulnerabilities have now been patched.…

What happens when you mix up the wood and metal screws provided for installation? Heeeeat Updated Amazon’s home security brand Ring is recalling roughly 360,000 of its Wi-Fi enabled video doorbells over concerns they may catch fire when incorrectly installed.…

It's not DNS. It can't be DNS. It's actually a TITSUP* Customers of the UK's self-professed #1 provider of domain names, GoDaddy-owned 123 Reg, have had a frustrating few days after finding DNS records disappearing from their dashboards.…

Full Euro data sovereignty, promises cloud company Google's "first partnership of this kind" with an independent hosting provider sees its Anthos Kubernetes platform offered without ties to Google Cloud, according to the third-party cloud company selling the service.…

And that might be bad news for our sales expectations Swedish telco and network provider Ericsson has warned investors that a potential thawing in relations between the US and China caused by a change of regime in Washington could hurt its bottom line.…

Make it swim with the fishes The US branch of Samsung’s mobile division has asked a New Jersey court to dismiss a proposed class action suit which alleges the business misled customers about the waterproofing on its Samsung Galaxy S7 lines.…

As C# 9.0 is released, a look back at functional programming adoption, what the language is for, and what was a mistake Interview C# Lead Designer Mads Torgersen cracked open a window into the evolution of the language during his spot at the virtual QCon Plus developer conference last week, and was quite frank about what has worked and what has not.…

If you run a physical graphics accelerator and SSD in the G-cloud, pay attention Google Cloud has warned that some of its servers will soon have their firmware upgraded, an event that will likely disrupt workloads.…

TikTok asks court to intervene as administration fails to rule on forced sale ahead of deadline for shutdown TikTok says the Trump administration has gone quiet on whether it will allow the sale of its US operations to Oracle and Walmart.…

No selling to evil folks albeit with a few big loopholes for some The European Union has tightened up export rules on cybersurveillance tools in an effort to limit their spread to repressive regimes.…

Scale the Data Cloud Summit takes place this November Promo There’s probably never been a more appropriate time to move your data to the cloud. Let’s face it, there’s a good chance you haven’t even seen your on-prem infrastructure for months.…

And also – gulp! – figure out when it’s time for a chat about licensing anomalies Microsoft has merrily revealed that it has just given its resellers new tools designed to help them sell you more stuff, more often.…

First stage already on its way to the Red Planet, full steam ahead A joint American-European effort to bring Martian soil back to Earth will need an extra two years and cost about $4bn more than anticipated, an independent review board (IRB) has warned in a report.…

This one's all about putting cricket behind a paywall for nine-figure audiences of ardent fans Amazon has made a big bet on cricket played on New Zealand as a vehicle to help it crack the Indian market.…

Share prices of China’s internet giants slump in wake of call for comment China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has opened a discussion on a revised anti-monopoly law for the Internet age.…

Russian rockets are Putin on the back burner, except for emergencies NASA on Tuesday officially certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule as vehicles capable of flying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, making it the first ever commercial spacecraft system to be approved by the American agency.…

Android, Adobe, SAP, Red Hat join the bug-busting party Patch Tuesday Microsoft published fixes for 112 software vulnerabilities for its November Patch Tuesday, 17 of which have been rated critical.…

Man jailed for 51 months after pilot temporarily blinded by the light An idiot who directed a laser at a police helicopter, temporarily blinding the pilot while he was searching for a shooting suspect, has been sent down for four-and-a-quarter years.…

ARM64 5nm TSMC-made silicon to ship next week, Cupertino claims apps are ready Apple on Tuesday unveiled three computers based on homegrown Apple Silicon processors, marking the start of a two-year transition that will replace Intel microprocessors with Cupertino-designed chips compatible with the Arm microarchitecture.…

They have a point Uber and Lyft have asked a California court to scrap an injunction that forces them to treat their drivers as employees given that the US state's voters backed Proposition 22.…