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Palo Alto Networks lays bare a year of dastardly digital doings Cybercriminals ruthlessly exploited the coronavirus pandemic to set up phishing websites that posed as Pfizer, BioNTech and other household-name suppliers of vaccines and PPE, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Big Red hopes automation will tempt new customers to its cloud Last week Oracle launched an upgrade to its data-warehousing technology that puts SQL, the language on which the company has more or less built its vast fortune, in the background.…

Privacy. Are we there yet? No, but there's some progress at least When version 90 of Google's Chrome browser arrives in mid-April, initial website visits will default to a secure HTTPS connection in the event the user has failed to specify a preferred URI scheme.…

It's a grim time to be in the commercial real-estate business KPMG's latest survey of global CEOs shows widespread belief that the remote-working trend will linger into 2022 as the world gets to grip with COVID-19.…

May have something to do with turning your dad into a cyborg at a wedding VIDEO Hyundai Motor Company and Singapore's dominant telecommunications company Singtel have teamed to build 5G-connected smart factories and an electric vehicle battery subscription service.…

Difficult choices face .uk registry Analysis On Monday, 740 members of .uk internet registry operator Nominet made the drastic decision to ditch five of its 11-strong board of directors, including the CEO and chairman, in a fierce rebuke of the company’s efforts to move from a non-profit organisation to a commercial one.…

New boss already spent 11 years at cloud colossus, has been CEO of data darling Tableau since 2016 Former AWS CEO and Amazon.com CEO-in-waiting Andy Jassy has announced his successor: Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky.…

Unix creators’ sequel-of-sorts seeks simpler licensing, fewer forks of OS that offered precursors to Linux, microservices, etc Bell Labs has decided the time is right to transfer copyright of Plan 9, the not-Unix OS it created in the 1980s.…

Ministries all given goals to infuse AI into operations, some in somewhat startling ways Vietnam has set off in pursuit of a ten-year plan to become a middle power in the field of artificial intelligence.…

App's owner says users didn't bail Messaging app LINE has removed Chinese affiliate’s access to personal data, after infosec concerns led Japanese government officials to stop using the app. Information stored in South Korea will also be rehomed to Japan by September.…

Teams with IBM, creates foundry biz to build x86, Arm, RISC-V cores, schedules in-person conf for October Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday outlined his strategy: getting manufacturing processes right so that Chipzilla can create modular products, and either build them itself or work with third-party foundries. And do that all even as Intel makes a serious tilt at the foundry business itself.…

Even FSF seems baffled by the defiant return of RMS Richard Stallman's return to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), from which he parted ways less than two years ago, has not been well received.…

Castanedas pocketed $2.3m from 800 laptops alone, Feds say A sister and brother have admitted over-ordering hundreds of new MacBooks for "a private university" in Silicon Valley to steal and sell the expensive gear for millions of dollars.…

New post accepted as Chief Impact (on Press Coverage) Officer for BetterUp Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have gone full California with the news that the actor’s husband is to become a tech exec.…

Snafu tripped up Gmail, Google Pay, and a variety of other Android apps For about seven hours on Monday, users of Android devices experienced crashes in various applications including Gmail and other applications that loaded web content.…

Chat-room super-app aimed at gamers now used by 140m people a month Microsoft is apparently mulling snapping up Discord, an IRC-a-like-for-the-2020s popular with gamers, techies, and others, for a whopping $10bn.…

AdoptOpenJDK is moving to Eclipse Foundation, but it is a slow process The Eclipse Foundation has introduced a new Adoptium working group whose goal is to promote free, open source Java runtimes, with initial members including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, New Relic, and Red Hat.…

Meanwhile, Emma is playing video games, and Daniel... well, Daniel is drunk already Transcription service Otter.ai has unleashed another remote-working survey. Today's report revealed that not only are workers not bothering to dispense with nightwear, a minority are content to virtually meet with just their undercrackers on.…

'In my 30-plus years as an IT pro, I have never been a part of a more difficult work situation,' says victim A California federal court has sentenced a "vengeful" techie to two years in the clink after he deleted 1,200 Microsoft user accounts belonging to a client.…

Well, you wanted to be just like Apple, right? The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has followed up its attempts to double a billion-dollar award from Apple and Broadcom for patent infringement by turning its sights on Microsoft.…

Uptick in attacks since schools reopened, warns National Cyber Security Centre Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has urged universities, schools, and colleges to be vigilant following an increase in ransomware attacks targeting educational institutions.…

Software behemoths to spend 2021 fixing CSS pain points While its managers squabble, engineers at Microsoft and Google have put their heads together to ease some of the more severe developer pain points in browsers. Spoiler: it involves CSS.…

Backup company says tracking code now removed, but what info was sent? Backup specialist Backblaze has fixed an issue where a Facebook advertising pixel was "inadvertently" included on signed-in web pages – but users are concerned private filenames and sizes were also sent to the social media giant.…

Public spat over code quality, reworked code set for 13.1 release, pfSense firewall also affected A faulty implementation of WireGuard, a high-performance VPN protocol, has been removed from FreeBSD 13.0, shortly to be released, and a new implementation will not ship until the arrival of 13.1.…

Got a link? Change the last character and bingo, it's blackmail time Exclusive Bulk SMS messages sent by local councils across the UK contained weblinks leading to pages that freely exposed to the public thousands of taxpayers' names, addresses, and outstanding debts, The Register can reveal.…

Sun, sea and software? UK south coast authority goes all in on Redmond Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council has awarded reseller Bytes Software Services a three-year contract for Microsoft software and cloud services that could be worth up to £18m.…

Student numbers have plunged 40% since 2015 Think tank WorldSkills UK has claimed Britain is facing a digital skills shortage as fewer young people opt to study IT-related subjects at GCSE and A Level.…

Magnetic tech could be used to deorbit debris Video Astroboffins are gearing up to test a method to remove future space junk from Earth's orbit with the launch of ELSA-d, an experimental spacecraft that uses magnetism to snare debris.…

App has common code base for three versions: one global edition; one for south-east Asian; one for China TikTok is likely no more of a threat to users than Facebook, according to an analysis by academic research group Citizen Lab that analyzed the video-sharing social networking service’s app to probe for security, privacy and censorship issues.…

Ad giant’s compute rigs ‘at inflection point’, custom motherboards no longer suffice at G-scale Google has signalled it intends to design its own server-grade systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), because it sees the technology as its next-generation compute platform.…

Restoration of some services at destroyed data centre promised for this week, SBG1 data centre status in doubt again French cloud company OVH has pledged to create a lab to model the effects of data centre fires – less than two weeks after one of its data centres was destroyed by fire.…

Seok-Hee Lee tips Compute Express Link memory to become the next big thing The CEO of SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory manufacturer behind Samsung, has tipped the merger of RAM and CPUs, and the rise of the Compute Express Link standard.…

Caesar Sengupta says it's time to take off Google's 'training wheels' as he both literally and metaphorically plans his next bike ride Caesar Sengupta, Google's vice president and general manager for Payments and the Next Billion Users initiative, will leave the company.…

Class action accusing antisocial media giant of privacy infringement will now move forward The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Facebook to halt a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit that claims the social media giant illegally tracked users.…

Ittt i so hrd to tpe onnnnnnnnnnn th bloddy thng Lawsuits alleging Apple knowingly sold laptops with its defective butterfly keyboard mechanism will go ahead as a single class action.…

Failed firm was full of it, Feds say Jessica Richman, 46, and Zachary Apte, 36, co-founders of San Francisco-based medical testing startup uBiome, have been indicted on civil and criminal charges for allegedly bilking investors out of $60m.…

May! crush! super-app! dreams! of! the! company! formerly! known! as! Yahoo! Japan! Less than a year after selecting the messaging app LINE as its preferred app COVID-era telemedicine, Japan has decided the app is too risky for government use over fears it leaks data.…

Senior management also booted off board in extraordinary vote Special report The CEO and chairman of Nominet have been ousted by the .uk internet registry operator's membership.…

'We’re aware of at least one case where an entity voted more than once' The Open Source Initiative (OSI) on Friday said it will redo its recent Board Election after uncovering a voting irregularity that affected the results.…

Plus: Report shows soft opening next cannot come soon enough for some Microsoft has firmed up plans to reopen its facilities and set 29 March as the date when employees might once again set foot in its Redmond-based HQ.…

Cross-platform appeal outweighs performance penalty, argues Linux flinger With an aim to expand the Linux app ecosystem, Ubuntu desktop engineering manager Ken VanDine has popped up in marketing material for Flutter to say that Google's cross-platform framework is Canonical's "default choice for future desktop and mobile apps".…

LTE it be: Nobody seems to care, so off the 15,000 lines go Greg Kroah-Hartman, responsible for maintaining the stable branch of the Linux kernel, has nudged WiMAX a little nearer the precipice with a commit to Linux staging to strip the technology from the operating system.…

Existing leadership to continue while majority shareholder exits stake Dutch business application biz Unit4 has been bought by private equity group TA Associates in a deal said to be in the region of $2bn.…

'Cases like this... stifle innovation and ultimately harm consumers,' says iGiant A jury in the Eastern District of Texas has ruled that Apple infringed upon a patent held by Personalized Media Communications (PMC) LLC, ordering it to pay over $308 million in damages.…

It's just 'Opera on iOS' now Opera has pushed out an update for its iOS browser, dropping the "Touch" in Opera Touch to become just plain old Opera on iOS.…

Try, try, try to understand, it's a Magic WAN Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare on Monday plans to launch a service called Magic WAN to allow companies to bring geographically dispersed data centers, offices, devices, and cloud services under a single cloud-managed wide area network.…

'Some of you will be happy at this, and some might be disappointed' Updated Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), announced at the organisation's LibrePlanet virtual event that he has rejoined the board and does not intend to resign again.…

Plus: Young female Japanese biker turns out to be boring 50-year-old uncle In brief AI proto-boffins can now rent up to 16 GPUs, the largest amount on any single virtual machine currently available, via Google Cloud.…

Plus: Exchange and SolarWinds autopatch tools and shocking news! In Brief Graham Ivan Clark, part of the crew that hijacked around 130 high-profile Twitter accounts and used them to collect cryptocurrency, has been sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the scam.…

On the plus side: Can't laser-cut that Live Laugh Love slogan into chipboard without software Column It takes a lot to stir the peaceable men and women of Makerhood into angry revolt, but 2D robo-snippers Cricut did it last week. Cricut makes desktop thingies that can print, cut and score a variety of flexible materials, which produce 2D templates you then glue, sew or otherwise fashion into 3D things like baseball caps for Etsy.…