The Register

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.…

There's only one way to stop this, says counter-ransomware bod Software AG has seemingly been hit by ransomware, with the German IT giant itself telling the Euro nation's stock market it had been “affected by a malware attack.”…

Stay home, log into Druva’s DxP virtual summit – and still get the t-shirt Promo A lot has changed over the past six months, but one thing hasn’t: your company’s data is still its most important asset, and protecting it is crucial.…

Private equity funding stalls amid COVID-19 Canalys Forum 2020 Some Internet of Things projects are stalling, trapped in what analyst Canalys terms as a "proof-of-concept hell," though it believes the limiting factors are cultural rather than technological.…

Computer Misuse Act charges stack up against vengeful former hubby A Crown Prosecution Service lawyer is on trial accused of unlawfully accessing information about his judge wife's new lover after their marriage broke down.…

Xbox fans, move along. These principles don't apply to console-jockeys In a vague swipe at the likes of Apple, Microsoft has declared its 10 app store principles. Surprisingly "please, please use our store" isn't one of them.…

Not going anywhere, just not going to space. A bit like the calamity capsule Former NASA 'naut Christopher Ferguson has withdrawn as commander from the first crewed mission of Boeing's calamity capsule, the CST-100 Starliner.…

Bulk of deal focuses on secure, high-performance connectivity to China IT services nonprofit Jisc, which runs the UK's academic network Janet, has awarded framework contracts worth up to £35m to provide remote access to British research and courses, including from China.…

Don't worry, says the internet giant, this doesn't happen too often An unsealed warrant in a case involving alleged pedophile R&B star R. Kelly has shown how the Feds can get Google to hand over the details of people who make specific web search queries.…

Netizens have been obliviously chatting with software for the past 10 days Someone used OpenAI's GPT-3 text-generating software to write a spree of posts on Reddit, convincing people the missives were penned by a real person, and banking thousands of internet points in the process, The Register can confirm.…

Capex to opex, capex to opex, capex to opex... Stop. 'It's just not what people really want' Canalys Forum 2020 Selling tech based on consumption is predicated on a "lie" and a "fallacy" created by the powerful marketing machines at some of the largest hardware vendors.…

Did we mention where it goes? Plus: LinkedIn trolling and other lockdown fun Something for the Weekend, Sir? My private parts are private, for sure, but I never thought about giving them a passcode.…

Fined £40k after probe. Plus: ICO wants your views on its future powers A company that fired out more than 9,000 spam emails promoting face masks has been fined £40,000 by the UK Information Commissioner's Office and ordered to stop doing it.…

Google has a word with digital rights warriors The EFF has disabled by default an anti-tracking feature in its Privacy Badger browser extension – after Googlers warned it could be abused to track people.…

Powerful computers need powerful fans, after all On Call Everybody knows a tidy desk equates to a drawer below rammed full of dusty detritus. Welcome to an On Call in which a Register reader channels his inner Kondo.…

And we're about to extract a sample from it Scientists have compared asteroid Bennu to a chocolate creme egg – and say it may explode as it continues to spin at an ever-increasing rate.…

Let the chips fall where they may AMD is said to be in advanced talks to buy Xilinx in a deal set to top $30bn.…

What are the chances? Facebook has claimed that the Real Facebook Oversight Board (RFOB), a critical advocacy group set up as a riposte to the social network's inaction on that front, is a phishing operation and has had its website taken down.…

Plus: Experts talk voting machine security, 'warming' of relations with infosec community If you're designing a security bug bounty for your organization's products, by all means get the lawyers to take a look, but keep their hands off the keyboard. If it's one thing flaw-finders find too tedious to deal with, which will put them off finding holes in your defenses, it's legalese – and these are people who otherwise spend all day combing reverse-engineered code for typos.…

Cache me if you can, Intel On Thursday, AMD CEO Lisa Su presided over a webcast to introduce the chip designer's latest line of Ryzen processors based on its Zen 3 microarchitecture.…

Zero trust, zero touch, crypto-jacking – bung all the usual buzzwords in "BlackBerry has always been known for our strong strategy," chief exec John Chen told the BlackBerry Security Summit earlier this week – just as a well-read investment blog concluded that "without a meaningful shift, this company (and stock) will probably keep on struggling".…

Gosh, that's a lot of Gits. But a viable alternative to Microsoft's stable Developers were given another option for code wrangling today with the arrival of native GitLab integration for Gitpod.…

Chinese bogeyman continues to seek stand-ins for Google's Android services Huawei's homegrown mobile software store has scored Intel-owned mobility app Moovit.…

We'll show you how to access persistent data across any hybrid environment Webcast Everybody may be ‘doing’ Kubernetes on some level these days, but it’s arguable whether everybody’s doing it properly.…

Support and knowledge base articles consolidated into a single and search engine-friendly location Microsoft has celebrated yet another tumble of its "365" services by consolidating its support sites into one location.…

And the name of this fresh public entity? World, say hello to... NewCo IBM has confirmed a "tax-free" spin-off of its Managed Infrastructure Services unit into a separately traded public company, expunging a part of Big Blue that has been shrinking and subject to years of cost-cutting.…

And if that's not Skynet enough for ya, Britten-Norman is working to make the BN-2 Islander fly autonomously The US Air Force (USAF) is deploying Kubernetes containerisation tech aboard some of its spyplanes – as UK-based Britten-Norman teams up to make one of its flagship aircraft semi-autonomous.…

Nobody expects the Telco Consolidation UK ISP TalkTalk has confirmed it is considering a takeover offer from Toscafund Asset Management that values the broadband and TV provider at £1.1bn.…

Raising inevitable concerns over protection of patient data NHS England is tendering for AI technologies in deals worth up to £15m to help guide the treatment of stroke victims while the health service groans under the strain of coronavirus.…

Which means your new Mac is vulnerable to 'evil maid' attacks, if that's something you worry about Apple's T2 security chip is insecure and cannot be fixed, a group of security researchers report.…

No, not the TV show, as great as it is. You, silly! Canalys Forum 2020 There are lies, damn lies, and tech vendor surveys, but the latest from hyperconverged specialist Nutanix might raise a wry smile. It turns out IT is important after all.…

Plus: MPs call for more OpenRAN-based work in UK The British government should rip out Huawei's 5G mobile network equipment regardless of the facts because doing so would curry favour with Donald Trump's US, Parliament's Defence Committee has said in an extraordinary new report.…

Sure, Salesforce is our main squeeze but we're open to suggestions Analysis Entering a marriage, it might be tough to keep old flames alive but that's what Tableau is trying to do as it gets closer to Salesforce, the enterprise application company which announced a $15.7m merger in June last year.…

LDMIA sp!, {die, die, die} Arm DevSummit Arm has set the date from when its high-end smartphone and laptop-grade Cortex-A processor cores will go fully 64-bit only.…

A fascinating exhibition of historic artefacts – and that's just the obsolete software Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's submission to the pantheon of bork comes from reader Alastair Craft (who spotted a rolling BSOD earlier this year) via the rather splendid Museum of London Docklands.…

And new boss beams: 'Actually, business has been going well ... We are not expecting a downturn' Sundar Subramanian, general manager of enterprise app platform Progress, marked the completion of his company's acquisition of DevOps outfit Chef with the words: "I can’t wait to see what Progress and Chef can do together."…

Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna will split $1m+ winnings Two biochemistry professors who led the groundbreaking development of CRISPR, the controversial "genetic scissors" DNA-editing tool, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.…

Sure, millions of profile pages slurped via dodgy Facebook API though it didn't actually affect anything, it seems The UK's privacy watchdog has wrapped up its probe into Cambridge Analytica, saying it found no hard evidence to support claims the controversial biz used data scrapped from people's Facebook profiles to influence the Brexit referendum nor the US 2016 presidential election. There was no clear evidence of Russian involvement, either.…

We can’t get our community to agree, perhaps you’ll do our job for us? After two years of failed policy work, ICANN has returned to Europe, dropped to its knees, and begged the continent to finish the rest of the DNS overseer's half-done Whois domain-name database so that it doesn't fall foul of GDPR.…

Don’t worry, it’s only the future of software development at stake Special report The decade-long mega-battle between two of the world’s largest corporations, which will decide the future of software development, began its final showdown this morning.…

Come back, Word 97, all is forgiven Updated Microsoft says it is figuring out why its cloud-based unproductivity suite Office 365 is down yet again for unlucky subscribers. The knackered platform knocked over Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and more.…

Sorry, EnrEcho Ringlesias couldn't come up with a suitable last line Amazon is to start selling its Eero mesh Wi-Fi hubs to ISPs in a move that breaks from its direct-to-consumer business model.…

Crowdsourced firm will be hoping you repair it yourself rather than rely on its incredibly generous policy Hoping to break the cycle of environmental catastrophe that is consumer tech, Teracube's next eco-conscious and repairable smartphone is available for pre-order on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.…

Exec adopts a build-and-they-will-come mentality Canalys Forum 2020 Forecasting tech sales is a dark art at the best of times but in a pandemic it takes on a whole new level of complexity. Unperturbed, Lenovo's president and COO is predicting shipment growth not seen in a decade for 2021.…

The IT services wish list is about what you'd expect from an 18-month-old Barely 18 months old, newly formed Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council has offered £18m to private sector IT and consultancy firms, asking if they can take on, well, almost everything.…

We pulled entire website to halt attack, says spokesman UK cashless school payments firm Wisepay has pulled its website offline after spotting a miscreant trying to spoof its card payment page.…

Also: James Webb Space Telescope shaken but not stirred, and Cygnus brings relief to the ISS In brief The weekend started badly for rocket fanciers as SpaceX failed yet again to launch a GPS III satellite for the US Space Force. The mission has been subject to repeated delays, and the company opted to press ahead last week with an attempt from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40.…

Own one of those Xfinity XR11 TV zappers? You better get patching A voice-activated TV remote can be turned into a covert home surveillance device, according to researchers from infosec firm Guardicore who probed the device to show that a man-in-the-middle attack could compromise it.…