The Register

Human art will still, erm, probably prevail OpenAI released a sneak peak of its latest GPT-3-based neural network, a 12-billion-parameter model capable of automatically generating hundreds of fake images when it is given a text caption, stylized as DALL·E.…

Local authorities' shared Unit4 system is late, overbudget, and only works on Microsoft's cloud Two local authorities in northwest England have awarded reseller Insight Direct a six-year £35m contract for Microsoft licences and cloud services.…

Not quite what we meant by 'record-breaking' Third borksman of the apocalypse 123-Reg has ridden into 2021 with... you guessed it, DNS issues.…

Server-side React solves 'many other problems we have had for a while' says Core developer Facebook's React team has previewed Server Components, allowing developers to write code that runs on the server, speeding up data access and reducing the amount of code that has to be downloaded by the web browser.…

And funded by private venture that'll take a chunk of the damages for itself Chinese social media app TikTok is to be sued in the High Court as part of a class-action-style lawsuit due to be publicised by England's Children's Commissioner.…

Exciting news for green fuel, but quality control, financing will be a challenge New research from China is promising to double the efficiency of hydrogen storage at a time when low-carbon collection of the omnipresent gas is seen as a potential path to a greener energy economy.…

Oh yes, I'm the Great Suspender, pretending I'm doing well Analysis Back in November, 2020, netizens warned that a Chrome extension called The Great Suspender may be malicious. Around that time, Google was made aware of these concerns and looked into the situation.…

Maker of developer tools says it played no role in the attack, hasn't heard from investigators The SolarWinds security breach disclosed last month, which US authorities believe was of Russian origin and led to the compromise of at least 18,000 organizations, may have been enabled in part by software from JetBrains.…

We may finally get that privacy legislation, net neutrality Comment Despite an extraordinary day in Washington DC where, under President Trump’s urging, insurrectionists stormed the Capitol and temporarily halted the approval of his replacement, Joe Biden is still going to become president of the United States on January 20.…

Welcome to the digital 1800s In a striking parallel to model villages created by Victorian industrialists for their workers, Amazon on Wednesday announced it would spend $2bn building affordable housing near its three new headquarters.…

If you don't agree then, well, you'll just have to use the infinitely better Signal WhatsApp users must agree to share their personal information with Facebook if they want to continue using the messaging service from next month, according to new terms and conditions.…

Images of evacuated and invaded offices, Senate PCs still left switched on shared online Updated Supporters of defeated American president Donald Trump this morning stormed the capital’s legislative halls, shutting down the process to confirm his replacement.…

Treasury Department clarifies advice with a brief FAQ The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has said it will de-list China's three largest telecommunications companies – China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom – after all, having received updated guidance from US regulators.…

With Fortinet, we'll help you weigh up your SASE options Webcast If you looked back at your list of 2020 New Year’s resolutions, would any of them make still sense for 2021?…

FRRP's full report will be uncomfortable reading for ex-CEO Mike Lynch The Financial Reporting Review Panel has said the senior Deloitte auditor who signed off Autonomy's accounts engaged in "word smithing" to help the British software firm hide its hardware sales from the market.…

Ahead of a formal probe, CMA want to ascertain risks to licensing, price gouging, and product cancellations The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has invited third parties to comment on the proposed $40bn acquisition of British-based chip designer Arm by US graphics giant Nvidia.…

It's 400, or indeed the 500 series, from here on out Intel is to sunset its 300-series motherboard chipsets, according to Chipzilla's prodict change notifications (PCN).…

Caveat: Four-nines SLA only applies to authentication, not admin features Microsoft is "taking the next step in our commitment to the resiliency and availability" of Azure Active Directory by promising 99.99 per cent uptime from 1 April 2021, rising from 99.9 per cent for the current Service Level Agreement (SLA).…

Nice work if you can get it... As UK school closures force working parents to juggle unfathomable phonics charts with their day jobs, it's time to turn our attention to those who accrue massive financial gain from the pandemic: consultants.…

Leaving-the-house version has, er, left the building Microsoft-owned Mojang is to pull down the shutters on Minecraft Earth, citing the "current global situation" as a factor in the decision to axe the augmented reality game.…

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Scotland’s Renfrewshire Council has awarded a £4.75m contract to incumbent ERP supplier Unit4 after its market test for a £2.3m contract offered little in return.…

Somewhere there is always an IT pro who warned this might happen Bork!Bork!Bork! Are you... genuine? It is a question often asked by software in recent years, and Windows is no exception in today's entry to The Register's hall of bork.…

Just after re:Invent, we talk with storage VP Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec about the intricacies and future of the AWS storage platform Interview At its virtual re:Invent conference, AWS presented faster block storage based on its custom Nitro hardware, strong consistency in its longstanding S3 (Simple Storage Service), and a solution for users forced to buy more storage capacity when all they needed was greater throughput.…

SmartDrive, DiskCopy... it's life at Redmond in the DOS era Interview Everyone remembers their first time. It might be Commodore-flavoured, or carry a whiff of Sinclair about it. For former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, it was a TRS-80 in a 1979 Radio Shack.…

Everyone’s favorite social media giant ordered to pay 3.8m euros An Italian judge has not only upheld a decision that Facebook stole a partner’s technology but issued a new fine of ten times the original amount.…

It won't settle anything in the hybrid cloud market Comment In the dog days between Christmas and New Year, VMware and Nutanix renewed hostilities.…

Alipay, WeChat and friends ‘threaten national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States’ United States president Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning the use of eight Chinese apps, namely Alipay, CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat Pay, and WPS Office.…

Indian vice-president calls for ‘dismal’ situation to change India's Vice-President Shri Venkaiah Naidu has called on his nation to sort out gender imbalance in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and to ensure that students can study in languages other than English.…

It’s hard to kill off a trusted, stable technology that works Verizon has delayed plans to shutdown its 3G network for a third time.…

We talk to the experts after US Treasury's OCC blesses blockchains, digi-bucks Feature The US Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Monday published a letter clarifying how federally chartered banking groups can use cryptocurrency and associated technology to manage financial transactions.…

American goliath vows to overturn ruling at Middle Kingdom's Supreme People’s Court Amazon hopes to overturn a ruling in China that not only banned it from using its AWS acronym and logo in the Middle Kingdom but also ordered the US giant to pay Chinese cloud outfit ActionSoft $12m for trademark infringement.…

Plus: US intelligence names and shames Russia as probable culprit SolarWinds – the network monitoring biz thoroughly hacked as part of a wider espionage operation – has been sued by its shareholders who claim bosses failed to tell them about its numerous security woes.…

Only three months after latest OS version released Blackberry Cylance's consumer antivirus product will not support macOS Big Sur until the end of January – three months after the Apple operating system’s latest version was released.…

Service restored, code silo gets license to serve Iranian programmers On Tuesday, startup service firm Pure Labs regained access to its GitHub account, which had been shut down since December 30 for an apparent breach of Iranian sanctions.…

So long, and thanks for all the fish Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf will step down later this year, handing control of the company to current president Cristiano Amon.…

But hasn't said why The New York Stock Exchange has reversed an earlier decision to delist China's three largest telecommunications companies.…

Here’s how to call time on aging databases, according to Pure Storage Webcast Depending on your point of view, it’s the time of the year for new beginnings or finally facing up to reality.…

'Unexpected spike in user traffic' causes Tuesday tumble The outfits might be arch-rivals in the messaging space, but Microsoft 365 showed a bit of solidarity with Slack this afternoon as its administration portal fell over for users in the UK and some of Europe.…

Messaging app makes inadvertent oversharing too easy A researcher who noted that using the "People Nearby" feature of popular messaging app Telegram exposed the exact location of the user has been told that it's working as expected.…

Chinese giant continues to feel bite of supply chain pressures Analyst house TrendForce has warned that Huawei will slip out of the top six smartphone vendors this year with shipments forecast to drop from 170 million in 2020 to 45 million.…

Without competition due to 'extreme urgency' around pandemic Updated The UK's NHS Digital – an executive non-departmental public body for health service tech support – has awarded an £8m contract without competition to X-Lab, which builds healthcare software systems.…

Offences alleged to have happened a decade ago, say police Lawrence Jones, the former chief exec of Manchester-HQ’d hosting firm UKFast, has been charged with rape and sexual assault.…

'There'll be no more work from external/unpaid contributors' – dev The Qt Company has followed up on its plan to make long-term support releases commercial-only by closing the source for 5.15 today, earning protests from open-source contributors who say that the 6.0 release, which remains open, is not yet usable.…

FCC won't mull law reform this month Section 230 – the liability shield that more or less prevents websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, from being sued in the US for their users’ content – is going to survive the Trump era despite furious last-ditch efforts by the President.…

One owned by every 13-year-old with dreams of slinging an axe Bass. Treble. Mid. Volume. Erm, footswitch and... 5G FREQ?! We've got it, people, we've found the top-secret diagram of the "COVID-19 5G chip" that Bill Gates is going to insert into our brains!…

Though that might not be the workaround it needs The Scottish government is sizing up the market for suppliers to develop on its low-code technology platform and support its social security overhaul.…

A reminder that XP was both frugal and prone to falling over 12BoC With the Twelfth Night approaching, we finish our 12 Borks of Christmas* (12BoC) series by waxing a little Dickensian as the ghost of operating systems past pays a visit.…

Let's see Gartner top this Column This time last year, it would have been a simple matter to predict that the world's supply chain would be disrupted for all things tech, and that it would not be Trump who did it, but a sudden, unexpected pandemic that impacted every aspect of our working and personal lives. Right, Gartner? So what does 2021 hold for tech's big players? Let's hazard a guess.…

Doing lockdown with bags and bags of Chinese plastic bricks When one has a Lego Saturn V and a launch platform and tower to go with it, where does one go next? A crawler to transport the thing obviously.…

144Hz refresh rate and a 108MP camera? Review Released late last year with a price tag of £599 (about $812), Xiaomi’s Mi 10T Pro is an aspirational sub-flagship 5G phone that focuses on photography and performance.…