The Register

Oh, snap Japanese optics manufacturer Olympus is winding down its 84-year-old camera division and selling it off to private-equity firm Japan Industrial Partners (JIP).…

Umm, kid: us computer folks are supposed to be the smart ones An Australian university may euthanise campus foxes after they bit computing students.…

Bid that proposed using Chinese vendor’s kit scores only limited network access Singapore has named two carriers as having won the right to build nationwide 5G networks, and both promptly named tech providers other than Huawei as their network providers of choice.…

To help Indian small businesses cope with COVID crunch Google’s Indian outpost will soon help small businesses to find loans.…

Former employees missed court appearence, maybe because a Taiwan court already found two of them guilty The US Justice Department has been granted arrest warrants for three Taiwanese nationals charged with stealing semiconductor secrets from US-based Micron Technologies.…

Last November: These ISPs know too much! June: God bless the ISPs Comcast has agreed to be the first home broadband internet provider to handle secure DNS-over-HTTPS queries for Firefox browser users in the US, Mozilla has announced.…

WikiLeaker accused of tapping up LulzSec's Sabu as a source Prosecutors in the US have upgraded their case against Julian Assange with a second superseding indictment claiming he sought out the services of a notorious hacker who, unbeknownst to the WikiLeaks boss, was secretly working with the Feds.…

Virtualization an option, Rosetta x86 Windows emulation doubtful Apple has confirmed its forthcoming Mac hardware using Arm-compatible Apple-designed processors will do away with Boot Camp, the iGiant's tool for booting Microsoft Windows directly on Macs.…

Time to trawl through some data lakes In a busy 24 hours Databricks has handed over MLflow – a machine learning management tool – to the Linux Foundation, bought an analytics biz and moved the status of its Delta Engine to General Availability.…

Too little, too late – but the inquiry is rolling Fujitsu has told UK Parliament it is no longer supplying evidence to the Post Office to convict sub-postmasters of criminal offences invented by the firm's Horizon IT system.…

Port will handle SPEC's SERT and Java suites, with more features soon While Apple's foray into the Arm world snagged much of the limelight this week, Microsoft quietly announced that the first phase of its port of OpenJDK for Windows 10 on Arm was complete.…

Botnet C2, denial-of-service, phishing – and that's after filtering Web traffic to the servers of the notorious Dutch-German Cyberbunker hosting biz was filled with all kinds of badness, including apparent botnet command-and-control and denial-of-service traffic, says SANS Institute.…

Well, that and the 'contract losses' Capita, the UK's fave outsourcing badass, estimates revenues for the first half of calendar 2020 to be down by double digits due to contract losses and customers tightening their belts during the pandemic.…

Salesforce Anywhere beta due to drop in July, full release in Q4 Salesforce is trying to tweak the nose of Microsoft Teams and Slack by building enterprise collaboration into its applications and platform in a move designed to make it integral to business process workflow.…

On a scale of 1 to 10, how shocked are you? The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed it placed Huawei on a list of organisations with ties to the Chinese military that trade in the US. While this doesn't have an immediate impact on the firm's business, it opens the possibility for further punitive sanctions down the line.…

Little more than online spreadsheets shared with a private team for now Amazon has unveiled Honeycode, a browser-based tool for building no-code applications that run on the AWS cloud platform, currently in public beta.…

'Unexpected removal' of crucial format-stripping app reversed in latest build Forget Linux GPU support, Microsoft has emitted a new Dev Channel Windows 10 build that fixes a far more serious problem: the disappearing Notepad.…

ISP and London users are both TITSUP* (Too Irritated To Smile at Usual Platitudes) Updated Just days after the ISP boasted about its network resilience in the face of spiking post-lockdown broadband usage, Virgin Media's customers across the UK capital are reporting being unable to get online as they attempt to work from home, do their schoolwork and watch Netflix.…

Teams rival hopes to consign cross-business email ping-pong to history The tit-for-tat feature race between Slack and its besuited rival Microsoft Teams has resumed with the creation of Slack Connect, allowing 20 organisations into a single Slack channel.…

Bank on the receiving end of massive 418Gbps traffic barrage Akamai reckons it blocked what may be the largest distributed denial-of-service attack ever, in terms of packets per second.…

Code shack is a great place for others to collaborate, but not so strong at collaboration for itself GitHub has redesigned its web repository layout for an "improved mobile web experience", but developers were quick to find flaws in the new approach.…

UCL study informs app that documents daily activities during quarantine Taking conference calls in your pyjamas? Furloughed into endless gaming? A University College London study is now saying that far from instigating a pandemic of bone-idleness, the lockdown has prompted healthy exercise and interest in meditation.…

Sure, you can make calls, for instance, but you can't end them WWDC One year ago, at 2019's WWDC, Apple showed off a set of accessibility features designed to help people operate their iPhone, iPad, or Mac without the use of their hands.…

'My work here is done, but my day job just got complicated' is the gist of it SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son will depart Alibaba's board to focus on his main business as it struggles during the coronavirus pandemic.…

Mmmm... microwaved protein chunks in spiced slurry – with rating by top analyst Special report Businesses everywhere are thinking on their feet to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes global airline catering outfit Gategourmet, which started selling the food it usually packages for consumption on airplanes as take-home ready meals, priced at the astounding rate of 10 dishes for AU$25 (US$17, £14).…

Retailer creates ‘Counterfeit Stuff Investigation’ team staffed by former federal prosecutors to go after dodgy merchants and makers When you log on to shop at Amazon.com in the near future you may benefit from the work of a CSI team the retail giant has created to crack down on counterfeit kit and haul its makers into court.…

From the belly of Perseverance comes a revolution in Red Planet exploration Vid NASA this week championed its autonomous helicopter Ingenuity, which is next month due to blast off to Mars attached to its buddy, the Perseverance rover.…

Make America Bake Again movement not going well, Europe also increasingly out of the picture Taiwan has become the world’s number one chipmaker, according to specialist semiconductor analyst house IC Inisghts.…

But the real money is in services and IaaS, not software, says Gartner’s first lash at container futures Analyst firm Gartner has completed its first forecast for container management software and services, finding that while adoption will be rapid the technology won’t be a big money-spinner for software vendors.…

All sorts of services all over the world with no word of explanation – but hey, Big Blue’s cloud gets a new Twitter support feed tomorrow Let’s call it Wobbly Wednesday: 30 services on IBM’s cloud took unplanned naps on June 24th and Big Blue’s offered little or no explanation for the incidents.…

Look, we wrote it! You're all wrong! The most debated and criticized piece of law in the United States at the moment is Section 230 of Communications Decency Act (CDA), which makes it all that much more frustrating that nobody seems to understand it.…

India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand can now bring the Amazonian cloud on-prem Amazon Web Services has extended the availability of its Outposts to four Asian nations, and New Zealand.…

Request for injunction raises pressure on cash-burning ride hailing apps California's Attorney General and the City Attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco have asked a judge to force ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber to classify their drivers as employees.…

Another machine-learning model that can't tell people of color apart? Shocker The American Civil Liberties Union has formally complained to Detroit police, who wrongfully arrested and locked up a dad after he was misidentified as a thief by facial-recognition software and a security guard.…

Lawmakers will attempt to bend the laws of mathematics to their will A trio of Republican senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that requires service providers and device makers in America to help the Feds bypass encryption when presented with a court-issued warrant.…

Non-profits call for independent probe into disastrous effort to sell TLD registry The non-profit organizations that fought to halt the sale of the .org registry to a newly created private equity firm are demanding an independent review into the fiasco, which pitted charities against domain registrars over the billion-dollar aborted deal.…

$600k starting bid, say public extortionists, or $42m to keep schtum Ransomware criminals claiming to have siphoned confidential docs on Nicki Minaj, Mariah Carey, and Lebron James from an American law firm are threatening to auction off the info.…

Separating widgets from App Icons is how Apple will avoid Microsoft's mistake WWDC Apple introduced WidgetKit during day two of its WWDC developer event yesterday, describing it as "the best way to bring your app's most useful information to the home screen."…

Rebrand accompanies tech launches as CEO hits 18 months in job Information Builders, that 45-year-old data management biz, has rolled out automated analytics wares and a corporate rebranding with a view to profiting off a burgeoning market for ML-powered enterprise data tools.…

Triumphant F#-major to return with upcoming macOS Big Sur As the saying goes: Out with the old, in with the… old. After temporarily ditching the iconic Mac "chime" in 2016, Apple is finally bringing it back with the upcoming release of macOS Big Sur.…

Top judge replies: Don't understand what you're on about A top judge told a barrister for the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today that his legal arguments against police facial-recognition technology face "a great difficulty" as he wondered whether they were even relevant to the case.…

A quarter? That's pretty weak Brits are spending more time than ever online, according to comms watchdog Ofcom's latest Online Nation report, and it's all thanks - surprise, surprise - to coronavirus. In April, at the height of lockdown, the average person was online for four hours and two minutes each day.…

This is the Apple-Google API one, not the 'world-beating' one Harriet Harman MP, chair of Britain's Commons Human Rights Committee, has written to UK health secretary Matt Hancock seeking clarity on privacy aspects of the government's latest coronavirus contact-tracing app.…

3DoF bad, 6DoF good Updated Facebook-owned Oculus has bowed to the seemingly inevitable and told the world about the demise of its entry-level Oculus Go VR headset.…

Researchers used a pretrained off-the-shelf model from Nvidia A new computer vision technique that helps convert blurry photos of people into fake, realistic images has come under fire for being racially biased towards white people.…

Makes sense while enterprises wrestle with new ways of working The hackneyed saying that revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality might easily be applied to Blue Prism, the vendor of software robots and automation tools.…

Tanks put through their paces SpaceX popped another Starship tank yesterday as NASA prepared to conduct a final structural test of its SLS rocket.…

Bungling cybercrooks throw toys out of the pram as negotiations shut down The Maze ransomware gang has threatened to publish information stolen from an American firm that overhauls airliners and installs flight control software upgrades – because its victim refused to pay a demanded ransom.…

I just can't quit you, Skype. Oh maybe I can... they've tweaked the close function Hot on the heels of Teams getting personal comes a shake-up for Skype that will see Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop becoming one.…

Mysterious object's mass has challenged astrophysics models Astronomers have detected what could be either the tiniest black hole or the largest neutron star found to date.…