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That AI-powered product and price recommendation engine? Useless now Machine learning models built for doing business prior to the COVID-19 pandemic will no longer be valid as economies emerge from lockdowns, presenting companies with new challenges in machine learning and enterprise data management, according to Gartner.…

Plus: SLS boosters arrive at Kennedy, Rocket Lab to go back-to-back with NRO In brief Lawmakers have signed off on a deal that will permit American companies to launch from a British spaceport, although the UK has yet to build one.…

Facebook laps up the leftovers Mixer has been consigned to the Microsoft graveyard to rot alongside other abortive stablemates like Windows Phone, Zune and Clippy to name just a few.…

Antisocial network floods registrars with unjustified data requests Facebook is accused of attempting to bypass Europe's hard-line privacy legislation and access personal data on domain name holders through an obscure policy process with the Whois registry.…

PANDA architecture said to be ideal microservices-muncher Arm server vendor Kaleao, which The Register covered way back in 2016, has re-emerged with a new name – Bamboo – and what it reckons is a fresh approach to building servers.…

Content tagging – and I'll give the tech away for free, says Safecast Global chief Interview A British firm says it has developed a tech proposal for preventing children from watching unsuitable internet videos – and doing so without needing age verification or other privacy-busting features.…

Please update me, let me load... Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows is everywhere and can be found pleading for attention all over the world, including signage lurking in the Finnish capital of Helsinki.…

Bitfusion integration will require an add-on licence after all, rather than being tossed into vSphere Enterprise Plus VMware has taken the unusual step of retracting and replacing a press release because it got its own licencing details wrong.…

To save telco workers from climbing the greasy pole as networks get denser The current febrile information climate might not be the best time to combine AI, 5G, cloud and drones, but Samsung has done it because the company is conspiring to ease network management chores.…

The other kind of DRM strikes: Bod baffled after attempt to raise alarm over vulnerabilities is ignored IBM is under fire for refusing to patch critical vulnerabilities in its Data Risk Manager product until exploit code was publicly disclosed.…

Stay up to date on DevOps, CI/CD and containerization while working from home Event Things start slowly going back to normal, but yeah, it might take a while until bringing people together again becomes a good idea. However, if you are responsible for keeping tech infrastructure in shape or if container tech is your cup of tea, we might have just the thing to (safely) switch things up a bit.…

Yes, this will help health pros. But after seeing it thrust a swab into your schnoz, you may want to avoid testing by humans or robots VIDEO The South Korean Institute of Machinery and Materials has developed a robotic rig capable of shoving a COVID-19-sputum-sampling-swab right up your hooter, so that medicos don’t have to come into contact with possibly-contagious patients.…

Hopes to educate 200,000 people in villages and smaller cities The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has won a $3.3m grant from Google’s philanthropic Google.org limb and will use it to educate locals in all things digital as part of the region’s COVID-19 escape plan.…

Latest sat launch was postponed but China's GPS alternative network is nearly finished China has signalled it anticipates further collaboration with Pakistan around Beidou, the middle kingdom’s satellite navigation constellation.…

US freezes visa applications until the end of the year, cites COVID-19-sparked unemployment President Donald Trump has signed an executive order suspending the processing of various immigration visas, including H-1Bs for skilled workers and J-1s for academics, for the remainder of the year.…

We take a look at Cupertino's one-Arm bandit gambit Analysis Apple on Monday said it plans to shift its macOS line from Intel chips to its own homegrown Arm-compatible processors, an initiative called Apple Silicon that will put all Cupertino's products on a common hardware architecture.…

'BlueLeaks' data lifted after web host biz pwned, we're told Some 269GB of data stolen from police and the Feds in America has been shared online by miscreants.…

That big Arm news you were all expecting today, right? Japan's Arm-based 415-PFLOPS, 28MW Fugaku monster was today crowned the world’s most-powerful publicly known supercomputer.…

Stop! In the name of tax! Before you break my bank! Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and a host of other tech giants will have to pay billions of dollars in extra tax after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on a stock-option case.…

Fixing scrolling issues and CSS flexbox but fears of browser monoculture remain A software engineer in the Google Chrome team has spoken about inconsistency in feature support across different web browsers, promising a "more compatible 2021".…

Three-quarters claim pandemic didn't trigger big changes to corporate security settings Nearly three-quarters of IT professionals haven't increased their company's security posture during the COVID-19 pandemic – while 90 per cent highlighted remote working as a security risk, according to a survey.…

We did what we think you want, now let it through A truce is being threatened in the standoff between Apple's App Store and email imagineer Hey.…

Five years since the last update, the team celebrates 50 years of the language with more architectures Great news, Pascal fans. After a lengthy hiatus, the cross-platform Free Pascal has emerged with an array of new features and new targets.…

Ironic, because new tech is supposed to solve the micro-burst issue Psychologists from Northumbria University have published a research paper examining the connection between beliefs in 5G COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and the willingness to act violently upon them. Surprise surprise, if you believe 5G is part of a Soros-backed depopulation plan, you might be tempted to take up a Super Soaker in arms.…

That subsurface ocean scientists think the dwarf has? It may have formed 'early', claims paper Pluto, the icy dwarf planet hanging out in the Kuiper Belt, may well have been hot when it formed and could have supported a subsurface liquid ocean early in its development.…

Also: Money for Excel hits US, Teams readies new toys for next academic year, and more Roundup As Microsoft continues to fling fixes at the world and its dog, the firm has also expanded Teams grid to allow teachers to gaze upon 49 little faces and despair as well as tweaking Edge to provide, er, heaps better memory munching.…

Somebody else will have to provide the rocket, though Virgin Galactic, the company that has yet to send a paying passenger on a sub-orbital lob, let alone trouble anything more challenging, has opened the door to "Private Orbital Spaceflight".…

We'll find out as WWDC rolls on WWDC Apple will confirm its transition to Arm this week at the virtual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says Ming-Chi Kuo – the analyst widely regarded to be the most accurate when it comes to Cupertino's movements.…

Plus: Nigeria-based entrepreneur accused of fraud, and more Roundup It was another week of furious firefighting in the security space, including the curious tale of a Forbes "most promising" entrepreneur indicted over alleged phishing attacks, new privacy laws in the US, software flaws and more.…

10% of the world's pagers are in use by Britain's health service The digital arm of England's health service, NHSX, is tendering for a replacement to ageing pager technologies in an effort to modernise hospital communications systems.…

Plus: AI for the benefit of humankind group loses a member and more Roundup Windows fans can finally train and run their own machine learning models off Radeon and Ryzen GPUs in their boxes, computer vision gets better at filling in the blanks and more in this week's look at movements in AI and machine learning.…

And there's £6m British pounds for the biz that can do it University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in the UK is desperately seeking to replace a mishmash of finance and warehouse management software with an integrated ERP system in a tender worth up to £6m.…

Shipments soared 86% in Q1, 200 million expected to be shifted this year Despite the economic effects of the pandemic, true wireless stereo (TWS) devices like earbuds, headphones and speakers have proved robust, with Q1 global shipments up 86 per cent year-on-year to 43.8 million.…

VxRail gets rugged version, dalliances with AMD, Optane and NVIDIA Qaudro GPUs Dell’s updated its VxRail hyperconverged boxen.…

Not even Brexit is going to slap our as-a-Service biz Microsoft's board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.51 per share this week as its UK tentacle reported another bonzer year of revenue growth.…

Pollution, sprawling cities of megastructures, any sign aliens are screwing up just like us... Astronomers are on the hunt for signs of alien civilizations in space by searching for things like extraterrestrial solar panels or planetary atmospheres spewing pollutants.…

Needs about €21bn it doesn’t have and a whole lot of new science to make it feasible The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has signed off on an update to its particle physics strategy that calls for the construction of two new very, very, large pieces of atom-smashing hardware.…

Brrrrr... dunngadunng... braaaaarp: that's the sound of da police Who, Me? Bid farewell to the weekend with a story from the Who, Me? mailbag that struck a little close to home for one Register hack.…

Tune in online next month to hear all about the advantages of legacy server emulation Webcast It’s a familiar story to many: you’re a business that’s run quite happily on an incredibly robust backend IT infrastructure for literally decades.…

Country total of $3.9bn is about 40 percent of AWS revenue, but Amazon sells to the world China’s spend on cloud infrastructure services in Q1 2020 jumped 67 percent year-year, says analyst firm Canalys.…

As India’s slowdown to 2G in Kashmir is extended to July The internet blackout in towns in two states of Myanmar (Burma) has entered a second year.…

A win for Vlad the Decryptor Russia has lifted restrictions on secure messaging app Telegram after its developers agreed to block some content.…

'Far more formidable gates to access to other applications than anything that existed in the industry 20 years ago' Analysis Microsoft president Brad Smith on Thursday called on antitrust regulators in the US and Europe to scrutinize whether smartphone app store business practices are consistent with antitrust law.…

City council demands snoop gear kit reports, mayor OK with that New York City Council has overwhelmingly voted to require cops to report their use of surveillance technology.…

An AI engineer recounts his previous woes to The Register Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a brilliant idea: get two neural networks and pit them against each other to get a machine to generate completely new, realistic looking images. But in practice they are notoriously difficult to train and deploy, as one engineer told El Reg.…

Wait and see before pointing the finger, warns threat intel boffin As Australia reels under sustained cyber attacks following increased Chinese diplomatic hostility, the country's Lion brewery and dairy conglomerate has been hit for the second time.…

Yeah, about that whole JSON thing... The Windows Terminal gang has got back into its preview groove with an update for the open-source command-line front-end.…

'We don't know what he stands for' Huawei is uncertain whether a change in leadership in Washington DC will resolve its ongoing woes with the US government, company representatives have told The Register.…

Doors remain closed at that other hub of nerdery, the Centre for Computing History Raspberry Pi fans rejoice! The foundation's Cambridge outlet has tentatively opened its doors once more, although is sadly shorn of its trademark interactive displays.…

'Revenge' attack cost biz £100k, say police A woman who deleted 5,000 files from her former company's Dropbox has been punished with community service – even though the business allegedly collapsed after her file-shredding spree.…