The Register

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.…

If you fear you'll drown in AWS, GCP, Azure, etc, maybe this is a wave you'd like to catch Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider DigitalOcean dipped its toes into the Platform-as-a-Service waters on Tuesday with the launch of App Platform.…

Because who would want to be a standalone print or copier biz in 2020? Japanese print and copier specialist Ricoh has snaffled UK storage infrastructure and security managed service provider MTI Technology for a figure understood to be in the region of £30m.…

120 hours' community service and suspended sentence for computer misuse and data protection crimes A police officer who quit while under investigation for computer misuse crimes has walked free from court after pleading guilty to a total of nine offences.…

Dept of Labor demands proof Windows giant isn't making 'illegal race-based decisions' in diversity push After Microsoft vowed to double its number of Black and African American bosses and senior staffers, the US government challenged the policy as potentially racist, it was revealed Tuesday.…

'These once scrappy, underdog startups have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons' A long-awaited congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google has been published – and it concludes the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.…

Cops charge suspect with theft as audit claims this gear definitely wasn't on loan A former public library employee is accused of stealing and reselling at least $1.3m worth of toner from his workplace over a 12-year period.…

Tech industry may limber up for war The Trump administration has announced it will place new restrictions on the H-1B work visa program, such as narrowing eligibility for foreign workers and recomputing minimum salary levels.…

Analyst predicts five good years as homeworking and refresh cycles meld The COVID-19 pandemic has proven fruitful for the consumer Wi-Fi sector, according to analyst house ABI Research, with shipments this year set to increase and long-term growth forecast.…

Bugs from Lodash and JQuery among the more commonly seen security problems GitLab, a rival to Microsoft's hosted git service GitHub, has for the second time tested the security of customers' hosted software projects... and found them wanting.…

Gives you confidence in an era where nobody accepts cash any more A little more than a quarter of companies worldwide are fully compliant with the exacting PCI DSS online payment security standard, according to US telco Verizon.…

Microsoft isn't the only company to fiddle with its iconography Google has fired a rebrandogun loaded with fresh icons at its G Suite platform. Prepare to relinquish the suite life and put nose to the grindstone in Google's "Workspace".…

Offshore electricity production target doable, says expert, but we need to decarbonise transport and heating too The UK government has committed to increasing offshore wind energy production from 30GW to 40GW by 2030 amid confusion over what it means for home power consumption.…

Meanwhile, Euro outsourcer claims Interserve failed to pay £3.5m invoices Interserve has alleged that Sopra Steria's IT outsourcing division caused it to bungle a Ministry of Justice prisoner rehabilitation contract because too many of the latter's staff were signed off sick through stress caused by overwork to deliver on its promises.…

Push to buy from 'purposeful suppliers' coincides with launch of yachting app Making a company's ethical image all shipshape and Bristol fashion requires careful navigation of choppy waters – so perhaps SAP should know better.…