The Register

You can only use it to weigh yourself now... how disgustingly low-tech In 2015, German sportswear manufacturer Adidas acquired a plucky Austrian IoT startup called Runtastic, which, among other things, manufactured a $129.99 "smart" scale called Libra. Now that product is being discontinued, preventing owners from synchronising their data or even downloading the app required to use it.…

Fitness fans get more battery capacity in thinner case, and replacing it is doable for the brave iFixit, terror of the tri-point, has pulled apart Apple's latest wrist job and found that the friend of the well-heeled fitness fanatic has retained the repairability of its predecessor.…

Yes, why not haul the system into the 21st century? The UK's Ministry of Justice has put out market feelers for the second time in three months in what could amount to a £20m deal, this time for a new payroll system.…

Also: Rocket Lab rehearses for a US debut while Firefly fires up an Alpha In Brief Mother Nature scuppered SpaceX's twelfth operational launch of its Starlink satellites, forcing the company to throw in the towel "due to severe weather in the recovery area."…

Once you're over the learning curve, it's a cross-platform all-rounder Review When you think about iconic mechanical keyboards, the Happy Hacking is among the first to spring to mind. Its compact design is unusual if you're used to full-sized boards with the numpad, function keys, and arrow keys excised. The result is a keyboard that is unfathomably small, occupying little desk real estate.…

Decentralised app rolling out soon, but manual process remains problematic In the absence of a working contact tracing app, the UK government has been forced to rely on manual data collection and human-powered tracing to identify potential cases of exposure to the Covid-19 virus. But, as Parliament’s cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights claims in a new report, this is just as problematic as the original centralized app, particularly when it comes to user privacy…

Single high-level impulse noise kicked in with morning cuppa. Owner vows never to use the set again Turning off an old second-hand television has restored internet services to a village in Wales.…

Join us on September 29 – and get ready for 2020’s OWASP Top 10 Webcast OK, it’s only updated every three years or so, which means it’s not quite the same as breathlessly clustering around the radio to see whether Blur or Oasis have grabbed the top spot or whether Rhiannon’s Umbrella is still number one, or whether team Taylor will see off Perry.…

What strange magic is this? 41st release and sequel to version 3.38 will be called version 40 Popular open source desktop-and-more outfit GNOME has taught itself a new way to count.…

Ambitions to see the rise of a Brit equivalent to Apple is cool and all but that strategy must include safeguarding chip designer, says union The UK government has been urged to add legal protections to the proposed £31bn sale of Brit chip designer Arm to Nvidia to protect jobs, protect its neutral business model, and make sure it remains headquartered in Cambridge.…

Branded tat and disrupto-talks could return - albeit nine months later than usual in Oz plague capital Cisco has invited its faithful to travel abroad to a mass-attendance event in December 2021.…

Scumbag sobs in court as judge orders him to cough up $1.5m The front man for the notorious Dark Overlord hacker gang, which threatened to leak stolen confidential information unless paid off, has been sentenced to five years behind bars in America.…

Court sends him into lockdown that’s not a whole lot nastier than some used to control a certain virus An IT contractor has been found guilty of pinching his employer’s supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency.…

At least one WiFi access point and five FTTP connections in each India’s government has ordered a broadband building blitz that will see all 45,945 villages in the State of Bihar connected by optic fibre before March 31st, 2021.…

Nancy is among 15 former Big Blue workers now suing the mega-corp for age discrimination IBM has once again been sued for alleged age discrimination, this time in Texas on behalf of 15 former employees.…

TL;DR: Trump is confusing everything to stay in the spotlight Analysis Each day for the past six days, the sale of the US wing of the video-sharing app TikTok has been alternatively approved and not approved, each time with a wave of announcements, tweets, press releases and 24-hour news coverage.…

Strange, it didn't show up during development, says social network Twitter says its AI that automatically crops images in tweets didn't exhibit racial or gender bias when it was developed – even though in production it may prefer to crop out dark-skinned people and focus on women's chests. The social network acknowledged it has more work to do to address concerns.…

You will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered Netgear has decided that users of some of its managed network switches don’t need access to the equipment's full user interface – unless they register their details with Netgear first.…

What goes up must come down. Or is it the other way round? Just weeks after Salesforce reported huge Q2 profits only to lighten the company payroll by more than 1,000 staff, the badass of CRM software has now said it plans to hire 12,000 or more people over the next year.…

Comes not long after firm ditched hybrid-electric propulsion demonstrator Airbus has lifted the lid on proposals for airliners that run on hydrogen, months after pulling the plug on a battery-powered testbed aircraft.…

How will CEO Safra Catz manage on her $950k salary in this environment? With the economy in uncharted waters as a result of a global pandemic, and businesses and homes under the spectre of another virus-related lockdown, spare a thought for those less fortunate in our society. Yes, Oracle executives.…

Robert Downey Jr's back to tell everyone how great it is OnePlus has confirmed its 5G-capable 8T flagship phone is scheduled to land on 14 October in an online-only event.…

Also: Darkness beckons for Dev Channel Insiders, TypeScript 4.1 beta arrives, Xbox swallows Bethesda In Brief Release Channel Windows Insiders were treated to Build 19042.508 of Microsoft's flagship operating system last week as Microsoft readied the OS for an October release.…

*Brexit Satellite. What did you think we meant? GPS continues to rule the roost in Blighty for now The UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy today denied the government had reconsidered its position on Galileo following weekend reports about it ditching plans for a homegrown alternative.…

Where are the search warrants for this? asks ex-Brexit Secretary Conservative backbencher David Davis has vowed to ask questions in Parliament over Uber's seemingly unregulated sharing of data with police and transport regulators as it battled to save its London taxi licence.…

It's avoiding the 'constraints of 10 years of design decisions' apparently GitHub has released version 1.0 of its CLI, allowing interaction and control of repositories from the command line.…

Plus: Lazarus Group joins the big league, ex-Aussie PM doxxed, new flaw found in Bluetooth, and more In brief A pair from Russia have been indicted for stealing nearly $17m worth of cryptocurrency.…

Citizen app, reporting for duty UK utility Anglian Water has declared itself in the market for suppliers to help with DevOps, Agile, and big data "transformations", reciting a laundry list of requirements that is as remarkable for its sheer exhaustiveness as it is for swallowing the buzzword dictionary.…

Tripp's off the hook for Tesla's supposed $167.37m market cap damages, though Tesla has successfully torpedoed a countersuit brought against it by a former employee accused of stealing confidential internal info from the luxury electric carmaker.…

A big time saver – but 'we can't tell if the current logic that you have in the code is correct or not.' Oh Oxford-based Diffblue has claimed its AI will automate one of the most important but tedious tasks in software development: writing unit tests.…

Optimistically aimed at airport-bound folk It’s not exactly the best time to launch a travel mouse, is it? Nobody’s going anywhere, except perhaps to the shops. Oblivious to this fact is Swiss peripherals Logitech, which today introduced smaller flavours of its MX Master 3 mouse for both PC and Mac, dubbed MX Anywhere 3.…

Tune in online this week and we'll show you ten things you can do better right now Webcast If working from home is the new orthodoxy, isn’t it time we started laying down some rules about how to do this securely?…

Why is it that ultrabook-makers can't give us more places to stick our USBs? Review September didn’t bring any new Huawei phones, but it did manage to push out a crop of new laptops, including an updated Matebook 14 2020. This machine could be described as a humble mid-ranger, but that would largely be missing the point.…

Estée Lauder’s pricey goop gets seat on next ISS resupply mission as Japanese companies pledge zero-G cosmetics Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of "Advanced Night Repair" skin serum and the suitable-for-zero-G “CosmoSkin” cosmetics-in-space project.…

You've been visited by the Don Corleone of code Who, Me? It is Monday, and time to stare glumly at the week of patching that lies ahead. Pause a while before hitting that update button with a cautionary tale from Who, Me? about support contracts and a naughty, naughty programmer.…

Government sysadmins given weekend to fix ZeroLogon elevation of privilege bug, rest of us given stern warning The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has taken the unusual step of issuing an emergency directive that gives US government agencies a four-day deadline to implement a Windows Server patch.…

Imminent demise of IE 11 and Angular JS means upgrades are incoming VMware is about to make some changes to its vSphere clients and users are going to have to make jump through some upgrade hoops to remain in complete control of their VMs.…

Banned merchants restored, rivals’ stores binned, cash sent around town in an Uber, it is alleged US prosecutors claim six people bribed corrupt Amazon insiders to rig the the web giant's Marketplace in their favor and leak terabytes of data including some search algorithms.…

Ban on app ruled a restriction on free speech Tencent-owned messaging-and-more app WeChat has evaded the USA’s ban on its presence in app stores and on the internet - for now - after the United States District Court granted a preliminary injunction against the Executive Order that branded the service a national security risk.…

Deal dilutes Chinese stake enough for Trump to tentatively approve Oracle has been formally announced as TikTok’s new technology partner and will also become a co-owner of a new entity that will run the made—in-China social network in the USA and other parts of the world. US president Donald Trump has backed the deal publicly.…

Plus: Machine-learning software and another Power processor core opened up by IBM In brief Samples of Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100, teased more than a year ago, are now shipping to select customers, the tech giant said this week. The hardware is due to officially launch in the first half of next year.…

Chip giant dinged for failing to block automated buying Analysis Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards on Thursday and promptly sold out from its online store, to the annoyance of more than a few would-be customers who were left empty-handed.…

NASA's long-lived spacecraft reaches another milestone NASA's extraordinarily long-lived Voyager 1 probe this week passed 14 billion miles from Earth.…

Quality comes in small packages Review Mechanical keyboard aficionados spend years (and an unconscionable amount of money) searching for typing perfection. One recent pocket-crushing contender in this arena is the Das Keyboard 4C TKL, which retails at $139 (or £139 in Blighty).…

Security upstart NS8, which raised $123m in funding, let its leader have sole control over revenue records The Feds on Thursday charged the head of a cyber-fraud prevention company with fraud in a complaint unsealed in a New York City court.…

Phish Scale hopes to make life easier for blue teams gazing at click rates The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has said it has developed a way of measuring precisely why corporate staff click on obvious phishing emails and open malware-laden attachments, despite warnings not to do those things.…

Some aspects are 'eerily similar to the peak of the 2000 bubble' warns Bernstein In a week that saw three tech companies float on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street analyst Bernstein is mulling the potential of a share price crash based on similar indicators prevalent during the .com bust.…

Richest boys' club wealth grew by $101.7bn between March and June Astounding though it is, there are members of the human race about whom it can confidently be said: "Look, they're having a good pandemic."…

Unless the Orange One steps in to save the day. Fancy that! The US Department of Commerce has threatened to ban new downloads of Chinese-owned social media platforms Tiktok and Wechat from app stores this weekend.…

All is well. Unless you trust everything you see on the internet An airliner that appeared to crash into the North Sea earlier this week in fact landed safely. Yet multiple flight tracker websites showed it spiralling into the ocean. Experts have explained to The Register what really happened.…