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While social media gets a portion of the blame for COVID-19's initial spread The impact of lockdowns during a global pandemic appears to be making itself known in a variety of ways – subtle and otherwise – including increased drinking and swearing. Or, as we like to call it, "the weekend".…

CMA claims to have taken 'oversight role' over removal of third-party cookies The UK's competition regulator intends to keep a weather eye on Google as it works to address concerns around its proposals to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser.…

Communication Workers Union believes 'scores of employees' will be placed 'at risk' under proposals Tesco Mobile has extended its customer management contract with Capita for another three years as part of ongoing plans to streamline the grocer-cum-telco's customer service operation.…

Tii Technologies claims hamfisted BT bods caused problems, not their kit BT is suing a supplier for £72m after it delivered nearly 100,000 defective landline connection blocks that caused ADSL broadband outages, London's High Court has heard.…

Now they've got £5m to try to stop it falling over again The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has signed contract extensions worth £5m with Digidentity and the Post Office for an online identity service which recently fell over.…

'Surprise stealing mechanics' made short work of network perimeter security EA Games, publisher of Battlefield, The Sims and FIFA, has admitted to a "recent incident of intrusion into our network" in which attackers reportedly stole game source code and software development kits.…

A trip to beautiful Snowdonia lakes takes in early hydroelectric experiment... and a tragedy for a village Geek's Guide To Britain They say that it is the history on one's doorstep which is most often overlooked. So it is with my latest piece for El Reg's Geek's Guide to Britain which concerns events in a quiet Welsh village that I called home between the ages of five and 18.…

Plus ça change The UK's Passport Office has awarded a £21m contract to Atos IT Services purportedly for business intelligence and infrastructure.…

Meanwhile users complain their IPs are being flagged for suspicious traffic Users of BT’s Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi range-extender discs have noticed their devices are making hundreds of thousands of daily DNS lookups for big tech companies’ websites – causing problems for some wanting to access Gmail and Microsoft services.…

You never did learn to play guitar, did you? Too late now... Something for the Weekend, Sir? Smile! We're all going back to the office!…

Three availability zones prophesied to open in the first half of 2023 Amazon Web Services has announced it will bring a full region to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.…

It must be working, look at the LED On Call An On Call reminder this week that all must worship the mystery beige box with the single baleful LED eye, no matter what one thinks it is used for.…

RCMP said it only used technology to rescue children, but regulator says that's wrong and Privacy Act was breached Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) announced yesterday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law by using Clearview AI facial-recognition software.…

Error handling? Nah, let's just unlock everything and be done with it A seven-year-old privilege escalation vulnerability that's been lurking in several Linux distributions was patched last week in a coordinated disclosure.…

As local search engines stop providing results on crypto-keywords China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation’s Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services.…

All systems check out, it's time to science the s**t out of Mars NASA has finished the Perseverance Mars rover's post-landing shakedown and the vehicle has therefore embarked on its first sample collection mission, the space agency confirmed on Wednesday.…

'Any Linux discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me' Linus Torvalds has used some of his strongest language in years to smack down a Linux Kernel Mailing List poster who made some odd remarks about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.…

Cloud colossus says aircon fail caused kit to shut down, networks dropped out and EC2 instances went dark Updated A single availability zone in Amazon Web Services’ EU-Central region (EUC_AZ-1) has experienced a major outage.…

Would you like a lawsuit with that? McDonald’s has been accused of illegally collecting and processing customers' voice recordings without their consent in the US state of Illinois.…

Enterprise newcomer has its work cut out in the data marketplace field Among the blizzard of new language support for Snowflake's data warehouse this week was a plan to beef up its data marketplace, which promises users somewhere to buy, sell, and otherwise share data on the platform. The problem is that it is far from the only game in town.…

Maker of industrial lift gear claims fraud as software project sinks Advance Lifts, an Illinois-based maker of industrial lift machinery, has sued Oracle, its IT implementation partner Folio3, and its finance partner Banc of America Leasing & Capital, claiming that the trio breached their contract and committed fraud by delivering a NetSuite system that lacked promised features.…

Someone's got to keep Altera company Intel offered more than $2bn to acquire RISC-V chip designer SiFive, it was reported today.…

No one expects the Worldwide Loyalty Team! During the development of iOS 15, Apple reportedly limited the extent to which engineers could see features being worked on by other colleagues to prevent potential leaks.…

Still, it's this or iOS Android 12 Beta 2 is here and contains many of the features that were teased during May's Google I/O shindig including an overhauled control panel and additional privacy tools.…

'The group is united in making RISC-V an option in HPC,' says SIG-HPC chair RISC-V International, the nonprofit at the helm of the free and open-source CPU instruction set architecture, says it is writing a high-performance computing (HPC) roadmap of "new features and capabilities."…

Brood X vents frustration at missed opportunity on free press, random Ohio drivers Following The Reg's recent exclusive coverage of the growing cicada threat to humanity, we can now reveal that US President Joe Biden narrowly missed being literally decapitated by a lone cicada assassin.…

How to bust the bottlenecks without breaking the bank Webcast We all know HPC and AI datasets are going to be massive. But they’re also very different — the former built from large, sequential files, while the latter from much more random info.…

It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it Samsung today introduced its latest imaging sensor, the 50-megapixel ISOCELL JN1, which it claims has the smallest individual pixels in the industry.…

Show me the money! say campaigners hoping to stamp out nefarious practices At the eleventh hour, UK government has detailed plans to regulate umbrella companies, some of which stand accused of dodgy dealings as their use grows among IT contractors after IR35 tax rule changes.…

Q1 WLAN sales rose by 16.7 per cent year-on-year A surge in wireless LAN sales in the opening three months of 2021 signals businesses are preparing to have you return to the office, according to IDC.…

AMD hoping to grow its $38bn Xilinx acquisition as it seeks to compete with Intel's Altera AMD-owned FPGA specialist Xilinx has announced the acquisition of Silexica, a 2014-era academic spinout founded on a promise to "democratise accelerated computing" – primarily through its SLX FPGA tool suite.…

Upgraded build-it-yourself kit now includes 80-character mode, improved video output options Nostalgia-fuelled vintage computing specialists The Future Was 8bit and Tynemouth Software have opened pre-orders for a new computer kit based on Commodore's venerable PET, featuring everything you need to compute like it's the 1970s – just bring your own flares.…

Buy-in comes after (nearly) 24 years of living next door to Altice Altice – the French telecoms outfit that operates fibre and mobile networks serving more than 40 million punters in the US, France, Portugal and Israel – has bought a £2bn chunk of BT, it announced today.…

Let's hope Sachin Jogia sticks around longer than his predecessor Ofcom is to get a new full-time CTO this autumn in Sachin Jogia, who has spent the last nine years at Amazon and is currently GM of the Alexa Smart Home product management and business teams.…

How to make software ch-ch-ch-changes easier Feature Anyone who has worked in medium or large organisations will know that there are three levels of change control when it comes to code: (a) the organisation doesn’t have any, (b) the organisation has change control but does it sub-optimally, and (c) change is managed well.…

FoI request details £76,800 in training fees, most of which went to staff security-specific departments The Student Loans Company (SLC) spent £76,800 on cybersecurity training over its previous two fiscal years – including a sudden and unsurprising interest in security in a work-from-home environment.…

Wine64 support arrives for the Apple M1 Fans of Apple's M1 silicon have some more code to play with as the Wine team emitted version 6.0.1 of the Windows-running platform with support for wine64 on the new chippery.…

Hotshot snotbot shows grotty terror plot buzzbots what's what Until recently, the variously camouflaged, partially stealthed and fully invisibility-cloaked boffins at DARPA – Uncle Sam's most famous left-field military research institute – had a problem.…

Why does it always... That's why. That's why it's raining on you UK government proposals to create a workers' watchdog have been slammed by campaigners for not adequately covering umbrella companies, some of which have been accused of sharp practices as the IR35 off-payroll tax revamp expands their usage among contractors.…

Plans fintech infusion for local banking sector, plus data-sharing infrastructure Hong Kong has revealed a strategy to give its financial services sector a fintech infusion.…

Russia, Greenland, northern Canada will get the Full Monty Dust off your funky eclipse sunglasses and your homemade pinhole projector – a partial solar eclipse is set to cast a blurry shadow across parts of the UK on Thursday.…

Fines, fines, everywhere there's fines Microsoft and five other companies have received fines totaling US$75K from South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), for running afoul of local data protection laws.…

Company also says large and well-funded IT department sorted recovery swiftly JBS Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, has revealed it handed over “the equivalent of $11 million” to resolve a ransomware infection that disrupted operations in Australia, the USA, and Canada.…

None were illegal, but they did put civil servants in awkward ethical territory and execs knew it Japanese tech and telecoms giant NTT has temporarily slashed the pay of several top executives, to reprimand them for paying too much of the bill at $500-a-head lunches with government officials.…

Sure, you can apply to work from home in the middle of nowhere, just don't expect Silicon Valley pay Facebook, like other Silicon Valley mega-corps, is ready to get its workers back in the office, setting October as the time when business returns somewhat to normal.…

Also sent lovely flowers as US$22bn GoTo Group cut driver bonuses Drivers who work for Indonesia’s Uber equivalent, Gojek, have gone on strike for three days in response to some of the payments they receive being halved.…

FBI reveals undercover employee sold him fake explosives before arrest Seth Aaron Pendley, the 28-year-old Texas man accused of planning to blow up an Amazon Web Services data centre, admitted on Wednesday he planned to destroy a building with an explosive.…

But executive order expands on supply chain security initiative with call for evidence-based vetting of technology The White House on Tuesday revoked stalled Trump-era orders that sought to ban social media apps TikTok, WeChat, and others in the United States as national security threats.…

Boffins find flaw in web security that enables certificate confusion Academics from three German universities have found a vulnerability in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that under limited circumstances allows the theft of session cookies and enables cross-site scripting attacks.…

The first based in China Huawei has opened another cyber security centre and, despite facing a crisis of trust in the West, has chosen to do so for the first time in its Chinese heartland.…