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A charm offensive, or just plain offensive? Amazon tried to head off negative column inches about its tax-efficient operations in Britain by cherry-picking journalists to brief on its latest financial results days before they hit Companies House.…

Explainability, model testing, experience reports – we've got everything you need next month Event Remember the days of coming together at a conference and venting about work stuff while learning something that may actually help you move your company's machine learning initiative forward?…

They're called glasses, look it up Dude. Imagine, like, if you had – bear with me – a smartphone, right? But, like, in your HEAD?!…

You didn't want to run that hot Cupertino code? Too bad, loser Apple's iOS 14 is supposed to let people select third-party apps, such as Chrome and Outlook, as their default browser and email client. Yet, when the iThings are rebooted or powered back on, these choices are wiped, and the defaults reset to Apple's Safari and Mail.…

Online Apple store comes to India even as millions remain in containment zones Apple will grace India with its online store, at just the moment that local bricks and mortar retailers need trade they can get.…

Go pivot on this On Call Everyone loves a mystery so clamber into the On Call vaults for a good old-fashioned VAX-based whatdunnit.…

Pitches tiny 'cloud computer' that streams apps and OSes over WiFi and hooks up to USB-C displays Alibaba has teased a tiny PC replacement that will stream apps from its cloud.…

Extortionware is bad but it never killed anyo... never mind A woman in Germany died after a ransomware infection prevented her hospital from giving emergency treatment.…

As Mozilla kills off secure file transfer tool because – shock! – it was being abused Mozilla's mail reader, Thunderbird, has implemented a feature first requested 21 years ago.…

Floats industry plan that requires ramp-up of locally made components and complete tech transfer Pakistan has proposed that foreign smartphone-makers entering the country will have to help it build a domestic smartphone industry.…

Three days remain before definition of prohibited transactions drops The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has revealed that the Trump administration has not yet decided exactly what sort of ban it wants to impose on Tencent-operated messaging service WeChat, but that users of the service won’t be subject to any penalties.…

It starts with a backpack of $200 of electronics and poor Wi-Fi security The US Department of the Interior (DoI) spectacularly failed its latest computer security assessment, mostly for a lack of Wi-Fi defenses.…

And Cloudflare customers get way better availability The Internet Archive, repository for some 468bn webpages, has become a fail-over service for Cloudflare customers, which could improve website availability for everyone.…

Plus: Strange $12m sale rumors surround top domain name Analysis The man who claims he was screwed out of ownership of one of the internet’s most valuable addresses – invest.com – has lost a critical appeals court ruling. He reckons the battle’s not over yet, though.…

Disclosed tracking, helicopter parenting programs are still kosher In an update to its Android Developer Program Policy, Google on Wednesday said stalkerware apps in its app store can no longer be used to stalk non-consenting adults.…

Telecom kit maker points finger in the general direction of Middle Kingdom's complicated supply chain Hardware video encoders from multiple suppliers contain several critical security bugs that allow a remote unauthenticated miscreant to run arbitrary code on the equipment.…

Another facet of its data platform vision thing Analysis For a data company, Cloudera appears to be short on answers. Amid a raft of technology releases, it seems to be trying to insert its muzzle into two well-established markets while questions still remain over its Enterprise Data Cloud, announced more than a year ago.…

Snapdragon 865-powered, 120Hz tall boy focuses on fun and games Hoping to regain ground lost to competitors in China and South Korea, Sony today unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the €899 Xperia 5 II.…

End of the line for Adobe's multimedia nightmare on iGiant's browser Ahead of the macOS Big Sur launch, Apple has released Safari 14 to the general public, granting Mojave and Catalina users access to the company's latest browser.…

Cloud connection with the performance of 12G-SDI - as long as VMs are physically close together Amazon Web Services has said its new Cloud Digital Interface (CDI) will enable cloud-based video production across multiple virtual machines for the first time.…

Never mind real-world viruses, get your networks into lockdown ASAP GCHQ offshoot the National Cyber Security Centre has warned Further and Higher Education institutions in the UK to be on their guard against ransomware attacks as the new academic year (sort of) gets under way.…

Oh, and Smart Freight System software in beta by April... will be used from December. WCGW? The UK government has enlisted controversial US AI biz Palantir in a bid to "mitigate and manage potential disruption at the border" as the country's departure from the EU comes into force.…

Vector-math processor core for high-perf computing promised, too Ex-Qualcomm exec Patrick Little will today take over as CEO and president of Arm-wrestling RISC-V chip design upstart SiFive.…

Agreement puts a stop to Feds' audit, but isn't an admission of wrongdoing Updated Microsoft has agreed to fork out $3,000,000 in back pay and interest to resolve an investigation by a US federal agency looking into allegations it unlawfully passed over qualified Asian, African American, and Hispanic applicants who were looking for work.…

Two audits also hit with combined £750k of personal fines by accountacy regulator Deloitte has been fined £15m by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) for “serious and serial failures” in its auditing of British software company Autonomy prior to the latter’s acquisition by HP for $11bn.…

Alexa-derived chatbot tech allegedly understands 'the British accent', but fails to recognise that there are many It's only taken three years, but the conversational interface tech underlying Amazon's Alexa assistant is now capable of the world's lingua franca in its purest form – "British English".…

Errors had no material effect on the outcome, promises the, er, board chairman Nominet has been forced to admit it wrongly calculated election results for its board of directors in 2018 and 2019.…

Shopping paradise forgot to pay for more support Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft has many operating systems that simply refuse to die. MS-DOS can be found here and there. Windows XP continues to hang around like a toxic airborne emission. And Windows 7? Despite the software maker's best efforts, it lingers on.…

Also: Cygnus named for Columbia 'naut, and Space Shuttle Endeavour dressed up for launch In brief "As we've always said, we expect it to take three flights to make it to orbit," upstart launch vehicle outfit Astra bravely said as its imaginatively named Rocket 3.1 went *phut* shortly after lift-off last week.…

F-Secure gives its take on the first half of 2020 in internet scumminess Coronavirus-themed malicious emails were the standout feature of online naughtiness in the first half of 2020, according to infosec firm F-Secure – though overall volumes of phishing did decrease a touch.…

iOS 14's new MAC scrambling could stop upgraded devices from connecting, Android 10 also a mess Cisco promotes its Identity Services Engine (ISE) as “intuitive network security for the digital age.” But Switchzilla has just explained that it’s not very good at handling the growing practice of MAC address randomization by mobile devices.…

Fasthosts made a mistake, this exhibit is closed The perilous state of the UK's internet space has been exposed once again, as the second largest seller of .uk domain names admitted last night it wrongly sold dozens of valuable internet addresses.…

Biz is not going to make any impact in core areas – but there's much more to life than HR, supply chains, accounting, analyst tells us ServiceNow, the workflow company home to humble-bragging CEO Bill McDermott, on Wednesday launched a package of tools to help organizations scratch an itch incumbent management software suites may not be able to reach.…

Data-harvesting test pilots to roam the streets wearing AR glasses and little lanyards explaining that you’re being recorded By permitting conspiracies and blatant falsehoods to circulate unchallenged, Facebook made denial of reality a nasty feature of actual reality. And now the Silicon Valley juggernaut has decided it wants to figure out how to build a digital layer that overlays the real world.…

And fancies giving mobile carriers a kicking to bust cosy triumvirate and make number-porting less of a nightmare Japan has three dominant mobile carriers and when consumers want to move from one to another and keep their current phone number, they must fill out a paper form, pay about US$30 and wait for delivery of a new SIM.…

Phishers claimed to be from 'National Health Commission', which exists in mainland China but not Taiwan Taiwan's CERT detected cyber-crooks impersonating medical authorities to attack the country's tech industry during the early stages of the COVID pandemic.…

HCI hit, security slugged, UXers axed, solutions peeps’ jobs dissolved Dell has made a new round of layoffs.…

Give that tagging finger a rest While Microsoft has added audio transcription to the premium edition of Word Online, cloud arch-rival Amazon has switched on the ability to identify languages in audio.…

Reality TV has now come to international business deals Comment In a business dance oddly reminiscent of reality TV twists and turns, it appears an offer by Oracle to handle TikTok in the US may have tipped the scales and tentatively gained White House approval.…

Ad giant takes aim at the meeting room – even though nobody's there Keen to remind everyone that Google Meet is still a thing in a world seemingly obsessed with Zoom, the Chocolate Factory has announced hardware for anyone trying to run its video conferencing service.…

Doesn't matter if a computer was in control, responsibility rests with the human, says prosecutor The safety driver who was behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber car when it hit and killed a pedestrian has been charged with negligent homicide.…

Taking away the ability to impose rules on developers 'hugely damaging to the public.' claims iThing slinger Apple has responded to an attempt by Epic Games to get its games back in Cupertino's App Store, as the two tech giants contest the fairness of compelling developers to hand over 30 per cent of revenue for applications in the software souk.…

Disappeared databases since returned with no memory of what happened, speculation of bug abounds Several versions of Amazon Web Services' Aurora PostgreSQL went missing earlier this week, prompting concern among AWS customers.…

Ugly: And it's all about video game robberies at this stage Two people have been arrested in Malaysia as part of America's crackdown on the Chinese government's hackers.…

Please just patch your infrastructure, begs US-CISA Where Chinese hackers exploit, Iranians aren’t far behind. So says the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is warning that malicious persons from Iran are exploiting a slew of vulns in VPN products from Citrix, F5 Networks and Pulse Secure.…

And let me tell you why in three words: Developers! Developers! Developers! Register Debate Welcome to The Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

Fortunately, it looks like Perseverance rover will start digging in the right place Evidence of ancient microbial life in Martian soil will not be easy to find, and some of it may have been destroyed by the flow of liquid acid, according to research published in Scientific Reports.…

Cupertino's subscription bundle favours its own products, says choons slinger Spotify has claimed Apple's new subscription bundle, Apple One, will "disadvantage competitors" and "threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect".…

The new normal is all right for some Disruptions caused by COVID-19 continue to play into Adobe's hands with company execs last night toasting doubles all round as sales went up 14 per cent to $3.23bn year-on-year and pre-tax profit leaped 26.5 per cent to $1.06bn.…

Plenty of time to get your apps through Cupertino's rigorous testing Apple is expected to release the 14th version of its iOS mobile operating system later today, alongside major system updates for the iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.…