The Register

IT consultancy favors male and Indian workers, watchdog told in complaint Four female former employees of IT consultancy Infosys on Wednesday filed a claim with the US Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging that they were subject to pervasive discrimination at the company.…

Action plan to regulate machine-learning software in 2021 revealed The US Food and Drug Administration wants manufacturers to specifically label AI-powered medical devices to help patients understand the technology, and to test them on real-world data to see how they perform in the wild beyond clinical environments.…

Hosts, guests paid off to 'ensure hate group members are not part of the Airbnb community' In preparation for the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday, January 20, 2021, room rental biz Airbnb said it is cancelling reservations in the Washington DC, metropolitan area for the entire week and will block any attempts to make new reservations in the vicinity during that time.…

CEO says he is 'truly sorry for painful but necessary' cuts Dropbox is close to decimating its workforce, firing 11 per cent of staff in an effort to become “a more efficient and nimble” company, its CEO announced on Wednesday.…

Enterprise customers 'are struggling with the implementation of Kubernetes at scale' says virty cloud giant VMware has completed the first phase of its Kubernetes-based Tanzu project by making the Advanced Edition generally available, and has a new (but delayed) tool in the works which promises to simplify application modernization.…

They signed our terms of service and broke them, notes hosting behemoth Amazon Web Services has denied that is engaged in a "conspiracy to restrain trade" after summarily pulling the plug on social network Parler.…

Three years at ESN would have been three years too many for most Joanna Davinson, who in her role at the Home Office spent the last three years overseeing the Emergency Services Network project – currently incurring £550m in additional annual costs because of delays – has been appointed executive director of the UK government's new Central Digital and Data Office.…

There’s more to it than just backups Webcast Are you using the cloud to manage your data? No, we don’t mean are you backing up to the cloud, we mean actually managing your data to ensure it’s safe and, as importantly, delivering value for your organisation.…

Someone with technical nous could be good for Chipzilla – the markets certainly think so Intel CEO Bob Swan's time at the head of Chipzilla is coming to an end and Intel's first CTO, Pat Gelsinger, is to replace him.…

Appeal judges say lower court stumbled with ruling over 'without prejudice' negotiations Motorola must pay a Chinese mobile network radio maker more than £800,000 after losing a Court of Appeal case over claims its rival threatened to "retreat to China" and evade a previous judgment.…

Fewer files now needed before additional storage purchase is required Microsoft is to cut the number of files needed to fill the increasingly limited space available to OneDrive users by upping the file size limit to 250GB.…

The suspense could quite literally be killing us The UK's NHS COVID-19 app developed a case of the borks overnight as Android users were presented with mystery notifications that never seemed to finish loading.…

Is that The X-Files theme we hear? Everyone needs a hobby, and for one John Greenewald Jr that's archiving declassified US government documents on his website, The Black Vault, which has this week published what the CIA claims is everything it has on UFOs.…

Jupiter and Mars machines get new life NASA is extending the missions of the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter and its moons and the Martian InSight lander probing for marsquakes until 2025 and 2022 respectively.…

It's expensive to be poor Three has announced plans to hike the price of its pay-as-you-go mobile service, with SMS and data prices set to soar by 400 per cent from 16 February. The per-minute cost of making a call, meanwhile, will more than triple.…

'We have been sold a lemon here' Supporters of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone are fuming after the niche UK mobile firm announced a downgrade in the crowdfunded device's processor and battery.…

BT-owned broadband plumbing biz says it's 'surprised and saddened' The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has told Openreach it is to ballot members on industrial action following what it claims is the company's decision to ignore consultation and instead hire engineers on a different grade and structure.…

20 DarkMarket servers siezed and probed in international raids Europol cops have taken down dark-web souk DarkMarket, after arresting an Australian citizen living in Germany who they claim was operating the world's biggest online bazaar of its kind.…

Assuming we can get our hands on these 7nm Zen 3 parts. Plus: Epyc and Nvidia teases CES AMD on Tuesday launched its Ryzen 5000 series of microprocessors at this year’s virtual CES trade show.…

Plus a bit of Azure, and it all costs so much it’s selling $1.5bn more shares Videoconferencing darling Zoom has issued a prospectus it hopes will raise $1.5bn, and which also reveals that it may be less dependent on the cloud than its suppliers have trumpeted. The document also reveals that it’s struggling to buy the servers it needs and that free Zoom sessions have – surprise! – cost the company plenty while eroding margins.…

For 20 years now, El Reg has been looking for proof – is this finally it? CES It was almost exactly 20 years ago – January 6, 2001 – that Reg reader Erik Trent wrote to us bemoaning the tendency of tech journalists to repeat futuristic nonsense.…

What a time to be alive CES The world is in the grip of a lethal viral pandemic. The technology industry’s response?…

Last four built will be freighters. And mighty freighters at that Boeing has confirmed that production of its 747 aircraft will end in 2022.…

China Telecom, world’s largest carrier, and China’s premier ISP, has accelerated - hard APNIC, the Asia-Pacific’s regional Internet address registry, has noticed a sharp uptick in IPv6 use by China Telecom, the nation’s top provider of internet services.…

Face-recognition biz hammered after harvesting people's pics, videos without permission A California-based facial recognition biz has been directed by the US Federal Trade Commission to delete the AI models and algorithms that it developed by harvesting people's photos and videos without permission, a remedy that suggests privacy violators may no longer be allowed to benefit from ill-gotten data.…

With just a week left of the administration, here we go again The Trump Administration has tried yet again to change the fine print around H-1B work visas, with the Department of Labor issuing a new rule on Tuesday that it said would “help protect the wages and job opportunities of American workers.”…

Redmond keeps us hanging with on-premises Exchange flaw still to be fixed Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday released updates addressing 83 vulnerabilities in its software, which doesn't include the 13 flaws fixed in its Edge browser last week.…

Another year, another study The UK Space Agency and Rolls-Royce have kicked off a study into nuclear-powered space exploration.…

Crowdstrike tech analysts explain how they think it slipped under the radar The malware that was utilised to hack SolarWinds checked to see whether software used to compile the firm's Orion product was running before deploying its payload, according to Crowdstrike.…

See that horse disappearing over the horizon? Time to close the stable door Cloud CRM megacorp Salesforce is the latest tech player to join Amazon, Twitter and Facebook in deciding there is something off about organisations that hype up insurrection against a democratic mandate.…

Tune in and learn how to benchmark your own success Webcast Good intentions are one thing, good data is quite another, and when it comes to implementing DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, it really helps to have both.…

Harmeen Mehta will handle telco's internal rewiring and tech product strategy BT has hired former HSBC exec Harmeen Mehta to head up a newly created Digital unit, overseeing the internal shift to digital systems along with the incubation of tech platforms, products, and services.…

Er, we mean 'distinguished', 'seasoned', 'battle-tested' Smartphones have a finite usefulness before they’re stuffed in a drawer, or shipped to a recycling facility where they’re disassembled and melted down for raw materials. Hoping to extend that short lifespan is Samsung, which was pushing a program called “Galaxy Upcycling at Home” at CES 2021 earlier this week.…

Upstart hopes to do for transactional databases what Snowflake did for data warehousing Even database companies you've never heard of might be worth a billion or two. Take Cockroach Labs, the firm behind the distributed RDMS CockroachDB, for example, which has hit gold in a $160m funding round.…

Easy to use with no big vendor lock-in? Nice idea but it's still early days Red Kubes, a small company based in the Netherlands, has released a free Community Edition of its Otomi Container Platform with the goal of making Kubernetes both easier to use and more portable between cloud providers or on-premises.…

Vendors slammed for 'lack of proper judgement' during the pandemic Software vendors have been targeting hospitals with licence audits while medical units find themselves overstretched with patients due to a surge in global coronavirus cases.…

Endpoint Detection and Response added. For servers, not standalone Linux desktops, mind After a few months in preview, Microsoft has made Defender Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) generally available for Linux servers.…

Analysts predict market to grow to $81.5bn from $68.9bn in 2021 Spending on wearable kit is forecast to jump this year by roughly 18 per cent to $81.5bn, if analyst house Gartner is to be believed.…

Just kidding, you'll totally guess US scientists claim to have developed a method for storing data directly in the DNA of living bacteria cells by using a new electromagnetic technique.…

The more things change, the more they stay the same A batch of UK government Cabinet records from late last century has revealed that difficulties in getting users to accept new systems is nothing new.…

Microsoft's finest suffers decisive defeat Bork!Bork!Bork! You are never far from Windows doing a whoopsie, particularly in a digital-signage heavy hub such as the UK's London Waterloo station.…

Still needs three launches and a dozen spacewalks to install 55kW capacity upgrade NASA and Boeing have announced that humanity's celestial outpost will soon install six new solar panels, each capable of producing 20kW.…

Some software errs on the side of caution too often, it is claimed A number of AI programs trained to detect diabetic eye damage struggle to perform consistently in the real world despite apparently excelling in clinical tests, say scientists in the US.…

And some desktop parts, from 14nm and eight cores to 10nm and four cores CES Intel announced at this year’s virtual CES tech trade show on Monday new clans of x86-64 processors for desktop and laptops.…

The PC is dead, says no one any longer, unless it's a desktop The do-everything-from-home revolution – work, study and play – led to a record 90.3 million personal computers being shipped into the channel in the fourth quarter of last year, up a whopping 25.4 per cent compared to the pre-pandemic final quarter of 2019.…

In a brave move, Russian firm fingers its own govt as one possible source of cyber badness Kaspersky Lab reckons the SolarWinds hackers may have hailed from the Turla malware group, itself linked to Russia’s FSB security service.…

Promises new client ‘within days’ but had years to make the fix Extreme Networks missed the deadline to expunge Adobe Flash from its management tools and is advising users they’ll therefore need to fiddle with their PC clocks to manage their networks.…

Theft-by-a-thousand-cuts flaw fixed Until early last year, Google's YouTube had a security flaw that made private videos visible at reduced resolution, though not audible, to anyone who knew or guessed the video identifier and possessed the technical knowledge to take advantage of the snafu.…

Data describing controversial supplement ractopamine didn’t render online A website that was supposed to offer real time tracking of pork imports to Taiwan has highlighted regional tensions.…

CEO Holmes also accused of funding extravagant lifestyle through fraud Failed blood-testing unicorn Theranos trashed vital incriminating evidence of its fraud, prosecutors said on Monday.…