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Google and Apple's new 'Exposure Notifications Express' gives health authorities a shortcut Google and Apple have updated their COVID-19 contact-tracing tool to make it possible to notify users of potential exposures to the novel coronavirus without an app.…

Kitchen table chat tries to sell you on the latest kit, AI devs might like it, too Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 30 series last night, its latest family of real-time ray-tracing graphics processors aimed primarily at PC gamers.…

Telecoms Authority says it could learn to love Tinder and Grindr if they open hearts and minds Pakistan has continued its crusade against lewd online content by banning a bunch of dating apps.…

Vodafone's Indian outpost has a $10bn bill all by itself and may struggle to pay India's supreme court has given the nation's telcos a decade to pay billions of dollars in back taxes.…

No degree? No H-1B? No worries! Indian giant tickles Trump’s tummy Indian IT services giant Infosys has pledged to hire 12,000 more American workers in the next two years and will prioritise graduate hires because they let the company grow while keeping costs down.…

Silicon Valley heavyweights demand access to review boards that can shoot down trolls just ahead of trial Intel is leading an effort to force the US Patent and Trademark Office to axe a new rule said to favor litigious patent trolls.…

Never mind GitHub Packages or Azure Container Registry, we've reinvented the wheel... er, box Microsoft's GitHub on Tuesday launched a public beta of its Container Registry, a service that both overlaps with and complements GitHub Packages, which debuted last year, but evidently has nothing to do with Microsoft's Azure Container Registry.…

So brave... but not so Brave Google Chrome is making good on its promise to block so-called "heavy ads" – web adverts that hog the network, drain batteries, or slow down your device by chewing up too much processor time.…

Some kind of protest against drones taking away people's jobs of pestering aircraft mid-flight? The pilots of a passenger jet landing at LA International reckon they were approached by a mysterious flyer equipped with what was described as a "jetpack," passing within a few hundred yards of their aircraft.…

Also: Scotland edges closer to launch, and ad astra Gerald 'Jerry' Carr In brief An impressive sequence of launches at the end of August was marred first by ULA's Delta IV Heavy preferring life on the ground just three seconds before lift-off and then SpaceX deciding the weekend weather looked a bit iffy for its next batch of Starlink satellites.…

For when precision isn't so important Microsoft shone light today on a new type, Half, lurking within the depths of .NET 5 Preview 7, aimed at adding another IEEE 754 format as well as saving a bit of storage space.…

Do people even know alternative videoconferencing software exists? The coronavirus pandemic has been kind to videoconferencing service Zoom, which has seen Q2 2021 revenues soar by 355 per cent year-on-year on the back of widespread adoption by business and personal users alike.…

Possibly the first of the 'dumb' phones that didn't suck It has been two decades since Nokia formally launched the iconic 3310 mobile phone, a device that instantly conjures nostalgia.…

HWND? AppWindow? Current situation 'not making anyone happy' as company seeks one true way Microsoft has revealed its plans for the future of the windowing API in Windows, a fundamental piece in desktop development, as part of the Project Reunion effort to untangle the mess caused by UWP (Universal Windows Platform).…

If your iPhone doesn't impress any more, Sammy thinks you'll flip for luxury Changed banks lately? Samsung thinks you're more likely to have done that than to have changed from iOS to Android.…

Also: A hat-trick of Windows previews, new Azure emissions, and researching HoloLens 2 In brief While Microsoft has yet to release official figures, the latest incarnation of Windows 10 has picked up steam. The May 2020 update is now on 24.1 per cent of PCs, going by the 150,000 systems surveyed by AdDuplex.…

Transaction 'disturbed the order of the capital market', claim Seoul prosecutors South Korea has indicted Samsung Group vice chairman Lee Jae-yong over his role in a 2015 merger that made him heir apparent to the multinational's empire.…

Outsourcer's employees 'would like to work in a more flexible way' In what could be seen as a traditionally British two fingers towards the government's plea for employees to return to their places of work, UK outsourcing firm Capita appears set to close a third of its office space permanently.…

I didn't get rich by signing checks Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of surveillance and stress, according to a study by the Open Markets Institute.…

You may have one or two, dare we say Epic, thoughts to share Apple on Monday said changes to its App Store review process, outlined at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, have now been implemented.…

Felled by an upside-down student card, apparently Bork!Bork!Bork! Summer time, and the borking is easy. Particularly if you're a Windows 10 IoT-powered ticket machine in Dublin.…

Contain your enthusiasm, because ‘Bottlerocket’ is for containers and containers only Amazon Web Services has created a second Linux distribution.…

At registry operator, money talks and everyone else is ignored Analysis Nominet has backtracked on a plan to give itself control of .uk's multi-million-pound domain-name-expiration market following an outcry by its members.…

TikTok TikTok … the sound of a sale slipping away? ByteDance, the Chinese owner of controversial social network TikTok, has signalled it will comply with China's new technology export control laws.…

That's certainly one way to get around COVID-19 travel restrictions A British citizen has been extradited to the US to face charges he oversaw a series of business email compromise attacks to steal over $2m from unwary accounts departments and individuals.…

Calls for more moderation to stop video nasties reaching local eyeballs Pakistan has asked YouTube and TikTok to impose tighter censorship on content it deems "vulgar, indecent and immoral", including nudity and hate speech.…

The toys are maintaining a constant horizontal velocity from the pram +Comment Facebook has announced it will "reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram" if Australia's pay-for-news plan becomes reality.…

Innocuous images deemed a threat, netizens silenced until twitterings terminated Netizens are being locked out of their Twitter accounts for tweeting innocuous posts and images, such as math equations, that trigger the social network's system that prevents the sharing of private personal information.…

NASA's OGO-1 dies a natural death after reentering Earth's atmosphere NASA’s first Orbiting Geophysical Observatory satellite, launched in 1964, plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated into pieces over the Pacific Ocean over the weekend.…

Imagine everyone placing 30-minute orders for stuff all day. In fact, let's turn to those who have lived under it Amazon has won approval to deliver packages by drone across the United States, meaning that customers could soon receive lightweight orders within 30 minutes but at a cost: drone delivery bots soaring overhead.…

Uni bod accused of destroying evidence by agents investigating possible visa fraud, transfer of 'sensitive' data to Beijing A Chinese academic working as a university researcher in America has been charged with destroying evidence while under investigation for possible visa fraud and potentially leaking "sensitive" software and data to Beijing.…

Chat app chaps, Electron security, Microsoft Teams under fire A critical remote-code-execution vulnerability affecting past versions of the Slack desktop app was disclosed on Friday after the software maker fixed its app.…

Plus: Time to dump that old backdoored ZTE mobile hotspot In brief Cisco has warned hackers are crashing or crippling its networking kit out in the field by black-holing all available memory via specially crafted IGMP packets.…

Signals imminent automotive RAM cram, but first it’ll focus on premium smartmobes Samsung has flicked the 'on' switch for a new production line at its Pyeongtaek facility and set it to work cranking out what it says is the first 16-gigabit (Gb) LPDDR5 mobile DRAM module.…

Wait! What? Aaah ... legacy systems strike again, but won't get another bite Microsoft has published a new security baseline for Microsoft Edge and one of the new rules is titled “Allow certificates signed using SHA-1 when issued by local trust anchors.”…

Plus: Apple's new machine-learning residency program In brief What’s the best way to chop up a banana so that each piece will perfectly fit onto a slice of bread that has been spread with peanut butter to make a classic sandwich?…

Beware the three options of the apocalypse Who, Me? Remember when September seemed so far away? Those of you still working from your bedroom since March should probably have changed your pyjamas by now. We'll wait. When you're ready, enjoy a tale from the Who, Me? vault courtesy of a reader who knows all about unplanned undergarment changes.…

‘Computer games are a new trend, however most have foreign themes’ says PM as he calls for change “Our country is so rich in ideas and concepts, with a glorious past,” he added, before asking: “Can we make games based on them?”…

Won’t somebody think of Microsoft and Oracle? Or Huawei, which says it’s too poor to sponsor an Australian football team China has added new technologies to its export control list and by doing so could derail the sale of Tiktok’s US operations.…

There be dragons, say US authorities, so first planned US-HK cable darkens its last leg Google and Facebook have dumped plans to build an undersea cable between the US and Hong Kong after after US security agencies warned that Beijing could use the link to infiltrate American networks.…

Cloudflare fingers intertwined BGP and Flowspec SNAFUs Internet backbone operator CenturyLink has experienced an outage that degraded performance of major web companies around the world.…

So sorry this keeps happening. Best out of three, er, four, er ten? Stop us if you've heard this one before – or not because you have absolutely heard this one before – but Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is sorry he helped make society a little worse.…

'The future's going to be weird' says startup's founder Elon Video In a late Friday evening reveal, Elon Musk updated the world on his Neuralink brain-to-computer interface startup, with the help of three little piggies. Specifically, his team revealed it has implanted a mind-reading gadget in a live pig's brain.…

Perl clutching time again Stop us if you've heard this one before: a remote-code execution vulnerability needs patching in Pulse Secure VPNs.…

Vacuuming up data? That's our job! Facebook on Thursday said it had filed two separate lawsuits in the US and UK to prevent unsanctioned snarfing of people's personal data and the inflation of likes on posts.…

We're apart but never more together – tune in to make your remote infrastructure sing Webcast As remote and dispersed working continues – and is likely to continue to do so until a COVID-19 virus vaccine is fully deployed, and then some – the IT industry is responding with a number of viable ways of keep business as usual.…

Is this some Apple marketing? Oh no, Intel still hasn't sorted its s*** out The scarcity of PC components – specifically CPUs and screen panels – are threatening to limit availability in the run-up to the Christmas holiday quarter as orders for notebooks keep coming thick and fast, HP execs have warned.…

Firm not the only SaaS-y outfit to enjoy bumper results during pandemic In what has been a bumper week for SaaS slingers, cloudy HR and finance application specialist Workday has shovelled 20 per cent more sales onto its top line and slashed losses.…

Please don't wax philosophical, please don't... Argh: 'Work is something you do, an outcome, not a place or a time' In and amongst Dell Technologies workplace existentialism and talk of "human transformation" in a pandemic, chief operating officer Jeff Clarke last night claimed the majority of his 165,000-strong workforce will not return to the office again on a regular basis.…

Trudging through PC port of 2019 console title in 2020 is weird The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column back once again with some triple-A, PlayStation-adjacent "content" albeit this time on PC. Ah, it's good to be home. Promise we'll get back to something a little more indie once the lamestream stops churning out games we actually want to play.…