The Register

Legal challenges? Scrutiny? Ah, never mind those The NHS has signed a £23m two-year contract with Palantir without scrutiny, even though the controversial AI firm's engagement with UK the health service was originally supposed to be a temporary, emergency measure to help address the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Not sure how the last bit relates to COVID-19 but there ya go Over the weekend, Republican and Democrat lawmakers in the US reached consensus on a new $900bn coronavirus stimulus bill.…

Also: Would have been great if they'd chatted to an epidemiologist about Eat Out to Help Out project The UK government's insistence that it was simply "following the science" during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic was a big factor in the costly delay to the nation's first lockdown and postponed the introduction of face masks rules, according to an independent report.…

And SS7 telco hack rears its ugly head yet again In brief In an 8-K filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SolarWinds has given more details on exactly how it learned its servers were spewing out malware.…

Meanwhile, Apple-1 in original box signed by Woz goes for $736,862 Steve Jobs may no longer be with us but the cult of Apple persists as fanbois haemorrhage money to own pieces from the company's past.…

And Sparta Global then didn't bother turning up to the Employment Tribunal A company hailed as the UK's top tech employer tried to diddle a former trainee out of £2,000 in unlawfully withheld back pay – and a judge was startled when he discovered how Sparta Global treats its new hires.…

Chester healthcare provider needs some tech to help wrangle its temps The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is launching a £60m procurement in the hope that it can better manage staffing with the magic of software.…

We have to be smarter than the baddies and expect the unexpected Column One of the great threats to our civilization is space weather. Specifically, the Sun's proven ability to target the planet with a tremendous cosmic belch of radiation, knocking out satellites, power grids, and networks worldwide.…

Not quite what we meant by Halt and Catch Fire Who, Me? The weather outside might be frightful, but the fire is... unexpected. Kick off your week with a tale of fan-tastic idiocy courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have enough technical debt that it’s blown a Euro-privacy deadline Google has revealed the cause of its very unwelcome Gmail outage and on The Register’s reading of the situation it boils down to forgetting to take an obsolete version of software out of production.…

Improved cloud-hopping capability started as a mere Fling, make AWS an easier target VMware has added a new and simpler way to move virtual machines between private clouds, or private clouds and the public cloud.…

As India shouts out to world+dog: Anyone fancy building a fab here? China’s largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has told investors that new US sanctions announced late last week will be a long-term hassle but won’t impact its current operations.…

Microsoft’s analysis of hack suggests someone else had a crack at SolarWinds in 2019 when next-level 'DLL hell' followed likely developer pipeline compromise United States secretary of state Mike Pompeo has laid the blame for the SolarWinds hack on Russia, but his boss begs to differ.…

Plus: Video of drone swarm formation flying through a forest The US Air Force has successfully tested an autonomous AI system on one of its aging Lockheed U-2 (aka "Dragon Lady") reconnaissance aircraft.…

No one's AMPing up the love Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.…

WinTel alliance weakens further Microsoft is reportedly designing its own homegrown server and desktop-grade processors using CPU blueprints licensed from Arm.…

At the SMIC of a flitch, biggest China semi foundry's on the entity list The US government has added SMIC — China's largest domestic semiconductor foundry — to a Treasury Department entity list.…

Join Basware’s webinar to find out how you can start small and deploy best-of-breed modules for a quick ROI Promo Basware, with research and advisory firm Gartner, has looked at how businesses are rethinking their investment plans in light of the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic. They produced a report earlier this year that suggests businesses look to start small and deploy best-of-breed modules that deliver a speedy ROI.…

Who remembers that Army recruitment calamity? Not the salty sea dogs running the naval forces Weeks after the British Army renewed a contract that retained Capita at the heart of its recruitment services, the oft-criticised outsourcing biz has snaffled a £1bn deal to provide training services for the Royal Navy and Marines.…

Medical records, insurance claim docs, promotion process feedback... you name it, Probase bared it Exclusive A business app developer's unsecured Microsoft Azure blob left more than half a million confidential and sensitive documents belonging to its customers freely exposed to the public internet, The Register can reveal.…

DBMS for dummies Rockset, the company behind the indexing-obsessed database of the same name, has confirmed integration with Retool, a low-code platform with the aim of helping businesses build data-hungry internal applications.…

Can we do Trump Tower next? Off he went with a Trumpety-Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. It's all we've heard for the past four years, and if the pandemic has done an iota of good, it's to have wrested some of the news agenda off the United States' lunatic ex-president.…

Misleading processes and inadequate testing caused an inversion of steering, officer ESA has published its report into the loss of the Vega VV17 mission and said the screwup was due to an "inversion of electrical connections" during integration.…

It's all in Chinese if you fancy a gander Huawei has launched the first developer preview of its in-house smartphone operating system, HarmonyOS 2.0.…

Plus: EU agrees that security could be better and calls for bigger role for itself Some 5G networks are at risk of attack thanks to "long-standing vulnerabilities" in core protocols, according to infosec researchers at Positive Technologies.…

How to always be on the wrong side of tech fashion Something for the Weekend, Sir? "It will never catch on." The next thing you know, you’re staring at a badly drawn zob scrawled over Shakespeare's shimoneta*.…

Fur the love of god! On Call Welcome to the last On Call before Christmas, and a reminder that furry friends and technology do not always make good bed, or even floor, fellows.…

Now to build over 130,000 little 'scopes in nasty hot places. Also in data centers Amidst the paroxysms of coronavirus and Brexit, the United Kingdom on Wednesday found time to ratify the Convention that formally establishes the SKA Observatory (SKAO), paving the way for the giant radio telescope to be built.…

And that’s not entirely terrifying, because plenty of people have good credit but struggle to prove it Your web search history plus records of the browser and device you use to make those searches could enable financial institutions to calculate you a more accurate credit rating than traditional methods, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the global finance organisation says the ability to use those records might be a good thing rather than a privacy nightmare.…

Repudiates the work, says it was never used by a customer. Which is just what Huawei said Alibaba Group today admitted its cloud business developed what it is described as “a facial recognition technology … that included ethnicity as an algorithm attribute for tagging video imagery,” then vowed it will never again see the light of day.…

Windows giant, nuclear administration play down danger – and kill switch found and activated America's nuclear weapons agency was hacked by the suspected Russian spies who backdoored SolarWinds' IT monitoring software and compromised several US government bodies, and Microsoft was caught up in the same cyber-storm, too, it was reported Thursday.…

Shows why it irks politicians by putting a link to its argument on home page Google has rejected Australia’s plan to force it to pay local news publishers for the right to index their output and present it in search results.…

Silicon Valley titan allegedly screwed rivals with exclusionary agreements On Thursday Google was hit for the third time in as many months in the United States with an antitrust lawsuit, once again focused on the internet giant's alleged monopolization of the search advertising market.…

Yes, Oracle the database giant. 2020 keeps on being 2020 Oracle on Thursday said it has uncovered the largest fraud campaign yet targeting businesses booking advertising in video streams showing on so-called "smart" televisions.…

Financial info swiped for 15 small-biz clients, too Renewable electricity and gas supplier People’s Energy has told its 250,000-plus customers that a “gap” in the security of its IT system was exploited by digital burglars.…

Long-term patching problems still haunt web giant's mobile OS platform Google and Qualcomm have linked arms to extend the lifecycle of new Android devices, meaning future phones could receive as many as three major operating system updates provided they're running the latest Snapdragon silicon.…

It'll be fine, just keep giving Boeing money Those within NASA hoping for some festive treats were in for disappointment this week as the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) administered a kicking over the agency's beleaguered Artemis programme.…

Privacy turns out to be fairly easy GitHub on Thursday said it has removed all cookie banners from its website, a decision the company is making in the interest of privacy, despite the claimed popularity of its disclosure interface.…

Snowflake? We can query that Enterprise data warehouse stalwart Teradata has capped a difficult year with an update to Teradata QueryGrid, which promises to connect customers to a vast array of new data sources – a decidedly underwhelming move, according to some.…

Those bitten by Google Maps price rises in 2018 will welcome alternative – but will the data be good enough? AWS has claimed its upcoming Amazon Location Service for developers building mapping and geographic features into applications is "priced at a fraction of common alternatives," presumably aiming squarely at a company whose name rhymes with schmoogle.…

No new hobbyist projects from January, everything deleted the following year Google is discontinuing its Android Things IoT platform for non-commercial users. The Chocolate Factory will not allow the creation of new projects after 5 January and the entire platform will be nuked the following year.…

'Rigorous' exam first, then take a freebie assessment once a year from home Microsoft is updating its certification system to one that requires an annual renewal as it eyes the rapidly changing tech landscape.…

A special Dunstone-friendly deal, how about that? TalkTalk has agreed to a £1.1bn takeover from Toscafund, its second-largest existing shareholder after company founder Sir Charles Dunstone and private equity fund Penta Capital.…

And police are backsliding on vital legal paperwork, warns body Three UK law enforcement agents blew the whistle about unlawful state surveillance to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s office – and one of those incidents was bad enough for the investigation to still be ongoing today.…

One Government Value Agreement working as intended, we see The UK's Home Office has handed AWS a fresh four-year hosting contract worth up to £120m under the One Government Value Agreement, just weeks after the Department for Work and Pensions renewed its vows with the US cloud biz.…

Is this the spirit of Xmas we've heard of? Well, new customers will have to pay to print 15 pages per month In a classic reverse ferret, HP is going to honour a previous commitment to Instant Ink customers meaning they will, after all, be able to print up to 15 pages per month for free over the lifetime of the printer.…

Er, we mean fighting terrorism and organised crime! The UK's Home Office has handed a £30m contract to engineering and IT outfit Leidos to help government agencies access and analyse communications data for combatting terrorism and organised crime.…

Prepare for two brownouts in July when things get tested properly Microsoft's GitHub plans to stop accepting account passwords as a way to authenticate Git operations, starting August 13, 2021, following a test period without passwords two-weeks earlier.…

A small steppe for probe, giant leaps await science ... and propaganda China has landed its Chang'e 5's probe and its precious payload of Moon rocks.…

And no, we’re not going to prosecute the bloke who found out Dutch prosecutors have confirmed what many already suspected about President Donald Trump: that he’s an idiot. At least when it comes to choosing passwords.…