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It’s actually just a stick, but maintenance staff love ‘em Australian airline QANTAS has developed a piece of technology dubbed a “wheel whacker” to help stop snakes and scorpions boarding planes it has parked due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Tell us whether you’re ecstatic or exasperated, or somewhere in between Reader survey There is no doubt that more and more applications are being hosted in the cloud. Hyperscalers are seen as the example to follow when it comes to managing infrastructure, while cloud-native organisations dominate the agenda at industry conferences.…

Looks forward to nicely lowered costs as production ramps up, but they're still hyperscaler-only for now For about three years, disk-making giant Seagate has been talking up tech called “MACH.2” – a conventional disk drive that offers considerable speed improvements. And now the disk giant has found that the tech also cuts its costs, raising the prospect that big, fast, hard disk drives might emerge at keen prices.…

After some heated exchanges, tensions seem to have cooled (for now) between Chinese government and Jack Ma’s empire Months after Beijing’s regulators stepped in and forced Alibaba's finance arm Ant Group to restructure its consumer loans business, China's Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission has granted the outfit permission to operate a consumer finance company.…

Shine chaebol's FOSSlight on your projects, careful what you find Korean mega-corp LG has open-sourced the in-house toolbox it uses identify and manage open-source software licences within its own business.…

Millions of Rust, JavaScript, Go, Maven repositories scanned and visualized Google has built an online tool that maps out all the dependencies in millions of open-source software libraries and flags up any unpatched vulnerabilities.…

Rarely seen miscalculations now crop up frequently at cloud hyperscale Computer chips have advanced to the point that they're no longer reliable: they've become "mercurial," as Google puts it, and may not perform their calculations in a predictable manner.…

Not a fan of homosexuality, either, judging from 2007 blog posts A Googler who was supposed to steer diversity efforts at the internet titan has been removed from his post – after netizens found a 2007 blog post in which he suggested Jewish people had an “insatiable appetite for war and killing" when acting in self-defense.…

We'll explain everything for you The US Supreme Court on Thursday limited the scope of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in a ruling that found a former sergeant did not violate the law by misusing his access to a police database.…

And if you ask your cloud provider, the answer might shock you Webcast What’s the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to protecting your data in the cloud? Probably assuming that it’s protected just because it’s in the cloud.…

Forget Seattle, Microsoft 'Round Island One' lives in Bermuda A subsidiary of Microsoft in Ireland has paid no corporation tax because it is "resident" in Bermuda for tax purposes – despite making a whopping $314.73bn in profit.…

You don't spend $5bn on a shiny glass Ive-designed HQ and leave it empty Tim Cook has issued a memo to Apple staffers warning that their days of shirking-from-home in the pandemic are over. From early September, employees will be expected to spend at least three days a week in the office, with Wednesdays and Fridays open to remote working for some.…

Mobile provider Orange fingers 'technical issue' on a router A technical issue with French mobile provider Orange, fixed early this morning, resulted in members of the public being temporarily unable to contact the emergency services.…

June 24 event to preview Win Tech: The Next Generation Microsoft will reveal "what's next for Windows" at a virtual event on June 24th, rumoured to include a UI refresh codenamed "Sun Valley".…

For once, Boris Johnson ignored calls of PECR Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is facing a £10,000 fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for dispatching marketing emails to unwilling recipients, 51 of whom complained to the regulator.…

Analyst: 'They need to blow up the obsolete Ariba engine first' Sapphire Now As customers, SIs and analysts demand more detail on SAP’s cloud lift-and-shift and transformation package, the German vendor came to the table at its Sapphire annual conference with a mixed spread of announcements.…

VERITAS and DAVINCI+ chosen and funded as part of agency's concept selection NASA announced yesterday that it will fund two new missions to Venus to study its atmosphere and topography, both chosen from the Discovery Program.…

Another big name buyout by STG FireEye has been sold for $1.2bn to the same American private equity fund that bought McAfee’s enterprise security business, severing it from infosec stablemate Mandiant.…

We wanted to post a dad joke about sodium, but we thought: Na, people will groan... TerraPower – the Bill Gates-founded nuclear company – and Warren Buffett-owned PacifiCorp are hooking up to build a Natrium reactor at a decommissioned coal plant in Wyoming.…

When it works well enough in the real world, that is Computer scientists have built an algorithm to predict deadly explosions within blazes before they occur in the hope it can one day serve as a warning system for firefighters tackling burning buildings.…

No, literally, let's make illegal Four in five Brits wants to make it illegal to force employees to work from the office, according to an extensive survey, providing further evidence that a shift in working patterns may be permanent.…

As Sapphire Now kicks off, users, SIs and analysts see unanswered questions Five months after SAP launched its RISE plan, a half-loaf cloud lift-'n-shift + business transformation service, the German software company is still struggling with unanswered questions.…

It is Thursday and it's framework-tastic Pheonix Software, Deloitte and Computeam are among the 17 winners sticking their snouts into a £100m pork barrel framework for outsourcing in the UK’s education sector.…

Plus: Judgement in immigration exemption case makes things worse Comment Almost two weeks ago, the European Parliament took the step of objecting to the Commission decisions to grant the UK data adequacy.…

Hello, my name is Mr Snrub, and I come from, uh ... someplace far away Analysis Huawei on Wednesday introduced its first tablets and smartphones running its HarmonyOS 2 software – and said 100 or so other devices will be able to upgrade to the totally-not-but-really-is-Android OS.…

Down continues to be the new up NortonLifeLock, the company that offers the consumer products Broadcom didn’t want when it bought Symantec, has started to offer Ethereum mining as a feature of its Norton 360 security suite.…

Applies pressure as negotiations on harmonized global web levies near conclusion Countries whose digital services taxes disproportionately affect the US tech industry have been slapped with 25 per cent tariffs on up to US$2bn of their goods by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR).…

Xi Jinping says it’s time the world learned Marxism works, socialism is good, and China is really nice Analysis Chinese state-controlled media has revealed the nation's rulers have decided it’s time for a charm offensive.…

Plans to grow capacity in all 27 regions by 30 percent in 2021 Chinese web giant Tencent has announced its cloud service has expanded its presence in Germany, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Japan.…

National growth strategy also prioritises low power distributed data centres Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga has outlined a national growth strategy that will include doing whatever it takes to lure semiconductor manufacturers to the nation’s shores.…

CentralSquare says Big Red raided it for key staff CentralSquare Technologies, a Florida-based maker of software for public safety officials, sued Oracle on Tuesday claiming that the database giant has been poaching key employees in an effort to build its business selling software to law enforcement and justice organizations.…

Ironically, they’re all advance notice of maintenance that's promised to improve resilience IBM Cloud is having another challenging day, this time sending customers word of upcoming maintenance work 20 or more times – and even to those who don’t use the services that will soon be patched.…

'A stalker can abuse it to stalk people better. There are no mitigations mentioned' Owners of Amazon Echo assistants and Ring doorbells have until June 8 to avoid automatically opting into Sidewalk, the internet giant's mesh network that taps into people's broadband and may prove to be a privacy nightmare.…

Top tips from an insider in the tech recruitment game Comment It has been a decade since we first demonstrated that IT pros' resumes were a bit crap, and so here's an update to help you get real about how you present yourself in 2021.…

Q&A community ponders life as an enterprise education resource Prosus NV, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on Wednesday said it plans to acquire online Q&A community Stack Overflow for $1.8bn.…

Embarrassing flaw in E3372 device finally patched Huawei has belatedly fixed a mild vulnerability in a USB connectivity dongle spotted by Trustwave after The Register intervened.…

It's not me, it's GNU The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) Steering Committee has lifted a long-standing requirement that all code contributions must be assigned to the FSF (Free Software Foundation).…

AWS Innovation Day promises to accelerate your business into the cloud and beyond Promo Who wouldn’t want to learn about reusable spacecraft, 3D printing and manufacturing in orbit, and malaria fighting drones – and what they all mean for your business?…

Aussie cops start probe and FBI and USDA lend a hand Australian police are investigating a ransomware attack at the facilities of JBS Foods — one of the largest producers of meat in the world – as the White House fingers Russia-based cybercriminals.…

2020 missives from American securities regulator to car firm revealed The SEC has repeatedly found itself frustrated by the bombastic tweets of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. And letters from the regulator have revealed that two of Musk’s postings were in breach of a previous settlement.…

Bizarre promotion practice leads to near-inevitable breach Exclusive An astonishing data security blunder saw the personal data of Special Forces soldiers circulating around WhatsApp in a leaked British Army spreadsheet.…

Belated recognition that maybe, just maybe, someone should check submissions to official Windows package receptacle Microsoft has introduced human moderation for packages submitted to the repository for its newly released Winget package manager, following a spike in duplicate and/or bad submissions.…

Time running out for secrets of cosmos to remain hidden Boffins at the University of Edinburgh will soon be able to get their hands on a new high-powered supercomputer to help them "unlock the secrets of the universe" following a deal with European tech outfit Atos.…

Now patched: 'A function that can be called with attacker-controlled data (which it shouldn't) and dereference twice a pointer (boom)' Security researchers have posted proof of concept code that exploits a recently patched vulnerability in Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. The bug enables code in the guest to crash the host, and in some circumstances compromise the host's security.…

Plans test launch this year, satellite-lifting in 2022 and moonshot not long after South Korea has revealed a test version of a locally developed rocket with satellite launch capabilities.…

Not the obvious function, the other obvious function OpenPGP project RNP has patched its flagship product after Mozilla Thunderbird, a major user, was found to be saving users’ private keys in plain text.…

New tax rules see a hike in use of umbrella companies - another can of worms Contractors able to continue working outside the IR35 regulations are gaining leverage in the market and succeeding in punting their scarce skills, according to a survey.…

'You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it' - but others disagree Analysis Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist Andressen Horowitz has posted a paper suggesting that "If you're operating at scale, the cost of cloud can at least double your infrastructure bill."…

ESA's veteran probe left for its mission 18 years ago today Space extenders Today marks the 18th anniversary since the European Space Agency' (ESA) launched the extraordinarily long-lived (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft from the Baikonur cosmodrome in 2003.…

Also tries to bust blades out of the box with new UCS-X series Cisco has advanced an alternative vision for running hybrid clouds – but you’ll need Cisco hardware to make it happen.…