The Register

Banned merchants restored, rivals’ stores binned, cash sent around town in an Uber, it is alleged US prosecutors claim six people bribed corrupt Amazon insiders to rig the the web giant's Marketplace in their favor and leak terabytes of data including some search algorithms.…

Ban on app ruled a restriction on free speech Tencent-owned messaging-and-more app WeChat has evaded the USA’s ban on its presence in app stores and on the internet - for now - after the United States District Court granted a preliminary injunction against the Executive Order that branded the service a national security risk.…

Deal dilutes Chinese stake enough for Trump to tentatively approve Oracle has been formally announced as TikTok’s new technology partner and will also become a co-owner of a new entity that will run the made—in-China social network in the USA and other parts of the world. US president Donald Trump has backed the deal publicly.…

Plus: Machine-learning software and another Power processor core opened up by IBM In brief Samples of Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100, teased more than a year ago, are now shipping to select customers, the tech giant said this week. The hardware is due to officially launch in the first half of next year.…

Chip giant dinged for failing to block automated buying Analysis Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards on Thursday and promptly sold out from its online store, to the annoyance of more than a few would-be customers who were left empty-handed.…

NASA's long-lived spacecraft reaches another milestone NASA's extraordinarily long-lived Voyager 1 probe this week passed 14 billion miles from Earth.…

Quality comes in small packages Review Mechanical keyboard aficionados spend years (and an unconscionable amount of money) searching for typing perfection. One recent pocket-crushing contender in this arena is the Das Keyboard 4C TKL, which retails at $139 (or £139 in Blighty).…

Security upstart NS8, which raised $123m in funding, let its leader have sole control over revenue records The Feds on Thursday charged the head of a cyber-fraud prevention company with fraud in a complaint unsealed in a New York City court.…

Phish Scale hopes to make life easier for blue teams gazing at click rates The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has said it has developed a way of measuring precisely why corporate staff click on obvious phishing emails and open malware-laden attachments, despite warnings not to do those things.…

Some aspects are 'eerily similar to the peak of the 2000 bubble' warns Bernstein In a week that saw three tech companies float on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street analyst Bernstein is mulling the potential of a share price crash based on similar indicators prevalent during the .com bust.…

Richest boys' club wealth grew by $101.7bn between March and June Astounding though it is, there are members of the human race about whom it can confidently be said: "Look, they're having a good pandemic."…

Unless the Orange One steps in to save the day. Fancy that! The US Department of Commerce has threatened to ban new downloads of Chinese-owned social media platforms Tiktok and Wechat from app stores this weekend.…

All is well. Unless you trust everything you see on the internet An airliner that appeared to crash into the North Sea earlier this week in fact landed safely. Yet multiple flight tracker websites showed it spiralling into the ocean. Experts have explained to The Register what really happened.…

Pull on your gold hoodie and Darth Vader breathing apparatus and take a trip with us to 2051 Updated Worried about the impact of Brexit and COVID-19 on your supply chain? Wondering about the operating systems of the future? A reseller has the inside scoop on when you should expect that shipment of 17 "Windows XP" cams, and it's 2051.…

Namesco says soz, Brit data watchdog investigating The last vestige of ye olde UK ISP Demon Internet, in the form of the demon.co.uk subdomain, was given its marching orders this year – after internet services outfit Namesco told customers to their change email address by 29 May.…

As the wisdom of the crowd decides Register Debate You’d think debating the benefits of database consolidation for storage would be a relatively straightforward affair. Not when it’s a Register Debate.…

Flushed out Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows pops up in the strangest of places. Sure, digital signage – been there, done that. But as something to stare at when one should be directing one's undercarriage? That's a new one.…

The kiddiwonks won't even know they're learning Review The Raspberry Pi's pitch is simple: it's a dirt-cheap, low-stakes computer designed to inspire experimentation in software engineering and electronics. Since it first hit the market in 2013, a flood of third-party accessories popped up to help foster that. Take, for example, the Elecrow CrowPi2.…

So says Check Point, piecing together Telegram-busting malware clues Infosec outfit Check Point says it has uncovered a six-year Iranian cyber-spying campaign directed at expats and dissidents worldwide.…

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.…