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They still laid him off, though On Call This week's episode of On Call, as ever, comes with a warning: Be careful moving that beige box, for you may not realise what it does.…

And we all know how good small business are at patching... NOT Cisco has addressed a clutch of critical vulnerabilities in its small business and VPN routers that can be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user. All the attacker needs to do is send a maliciously crafted HTTP request to the web-based management interface.…

Every breath you take, Google’s watching you - and offering an alternative to recently acquired Fitbit Google has announced that its own Pixel Android phones will soon gain the power to measure users heart rate and respiratory rate.…

Android edition just didn’t do the job and Health Ministry knew it. Now Japan is in its third and nastiest wave of infections Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has admitted that the Android version of its COVID-19 contact-tracing app has not informed users of contact with virus carriers since September 2020.…

A whole new dimension of social responsibility as Taiwan’s population falls while demand for stuff it makes surges Hon Hai Precision Manufacturing – aka Foxconn – reported two sets of numbers this week: record revenue, and record birth-rate among staff.…

Turns out words have consequences Electronic voting machine maker Smartmatic has sued Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump’s loyalists – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – for an eye-popping $2.7bn in defamation damages over the false claims it stole the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.…

Modis also accused of suspending techie for criticizing working conditions The Alphabet Workers Union on Wednesday filed a labor complaint against Google contractor Modis, claiming that for the past six months the staffing firm has prevented workers from discussing wages and job conditions as allowed under US law.…

Another day in the world of the Bezos-built worker's panopticon +Comment Amazon has installed AI cameras inside its delivery vans to nitpick its drivers for, we're told, safety reasons.…

New Jersey court says defendant must be able to challenge evidence A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.…

'Try telling leaders of libpng, libjpeg-turbo, openssl, ffmpeg etc they can't make "unilateral" changes to their own projects' Google has proposed a framework for discussing and addressing open-source security based on factors like verified identity, code review, and trusted builds, but its approach may be at odds with open-source culture.…

Out-of-work actors beware, Azure can take on voice-over duties Microsoft has pushed its Custom Neural Voice service to general availability, although you'll have to ask the company nicely if you want to use the vaguely unsettling text-to-speech service.…

Openreach FTTP doing very well, thanks FTTP rollout numbers from the BT Group's "arm's-length" infrastructure arm, Openreach, were the bright spot in an otherwise difficult quarter, which saw consumer and enterprise revenue slump.…

Plus: Parliament says UK was too hasty booting Chinese giant off networks EU infosec agency ENISA has announced that it will begin licensing 5G network equipment providers as Britain's Parliament issued a report criticising the way Huawei was kicked out of the UK's 5G networks.…

They also have to use the credit before 31 May or lose it Apple has provoked the ire of its Mac developer community by asking for the early return of its ARM-powered Developer Transition Kit loaner computers.…

Huh, where's our $13m then? Scratchpad, a startup based around easing Salesforce data input, has snared $13m in new funding, apparently without even really wanting to.…

Hello lonely. Let's get you feeling productive Microsoft's latest take on employment engagement, Viva, is aimed at cheering those working remotely with only Office and Teams for company.…

Atom bond length of Es measured for the first time Chemists have measured a fundamental chemical property of einsteinium, a mysterious and radioactive element that was discovered in the debris of America's first full-scale thermonuclear device test – the Ivy Mike shot in 1952.…

Community? 'The software isn’t changing at all. This is a label on the name, nothing else' The Document Foundation (TDF) has released LibreOffice 7.1 Community, while continuing to complain about free-loading enterprises who do not pay for support. The "community" label is an effort to steer them away, though it is not a cut-down version.…

With top research talent focused on commercial AI goals where do we go? Boffins from Denmark and the UK have measured the AI brain drain and found that private industry really is soaking up tech talent at the expense of academia and public organizations.…

Represented himself, but judge denies last-minute attempt to make it an age discrimination claim A long-serving IBMer has won an unfair dismissal lawsuit after representing himself against a qualified barrister – although his related discrimination claim was struck out by the judge.…

Time to grow up and smell the dollars as founder Sacha Labourey steps back February's game of musical CEO chairs continued today with the appointment of Stephen DeWitt as boss of DevOps darling CloudBees.…

Google and Alibaba playing catchup Sixty five per cent of all the money customers spent globally on infrastructure clouds in Q4 went into the pocket of AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba, according to the latest research by analyst house Canalys.…

That’s a 41% traffic relief for all concerned The Google-sponsored Chromium project has cleaned up its act and the result is a marked decline in queries to DNS root servers.…

Tune in online this month and learn how to mind the security gap Webcast It’s been almost a year since large parts of the workforce beat a hasty retreat from their offices, and began a mass experiment in working from home, often courtesy of Microsoft 365.…

Older commercial machines rely on insecure Mifare Classic payments Some commercial Nespresso machines in Europe that incorporate a smart card payment system can be manipulated to add unlimited funds to purchase coffee, thanks to reliance on technology that's been known to be insecure for more than a decade.…

New site lists the ‘bit of a sprawl issue’ that Redmond offers the faithful A sysadmin supergroup has created a site that tries to list all of the portals Microsoft offers its users.…

Pre-compilation tech means faster startup and lower memory overhead, to make Java cool for microservices Oracle has sweetened its Java SE subscriptions by tossing in a free entitlement to use GraalVM, a new universal virtual machine that Big Red says runs just about anything faster, anywhere.…

People still itching to get our Snapdragons, CEO swears Qualcomm suffered an after-hours share drop on Wednesday after missing Wall Street's sales expectations, albeit not by much.…

Uniregistry announces auction of 20+ dot-words with no minimum for some Anyone will be able to bid for a piece of the internet’s domain-name landscape this April – and for just $1 you could bag one of the more unpopular parts.…

Oh look, Cloudflare spots a sudden surge in use of other messaging apps The new self-appointed military government of Myanmar has temporarily banned Facebook.…

'From US to Europe to China to Asia-Pacific, our channel inventory has never been so low' In a blow to anyone fighting over the scraps in the laptop market, Lenovo says it is running at between one third to a half of normal stock levels because it can’t keep up with relentlessly high demand for PCs.…

Probably not used by last year's US government-busting attackers, though As if that supply chain attack wasn't bad enough, SolarWinds has had to patch its Orion software again after eagle-eyed researchers discovered fresh vulnerabilities – including one that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution.…

Turning smart homes into dumb ones Updated Ring is suffering a major outage with many of its video doorbells effectively dead, turning smart homes into very dumb ones.…

Liquid hot Facebook project tucked under penguin's wing The Linux Foundation has said it will join forces with Facebook’s Magma project, with the intent of building an open source mobile core network platform based on the software project.…

'We are using the word experimental right now' Microsoft's Project Bicep, first demoed at the Ignite event last year and still described as "experimental", lets users define a set of Azure resources in code by using a domain-specific language.…

It works – but the more 'exciting' stuff is in the Dev and Canary Channels Microsoft has added new features to Edge and released a stable channel version for Mac M1 users as it strives to make the browser more than a tool to download Chrome.…

Which are – you guessed it – behind schedule An independent review of the coalition-era Superfast Broadband programme published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today argues Britain received value for money, although some rural areas are still waiting for the cable guy.…

Not like every expert didn't warn it. Also: Queen of Carnage confirms consultants were paid average of £1.1k a day Baroness Harding, head of the UK's NHS Test and Trace programme, has defended the money spent on the app it scrapped in June last year, saying £14m was not wasted.…

Modernisation that happens to be an upsell to premium cloudy plans Analysis Microsoft has introduced a cloud configuration for Windows 10 with the claim of "easy to manage cloud endpoints," but complex manual steps and interaction with InTune management means it is unlikely to match Google's Chrome OS for ease of deployment.…

Advice is nice. But what it isn't is binding, says Akamai Britain's National Cyber Security Centre has urged internet service providers to adopt its Border Gateway Protocol best practice guide following a number of routing blunders over the past few years.…

Linux variant studied, dissected in detail in case you want to look out for it ESET researchers say they have found a lightweight strain of malware that targets multiple OSes and has hit supercomputers, an ISP, and other organisations.…

Bye bye Ubiquity, Subiquity: new unified installer will cover both desktop and server Canonical is building a new installer for Ubuntu using Google's cross-platform Flutter framework – but is facing questions about use of a non-native toolkit for such a key component.…

'Procedural content' might offer a way forward for projects queueing up to use a supercomputer Researchers at the UK's University of Sussex have developed a way to boost neural activity simulations without reaching for expensive and scarce supercomputing resources.…

450 Android apps track location, 1.7bn downloads, 44% use X-Mode code: only 10% pulled off Play Store A report on Android apps that do location tracking identified 450 apps that use tracker SDKs, many of which use an SDK called X-Mode, which Apple and Google have banned, but are still in Google's Play Store.…

Thunk: The reassuring sound of a rugged, comfy biz computer Review Lenovo's ThinkPad range is a bit like a pair of sensible shoes. It might not look flashy but there's something comfortable about its configuration, and the recently released ThinkPad T14s Gen 1 AMD is no different.…

Cloud supremo to become CEO of one of Earth's biggest super-corps Analysis Even though Amazon is one of the largest and most recognized companies in the world, such was the outsized stature of its CEO and founder Jeff Bezos that the ecommerce giant's actions have often been personally associated with him.…

Google wants researchers, vendors to stop making attacks easy Enigma To limit the impact of zero-day vulnerabilities, Google security researcher Maddie Stone would like those developing software fixes to stop delivering shoddy patches.…

Is there anywhere in the world TikTok isn’t in trouble? ByteDance, the Chinese company that makes TikTok, has sued local rival Tencent for alleged monopoly practices.…

Forget academic adversarial attacks and imagine if ML were the weakest link in the chain Enigma When Microsoft surveyed 28 organizations last year about how they viewed machine learning (ML) security, its researchers found that few firms gave the matter much thought.…

Sees businesses signing up for long deals, confident the black ink will come Google’s various cloud services bled $14.6bn in losses in the past three years while also growing revenue to new heights.…