The Register

Dept of Labor demands proof Windows giant isn't making 'illegal race-based decisions' in diversity push After Microsoft vowed to double its number of Black and African American bosses and senior staffers, the US government challenged the policy as potentially racist, it was revealed Tuesday.…

'These once scrappy, underdog startups have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons' A long-awaited congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google has been published – and it concludes the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.…

Cops charge suspect with theft as audit claims this gear definitely wasn't on loan A former public library employee is accused of stealing and reselling at least $1.3m worth of toner from his workplace over a 12-year period.…

Tech industry may limber up for war The Trump administration has announced it will place new restrictions on the H-1B work visa program, such as narrowing eligibility for foreign workers and recomputing minimum salary levels.…

Analyst predicts five good years as homeworking and refresh cycles meld The COVID-19 pandemic has proven fruitful for the consumer Wi-Fi sector, according to analyst house ABI Research, with shipments this year set to increase and long-term growth forecast.…

Bugs from Lodash and JQuery among the more commonly seen security problems GitLab, a rival to Microsoft's hosted git service GitHub, has for the second time tested the security of customers' hosted software projects... and found them wanting.…

Gives you confidence in an era where nobody accepts cash any more A little more than a quarter of companies worldwide are fully compliant with the exacting PCI DSS online payment security standard, according to US telco Verizon.…

Microsoft isn't the only company to fiddle with its iconography Google has fired a rebrandogun loaded with fresh icons at its G Suite platform. Prepare to relinquish the suite life and put nose to the grindstone in Google's "Workspace".…

Offshore electricity production target doable, says expert, but we need to decarbonise transport and heating too The UK government has committed to increasing offshore wind energy production from 30GW to 40GW by 2030 amid confusion over what it means for home power consumption.…

Meanwhile, Euro outsourcer claims Interserve failed to pay £3.5m invoices Interserve has alleged that Sopra Steria's IT outsourcing division caused it to bungle a Ministry of Justice prisoner rehabilitation contract because too many of the latter's staff were signed off sick through stress caused by overwork to deliver on its promises.…

Push to buy from 'purposeful suppliers' coincides with launch of yachting app Making a company's ethical image all shipshape and Bristol fashion requires careful navigation of choppy waters – so perhaps SAP should know better.…

Some things simply don't belong in regulatory environments Column The howls of disbelieving, horrified laughter caused by the news of the latest pandemic data cock-up yesterday were well deserved.…

Pour a bowl of granola and celebrate free and open software The Free Software Foundation turned 35 on Sunday, ushering in a week-long celebration of its user liberation efforts.…

Up to 5,600 megatransfers per second at just 1.1V, company claims South Korean memory giant SK Hynix has released the world's first commercially available DDR5 DRAM sticks, pipping rivals Samsung and Micron.…

Faking an emergency collision alarm - just what you don't need over Heathrow Aviation boffins have found that next-gen collision aircraft avoidance systems appear to be just as vulnerable to signal spoofing attacks as older kit.…

No pressure West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) is on the hunt for a new £3m ERP system amid an IT services revamp.…

Firm says 'cyber incident' is being fought with third-party help Jersey-headquartered insurance company Ardonagh Group has suffered a potential ransomware infection.…

Go-live date of 1 December 2021 or authority incurs the full cost of SAP support and maintenance for 2022 Surrey County Council, a local authority in southern England, has awarded Unit4 a £30m contract to replace its SAP ERP system, with a private consultant picking up £177,000 to lead the programme for two years.…

Just a short 100 or more light years away Astrobiologists have found 24 exoplanets that, compared to Earth, may have environments better suited to complex life like that found on our world.…

Dot-UK overlord descends into farce The operator of the .uk registry has descended into a farce after refusing to accept a complaint from one of its members – and claiming its CEO didn’t mean what he is recorded on camera saying.…

We sat through the full day so you didn't have to GTC 2020 Nvidia on Monday launched its first ever virtual GPU Technology Conference, taking place online over the course of this week across multiple timezones.…

He paid more or less than $750, though? Two US government tentacles this week snared John McAfee, accusing the one-time antivirus mogul of tax evasion and breaking securities law.…

Centripetal Networks uses lawsuit against Switchzilla. It's super effective Cisco has been hit with a massive $1.9bn patent-infringement bill for copying cybersecurity tech from Centripetal Networks and pushing the company out of lucrative government contracts.…

One person still believes forced sale is a good idea. Hint: He’s in hospital China has accused the United States of breaking international trade rules by threatening to block the TikTok app unless the Chinese biz sells its operations to a US company.…

iGiant 'would rather shred stuff than let it hit the used market' Apple in January sued the Canadian arm of Global Electric Electronic Processing (GEEP) for allegedly reselling roughly 100,000 iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that were supposed to be broken up and recycled.…

Don't be monster-mashing that reservation button in the US and Canada, you ghouls and ghosts Airbnb is cracking down on late-October reservations, hoping to thwart anyone's plans for a rowdy Halloween get-together in the US or Canada.…

It's like Hacking Team all over again Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky has said it uncovered "rogue UEFI firmware images" seemingly developed by black hats with links to China.…

IRC-for-the-2020s up and down as it catches a bad case of the Mondays Slack has been up and down on Monday thanks to a mystery issue the software's maker is still probing.…

Those most likely being image sensors and NAND flash storage for phones Sony and Kioxia have reportedly requested waivers from the US government that would allow them to supply Huawei with components.…

How? Join our October 7 online broadcast to find the answer Webcast Consider a world where cyber-attackers are using AI to refine, control and scale up their attacks. There is no need to stretch your imagination: sophisticated hackers are using AI techniques today to manage botnets, mount attacks, and cover up their traces, as well as to help them understand the context they’re operating in, and, naturally, increase profitability.…

Softbank-backed firm may yet appeal London transport authority decision Transport for London (TfL) has refused to renew the licence of the Indian ridesharing startup Ola, after the discovery of what it described as "potential public safety consequences".…

You can't make this stuff up An IBM manager unfairly sacked a third-line IT support engineer despite having a pool of just two people to make redundancies from, a UK employment tribunal has ruled.…

Get your kicks on, er, the A12 Bork!Bork!Bork! A bit of drivethru borkage is on show today, courtesy of regular contributor McDonald's.…

Let's just go back to human-selected cropping, eh? In an attempt to fix Twitter’s problematic automated image-cropping tool, its engineers said the software will in future simply rely less on AI algorithms.…

Be careful what you wish for Who, Me? The end of a damp weekend (for the UK at least) heralds a new instalment in our ongoing series of Register reader confessions. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

This year’s conference is slimmed down, highly practical – just like you Event There’s one thing that hasn’t been disrupted over recent months. Machine learning and AI continue to push their way into the mainstream, and are helping provide answers to the blizzard of tough questions we are all facing right now.…

Plus: IBM shares its ML know-how in schizophrenia fight In brief AI software designed to monitor students via webcam as they take their tests – to detect any attempts at cheating – sometimes fails to identify the students due to their skin color.…

Guess which option this electric truck dreamer chose Video Nikola Motor Company has demanded the removal of videos posted by the embattled electric vehicle maker's critics that incorporate its ridiculed promotional footage of its Nikola One truck.…

Plus: A little reminder to not pay off ransomware crooks In brief LGBTQ dating site Grindr has squashed a security bug in its website that could have been trivially exploited to hijack anyone's profile using just the victim's email address.…

Refresh dukes it out with gear from rival HP Inc has given part of its laptop lineup a bit of a buffing, the result is the HP Spectre x360 14 2-in-1.…

And don't forget the paperwork after, says Chocolate Factory Google is offering bug hunters thousands of dollars worth of compute time on its cloud to hammer away at JavaScript engines and uncover new security flaws in the software.…

We're taking steps to prevent this from happening again, says Redmond Microsoft has blamed a software bug for the service disruption on Monday and Tuesday that affected customers using Azure Active Directory-dependent applications.…

RHEL 7.9 also here – last major version in the 7.x family? Red Hat has released Fedora 33 beta, with the finished article expected at the end of this month, as well as version 7.9 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.…

I don't know why she swallowed the fly... There was good news for administrators of Microsoft's SQL Server 2019 last night as Cumulative Update 8 emerged, fixing the borkage of its predecessor.…

Resource Public Key Infrastructure now, bellows ProtonMail Aussie telco Telstra has apologised after a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing oddity caused traffic destined for encrypted email service ProtonMail to wrongly pass through Telstra's servers.…

Despite Android dwarfing the iPhone ecosystem Consumer spending within mobile apps surged in the third quarter of 2020, according to a new report from app analytics house Sensor Tower.…

Catch up with cybersecurity heavyweights in the comfort of your living room via Rubrik's virtual Data Security Summit Promo After six months of the so-called new normal, are you ready to take a breath? Or are you acutely aware that the real threats to your organization are only now becoming clear?…

Graz University of Tech's Daniel Gruss thinks natural sciences can save us Complexity has broken cybersecurity, but a reappraisal of computer science can keep us safe.…

Also: Scrubtember becomes Abortober, and the worm returns once more to NASA In brief The location of the air leak from the International Space Station (ISS) has been identified. According to Russia's Roscosmos, it is in the Zvezda Service Module transfer chamber.…

Open-source projects aim to give researchers, startups a helping hand IBM has published two open-source artificial intelligence projects it hopes will help astronomers better deal with space junk – and encourage startups to circle Earth with swarms of CubeSats.…