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Sharp practices can leave temp tech workers with nowhere to turn Campaigners and MPs are urging UK government to introduce legislation to stop umbrella companies siphoning off contractor pay through a range of sharp practices.…

Over 150 million people given freebies or generous top-up deals Indian telcos are giving away services to help clients who don’t want to leave home during a savage second wave of COVID-19 infections.…

TraceTogether app becomes primary tracking tool and compulsory in many settings Singapore has made its Bluetooth-powered "TraceTogether" contact-tracing app its preferred means of recording movements in public spaces across the island.…

Head to the Nutanix Database Summit for a frank exchange of ideas Promo Databases are the key to unlocking business value, but far too many are still built on complex legacy platforms that cannot meet the demands of today’s businesses.…

Also puts brakes on data collection by carmakers China has signaled that ride-sharing companies can expect the same scrutiny as its web giants, and laid out regulations that will stop cars from collecting unnecessary data.…

Plus: Non-profit ML groups snub sponsorship money from Google In Brief Highway patrol officers in California arrested a man this week accused of riding in the backseat of his Tesla while it was under Autopilot.…

'An important step in our country’s interplanetary exploration journey' – state media Updated China's Zhurong rover today touched down on Mars from the Tianwen-1 orbiter, the nation's state media says.…

Coalition of 41 organizations oppose labor rule challenge Google is spearheading an effort to save a visa rule that allows the spouses of H-1B visa holders awaiting green cards to work in the US.…

Also wriggles out of exclusivity deal Amid fears the global semiconductor crisis may last until 2023, AMD has opted to extend its purchase agreement with GlobalFoundries, giving it access to a greater proportion of the fabricator's output.…

Sorry for trying to add it or sorry for cocking up the comms? Amid the smell of burning rubber, the new managers of open-source audio editor Audacity have announced a U-turn on plans to introduce "basic telemetry" into the product.…

How easy would it be for customers to depart the walled garden, legal eagles ask economist Epic Games' lawyers had a chance to put Apple's expert witness through the wringer in the latest from its California bench trial.…

Problem was of social network's own making, says unimpressed judge Facebook has failed to neutralise an order from Britain's competition regulator freezing its buyout of Giphy after having "sat on its hands" and failed to answer questions, the Court of Appeal has found.…

Sometimes you need to lift yourself out of the cybersec trenches and look up to the summit Promo Keeping your organization safe from cybercriminals and other ne’er do wells requires constant honing and refining of your own skills and knowledge.…

That's 37% of the country covered, and BT is expected to pick up the pace too A new Ofcom report shows the number of UK homes with access to gigabit-capable broadband hit 10.8 million in January, representing 37 per cent of households.…

By probing for installed apps with custom URL schemes, it's possible to build a 32-bit unique fingerprint FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser.…

Visible from the launchpad... when it finally gets there NASA has slapped its worm logo on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft as the first Artemis mission to the Moon inches closer.…

Russia-based criminals pick soft target in hope of easy gains Ireland's nationalised health service has shut down its IT systems following a "human-operated" Conti ransomware attack, causing a Dublin hospital to cancel outpatient appointments.…

OtterTune to compete with Oracle automation, but also for open source databases A university spin-out startup has announced a private beta of an automated database tuning service which its founder claims can double the performance or halve the cost of the popular AWS Relational Database Service.…

Retention of now-deleted security breach evidence sparks spat +Comment IT pro Rob Dyke says an NHS-backed company not only threatened him with legal action after he flagged up an exposed GitHub repository containing credentials and insecure code, it even called the police on him.…

You know it's time for an upgrade when your PC gets spanked by a sign Bork!Bork!Bork! The mean streets of Birmingham in England's West Midlands are our destination today, with an entry in the bork archive reminding us of the raw power of signage.…

Because our golf-obsessed boss has wandered off fondling his balls Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I am writing with regard to a data security incident relating to you."…

Be alert, not a-llam-ed Douyin, the Chinese app known as TikTok in the rest of the world, is apparently censoring Alpacas.…

Because now you have a bill to replace all these perfectly functional devices On Call Welcome back to On Call where this week we peek behind the scenes and see what happens when public-facing kit is reported as borked.…

Samsung and SK Hynix singled out as nation tries to become a titan South Korea's government announced a support package worth 510 trillion won (US$451bn) to bolster in-country chip production with the hopes of becoming a global supply chain leader.…

It's Space Race 2 for Russia and America Internet clothing mogul Yusaku Maezawa on Thursday said he and an assistant will take a 12-day trip to the International Space Station in December.…

Pen and sticky paper still a great analog productivity hack Obit Spencer Silver, the co-creator of Post-it Notes found in offices all over the world – occasionally with passwords written on them – has died at the age of 80.…

Testing dongle-driven ‘Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood’ and WebAuthn as alternative Poll Cloudflare has called on the world to “end this madness” by consigning Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAS) to the dustbin of history.…

First loss as a listed company thanks to Beijing’s $2.8bn antitrust fine Chinese tech giant Alibaba has posted its first loss as a listed entity, thanks to the $2.8bn antitrust fine imposed by local authorities, and also revealed that it has lost a major cloud customer “due to non-product related requirements.”…

Web giant tells us it's considering its response to €100m fine demand Google was tickled with a €100m fine by Italy’s monopoly watchdog on Thursday for unfairly holding back an Android app maker.…

Ad tech engineer out after autobiography sparks protest – and what does this say about iGiant's hiring process? Antonio García Martínez, hired by Apple last month as a product engineer on its ad platform team, no longer works for the iGiant following an employee petition objecting to his writings disparaging women and people of color.…

Cloud hyperscalers drive projects to slap restrictions on code use Percona’s CEO had taken a swipe at open-source software vendors switching to proprietary or less-permissive open-source licences in an attempt to avoid being run over by cloud giants.…

It’s the one lever you really need to get a grip on Webcast Moving to the cloud is so exciting isn’t it? New tools, unlimited infrastructure, a whole new world of analytics and machine learning. Why didn’t we do this years ago, they’ll ask?…

JAM with a distinct whiff of Redmond, as you would expect Microsoft's Azure Static Web Apps service, in preview since May 2020, is now generally available, together with extensions for Visual Studio Code to support local development and automatic deployment via GitHub.…

Anonymous sources get into war-by-media counterbriefing Colonial Pipeline's operators reportedly paid $5m to regain control of their digital systems and get the pipeline pumping oil following last week's ransomware infection.…

Sign-ups open in second half of 2021 Google has linked arms with SpaceX to hawk data and cloud services through the Starlink constellation.…

'I got bored sitting at home while retired ... I chose to go back to my roots' Language Summit Python creator Guido van Rossum this week told attendees at the Language Summit that he hopes to double performance in version 3.11.…

Paid fraction of his fellow execs, though he is worth $50+bn (just don't mention tax) For a man’s whose net worth is estimated at $50.7bn Michael Dell isn’t short of spare change, but he was paid a fraction of what his corporate generals received in fiscal 2021 after agreeing to forgo a huge chunk of his salary.…

We'll hire 7,000 to get it done by 2026, says boss BT's Openreach has promised to bring FTTP connectivity to 25 million premises by the end of 2026, an increase of 5 million against the previous target.…

Analyst: 'Company may need to license 7nm and below process tech' With the world facing a drought of crucial semiconductor components, Samsung Electronics has said it plans to dig a fresh borehole in the form of a new production facility, expected to open in Q2 next year.…

Good luck to whoever got that gig Stricken US bulk hydrocarbon conveyor Colonial Pipeline advertised for a new cybersecurity manager a month before that ransomware attack forced operators to shut down the pipeline as a pre-emptive safety measure.…

A few final tests then it's bags packed for French Guiana – and about time too ESA, CSA and NASA's James Webb Telescope opened its giant primary mirror one last time on Earth ahead of being packed up for long awaited launch later this year.…

Read my blips Video A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface.…

They are personal data, you know. Wait – you did know that, right? Exclusive Manchester City Council exposed online the number plates of more than 60,000 cars slapped with parking tickets, breaking data protection laws as it did so.…

'More data, more breadth, more depth... it's the whole f&*king deal' Updated The NHS is preparing for the "biggest data grab" in the history of the service, giving patients little information or warning about the planned transfer of medical records from GP surgeries in England to a central store for research purposes – and with no prospect of the data being deleted.…

Also: Why Rust in Android will use the Soong build system, not Cargo The Rust 2021 Edition Working Group has scheduled the new version for release in October, with what it says are small changes that amount to a significant improvement.…

'My Number' identifier to become central to myriad government services if the plan works Japan has passed laws that will allow it to create a new Agency to lead a national digital transformation effort.…

HTML and CSS? What is this, 2003? Analysis Over the next few months, Google plans to change the way its online word processor Docs renders its pages in web browsers, and collateral damage is expected.…

Says picking a replacement is your next step. Seriously, that’s Redmond's first piece of advice. Eventually it recommends Quorum Microsoft has announced the imminent death of its Azure Blockchain service.…

It’s faulty, struggling to scale, lacks a dedicated privacy policy As India struggles to cope with its savage second wave of COVID-19 infections, its government is being criticised for an API that critics say is creating inequities in the nation’s vaccination program.…

CEO wakes up to BTC's connection to coal, holds onto the stash until mining becomes more eco friendly Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced his electric car maker will stop accepting Bitcoin payments for its vehicles.…