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Black is free on the Inspiron 15. ‘Soft Mint’ is a very expensive option Video If you have a spare £12m (US$16m) to hand, a kind Register reader let us know that Dell has just the laptop for you.…

China has the giant e-tailers, India has the customers, Brazil, Russia and South Africa are aboard The annual BRICS summit – a high-level meeting between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has resolved to explore development e-commerce consumer protections, both for their own citizens and possibly for the rest of the world.…

Terminated by presidential tweet that piled on the baseless election-rigging allegations CISA director sought to counter President Donald Trump tonight fired the boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the very organisation his administration formed with the aim of shoring up America's computer networks from hackers.…

In latest court bout, snooper biz seems to ask: Are you sure you want to open this can of worms? Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has taken a leaf out of Hollywood in an attempt to avoid any legal repercussions from making and selling tools that hack WhatsApp users' phones.…

Phone calls are so 1970s says Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Debt collectors will be allowed to chase people over their social media accounts under new rules approved by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).…

Downtime infuriates customers – guess they'll have to just swallow it Nest is down - again.…

Intel, AMD, Qualcomm are all on board Microsoft has joined hands with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm to release a new security chip called Pluton, which Redmond reckons will delete "entire vectors of attack" from the infosec landscape.…

So make sure you've updated since July, fandroids A crafty person could have slurped every single cookie from a Firefox-using Android device by tricking a user to look at a specially crafted HTML file.…

SnoSQL for Snowflake? Flurry of tech releases follow $33bn IPO Enjoying an avalanche of interest since its $33bn IPO, cloud-based data warehouse slinger Snowflake is promising support for unstructured data, ETL within its data cloud, and partners in its data market.…

'Yeah, that's how we roll,' an exec may have said at some point Smartphone brand OPPO has shown off its first "rollable" concept phone – though at this stage it isn't clear if this will go into full blown production.…

900-ton receiver platform threatens to plummet into dish below The remaining cables supporting a 900-ton platform hanging over America’s largest radio telescope are struggling to take the load, threatening the 1,000-ft wide reflector dish.…

Stateful L4 and L7 protection coming ... eventually VMware has revealed that it has firewall vendors in its sights by announcing that the security appliances will be virtualised to run on SmartNICs under its ‘Project Monterey’ plan to relieve CPUs from the chore of running network functions.…

Mudge work to be done after high-profile Bitcoin scam earlier this year Twitter has hired legendary hacker Peiter "Mudge" Zatko as head of security.…

Flippin' Dell! All major vendors lifted by pandemic purchasing frenzy... except one Chromebooks, tablets, and ultraslim notebooks dominated global growth of PC shipments into retailers and distributors in Q3 as demand for desktops melted away, according to the latest stats from Canalys.…

Come to think of it, has anyone checked in with the Queen lately? It's one of the industry's worst-kept secrets that media orgs write obituaries for prominent figures ahead of time, and premature publication can seem like a fate worse than death for a humiliated newsroom.…

Egregor gang publishes stolen data snippet but did anyone receive their extortion note? Ransomware criminals who targeted Edinburgh Woollen Mill are congratulating themselves on infiltrating the business and publishing their usual extortion demands – unaware the company has crashed into administration.…

Complaint was 'inaccurate' and tried to 'deceive' arbitrator, declares UK domain name registry Peli, makers of heavy plastic boxes, has been labelled a reverse domain name hijacker by Nominet after wrongly claiming ownership of a disputed website name.…

Watch as we effortlessly segue from BSODs to hovertrains Bork!Bork!Bork! It is tech mirroring life in today's edition of Bork as the text-based BSOD of yore is replaced by… the Sad Face of 2020.…

Veep needles British government: Without us, you'll 'widen the north-south digital divide' Analysis Huawei isn’t waiting for Donald Trump to concede, or, in fact, even leave the White House, before flexing its muscles again.…

Japanese Astronaut Soichi Noguchi bringing soft toy into space was only surprise as Crew-1 docked Crew-1, the first ever four-passenger flight to the International Space Station (ISS) and also the first time NASA has formally used a commercial craft to carry astronauts, has docked safely.…

Big Sur highlights shortcomings in OCSP comms, APIs Analysis Apple plans to revise the way it checks the trustworthiness of Mac applications when they're run – after server problems last week during the launch of macOS Big Sur prevented people's desktop apps from starting.…

Top speakers, new courses, all live online Promo If you work in cybersecurity you’ll know that come December, it’s time to kick back, take stock… and prepare for whatever devilish tricks the hacker community is planning to pull over Christmas and into 2021. And this year and next can be expected to be particularly challenging, with cyber criminals looking to take advantage of a chaotic 2020, whether it’s by targeting the security gaps opened up as your workforce has gone remote or ripping the headlines for enticing spear phishing material.…

Consortium of dealers and resellers buys 70-million-a-year handset-maker Huawei has sold its low-end Honor handset business and all-but admitted the deal was necessary due to US technology export restrictions.…

US giant breaks privacy law by generating per-user 'digital license plate' without permission – claim Privacy activist Max Schrems is back, and this time he has filed complaints against Apple for privacy violations over a cookie it places in iPhones for some advertisers.…

Trading proves a tricky combination Australia’s stock exchange took most of Monday off, without warning, after new software went live ...and quickly created problems that made trading inadvisable.…

Hundreds of email addresses exposed, customers predictably less-than-thrilled Micropayments company Coil has emailed users its new privacy policy but placed hundreds of their addresses in the “To:” field and therefore breached their privacy.…

eMMC storage will soon enough die in 159,000 cars, automaker says Worn-out NAND memory chips can cause a whole host of problems with some Tesla cars, ranging from the failure of the rearview camera to an absence of turn signal chimes and other audio alerts, it emerged this month.…

Hardware aimed at supercomputers, servers, mega-workstations Nvidia on Monday upped the memory specs of its Ampere A100 GPU accelerator, which is aimed at supercomputers and high-end workstations and servers, and unveiled InfiniBand updates.…

Dept of Justice lawyers: No way Google has insisted it needs to see the confidential information that its competitors provided to the US Department of Justice in support of an antitrust case against the tech giant.…

Chip takes aim at Nvidia's A100 AMD announced on Monday its Instinct MI100 accelerator, a GPU aimed at speeding up AI software and math-heavy workloads for supercomputers and high-end servers.…

Software warehouse also pledges to review claims better, $1m defense fund for open-source coders Microsoft's GitHub on Monday restored access to youtube-dl, software for streaming and downloading YouTube videos, after removing the repository and forked versions last month in response to a controversial DMCA complaint from the RIAA, the US music industry trade group.…

Dare we say... telco fiddled while roam burned? Vodafone was today left counting the cost of reduced international travel among its customer base due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Which is hardly a reprieve for Chinese company's throttled handset biz In a rare bit of good news for Huawei's mobile business, Qualcomm has won a licence from the US Department of Commerce to provide the business with selected 4G chipsets.…

New interim human calculator hired, permanent replacement being hunted Capita's most senior counter of beans, CFO Patrick Butcher, is standing down from the board with immediate effect and will – according to the business – "assist" his chosen replacement as he hands over the corporate calculator.…

Join this Intel webinar and learn how to unleash your data Promo All the data in the world means nothing if you’re not getting it to the right place at the right time and drawing insights out.…

Capcom KO'd by 'criminal organisation that calls itself Ragnar Locker' Japanese games giant Capcom, the company behind the 33-year-old Street Fighter franchise, has issued "deepest apologies" to customers and other stakeholders whose details may have been accessed by miscreants during a ransomware infection.…

Tribunal ruling prevents the Zuckerborg from swallowing GIF peddler until further notice Facebook remains barred from integrating social media GIF engine Giphy into its wider corporate operations following a failed legal bid.…

And with better repairability than its big brother too Though the iPhone 12 Mini is the smallest device in Apple's newest lineup, it is largely feature-complete when compared with its stablemates.…

Software subscriptions and licence support a must for bidding businesses The UK government's Crown Commercial Services (CCS) has issued a contract for back-office software with an estimated street value of £1.2bn.…

Plus: Uber to sell off its self-driving unit, and pay $200 to spy on anyone you'd like in Russia In brief Thousands of nude images from a popular dataset designed to train machine learning models to create AI-generated adult content are often taken from porn production companies accused of sexual abuse.…

Five more years, five more years... or nothing! A West Midlands town has found out the hard way exactly how much sympathy IT suppliers have for public sector bodies disrupted by the unprecedented circumstances of the current COVID-19 pandemic.…

Time to call time on video. Just NO. No interoperability, no Column As we struggle wearily towards the beginning of the end of the pandemic, we can take stock of what we as a species and as a society have learned.…

The Qt advantage? 'We're a weird by-product of coffee machines and cars' Interview KDE Plasma is a Linux desktop which has just been updated to 5.20 - but why should users consider it instead of GNOME, the default for Ubuntu and Red Hat, or the lightweight Xfce? We spoke to Plasma maintainers David Edmundson and Jonathan Riddell.…

That other 1973 hit: The Dark Side of the Mainframe Who, Me? Modern life is rubbish, so take a trip back to the 1970s with a Who, Me? all about the Master Control Program (MCP).…

Don't hack, don't backdoor, don't hurt the internet … and don't expect rapid adoption because there's still a lot of multilateral work to be done The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC), a group that works to develop policy the world can follow to keep the internet stable and secure, late last week delivered a final report that outlines its vision for how the nations of the world should behave online.…

When recommendation engines promote misinformation during a pandemic, it's a matter of life and death Column My television is trying to radicalise me with an endless stream of recommendations to watch videos from a mainstream media outlet that deliberately inhabits a place on outer reaches of the political spectrum.…

Learn to think like an attacker so you can start fighting back Webcast This year has turned corporate IT upside down, scuppering digital transformation plans as tech teams struggle to keep the lights on and support a suddenly remote workforce.…

First certified commercial crewed spaceflight flies, but fuel heaters are acting up NASA and SpaceX are celebrating the successful launch of the first non-experimental commercial crewed launch.…

Plan calls to link government data across jurisdictions, even sharing airline records to track outbreaks and people who may be at risk of infection Australia will develop the capability to use payment records in the service of coronavirus contact tracing.…

New top trade bloc wants fewer barriers to business across China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia and 11 more countries, but not India 15 Asian nations that together represent around 30 percent of the world’s population and GDP have signed a trade deal that means e-commerce operators in member nations will not be required to store customers’ data in their nation of residence.…