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Procurement limb seeks fully auditable contact channel for reporting crimes, emergencies – what could go wrong? The Police ICT Company, which handles procurement for forces across the UK, has millions in taxpayer cash to spend on a master mobile and desktop platform to "operate and control" all corporate social media channels.…

Next-gen connectivity requires reshuffle beneath the surface The iPhone 12 series is Apple's debut foray into producing 5G-capable devices and the first major redesign since the launch of the iPhone X. But what lurks underneath?…

Plus: Facebook won't get lost in translation, Cruise all set to build fleet of driverless taxis, and more In brief An activist in Portland, Oregon, claims to have trained a facial recognition model that is able to identify one-fifth of the police working in the US city.…

Great, we can't wait for Grand Theft Auto: Brecon Beacons UK map maker the Ordnance Survey is looking to hire £6m worth of game developers.…

And please forget about that 4th industrial revolution because most networks only have NSA 5G Feature 5G iPhones went on sale last Friday and a thousand social media pundits doubtless declared it meant the new network standard had capital-A Arrived and its role as catalyst of a "fourth industrial revolution" will now be realised.…

The site may be getting on a bit, but the Windows fail is bang up to date IKEA may be the master of the flatpack and the neverending check-out queue but it seems to be struggling a bit with Windows 10 if this serving of Bork is anything to go by.…

Only a complete banker would map that to... oh dear... Who, Me? With the weekend gone, like the contents of a file share after a hasty execution of a seemingly innocuous script, pause for a second before tackling the week's shenanigans with another Reg reader Who, Me? moment.…

Next comes all the joy and laughter of the standards process The Internet Engineering Task Force has set November 16th, 2020, as the final date for comment on Quick UDP Internet Connections, the would-be TCP-killer that Google and Cloudflare have offered up as part of HTTP/3.…

Collector is leaking regolith, sparking swift stash plan We’ve all been there: you go on holiday, find lots of fabulous stuff and when the time comes to return home, your suitcase just won’t close.…

Tune in next week to see what VDI can do to help Webcast You’ve got a lot less users coming into the office right now, but what are you doing to bring the office to them?…

Chaebol's second CEO once set a bonfire of dud fax machines to teach the company a lesson in quality control Lee Kun-hee, who transformed Samsung from a small trading business into a global electronics titan, has died at the age of 78.…

As comms minister says nation will create its own regulated Netflix clone Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan has called on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to ban all Islamophobic content from the platform.…

Memory-handling oddity from the age of the 286 has been around since ‘pretty much the original release of Linux’ Linus Torvalds has given the world the first release candidate of version 5.10 of the Linux kernel and called out what he’s labelled an historic change – the removal of an addressing tool that appears to have been around for nearly 30 years, sparked a nasty bug a decade ago but has since been made redundant by chipmakers.…

Are you where you think you are, or are you where I want you to think you are? Rapid7 found Apple’s Safari browser, as well as the Opera Mini and Yandex browsers, were vulnerable to JavaScript-based address bar spoofing.…

Did 2020 just loop round to 1999? GitHub has hidden from view the source code and downloads of YouTube-DL, a popular open-source tool used for saving YouTube videos to disk, at the request of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).…

Driver software snubbed by macOS 10.15, 10.14, Amazon Music, too Updated Many Mac users today found, to their surprise, they are unable to print to their HP Inc printers.…

America's punch bag still standing, black and blue but not in the red US sanctions are starting to have a pronounced impact on Huawei’s financials, with the embattled Chinese telco reporting just single digit year-on-year growth for the first three quarters of 2020.…

Like a dotcom dude vs '70s veteran buddy movie Six years after it considered putting itself up for sale, dotcom era data wrangler Tibco is set to buy Information Builders, a privately held data management biz with a 45-year history.…

'I'm not going to be bullied by someone with deeper pockets' vows Orca boss Palo Alto Networks has threatened a startup with legal action after the smaller biz published a comparison review of one of its products.…

It's 2020. Things are weird. So maybe it's time to dance alone to 'Back Dat NAS up' If you thought things couldn’t get any more weird right about now, then this may be the nadir of an already odd 2020: COVID-19; Trump being Trump; a likely hard Brexit; and now someone working in tech rapping about SQL Server has just released some sounds.…

Better late than never, eh The European Union has imposed sanctions on a Russian military malware developer and the commander of Russia’s MI6 equivalent, a mere five years after the two targeted Germany's parliament with a cyberattack.…

But company also has its eye on Kubernetes at the edge Ubuntu 20.10 is out, with Canonical highlighting its Raspberry Pi support, including not only desktop support but also micro clouds based on MicroK8s, the company's lightweight Kubernetes distribution.…

Gloomy workers unlikely to moan about open plan again as office reopening slides to July 2021 Remote working is the gift that keeps on giving, as Microsoft's workforce reacted glumly to the Windows giant's plan to push back the reopening of its US offices.…

'That button is there on the app' says minister. How many times have you heard a client make wild claims about functionality? The NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app for England and Wales* has a major flaw. Yes, another one. People told to self-isolate by the app are unable to access a code required to claim a £500 financial support grant.…

It takes 'grit' to send in a holograph to meetings instead of struggling with mute buttons yourself... Forrester has offered its contribution to the pantheon of failed predictions gathering smart-dust in the broom cupboard of IT history with its assertion that blockchain is coming to polish up AI's tarnished image.…

Snaps vs Flatpaks, losing in mobile, Microsoft and Linux, and avoiding another GNOME 2 to 3 disaster Interview Patent assertion entities: do not pick a fight with open source. It won't end well for you. This is the message from GNOME Foundation executive director Neil McGovern, who will speak on the subject at the Open Source Summit Europe next week.…

Do you really need so much RAM, though? Six months after OnePlus released a flagship, it followed with a slightly upgraded refresh of the same device. You can distinguish these souped-up variants from their predecessors by the "T" in the name. One such device is the OnePlus 8T — an affordable 5G powerhouse.…

My careful plan to save the economy Something for the Weekend, Sir? People say I don’t care but I do. I care a lot.…

Greasy goodness plays havoc with a PC's disk Bork!Bork!Bork! The best borks are the simplest, and today's is no exception. A black screen, a plaintive message, and a nugget of the Colonel's menu for the hungry masses has been lost.…

IBM builds AI that correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests Machine-learning algorithms analyzing human communication can predict whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease more accurately than standard biomedical screening, say IBM and Pfizer.…

The 'S' in SX, stands for 'Sporty', ok? On Call One of the hardest tasks in IT is giving a user what they need, while also persuading them it's what they want. Join us for another tale from our weekly On Call column where a Register reader achieved the seemingly impossible.…

Immigration reforms allowing more skilled workers to stay seem to have resulted in permanent residency Russia has apparently given super-leaker and former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden de facto permanent residence.…

With DSTI’s data engineering MSc, you can study in Paris, Nice, Lagos… or home Promo Data scientists like to think of themselves as doing the sexiest job of the 21st century, but it’s only because data engineers let them think that way.…

It's saying something when it's easy to believe the US President's passphrase was maga2020! Donald Trump's Twitter password was easily guessed, and he still isn't using multi-factor authentication, claims a Dutch hacker who on Thursday bragged he broke into the President's account last week. Twitter says it has "no evidence" this claim is true.…

Reveals hosting service for WhatsApp Business API and gives its partners reasons to be fearful Facebook wants to host some of your customer data, an offer that hurts its own partner community.…

Privacy crackdown in the land of ubiquitous surveillance, where 5G now blankets all cities Through most of 2020 bans on Chinese apps have meant geopolitical strife, but China yesterday revealed it has started banning some of its own apps.…

Taiwanese chipmaker promises ‘substantial assistance’ in ongoing China IP theft action Taiwanese chip-maker United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) will plead guilty to theft of trade secrets from Micron Technologies and pay a $60m fine to the USA.…

Enterprise and govt data-center sales halve, Xeon processors delayed Intel shares dived today after it revealed a steep slump in enterprise and government sales of its server chips – and delays to its latest Xeons.…

Energetic Bear team caught breaking into govt systems, no harm done to Nov 3 elections The FBI and the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday issued a joint warning that a Kremlin hacking crew is probing or breaking into systems belonging to the US government and aviation industry.…

Mojang bows to the inevita... oh, look – a free cape! With the inevitability of death and taxes, Microsoft-owned Mojang is to require players have a Microsoft account for all its games, including the Java Edition of Minecraft.…

I feel the need, the need for 16mph taxiing in safety Rise of the Machines Boeing has successfully taxied its Loyal Wingman robot fighter jet around an airfield, a key milestone for the aircraft to operate fully autonomously.…

US lawmakers can look away now. Actually, don't Amid grumbling from lawmakers, Microsoft has pushed out a fresh diversity report, sprinkling the odd "must try harder" among the corporate back slappery.…

Mate 40 family could be the company’s ‘last hurrah’ in smartphones outside China - analyst Beleaguered mobile biz Huawei’s Consumer Business Group has rolled out its newest flagship devices: the Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro.…

For everyone else there are splash screens, fixes and iffy anti-malware Fresh from nudging the October 2020 Update out of the door, Microsoft has emitted an update to next year's Windows 10 in the form of a fresh Insider Dev Channel build.…

You know, the firm that runs half of NHS Business Services French-headquartered IT outsourcer Sopra Steria has been struck by a “cyberattack,” reportedly linked to the Ryuk ransomware gang.…

Open source observability for debugging and tracing The OpenTelemetry community has taken another step toward General Availability with the first release candidate of the tracing specification.…

No, he's not dragging his cool vintage steamer-style suitcase onto an IKEA armchair in a host villa ... it's a 'special' design relationship Jony Ive’s design firm LoveFrom has inked a deal with the app-that-takes-a-cut-of-users'-holiday-rentals Airbnb in a multi-year “special relationship,” the short-term gig economy rental platform said today.…

'I didn’t realise that our success would lead to government attention' Microsoft co-founder and long-serving ex-CEO Bill Gates has admitted naivety in his dealings with Washington around the software giant’s fabled antitrust case with the US Department of Justice (DoJ).…

Yeah I've heard you were in a car accident that wasn't your fault. Is that right? *Click* Samsung phones will soon come with automatic spam call blocking. The feature, which is part of Samsung Smart Call, will debut on the Galaxy Note20 and will roll out to all new devices released after 2020.…

Also: Starlinks soar but GPS stays grounded, NASA names first Virgin Galactic flier In Brief There was good news for International Space Station (ISS) residents this week as the crew managed to plug a leak in the orbiting laboratory. While never an immediate threat to the crew's safety, nobody likes knowing that air is escaping overboard.…