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A very strange pairing indeed Updated Oracle is reportedly set to snap up TikTok's US operations - the astronomically popular, China-founded social media network - in what could be the century’s strangest corporate buy-out.…

Linux distro founder apologises for 'having dropped the ball' Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth said yesterday that he will revive the defunct Community Council amid complaints that the volunteer Ubuntu community has been neglected.…

Update to give your phone a 3-fingered gesture (to translate words. What did you think we meant?) Android manufacturers often lean towards custom UIs in a bid to distinguish themselves from the competition. Among that camp is Chinese smartphone vendor OPPO, which today introduced the latest update to its Color OS platform.…

Plus get patching your Palo Alto kit, there's a nasty crit out there In brief Cryptocurrency exchange Eterbase last week admitted hackers broke into its computers and made off with other people's coins, said to be worth $5.4m.…

We know it is a bore, but check your backup and restore Who, Me? Banish those Monday blues with a recollection of IT-related foolishness in The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Cloud giant's Kubernetes-based brand presented as open source and multi-cloud – but it is not so simple Google Cloud's Next OnAir – a 63-day video epic – is drawing to a close with its Business Application Platform week, but the main keynote was on the exact same topic as that from a fortnight ago: Application Modernization, specifically Anthos.…

Great, back to the '80s green-screens Global ERP slinger Infor has paid UK hardware and construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m in settlement for a four-year failed ERP project that cost £108m.…

‘Certain foreign governments’ can’t be allowed to conduct mass surveillance “Certain foreign governments” should not be allowed to access technology that would let them deploy facial recognition technology as a tool of mass surveillance, says IBM government and regulatory affairs veep Christopher A. Padilla.…

Template for post-Brexit bilateral deals excludes algorithmic disclosures too The UK and Japan have agreed to a new trade deal that will see the two nations to share a “free flow of data” across their borders.…

Software fighter pilots could bring a whole new meaning to 'crash and burn' In brief The US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said a “full-scale tactical aircraft” controlled by an AI system will go up against a human fighter pilot in a real-world dogfight in 2024.…

Then hired some of them back on lower wages IBM systematically sought to sack older workers, according to the United States' Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).…

Party like it’s 1986 when the Walkman craze put cassettes on top of the charts Vinyl records accounted for 62 percent of revenue derived from physical music sales across America in the first half of 2020 – the first time they’ve beaten compact disks in decades, apparently.…

UK to remain HQ as combined companies eye off cloud-to-edge AI stack Nvidia has announced it will buy UK chip-designer Arm.…

Redmond wishes good luck to whoever gets to fix TikTok's security and fake news problems - which may be Oracle as a host not an operator Updated Microsoft has revealed ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has declined to sell its social media app's US operations to the software giant.…

Janus mission seeks solution to orbiting space rocks in the Solar System NASA is splashing $55m on a new space mission to send two small camera-carrying spacecraft into the heavens to study a type of an object in our Solar System that has yet to be observed in detail: binary asteroids.…

Better yet - do the basics and your systems won't get encrypted in the first place Most online attacks could be easily avoided by following basic cyber security advice, Australia’s national cyber security bureau has said – even as it warned that the impact and severity of things like ransomware attacks are getting worse and worse.…

What's that? You want to breathe clean air? Tough luck then VMware, the cloud computing biz headquartered in Palo Alto, California, will reportedly cut salaries for employees opting to permanently work-from-home if they decide to move out of Silicon Valley.…

But playboy CTO and Big Red plays to Wall Street types with slick sales patter The first rule of presenting club is, know your audience. Larry Ellison certainly knows his.…

'May constitute a possible breach of the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act' A Singapore golf club has called in the police claiming members may have broken the country’s Computer Misuse Act after using scripts to book up course slots within seconds of them becoming available.…

Avoid bloated pulls thanks to more formatting smarts Microsoft's cross-platform code wrangler, Visual Studio Code, has received its monthly batch of updates, including editor tweaks and debugger improvements.…

... but humans still needed to fix the 'Hygiene Compartment' NASA has conjured imaginings of an orbital Roomba after boasting of a "sweep" of the ISS interior by an Astrobee robot as hardworking 'nauts keep the outpost up and running.…

But beware last week's update: WSL borkage may await ye with sharp, pointy Element Not Found errors Although Windows 10X remains missing in action, Microsoft dished up some more goodies for Linux fans in the latest Dev Channel build of Windows 10.…

Special source poured into GitHub Microsoft has published the kernel for its new Surface Duo smartphone to GitHub, making it easier for third parties to develop their own custom ROMs for the unusual, yet critically panned dual-screen blower.…

The only lockdown excursion we'll be taking - courtesy of some heated hardware Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork leaves the shores of the UK today and returns to Italy, country of culture, history and the finest of bork.…

Oracle wins protest after agency failed to get it kicked out for not being a reseller In a decision [PDF] issued yesterday, a US public watchdog said the Library of Congress needs to stop asking contractors to supply brand-name-only commercial stuff for a five-year $150m cloud hosting contract.…

Remember when The Reg told you in 2012 that they were taking over? A UK government desperate for good news in the face escalating cases of COVID-19 has finally announced a launch date for its contact-tracing app, once said to be the "cornerstone" of Blighty's pandemic response.…

Doing the right thing - after trying all the wrong things first A “female social network” called Giggle whose operators left its user database unsecured has triggered a wave of Twitter controversy after its founder threatened to sue a UK infosec firm who pointed out the vulnerability.…

Spoiler alert: Not that machine-learning salesperson Register Debate How does that saying go? I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist. That's pretty much how I'd sum up our first-ever Register Debate, which ran this week.…

Android skin has some worthwhile updates, despite software lag Huawei has claimed to be prepping its Android-challenging homegrown mobile operating system, but still has to look after its existing smartphone customers.…

Supply chain woes also fingered after second quarter of pain in Europe Western Europe led a decline in the value of EMEA external storage systems sales in Q3 with a recovery in the remainder of the year obviously hinging on whether a second wave of infections leads to further lockdowns.…

So says Pro Privacy after automatedly gazing at 82,000 sites British charities are sharing information about people visiting their websites with adtech data brokers, according to a report.…

And there you were thinking the annual developer conference was all about software It wasn't just software that hogged the limelight at Huawei's annual developer conference, the embattled Chinese company's PC hardware got a fresh lick of paint too.…

Fab: Boffins etch cooling into chip design Researchers in Switzerland demonstrated an approach that may have gone some way to addressing the sweltering heat and worrying carbon emissions from large computer systems: by integrating liquid cooling into microprocessor fabrication.…

The Orange One was using a password breached four years previously Three “grumpy old hackers” in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack.…

$9m already coughed up with more to come, plus 'contrition payments’ to Australian government IBM’s Australian limb underpaid 1,647 staff and has been forced to pay them AU$12.3m in back pay (US$8.97m or £6.98m) and make “contrition payments” to Australia’s government.…

BORKlife! Flaw allows overwriting of keys by the habitual voyeur The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has admitted some previous iterations of its technology had a flaw that could be exploited to hijack or eavesdrop on nearby connections.…

Luckily, earthly pleasures dished out by the exorcist On Call Those of a religious bent might want to look away now, or be regaled by the story of a server room seemingly haunted by a demon that really didn't like Windows in this week's On Call column.…

Q1 revenue climbs a couple of points, led by cloud and apps, as COVID fails to bite Oracle this week reported two per cent revenue growth for the first quarter of its 2021 financial year, along with strong demand for its hardware that caused a backlog of orders for Exadata and other equipment.…

'No government should politicize 5G' says position paper published to mark United Nations’ 75th birthday China has made treatment of its 5G vendors an issue of the same rank as its aspirations on issues like climate change and trade liberalisation.…

Aadhaar-adjacent app will put beasts' full history in farmers' hands India has launched a new app to help farmers access information about livestock and expects it will cut the cost of cattle and make farms more efficient.…

OpenAI's GPT-3 can go from zero to QAnon stan in 60 seconds... or however long it takes to ask it a couple of questions OpenAI’s powerful text generator GPT-3 can, with a little coaxing, conjure up fake political conspiracies or violent manifestos to fool or radicalize netizens, according to fresh research.…

Only accessible through underwater tunnel attached to Casino (and a few years behind the back-blocks of Cambodia) Apple has opened a store housed in a floating glass dome in Singapore's Marina Bay.…

UK political parties probed, too, reckons Redmond as it wades into debate with call for extra election security funding Microsoft believes there have been extensive “cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election,” and that foreign government hackers responsible for attacks ahead of the 2016 vote are back with new and nastier tactics.…

Hand-over to happen on the lunar surface. Legally speaking Got a Moon rocket handy? NASA is looking for proposals from the private sector for scraping bits off the surface of the Moon.…

Databases, info pipelines, software... 'that is where the fight of 20 years will be won' The nation to dominate modern warfare with AI will not have necessarily built the most deadly killer robot or algorithm – it’ll be the one that has the best infrastructure to support and quickly deploy new technologies in the battlefield, according to US military experts.…

Protectionist public policy prompts fresh focus on infosec fears Chinese drone maker DJI has commissioned yet another security audit with FTI Consulting that's given it a clean bill of health, as the US government reportedly prepares to ban its remote controlled aircraft from American skies.…

Here’s an ebook just for you, courtesy of Rapid7 Promo When you’re running security, it can be hard not to feel you’re slogging away in the trenches, saving your organisation on a daily basis, but getting precious little in the way of recognition and even less in terms of budget.…

Ladling out custom brew to its devices Android 11 is coming to Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro smartphones, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has confirmed.…

Hayabusa's heading home, but 8K's going to Mars The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) are planning to pop a "Super Hi-Vision Camera" with 4K and 8K capabilities onboard JAXA's 2024 mission to Mars.…

Homegrown system – previously a 'lightweight' OS for IoT – punted onto smartphones After years of speculation, Huawei has confirmed it will release the homegrown Harmony operating system for smartphones, theoretically posing a direct challenge to the enduring Android and iOS duopoly.…