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Plus: US govt says it's 'looking at' banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok Social media businesses are making moves to block Hong Kong authorities from accessing their user data, days after Beijing imposed a new national security law on the territory.…

Plus: A release candidate for Azure DevOps, Pylance gallops into VS Code and hairdressing in Teams In Brief Microsoft's browser gang at Edge has said it will take a breather in order to "stay aligned with Chromium Project's release schedule."…

No NFC, but it's great for productivity Review Nokia has traditionally been typified by utilitarian phones* that get the job done — from the legendary Communicator series to the indestructible 3310.…

Slower than an iPhone, faster than a 2019 MacBook Air: It's an iBook that's over a decade old Column The modern always-on workplace isn't designed for everyone. And that's why a search for a coping strategy for dyspraxia* took me to eBay, where I bought an archaic Apple iBook for the princely sum of £40 (excluding shipping).…

Experiment to diversify academic workforce falls foul of human-rights watchdog Eindhoven University of Technology has been told to stop posting women-only job ads as part of a push to diversify its academic workforce.…

DNS entries left pointing to Azure-hosted server names snatched by miscreants for mischief More than 240 website subdomains belonging to organizations large and small, including household names, were hijacked to redirect netizens to malware, X-rated material, online gambling, and other unexpected content.…

Antisocial network accused of unfairly snubbing Black people when it comes to jobs, promotions Facebook has been formally accused of racial discrimination in a complaint from three Black plaintiffs, one a manager at the social network and two applicants who have repeatedly been rejected by the web giant.…

Bloke calling himself Hushpuppi extradited, allegedly conspired to steal $100m from English Premier League soccer club among others An Instagram super-star with 2.3 million followers has been extradited to America accused of conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars obtained via cyber-crime. He faces up to 20 years behind bars if convicted.…

Proposed Section 230 shake-up passes committee stage with amendments An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics’ greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.…

Some of them will be feeling very ill and won’t pick up the phone and return the call. Ahem... Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombe, who is currently leading the UK’s coronavirus track-and-trace efforts, has shed light on the nation's human-driven contact-tracing efforts in a meeting of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee.…

Asks that at least three Board members give up their seats for diverse replacements Oracle is being sued by a shareholder who alleges the IT titan has not been truthful and honest in its efforts to create greater racial diversity within its workforce.…

Announces plans to close 50% of its Japanese office space by close of 2022 Fujitsu is to permanently shutter one half of its office real estate in Japan and will ask 80,000 locals to work from home permanently as it redefines work culture internally in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.…

Points-powered getaways could cost booking site dear Miscreants have been nabbing British supermarket chain Tesco Clubcard discount codes to snap up Hotels.com rewards meant for holders of the retailer's loyalty cards.…

'Pics or It Didn't Happen' won't be sending back any pics any time soon Upstart rocketeers at Rocket Lab had a bad weekend as the thirteenth launch of its Electron rocket ended in failure.…

Move won't fix 'brutal system of human misery' but aims to encourage participation In the light of the 2020 "global reckoning on race relations" the Linux kernel developers have stepped up with proposed new inclusive terminology guidelines for their coding community.…

NCSC will make the call, says UK digital secretary After months of dilly dallying, the UK government has said it will finally decide this month whether Huawei should be booted out of Blighty’s nascent 5G network, according to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden.…

Like most other things these days, COVID-19 blamed for extension to framework agreement How much does the Scottish public sector need to spend on toner and cartridges in a day? Circa £5,000 if a recent tender notice is anything to go by.…

Sheffield's doctors given tools to save residents from BIKE FITNESS HORROR The UK’s Sheffield City Council is looking to buy a fleet of electrical bikes to allow local GPs to offer them on prescription as a form of exercise in what is known as Social Prescribing.…

So ... CLICK HERE to find out more! A subset of Three UK users have received an SMS message warning them about text message-based spam – complete with a shortlink and textual urgings to click it and learn more.…

Pressuring clients into products they're not ready for doesn't benefit anyone, says new chair The new chair of the ITAM Forum, a body set up in part to help organisations traverse the software licensing minefield, has called on vendors to stop using the prospect of licence audits to influence customers' cloud infrastructure decisions.…

Plus: What? No. No way. People would just do that? Go on Tor and use it to commit crimes? In Brief Exploit code for the pair of nasty vulnerabilities in F5 Networks' BIG-IP application delivery controllers is now doing the rounds, so make sure you're all patched up.…

Airport antics for a Microsoft OS well past its prime Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a bork with a difference as we find an old friend still running even as the world around it has been put on hold.…

In praise of UNIX and knowing when to deliberately drive a server off a cliff Who, Me? The weekend has been deleted. Pause a moment before you start your own workplace odyssey and enjoy another's trip to Oopsville courtesy of Who, Me?…

Plus: Experts back a national cloud for ML research In brief Cops in Detroit have admitted using facial-recognition technology that fails to accurately identify potential suspects a whopping 96 per cent of the time.…

Tight-lipped bank has fixed the weirdness - but not said why it happened Updated Barclays Bank appears to have been using no less than the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine as a "content distribution network" to serve up a Javascript file.…

Great problem of our time solved: Classic FM won't have to rebrand as Classic DAB Analogue radio station licences will be extended for another 10 years, the UK government has said – entirely reversing plans to shut off FM and AM radio stations in favour of DAB digital radio.…

Microsoft emits a fix for those fearful of Registry tinkering While Microsoft was showing off its new OneDrive toys, the company also slipped out a fix for brave souls running Windows 10 2004 and finding Files On-Demand a little borked.…

Plus: IBM emits BlueGene/Q CPU blueprints – and 'fastest' open-source RISC-V core emerges If you're doodling your own computer chip yet wondering if you'll ever see it physically manufactured, Google is offering to fabricate it for you for free.…

Whitehall buddies up with Bharti to complete constellation The ongoing saga of OneWeb and the UK's ambition to be a major space player took another twist today with the confirmation that $500m will be splurged by Whitehall on the satelite biz.…

Bezos' bunch beats Microsoft to the punch, though it has limited use for now Amazon Web Services is trying to lure more to developers to its cloud by creating a tool built for porting .NET applications to Linux, though in its current form we found it to be less useful than hoped.…

Tees Valley mayor expresses his love for two-wheelers The UK's first trial of rented electic scooters will be in Teesside, according to Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen.…

Tech stands on own two feet rather than 4G infrastructure Vodafone has switched on its first 5G SA (standalone) network in the UK.…

Something for everyone this week, including wannabe Vultures Job Alert It's that time of week again people, our job column is back with another list of opportunities in the world of tech.…

€1.7bn Estonian company is first on store to have a global presence Huawei has signed its first major ride-sharing platform to its AppGallery app store – and no, it's not the one you're thinking of. Unless, of course, you were thinking of Bolt.…

100 people have lost their jobs, COVID-19 blamed Exclusive It has been a bad week for the UK jobs market and Capita has just added to the unemployment stats by ditching more than a quarter of its Consulting division, sources close to the company have told The Register.…

Brave browser's policy officer questions efficacy of personalised ads Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer at privacy-focused browser biz Brave, has reported on how ad revenue increased when Dutch national broadcaster NPO stopped running third-party trackers on its online video website.…

We said, we hope you get some downtime. Oh never mind. Come on, it's just once a year Hang the bunting, ice the cupcakes, and wrap the presents: it comes but once a year but today, as you beautiful people well know, is international DBA Appreciation Day.…

Thinking in binary, dreaming in hexadecimal, and this is what they'll remember you for On Call It is Friday so may we suggest taking a moment out of your preparations for a weekend charge to the pub to enjoy another tale from those tasked with helping the confused in today's On Call.…

No wonder J2157 clocks in at 34 billion solar masses The greediest supermassive black hole spotted by us Earthlings is an eye-popping 34 billion times more massive than our Sun, and gobbles nearly a solar mass of nearby gas and dust every day.…

It's only downloaded 26.5m times a week, NBD A lingering vulnerability in lodash, a popular JavaScript helper library distributed through package manager npm, has prompted developers to kvetch about the fragile state of security.…

Not to worry, there are only *searches* several thousand devices apparently exposed online Network administrators are urged to patch their F5 BIG-IP application delivery controllers following the disclosure of a pair of critical remote takeover bugs.…

Is that listed phone number going direct to a professional or a call center? Special report Addicts seeking substance abuse treatment are being deceived by phony medical clinics advertising on Google's business directory system – and the web giant seems unwilling or unable to fix the issue.…

Best get updating pronto, folks The Apache Project's popular Guacamole open-source remote desktop software contained vulns allowing remote attackers to steal login creds and hijack targeted machines, researchers have said.…

Continental capers lead to 750 UK arrests French and Dutch police have boasted of infiltrating and killing off encrypted chat service EncroChat, alleging it was used by organised crime gangs to plot murders, sell drugs, launder criminal profits and more.…

Redmond also praised for blocking malware control systems on its clouds Microsoft has emitted a pair of security patches to address flaws in Windows 10 that can be potentially exploited by miscreants to hijack PCs. A victim simply needs to be tricked into opening a file containing a specially crafted image on a vulnerable system.…

Hunting for the right file is the 'bane to anyone's productivity' allegedly Microsoft is rolling out a swathe of updates to OneDrive, increasing the upload file limit for the cloudy bit barn from 15GB to 100GB.…

Surprise! The UK has been shut out of an EU-led project From the department of "chickens coming home to roost" is news that the European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded prime contracts for the next six Copernicus missions, and the UK has missed out.…

Privacy-focused Librem 14 laptop available for pre-order Purism, a San Francisco social purpose company that emphasises privacy and free software, today flung out its latest notebook: the Librem 14.…

Plus: Apple declares first-gen Retina MacBook Pro 'obsolete' Google has discontinued its hugely popular Pixel 3A and 3A XL mid-range smartphones. While the device will continue to receive updates for the foreseeable, the Chocolate Factory has no plans to produce more units.…

Record 53.6 million tonnes produced last year - that's 7.3kg per person on the planet The United Nations is sounding the alarm on increasing levels of e-waste, with 2019 producing a record 53.6 million tonnes of the stuff: an increase of 21 per cent in just the past five years.…