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'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.…

Undisclosed amount of money to change hands VMware is buying Datrium, a business that started out in the cut-throat world of HCI and then switched to disaster recovery in the cloud.…

VPN gear vulnerable to remote hijackings Cisco has patched a cross-site scripting vulnerability in two VPN routers it sells to small businesses and branch offices.…

It's like the Chocolate Factory isn't dominant enough already Updated Twenty consumer and citizen rights groups have published an open letter [PDF] urging regulators to pay closer attention to Google parent Alphabet's planned acquisition of Fitbit.…

Icon backgrounds banished, but some Insiders may have to wait for new toys Microsoft has unveiled a long-teased update to the Windows 10 Start Menu for its loyal fans... or at least some of them.…

Amendment aimed to push back introduction to 2023/24, but it'll go ahead as planned next year MPs have voted against an amendment to the Finance Bill which set out to delay changes to IR35 legislation for off-payroll working, a subject close to the heart of many IT contractors.…

Sharing's caring The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has proposed that Google should open its click-and-query data up to rival search engines to help them improve search algorithms and properly compete with the web giant.…

'If diversity is not important to you, then at least you might care about the bottom line' Open Source Summit Diversity and open source can help fix the software developer skills gap, argued Scala contributor and Carnegie Mellon Assistant Professor Heather Miller in a keynote talk at the virtual Open Source Summit North America.…

Southampton Central: 'Old fashioned', 'tired', and now... borked Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's addition to the encyclopaedia of borkage comes courtesy of some digital signage sat next to ticket machines in the fair city of Southampton, UK.…

This year is just one disappointment after another, eh? The black hole thought to be nearest to Earth – a mere 1,000 or so light years away – may not exist at all, more than a dozen scientists have warned.…

Find out how to weather the storm – tune in online here this month Webcast The financial services world has had a tough decade. From a global financial crisis to an uptick in regulation to the COVID-19 coronavirus, and possibly yet another financial crisis off the back of that, it’s no wonder the sector is often seen as traditionally slow to digitally transform. With everything else going on, it often feels like there’s simply no time.…

There's iron in them hills, maybe The latest measurements from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest the Moon contains more metal than previously thought.…

Golden State AG prepares crackdown Today is the first day that California will start enforcing its new data privacy law, so if your website doesn’t have a “Do not sell my personal information” link in, say, the footer, you may soon regret it.…

Senior techie sues, says he was snubbed due to Dalit ancestry, HR ignored complaints A senior engineer working at Cisco headquarters in Silicon Valley claims he was mistreated by coworkers and managers because of his Indian caste status – and that HR ignored his complaints about the matter.…