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'Far more formidable gates to access to other applications than anything that existed in the industry 20 years ago' Analysis Microsoft president Brad Smith on Thursday called on antitrust regulators in the US and Europe to scrutinize whether smartphone app store business practices are consistent with antitrust law.…

City council demands snoop gear kit reports, mayor OK with that New York City Council has overwhelmingly voted to require cops to report their use of surveillance technology.…

An AI engineer recounts his previous woes to The Register Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a brilliant idea: get two neural networks and pit them against each other to get a machine to generate completely new, realistic looking images. But in practice they are notoriously difficult to train and deploy, as one engineer told El Reg.…

Wait and see before pointing the finger, warns threat intel boffin As Australia reels under sustained cyber attacks following increased Chinese diplomatic hostility, the country's Lion brewery and dairy conglomerate has been hit for the second time.…

Yeah, about that whole JSON thing... The Windows Terminal gang has got back into its preview groove with an update for the open-source command-line front-end.…

'We don't know what he stands for' Huawei is uncertain whether a change in leadership in Washington DC will resolve its ongoing woes with the US government, company representatives have told The Register.…

Doors remain closed at that other hub of nerdery, the Centre for Computing History Raspberry Pi fans rejoice! The foundation's Cambridge outlet has tentatively opened its doors once more, although is sadly shorn of its trademark interactive displays.…

'Revenge' attack cost biz £100k, say police A woman who deleted 5,000 files from her former company's Dropbox has been punished with community service – even though the business allegedly collapsed after her file-shredding spree.…

£499 nabs early birds 5G, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage Xiaomi's latest flagship, the Poco F2 Pro, hits UK shelves today with an early-bird price of £499.…

*Cough* But are they freelancers? *cough* – HMRC IR35 tax reforms remain set to come into force on 6 April 2021 as the 2019-20 Finance Bill passed through its committee stage.…

Vodafone responsible for maintaining system infrastructure The UK's 101 and 111 non-emergency telephone numbers are currently inaccessible by the public following a behind-the-scenes failure.…

I always feel like / somebody's dropping eaves / and I have no privacy Google has introduced "continuous match mode" for apps on its voice-powered Assistant platform, where it will listen to everything without pausing. At the same time it has debuted related developer tools, new features, and the ability to display web content on its Smart Display hardware using the AMP component framework.…

Because nobody wants to be the new Yahoo! apparently Date: June 1, 2022.

If you're looking around - there's a lot on offer Job Alert It's Friday and The Reg's Job Alert column is back with another list of work opportunities.…

'If that is true, that is a horrendous admission' – analyst ServiceNow, the company that sees itself dominating enterprise software via workflow tools, has told customers contractual arrangements will not be altered as it wrestles with economic stresses accompanying a pandemic.…

A week of wobbles ends in a good, old fashioned TITSUP* Code shack GitHub has rounded out the week with "elevated error rates" as developers learned that Friday is a day for bacon sandwiches rather than pull requests.…

But it does have a name. 'Firefox Private Network' is out, ‘Mozilla VPN’ is in. The Mozilla Foundation has announced it will soon launch its VPN.…

And look, confirmed hacker sitting up front Bork!Bork!Bork! Those wondering if perhaps there were nefarious actors at work back in 2016, influencing the electorate, need look no further than some software on a London bus tidying up after itself.…

eROSITA telescope shows a busy, energetic universe Pic Astronomers have mapped the hot gas floating in our Milky Way for the first time – and identified more than a million X-ray-emitting objects in the universe – by piecing together images snapped by the eROSITA telescope.…

Time for the Windows pantomime: 'Oh yes it does...' 'Oh no it doesn't' On Call Hey, it's the 111th of March, or thereabouts. How will you celebrate this milestone? May we suggest a biscuit, a beverage of your choice and the schadenfreude that comes from a dip into The Register's On Call mailbag.…

Threesome now plan to march East and conquer Europe Chinese consumer tech enfant terrible Xiaomi has bunged a special NFC chip into its fitness wearable, giving it the power to serve as a Mastercard in Russia.…

It's The Reg wot warned it The UK government last night confirmed it has aborted its ill-conceived coronavirus contact-tracing phone app – blaming protections and battery-saving restrictions in Apple’s iOS for its failure.…

Two models get hot-fixes, er, looks like 77 more to go? Netgear has issued patches to squash security vulnerabilities in two router models that can be exploited to, for instance, open a superuser-level telnet backdoor.…

Freeform Dynamics took a look at survey submissions, now shares its report for you to pore over Analysis Every organisation realizes and understands storage is important – or should do. Users, customers, and executives all want instant access to information, using whatever tools they wish to use. And then there are the demands of auditors and regulators. Storage is anything but invisible.…

Analyst predicts seven-football-fields-per-minute printing plunge Analyst firm IDC says the printer industry has been kicked right in the COVIDs.…

Although Huawei’s details are rather thin on this one Despite looming US government bans preventing access to American technology, Huawei has announced a new server based on the third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors launched just this week.…

Won't say who the attackers are working for – just don't mention 中国 Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called a snap press conference to reveal that the nation is under cyber-attack by a state-based actor, but the nation’s infosec advice agency says that while the attacker has gained access to some systems it has not conducted “any disruptive or destructive activities within victim environments.”…

Data pilfered from PeopleSoft HR database sold to tax fraudsters, it is claimed US federal authorities said they had arrested Justin Sean Johnson in Detroit, Michigan, on charges associated with the 2014 hacking of a human resources database at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and thrown the book at him.…

Employees bag commiseration prize of free ID protection Staff records – from social-security and corporate credit card numbers, to passport and bank account details – were siphoned from Cognizant by hackers who then doused the IT contractor in ransomware.…

New York architects hit instead of Canadian standards agency after crooks get names mixed up The Maze ransomware gang has screwed up by targeting a New York design and construction firm instead of the Canadian Standards Association it was intending to hit.…

We wanted flying cars and space travel for 2020 but instead we got re-runs of fascist propaganda Facebook has removed online ads and posts by President Trump's reelection campaign for violating its rules prohibiting "organized hate," a step the ad biz has been reluctant to take.…

By which it means people who can’t afford a Macbook, right? Given the continuous turmoil in Huawei’s telecoms and mobile businesses, it’s easy to forget that the company’s laptop business remains relatively unscathed, with the Chinese tech giant regularly introducing new models. The latest is the Ryzen-powered Huawei MateBook 13 AMD Edition ultrabook.…

Google, Facebook cable link to China problematic, says oversight body The White House's Team Telecom advisory committee wants the FCC to put the kibosh on a proposed capacious fiber-optic cable linking America and Hong Kong.…

Hollywood was right! The UK Ministry of Defence has shortlisted BT, Serco, Babcock and Airbus in the bidding for its £6bn Skynet satellite project.…

We're producing a study with Freeform Dynamics – and we need to hear from you clever people, please Reader survey Do you have automation and self-service capabilities in place that aren’t being used?…

Only if they'd already pwned your box, mind. Still: get patching! Cisco Webex suffered from a vuln that could have allowed an attacker to access any account by simply copy-pasting a unique session token into a browser string.…

Plus: Tech contracts dished out reportedly worth £108m The UK government will abandon its centralised COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app in favour of the distributed system proposed by Apple and Google more than two months ago.…

Galcomm retorts: 'The report is at least irresponsible, if not worse' Researchers at Awake Security have published a report on malicious extensions in the Chrome web store, making both specific claims of over 32 million downloads of one malware family, and general claims of weak security in both domain registration and Google's store.…

Also: Kernel updating and benchmarking the beast After months of moribund emissions, Microsoft's loyal cadre of Fast Ring (or Dev Channel) Insiders were rewarded with toys aplenty last night as Windows 10 crested the build 20,000 mark.…

It's remote business as usual though, insists firm The chief exec of Hewlett Packard Enterprise has tested positive for coronavirus, he revealed today – adding to the firm's recent list of woes.…

'Focus' now on call centre-based system run by outsourcers, it seems Once described as a key part of England's COVID-19 test-and-trace system, the smartphone app being trialled on the Isle of Wight is no longer a priority for the UK government and won't be ready until winter.…

There's also a Stratix FPGA designed with AI tasks in mind Intel plans to debut its third-generation "Cooper Lake" Xeon Scalable processors today, alongside revised Optane memory, 3D NAND SSDs, and an FPGA tuned for AI workloads.…

Mars2020 mission will scout for interesting rocks to bring back to Earth NASA is gearing up to launch its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity drone helicopter to hunt for signs of microbial life on Mars next month.…

Britain's Military Court Service mixes ancient and modern in the most jarring way A bizarre new court protocol for sentencing military criminals over Zoom includes instructions for the ceremonial carrying of a laptop and webcam in and out of the courtroom.…

Shipments up 12%, says Canalys The first quarter of 2020 proved challenging for the consumer tech sector as lockdowns prompted many to defer their luxury purchases. Except, it seems, in the smartwatch segment, where shipments actually rose year-on-year by double digits.…

Are you happy with staff picking and choosing what they want, when they want it? We'd love to hear your views, please Reader survey Ask a bunch of people – users, developers, applications teams – why they went around central IT and just grabbed whatever they needed from the cloud, and they’ll give you all kinds of "justifications."…

That's a lot of... Netflix. Yes, that's it Virgin Media has published post-lockdown broadband usage figures that, unsurprisingly, point towards massive spikes in data consumption as Brits work from home or look for something to do online.…

Biz model isn't good for consumers or the environment, but Google holds all the cards for Android Comment Fairphone is a tiny player in the smartphone space. Unusually, it competes on the basis of its environmental credentials, touting an ethical supply chain and modular components designed to be easily replaced by end users. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the Fairphone 2 – first released in 2015 – still receives software updates*.…

The spectre of bork returns to Newcastle Bork!Bork!Bork! Sometimes we all need a reminder of just how borked the world is at the moment, and what better way to discourage people from using public transport than a Blue Screen of Death hanging over the entrance?…

Oh OK, so NOW the social network cares about getting people's permission before using their data to train computer systems Special report Five engineers missed out on sharing a top prize of $500,000 in a Facebook-backed AI competition – after they were disqualified for using images scraped from Flickr and YouTube to train their deepfake-detecting system.…