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Request for injunction raises pressure on cash-burning ride hailing apps California's Attorney General and the City Attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco have asked a judge to force ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber to classify their drivers as employees.…

Another machine-learning model that can't tell people of color apart? Shocker The American Civil Liberties Union has formally complained to Detroit police, who wrongfully arrested and locked up a dad after he was misidentified as a thief by facial-recognition software and a security guard.…

Lawmakers will attempt to bend the laws of mathematics to their will A trio of Republican senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that requires service providers and device makers in America to help the Feds bypass encryption when presented with a court-issued warrant.…

Non-profits call for independent probe into disastrous effort to sell TLD registry The non-profit organizations that fought to halt the sale of the .org registry to a newly created private equity firm are demanding an independent review into the fiasco, which pitted charities against domain registrars over the billion-dollar aborted deal.…

$600k starting bid, say public extortionists, or $42m to keep schtum Ransomware criminals claiming to have siphoned confidential docs on Nicki Minaj, Mariah Carey, and Lebron James from an American law firm are threatening to auction off the info.…

Separating widgets from App Icons is how Apple will avoid Microsoft's mistake WWDC Apple introduced WidgetKit during day two of its WWDC developer event yesterday, describing it as "the best way to bring your app's most useful information to the home screen."…

Rebrand accompanies tech launches as CEO hits 18 months in job Information Builders, that 45-year-old data management biz, has rolled out automated analytics wares and a corporate rebranding with a view to profiting off a burgeoning market for ML-powered enterprise data tools.…

Triumphant F#-major to return with upcoming macOS Big Sur As the saying goes: Out with the old, in with the… old. After temporarily ditching the iconic Mac "chime" in 2016, Apple is finally bringing it back with the upcoming release of macOS Big Sur.…

Top judge replies: Don't understand what you're on about A top judge told a barrister for the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today that his legal arguments against police facial-recognition technology face "a great difficulty" as he wondered whether they were even relevant to the case.…

A quarter? That's pretty weak Brits are spending more time than ever online, according to comms watchdog Ofcom's latest Online Nation report, and it's all thanks - surprise, surprise - to coronavirus. In April, at the height of lockdown, the average person was online for four hours and two minutes each day.…

This is the Apple-Google API one, not the 'world-beating' one Harriet Harman MP, chair of Britain's Commons Human Rights Committee, has written to UK health secretary Matt Hancock seeking clarity on privacy aspects of the government's latest coronavirus contact-tracing app.…

3DoF bad, 6DoF good Updated Facebook-owned Oculus has bowed to the seemingly inevitable and told the world about the demise of its entry-level Oculus Go VR headset.…

Researchers used a pretrained off-the-shelf model from Nvidia A new computer vision technique that helps convert blurry photos of people into fake, realistic images has come under fire for being racially biased towards white people.…

Makes sense while enterprises wrestle with new ways of working The hackneyed saying that revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality might easily be applied to Blue Prism, the vendor of software robots and automation tools.…

Tanks put through their paces SpaceX popped another Starship tank yesterday as NASA prepared to conduct a final structural test of its SLS rocket.…

Bungling cybercrooks throw toys out of the pram as negotiations shut down The Maze ransomware gang has threatened to publish information stolen from an American firm that overhauls airliners and installs flight control software upgrades – because its victim refused to pay a demanded ransom.…

I just can't quit you, Skype. Oh maybe I can... they've tweaked the close function Hot on the heels of Teams getting personal comes a shake-up for Skype that will see Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop becoming one.…

Mysterious object's mass has challenged astrophysics models Astronomers have detected what could be either the tiniest black hole or the largest neutron star found to date.…

The big release with nothing in it. Thanks Oracle! Interview The Eclipse Foundation has released a preview of Jakarta EE 9, the next major version of what used to be called Java Enterprise Edition.…

No intelligent pentesting systems were available to comment on this assertion Puny humans still think they're superior to AI when it comes to infosec – and a significant number still don't venture into meatspace or get enough sunlight.…

High-spec £249 blower – but can it play Crysis Call of Duty? Review Bargain-basement phones like the Redmi Note 9 Pro helped establish Xiaomi. And, having spent time with the Chinese firm's latest blower for the UK market, it's really not hard to see why.…

Bork on, bork on... with hope in your heart.. And you'll never bork alone Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork returns to Blighty today, with the proud people of Liverpool contributing their own entry into the annals of Windows being a bit sad.…

How Bitdefender's security software was caught napping by ad-block bod Folks running Bitdefender's Total Security 2020 package should check they have the latest version installed following the disclosure of a remote code execution bug.…

Scantily-clad presenters and vulgar language 'corrupt the social atmosphere' and 'endanger the healthy growth of young people' China's internet watchdog has called out several live-streaming channels for showing trash TV amid Beijing's crackdown on "unhealthy content".…

Springer ditches paper from research tome after mass protest by boffins over junk science Springer Nature has reversed its decision to publish a paper describing a neural network supposedly capable of detecting criminals from their faces alone – after top boffins signed a letter branding the study harmful junk science.…

Jakarta region is live now. And hopefully high and dry Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta, is literally sinking. But Google has just opened a cloud region there anyway.…

HomeKit still playing catch-up though facial rec and better automation still a step in the right direction WWDC Apple has added facial recognition and new automation features to its smart home products, edging its HomeKit system forward while still playing catch-up in the market.…

Founder posts bail as German investigators probe accounting scandal Markus Braun, who resigned as CEO of financial services firm Wirecard AG last week, was arrested by police in Munich, Germany, on Monday and released after posting €5m ($5.7m) bail.…

We’re not buying the idea it could buy Virtzilla, but selling a stake could work Dell and VMware are talking to finance folks about some sort of transaction, according to The Wall Street Journal.…

Seems sensible to assume it's going after India's new electronics investment incentives Electronics manufacturer to the stars Foxconn has signaled it will make further investments in India.…

It's frolicking with the Sinclair C5 at a puffed-up press conference in the sky In yet another reminder that the heady days of the noughties are but a distant memory, the classic Segway is set to officially end production after a near-twenty-year run.…

Sorry, I was busy, came the reply There was a time when there was a certain amount of pride in the fact internet engineers all knew one another, that systems critical to the internet’s functioning were run in the back of other facilities, and a single person was often in charge of whole services.…

Redmond knows a thing or two about tackling malware – amirite, Windows fans?! Microsoft has extended its antivirus package for servers – better known the Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for servers suite – to Linux as a general availability release.…

The Lord of the iThings will see you now WWDC Apple on Monday promised to reform its app review process this summer with a way to appeal app rejections and to challenge rule legitimacy, and to allow bug fixes through without review.…

Middle Kingdom completes its third-generation positioning system The delayed launch of China's 35th and final third-gen Beidou satellite today gives the Middle Kingdom a completed advanced global positioning network.…

A plan to inject life into the flagging PC industry? Meet the Predator Shot: putting the spin in spinach Carving a living in the cut-throat world of PCs sales is a tough business, just ask Taiwanese vendor Acer. Perhaps in the hope of injecting more fizz into its upcoming line-up, the business has rolled out an energy drink alongside a slew of brand spanking new computers.…

Clicking through Protected View is why we can't have nice things, so here's 'Safe Documents' Feeling a bit uncertain about things? Never fear, kind old Microsoft has made Safe Documents generally available (assuming you're a Microsoft 365 E5 subscriber).…

Would you like it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Teradata, the enterprise data warehouse provider with customers including HSBC and Unilever, has pushed out a list of cloud platform integrations and enhancements in an effort to keep up with cloud-native rivals.…

Appeal starts over Cardiff creepycam deployment Automated facial recognition (AFR) use by British police forces breaches human rights laws, according to lawyers for a man whose face was scanned by the creepycam tech in Cardiff.…

Kubernetes? 'A huge set of workloads get excluded' by it, says HashiCorp HashiCorp unveiled the widely anticipated HashiCorp Cloud Platform at its virtual HashiConf event under way this week, as well as updates to all its core products.…

'Ezmeral' brand added to container platform and machine learning stuff HPE is going public with a series of enhancements for its GreenLake Cloud Services, an on-premises managed computing service.…

Is it a real computer yet? WWDC The iPad initially struggled to shake the perception that it was merely a bigger iPhone, good for bedtime Netflix binges and not much else. It was only later, with the development of a peripheral ecosystem and the release of iPadOS, that the image started to shift.…

Just look at the time. Looks like I can't attend the family meeting about our calendar! Microsoft's Teams is getting personal in a preview of the Slack-for-suits platform that is aimed more at consumers than companies.…

That's 32 more than you... when it ships... next year Ampere said today it hopes to bring a 128-core data-center-grade microprocessor to the market next year.…

That AI-powered product and price recommendation engine? Useless now Machine learning models built for doing business prior to the COVID-19 pandemic will no longer be valid as economies emerge from lockdowns, presenting companies with new challenges in machine learning and enterprise data management, according to Gartner.…

Plus: SLS boosters arrive at Kennedy, Rocket Lab to go back-to-back with NRO In brief Lawmakers have signed off on a deal that will permit American companies to launch from a British spaceport, although the UK has yet to build one.…

Facebook laps up the leftovers Mixer has been consigned to the Microsoft graveyard to rot alongside other abortive stablemates like Windows Phone, Zune and Clippy to name just a few.…

Antisocial network floods registrars with unjustified data requests Facebook is accused of attempting to bypass Europe's hard-line privacy legislation and access personal data on domain name holders through an obscure policy process with the Whois registry.…

PANDA architecture said to be ideal microservices-muncher Arm server vendor Kaleao, which The Register covered way back in 2016, has re-emerged with a new name – Bamboo – and what it reckons is a fresh approach to building servers.…

Content tagging – and I'll give the tech away for free, says Safecast Global chief Interview A British firm says it has developed a tech proposal for preventing children from watching unsuitable internet videos – and doing so without needing age verification or other privacy-busting features.…