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'Aggressive oversight' needed, Congress urged A prominent senator has called for “aggressive oversight” into the sale of the NSO Group's hacking-and-spying tools to police forces in America.…

You have been weighed, measured, you have been found wanting Oracle has tacked a suite of cloud analytics tools onto its human resources platform with the aim of helping HR teams and line-of-business leaders do some number crunching without outside help.…

And just the thing for remote work, which was so not a thing when these were designed Intel has announced the tenth generation of its Core vPro microprocessors, the silicon it aims at business desktops – and now says the chips are also just the thing for remote working.…

What was Monthly is to be Current as Insider is banished in favour of Beta Microsoft has wielded the rebrandogun once more and directed fire at the update channels of its Microsoft 365 productivity cash cow, as well as slipping in a little extra something to "reduce the burden on IT".…

Claims consent was neither informed, nor specific, nor free – but Google says it cannot identify a user from the ID Privacy pressure group Noyb has filed a legal complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming the Android Advertising ID on every Android device is "personal data" as defined by the EU's GDPR and that this data is illegally processed.…

Ooh... Aah... Just a little fix Déjà vu was in the air last night as Microsoft has made yet another final tweak to the upcoming Windows 10 May 2020 Update while encouraging developers to get coding.…

Comms regulator Ofcom yet to rubberstamp proposals Broadband plumber Openreach will discontinue sales of copper-based products in more than 100 exchange areas across the UK, starting from June 2021, it said today. The move is part of Openreach's effort to discontinue the legacy analogue network in favour of full fibre connectivity.…

Assault on TOP500-listed machine may have hit Euro HPC too, warn sysops One of Britain's most powerful academic supercomputers has fallen victim to a "security exploitation" of its login nodes, forcing the rewriting of all user passwords and SSH keys.…

Release hits the waves, beats the competition to full OCI-compliance Harbor, the open-source container image registry, has reached version 2.0, becoming the first open-source registry to fully support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification.…

Bombarding audiences with quick-fire telly spots won't cut the mustard Sky Broadband has been publicly punished for peddling porky pies after running telly ads that made it out to be the UK's cheapest superfast home internet connection.…

Can we have 'Shaddap You Face'* next? We've seen it countless times on the news during the lockdown coverage – Brits getting happy-clappy for our beleaguered National Health Service once a week among other forms of forced fun for the cameras.…

New Edition has those all-important Google services, but dated chippery and no 5G future-proofing Huawei has a new phone! Actually, no. That's not exactly true. The P30 Pro New Edition is almost a carbon copy of last year's flagship blower with a few minor changes.…

Gartner slashes pre-pandemic spending forecast COVID-19 and its resulting economic impact has wiped a whopping $500bn off Gartner's pre-pandemic IT spending forecasts for 2020.…

Ensuring the US lights keep burning aboard the ISS... just in case Great news, everyone (if you're Russian): NASA is hedging its bets on Commercial Crew and SpaceX by spanking a few more million dollars on another Soyuz seat this autumn.…

How about a little stimulus... for anyone-but-China research? A concerted push for the US government to fund research into open 5G technologies has gained additional momentum – with a bipartisan letter from 38 lawmakers to the leaders of the House of Representatives urging them to support the Open RAN initiative.…

I, for one, welcome our robot replacements... Wait, no I don't Businesses should revisit automation with renewed vigour as the COVID-19 crisis abates, according to Forrester.…

Isn't it cute when a coffee machine addresses you in the first person? Bork!Bork!Bork! A vending machine appears to have gained sentience and is pleading for help (or an operating system update) in today's submission for the The Register's hall of shame.…

Revenue's tumbling, but that's also typical of a move to the fluffy stuff Analysis When Oliver Ratzesberger was named as Teradata CEO and president in January last year, it seemed he was made for the job. Not only did he have a background in engineering and software, but thanks to seven years leading analytics at eBay, he was also well versed in the challenges of big data. By December, he was gone.…

CTO Mark Potter to depart as re-shuffle connects boss Neri to product peeps HPE has lost its second key executive in just over a week, as the company announces a reshuffle to better deal with a "post COVID-19 world".…

Now is not the time for Hollywood 'zoom and enhance' fantasies Be wary of medical scans enhanced by AI algorithms: the software is prone to making tiny errors that could lead to incorrect diagnoses, a study has warned.…

In tech and everything else needed in a post-COVID-19 economy Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modhi has signalled that the nation intends to become self-reliant in as many industries as possible and other officials have already started saying that includes tech.…

Oh OK, so now we know who to blame for all this mess on Earth Potentially helping to answer the question of how did we all get here, scientists have found evidence of ideal conditions for the formation of microbial life on Earth – sodium-rich, alkaline fluids present in the early Solar System.…

CEO says it’s to stop fraud and the public seems to be on his side Gaming hardware vendor Razer has offered up to five million free face masks to Singaporeans – if they sign up for its payment system.…

Nothing too scary. Plus updates from SAP, Adobe, VMware The May edition of Patch Tuesday landed this week. And there are scores of security fixes to install.…

‘This workload will self-destruct in 30 seconds’ - now with variable pricing Microsoft’s Azure cloud has started to offer Spot VMs, the pay-what-you’re-willing-to cloudy servers that hyperscalers use to sell off their unused capacity.…

Sure, they should have got more, but let’s not get greedy here The lawyers who successfully sued Facebook for breaking Illinois’s biometric privacy law on behalf of citizens in the US state have hailed the “superb result” that will see them receive a quarter of the settlement.…

As opposition MP criticises slow and incomplete source code release, saying 'Public health messaging shouldn't require citizens to follow GitHub forks' The legislation underpinning Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app makes it possible to demand that visitors to private homes install the app before entry.…

Experienced ‘degraded performance’ earlier in the day, now seems to just be TITSUP Updated Slack is down – in the middle of a pandemic during which millions are working from home and reliant on collaboration tools.…

Social isolation, meet real estate, hardware, HR savings Twitter on Tuesday said employees who are able to work from home can "continue to do so forever," a policy change that suggests the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, and resulting stay-at-home orders, may have a lasting impact on corporate work practices.…

What was really behind Tesla CEO's reopening of factory while daring cops to arrest him? On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dared the authorities in Alameda, where his factory is based, to arrest him for breaking coronavirus lockdown edicts by restarting production in the California county. We're still waiting for the cuffs to come out.…

Free-as-in-speech software is wildly popular – keeping libraries, components up to date is not Ninety-one per cent of commercial applications include outdated or abandoned open source components, underscoring the potential vulnerability of organizations using untended code, according to a software review.…

Here's how you might go about building an infrastructure for modern workloads Comment Data storage is one of the most complex areas of IT infrastructure, as it needs to fit in with a range of conflicting requirements. Storage architectures have to be fast enough to meet the demands of users and applications, but without breaking the budget. They must deliver enough capacity to meet ever growing volumes of data while being reliable.…

Take care what data you enter into apps, it may be stored insecurely Security researchers at Comparitech have reported that an estimated 24,000 Android apps are leaking user data because of misconfigured Firebase databases.…

Flagship killer at a lower cost, though €500+ isn't exactly budget Xiaomi has lifted the lid on the much-anticipated successor to 2018's Pocophone F1 flagship killer: the Poco F2 Pro. The handset, which starts at €500, packs Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragon 865 platform and a 64MP quad-camera setup.…

Now out of preview and optimised for 8 more domains The concept behind Kendra, the enterprise search service that Amazon Web Services made generally available today, is pretty simple.…

That discussion you were dreading has to happen sometime As part of the rebranding exercise that saw Office 365 morph into Microsoft 365, the Windows giant has unveiled its new Family Safety app. Kind of.…

Too lazy to type out Python? But not too tight to pay $20 a month? Kite will today launch a subscription-based coding assistant that tries to help programmers craft stuff quickly and efficiently.…

Didn't a soft drinks company try a similar stunt a few years ago? Microsoft has flung open the doors on its latest crack at Facebook-for-suits with a "New" Yammer.…

Also: China trumpets the return of its new capsule and Cygnus has left the station Roundup Welcome to your weekly reminder that space is both expensive and difficult in The Register's roundup of all things rockety.…

'An entire database can be in one rack' DataStax, the lead vendor behind open-source DBMS Apache Cassandra, is rolling out a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) version of its wares, while the Cassandra-emulating ScyllaDB has pushed out its own upgrade to compete with DynamoDB, the AWS-native version of the same database.…

'The pandemic hasn't changed these trends: it has accelerated them' Webcams – like toilet paper and disinfectant wipes – have become an increasingly scarce commodity since the start of the pandemic, with analysts at the NPD Group reporting an almost-threefold increase in sales for the first three weeks of March.…

Coronavirus focused minds on desktop kit, networking, security, cloud, Register reader survey finds Seven in ten IT pros and executives surveyed by The Register told us they, on average, maintained or increased their technology spending amid the coronavirus pandemic. Those polled also, overall, named Microsoft as their most valued vendor, followed by Zoom, Google, and Amazon Web Services.…

Bye-bye US, bonjour Brussels The Eclipse Foundation today unveiled plans to make itself a little more European with a jump into Brussels.…

And smiles as its tech services industries do swimmingly in Q1 Taiwan has let it be known it’s attracted a big new investment from Apple.…

We like finding non-Remond alternatives, but the free options make it tough for commercial operations SoftMaker's Office 2021 – a cross-platform office suite that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux – has hit public beta.…

Virtzilla prepares to re-open some offices next week for staff who are willing to leave home VMware has emerged as a player in coronavirus contact-tracing.…

Good luck fishing all that out of the sky Russian rocket tanks used to launch a radio telescope have broken up into 65 chunks, littering Earth’s orbit with debris.…

Infraspace Cloud encrypts, stores and protects to mitigate high-end risk for high-end apps Promo It feels like every article starts with something along the lines of "now we’re all working remotely" but, honestly, when the shoe fits...…

Eight weeks to turn ‘helping you enable remote work with Office 365 at this difficult time’ into cash Organisations that took up Microsoft’s offer of a free six-month Office 365 trial to help them enable remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic are about to see the other side of that offer.…

Cart, meet horse, and you can both worry about 180-day data retention India's government has released the protocol for using data gathered by its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app, weeks after its April 2nd release and after it was downloaded almost 100 million times.…