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Only been out 2 years Seoul's High Court has sentenced Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-Yong to 30 months behind bars for bribery, concealment of criminal proceeds, and embezzlement.…

That technical issue the department said it had fixed? It didn't exist Estimates detailing the loss of criminal evidence records by the UK Home Office and the police show the figure leaping from 150,000 to 400,000.…

Also: Departures from Redmond, going big with Surface Hub, and celebrating third place In brief  Build 21292 of Windows 10 arrived for Dev Channel Windows Insiders last week and while there was little of interest, the team was delighted to note that it had continued to work on the x64 emulation in the Arm edition of the

Here's some news from CNN for the 30 million tourists visiting Venice, Italy each year: They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city. What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time. And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world.... Be

Zoom is great for status update meetings, says big cheese, but as for inspiring a workforce... To some of us, the work-from-home revolution provides a welcome opportunity to spend time with family members, even though working and studying shoulder-to-shoulder might not be a frictionless process.…

Plus: Google trains 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model, popular software used for job screenings scraps facial-recognition feature In brief  Just days before President Trump is due to leave office, the White House created its National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which will sit under the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

Pat Gelsinger returning to Chipzilla as CEO is another extraordinary stroke of luck for the company Column  Intel has been many things. It has been a struggling startup, surfing the sudden successes and near-death experiences of 1970s Silicon Valley. It's been a relentless powerhouse, ruthlessly exploiting its dominance as personal computing rode Moore's Law to commercial and social revolution. Now it's in danger of seeing its supremacy crumble as rivals grab market

"I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated user generated content on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways..." writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. And then he shares "a bit of history": Back in 1985 when I launched my "Stargate" experiment to broadcast Usenet Netnews over the broadcast television vertical blanking interval of national "Superstation WTBS," I decided that the project would only carry mode

Oh good, you fixed it. Now, if you could just put your head on that plate... Who, Me?  Beware the perils of being too helpful as we kick the working week off with a Who, Me? starring both DNS and the need of management to put someone's – anyone's – head on a spike.…

Plus: Watch out for NTFS-corrupting folder, Mimecast hack, and more In brief  Last week ended with news that the venerable infosec mailing list Bugtraq was being shutdown at the end of the month.…

CNN reports: According to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases in the United States, there have been at least 23,754,315 cases of coronavirus in the U.S., and at least 395,785 deaths. On Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 198,218 new cases and 3,286 new deaths... On Friday, the CDC said new more contagious variants of the coronavirus will likely accelerate the spread of the virus and that means the US must double down on efforts to protect people. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates the co

CNN reports: A 70-foot rocket, riding beneath the wing of a retrofitted Boeing 747 aircraft, detached from the plane and fired itself into Earth's orbit on Sunday — marking the first successful launch for the California-based rocket startup Virgin Orbit. Virgin Orbit's 747, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, took off from California around 10:30 am PT with the rocket, called LauncherOne, nestled beneath the plane's left wing. The aircraft flew out over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was releas

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology. Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon fo

CNN reports: Twitter on Sunday temporarily suspended the account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeated violations of new rules the social media platform put in place following the violent U.S. Capitol riot earlier this month, a company spokesperson told CNN. "The account referenced has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy," the spokesperson said. As a result, the congresswoman will be locked out of her account for 12 hours. CNN also notes th

"The Trump administration notified Huawei suppliers, including chipmaker Intel, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications," Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter: One of the sources said eight licenses were yanked from four companies. Japanese flash memory chip maker Kioxia Corp had at least one license revoked, two of the sources said. The company, formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corp, could not im

The state of Florida's former Covid-19 data manager was apparently arrested today. After her firing in May of 2020, Rebekah Jones had become a critic of the state's publicly-available information, even setting up her own online dashboard of Covid-19 case data. The state suspected her of being the person who'd illegally accessed the state's emergency alert health system in December to urge Health Department employees to speak up about the coronavirus, and state police obtained a warrant for a r

The New York Times reports on an "exodus" of tech workers from the San Francisco Bay Area, where "Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn't like you" — and your commute could be over an hour. The biggest tech companies aren't going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring... But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27% from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7%, a number not seen in a decade.

Nine days ago America set a record: nearly 290,000 new Covid-19 cases within 24 hours. according to figures from Johns Hopkins University. Four days later, anti-mask protesters in Oregon filmed their confrontation with employees at a Trader Joe's grocery store who wouldn't let them enter the store unless they were wearing a mask. Their 8-minute video has since been viewed over 325,000 times. The Oregonian newspaper reports: As other masked customers enter the store, the manager repeats that t

"SpaceX's attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers," reports Gizmodo: Starlink satellites with an anti-reflective coating are half as bright as the standard version, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journal. It's an improvement, but still not good enough, according to the team, led by astronomer Takashi Horiuchi from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. These "DarkSats," as they're called, a

"After experiencing technical difficulties Friday, the Signal messaging app appears to be back up and running," reports the Verge: The company tweeted Saturday night that it was "back," although added that some users may still see error messages in their chats. The company didn't explain what caused the outage. For users still seeing error messages in their chats — which the company said was a "side effect" of the outage that began around 11:30AM ET Friday — Signal tweeted that t

TechRepublic shares a remarkable calculation by the not-for-profit IT leadership group the Consortium for Information and Software Security: CISQ's 2020 report, The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S., looked at the financial impact of software projects that went awry or otherwise ended up leaving companies with a larger bill by creating additional headaches for them. According to the consortium, unsuccessful IT projects alone cost U.S. companies $260 billion in 2020, while software probl

The Washington Post reports: Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively. The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions acros

Long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher weighs in on the de-platforming of U.S. president Trump, arguing Trump "was only following the rules set for him and it was entirely the fault of the tech companies for giving him the kind of latitude that allowed him to go that far." Like a parent who gives a child endless bowls of sugar and then wonders why their kid is batshit crazy, tech has pretended to be obtuse to the consequences of their products and the choices that have been made

Not a machine-generated headline, we swear Facebook and its Irish subsidiary on Thursday announced the filing of a lawsuit in Portugal against two people for allegedly scraping Facebook profile data and other browser info using malicious Chrome extensions.…

Idiot faces up to a year in the cooler after FBI tracks him down from SD card found in prang wreckage A man in California faces up to a year behind bars and a fine for crashing his drone into a police helicopter, forcing an emergency landing.…

While the Touch Bar is to be banished Renowned Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo reckons the iGiant is bringing back its beloved MagSafe charging standard with the next generation of MacBook Pro machines.…

We'll drink to that The compatibility layer for Windows applications, Wine, has celebrated the start of 2021 in the traditional manner – with a substantial update.…

Parting shot by Trump – but 'bi-partisan' push against China will continue, says analyst With five days left before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration has delivered a parting blow to China's tech industry by designating Xiaomi as a "Communist Chinese military company" and placing it on a financial ban list.…

A blue day on the Red Planet Hot on the heels of a mission extension comes news that scientists have now given up on attempts to persuade the NASA InSight lander's "mole" to burrow more than a few centimetres beneath the Martian surface.…

Install base explodes following WhatsApp 'privacy' update, Musk endorsement Updated  Signal is experiencing a partial outage as tens of millions of netizens flood the free secure messaging service.…

Commercial involvement in open source is essential, says CMS boss Interview  Content management system Drupal is 20 years old, prompting its founder to talk to about its evolving role, why it shifted from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release, and concerns about JavaScript bloat causing issues for those with poor connectivity.…

Epic by name, epic (lawsuit) by nature Epic Games intends to file a competition lawsuit against Google in the UK as part of the ongoing Fortnite-kicked-off-platforms saga, according to documents lodged with the Competition Appeal Tribunal.…

Uphill battle shifting business applications to the cloud laid bare SAP today reported preliminary results for 2020, showing the German enterprise software vendor serving up flat revenue and slightly improving profits, along with a worryingly notable drop in licence sales.…

Spoiler: It's quantum. And who knew? 5G isn't for the peasants Dell's global chief technology officer, John Roese, shared his thoughts on where technology will go in 2021 at a roundtable event this week. Short version? Anywhere it likes – so long as it's on Dell kit.…

Hybrid? Multi-cloud? Big Blue has a consultant for that IBM is to snaffle San Jose-based consulting outfit Taos as it seeks to bolster its cloud biz.…

This has got to be the Who Me? story of all time... An "error" in a "standard housekeeping process" on the UK’s controversial Police National Computer (PNC) database has led to the deletion of more than 150,000 DNA, fingerprint and other records, the Home Office has confirmed.…

'Long and complex' saga shifts into next phase as new heroes enter battlefield Games Workshop, the fantasy model maker and table-top wargames retailer, has ingested a dose of reality as it delays its high-risk ERP project and appoints a new integrator.…

But maybe Foveros finest should have been a Duplo kit... *cough* 7nm We can exclusively reveal that any grumbles regarding Intel's Lakefield chippery might be down to it being made out of plastic Lego parts. At least, that's if the marketing kit is anything to go by.…

Have you finished that sandwich? If not, it’s classified as contraband Something for the Weekend, Sir?  What was the big story of 2020? With the luxury of two weeks' hindsight, I think we can all agree: it was, of course, the year autonomous vehicles failed to go mainstream again.…

Record low onshore work as pandemic teaches clients they need not fear off-site workers Infosys has revealed “dramatic growth” of its workforce in Mexico and Canada, which are being used as “near-shore bases” for its US operations despite the company last year announcing 12,000 hires in the Land of the Free.…

IT staff can be so... spiky sometimes On Call  A seemingly innocent uplighter looms large in today's On Call tale of NetWare nefariousness in which a reader takes observability to new lengths.…

Anti-money-laundering agency says it mis-interpreted info, leading to allegations of unexplained $1.8bn transfer to Australia The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), a government agency tasked with detecting and preventing financial crimes, has admitted that software errors led it to allege that the Vatican had inexplicably shipped AU$2.3bn to Australia.…

Extreme Networks flings flaky Flash-free fix and Cisco all-but-sighs as it reminds users to upgrade Extreme Networks has updated the WiNG-Man software that left some users unable to manage their networks with a GUI after it failed to deliver an upgrade before Adobe’s Flash plug-in reached end of life.…

Outlines $25bn of capex plus plans to expand in China Taiwan’s silicon manufacturing titan TSMC has revealed it should be ready to produce chips using a three-nanometre process in 2022.…

Academic also charged with hiding foreign assets, false tax statements An MIT professor has been arrested and charged with federal grant fraud and failing to disclose contacts with the Chinese government, the US Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts said on Thursday.…

Switchzilla's enlarged offer accepted after smaller biz tried to stall acquisition Cisco’s merger with Acacia Communications is set to go ahead after the Silicon Valley giant raised its offer to $4.5bn, an increase of nearly $2bn or 64 per cent.…

Firmware updates aren't enough to tackle worn-out memory The US Department of Transport has recommended Tesla recall 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles after an investigation found worn-out NAND flash memory can cause the cars’ rearview cameras to fail.…

The Reg speaks to Stanford boffin behind decade-long push for SI prefix In 2010, Austin Sendek, then a physics student at UC Davis, created a petition seeking recognition for prefix "hella-" as an official International System of Units (SI) measurement representing 1027.…

One more thing to, er, look forward to when the pandemic ends Around the world, office blocks sit empty. Official government guidance says if you can work remotely, you should. However, it seems like nobody told Logitech, which just expanded its B2B video conferencing portfolio with three new devices aimed at the workplace.…

Great to know they 'remain committed' SAP is trying to tease the market with new features headed to the core database underpinning its enterprise applications.…

Just your Stylus? Pen support moves to latest flagship models It's flagship Thursday at Samsung, which for the better part of a decade has squatted over the premium sector of the Android market.…

You know that update thing? JFDI Out of the top five vulnerabilities for 2020 three dated back to 2019 or earlier, according to infosec firm Tenable's annual threat report.…

A combined total of $575m deleted... and counting A couple of news items about what we'll call "cryptidiots" wriggled into the mainstream media this week, momentarily shedding light on the important topics of e-waste and password hygiene for the masses.…

Join us later this month to see what modern data management looks like Webcast  There’s been a lot of talk about resilience lately. But while it’s one thing working through mid-pandemic self-care and wellness prescriptions for the individual, what does resilience mean when it comes to your company and its data?…

It's been sloshing around the International Space Station for a while SpaceX hit another milestone overnight with the return of the upgraded cargo Dragon capsule from the International Space Station (ISS), which splashed down off the Florida coast.…

Security, lack of suitable hardware for testing makes full 32-bit support hard Debian 11, codenamed "Bullseye", has entered the first freeze stage, meaning no large or disruptive changes, or new package transitions (merging, splitting, renaming or removing) are allowed. The 32-bit i386 architecture is part of the release but may not be in Debian 12, codenamed "Bookworm".…

All that counter-China stuff costs a pretty penny, y'know The Ministry of Defence's multibillion budget overrun has been caused in part because of its spending splurge on flashy new "cyber" capabilities, according to the National Audit Office.…

The world's favourite language has complex ecosystem in which build tools are now fundamental The 2020 State of JavaScript report, a survey of over 23,000 developers globally, has revealed growing use of WebPack and Jest, continuing high use of React, Express and TypeScript, and that top of the wishlist is no longer better browser compatibility, but rather static typing.…

Meanwhile, hello Epson drivers? The Raspberry Pi OS plunged another knife into the dark heart of Flash this week while adding drivers for Epson printers.…

Toxic wastewater and resource hungry - wafer-fabbing's a mucky biz South Korean memory biz SK Hynix has issued a $1 billion “green bond” with the funds intended for pay for projects designed to reduce the ecological impact of its manufacturing activities.…

Before you choke on your tea, authority likely won't splash anything near that Eight resellers have been awarded places on a £5bn framework contract led by the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Northamptonshire, a county in England's East Midlands.…

This one is not just written in Rust – its design is based on Rust features Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as "an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management."…

Accused pinched them from employer, sold them on eBay, prosecutors claim A 23-year-old Gloucester IT worker is to stand trial after allegedly stealing more than £30,000 worth of Amazon vouchers before selling them on eBay.…

Juicier payoff for those who do, but employees fear process will become compulsory if numbers aren't met Exclusive  Fujitsu is looking for hundreds of volunteers in its UK Delivery organisation to leave with an enhanced payoff, though only employees with at least five years' service can currently apply. At the same time it is running a small redundancy process in other areas of the business where contracts are running off.…

Working from home means lots of us might as well be offshore now, suggests CEO Wipro has both celebrated customers’ use of offshoring for its positive impact on its finances and suggested the concept may have been made obsolete by the pandemic-induced surge in working from home.…