Don't know what a mother-of-pearl coated USB Flash drive should be "trendy", but manufacturer Transcend reckons it is. The slimline - 4.8mm thick - drive has 2GB of storage on board and includes software to let you use your apps on someone else's computer without leaving any files behind. All well and good, but will Transcend still be selling it in 30 years' time?
From the department of "I'm not dead yet" comes news of a Slackware 15 beta release, nearly five years after the distribution last saw a major update.
Created by Patrick Volkerding (who still lays claim to the title Benevolent Dictator For Life), the current release version arrived in the form of 2016's 14.2.
While there have been some rumblings over the years, the lengthy absence of a full new version hinted that all might not be well with one of the oldest Linux distributions and its band of contributors.
Microsoft has had a busy six months if its latest biannual digital trust report is anything to go by as law enforcement agencies crept closer to making 25,000 legal requests.
Requests for consumer data reached 24,798 during the second half of 2020, up from 24,093 during the previous six-month period, and quite a jump from the 21,781 for the same period in 2019.
"Non-content data" requests, which require a subpoena (or local equivalent), accounted for just over half of disclosures and were slightly down on the same period in 2019. Microsoft rejected 25.81 per cent of requests in the last six months of 2020, up on the 20.14 per cent of the same period in 2019.
Each year nearly 250,000 people flock to the sprawling Messe Berlin for IFA, one of the world's biggest tech consumer trade shows, to peruse the stands and discuss all things laptops, phones, and... fridges.
At least they used to. Like most events, IFA has been acutely affected by the pandemic, which has disrupted international travel and resulted in the imposition of social distancing rules by governments across the world.
Although IFA organisers were not forced to cancel the 2020 edition, as was the case with the GSMA's Mobile World Congress, they did have to scale back the event massively. Instead, it ran in just four halls of the massive exhibition centre, with attendance capped at just 1,000.
A luxury desk designed based on what Brits "want to see" in their home office setup is not sure what it wants to be.
Games room specialist Liberty Games says it undertook research to discover UK remote workers' ideal desk and whipped up a concept that "meets all your working-from-home needs."
As technical director Stuart Kerr explained: "With the shift to working from home, we saw an opportunity to create a desk concept that would meet the needs of British home workers. We wanted to make sure we included some fun features in the desk... to ensure people were still making time for themselves. I think the sleek and modern aesthetic of the desk and the cool features make this desk one of a kind."
Five people were arrested in Hong Kong this week for selling electronic question banks for primary schools online. Hong Kong Customs detected the operation and seized over 59,000 suspect teaching materials.
The agency was tipped off by copyright owners and a big data analytics team got to work. Hong Kong Customs targeted websites and social media and after an investigation raided four residential premises and one tutoring centre.
One man and four women were arrested. Seized material included the electronic files of Chinese, English, Mathematics, and General Studies question banks as well as five sets of computers, four tablets, a number of USB flash drives, seven mobile phones, and various teaching materials.
Australian federal court sent a message to Big Tech about its willingness to act on privacy violations when it ruled today that Google had "partially" misled consumers about collecting mobile phone personal location data.
For Google to not collect a device's location data, the user needed to let their wishes be known in both the "Location History" and the "Web & App Activity" setting segments. In its case, which it first brought against the web search giant in July 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACC) had argued that Google did not adequately publicise the secondary setting requirement.
The court ruling handed down revealed that when an August 2018 Associated Press article challenged Google's support page assertion that "With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored," Google called an emergency meeting referred to internally as the "Oh Shit" meeting.
Vendors should only be allowed to go "cloud-native" once, no matter how many times they try to pull off the publicity trick. We can decide later how we'll police this house rule – electrical clamps to the nodes, anyone? – but for now let's look a recent suspect: Informatica.
At its annual shindig this week, held online like 2020's affair because of COVID-19, the 28-year-old data integration vendor launched its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). The accompanying guff says it is "micro-services based and API-driven" and able to scale with "elastic and serverless processing."
"The IDMC takes cloud-native to the next level, offering all services in a single cloud-native platform for data integration, app and API integration and data management," it said.
A federal judge in Texas has allowed Apple a limited retrial [PDF] in its battle with PanOptis, which stung the iPhone maker for $506m in damages over claims it infringed the company's 4G LTE patents.
Although Apple was not permitted to relitigate the question of its liability, the retrial will determine how much it's on the hook for.
This decision has likely proven bittersweet for Apple, which had been looking for a broader retrial, arguing the jury was not instructed about PanOptis's obligation to license its patents to the company on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis.
Something for the Weekend, Sir? Gizza job*. I can do that. Go on, giz it.
The time has come, I say, to apply for many things. A job as a shoemaker? Shipbuilder? Fabricant of sealing wax? Cabbages? Kings?
Every now and again, a freelancer feels the urge to seek solace in full-time employment. I am no exception. Even long-term contractors, who experience the daily working life of an employee in all but name, get fed up with endless podiatric scratching and muse the possibilities of professional subservience.
A legal battle between a company which says Facebook Live infringes one of its patents and the anti-social networking biz is currently playing out in the High Court of England and Wales as part of a long-running multinational legal battle.
Voxer, which The Register briefly covered in 2011 when it launched its “walkie-talkie for the modern age”, is locked in a courtroom skirmish with Facebook over a patent for its live streaming video technology.
The case is notable because Facebook claims Voxer infringed its intellectual property and wants Voxer’s patent declared invalid. For its part, Voxer wants to alter its disputed IP, EU patent 2,393,259, and then have the High Court declare that it doesn’t infringe any of Facebook’s patents for its Live technology.
On Call Welcome back to On Call and a timely reminder that no matter how careful and clear you think your instructions are, a user will somehow always misunderstand.
Our tale, from a reader Regomised as "Keith", takes us back to simpler times: the era of the 5.25-inch floppy disk and software updates mailed out to users rather than flung out at inconvenient times by an unforgiving internet.
Keith recalled a call from a customer complaining that the update of the company's proprietary software had not worked.
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