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As a stunned world struggles today to come to grips with the global economic catastrophe that is the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it seems that some of the investment bank's employees aren't quite as bothered as they should be:
Childish, yes, but nicely done. We're sure the couple in question will be warmly embraced down at Barclays, should the bank sweep up the remains of Lehman Bros. ®
In brief Contract lawyers are increasingly working under the thumb of facial-recognition software as they continue to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The technology is hit-and-miss, judging from interviews with more than two dozen American attorneys conducted by the Washington Post. To make sure these contract lawyers, who take on short term-gigs, are working as expected and are handling sensitive information appropriately, their every move is followed by webcams.
The monitoring software is mandated by their employers, and is used to control access to the legal documents that need to be reviewed. If the system thinks someone else is looking at the files on the computer, or equipment has been set up to record information from the screen, the user is booted out.
A federal judge dismissed the proposed class-action lawsuit accusing retail brokerage biz Robinhood of colluding with trading firm Citadel Securities to prevent people from purchasing GameStop and other so-called meme stocks, earlier this year.
Share prices from the likes of GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings, BlackBerry, and Nokia Oyj skyrocketed in January. Internet traders swiping on the Robinhood app inflated prices in an attempt to push back on Wall Street finance houses shorting the securities.
Robinhood users started furiously buying the stocks and as the prices climbed higher and higher, the company suddenly blocked customers from purchasing more shares on its app. Users were only allowed to sell and as a result, GameStop and other companies' market value began to plummet.
Most modern chat systems are entirely proprietary: proprietary clients, talking proprietary protocols to proprietary servers. There's no need for this: there are free open standards for one-to-one and one-to-many comms for precisely this sort of system, and some venerable clients are still a lot more capable than you might remember.
But as it is today, if you need to be on more than one chat system at once, the official way is to install their client app, meaning multiple clients – or at best, multiple tabs open in your web browsers. Most of these "clients" are JavaScript web apps anyway, running inside Electron – an embedded Chromium-based single-site browser. Which is fine, but Chrome is famously memory-hungry.
There is a brute-force way round this: have one app that embeds lots of separate Electron instances in tabs. There are a few of these around – first came RamBox, followed by Franz. Both use the "freemium" model: there's a completely functional free client, plus subscriptions for extra features. If you prefer to avoid such things, both services have no-cost forks: Ferdi from Franz and Hamsket from RamBox. A newer rival still is Station.
After cancelling its contentious Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud contract solicitation in July, the US Department of Defense (DoD) promised a followup request for proposals to provide cloud services for national defense under a less catchy acronym, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).
The Pentagon at the time said its $10bn JEDI cloud contract – the award of which to Microsoft triggered a bitter legal dispute and accusations of political favoritism by spurned contender Amazon – no longer met its needs. But it added that its JWCC solicitation would be "a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract" and assured both Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) that it would seek proposals from the two firms because each could meet its needs.
The DoD went further still, offering hope of recurring defense revenue to less successful cloud firms. It teased that it "will immediately engage with industry and continue its market research to determine whether any other US-based hyperscale [cloud service providers] can also meet the DoD’s requirements."
Mediatek rolled out what could be the first chip based on the Armv9, which is the ARM's first architectural upgrade in a decade.
The Dimensity 9000 is, as Mediatek company's CEO Rick Tsai previously stated, the company's "entry in the flagship segment." The chip is also the company's first aimed at pricey smartphones.
Mediatek's chips are seen mostly in low- to mid-range Android smartphones. The Dimensity 9000 will compete in top-line smartphones, meaning customers in the high-end market may have more options outside Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 888 chips. Qualcomm is announcing a new flagship chip by year end.
Windows 11 has continued to notch up known issues as Microsoft admitted to problems in the Intel Smart Sound department and Microsoft Installer following a security update.
The former turned up earlier this week, when Microsoft realised that "certain versions" of drivers for Intel Smart Sound Technology (SST) could tip Windows 11 into a blue screen (of death). The driver involved is IntcAudioBus.sys and file versions 10.29.0.5152 and earlier or 10.30.0.5152 and earlier are affected.
The workaround is, unsurprisingly, to get an updated driver from one's OEM. 10.30.00.5714 and later or 10.29.00.5714 and later should do it, according to Microsoft. Slightly confusingly, "for addressing this issue, 10.30.x versions are not newer than 10.29.x versions." The key bit is the last of the version number.
Workday has swallowed vendor management SaaS type VNDLY for over half a billion dollars, just as 9 per cent of the company's value was wiped off after moderately positive financial results failed to impress investors.
The US-based business application company, which specialises in finance and HR, posted calendar third-quarter revenues of $1.33bn, up 20 per cent from the same quarter last year. Subscription revenue was $1.17bn, an increase of 21 per cent over the same period.
Meanwhile, it turned in an operating income of $23.9m, a turnaround from last year's third-quarter operating loss of $14.1m.
Reg Reader Survey Our recent survey into how we go about introducing new systems threw up a set of responses that were positively multifarious. Who’d have thought that there could be so many approaches to putting new stuff in? Thank-you to everyone who participated. Now let's take a gander at the results.
Marketing strategies have taken an interesting turn for Huawei this week as it launched a wireless noise-cancelling earbud in the Chinese market that is designed to look like a lipstick.
The Chinese tech giant announced the Huawei FreeBuds Lipstick last month, hawking it as combining "luxury design with cutting-edge technology." The company said the gold-accented cylinder was designed by a multinational crew from the fashion, automotive and digital industries.
The product itself has AI-adaptive audio technology pitched as intelligently optimizing sound quality for the price of ¥1,699 ($266, £198, €235). Other aspects of the earbuds include an ergonomic shape designed through extensive stress testing, support for EMUI 12+ device OS, proximity Bluetooth pairing, dual device connections, on-ear touch controls via the Huawei AI Life App, up to 48 kHz HD recording, and up to 22 hours of music playback when the noise cancellation feature is disengaged.
French cloud hosting outfit Scaleway is to depart the EU's data sovereignty project, Gaia-X, with CEO Yann Lechelle worrying that what began with splendid ideals is getting increasingly mired in the status quo.
Scaleway's announcement came as the second Gaia-X summit got under way, titled "Here to deliver", and amid rumblings from members over the sponsorship of the gathering by the likes of Huawei and Alibaba as well as the involvement of US cloud giants such as Microsoft and AWS.
"Scaleway will not renew its GAIA-X membership," the company said. "The objectives of the Association, while initially laudable, are being sidetracked and slowed down by a polarization paradox which is reinforcing the status quo, that is an unbalanced playing field."
The UK government is advising schools in England to press pause before signing up to a three-year licensing agreement with Education Software Solutions (ESS).
As we revealed earlier this week, ESS – formerly owned by Capita but sold to Montagu Private Equity last December for £400m and now in the same group as ParentPay – told clients it is making changes to its SIMS (schools information management systems) Annual Entitlement Plan by "extending" the agreement to 36 months.
Some school techies were outraged by this and leapt on the Edugeek forum to discuss it. Now the Department for Education has stepped in to advise.
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