A New Zealand plimsoll emporium has apologised for inadvertently playing smut on its promo screens for nine hours over the weekend. The manager of Asics’ flagship kiwi store found the screen above the shop on Shortland Street, Auckland, playing smut films when he got into work at 10am on Sunday morning. He told the New Zealand Herald that he was “100 per cent sure” staff were not to blame…
A US firm is flogging facial-expression software to analyse job candidates’ performance in video interviews and make initial selections for companies including Unilever. The Marmite and Persil maker has previously used facial recognition software to analyse shoppers’ reactions to in-store displays of products, and is now turning to algorythms to help in choosing its workforce. Hirevue software claims to analyse facial expressions and language to select the best candidates….
Roundup As the faithful attempted to stir up excitement for this week’s hardware event, Microsoft has continued its efforts to ship the next version of Windows while also flinging out updates for Azure and SQL Server. Windows 10 May 2019 Update certified fresh by Microsoft There’s some good news for customers tempted to make the leap to Microsoft’s latest public release of Windows 10. The team has declared it…
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk braved the wind to give the faithful an update on the progress of the Starship and Super Heavy program from the company’s Boca Chica facility in Texas. Standing in front of the recently assembled Starship Mk 1, on the 11th anniversary of the first time the company managed to reach orbit, Musk reflected on the importance of that launch (“if that fourth launch had not…
A bank paid a rapacious reseller more than £40 for a two-metre Ethernet cable that cost just 32 pence at trade price or retailed for £4 on a popular online store, in the latest survey of UK margin mugging. The unnamed company actually coughed £42.32 for the cable, which represented a 12,347 per cent markup on the supplier’s cost, according to tech seller Probrand, which analysed £12m worth of…
We all like to think that we generally try to do the right thing. However, sometimes doing the right thing is not doing anything at all. It was all going so well for 59-year-old Billy Bob Hall, a resident of Weatherford, Texas. That is until he started worrying that he was “the subject of a warrant for a parole violation”, the local CBS news network reports. Poor old Billy…
Ohm my God Ampere boss … Renee James On Friday Oracle said it had invested $40m in Ampere Computing, a designer of 64-bit Arm server-class processors, run by Renée James, who coincidentally also holds a seat on Oracle’s board of directors. In a financial filing, Oracle said it made its investment in April, amounting to less than 20 per cent of the company’s outstanding shares, and had appointed one…
A programmer claims to have found a way to execute arbitrary code on recent-ish iPhones and iPads, paving the way for full-blown tethered jailbreaks. And, we’re told, it is impossible for Apple to block these shenanigans as it involves a vulnerability baked into the devices’ immutable Boot ROM. Specifically, the coder, who goes by the handle axi0mX, on Friday said they had built checkm8: “A permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit…
Online merchant fragrancedirect.co.uk has confirmed a miscreant broke into its systems and made off with a raft of customers’ personal data, including payment card details. The e-retailer, based in Macclesfield, England, wrote to punters this week to inform them of the digital burglary and the subsequent data leakage. “We recently discovered that some of our user data may have been compromised as a result of unauthorised access to our…
Financial specialist SS&C is buying a bunch of IBM’s risk algorithm assets as Big Blue continues to offload areas of the business it deems to be non-core. No price was given on the deal but given that it involves 350 staff, offices in 25 countries and 200 clients, it must be reasonable chunk of money that exchanged hands. Customers include banks, brokers, hedge and equity funds and asset managers….
Welcome to yet another El Reg security roundup. Off…
The US Federal Trade Commission has issued what looks…