John Lister

Using the average phone a year longer would have the same environmental impact as taking 636,000 cars off the road each year according to campaigners. It's a claim that's sparked calls to end the habit of manufacturers to produce a new model every ... year. The calls come in the run-up to a major climate change conference, but remains unclear what incentive gadget-makers have to respond. The 636,000 cars figure comes from the Public Interest Research Group, whose campaigns include giving consumers a right to repair devices. It told The Register that an average of 416,000 US cellphones are ditched ... (view more)

The United States is the third safest country for cyber crimes according to a newly-published study. However, the methodology means that might not reflect the actual risk to users. The figures come from Seon, a security company that specializes in ... automatically detecting online fraud. That makes the results (and the decision to publish them) a little surprising as such a company would have an obvious interest in suggesting cyber crime is a particularly big risk in larger, wealthier countries full of potential customers. Overall the results showed Denmark as the safest country, just ahead of ... (view more)

Intel says a shortage of computer chips could last until 2023. It's particularly bad news for video game players but could make it harder to buy affordable PCs. Pat Gelsinger, Intel's CEO, says the shortage is likely at its worst point now. He says ... the situation should improve throughout next year, mirroring his counterpart at AMD who believes supply should pick up in the second half of next year. However, Gelsinger believes it will be 2023 before production is back at a point where supply can meet demand. (Source: eurogamer.net ) Shutdown Means Slowdown The shortage is largely a result of ... (view more)

A browser that promotes privacy as its key feature is ditching Google as its default search engine. Brave will instead use its own search service, though users are free to change back. Although Brave is based on the same Chromium code as Google ... Chrome, it's marketed towards users worried about privacy. By default it blocks all third-party ads and tracking tools. Until now, the browser has used well-known search engines as the default search tool. These include Google in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and DuckDuckGo in Germany. However, Brave has been developing its own ... (view more)

Internal Facebook documents suggest automated moderating will never pick up more than a small portion of the hate speech posted on the site. The figures suggest Facebook has used some creative wording when publicly arguing how well its systems are ... working. The company has a natural interest in using automated moderation, particularly with artificial intelligence that doesn't simply follow rules to spot content that breaks site rules, but develops its own methods for detecting it. That's because it's highly unlikely Facebook could every employ enough humans to manually moderate posts (before ... (view more)

Canon is being sued for allegedly blocking multifunction printers from scanning or faxing because the printer ink is empty. The customer bringing the case has asked for class action status. David Leacraft bought an "all-in-one" Pixma device with ... printing, document scanning and faxing features. When his ink ran out, he found the other features no longer worked. According to the lawsuit, multiple posts and replies on an official Canon support site suggest this is by design. One reply from a Canon "Product Expert" read: "The Pixma MG6320 must have all ink tanks installed in the printer and they ... (view more)

Apple has released a patch for a potentially serious iPhone bug. It's worth double-checking the patch was installed automatically and forcing it to do so if it has not. The fix comes in version 15.0.2 of iOS and patches an actively exploited ... zero-day bug. That means attackers not only know about the security hole but were already using it before Apple could release a fix. In other words, Apple had a "zero days" head start in the battle between patching and hacking. The bug involves memory corruption and means a correctly-targeted attack could allow malware to access parts of the memory that ... (view more)

Google says it will no longer place ads on pages that make false claims about climate change. The move is as much about keeping advertisers happy as it is a political statement. The policy doesn't affect whether pages appear in Google search results ... or how highly they are ranked. Instead, its all about the ads which Google places when acting as a middleman between advertisers and websites. It also affects ads shown before, during or beside YouTube videos. The move "demonetizes" the content in two ways. Sites affected by the move will no longer be allowed to carry Google advertising, nor be ... (view more)

Google is giving free USB security keys to around 10,000 users whose accounts are at particular risk. They include politicians and human rights activists. The move follows a targeted campaign linked to Russian hackers to try to trick such users into ... revealing their passwords. The attackers could then not only look for sensitive information in email archives but also use the hijacked accounts to spread misinformation. The USB keys use the two-factor authentication approach , adding an extra level of protection, meaning that simply getting somebody's password wasn't necessarily enough to get ... (view more)

Google is switching on two-factor authentication by default for 150 million users. It's also making it mandatory for two million people who upload videos to YouTube. The system means no longer relying on passwords as the only way to control access ... to account. Instead it adds a second method such as getting a security code on a particular phone. Two-Factor versus "Two-Step" Verification Google calls the concept two-step verification, though that doesn't really describe it properly. The more commonly used "two factor" term refers to the idea of combining different types of ... (view more)