Analysis The campaign to remove the CEO and non-elected board members of .uk internet registry operator Nominet may be over before the official petition is even filed. The PublicBenefit.uk drive, spearheaded by CEO of hosting company Krystal Simon Blackler, announced its intention to call for an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on Sunday, noting that it already had 40 members on board and so had sufficient votes to legally require…

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Virtual cycling company Zwift has banned two riders for fiddling with data they uploaded to the service, and which helped them to do better in races. Zwift allows cyclists to race each other in a virtual world – after first bolting their bikes to a static trainer that allows them to pedal without going anywhere while measuring their performance by tracking power output and the speed at which riders…

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The UK internet industry has called for the ousting of the CEO and board of Nominet – the organization that operates the .uk registry – accusing them of lining their own pockets at the expense of charitable causes and millions of ordinary Brits. In a formal notice that will be served on the not-for-profit member-based org on Monday, a group of nearly 40 internet registrars have demanded a special…

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The notion of phosphine-producing microbes floating in Venus’s atmosphere is looking more and more shaky, as scientists believe the detection of the gas may have been skewed by the antenna of a telescope used to discover it. Last year, the astronomy community was buzzing with excitement that alien life may exist right under our noses on the Earth’s closest neighboring planet: Venus. A team of researchers led by the…

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Google’s QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol, announced in 2013 as a way to make the web faster, waited seven years before being implemented in the ad giant’s Chrome browser. But it still arrived before privacy could get there. A trio of researchers from China have found that QUIC is more vulnerable to web fingerprinting than HTTPS, a shortcoming that could make it easier for an adversary to infer…

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Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy on Thursday reported a severe flaw in Libgcrypt 1.9.0, an update to the widely used cryptographic library that was released ten days ago. Libgcrypt is a general-purpose crypto module developed for GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG), a free software implementation of the OpenPGP standard (RFC4880). It provides assorted cryptographic primitives or building blocks that applications can implement to encrypt and decrypt data….

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Swedish telecoms equipment manufacturer Ericsson will be raising a glass of aquavit to this week’s Q4 2020 figures. Network sales were up 11 per cent unadjusted, driven by the ongoing rollout of 5G connectivity, as well as the ongoing malaise of rival Huawei. Sales of kit to carriers reached 49.4 billion SEK (£4.3bn), up from 44.4 billion SEK (£3.8bn) from Q4 2019, driven largely by activity in developed markets…

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Motorola and Lenovo are experimenting with wireless charging tech that works remotely, casting power to phones and wearables from across the room. Xiaomi’s tech – called Mi Air Charge – purportedly offers charging speeds of 5W, and works within a radius of “several meters”, which is as vague a metric as any. It consists of two parts: a base station that looks a bit like a shrunken air conditioning…

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Exclusive The European Commission’s war of words against pharma company AstraZeneca over COVID-19 virus vaccines has descended into farce after Brussels accidentally published an unredacted version of a disputed supply contract. The classic tech blunder saw commercially sensitive details freely published online – and readable by anyone who knows what Adobe Reader’s Bookmarks tab is. Although the main text of the contract had been heavily redacted in places, nobody…

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Microsoft has disappointed hair-shirted developers with the arrival of a settings screen preview for its Windows Terminal product, potentially – though not necessarily – heralding the end of JSON tinkering to make things just so. Thankfully, however, actually accessing the preview screen is not a simple case of selecting the “Settings” option from the drop-down menu. All that will do is fire up the JSON file for tinkering (as…

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