Two Chinese tech companies, China Telecom and DiDi Global, are packing their bags and moving out of the US, one under the ruling of Washington, the other under the thumb of Beijing.

On Friday, DiDi Global announced it would delist from the New York Stock Exchange in favour of Hong Kong after a mere five-month presence.

The mobility technology platform floated on the NYSE on 30 June, raising $4.4bn, making them the biggest IPO of a Chinese company on an American exchange since Alibaba in 2014.

But not everyone was happy as DiDi had ignored a request from Chinese regulators to maybe not do that. And less than a week later, Chinese ride-hailing app DiDi Chuxing was removed from local app stores on the grounds that it violated data protection laws.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) then ordered the removal of more mobile apps – 25 in total – citing national security concerns, and affecting DiDi Global's bottom line.

By late October, the CAC was pressuring DiDi and other companies to list in Hong Kong. The company is now complying.

As for China Telecom, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied China Telecom's last-ditch bid to retain its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licence on Thursday.

"Petitioner has not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review," read the court document [PDF].

The FCC terminated China Telecom Americas Corporation's authority to provide telecom services within the US on 26 October, citing national security risks such as the telco's potential for exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government, potential espionage, and other harmful activities.

The carrier's appeal was based on the grounds that the FCC had rejected its request for a hearing and that it didn't pose an imminent threat to US national security.

China Telecom must comply with the 26 October orders to end US services by early January. ®

Analysis While much of the world was in lockdown in 2021, storage boomed. It was a year of ransomware, tech advances, hybrid multi-cloud, a switch to subscriptions and services, hypergrowth in analytics startup funding, and building a DPU data centre makeover.

Suppliers grew, were acquired, struggled, were reborn, and a few (very few) went under. We also saw moves on the high-level exec dancefloor as CEOs and other execs darted between companies, looking to make the optimal career move.

12BoC IKEA, furniture retailer and place where relationships go to die, features large in our final run of borks. It also appears unable to configure Windows, as demonstrated in this edition of The Register's 12 Borks of Christmas.

Snapped by one-time Vulture Matt Hughes, who we know is more likely to be found rescuing some elderly bit of obsolete Apple kit rather than traipsing around the aisles of the flatpack flinger, this bit of Windows-powered digital signage seeks that which Windows needs the most.

No, not a wipe and a reinstall with something more suited to the purpose. A patch, of course.

Some traditions ought to be set on fire, but sadly for Sweden's Gävlebocken – a giant Yule goat made of straw – setting fire to traditions has become a tradition in itself.

After five arson-free Christmases, the goat succumbed in the early hours of 17 December and a man in his 40s was arrested, Reuters reports, despite efforts by the city of Gävle to develop a flame-retardant idol.

The goat was first erected in the town square in December 1966. It burned down on New Year's Eve thus beginning a glorious (and illegal) tradition. Gävlebocken has since been engulfed by flames at least 35 times.

12BoC London transport is notable for the occasional twee messages on its whiteboards. However, it is also rather good at the odd whoopsie, as today's entry in the 12 Borks of Christmas shows.

Spotted by Register reader Carly Stone at Ealing Broadway station (currently being redeveloped ahead of the long-awaited arrival of Crossrail), the digital sign in the newly enlarged ticket hall is flaunting that all-too-common "Your computer is low on memory" error, partially obscuring the list of services on each line.

Systems Approach This month's column was co-written by Amar Padmanabhan, a lead developer of Magma, the open-source project for creating carrier-grade networks; and Bruce Davie, a member of the project's technical advisory committee.

Discussions about mobile and wireless networking seem to attract buzzwords, especially with the transition to 5G. And hence we see a flurry of “cloudification” of mobile networking equipment—think containers, microservices, and control and user plane separation.

But making an architecture cloud native is more than just an application of buzzwords: it entails a number of principles related to scale, tolerance of failure, and operational models. And indeed it doesn’t really matter what you call the architecture; what matters is how well it works in production.

12BoC The Register's Bork column is coming to an end, and to mark the occasion we present the 12 Bork's of Christmas. Today: an unwanted appearance by the Windows command line.

No PowerShell for this administrator, oh no. Whoever is behind this screen (spotted by Register reader Sam Owens) has fired up cmd.exe, probably via a script or batch file, and piped the output somewhere passers-by can admire it.

Opinion It's the end of the year, when the tradition is to look back at what just happened. Let's not do that. Let's take a step back and look at the wider picture, because while we've been worrying about data breaches and OS updates, we've rather missed the point.

The world is living through an historically great technological revolution as huge as any that has gone before. Farming and settlement turned us from slaves to masters of life support systems. The printing press liberated thought and enabled the Enlightenment and science. The Industrial Revolution linked energy to society.

Now, the information revolution is doing the same for data, putting it to work, putting it in the hands of everyone, upsetting the status quo so fast we can barely see the shapes it makes.

Who, Me? Before one can organise a piss-up in a brewery, one must first get the brewery started. Something a Register reader found difficult in today's Who, Me?

Our tale takes us back to the '80s, the decade of fun. Our brave reader – let's call him "Gareth" – was heading up a team building a state-of-the-art Brewery Process Block.

It was quite the thing to behold. "They literally came from all over Europe to see it," boasted Gareth. The clever modular design meant that bits could start being water tested even if other parts were not quite ready. It was also up and running – handy since a grand opening was planned.

12BoC Every little bit doesn't help in today's edition of our final run of 2021 Borks: The 12 Borks of Christmas.

It is the Hove branch of the UK grocery retailer Tesco feeling the pinch today as a number of Register readers and your correspondent separately spotted the same bit of sick signage outside the store.

Review Smartphones aren't very exciting anymore, but Apple insists its mutually optimised operating system, online services, and proprietary silicon combine to deliver an uncommonly fine experience.

I decided to put that assertion to the test with both an unusual and extreme workload, and with general smartphone tasks.

For the extreme workload I chose to use the iPhone to run Zwift, a cycling simulation game that ingests real-time information about a cyclist's power and cadence, broadcast over Bluetooth, and matches those exertions to simulated speeds in a virtual world.

12BoC We take a trip to the seaside in our 12 Borks of Christmas as a parking machine touchscreen goes rogue... with inevitable consequences.

The fair city of Brighton has many car parks, all of which will charge the visiting motorist an eye-watering premium in return for a few hours of parking.

It appears that one customer has taken advantage of a distressed unit, the touchscreen of which is displaying Microsoft Paint (replete with a bitmap of the local council's logo) rather than the normal extortionate rates expected for a stay in Brighton and Hove.

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