The Register

Activists note absence of VPNs ponder whether Apple may put revenue above human rights in some markets Apple has been accused of selling out human rights for the sake of profit by cooperating with authoritarian censorship demands in China and Russia, according to two reports issued on Thursday.…

So long and thanks for all the science As expected, NASA’s Mars InSight lander has run out of energy, leaving the space agency no alternative but to end the mission.…

But will be bigger than gaming consoles, so maybe this metaverse thing has legs Analyst firm IDC has crunched the numbers for sales of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets and found they’re not going to be a big seller any time soon – at least compared to conventional computing devices.…

Two test missions fly first, before Gaganyaan makes India just the fourth nation to put people into orbit India has named the fourth quarter of 2024 as the likely date for the nation’s first crewed space mission.…

No horse heads in beds...that we know of Crooks are using an Android banking Trojan dubbed Godfather to steal from banking and cryptocurrency exchange app users in 16 countries, according to Group-IB security researchers…

Nearly three weeks and no email for customers As the Rackspace email fiasco approaches week three with the company's hosted Exchange customers' data in limbo, Rackspace execs still won't put an exact number on how many customers were affected by the ransomware-induced email outage, or when — if — they'll be able to recover their old messages and contacts.…

No Girl Scout cookies for you A Girl Scout troop trip to see the Rockettes in New York City didn't go as planned for mom Kelly Conlon, who was turned away at the door of Radio City Music Hall because a facial recognition system pinned her as a prohibited person.…

Huawei to the chipless zone prediction Chinese telecom giant Huawei has reportedly run out of homegrown advanced chips for smartphones due to Trump-era US sanctions that were enacted.…

Designers' jobs to crash or GLIDE OpenAI has extended the capabilities of its text-to-image software from two dimensions into three with the release of Point•E, an open source project that produces 3D images from text prompts.…

Redmond accused of monopolising a market! How shocking First the FTC threw a legal wrench in the works, and now a group of gamers has filed a class action lawsuit in California to stop Microsoft from purchasing Activision Blizzard.…

The emergency OOB release should solve those frustrating failures Microsoft has pushed out an emergency fix for a problem in Windows Server caused by patch updates that made it impossible for some organizations to create virtual machines on Hyper-V hosts.…

More cash will still be needed to maintain service come spring, says Ukrainian deputy PM Ukraine's hunger for Starlink service continues unabated, and several EU countries have stepped in to help the war-torn nation foot the bill for an additional 10,000 terminals set to be delivered in the coming months.…

Tech IPOs down 85 percent on last year, research finds Analysis MariaDB has celebrated going public a few weeks before the end of a year which has seen a dramatic shift in the fortunes of tech companies raising money on the world's stock exchanges.…

Reporters work from home as publication promises Thursday's print edition will hit newstands on time UK broadsheet media outlet The Guardian has become the victim of a ransomware attack which seems to have taken out a large chunk of office-based systems.…

Good thing space agency doesn’t have any state secrets … oh, hang on The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has published its annual audit of the aerospace agency's infosec capabilities and practices, which earned an overall rating of "Not Effective."…

It doesn't work for SAP and Salesforce but does work for Workday. For now Are two heads better than one or do too many cooks spoil the broth? For Workday, the answer is yes.…

A last-minute dose of festive FOSS freshness The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it's not the only new distro for Yule.…

Security firm tagged with malware misrepresentation Threat researchers have found a rapidly updated malicious Python package on PyPI masquerading as a legitimate software-development kit (SDK) from cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, but actually contains malware designed to exfiltrate data from infected systems.…

Updates for multiple devices including PinePhone Pro and keyboard incoming Pine64's last update of 2022 brings word of a new version of its PineTab FOSS-driven tablet after chip shortages effectively killed the first generation.…

It's getting cold out there, better spin up a few more VMs Thousands of residents living in the Groningen region of The Netherlands will soon find their homes warmed by waste heat from local datacenters.…

The team needs a year to recover and figure out how not to stress supply chains before planning an upgrade If you’re hoping a new Raspberry Pi will pear in 2023, we have bad news: Rasbposs Eben Upton says work on a Raspberry Pi 5 won’t start until the second half of the year, meaning delivery is a way off yet.…

At the same time, tools like Github Copilot and Facebook InCoder make developers believe their code is sound Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo.…

Suggests VMware might not allow NICs and HBAs other than Broadcom’s, which would be a bizarre act +COMMENT The European Commission has opened what it describes as an “an in-depth investigation” into Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.…

DNA Center Appliances shipped since September may spoil Christmas with inaccurate reports of dead disks Sorry to do this to you, dear reader, but here’s another item for your pre-holiday to-do list: update firmware on any Cisco DNA Center appliances you’ve acquired since September.…

Will stay on as boss of servers and software – the fun bits, in other words Poll Elon Musk has made good on his promise to abide by the results of a Twitter poll that asked whether he should quit as CEO of the microblogging service – and delivered a resounding “YES” vote.…

20m downloads can't be wrong? Or can they? Parental control apps may do more harm than good, according to researchers who found 18 bugs in eight Android apps with more than 20 million total downloads that could be exploited to, among many nefarious acts, control other devices on the parents' network.…

Leader of the the world's largest contract chip manufacturer would like it if the two world powers could work out their differences As TSMC plans to spend $40 billion to build two chip manufacturing plants in the US, the Asian foundry giant's CEO is bemoaning the way America's growing rift with China has messed with the global semiconductor industry.…

At $349 it's a cheap computer and a not-very-expensive keyboard If you thought unicorn puke was the epitome of keyboard bling, Finalmouse's upcoming Centerpiece keyboard may see you rethink that assessment.…

Criminals have noticed that spreadsheet's XLL files add custom functionality - including malware It took a few years and one temporary halt, but in July Microsoft finally began blocking certain macros by default in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, cutting off a popular attack vector for those who target users of Microsoft's Windows OS and Office suite.…

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor lack of gas will stay these NGDVs from carbon-free completion of their appointed rounds The United States Postal Service announced today that "at least" three quarters of its planned fleet of next generation delivery vehicles (NGDVs) would be electric, marking a sharp departure from fossil fuel-heavy fleet plans announced in 2021.…

Heavily armed US police turning up on the doorstep is no laughing matter Two men have been charged with an alleged week-long US swatting spree in which they used stolen Yahoo email credentials to break into Ring door cameras, livestream the events on social media, and then taunt responding police officers.…

Scheme allegedly allowed taxi drivers to bypass airport waiting line for $10 fee Two men have been charged for allegedly conspiring with Russian hackers to manipulate the taxi dispatch system at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.…

Beijing's 'military-civil fusion' doctrine suffers multi-billion dollar blowback US chip sanctions against China have tag-teamed with a weaker economy to vaporize a chunk of the wealth held by the Middle Kingdom's richest semiconductor business owners.…

Bold move, Cotton. Let's see how that plays out for them Amazon has avoided being charged with breaking EU law and a fine of up to $50 billion by making several commitments to the European Commission today, one of which was to allow Prime sellers to "freely choose any carrier" for their logistics and delivery services.…

Insert your Trojan joke here Security researchers at Microsoft have discovered a bug in macOS that lets malicious apps bypass Apple's Gatekeeper security software "for initial access by malware and other threats." …

Compass, protractor and map not required to triangulate lunar coordinates NASA scientists are developing an AI to help future astronauts traverse the Moon's surface without the aid of satellite fixes, instead relying on landmarks to pinpoint lunar location.…

Much money for Amazon, that is. Bezos heads to dockside after doomed JEDI deal Amazon Web Services has secured a five-year contract with the US Navy for cloud services, just weeks after scoring its share of a major US Department of Defense deal for cloud computing.…

It also boasts MemTest86+ 6, which now can boot and run on UEFI machines SystemRescue 9.06 may only be a point release, but it has some good stuff including the newly released Xfce, MemTest86+ version 6, and a new USB-key-writing tool.…

Flight computers down for 2 hours worldwide 'and no BA plane can file a flight plan? Seems not ideal' British Airways flights have been grounded into Tuesday morning due to issues with flight planning software that caused aircraft to be held on the tarmac instead of being able to take off as scheduled.…

Doesn't it make your current migration at work look like a walk in the park though Regulators in the UK have fined TSB Bank a total of £48.6 million ($60 million) for a botched platform migration which in 2018 cost the financial services firm £200 million.…

But gas likely to find a 'big niche' in rail, aviation, shipping, and industry Hydrogen is not likely to be practically and economically viable for mass use in the short and medium term for heating homes or fueling passenger cars, a report from UK Members of Parliament has concluded.…

Meanwhile the next-gen Linux filesystems are going nowhere fast The forthcoming Linux kernel 6.2 should see improved filesystem handling, including performance gains for SD cards and USB keys, as well as FUSE. As for the next-gen storage subsystems… not so much.…

Alleged 'mastermind' who proposed 'take the money and run' exit strategy remains a fugitive "What is OneCoin?" asks the narrator of a YouTube video. "Millions of people around the world are mining OneCoin today. The reason? It's a platform for innovation that changes the financial industry."…

Central hub will make things smoother and safer but not store details The European Commission last week proposed rules governing the use of Advance Passenger Information in a bid to strengthen border security.…

All those expensive gadgets the boffins attached to it, they couldn't afford a feather duster? In a year during which AI started making art and conversation, the question of whether a robot can make you cry with a tweet seems very apt.…

Picture your avatar wearing a logo-emblazoned shirt driving past a billboard touting a product Microsoft appears to be expanding its push to place ads throughout different products to online games.…

Collab obviously goes deep – accessing DigiLocker requires use of national identity service Google has integrated the Indian government's cloud storage service into Android – a feat that weaves the national ID system and government documents deeply into the search giant's OS.…

A notable misstep as the iPhone supplier looks to grow its chip-making footprint Foxconn plans to sell its controversial stake in Chinese chip-making giant Tsinghua Unigroup, but that reportedly won't stop Taiwan's government from fining the iPhone supplier for buying shares in the first place.…

Educator gets an F for security Misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets belonging to McGraw Hill exposed more than 100,000 students' information as well as the education publishing giant's own source code and digital keys, according to security researchers.…

Unlike Oracle and Google, this time there's no heatwave to blame Alibaba Cloud lost its cool over the weekend after a refrigeration failure rendered several services unavailable at one of the cloud provider's Hong Kong availability zones.…