The Register

Even 2022 can't muster this much madness – or can it? Opinion The stupid is strong right now. In politics, economics and climate, crass madness is the order of the day. Commerce has its own flagships of farce, the Ford Edsels and New Cokes of companies being their own worst enemies. That list of legendary loserdom may soon have a new name for the ages, if what Qualcomm claims for Arm's future plans is anywhere near the truth.…

'Every major project' on the table, says government as Autumn Statement looms About half of the UK's planned civil nuclear capacity could be reviewed as the government struggles to fill a £40 billion ($45 billion) black hole in its finances.…

And it should know – having just failed to catch one Private launch outfit Rocket Lab has again failed to catch one of its Electron launcher's first stages with a helicopter as it floated back to Earth.…

Increase in espionage and cyberattacks since law requiring vulnerabilities first be reported to Beijing Microsoft has asserted that China's offensive cyber capabilities have improved, thanks to a law that has allowed Beijing to create an arsenal of unreported software vulnerabilities.…

To quote the great philosopher Han Solo: Don't get cocky who, me? Welcome, dear reader, to another installation of Who, Me? in which we recount for your schadenfreude indulgence tales of Regizens who create havoc – either by their own design or others – but mostly emerge unscathed.…

Suggests tweaks to IP semantics as one way to identify protected tech and traffic The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wants to devise a digital equivalent of its emblems (the red cross and red crescent), to signify that certain digital resources are protected and must not be targeted during cyberwarfare.…

Buyers told of longer wait times for shiny new phones that don't do a lot more than last year’s model Apple has warned that a COVID outbreak in Zhengzhou, China, has impacted production of the iPhone 14 and will mean customers wait longer than anticipated to get their hands on the device.…

Australia's Medibank uses a government-approved Band-Aid to cover a gaping 10-milion-record wound Australian health insurer Medibank – which spent October discovering a security incident was worse than it first thought – has announced it will not pay a ransom to attackers that made off with personal info describing nearly ten million customers.…

PLUS: Tencent's edgy JV; US/China space spat; Facebook's India boss bails to join Snap; and more Asia In Brief Microsoft has informed its channel it will revise corporate licenses and service prices in Japan and South Korea.…

Customers just love taking risks on pricey new tech, right? Analysis If one thing was abundantly clear from Supermicro's Q1 earnings call this month, it's that the server maker really needs Intel, AMD, and Nvidia's next-gen datacenter components to be a hit if it's going to weather the economic downturn.…

To help save x86 titan some cash, we look at the components Intel may want to lose Analysis With a major downturn in revenue and profitability over the past six months, Intel has some tough decisions ahead as it seeks to make billions of dollars in cuts while the beleaguered semiconductor giant tries to enact its grand comeback plan.…

One 8-K filing, two bombshells SolarWinds has agreed to pay $26 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit, and it's also expecting to be slapped with an enforcement action by Uncle Sam – both related to its infamous 2020 supply chain security fiasco, according to the software maker's most recent US regulatory filing.…

Desktop app buckles up for faster switching between chats or channels or join a meeting Microsoft has rolled out an upgrade for its Teams desktop app, and is claiming a more than 30 percent speed jump when switching between chat and channel threads.…

Ericsson's VoIP biz used 'a panoply of hurdles' to keep customers on the hook Vonage has agreed to cough up $100 million to customers for making it nearly impossible to cancel their internet phone service, according to a proposed court order.…

Musk-owned companies have now faced 3 WARN Act lawsuits alleging the same thing The great Twitter cull of '22 is expected to begin today, but a group of tweeps have preempted the event by filing a class action lawsuit against Twitter for violating the WARN Act.…

Crimson Kingsnake impersonates legit attorneys, fakes email threads from your colleagues in far-reaching BEC campaign A new threat group called Crimson Kingsnake is impersonating real law companies and debt recovery services to intimidate businessess into paying bogus overdue invoices.…

An unexpected move, but we suspect that Carl Sagan might have approved Mozilla has announced the successor to the Mozilla Builders incubator: Mozilla Ventures.…

The official word is 'scheduling conflicts,' but NASA's safety panel has expressed concerns too The first crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner has been delayed again, this time being pushed back to April 2023 from an earlier planned launch date of February.…

'You'll be hearing from us,' say privacy campaigners who previously forced the government to back down The UK government is set to extract patient-identifiable data from NHS hospital systems and share this with its data platform based on technology from Palantir, a move that seems set to provoke another legal challenge.…

Just hang on while we convince the rest of the world, Commerce Sec tells makers US companies that build chipmaking equipment have been told to tough it out as they face a ban on selling to customers in China, while their rivals elsewhere in the world currently have no such restrictions.…

Alphabet Workers Union says it's an illegal block of workers' right to discuss pay The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) claims the company blocked access to a shared spreadsheet in which it reckons "hundreds" of subcontracted workers had shared their salary details and "up to 50,000" of those staffers are now prevented from looking them up.…

Watchdog claims add-ons to computer purchases appeared to be discounted but did not reflect the standalone RRP Dell's Australian business is in trouble with the country's consumer watchdog for allegedly misleading buyers about the price of displays purchased as an add-on with its computers.…

What forced the change in attitude? The impact on 40,000 broadband connections possibly The Communication Workers Unions (CWU) claims BT Group has agreed to re-enter negotiations to find a solution to the protracted pay dispute that has caused thousands of engineers and call center operators to strike.…

Don't everyone rush at once NFTs are dead. And stupid. Don't just take our word for it – Bill Gates, widely considered a pretty smart guy, described them as "100 percent based on greater fool theory" and analyst Forrester recently said "most consumers aren't interested in NFT stunts."…

Freedom isn't free The Ukraine government will continue to be able to run its digital infrastructure through the Microsoft Cloud for free in 2023, the tech giant confirmed today.…

Magnetic north is on a walkabout, and your OCD will benefit UK map lords at the Ordnance Survey have some big news for people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder or otherwise like everything to be neatly lined up.…

Extension cords are good for power. Extension tubes? Not so good for air On Call As two precious days of free time loom, The Register offers a two-minute taste of the energy-draining drama that makes weekends so important in another instalment of On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of the messes IT people are asked to address.…

But investors aren't impressed by losses and unpleasant outlook Atlassian sees the current round of layoffs and hiring freezes across the tech industry as an opportunity on which it hopes to capitalise – even as its own share price slumps.…

Smooth 'OPERA1ER' hit orgs around the world over four or more years A French-speaking criminal group codenamed OPERA1ER has pulled off more than 30 cyber-heists against telecom organizations and banks across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, stealing upwards of $30 million over four years, according to security researchers.…

A weighty lens, placed off-centre on a lightweight smartphone – what could possibly go wrong? Chinese smartphone darling has shown off a phone with a full camera lens bolted to its back – which looks very dorky, but thankfully is only a concept device.…

Execs say enterprise hardware biz is flying – don't mention the sub-one-percent profit In February 2022 Lenovo shared a slightly special number: $17 million. That's the first profit made by its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) since its predecessor was formed by the 2014 acquisition of IBM's x86 server business.…

Email to your personal account is bad news, email to your work account means you still work at Twitter Twitter owner, sole director and – according to his Twitter profile, now also "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator" – has reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow.…

Sanctions? What sanctions? Just look at the low, low, power consumption figures Alibaba Cloud has revealed that it plans to power 20 percent of its operations with its own homebrew CPUs by 2025.…

Monetary authority presses ahead with Ubin+ cross-border CBDC trial anyway While central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are often advanced as a way to improve the world's creaking cross-border payments infrastructure, some financial experts believe the government-issued tokens may be usurped by stablecoins and other products.…

After two previous failures, will third time be the charm? NASA will roll its Space Launch System back out to the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday to prepare for a third attempt to put its most powerful rocket yet into the sky on November 14.…

Chiplet-based RNDA 3 GPU fans have been waiting for AMD has come out swinging at Nvidia with new flagship Radeon graphics cards that are cheaper than its rival's fresh GeForce RTX products.…

Overwhelmed by waves of push notifications, worn-down users inadvertently let the bad guys in Analysis The September cyberattack on ride-hailing service Uber began when a criminal bought the stolen credentials of a company contractor on the dark web.…

While Elon may just dump half of Twitter and scrap work-from-home Citing the likelihood of recession and increases in rideshare insurance costs, Lyft is laying off 13 percent of its workforce, with no team left unaffected.…

Also one of the first distros we've seen with Kernel 6.0 Nitrux OS is one of the most stylish and innovative distros we've seen so far: systemd-free, based on AppImages, and with a very unusual desktop.…

The decision comes as the e-commerce giant stuggles with soaring energy prices and cash-strapped customers Amazon is freezing hiring of new corporate positions across the company for the rest of 2022 amid worsening economic conditions.…

How to turn a classic infrastructure biz into something fit for the cloud era Shapeshifting infrastructure services biz Kyndryl can't plug its revenue leak but cutting costs did cut losses in half.…

But old 'go nuts, show nuts' attitude is dead for good Tumblr has reversed course on its 2018 nudity ban, welcoming some – but not all – adult content creators back to the platform after a four-year hiatus.…

Commitments include international wallet info sharing, KYC requirements, and an AML crackdown The White House's second International Counter Ransomware Initiative summit has concluded, and this year the 36-nation group has made clear it intends to crack down on how cryptocurrencies are used to finance ransomware operations.…

Public will be able to test each system as part of development process The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has conditionally approved 13 proposed automated frequency coordination (AFC) systems to manage spectrum access for unlicensed devices in the 6GHz band.…

Acquisition of Ukrainian startup to help broaden appeal beyond popular cache Database provider Redis has acquired RESP.app, a popular developer tool used to ease developer experience on the popular key-value database.…

But overall profits are up thanks to cost cutting and success in other divisions Lenovo revenues declined for the first time in 10 quarters due to a steep fall in demand for PCs and tablets. Still, profits rose due to cost-cutting measures and growth in other areas such as its services division.…

National telecom giant admits strike action is impacting customer broadband connections BT Group is looking to wrench out higher savings amid rising inflation in the relentless pursuit of improved profits.…

The init system that everybody loves to hate The fall version of systemd is here, with support for increased boot security, including tightened full-disk encryption.…

Project beginning in 2019 has left employees and suppliers waiting on payments Scotland's University of Edinburgh has paid staff and suppliers late owing to the troubled implementation of a new Oracle-based HR and finance system.…

Just as providers prepare to crank up their fees Cloud networking outfit Aviatrix has extended its platform with a new capability that monitors network usage to help enterprises more accurately track costs and enable chargeback to individual departments.…