The Register

Productivity KPIs need a 21st century makeover, say tech bosses Canalys Channels Forum Businesses need to reassess the metrics they apply to determine how productive employees are in the world of hybrid work – or risk staff leaving for a corporate culture that is more flexible and trusting.…

We'd say this was a clear case of RTFM but this rig was so simple it didn't have a manual On-Call After a week of global chaos, put it all behind you with another instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly tale of readers who were asked to tackle IT turmoil and emerged triumphant.…

Moonlighting is now now OK – if you do it the Infosys way, says CEO Salil Parekh The CEO of Indian tech services giant Infosys, Salil Parekh, has said employees will be allowed to take on external gigs if they secure company approval – a reversal of the position espoused a month ago when the company warned workers that "dual employment" could result in disciplinary action.…

Weird puffy gas giant circles red dwarf Located 580 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer, there lies an extra fluffy exoplanet with an average density similar to a marshmallow, light enough to float on water. …

Attempted revival of virtual reality is only just beginning and already the cops just want to take a look around Interpol this week unveiled what it has called a Metaverse for police around the world while signalling a lawless virtual universe will not be tolerated.…

Works well, but selection of available apps is meagre First Look Microsoft has decided the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) – its offering that runs Android VMs which behave just like another application in Windows – is sufficiently stable that it can be designated version 1.0 and made available to all.…

That's a whole six hours of revenue, but requirements to open the Android ecosystem will hit harder India's Competition Commission has announced it will fine Google ₹1,337.76 crore (₹13,377,600,000 or $161.5 million) for abusing its dominant position in multiple markets in the Android Mobile device ecosystem and ordered the company to open the Android ecosystem to competition.…

The question is: how severe will the Middle Kindgom's response be? Analysis The Biden administration's efforts to stymie China's semiconductor industry appear to have got the attention of chipmakers.…

Scream with us: Aaaaaa-AAH A hospital network in Wisconsin and Illinois fears visitor tracking code on its websites may have transmitted personal information on as many as 3 million patients to Meta, Google, and other third parties.…

Internet mega-souk thinks allegations are a waste of Prime Amazon is facing a £900 million ($1 billion) lawsuit that claims its Buy Box algorithm breaks competition laws by unfairly favoring products sold by the American giant and preferred vendors.…

You can kiss my Californian ass, says ad giant Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Google claiming the internet titan captured biometric data from millions of Texans without notice and consent.…

Time to start considering forest blazes alongside industrial sources of greenhouse gases, say scientists Researchers studying the effects of California's record-breaking 2020 wildfire season have uncovered some unsettling evidence. The fires in that single year undid all the state's greenhouse gas emission reductions since 2003 by a factor of two.…

Video Electronics Standards Association shows the USB Implementers Forum how it's done The USB Implementers Forum, USB-IF, rolled out the spec of USB 4 version 2 just last month, as you've probably read in The Register. We noted at the time that the nitty-gritty stuff would debut in time for developer events scheduled for November.…

Five-year blueprint to modernize tech estate, but cloud still not for everyone in finance sector UBS, one of the largest private banks in the world, is preparing to send more workloads into Microsoft's Azure cloud in pursuit of lower energy consumption and to accelerate digital services for customers.…

Tick tick tick ... just 8 days to go Billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk told analysts last night he was excited about his upcoming deal to buy Twitter despite his apparent belief that he will be "obviously overpaying."…

NASA had been aiming for the region since before landing because there are 'signs of past water' NASA's long-serving Curiosity Mars rover has finally reached an objective it has been ambling toward since landing on the red planet a decade ago: the "sulfate-bearing unit" of Mount Sharp. …

SOCRadar says sensitive info from 150,000 orgs was exposed, Redmond disputes findings Microsoft has confirmed one of its own misconfigured cloud systems led to customer information being exposed to the internet, though it disputes the extent of the leak.…

What connects a decaying salad vegetable with something called 'the 1922 Committee'? Enter the wonderful and frightening world of British politics The analogy was first drawn by august finance journal The Economist, which said the shelf-life of a lettuce was longer than Liz Truss's period with any actual political power as British Prime Minister, after she "blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23."…

Why does it always rain on renters, asks CTO? Listening to the vendors, the analysts, hell, even the government – the direction of travel is obvious. All your server-side computing resources will move to the cloud, like it or not.…

Linux wunderkind's project now an official flavor as 'Kinetic Kudu' brings nine months of updates Ubuntu 22.10 is out, and the biggest change is a new official remix: Ubuntu Unity is now an official flavor.…

We speak to the boffins behind the mission about hits, misses, engineering, and that extraordinary near death scrape This week, the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) spacecraft celebrated the 20th anniversary of its launch – although it was only meant to last five years.…

Don't penalize resellers for selling refurbished kit, educate shareholders on being Earth's friend Hardware makers are currently among the mix when it comes to the problem of environmental sustainability, in part by "penalizing" and competing with resellers that are trying to sell refurbished kit.…

May follow Finland and Germany in adopting Singapore's standard The Biden administration has accelerated its efforts to add cyber security labelling for consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and may join other nations in adopting the scheme pioneered by Singapore.…

Software-as-a-hostage? Freeing yourself from the fluffy white chains is not easy, even in face of inflation Public cloud prices are forecast to jump by almost a third in Europe next year as the cost of borrowing and energy squeeze providers. For the US, the expectation is for the price list to jump by a fifth.…

Boffins say educators need to deal with opportunities and risks of GitHub Copilot and pals Analysis While the legal and ethical implications of assistive AI models like Github's Copilot continue to be sorted out, computer scientists continue to find uses for large language models and urge educators to adapt.…

Changes follow astronaut's headgear filling with water during seven-hour star trek Spacewalks outside the International Space Station are set to resume after NASA temporarily paused all such activity to investigate an issue that caused water to accumulate in one astronaut's helmet.…

There's a fat AMD Rome under the hood and 28TB of storage too Amazon Web Services has doubled the specs of its Snowball edge compute device.…

Wanted: AI experts, data scientists, fintech folk, willing to work in the shadow of repressive regime Hong Kong has decided it wants to become a technology hub again, and has unveiled plans to "trawl" the world for talent to make it happen.…

DoJ cracks down on competing companies that share board members Directors at tech firms SolarWinds, DynaTrace, Skillsoft, and Udemy have resigned after the US Department of Justice raised concerns about overlapping board membership it felt created antitrust problems.…

Australia's Medibank says it's been shown stolen data that includes details of treatments administered to customers Updated Australian health insurer Medibank has revealed it's been contacted by a group that claims to have its customers' data and is threatening to distribute it.…

When we concede that everything has bugs, we wish it wasn't quite everything This week, the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) expanded its ever-growing list of vulnerability in industrial control systems (ICS) and critical infrastructure technology.…

Hundreds of thousands of people's sensitive info poorly protected New York regulators continue turning the screws on organizations with slapdash computer security.…

And would you believe it, employees are not thrilled Exclusive IBM Consulting on Tuesday issued a policy telling US employees located near IBM or client offices that they are expected to be in the office at least three days a week.…

Everyone cool with us plonking down a massive warehouse here? No? Oh well Exclusive Intel is being taken to court in Massachusetts over its proposals to build a distribution and logistics warehouse on the site of its defunct R&D offices and chip factory that closed in 2013.…

Nightmare for those with one-time security codes texted to their phones Verizon has notified some prepaid customers that their accounts were compromised and their phone numbers potentially hijacked by crooks via SIM swaps.…

Don't want to see ads during your trip? Sorry, no app for that Uber has announced the creation of an advertising division dedicated to helping brands "connect with consumers throughout the entire ride process." That's right. The entire ride.…

Remember, remember, the Microsoft trackers DuckDuckGo's macOS browser has entered public beta, opening the privacy-centric browser to anyone on a Mac or MacBook willing to give it a go. …

What did you expect, HoloLens-ready Minesweeper and new skins for Calculator? Microsoft is rolling out the only feature updates this year for Windows 10, with the IT giant describing it as a "scoped and streamlined" effort with a strong focus on security.…

Did we say donate? We meant submit. Megacorp swiftly KOs former blog title Google has offered its tool for pure Go Kubernetes containers to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ... and may have thought it was a done deal.…

Verdict in for trial where promo vid showed gravity rather than batteries or fuel cells keeping electric truck moving A federal jury has found the founder of eco-truck outfit Nikola, Trevor Milton, guilty of deceiving investors with exaggerated claims about how close his company was to producing working prototypes of zero-emission 18-wheelers.…

Oh c'mon! Was it too much to expect Skynet? SpaceX's in-flight internet service for airplanes now has a name – Starlink Aviation.…

OK, boomer – how do I turn off cookies? It's just as you suspected: your Gen Z and millennial coworkers just aren't taking cybersecurity at work seriously enough. …

Oh snap. It's not going to work with existing passive cables if they're longer than a metre A new generation of Thunderbolt interconnect technology is coming, with Intel promising data speeds up to 120Gbit/sec when it ships.…

Big Red rolls out DB document handling, white-label cloud package – but customers warned to check out terms of service first Oracle CloudWorld Oracle's vision for the coming year is to start putting the same tools it uses internally into the hands of customers.…

Suffice to say things got a little awkward Cyber-diplomats from around the world say they want the internet to be safe, secure, and free of interference. Of course, they believe it's the fault of other nations that the internet is not safe, secure or free of interference.…

Tech dept still wearing halo from saving companies in lockdown... plus cloud committers 'can't cut that spending' Despite the abundance of geopolitical uncertainty and darkening economic clouds, global IT spending is projected to hit $4.6 trillion in 2023, up 5.1 percent from 2022, according to Gartner's latest forecast.…

Orca Security disclosed the bug, and older versions remain vulnerable A proof-of-concept exploit has been published detailing a spoofing vulnerability in Microsoft Azure Service Fabric. The flaw allows attackers to gain full administrator permissions and then perform any manner of malicious activity.…

If you need even more speed, Nvidia and Broadcom have silicon twice as fast Cisco this week unveiled one of its highest performance and lowest form factor switches yet – a diminutive 1RU pizza box packed with 32 800Gbit/sec ports – at the Open Compute Platform Summit in San Jose.…

AI-driven coding tool might generate other people's code – who knew? Well, Redmond, for one Special report GitHub Copilot – a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet – has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim.…

"Serverless" microVMs further blur the line between containers and virtual machines The FreeBSD developer who brought FreeBSD to Amazon EC² has now got it working on the company's lightweight Firecracker hypervisor.…