The Register

What’s worse than absurd support requests at work? Ridiculous requests at home, that’s what On Call As another working week ebbs away into history, dispel any thoughts that your efforts have made no mark in history by wallowing in other readers’ misery in another instalment of On-Call, The Register’s weekly tale of being asked to fix the ridiculous and absurd.…

Kieren's here to chew bubblegum and kick Nominet ass. And he's all out of bubblegum Former Register journo Kieren McCarthy was this week elected to the board of Nominet, the domain registry in charge of the .uk name space.…

Microsoft has four entries on list of shame, Log4j tops the chart Three US national security agencies - CISA, the FBI and the NSA - on Thursday issued a joint advisory naming the 20 infosec exploited by state-sponsored Chinese threat actors since 2020.…

Meanwhile in China, Alibaba runs 500 delivery-bots and they’ve delivered 10 million items to Easy Street E-commerce behemoth Amazon.com has stopped work on its “Scout” parcel delivery robots.…

Q3 revenue still set to be up overall, Ryzen biz says in FYI to Wall St AMD has warned investors its guidance for quarterly revenue was out by $1.1 billion.…

Two Americans, a Japanese bloke and a Russian float into a lab. The bartender says... SpaceX has dropped off another four astronauts at the International Space Station, their Dragon capsule successfully docking just now with the orbiting lab.…

Is it Putin? Is it the Norks? Is it a bored teenager? Roll the dice Lloyd's of London has reset its IT systems and is probing a possible cyberattack against it after detecting worrisome network behavior this week.…

Maybe finally a good use for DRM, eh? Preventing armed modifications Boston Dynamics and five other robot makers have promised in an open letter they won't allow their machines to be weaponized by either themselves or their customers. …

Ambulances diverted, patient records frozen, rhymes with handsome wear America's second-largest nonprofit healthcare org is suffering a security "issue" that has diverted ambulances and shut down electronic records systems at hospitals around the country.…

This and wearables fortified with machine learning to serve you, human On Thursday Google held an event in Brooklyn, New York to introduce revised Pixel phones, along with the Pixel Watch mentioned at the search giant's developer conference in May. There was also a glimpse of a Pixel tablet due next year.…

When the tracking hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a priori Papa John's is being sued by a customer – not for its pizza but for allegedly breaking the US Wiretap Act by snooping on the way he browsed the pie-slinger's website.…

Remember the bad old days when getting X settings wrong could fry your CRT? They're back, kinda A bug in version 5.19.12 of the Linux kernel "may harm" screens on laptops powered by Intel's 12th-generation Core processors.…

We're paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of this week's PR stunt President Joe Biden popped by IBM's latest chipmaking venture this week as Big Blue clearly hopes to keep the White House close and bag a slice of those government semiconductor manufacturing subsidies.…

Kernel live-patching and a full decade of software updates Canonical has opened up its previously paid-for Ubuntu Pro update service. Now it's free of charge for up to five physical boxes.…

I think we can handle one little Russia. We sent two units, they're bringing any attempts down now The FBI and the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) claim any foreign interference in the 2022 US midterm elections is unlikely to disrupt or prevent voting, compromise ballot integrity, or manipulate votes at scale.…

Lots of talk about the automation and digitization of manufacturing chips too Samsung has gone public with new silicon and outlined plans for its semiconductor business at its Samsung Tech Day 2022 in San Jose, including upcoming DRAM and NAND flash developments.…

Whereabouts of wanted cryptobro unknown, but he's reliably on Twitter South Korea issued a publicly available notice on Wednesday to wanted man and Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, demanding he return his passport.…

How Meta, er, meta Google-owned DeepMind has applied reinforced learning techniques to the multiplication of mathematical matrices, beating some human-made algorithms that have lasted 50 years and working toward improvements in computer science.…

They can't hurt us if we stay indoors "Space: the final frontier" – not just for humanity but also marketeers, it would seem, as Russian scientists have undertaken a feasibility study on satellite-displayed advertising. They conclude that not only is it possible, but it could also turn a profit.…

And it wouldn't be a Redmond OS update without printing issues The Windows 11 2022 Update that Microsoft started rolling out in September is in its teething phase, with warnings of unexpected restarts and half-completed out of box setups for users when deploying on new devices.…

Biggest demo yet of single and double quantum dots, x86 claims Intel claims to have achieved a milestone in efforts to produce silicon spin qubit devices using existing manufacturing processes, a move they think might pave the way for large-scale production of quantum computers.…

Customers were allegedly sent texts demanding $1,300 or face having ID used in financial crime Aussie police have cuffed a 19-year-old Sydney resident accused of trying to extort money from victims of the recent cyberattack and digital burglary at national telecommunications provider Optus.…

Brace yourself for a weird future where everything is imagined by magic sand we taught how to think Hot on the heels of Meta's Make-A-Video, Google said on Wednesday it too has built an AI-powered text-to-video system. This one's called Imagen Video.…

UK and Germany among adoption leaders in the region Europe is falling behind global leaders in 5G adoption as rising inflation and war in Ukraine affect infrastructure ambition, according to an industry survey.…

CWU: Just like UK government did a reverse-ferret on tax, so will national telecom titan on staff pay BT strikers protesting over pay should take note that the British government was forced to climbdown on its proposed tax cut for the richest in society, and the national telecom operator will inevitably bow to continued protests too.…

Amid inevitable talk of 'red tape' cutting at ruling party conference, data protection experts are concerned Britain's digital minister says the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is "limiting the potential of our businesses," and is vowing to cut data protection "red tape," for the "newly independent nation free of EU bureaucracy."…

If and when this hits the mainstream, who's going to trust their retinas to random models? AI algorithms can predict whether a patient is at risk of suffering a stroke, heart attack, or dying from heart disease just by studying images of their retinas, according to research out of England.…

Cribl accused of terrible behaviour, horrible IP practices, implausible deniability Data-crunching outfit Splunk has filed a lawsuit alleging that a former employee stole its source code and used it to start a rival company.…

COVID hiccups be damned, work on instruments and connectivity is under way and space agency JAXA is determined to hit launch window The world’s first mission to collect samples from Phobos, one of two moons orbiting Mars, has progressed to testing its bus system and mission instruments.…

As version ‘Zed’ debuts, project slows down a little OpenStack has completed an alphabet’s worthy of releases, with the project on Wednesday issuing “Zed” – the 26th version of the open-source cloud stack and also adding an optional slower upgrade cadence.…

Just in time to ensure nobody can disagree that giving Xi five more years as president is the best idea ever China appears to have upgraded its Great Firewall, the instrument of pervasive real-time censorship it uses to ensure that ideas its government doesn’t like don’t reach China’s citizens.…

Passing off a ransom payment as a bug bounty? That's obstruction of justice Joe Sullivan, Uber's former chief security officer, has been found guilty of illegally covering up the theft of Uber drivers and customers' personal information.…

And note to his crime pals – he said he would sing like a canary An ex-Canadian government worker who extorted tens of millions of dollars from organizations worldwide using the NetWalker ransomware has been sent down for 20 years.…

Get ready for that deposition tomorrow, Elon Elon Musk's decision this week to go ahead with his Twitter purchase – after months of trying to wriggle out of the deal – hasn't automatically stopped his upcoming trial, the judge overseeing the case said today.…

LA DA ain't happy about handling of poll workers' info Eugene Yu, CEO of Michigan-based software firm Konnech, has been arrested by police in that US state at the request of the Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, as part of an investigation into the theft of personal information.…

Small, safer vessels could be 'silicon chip' that ushers in new nuclear age As the US Department of Energy (DoE) continues to look for ways to improve molten salt nuclear reactors (MSRs), a team from Brigham Young University in Utah has designed one it says can fit safely in the bed of a 40-foot truck. …

Tell us it’s Russia without telling us it’s Russia Spies for months hid inside a US military contractor's enterprise network and stole sensitive data, according to a joint alert from the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, and NSA.…

Adaptable Linux Platform v0.01 shows that the future of SLE is containerized As we reported back in July, the future direction of SUSE Linux Enterprise is starting to take shape, and it's containers all the way down.…

Oh the hijinks of academia Researchers gave a laser beam machine vision and trained it to hunt cockroaches.…

Windows giant know exactly how to get these types fired up Microsoft is looking for a share of the financial services industry's wallets, talking up new features and a "compliance" program for its industry cloud in the run-up to next week's Ignite 2022 show.…

Well, yeah, when the batteries and power supplies can handle it, too Experimental tech designed to cool NASA equipment in space has an Earth-bound use as well: slashing electric vehicle charging times to five minutes or less.…

Neat algorithmic trick squeezing into 256KB of RAM, barely enough for inference let alone teaching Researchers claim to have developed techniques to enable the training of a machine learning model using less than a quarter of a megabyte of memory, making it suitable for operation in microcontrollers and other edge hardware with limited resources.…

New language will be official, probably within a couple of months The first big change for the forthcoming Linux kernel 6.1 is in… and it's a big one.…

Cloud and equipment makers also keen to escape Softbank's licensing boot Analysis Arm might not think RISC-V is a threat to its newfound foothold in the datacenter, but growing pressure on Chinese chipmaking could ultimately change that, Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell tells The Register.…

No formal offer yet received, Baring Private Equity Asia linked with ailing IT services house BPO and IT services multi-national DXC Technology has confirmed it is in contact with a "financial sponsor" that is interested in buying the business, amid indications that Baring Private Equity Asia is the suitor.…

Memory maker says plant will help to boost memory production in America Micron has committed to a $100 billion memory chip fabrication plant in New York State, just days after saying it was cutting back on investment because of weakening demand in the semiconductor market.…

British minister famed for love of imperial measures picks a spot in center of industrial decline UK business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg has proposed building the UK’s first nuclear fusion power plant in a center of industrial decline.…

Patiently gathers data that can be used to identify the victims, says Kaspersky Cybersecurity biz Kaspersky has spotted a modified version of the Tor Browser it says collects sensitive data on Chinese users.…

And it's not the only venerable window manager still in development A new version of a quarter-century-old window manager shows that there's still room for improvement and innovation, even in established, mature tools.…

Scientists believe moth larvae saliva can oxidize, degrade polyethylene The caterpillar larvae of the wax moth produce saliva with enzymes capable of oxidizing and degrading polyethylene, offering a potential solution to the plastic pollution challenge.…