The Register

Passphrases PIP'd, FIDO and W3C projects promoted Analysis Microsoft, Apple and Google – all longtime proponents of doing away with passwords for authentication purposes – are throwing their support behind standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that could eliminate passphrases completely.…

Bluesky thinking includes blueprints for distributed social network After several years of work, Twitter's open-source offshoot Bluesky has published some code and more information about what it's doing – but not a new social network yet.…

US requires a bit more transparency than some Chinese tech companies are giving More Chinese tech companies including Tencent, JD.com, and China Mobile face delisting by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) thanks to opaque disclosures.…

It's Q2 2022 – and remote/mixed access is still very much a thing Citrix has made deals with cloud providers to sell its Desktop as a Service (Daas) platform, providing enterprises with a choice of host for its virtual desktop products.…

Panic buying is over, but the market's still well above pre-pandemic norms Shipments from nearly all of the major tablet manufacturers are declining as consumers and educators find other things to do with their money.…

Love your Windows Update Compliance reports? Best learn to love Azure AD as well Users of Microsoft's Update Compliance service have been warned that a move to Azure Active Directory will be required if they wish to continue using the service.…

Controversial analytics company sees expansion into healthcare continuing Peter Thiel-founded analytics company Palantir has won a $90 million, five-year contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for a "holistic" enterprise data project.…

Woos European firms who don't want their data caught in the US Cloud Act dragnet Google is joining Microsoft in its attempts to tackle EU concerns regarding data sovereignty but some privacy experts are yet to be convinced by the move.…

Middle Kingdom subsidiary claims Allen Wu refusing to 'hand over his management duties' The Arm saga is continuing with the ousted CEO of Arm's renegade Chinese division still refusing to step down, despite being fired again recently.…

Russia's Google desperately seeking new energy deal after Finnish renewables supplier agreement terminated Finnish energy supplier Ilmatar says it has terminated a supplier agreement to provide electricity to Yandex's datacenter in the southern part of the country, forcing the facility to rely on diesel generators.…

New review system supposedly less of a headache for managers, staff Google is shifting to one performance review per annum for employees even though more than half of its workforce consider the current twice yearly appraisal system to be beneficial.…

Ain't that the tooth? VideaHealth, a dental AI startup spun out of MIT and Harvard, has received FDA approval in the US to commercialize its cavity-detection algorithm for clinical use. …

Good thing no one's buying or selling stock from Twitter posts, right? Um, right? For years, Twitter posts and other online messages have been gathered and analyzed by financial algorithms in an effort to anticipate stock market movements. But, it turns out, these smart systems are rather dumb.…

Must ... cloudify ... internal .... apps, says giant as it continues to push modernization project BT, Britain's largest telecom biz, has signed a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it cloudify internal applications and speed-up digital transformation under the broader modernization program.…

Current arrangements may promote offshore workarounds and don't make life hard enough Sanctions on transfer of chipmaking tech to China might be driving more offshore chipmaking, and therefore failing to achieve strategic goals.…

You've won $2m! Now just send me a small fee A phishing operation compromised over one hundred UK National Health Service (NHS) employees' Microsoft Exchange email accounts for credential harvesting purposes, according to email security shop Inky.…

Domestic action and international collaboration to make sure you-know-who – OK, China – doesn't get ahead of the game US president Joe Biden issued two directives on Wednesday aimed at ensuring the nation – and like-minded friends – remain ahead of other countries in the field of quantum computing. Especially as applied to cryptography.…

MIT folk tested the interest-based ad scheme to understand why it was discontinued Computer scientists from MIT Media Lab have exhumed the corpse of Google's FLoC ad targeting scheme and found that it lacked its key advertised ingredient: privacy.…

Infosec outfit says group avoided detection by hiding payloads in undocumented Windows logs Infosec outfit Cybereason says it's discovered a multi-year – and very successful – Chinese effort to steal intellectual property.…

Code locker has figured out it's a giant honeypot for miscreants planning supply chain attacks GitHub has announced that it will require two factor authentication for users who contribute code on its service.…

Unless you happen to be in healthcare or finance or using AI on personal info or... Firewalls play a significant role in securing today's datacenters, but the technology must evolve if it's to remain relevant, Fortinet VP of product Nirav Shah told The Register.…

'Hunt forward' operations push US capabilities across borders US Cyber Command chief General Paul Nakasone has revealed the agency he leads conducted nine "hunt forward" operations last year, sending teams to different counties to help them improve their defensive security posture and hunt for cyberthreats. …

Might be a $30 check for you if you were screwed over by 'free, free, free' ads Intuit will cough up $141 million in settlement costs and has promised to not make any misleading claims about its supposedly free tax-filing software, prosecutors in the US announced on Wednesday.…

Mystery zero-byte file deluge makes site unusable, hundreds of netizens complain Attention, Mac users who access Outlook with Safari: something's broken, and it's causing an empty TokenFactoryIFrame file to be downloaded every few seconds for as long as you remain there.…

Now all we need is a model to predict where and when and how this will be used Wish your network could predict its own problems and fix them automatically? Cisco believes it has the technology you need.…

OEMs able to develop new products with aim of 10Gbps-plus throughput Qualcomm is sampling its Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series chips aimed at throughput of more than 10Gbps for enterprise access points, gateways, and premium home routers.…

True believers really can bring about resurrections, it seems Two minority Linux desktop environments were updated this week. Coincidentally named Unity and Trinity, both are forks that continue projects long ago abandoned by their creators.…

Users claim lack of transparency following compromise of Github tokens Efforts by Salesforce-owned cloud platform Heroku to manage a recent security incident are turning into a bit of a disaster, according to some users.…

So those hardware requirements for Microsoft's OS really are arbitrary Arch tinkerer Gustave Monce has demonstrated Windows 11 running on a first-generation Surface Duo.…

Affected jet equipment will need retrofitting and eventual replacement, agency warns The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) met with airline and telecom officials yesterday to present its latest solution to the instrument interference problem presented by C-band 5G: replace the affected equipment.…

Peripherals-maker CEO lowers forecast, citing ongoing war in Ukraine as cause of uncertainty Peripheral maker Logitech is ending its fiscal 2022 on something of a low point, with the pandemic-induced sales growth extravaganza coming to an abrupt end, and forecasts for business this year lowered due to the conflict in Ukraine.…

US regulator looking into alleged 'misstatements' and 'omissions' related to June 2021 USA float Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global is under a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation regarding its $4.4 billion June 2021 initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.…

Area no longer a priority as cloud migration takes center stage, deal of around $1b in the offing, reports say SAP is to sell a chunk of its business known as Litmos in a deal reputed to be worth $1 billion.…

Bit barns consumed 14% of all energy for 2021 – a significant rise over just a few years Datacenter energy use has eclipsed power consumption among all rural homes in Ireland, according to figures from the country's Central Statistics Office (CSO). The trend is set to continue if 2020-2021 data holds with datacenter power draw growing by nearly one-third between 2020 and 2021.…

Tesla chief courts private equity with promises of future IPO according to report In another twist to the Twitter saga, Elon Musk could be returning the microblogging mainstay to public ownership in the not-too-distant future, after agreeing to take it private as part of his $44 billion takeover.…

Docker container runtime will no longer ship by default with K8s The day has come. At long last Dockershim is dead.…

'Soul-sucking' data problems were impetus for the founding of Galileo Machine learning alumni from Google, Uber, and Apple have started a new company to address errors in unstructured data.…

Next Nadella keynote to be delivered by McZee? Microsoft has continued its record of open-sourcing curiosities from the past and released the code behind kids' favorite 3D Movie Maker.…

A technical deep-dive with a networking guru who was there Systems Approach Since our recent posts have been retracing the history, and recounting the lessons, of software-defined networking, it seems like a good time to do the same with the other sea-change in networking over the past decade: network functions virtualization, or NFV.…

Go on, spoil yourself: NS&I to splurge on IT as Atos deal hits twilight years UK state-owned bank National Savings & Investments (NS&I) is looking for IT suppliers to help overhaul its customer and banking systems in a procurement that could be worth £756.1 million ($938 million).…

And apply an asterisk or two Samsung has dished up a new variety of SD card that can, it claims, sustain 16 years of continual writes.…

Study confirms AWS prices go down as you upgrade host CPU family, not up – and not so fast, GPU users Better, faster, and more efficient chips are driving down cloud operating costs and pushing prices lower, according to research from IT infrastructure standards and advisory group, the Uptime Institute.…

CEO says Intel may yet end up inside, through its Mobileye tech Volkwagen Group’s automotive software subsidiary CARIAD has picked Qualcomm to provide system-on-chip modules (SOCs) for its automated driving software platform.…

‘Certain organizations’ to be named in ten days and denied access to Russian resources Russian president Vladimir Putin has authorized retaliatory sanctions against individuals and organizations that have taken action over the illegal invasion of Ukraine.…

Now they can experiment with the algorithms even if they don't have hundreds of GPUs Meta will release a giant language model to academics, in hope that better understanding of how these systems work can make them less toxic and biased.…

Not to be confused with Apple iOS or Cisco IOS IBM has outlined a major update to the "I" operating system it offers for its Power servers.…

And unlike Intel, Zen giant saw boom in PC land, thanks to focus on high-end parts AMD plans to introduce processors next year that integrate an AI engine from the company's recently acquired Xilinx FPGA business unit, which helped the chip designer deliver high sales growth in the first quarter along with the company's traditional PC and server businesses.…

Beware, a lot can happen in three years – speaking from experience AMD says it is well on its way to achieving its ambitious goal to deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency across its high-performance compute (HPC) platforms by 2025.…

If a network snoop probes like a Kremlin agent, exploits like a Kremlin agent, it might be... A cyber-spy group is targeting Microsoft Exchange deployments to steal data related to mergers and acquisitions and large corporate transactions, according to Mandiant.…

Microsoft's social network for thinkfluencers disagrees with Uncle Sam, coughs up $1.8m Microsoft's LinkedIn social network has agreed to settle allegations it systematically underpaid women in engineering, product, and marketing roles.…