The Register

When audiobooks just take too darn long... Friday FOSS Fest In this week's edition of our column on free and open-source software, El Reg takes a look at Calibre, which converts almost any file type into almost any other file type, so you can read whatever you want, wherever you want, no matter what format it's in.…

It's not the wurst idea in the world Man's best friend, though far from the dumbest animal, isn't that smart either. And if there's one sure-fire way to get a dog moving, it's the promise of a snack.…

Freed of launch restraints, mirror segments can waggle at will NASA scientists have deployed mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope ahead of a critical thruster firing on Monday.…

Prototypes now available for testing Arm has made available for testing prototypes of its Morello architecture, aimed at bringing features into the design of CPUs that provide greater robustness and make them resistant to certain attack vectors. If it performs as expected, it will likely become a fundamental part of future processor designs.…

Alleges he had an off-the-books agreement with reseller MLM firm Herbalife, which sells diet-linked products but styles itself as a "nutrition company", has accused one of its former execs of cutting a "fraudulent" $20m deal with a Dell reseller.…

Freshly overhauled, several careful owners Fancy buying an almost-original and flyable Second World War Supermarine Spitfire? If you've got £4.5m gathering dust in the bank, today might be your lucky day.…

Processes relying on 1980s ICL mainframe contributed to £1bn pension black hole Brit MPs have told the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) it should factor in the cost of not upgrading a 34-year-old legacy system when reviewing tech investments after it contributed to a £1bn pension shortfall.…

Fusion energy projects nearing 40th anniversary A milestone was reached this week by the Joint European Torus (JET): the 100,000th pulse of the fusion energy experiment.…

Announcement scheduled for today as Gelsinger meets with Biden at the White House Intel is scheduled to announce on Friday that it is committing $20bn to build semiconductor plants outside Columbus, Ohio, thereby strengthening domestic supply chains, according to reports from the White House.…

Wolves no longer at the door of struggling Brit cloud slinger Updated Private investors led by current chairman Jeff Thomas have bought loss-making public sector service provider UKCloud for an unspecified sum, ending the months-long pursuit for potentially life-or-death funding.…

Influencing billions in spending, the Cabinet Office will keep tabs on Whitehall with… a spreadsheet?!? Exclusive The UK's Cabinet Office has launched a new approach designed to assess the IT resource needs of central government departments and measure their performance: emailing a spreadsheet and asking for multiple replies.…

'Inside' knowledge on the image database conundrum – at 25 frames per second Something for the Weekend, Sir? Stop that uterus! It stole my wallet!…

But if I give him my bank details, I'll be rich! On Call Friday is here. We'd suggest an adult beverage or two to celebrate, but only if you BYOB. While you fill your suitcase, may we present an episode of On Call in which a reader saves his boss from a dunking.…

Enhanced 'Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership' will transport crime to harsh penal regime on the other side of the world The United Kingdom and Australia have signed a Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership that will, among other things, transport criminals to a harsh penal regime on the other side of the world.…

Coinhive-slinger wins on appeal A man found guilty of using the Coinhive cryptojacking script to mine Monero on users' PCs while they browsed the web has been cleared by Japan's Supreme Court on the grounds that crypto mining software is not malware.…

'Most of our supplies come from outside Europe. This is a dependency and uncertainty we cannot afford' The European Commission will introduce legislation next month designed to turn the continent into a center of chip expertise and manufacturing.…

Central bank worries that block-bucks reduce government control and are used by crims Russia has floated the prospect of Putin a ban on cryptocurrencies.…

730 million 5G services active in Middle Kingdom, while another 100 million 4G services came online too 730 million 5G subscriptions have been ordered in China, according to operational statistics published this week by the nation's big three carriers: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile.…

What a retirement for the ISS: Gaining a totally feasible 'state-of-the-art media production capability' Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE), a UK-based media company, has commissioned Axiom Space in Texas to build an inflatable space station module for orbital media production.…

To be fair, this is after 17 years of service in space NASA has put its orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory into safe mode due to a suspected faulty reaction wheel, the first time this type of failure has occurred in its 17 years of operation.…

Won't reveal net loss, says it stopped some withdrawals and has reimbursed those who had funds taken Crypto.com on Thursday said in a roundabout way that an unidentified person stole or attempted to steal as much as $34m in cryptocurrency from customer accounts.…

Folks can enable or disable it, install Linux as normal. Just sayin' PCs coming out this year with Microsoft's integrated Pluton security chip won't be locked down to Windows 11, and users will have the option to turn off the feature completely as well as install, say, Linux as normal, we understand.…

And to pay for the privilege. Consultation's open, though Small and medium-sized managed service providers (MSPs) could find themselves subject to the Network and Information Systems Regulations under government plans to tighten cybersecurity laws – and have got three months to object to the tax hikes that will follow.…

GigaIO CTO talks up 'solution that has a lot of what CXL offers' GigaIO and MemVerge are developing a joint solution to enable memory to be composable across a cluster of servers, addressing one of the thorny issues in high performance computing (HPC) where some nodes may not have enough memory for the tasks in hand, while others may have spare capacity.…

If you love your job, going the extra mile might not be stressful or cause depression Working too hard? Is that overtime making you feel like you're caught in the vice-like jaws of burnout? Well, keep on carrying on because far from negatively impacting your well-being, it might actually be good for you if you love your job.…

So far we've got a pisspoor video and... er, that's it Opinion The British government's PR campaign to destroy popular support for end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms has kicked off, under the handle "No Place To Hide", and it's as broad as any previous attack on the safety-guaranteeing technology.…

Red Hat agrees The CVE-2022-0185 vulnerability in Ubuntu is severe enough that Red Hat is also advising immediate patching.…

Quantum, HPC, and AI to take us to rainbow sunshine happy land Fujitsu wants to make the world a better place and thinks technology is the way to do it. Fujitsu technology, naturally.…

Is nothing safe from the dead hand of the Windows 11 design aesthetic? Windows' murderous Task Manager looks set to get a makeover in Windows 11 after a work-in-progress turned up in the latest Insider Dev Channel build.…

Ageing populations, competition, cost-cutting and COVID-19 driving increased adoption Across Europe, 12 million jobs will be lost by 2040 through automation technologies, according to analyst firm Forrester Research.…

CMA invites comments from 'interested parties' on what merger means to them The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has invited comments from industry and interested parties about NortonLifeLock's proposed $8bn purchase of fellow infosec outfit Avast.…

LibreOffice alternative unfurls latest productivity software update Another contender in the productivity stakes, ONLYOFFICE Docs, has hit version 7, introducing fillable forms as well as multiple tweaks for its web and desktop applications.…

'Ensure that code you write works with these open standards' Sir Tim Berners-Lee said today he believes many current global challenges can be solved if people can be convinced to share data – but on their own terms.…

Run like RHEL Official details remain scant, but SUSE Liberty Linux is a new member of the growing tribe of CentOS Linux replacements. The new distro is a SUSE rebuild of CentOS 8, aimed at near-perfect RHEL 8 compatibility.…

Director-general pleads with cyber-scum: leave this data alone, because the people involved have suffered enough Humanitarian organization the International Red Cross disclosed this week that it has fallen foul of a cyberattack that saw the data of over 515,000 "highly vulnerable people" exposed to an unknown entity.…

To evoke support for growing things, not the 1990s vendor of web-pages-made-easy-ware LogoWatch Newly combined security outfits McAfee and FireEye have revealed a new name: "Trellix".…

Edict follows widespread bank phishing scam claiming well over $6.3 million A widespread phishing operation targeting Southeast Asia's second-largest bank – Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) – has prompted the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to introduce regulations for internet banking that include use of an SMS Sender ID registry.…

IPv4 limits apps to simple interactions, and in 2021 IPv6 adoption growth was just three per cent Carriers and Big Tech are happily continuing to use network address translation (NAT) and IPv4 to protect their investments, with the result that transition to IPv6 is glacial while the entire internet is shaped in the image of incumbent players.…

Free incarnation of online app package, which became Workplace, is going away Google has served eviction notices to its legacy G Suite squatters: the free service will no longer be available in four months and existing users can either pay for a Google Workspace subscription or export their data and take their not particularly valuable businesses elsewhere.…

Annoying, maybe – but totally ruining this science, maybe not SpaceX’s Starlink satellites appear in about a fifth of all images snapped by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a camera attached to the Samuel Oschin Telescope in California, which is used by astronomers to study supernovae, gamma ray bursts, asteroids, and suchlike.…

Breakthrough could lead to development of drugs to target illness A machine-learning algorithm has helped scientists find 690 human genes associated with a higher risk of developing motor neuron disease, according to research published in Cell this week.…

Exploit, vulnerability discussion online can offer useful signals Organizations looking to minimize exposure to exploitable software should scan Twitter for mentions of security bugs as well as use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System or CVSS, Kenna Security argues.…

NotPetya started over there, don't forget US companies should be on the lookout for security nasties from Ukrainian partners following the digital graffiti and malware attack launched against Ukraine by Belarus, the CISA has warned.…

Improved graphics card, multi-monitor, Direct3D, and 64-bit support Version 7 of the WINE compatibility tool for running Windows programs on various *nix operating systems is here, bringing notably improved 64-bit support.…

Visitors have to install it 14 days prior to arrival in China until their departure Toronto-based Citizen Lab has warned that an app required by Beijing law to attend the 2022 Olympics contains vulnerabilities that can leak calls and data to malicious users, as well as the potential to subject the user to scanning for censored keywords.…

Gartner reports 25.1% growth off the back of supply chain pain Semiconductor giants enjoyed soaring revenues in 2021 as global sales topped the half-trillion-dollar mark for the first time against a backdrop of squeezed supply chains.…

(And maintain a guard band.) US airliners melt down as rest of world moves on American aviation regulators have banned the use of autoland at some of their country's airports as the local debate about 5G phone mast emissions and airliners continues – while Japan claims to have solved the problem a year ago.…

ICO threatens £17.5m fine over late processing of subject access requests The UK's data watchdog has issued the Ministry of Justice with an Enforcement Order [PDF] after the government department broke data protection laws by failing to process thousands of subject access requests (SARs) without undue delay.…

Dutch semiconductor lithography bigwig reports net sales up by a third ASML – the outfit that oufits the chipmakers with chipmakers – believes the recent fire at its Berlin factory on 2 January will not have a "significant impact" on its output in 2022.…

Hands-free kit a 'game changer' for doctors assessing residents during pandemic Microsoft has bragged about how its HoloLens 2 is being used by doctors to assess care home residents in a COVID-safe way.…