The Register

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.…

Rover heats up samples, sniffs carbon signature associated with biological processes on Earth NASA's Curiosity rover has collected samples of rock from the surface of Mars that are rich in a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.…

Last set of rules written in 2010 – a whole different era in tech terms The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) Antitrust Division are launching a joint public inquiry as a first step to modernising merger guidelines and preventing anticompetitive deals.…

Meanwhile, ICO says government should not be choosing its CEO in debate over its future independence The UK government is backing away from proposals to remove individuals' rights to challenge decisions made about them by artificial intelligence following an early analysis of its consultation process.…

Oh look, another High Court sueball over cryptocurrencies A man who claims he's the creator of Bitcoin says his private keys to £14m of Bitcoin SV were deleted by hackers in 2020 – and now he's suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins he "owns but cannot access."…

Faux flexibility – and then back in the office where we can keep an eye on you ... Sent home to wait out the Omicron wave of the seemingly never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, office workers throughout much of the world naturally will be wondering what comes next.…

Governance structure is 'a bush, not a tree' – whatever that means UK police forces have no overarching rules for introducing controversial technologies like AI and facial recognition, the House of Lords has heard.…

Browser filter biz Eyeo defeats Axel Springer – but case against Google poses similar risks Ad-filtering biz Eyeo on Tuesday celebrated the defeat of a copyright claim that threatened to break the web, though that risk hasn't entirely been put to rest in the US.…

Brit exec plays extremely expensive game of hurry up and wait Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch will have to wait a week to find out if he can have his extradition from the UK to America kicked into the long grass – while the High Court in England has set itself yet another deadline for its epically long judgment on the HP/Autonomy merger.…

Still borked, 1C and 1D are waiting in the wings ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher has addressed the issue of the space agency's borked Copernicus Sentinel-1B spacecraft in his first annual press conference.…

Prosecution seems to be first of its kind in America A Tesla driver has seemingly become the first person in the US to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for a deadly crash in which the vehicle's Autopilot mode was engaged.…

We're back in black AMD's GPU technology is returning to mobile handsets with Samsung's Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, which was announced on Tuesday.…

'I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy,' billionaire VC admits Billionaire tech investor and ex-Facebook senior executive Chamath Palihapitiya was publicly blasted after he said nobody really cares about the reported human rights abuse of Uyghur Muslims in China.…

Security biz PeckShield claims $15m in Ethereum taken Crypto.com, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange, has denied reports that the firm lost nearly $15m in Ethereum in a possible network intrusion over the weekend.…

Next steps for island nation Limited communication is being restored in Tonga through satellite, high-frequency radio and motorboat after a violent underwater volcano severed a fiber-optic cable connecting the remote island to the world.…

But smartphone shipments globally edge up just 1% for total market as demand outweighs supply More than one in five phones shipped in Q4 carried a certain fruit brand as Apple leapt to the top of a barely growing global smartphone market.…

Outfoxed? Not if you read The Reg In a hard-to-beat demo of the perils of software telemetry, Mozilla accidentally kicked legions of users offline last week by an update to its telemetry servers that triggered an existing bug in Firefox. Internally, Mozilla is calling the bug "foxstuck".…

VPN service used by crims to support ransomware attacks and other illicit activity Some 15 server infrastructures used by crims to prepare ransomware attacks were seized by cops yesterday as part of an international sting to take down VPNLab.net.…

'Creative success and autonomy go hand-in-hand with treating every person with dignity and respect' Microsoft has cracked open its wallet once again with an acquisition of Activision Blizzard in an all-cash transaction valued at an eye-popping $68.7bn.…

Could there be a South Korean TV show somewhere in this? The European Space Agency (ESA) has completed stage one of its latest astronaut selection process, with 1,362 astronaut and 29 parastronaut applicants making the cut.…

Ransomware suspected but not confirmed SJD Accountancy and Nixon Williams – both contractor-focused beancounting firms owned by the same corporate parent as cyber-attack-struck UK umbrella company Parasol – have been hit by online attackers.…

Now what – in the middle of a pandemic – is a useful thing we could do with that $800bn extra dosh, Oxfam wonders Self-proclaimed visionaries of our times like to explode myths about what can and cannot be done. Inhabiting mars? Let's get on it, electric car maker Elon Musk says.…

Scam has claimed 469 victims in December alone, of which OCBC has issued goodwill payments to 30 The Monetary Authority of Singapore says it is considering supervisory action against Southeast Asia's second largest bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), which was criticised for its incident response to a widespread phishing scheme across the island nation.…

Company pauses bonus clawbacks amid controversies and drop in share price HCL's latest quarter was packed with revenue growth and new deals – but also saw a near-doubling of attrition when compared to last year, affecting net profit and forcing the firm to get creative in preventing staff from jumping ship.…

Testing? Isn't that what users are for? Microsoft has patched the patch that broke chunks of Windows and emitted fixes for a Patch Tuesday cock-up that left servers rebooting and VPNs disconnected.…

Hardware hacker spots 'ghost in the ethernet optic' Hardware hacker Ben Cox has spotted an interesting bit of kit that we're sure has entirely reasonable uses other than network intrusion: Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP.…

Lynch fears US.gov will add yet more charges against him Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch has branded a judge's decision to not delay the process deadline for his extradition to the US on allegation of fraud as "perverse" and "irrational" – while the US government said his legal arguments were like saying "the Moon is made of cheese."…

Glitch is spilling private data and there's not much Apple users can do about it An improperly implemented API that stores data on browsers has caused a vulnerability in Safari 15 that leaks user internet activity and personal identifiers.…

'Reel'-y cheap – like $0.70 a pop If you only need the smallest of Raspberry Pi chips, but you need a lot of them, you can now buy the gang's RP2040 microcontrollers directly from the farm supplier in lots of 500 or 3,400.…

And for last week's digital graffiti operations, too After last week's website defacements, Ukraine is now being targeted by boot record-wiping malware that looks like ransomware but with one crucial difference: there's no recovery method. Officials have pointed the finger at Belarus.…

Is that an extremely large moon we see outside the solar system, astro-boffins ask themselves Scientists have spotted a new candidate for a moon existing outside of our solar system, with only a 1 per cent chance the observation could be an anomaly.…

IDC figures suggest providers had extra inventory to shift after pandemic panic Spending on compute and storage infrastructure for the cloud rose by 6.6 per cent during the last quarter following a cooldown in the middle of 2021 due to overprovisioning by cloud providers in response to the pandemic.…

'Malicious activity on our network' spotted, says CEO, as some contractors say they've still not been paid Umbrella company Parasol Group has confirmed why it shut down part of its IT last week: it found unauthorised activity from an intruder.…

Sorry, that IP address is on the naughty step Microsoft appears to have delivered the unwanted Christmas gift of email blocklisting to Linode IP addresses, and two weeks into 2022 the company does not seem ready to relent.…

Nobody expects the Linux malposition, do they, Michael Palin? Feeling old yet? Let the Reg ruin your day for you. We are now substantially closer to the 2038 problem (5,849 days) than it has been since the Year 2000 problem (yep, 8,049 days since Y2K).…

Analyst predicts double-digit percentage uptick in '22 Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to see double-digit growth this year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.…

Stop horsing around. Pony up Opinion There's much talk of the Open Source Sustainability Problem. From individual developers to Google's White House lobbying, the issue seems simple but intractable. Is the willingness of volunteer coders a solid enough basis for the long-term health of essential infrastructure?…

Please Mr Hitchcock, no more. The UPS can't take it Who, Me? "Expect the unexpected" is a cliché regularly trotted out during disaster planning. But how far should those plans go? Welcome to an episode of Who, Me? where a reader finds an entirely new failure mode.…

Plus: FIFA 22 players lose their identity and Texas gets phony QR codes In brief Thieves operating for the North Korean government made off with almost $400m in digicash last year in a concerted attack to steal and launder as much currency as they could.…

Plus: AI systems can identify different chess players by their moves and more In brief California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said it’s “revisiting” its opinion of whether Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving feature needs more oversight after a series of videos demonstrate how the technology can be dangerous.…

Laser experiments show their magnetic fields shielding their surfaces from radiation last longer Life on Super-Earths may have more time to develop and evolve, thanks to their long-lasting magnetic fields protecting them against harmful cosmic rays, according to new research published in Science.…

Let's not mention on-premise licences.... ERP specialist SAP saw Q4 cloud revenue jump 28 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier to hit €2.61bn…

Latest iteration of Texas-led antitrust complaint against Google expands claims of bad behavior The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint filed in the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google.…

It's blowback time again China's cold war with the US on chips isn't slowing down the country's rapid growth in semiconductors, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week.…

Machine learning to propel us into glorious era of scientific discovery Alibaba has published a report detailing a number of technology trends the China-based megacorp believes will make an impact across the economy and society at large over the next several years. This includes the use of AI in scientific research, adoption of silicon photonics, the integration of terrestrial, and satellite data networks among others.…

The bill calls for concise, machine readable summaries of how websites and apps use client data Almost no one bothers to read the Terms of Service agreements on websites so a group of US lawmakers on Thursday proposed a bill to require that commercial websites and mobile apps translate their legalese into summaries that can be more easily read by people and by machines.…

Cybercrook gang has 'ceased to exist' says Putin's military service Russia's internal security agency said today it had dismantled the REvil ransomware gang's networks and raided its operators' homes following arrests yesterday in Ukraine.…

It took two years for Big Red to find five breaches A US court has found Oracle support specialist Rimini Street in contempt of court and ordered it to pay $630,000 in sanctions – peanuts for the $40bn-revenue Big Red software company.…