The Register

We're not the ones telling them to burn fossil fuels, top names write in response to probe request Big names in Bitcoin have defended cryptocurrency mining, issuing a jointly signed letter hitting back at US lawmakers who last month urged a government watchdog to probe the practice.…

Mission not quite accomplished after some weird wobbles Space launch contender Rocket Lab has successfully demonstrated its peculiar method of capturing spent rocket boosters so they can be re-used: catching them with a helicopter as they fall.…

SoftBank may control the company, but it seems not to have all the important passwords Japanese investment firm SoftBank may have the paperwork to prove it has taken control of chip design biz Arm's troubled Chinese outpost, but appears not to have yet secured passwords to the company website. It currently carries what appears to be a letter from staff protesting the ouster of former CEO Alan Wu.…

Campaigners again say web giant again held mandatory anti-union meetings Amazon workers in New York voted against joining the Amazon Labor Union on Monday, a month after the trade union group won a separate election to create its first-ever unionized warehouse.…

At least some of you realize not every server has to go into AWS, Azure or GCP Colocation giants Equinix, Digital Realty, and Iron Mountain shrugged off ongoing supply-chain shortages, soaring energy prices, and the looming threat of inflation, boasting instead robust demand and record revenues.…

Plus: Pentagon hires first chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, and more In brief A synthetic enzyme designed using machine-learning software can break down waste plastics in 24 hours, according to research published in Nature.…

Too bad everyone else is pretty much on track with their processors Qualcomm has vowed to unleash a generation of laptop processors that will rival Apple's M-series chips, though they won't arrive until late 2023.…

If true, a good use for DRM? Millions of dollars worth of John Deere agricultural machinery stolen from a dealership in Ukraine by Russian Federation forces has been traced to the Chechen Republic and bricked, it is reported.…

Plus: Another university hit with malware, and more In brief The Black Basta crime gang has claimed it infected the American Dental Association with ransomware.…

Security Service Edge separates cloud-delivered defenses from SD-WAN as debate rages Analysis The emergence of secure access service edge (SASE) dominated the networking market for the last few years as enterprises sought to address increasingly distributed IT environments.…

Tower Semiconductor’s involvement means Intel could eventually own a piece An international semiconductor consortium called ISMC Digital plans to invest $3 billion in a new manufacturing plant in India and Intel could eventually own a piece of it.…

Dell shows off full stack of cyber recovery SaaS, partners with Snowflake for data analytics LAS VEGAS – Dell is giving enterprises new ways to protect the data they store in public clouds.…

Latest Spanish officials to detect Pegasus spyware on mobile devices Spain's prime minister and defense minister are the latest elected officials to detect Pegasus spyware on their mobile phones, according to multiple media reports quoting Spanish authorities.…

Big three’s market share now at 65 per cent almost everywhere outside China AWS, Microsoft, and Google collectively harvested 65 percent of global spend on cloud computing in Q1 2022 and outgrew their competition to the extent that their collective dominance leaves rivals with only niches to explore.…

The new investigation marks the fourth set of allegations leveled against Apple by the EU since 2020 It is set to be a contentious morning in Cupertino as Apple execs wake to the announcement of a new European Union investigation into anti-competitive practices. …

Surveillance is a poor starting point for your security strategy Many information security practices use surveillance of users' activities. Logging, monitoring, observability – call it what you will, we have built a digital panopticon for our colleagues at work and it's time to rethink this approach.…

Gearing up to go full stack, firm spends time on standards, open-source communities Graphics processors are becoming a must-have in computing, so Nvidia is stepping up its work with standards and open-source communities to downstream technologies once largely exclusive to the company's development tools.…

I know what this process needs: Microsoft Access! Who, Me? A tale of discounts and process improvement via the magic of Excel, Access and a fair bit of electronic duct tape we imagine. Welcome to Who, Me?…

To Solaris 11.4, rather than somewhere more cloudy and less Sunny Oracle has given Solaris 10 users an easier way to migrate their apps – to a more modern version of Solaris.…

Developers will be given 90 days to get them up to code, or face banishment Apple has warned developers it will remove their products from its App Stores if they've not been updated for three years.…

Applications in lunar exploration and Earth-bound locomotion are possible Scientists with a grant have done what none thought possible – perhaps few even gave any thought to – and smashed the world record for the highest jumping robot.…

Boffins get excited about building better machine synapses There's a potential solution on the cards to the energy expenditure problems plaguing AI training, and it sounds simple: just strengthen the "synapses" that move electrons through a memory array. …

Plus: US government's NIST publishes 86-page report investigating algorithmic bias AI algorithms can still come loaded with racial bias, even if they're trained on data more representative of different ethnic groups, according to new research.…

Scientists develop algorithm that decides if your job can just be an algorithm An online index of nearly a thousand jobs may useful in cluing in folks to the automation risk their field of employment faces.…

Also: Occulus virtual reality apps fail to detail info collection Meta's Facebook subsidiary has been collecting hashed personal data from students seeking US government financial aid, even from those without a Facebook account and those not logged into the student aid website, according to a research study published this week.…

Plus: A look at some of the Centre for Computing History's most exciting machines Interview The Register took a road trip last weekend to celebrate the ZX Spectrum's 40th birthday, and visited The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park and the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge in search of the origins (and clones) of the rubber-keyed marvel.…

Plus: He reportedly wants to oust CEO, shake up site features Elon Musk has sold $8.4 billion of Tesla shares over the past few days and reportedly wants to hire a new Twitter CEO, after the company's board accepted his offer to privatize the social media biz.…

Besides files being erased, another thing being deleted: Any sense this is a coincidence Security researchers have detailed six significant strains of data-wiping malware that have emerged in just the first quarter of 2022, a huge surge over previous years.…

Will they WF-other people's-H? Room rental biz Airbnb on Thursday said it will allow its employees to work from anywhere and compensation will remain flat or increase within countries.…

China lockdowns, Apple's homegrown silicon, and more give x86 giant a headache – with an aspirin in reach Analysis Intel promises that a costly ramp in production of 10nm processors, which includes the forthcoming Sapphire Rapids server chips, will pay off in the second half of the year to counter a slowdown in the PC business.…

Final flight of Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy will be in 2022 Even as NASA publishes images demonstrating progress in the commission of the James Webb Space Telescope, preparations are being made to ground the Boeing 747-based Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) for good.…

Customer credits unlikely 'to be material to the financial statements' Atlassian has reported robust figures for its Q3 2022 ended March 31 in which revenues were up, net income was in the red and questions over the recent outage continue to linger.…

Only works with signed-in users, but could lure more into using the browser Microsoft appears to be planning a VPN-like solution for its Edge browser judging by a support page for the upcoming feature.…

Claims new formula reduced carbon emissions by 40%, exceeded strength requirements Facebook parent company Meta has a new project that's grounded in the physical realm: using artificial intelligence to discover new formulas for green concrete.…

The cybercriminals trash files larger than 2MB, forever losing them to the void Ransomware groups in recent years have ramped up the threats against victims to incentivize them to pay the ransom in return for their stolen and encrypted data. But a new crew is essentially destroying files larger than 2MB, so data in those files is lost even if the ransom is paid.…

34% jump shows smaller businesses are catching on and driving investment, says Canalys Sales of cloud infrastructure services are still expanding by roughly a third every quarter – despite the maturing market – and in Q1 they leaped 34 percent to hit $55.9 billion.…

That Mac you ordered? Lead times stretch to June, but Apple warns 'most products affected' over next 3 months Apple is warning that lockdowns of factories in Shanghai due to COVID-19 and industry-wide silicon shortages will hurt its sales by between $4 billion to $8 billion in the next quarter.…

Concerns for Paragon CEO, and head kernel boss Torvalds suggests seeking maintainers There are doubts about the future of the new read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, because its author is not maintaining the code, or even answering his email, leaving the code orphaned, says a would-be helper.…

Cloud shrugs off woes of retail parent while advertising cash also increased AWS shone in an otherwise subdued set of financials from megacorp Amazon last night.…

Especially when gangs are better funded than local police As cybercriminals become more sophisticated and their attacks more destructive and costly, private security firms and law enforcement need to work together, according to Interpol's Doug Witschi.…

Google says it outperforms comparable models despite needing fraction of training data Google's Deepmind has published a paper proposing a family of machine learning models with the aim of doing more work with far less costly and time-consuming training.…

Customer data collection and retention requirements also increased, including for crypto operators India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has given many of the nation's IT shops a big job that needs to be done in a hurry: complying with a new set of rules that require organizations to report 20 different types of infosec incidents within six hours of detection, be they a ransomware attack or mere compromise of a social media account.…

We have bad news: you probably can't... but good luck anyway UK watchdogs under the banner of the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) have called for views on the benefits and risks of how sites and apps use algorithms.…

You thought Zoom was bad? Welcome to the Thunderdome Something for the Weekend The bloke next to me is acting strangely. Sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead, he is holding his hand, palm forward, level with his face.…

Sssshhhh! Nobody tell Elon Musk To the surprise of many users, China's largest Twitter-esque microblogging website, Sina Weibo, announced on Thursday that it will publish users' IP addresses and location data in an effort to keep their content honest and nice.…

Code so clever it is like perpetual motion. In C++ On Call Modes of operation always present a challenge for users. Especially when they invent their own. Welcome to a mysterious On Call with an all-too-obvious solution.…

Ouster of rebel CEO should clear path for planned Arm IPO SoftBank-owned chip designer Arm has reportedly regained control of its Chinese joint venture.…

The walls are alive with the sound of music Video Engineers at MIT have created paper-thin speakers using a plastic film and a piezoelectric layer embossed with tiny domes.…

Second shot after lack of humans to fix simple issue crippled sea vessel The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is attempting to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with no humans on board again, after it failed three days into its first trip last year.…

At least three threat groups are using the loader in malicious email campaigns A sophisticated malware loader dubbed Bumblebee is being used by at least three cybercriminal groups that have links to ransomware gangs, according to cybersecurity researchers.…