The Register

Meta adverse to internet mercenaries using its social networks to help governments violate human rights Facebook successor Meta on Thursday said it canceled 1,500 social media accounts used by seven surveillance-for-hire firms to conduct online attacks against government critics and members of civil society.…

Alleges it and seven other Middle Kingdom tech outfits aid systematic oppression of Uyghur minority The US Treasury today banned American investment in eight entities – including prosumer drone maker DJI – that Uncle Sam claims are “part of the Chinese military-industrial complex” and active participants in surveillance and repression of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province.…

Have all those scientists been naughty ... or nice? Updated The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been confirmed for December 24* after engineers investigated and fixed up a communications problem on board the booster and spacecraft combo.…

Somehow people keep buying into dodgy crypto projects that vanish with investor funds First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors' funds.…

Millipede? Has something been bugging you about the name? Not any more Pedantic observers of arthropods can finally sleep at night as scientists have discovered a millipede with more than 1,000 legs.…

You can really tell System76 is a hardware vendor Stateside Linux laptop vendor System76 has released a new version of its own distro, which promptly messed up this hack's test laptop.…

Bank migrating thousands of apps and 100k+ workloads to new platform Hewlett Packard Enterprise's direct salesforce has inked a 10-year contract with Barclays Bank to provide a global private cloud via its GreenLake platform.…

App runs off a database, and databases are run by humans British police have made a series of arrests over the past few months after people with apparent access to NHS databases allegedly sold fake vaccination status entries on the NHS vaccine passport app.…

Fiasco replacing fire, police and ambulance comms already costing £550m for each year of delay The UK government has extended its contract with Samsung to provide LTE handsets for the much-troubled rollout of vital emergency services communications infrastructure.…

Handily, the team spotted a bug in Linux's ARM SMMU support too 2022 looks set to be the year of Linux on the desktop. By which we mean the Mac M1 desktop, judging by this week's emission from the Asahi Linux team.…

Both WWE and Reddit have cult-like followings, so why not? Comment Reddit says it has "confidentially" filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of the process to list publicly.…

'Cloud-native' outfit munches up $278m in new funding Cockroach Labs, the unfortunately named firm behind the distributed RDBMS CockroachDB, is ending the year as it began – with a massive inhalation of investor cash.…

Settles claims relating to cyber attack and data leak, court hears British Mensa Limited has paid former CTO Eugene Hopkinson defamation damages and costs settling his claims of libel, malicious falsehood, and breach of his rights under the UK GDPR relating to a series of statements it made on the subject of a January 2021 cyber-attack and a data leak at the org.…

Lack of recognition and support for quality engineering part of science's reproducibility problem, MPs hear Lack of support for software engineering is holding back efforts to improve reproducibility and openness in the UK's scientific research, a panel of MPs was reliably informed yesterday.…

Don't worry, it'll be carbon neutral ... In an appropriately nebulous blog post, Kickstarter, the non-profit crowdfunding site, has announced it will move to a decentralised model via the dreaded blockchain.…

First five full releases took 20 years, this one arrived in 18 months Text editor GNU Nano has reached version 6.0.…

And potentially an increase in UK state-backed hacks The British government has launched a £2.6bn National Cyber Strategy, intended to steer the state's thinking on cyber attack, defence and technology for the next three years – and there's some good news if you run a tech company.…

Looks a lot like a response to messaging services passing data through China Social media and search engine operators in Japan will be required to specify the countries in which users' data is physically stored, under a planned tweak to local laws.…

Ingenuity clocks up 30 minutes flying in the Martian skies NASA has revealed that Ingenuity – the experimental helicopter sent to Mars with the Perseverance Rover – has clocked up a whole half-hour of flight in the Red Planet's meanly thin atmosphere.…

Which isn't a lot – a single fab can cost more than the entire subsidy pool. India wants four built soon India has unveiled a $10 billion subsidy scheme designed to lure semiconductor manufacturers to its shores.…

Company behind cloud-native DB munches up $273m in new funding Cockroach Labs, the unfortunately named firm behind the distributed RDBMS CockroachDB, is ending the year as it began – with a massive inhalation of investor cash.…

But still allows limited harvesting Meta has expanded its bug bounty program to include payouts for reports of scraping attacks on Facebook – but hold your applause.…

Non-consensual on-device image analysis perhaps was difficult to reconcile with privacy protests Updated Apple evidently has decided against forcing customers to run its sex crime detection software on their iPhones in order to refer those stashing illegal child abuse images in iCloud to authorities.…

Microsoft says cyber-spies linked to Beijing, Tehran are getting busy with security flaw along with world + dog Microsoft reckons government cyber-spies in China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey are actively exploiting the Log4j 2.x remote-code execution hole.…

Other terminals welcome Microsoft is to make its new Windows Terminal the default for command line applications in Windows 11.…

Not so much JEDI lightsabers, more magic WANDS The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed why it upheld Microsoft's challenge over the award of a $10bn National Security Agency (NSA) cloud contract to arch-rival AWS.…

Export controls aren't enough, Dems say: Bring on the Global Magnitsky Act Eighteen US Democratic lawmakers have asked the Treasury Department and State Department to punish Israel-based spyware maker NSO Group and three other surveillance software firms for enabling human rights abuses.…

Not getting a COVID-19 jab? That's not very googley of you Updated Google has given its anti-vax workers an ultimatum: you're fired unless you comply with its COVID-19 vaccination rules.…

If you're wondering why you couldn't access a website, app, or service for about 30 minutes today, this may be it Amazon Web Services gave everyone a scare today as it once again suffered a partial IT breakdown, briefly taking down a chunk of the web with it. If you found you were unable to use your favorite website or app for a moment today, this may have been why.…

Wanna play on a US stock exchange? You'll need US regulators on side South Korean semiconductor company Magnachip has terminated its planned merger with Chinese private equity firm Wise Road Capital.…

And online flea market had IDOR in an iOS-focused API UK online used goods bazaar Gumtree exposed its users' home addresses in the source code of its webpages, and then tried to squirm out of a bug bounty after infosec bods alerted it to the flaw.…

High price and no ARM64 yet. We quiz boss on whether it makes sense Interview Azul, a provider of OpenJDK (Java runtime) builds, has introduced a "Cloud Native Compiler" which offers remote compilation of Java to native code, claiming it can reduce compute resources by up to 50 per cent.…

It isn't just the products that are embarrassing Microsoft's Raymond Chen has continued his odyssey through the Windows vendor's back catalogue of awkward product names with the story behind WinCE.…

REST-to-GraphQL data hub also on offer and looking for more contributions Hasura, a vendor specialising in the GraphQL data-fetching query language, has created a low-code approach to connecting existing REST endpoints into a unified GraphQL API.…

'Event imputation' draws on lots of other sources to fill in gaps CompSci boffins think they've come up with a novel way to recreate missing entries in log files.…

What is it for and how does it work? The Reg investigates Comment The growing scepticism around web3 can be summed up by the titles of a few recent blog posts. Web3 is B*llsh*t. Web3? I have my DAOts. Web3 is not decentralization.…

Modern analytical techniques suggest the natural satellite cooled much faster than previously thought Humans haven't been on the Moon for 49 years but samples they took continue to provide new discoveries.…

Shocked, shocked, to find that anti-competitive behavior is going on in here The UK's antitrust regulator fears Apple and Google have a "vice-like grip" on mobile apps and browsers, which freezes out competitors and gives folks a crummy deal.…

Parker solar probe partly determines where Sol ends and begins NASA's Parker solar probe has become the first spacecraft to reach the Sun, after solar boffins announced the feat at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.…

Chinese handset maker doesn't go too hardcore, focuses on making snaps sparkle Oppo has joined the elite club of smartphone makers that design their own silicon for use in their products.…

Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward measures ventilation quality so diners can breathe easy Chiyoda Ward, an area of central Tokyo, has created an app to help folks ascertain whether or not a restaurant is well ventilated and therefore less likely to lead to a COVID-19 infection.…

Round off the year with a large crop of fixes for programming blunders Patch Tuesday It's not just Log4j you need to worry about this week. It's the final Patch Tuesday of the year.…

Not to mention the FAA delegating its watchdog duties to the actual aircraft manufacturers An Aviation Whistleblower report issued Tuesday by a US Senate committee cites numerous oversight gaps within the government and the aviation industry.…

Now open-source logging library's JNDI disabled entirely by default, message lookups removed Last week, version 2.15 of the widely used open-source logging library Log4j was released to tackle a critical security hole, dubbed Log4Shell, which could be trivially abused by miscreants to hijack servers and apps over the internet.…

Three years of pushback have produced few changes while search giant insists it's listening to netizens Analysis The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday renewed its campaign to convince Google to listen to criticism of the tech goliath's plan to overhaul its browser extension platform and to make changes while there's still time.…

Private equity owners play pass the parcel One of the biggest beasts in the password management world, LastPass, is being spun out from parent LogMeIn as a "standalone cloud security" organisation.…

Too far? Committee thinks it doesn't go far enough Britain's Online Safety Bill is being enthusiastically endorsed in a "manifesto" issued today by MPs who were tasked with scrutinising its controversial contents.…

Forrester research sheds new light on dynamic Larry Ellison says is going in Big Red's favour New figures from global research group Forrester suggest Oracle ERP users are more likely to look for systems from alternative vendors than arch-rival SAP. More than a quarter of users of its finance applications are looking to switch, the study showed.…

Regulatory body needs method to account for business models that monetize free services Current US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosures have not evolved to capture new Big Tech business models and thus allow the world's megacorps to dodge antitrust rules, with the integrity of the market policed only by whistleblowers, according to a recent study.…

Nobody wants to see Rosalind Franklin scattered over Oxia Planum The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has successfully completed a high-altitude drop test.…