The Register

DoubleX static analyzer is doubleplusgood Security researchers from Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have developed software to help identify Chrome extensions that are vulnerable to exploitation by malicious webpages and other extensions.…

Begun, the Metaverse Wars have. And the metaverse will fight Facebook's attempts at domination Column The further we get from the sudden and spectacular pivot-and-rename of Facebook, the more it looks like the most spectacularly ill-conceived business decision of the 21st century.…

Founder Pony Ma reassures all he is proactively embracing new regulatory environment even as numbers take on less rosy hues After merrily speeding along for years, Chinese web giant Tencent has slowed to its lowest revenue growth since going public in 2004 - a dip that coincided with China imposing a raft of new regulations on its big internet companies.…

Joins 79 nations supporting Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace – China and Russia aren't on the list The United States has signed up for The Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace – an international effort to ensure the internet remains free and open, and an agreement to put critical infrastructure off limits to electronic attack by sovereign states and other actors.…

Kiwis are done with dishes, and the Five Eyes alliance is cool with it New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – the nation's signals intelligence and infosec agency – will retire its Waihopai satellite communications interception station because it's no longer needed.…

Meanwhile, next crew of astronauts all set to launch on Thursday The International Space Station performed a short engine burn on Wednesday to avoid potentially hitting a chunk of space junk.…

Cupertino tells The Reg it will fight on Apple must allow apps in its iOS store to direct users to outside payment systems within the next 30 days, a federal judge in northern California reminded the super-corporation this week.…

Cloudy tools to enrol users, disperse apps, backed with on-site service Apple has introduced a device management service for small businesses.…

Who's going to be the first to bite? Hint, you may need to be the size of Facebook or Google Software is a top priority for Nvidia, the chip designer has made clear at this week's ongoing GPU Technology conference, and that this continues to influence its hardware development.…

Group communication app integration breaks down barriers and whatever Meta, the brand donned by Facebook to launder its past, has expanded its partnership with Microsoft to integrate the Microsoft Teams communications app into its Workplace enterprise social software.…

Also: AI is near the 'trough of disillusionment' Gartner analyst Milind Govekar believes that application development is moving to "low code or no code," and software development shifting to "assembly and integration."…

Surface Go users need not apply As the monthly Patch Tuesday excitement got under way this week, Microsoft issued a reminder that the first Windows of the pandemic, Windows 10 2004, was due for the chop. An upgrade to Windows 11 is in order, unless one is using Surface hardware bought around that time.…

Red faces all round thanks to premature emission Microsoft is all about the metaverse these days if its recent emissions are anything to go by. So it's unfortunate that the company has managed to brick some nerd goggles enrolled in the HoloLens Insider programme.…

Customers' passport data potentially exposed, says company, promises to carry out password testing It's never good when a boat operator talks of a breach, even if in this case it's a figurative one.…

Was going to buy a spider from a pet shop, then realised I could pick one up on the web. Here all week The EU's General Court this morning upheld the record €2.42bn fine imposed on Google in 2017 for violating the European Commission's antitrust laws with the way it treated searches on Google's shopping comparison service.…

Case study in 'how not to collaborate with upstream'? A core member of the GNOME team has accused System76 of being "a case study on how not to collaborate with upstream" following confirmation that the Linux PC vendor is working on a new desktop built with Rust.…

Proof of concept produces tiny volume of hydrocarbons, but makes a big point Scientists in Switzerland claim to have proved it is possible to create fuel from air and sunlight in the first field experiment of its kind.…

New research says it's Clop's favourite attack method du jour Stor-a-File, a British data capture and storage company, suffered a ransomware attack in August that exploited an unpatched instance of SolarWinds' Serv-U FTP software.…

BT is getting axe-happy but regulator's scheme could save 5,000 kiosks Grotty, soaked in urine, and plastered with escort ads if the windows haven't already been kicked in – the public phone box is a British institution on its last legs. And yet comms regulator Ofcom has a plan in place to protect the endangered species.…

Campaigners' case had 'no real prospect of success' Google has successfully fought off a £3bn lawsuit brought in London over ad tracking cookies, beating the Google You Owe Us campaign in the Supreme Court of England and Wales.…

How can you get to net zero without knowing what's generating the nasties? BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT – is the latest to weigh in on the Net Zero debate, with a call for better data on what is generating C0 emissions in the office, at home and in transit.…

It's another string to your bow Opinion To become a Linux developer, you used to need C as your passport. Now Rust can let you be an OS programmer as well.…

The space agency wants you to know they are still committed to the project NASA has delayed the first Artemis crewed mission to the moon until 2025, rather than the previously planned 2024.…

Nvidia pushes 30-year-old description language for the internet of the future An open-source file format adopted by Apple, and the origins of which can be traced back 30 years, is getting a fresh look as hype grows around the building of a metaverse without borders.…

Smartphone-derived LPDDR5X said to be faster and more miserly than predecessors Samsung has revealed a new variety of DRAM, and probably won buzzword bingo for the year 2021 too.…

We're guessing it wasn't Fiber Channel, but it would be weirdly cool if it was A federal grand jury has charged a former Broadcom engineer with stealing trade secrets and using them while working at a new employer – a Chinese chip start-up.…

Flags any effort to create central bank digital currency as major national infrastructure project The Bank of England and HM Treasury have announced a consultation process that will inform a decision about whether the UK should proceed to design and create a central bank digital currency (CBDC).…

Promises to keep Inmarsat's commitments to build more stuff in Blighty Satellite broadband providers Inmarsat and Viasat will combine forces.…

Dems, Repubs in House, Senate unite for Filter Bubble Transparency Act A proposed bipartisan law that would force tech companies to let netizens view posts and search results free of meddling by mysterious algorithms has gained further support in Congress.…

Infrastructure bill brings $65bn to freshen up American internet US broadband is about to get a major cash injection through the $1.2tr bipartisan infrastructure bill approved by the House of Representatives on Friday.…

Oh OK, so the kids get a repairable Surface laptop but not us, huh? Microsoft has prepared a version of Windows 11, dubbed Windows 11 SE, primarily for schools and their students, and has crafted a $250 Surface SE laptop to go along with it.…

iFixit welcomes 'tactical achievement' after iGiant offers vague software fix to Face ID block Apple has said it will stop making life difficult for anyone replacing a broken iPhone 13 screen with a third-party display and wishing to retain Face ID support.…

Light load has infosec bods wondering what awaits next month Patch Tuesday As the US season of giving thanks and turkey carnage approaches, let us reflect upon Microsoft's November Patch Tuesday, which has bestowed 55 CVEs and the promise of continued employment for the IT admins who have to clean up the recurring mess of software.…

And more badness going for Linux and virtualization, too Future malware and ransomware infections will consist of "shotgun attacks with pinpoint targeting", according to Sophos' 2022 threat report.…

TDE releases 14.0.11 and LXQt hits 1.0 There are loads of Linux desktops to choose from, but the majority use some version of GNOME's Gtk. Only a handful favour the Qt toolkit, and two of them just released new versions.…

Where were you during the Great Comcast Outage? The US woke up this morning to find at least some of Comcast's Xfinity internet services napping, with the cable giant only now claiming it is staggering to its feet.…

Telemetry from CDNs and data centres presented alongside a thousand promos to irritate your eyes Updated Cisco has decided the world needs its take on an outage map.…

.NET works in mysterious ways Microsoft has pushed out another preview of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, stating that it provides a "truly native macOS experience."…

Move over 'dog ate my homework', there's a new excuse in town Google has come up with a cast-iron excuse for why the fingerprint sensor on its latest Pixel 6 series of smartphones appears to be so unreliable – and you're going to love it.…

Command line fun on Apple silicon with Canonical's lightweight VM manager An Apple Silicon version of Canonical's Multipass has arrived, adding another way of firing up Linux on an M1-powered Mac.…

Firm still manages to lose $48m while Italian Air Force waits to board Branson's space jalopy Rocket plane company Virgin Galactic is boasting that it has sold an additional 100 seats since sales kicked off again in September.…

Private-sector investment could unlock additional government cash British engineering and aerospace giant Rolls-Royce has secured funding to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor (SMR) technology.…

Double-digit declines in Germany, UK, France and 15 other countries Server sales across the European channel fell to their lowest level in four years over the third quarter of 2021, as the long-awaited recovery in infrastructure spending failed to show up – with shrinking volumes reported for 18 countries.…

Where Mark leads, Jensen follows Nvidia sees itself as a hardware overlord of the "metaverse" and dropped some hints about the operation of a parallel 3D universe in which our cartoon selves can work, play and interact.…

Market for related services driving an M&A feeding frenzy Analysis As Microsoft takes down the virtual bunting from its online Ignite jamboree, it's time to reflect that, whatever the tech news from the Redmond software factory, it is only one piece of the puzzle for users in need of a successful project.…

Plus further step toward a full desktop on Apple M1 Arm Macs While folks straddling the worlds of both Windows and Linux will appreciate the shiny NTFS support in version 5.15 of the open-source kernel, Arm device users may find more to appreciate in the following release.…

Expect to shell out around $500k to take it home Anyone interested in an Apple I hand built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak circa 1976 has until 11:30 am PST today to make a bid as the rare computer goes up for auction at John Moran Auctioneers outside Los Angeles, California.…

Puts a whole new spin on 'To boldly go where no one has gone before' Four astronauts departed the International Space Station on Monday, and made their way safely back to Earth wearing diapers after their SpaceX capsule's toilet broke down.…

'Homtruck' also packs a tea maker, washing machine, the feel of a bamboo forest – and a roadmap to autonomous ops Chinese auto maker Geely, which owns Volvo, Lotus and other car brands, has unveiled a hybrid electric truck it says will go on sale in 2024 offering all the comforts of home.…

Didn't act until CERT stepped in and pointed out problems Indian infosec consultancy CyberX9 claims it twice found records of 43.9 million shareholders exposed by systems operated by Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL) – and that the depository company responded slowly to its alerts of significant vulnerabilities.…