The Register

Nuisance call companies... and others... are quite the nuisance More than half of data protection fines issued by the Information Commissioner's Office over the last two years, totalling more than £5m, have not been paid.…

In preview. For Insiders. By end of 2021. Two full years after Surface Pro X Ignite Microsoft will at last bring a native version of its OneDrive cloud storage service to Windows on Arm users, months after announcing the same for Apple silicon.…

Show you’re worth it, demand more Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

£30m project uncertain amid cuts to academic departments The UK's Sheffield University has abandoned the original design of a £30.4m project to update its student record management system after a vital integration with an Oracle corporate information platform stumbled.…

Computer Misuse Act campaign gets down to brass tacks Campaigners want a new code of practice alongside a proposed public interest defence for the Computer Misuse Act 1990, in the hope it will protect infosec pros from false threats of prosecution.…

Machine-to-machine communications, AI, DevOps tech all coming together Analysis Adding robots or automating machines in old factories isn't as easy as it sounds. Retrofitting factories with new technologies for machines and robots to operate in sync requires a new system architecture.…

Brit watchdog considering next steps, Australia's orders deletion of scraped image trove A joint probe conducted by the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found that facial-recognition-as-a-service company Clearview AI breached Australian privacy laws.…

And if the electronics aren't available, features are simply removed Car makers are shutting down factories because of semiconductor shortages – and whatever chips they can get their hands are going into more expensive vehicles.…

US sanctions mean the Intel chip well has run dry, so China's champion has little alternative but to offload Huawei is reportedly poised to offload its x86 server business after US sanctions left it unable to buy the silicon it needs to build boxes, according to Bloomberg.…

Consoles are in short supply everywhere, which may be why this one aroused suspicion Australia's federal police (AFP) have arrested a chap for attempting to import cocaine inside a PlayStation 5.…

Ah well, back to panicking over imaginary drones, then Video Passenger jet pilots who reported what looked like a man in a jetpack flying over Los Angeles may have just been seeing runaway balloons.…

Unvaxxed can vaxx off for unpaid leave during which Switchzilla can fire them or erase their jobs Exclusive Cisco has updated its COVID-19 vaccination policy for US staff to make the jabs mandatory – even for those who work remotely.…

Says she is not 'without hope' for biz Jen Oneal is ending what has turned out to be a brief stint as co-lead of Blizzard.…

Text'n'code-emitting system still available from OpenAI Ignite Microsoft will provide access to OpenAI’s text'n'code-generating GPT-3 model via an API service in the Azure cloud.…

Big Red, for now, has the upper hand in battle over agreements A San Francisco federal court judge has dismissed NEC Corporation of America's (NECAM) counterclaim of fraud against Oracle, which sued NECAM in July alleging copyright infringement and breach of contract related to the use of Oracle's database software.…

Plus: Why the distro isn't in the Microsoft Store for WSL The Fedora project has released version 35, complete with GNOME 41 desktop and easy installation of proprietary software like Teams, Zoom, and Spotify.…

Social network is going to sit this one out until clear rules are formulated Having last week sidelined the tarnished brand Facebook to conduct business under the name Meta, the social ad biz intends to deactivate its Facial Recognition system in a few weeks.…

Software upgrade hits snack production for over a week Potato snack maker Walkers has seen the semiconductor chip shortage and raised it a deep fried crisp* between two oily fingers.…

Common format and license floated to foster greater exchange of info for ML The non-profit Linux Foundation on Tuesday said it has teamed up with dataset management platform Graviti to develop Project OpenBytes, an initiative to make open data less legally risky through the development of data standards and formats.…

The direction of travel is clear – cloudwards Ignite Be afraid, be very afraid. The "most Azure-enabled" release yet of Microsoft's flagship database has arrived in preview form at the company's Ignite shindig. Welcome to SQL Server 2022.…

Vid chat app gets 3D virtual meetings while users hope for more reliable connections Ignite Microsoft's virtual Ignite event, aimed at IT admins, kicked off today with a focus on Office and Teams, among other cloudy news. Office is getting a new application called Loop, while Teams users get mixed reality meetings based on Microsoft Mesh.…

惊叹号 Yahoo! has confirmed it is quitting China due to the "increasingly challenging" business and legal environment just as the country's new Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) comes into effect.…

We say GMT, you say BST, let's call the whole thing off Sky+ set-top boxes have failed to set themselves back an hour after the UK stumbled from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time at the weekend.…

Resellers: Cupertino is doing OK compared to PC makers A component shortfall is reportedly forcing Apple to divert supplies of essential innards to the iPhone 13 at the expense of the iPad – though European suppliers are not yet seeing elongated lead times for buyers in all but the basic models.…

Indian service provider tasked with getting authority from SAP R/3 to Oracle Fusion Infosys has won a long-awaited contract worth around £22m to swap out SAP R/3 systems with Oracle Fusion for East Sussex County Council (ESCC), a local authority on the south coast of England.…

Science suspended as engineers study synchronisation issue Attempts to restore NASA's stricken Hubble Space Telescope by turning it off and on again appear to have failed.…

Xi Jinping announces to G20 he wants in on 3-nation agreement China's Ministry of Commerce said on Monday the country has officially applied for entry into the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA).…

Even if we kept the business moving during the pandemic, it's all forgotten by the next service ticket Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

Amazon tech requires fork of PostgreSQL, is not fully compatible with SQL Server Canonical is offering joint support with Microsoft for SQL Server on Ubuntu running on Azure, all while Amazon is nudging users towards PostgreSQL with general availability of the Babelfish compatibility extension, now open source.…

Deloitte already has the deal to guide organisational structure and strategy The UK's Foreign Office has entered the market for IT hardware, software, and specialist services with up to £40m on the table.…

Homegrown processor looks like RISC-V-MIPS fan fiction Comment China is slowly achieving its long-term goal of semiconductor self-sufficiency – homegrown chips for its computing devices, in other words.…

Meanwhile, SpaceX already has 1,000+ orbiting Starlink birds Amazon hopes to launch two prototype satellites into low Earth orbit by the end of 2022 as part of Project Kuiper – its $10bn effort to provide a commercial satellite broadband service that will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.…

Think explainability and accuracy are mutually exclusive? Think again! Special series You have collected all the data, trained the best possible model, and built the most brilliant application, yet your potential users' distrust of AI means uptake is falling short of expectations.…

It's not COVID-19 and it's not an emergency, insists NASA Four astronauts will not begin their journey to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday as planned after NASA revealed an unspecified medical problem with the crew.…

Wants to be the 'Switzerland' of cloud VMware completed its divorce from Dell on Monday – and immediately signaled its intent to go out find more partners and acquire companies.…

You've got just over a couple of months to get your compensation requests filed The FCC is now accepting reimbursement requests from companies in the US that are ripping out and replacing their now-unwelcome Chinese Huawei and ZTE networking equipment.…

Reports of bricked computers suggest it may be worth waiting for better-behaving code Apple's latest desktop operating system, macOS Monterey, has downgraded some users' machines to the equivalent of a brick, according to multiple complaints posted to social media.…

What's that, the world's tiniest violin playing? In a move bound to incite a collective "diddums" from industry watchers, Apple's decision to change the privacy settings on iPhones has left an estimated $9.85bn crater in the revenues of Facebook, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube.…

Bidirectional character attack – simple and nightmarish Updated The way Unicode's UTF-8 text encoding handles different languages could be misused to write malicious code that says one thing to humans and another to compilers, academics are warning.…

US Government Audit Office upholds Redmond's protest The US Government Accountability Office has agreed Microsoft was right to contest the award of the National Security Agency's $10bn cloud computing contact, saying it found parts of NSA's evaluation to be "unreasonable".…

Now exec talk turns to defence against corporate takeovers and where next for efficiency gains BT is said to be mulling whether to widen the multibillion-pound cost savings initiative that began in 2018 after meeting financial goals well ahead of the deadline.…

Also SMB3 server in the kernel, and new DAMON memory monitor Linus Torvalds released version 5.15 of the Linux kernel yesterday with a new NTFS driver, an SMB3 server and an advanced memory monitor among the features. 5.15 is likely to be an LTS release unless 5.16 squeezes in before year end.…

When we say 'way easier,' you better have a steady hand and nerves of steel The fearless iFixit website has taken its tools to the M1-powered 2021 MacBook Pro and come away with a repairability score that will be of no surprise to followers of Apple's pricey hardware.…

Plus Microsoft funding community security to fill US skills gap In Brief A new and dangerous form of malware for rooting Android phones has been spotted in 19 apps on Google's Play store, as well as in several in the Amazon Appstore, the Samsung Galaxy Store, and other third-party sites.…

From Tatooine to Earth Star Wars-style moisture farming could provide safe drinking water for approximately 1 billion people here on Earth, according to research from a Google-owned research lab.…

Two months late is better than never in a supply chain challenged-world, and means it is out in time for Diwali After an approximate two-month delay but in time for India's biggest holiday, Diwali*, Google and giant Indian telco Jio are finally making good on their promise to offer an India-exclusive budget 4G Android.…

This (still) applies to British businesses too... for now Lightning does not strike twice – except, it would seem, in the land of data privacy. Having struck down Safe Harbor – the agreement governing EU-US data transfers – in 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) went on to condemn its replacement, the beleaguered EU-US Privacy Shield, to a similar fate just over a year ago.…

Yes, the tech dept was elevated in these trying times – we just need to keep reminding everyone why Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

Creates category to control what we call a superapp for antitrust behavior and more China's antitrust watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has issued new draft rules for internet platforms the organization considers "super-large" – including vague directives forbidding anticompetitive behavior and more.…

I've read this stuff, says one dev. 'Either Google is screwed, or society is screwed' Opinion Ten days ago, a New York judge revealed the full prosecution filings in a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google – one of many against the company, and of many more against the ad tech giants.…