The Register

System 'operating outside of the original design specification' said AAIB An EasyJet flight to Edinburgh Airport took off with wrongly loaded passengers and baggage because of IT network congestion causing computer systems to interact "in a manner which had neither been designed nor predicted."…

Saving the forests by making printing even harder Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows 11, appears to be just as iffy when it comes to printing as its predecessors.…

Facial recognition for meal payment system works for kids, supplier says Updated Facial recognition technology is being employed in more UK schools to allow pupils to pay for their meals, according to reports today.…

UK Cabinet Office organises latest print hardware and supplies mega framework The UK government has awarded a contract worth up to £875m for a range of printer hardware and multi-function devices in a move which again raises questions about whether the paperless office was a dream that has faded in the recesses of our collective memory.…

Plus: Rounded corners make GNOME 40 look like Windows 11 Review Canonical has released Ubuntu 21.10, or "Impish Indri" as this one is known. This is the last major version before next year's long-term support release of Ubuntu 22.04, and serves as a good preview of some of the changes coming for those who stick with LTS releases.…

Jamie and Amanda have a new co-presenter to contend with There can be few things worse than Microsoft Windows elbowing itself into a presenting partnership, as seen in this digital signage for the Heart breakfast show.…

Information wants to be free, and it's making its escape Opinion Forget the Singularity. That modern myth where AI learns to improve itself in an exponential feedback loop towards evil godhood ain't gonna happen. Spacetime itself sets hard limits on how fast information can be gathered and processed, no matter how clever you are.…

Say what you mean NSFW Who, Me? Ever written that angry email and accidentally hit send instead of delete? Take a trip back to the 1990s equivalent with a slightly NSFW Who, Me?…

Ongoing crackdown saw apps 1.83 million apps tested, 4,200 told to clean up their act, pop-up ads popped China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Xiao Yaqing, has given a rare interview in which he signalled the nation's crackdown on the internet and predatory companies will continue.…

Despite modern labour laws, 72-hour work weeks are still common Chinese software developers have crowdsourced a spreadsheet that dishes the dirt on working conditions at hundreds of employers.…

Names and bars crypto exchange SUEX, warns paying ransoms could spell trouble Ransomware extracted at least $590 million for the miscreants who create and distribute it in the first half of 2021 alone – more than the $416 million tracked in all of 2020, according to the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Total ransomware-related financial activity may have reached $5.2 billion.…

Crew successfully de-orbited on Sunday carrying vital payload: footage for a movie shot in space The International Space Station has again had to compensate for unexpected thrusting by a Russian spacecraft.…

Plus rifle-toting robot dogs, but makers insist they're really dumb In brief Whether or not non-fungible tokens are a flash in the pan or forever, malware operators have been keen to weaponise the technology.…

Plus: Microsoft Translator machine learning software now supports over 100 languages In brief Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice's help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice.…

Michigan man arrested for borrowing costly textbooks and selling them A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them.…

Academics advised to consider excluding certain terminology for the sake of inclusivity A working group in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has proposed a series of steps to "decolonize" the Informatics curriculum, which includes trying "to avoid using predominantly Western names such as Alice/Bob (as is common in the computer security literature)."…

Car makers facing increasingly tough times until supply catches up Toyota said it would cut car production by up to 150,000 vehicles due to ongoing semiconductor shortages and restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Salus populi suprema lex esto ... or perhaps not A Missouri politician has been relentlessly mocked on Twitter after demanding the prosecution of a journalist who found and responsibly reported a vulnerability in a state website.…

Global handset market slips in Q3 on sliding chipset availability, says Canalys Crippling component shortages caused smartphone shipments to dip in calendar Q3, though it was the also-rans, vendors outside of the top five biggest brands with the lowest economies of scale, that suffered most.…

This webcast will help you comply WEBCAST So, it can be a bit of a shock for Microsoft 365 customers to find out that the platform’s native security and data protection tools can be somewhat … lacking. Oh, and inconsistent, with different apps having different retention periods.…

Washington Metro admin has taken an early lunch Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a whole new world for bork today as a Washington Metro platform indicator suggests an alternative to the usual train for weary commuters. How about getting a bit more out of Windows?…

He hasn't got $2.5bn to hand to the DoJ, unlike his bosses A Boeing 737 Max test pilot has been charged with obstructing US aviation safety regulators, according to the US Department of Justice, and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.…

French cloud provider puts outage and fire behind it to focus on beating the big players French cloud and colocation service provider OVH has edged a 6 per cent increase in its nominal market valuation following its initial public offering on the Euronext Paris stock exchange.…

Hope extended to gas giants across the universe... well, it is Friday Those of us fatalistically counting down the minutes until the Earth is engulfed by the dying embers of the Sun in approximately 5 billion years might be offered a glimmer of hope by the news that planets – or at least gas giants – can survive the collapse of their host star.…

Meanwhile, Yugabyte says PostgreSQL compatibility for its distributed database dates back to 2019 Google has clarified details of the interface between its popular distributed SQL database-management-cum-storage-service Spanner and the open-source RDBMS PostgreSQL.…

ICANN also dislikes it but web infrastructure firms don't really mind The European Union has drawn the ire of privacy activists for proposals to put real names and contact details back into Whois lookups, as part of its Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive.…

Things not likely to improve until 2023 Canalys Forum 2021 Technology price rises are about as welcome Windows 11's needy hardware specs but one part of the industry is quietly happy about the inflationary conditions caused by industry-wide component shortages – the channel.…

Debate exhibits chronic distrust of policy makers, Big Pharma, and insurance companies Register debate This week's Register Debate tussled over the motion Assumed consent is the right approach for sharing healthcare patients' data, beyond their direct care. The results are in, and as you can see, we have a clear winner.…

Send me an SMS and I’ll tell you everything Something for the Weekend, Sir? Below the note is scrawled an ominous threat: "We know where you live."…

The computer is a chauvinist, you say? On Call Round off your week with an electrifying tale from the land of chunky-knit sweaters and addictive television mystery drama serials. Welcome to a Scandinavian On Call.…

Learn how at our Ransomware Remediation Masterclass WEBCAST You wouldn’t want to learn to box just as Tyson Fury steps out of the opposing corner. Likewise, the time to learn how to recover from ransomware is long before your systems come under attack.…

Landing with liquid fuel aboard made slosh-avoidance essential. Plus: China names first woman to visit Tiangong space station Chinese space boffins have revealed details of how the guidance navigation and control (GNC) system in the Chang'e 5 got the probe onto the surface of the Moon despite its propellant sloshing about inside.…

Deployment of 120,000 headsets hoped to 'increase lethality' pushed into 2022 The US Army has delayed a massive rollout of Microsoft's HoloLens virtual reality headsets.…

Inconsistent regulation means crooks can sneak cryptos through cracks – pretty much everyone wants them filled The 30-nation gabfest convened under the auspices of the US National Security Council’s Counter-Ransomware Initiative has ended with agreement that increased regulation of virtual assets is required to curb the digital coins' allure to criminals.…

Chrome, Edge, and Opera can rest easy – this one's designed just to run virtual apps Citrix already manages Citrix has created a web browser and lost its CEO.…

Three bootloaders offered – natch – plus lots of desktop love, and a warning of some exim oddities The team of self-described "veteran Unix admins" who opposed Debian's adoption of systemd instead of sysvinit init, have released a fourth version of their alternative Linux distro, "Devuan".…

Hopefully we're still listening to experts Fourteen of the world's leading computer security and cryptography experts have released a paper arguing against the use of client-side scanning because it creates security and privacy risks.…

Want one? Too late It seems computers without an ARM or x86 chip are in serious demand in the RISC-V community.…

It's not all bad news for some Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has a clear vision of its post-pandemic reality: more demand for chips, and even more profits from it.…

Try InJobs instead! All the fun of a résumé and no comments allowed LinkedIn is shuttering its social networking service in China as it faces mounting pressure to comply with the country’s strict censorship rules, it announced on Thursday.…

Global messaging giant extends security and privacy to Google Drive and Apple iCloud Facebook's WhatsApp on Thursday began a global rollout of end-to-end (E2E) encryption for message backups, which offers Android and iOS users with the ability to protect WhatsApp messages stored in Google Drive and Apple iCloud.…

Criminals follow the money, code flaws Google's VirusTotal service showing that 95 per cent of ransomware malware identified by its systems targets Windows.…

Also: Why Canonical thinks Ubuntu GUI on Windows 11 matters Ubuntu 21.10 comes out today, an interim release with nine months of support, and the first to use GNOME 40 for the desktop.…

So says Have I Been Pwned's maintainer - but site claims breach only impacted 'handful of users' Update Thingiverse, a site that hosts free-to-use 3D printer designs, has suffered a data breach – and at least 228,000 unlucky users' email addresses have been circulating on black-hat crime forums.…

Here's an even cheerier thought – it requires a Power BI Pro subscription Microsoft has made its Emissions Impact Dashboard - formerly known as Sustainability Calculator and designed to measure the carbon impact of cloud workloads - generally available.…

The Register is an amazing website, simply one of the very best out there. Extremely cool people. 10/10 US companies ranging from Amazon to Applebee's, Google to Gap, IBM to IHOP, and Microsoft to McDonald's have received warnings from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about fake reviews and misleading endorsements.…

A new patch next week might Windows 11 received its first bundle of fixes this week, but AMD users hoping for respite from performance issues that have dogged their PCs were to be disappointed. In fact, for some, performance might have actually got a bit worse.…

One-stop shop all the way to the bank The one-stop shop approach by DevOps darling GitLab appears to have attracted an Initial Public Offering price of $77, giving the loss-making biz a potential valuation of $11bn…

New cloud region able to hold out against attacks due to regional instability Oracle has opened a data centre in Israel which it claims is able to withstand rocket attacks to ensure continued resilience in the troubled state.…

AMD had the last laugh – their kit is in both PlayStation and Xbox these days One of the developers of the original Xbox has apologised for jilting AMD at the altar ahead of the games console's launch 20 years ago.…