The Register

Bullet-proof hosting? Can't help you there. Will you settle for rapid repairs? Comcast Xfinity technicians have restored service to customers in Oakland, California, after the cableco's cables were pierced by gunfire early Sunday morning.…

A timeline of the x86 giant's stumbles – and commitments for the future Analysis Intel is cranking up its research spending to fix past mistakes, catch up with and overtake the competition, and build a foundation to grow in future.…

Now that's egg on your typeface Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website €100 ($110, £84) for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font.…

Semiconductor shortage helps cause reshuffle at the top The semiconductor shortage helped smartphone and memory chips in 2021, and Samsung toppled Intel to become the world's largest chip company, according to Counterpoint Research.…

PC makers ditch Google OS portables for higher-margin Windows machines as component shortages linger Chromebook shipments collapsed in calendar Q4 as the channel – with an eye on market saturation – ordered in lower volumes and PC makers moved available components to higher-margin builds running on Windows.…

Oracle replacement project continues as SLC opts for SaaS model Workday has pocketed a £9.8m contract for the second phase in an ERP project intended to improve efficiency in finance and HR management at the UK's Student Loans Company (SLC).…

Go-private deal with gang it previously bought Wrike from Citrix is to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital in a deal worth $16.5bn. The move will see Citrix taken into private ownership and combined with Tibco, another firm already in Vista's portfolio.…

Claims it will make it easier to amend ‘retained EU law’ The UK government is having a second pass at flogging the benefits of Brexit, as much as they exist, in a new bill that promises to accelerate work on AI and gene editing.…

Plus: Non-profit suicide hotline criticised for sharing mental health crisis texts with AI startup, and more In brief Waymo is suing California's Department of Motor Vehicles in an attempt to keep information about its autonomous car crashes and other operational details private, arguing that the data is a trade secret.…

Next: How to throw it a million miles without anything falling off A double helping of plastic playtime this Monday as we honour the achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope by building one out of Lego and an ESA astronaut takes some Playmobil on a tour of the ISS.…

Data at rest should remain at rest Dell believes that technologies such as computational storage will soon play a part in high-performance computing (HPC) in response to ever-growing volumes of data. It doesn't see the general-purpose CPU disappearing any time soon, but says it will be complemented with specialised processors for specific tasks, with composability seen as both an opportunity and a problem.…

The doctor won't see you now Opinion It started in Jeopardy and ended in loss. IBM's flagship AI Watson Health has been sold to venture capitalists for an undisclosed sum thought to be around a billion dollars, or a quarter of what the division cost IBM in acquisitions alone since it was spun off in 2015.…

'Save and replay memories'? Not quite, say boffins... Publicity-shy self-proclaimed technoking Elon Musk reluctantly hit the headlines last week as his brain wiring startup Neuralink launched recruitment for clinical trials.…

A tale of command line booby traps and bored engineers Who, Me? Take a trip back to when mainframes and terminals were all the rage and The Cloud was the smoke produced by the mainframe when a washing-machine-sized disk was about to let go. Welcome to another Who, Me? confession.…

Deep Space Network scope tilts to find its targets, or to dispose of the effects of recent rain Video The venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft is currently more than 19 billion kilometres from Earth, travels at 15 kilometres per second and talks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) at a torturously slow 160 bits per second.…

Offers $2 million bug bounty and hopes perps see that record payout, and a clean conscience, as reasons to sacrifice $78m Another week, another crypto upstart admitting its lax security has been exploited and parties unknown have made off with millions. But this time there's a twist: the crypto upstart has appealed for the return of its assets by appealing to the thieves' consciences.…

Big Tech gets hauled in and reminded of its responsibility to keep China's internet nice The Chinese government has unveiled a draft law clamping down on deepfakes – the practice of using AI to adapt existing digital content into realistic simulations of humans.…

Pledges work on 'mutually agreed commercial initiatives' – such as figuring out how to use 5G Google has dipped into its $10 billion India Digitization Fund to have local wireless carrier Bharti Airtel work with it on "mutually agreed commercial initiatives."…

35 US States, more than 50 academics, Microsoft, others take aim at iGiant and its grip on the iOS ecosystem Analysis Epic Games' legal campaign to break Apple's near absolute control over its iOS ecosystem received reinforcement this week from 35 US states, Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen, and more than 50 academics, among others.…

The migration of PlayStation exclusives continues to be a great idea The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Long may this trajectory of PlayStation titles eventually coming to PC continue – because we now have God of War.…

Brit tycoon's bad Friday just got worse UK Home Secretary Priti Patel tonight approved Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's extradition to America to face criminal charges over the multi-billion-dollar sale of his tech biz to Hewlett-Packard.…

Where Britain leads, America follows The US Navy has managed to drop an F-35C fighter jet off one of its aircraft carriers into the South China Sea, just months after the Royal Navy did the same thing with an F-35B in the Mediterranean.…

Not enough money going into 40nm+ process nodes Semiconductor shortage issues will continue through the first half of 2022 as the industry attempts to build up inventory to normal levels, according to research firm IDC.…

Exorcising the ghost of Windows past Microsoft has dropped another Windows 11 Insider build into the hands of unpaid testers, demonstrating it is serious about tidying up the mismatch of user interface cues in its flagship operating system.…

Federal appeals court upholds decision not to block connection protection rules The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's refusal to block California's net neutrality law (SB 822), affirming that state laws can regulate internet connectivity where federal law has gone silent.…

Hobby project sees Hello Games' first baby return at the request of a dedicated dad In these times of political uncertainty, economic upheaval, and an ongoing pandemic, it’s heartening to reveal a human story in software development.…

Oh boy While Microsoft's Azure Quantum continues to hover between vapourware and hardware – a state of quantum if you will – NASA boffins have been putting tech inspired by the research to work in spacecraft communications.…

All that and improved energy efficiency The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has published the official standards for HBM3 memory, the latest update to the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Standard.…

€500m cloud investments drag on profit SAP's operating profit has fallen 45 per cent year-on-year in the fourth calendar quarter pf 2021 to €1.47bn as cloud investments drag on profitability.…

Where to begin when you're ready to get your K8s on Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.…

Time to get out ISO 22300:2021, Security and resilience – Vocabulary The great International Organization for Standardization outage is entering its third day as consultants find themselves bereft of technical documents with which to beat engineers.…

Remainder of Capita's Portfolio of unwanted businesses to be expunged by year end, says CEO Capita is again clearing out another of the previous CEO’s past conquests with confirmation this morning that it is offloading software licensing and hardware reseller Trustmarque to One Equity Partners for £111m.…

Plus: Cops' surveillance is used against drug gangs and not child abusers, says Tutanota Britain's controversial Online Safety Bill will leave Britons more exposed to internet harms than ever before, the Internet Society has said, while data from other countries suggests surveillance mostly isn't used to target child abusers online, despite this being a key cited rationale of linked measures.…

All eyes turn to Priti Patel as midnight extradition deadline looms Updated Hewlett Packard Enterprise "substantially succeeded" in its multi-billion pound lawsuit against Autonomy founder Mike Lynch for fraud over that startup's accounts.…

'Incalculable cost' of non-participation in Horizon programme 'continues to rise' The UK's European Scrutiny Committee has published the government's response to concerns over the Brexit divorce bill and the impact on the UK's participation in EU programmes.…

*They're probably fine Poll Boffins from UCL's Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) have linked arms with London e-scooter providers to decide on a "universal sound" for the silent but deadly transport mode.…

Mme D finally takes to the Web 2.0 stage and becomes a bad actor Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Is it in yet?"…

Sure, you can program an autopilot but will you be defeated by a Dell? On Call Some users are less than bright, and some are just slightly dim. But few are quite as dim as this high-flying employee of the world's formerly favourite airline. Welcome to On Call.…

Cook & Co made $384M profit per day during latest quarter Apple is hauling in the cash as Mac users escape Intel x86 processors and upgrade to Cupertino's homegrown Arm-compatible M1 chips in record numbers.…

Together with Japanese space agency, now imagining optical comms terminals on sats Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) and the Japanese space agency have conducted an experiment to transmit data from the stratosphere to space and declared the results promising as a complete file was delivered at 446 megabits per second.…

At last, a worm that improves security Silk could become a means of authentication and unbreakable encryption, according to South Korean boffins.…

Driver drama is done, new dev practices should prevent repeats, says Virtzilla VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.…

Billions spent on weapons and boondoggles while service members battle away on cheapo PCs A US Air Force director of ops this week blasted the Pentagon for failing to overhaul its outdated computer IT infrastructure after his work machine apparently took an hour to send an email and completely froze when he tried to use Microsoft Excel.…

Cheesed-off customers have 'alleged enough facts at this stage' to allow legal battle to continue, says judge Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers.…

As commissioner suggests watchdog gets ability to crack down further on China-controlled data centers Updated Citing national security concerns, America's Federal Communications Commission has barred Chinese carrier China Unicom from providing telecoms services in the United States.…

Plus: Apple patches exploited-in-the-wild bug, White House zero-trust order, and more In brief A US Department of Defense staffer with top-secret clearance stole the identities of dozens of people from a work SharePoint system to apply for loans totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars.…

Facebook-born blockchain payment system's day well and truly seized Diem, the spurned cryptocurrency payment system spawned under the name Libra by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook (itself now operating as Meta) will reportedly sell its assets to Silvergate Capital Corporation. …

hurdles <= hurdles - 1; Chip megadeals have become daunting, with governments looking at transactions suspiciously, though AMD can breathe a sigh of relief: the path to acquire FPGA giant Xilinx is now clearer.…

Expects more stability but warns of potential fab lockdowns on road ahead Samsung blamed disruptions in the global supply chain for failing to meet its own guidance for DRAM and NAND shipments during final three months of 2021, nevertheless racked up a record quarterly sales at group level.…

'Script was adding the cc: to msg.000 not msg.0000' A small SNAFU in Linux kernel land meant that a notification regarding the stable review cycle for the 5.16.3 release didn't reach everyone it should have.…