The Register

From pocket calculators to ZX Spectrum and beyond Sir Clive Sinclair died on Thursday at home in London after a long illness, his family said today. He was 81.…

It's CUs and GDRs here on out for Microsoft's SQL Server It's the end of an era. Microsoft has finally released its very last SQL Server service pack.…

Ikea parent Interogo Holding among the investors Full-fibre network operator CityFibre has grabbed £1.125bn in financing to help support its plan to wire up to eight million homes in the UK.…

Unwitting star of #Slipgate viral images awarded reduced damages, tempts Streisand effect A French farmer who was filmed setting about bird conservationists with a shovel while in his underpants has won damages from a TV company that filmed the incident for violating his privacy.…

Open-source project migrates deprecated apps to WebAssembly Microsoft Silverlight, now only supported in the legacy Internet Explorer, goes completely end of life on 12 October – but an open-source project called OpenSilver has appeared to convert Silverlight projects to WebAssembly.…

You tell 'em, 4 New Square chambers The London law firm which secured a court injunction forbidding ransomware criminals from publishing data stolen from them has now gone a step further – by securing a default judgment from the High Court.…

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life... for Dorries Comment Nadine Dorries is the latest government minister charged with steering the data protection law through the choppy straits between the UK's desire to unleash "data's power across the economy and society for the benefit of British citizens and British businesses", and the boring need to comply with EU data protection law.…

Interested in poking away at machine-learning models? This academic study could be a good start Makeup carefully applied to the forehead, cheeks, and nose may help you evade facial recognition systems, judging from these computer scientists' experimental work.…

Adds Teams integration for new ‘Employee Centre’, automated automation for service desk ServiceNow has loosed the new "Rome" release of its SaaS workflow platform on a waiting world.…

Translation: Skills shortage here! DSEI 2021 Military computer scientists ought to be treated with the same regard as pilots and warship captains, the head of the Army's cyber command has said.…

Green machine will also suck up microplastics between Glasgow and Belfast A hydrogen-powered cargo-carrying submarine has received taxpayer funding as part of the UK government's goal to slash maritime emissions by 2050.…

And no, we don’t want a generation of early-years coders 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. It's up to our writers to convince you to vote for their side.…

'This is not the outcome you were hoping for,' bidders told The UK's Cabinet Office has cancelled a procurement to move a group of central government departments off Oracle's wares to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP systems.…

Error handling and encapsulation remain the name of the game Interview It has been 13 years since Barbara Liskov won a Turing Award for her contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, and these days the creator of the CLU programming language continues to work on some interesting problems.…

Jeffrey Singh, stamp-collecting bachelor (35) of Milwaukee, Wisconsin – is that you? Feature Publishing data of all kinds offers big benefits for government, academic, and business users. Regulators demand that we make that data anonymous to deliver its benefits while protecting personal privacy. But what happens when people read between the lines?…

Norwegian carrier insists it's quitting Asian nation to defend human rights – but the buyer it lined up is accused of shady dealings Norwegian mobile carrier Telenor has revealed one reason it is quitting Myanmar is that the nation's ruling junta wanted it to intercept calls carried on its network.…

Welcome to the No-Fee Terms and Conditions, which makes the Java dev kit a bit more appealing Analysis Oracle this week made Oracle JDK "available for free," for personal, commercial and production use, including quarterly security updates, for a limited time.…

And go passwordless, use auth app, keys, Windows Hello, or codes to login From this week, Microsoft won't require you, or your password manager, to come up with strings of letters, numbers, and special characters forming a silly sentence or a reconfiguration of an ex’s name and birthday to access the Windows giant's services.…

Moratorium offered to ease burden of $22B debts India has re-written some of its telecommunications laws to make foreign investment easier and reduce enormous retrospective tax bills that threatened to send some carriers to the wall.…

Will build nuke-powered subs together and share cyber, AI, quantum and mysterious 'undersea capabilities' tech Australia, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom have signed a new defence and technology-sharing pact.…

Vision from window seats didn't stream, everything else worked SpaceX has successfully launched its first all-civilian crew into space.…

Staff also told to 'seize the patent position' on sixth-gen mobile networks Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei told an internal company meeting his mega-corp must focus early on 6G to avoid being restrained by patents – and it will seek international talent to achieve that.…

For at least a week, cloning a public repo made upstream environmental variables accessible From at least September 3 through September 10, public open-source code repositories that used Travis CI exposed their sensitive keys, credentials, and tokens to potential theft.…

Mmmm... BACN. Is there anything it can't do? DARPA, the famously scattershot defence research agency of people's hearts, has turned its attention to recent announcements of planned and actual communications satellite constellation launches, asking: "Why can't these things all just talk to each other?"…

On track for November release, but why is ASP.NET more loved than wanted? Microsoft has released another wave of previews for its .NET technology stack, but this time including a go-live licence for .NET 6 that enables brave users to deploy to production.…

'Our hope is that DNA-based CPUs will replace electronic CPUs in the future' Boffins at the Incheon National University have made what they claim to be a breakthrough in computing: a programmable processor which uses DNA, rather than electronics, to perform its computation.…

Musk to demonstrate his is mightier than Bezos or Branson's The first orbital spaceflight crewed completely by civilians, Inspiration4, is due to launch tonight from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9.…

Takes Avalanche's latest STT-MRAM tech and packs it into rad-hard ceramic squares Electronics outfit Micross has announced the launch of a 1 gigabit magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) component, its highest-density part yet - and a device it hopes will prove the future of spintronics for high-reliability computing in harsh environments.…

FOSSi Foundation's Olof Kindgren on the origins, future, and success of the RISC-V ISA The SweRVolf project, a fully open system-on-chip designed as a reference platform for Western Digital's RISC-V SweRV cores, has announced a major new release promising lower barriers to entry for those looking to experiment.…

New products launched to help shift oblivious or straggler firms over ahead of PSTN switch-off Small businesses in the UK are still woefully unprepared for the 2025 PSTN switch-off, when the plug will be pulled on the copper phone network.…

Hybrid disk and RAM system should slash costs, firm says Pinecone has upgraded its vector database, aiming at enterprises that are looking to boost productivity in machine learning projects.…

Analytics firm will neither admit nor deny the findings The US Securities and Exchange Commission has fined mobile data analytics biz App Annie $10m for engaging in deceptive practices and making material misrepresentations about how its alternative data was derived.…

Grace Hopper landed Google's newest transatlantic subsea cable has finally been hauled ashore in Cornwall, more than a year after the megacorp revealed plans to connect the UK and US.…

Change also has handy side effect of fixing some warnings as errors Linux creator and maintainer Linus Torvalds has merged a late change to the forthcoming 5.15 kernel code that raises the minimum compiler from GCC 4.9 to 5.1 – which may in future enable use of an updated version of the C programming language, C11.…

In-demand exec poached from VMware after Virtzilla poached her from Iron Mountain HPE has confirmed an executive remix, putting Fidelma Russo – formerly of VMware – into the role of chief technology officer, just 16 months after previous incumbent Kumar Sreekanti was appointed.…

Grief Corp are already under US sanctions, says Emsisoft A couple of ransomware gangs have threatened to start deleting files if targeted companies call in professional negotiators to help lower prices for decryption tools.…

The pandemic has turned children away from tech, says early-years teacher Maria 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.…

Bold words from Boston Dynamics' new man There was never a rogue drone at Gatwick Airport that caused planes to be grounded over the 2018 Christmas holidays, an outgoing exec at Chinese drone-maker DJI has claimed.…

Who needs a 3,000-piece orrery? We do, of course A clockwork model of the solar system has turned up in Lego Ideas*, combining some impressive Technic work with artistic whimsy.…

London cops on track to spend £1bn on IT contracting over couple of years The Mayor of London's Office for Policing and Crime is looking to talk to suppliers as it prepares for an IT procurement worth up to £300m.…

Which may not be a good thing for Arm, or anyone Attempts to restrict technology transfer to China could see the RISC-V architecture become more prominent, but also reduce the diversity of development around the platform.…

And then there were three servers on sale, just three and a half years after launch IBM has quietly announced the withdrawal of its two smallest POWER9 servers, leaving just three options available for purchase.…

Smartphones can keep us informed about everything other than environmental impact. That needs to change Column I recently installed an app that promised to measure my carbon footprint, then offer meaningful recommendations that could help me to reduce it.…

Three men charged with breaking export, security laws, agree to deal after infiltrating smartphones with zero-click exploits Three former US intelligence and military operatives broke America's weapons export and computer security laws by, among other things, helping the United Arab Emirates hijack and siphon data from people's iPhones, it emerged on Tuesday.…

Smartphone-driven instant money transfer across borders to come online in 2022 Singapore and India have struck an agreement to harmonise their peer-to-peer payments systems, allowing low-cost real-time cross-border payments…

Removes sysop privileges for another dozen, warns more about doxing, frets about preserving freedom to edit in the face of hostile regimes The Wikimedia Foundation has revealed efforts to gather personal information on some Chinese Wikipedia editors by entities opposed to their activities on the platform and likely to threaten the targets' privacy or well-being.…

It's happening already in Singapore, where Uber-analog Grab says lending and deliveries are post-COVID highlights Singaporean superapp Grab has walked back its 2021 earnings projections, citing COVID unpredictability and rolling government lockdowns across Southeast Asia as the reason for curbing its enthusiasm regarding future financial performance.…

Content won't be welcome if it doesn't laud the Party, strays into anything a little tawdry, or diverts from the official line China wants a "civilized" internet that displays and promotes Chinese socialist values and will strengthen oversight to make it happen with tools including a rumor-debunking mechanism, as outlined in a missive from China's Communist Party and the State Council.…

Azure agent in Linux guests fixed, MSHTML exploit tackled, and much more – Plus: Adobe and SAP issue updates Patch Tuesday For its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft churned out fixes for 66 vulnerabilities alongside 20 Chromium security bugs in Microsoft Edge.…

'I think the legislative framework around patents needs a deep examination, and I don’t think I'm alone in saying that' Interview Square, which last year founded the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to defend cryptocurrency technologies against patent trolls, has now joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) to further bolster its legal defenses.…