The Register

Now what – in the middle of a pandemic – is a useful thing we could do with that $800bn extra dosh, Oxfam wonders Self-proclaimed visionaries of our times like to explode myths about what can and cannot be done. Inhabiting mars? Let's get on it, electric car maker Elon Musk says.…

Scam has claimed 469 victims in December alone, of which OCBC has issued goodwill payments to 30 The Monetary Authority of Singapore says it is considering supervisory action against Southeast Asia's second largest bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), which was criticised for its incident response to a widespread phishing scheme across the island nation.…

Company pauses bonus clawbacks amid controversies and drop in share price HCL's latest quarter was packed with revenue growth and new deals – but also saw a near-doubling of attrition when compared to last year, affecting net profit and forcing the firm to get creative in preventing staff from jumping ship.…

Testing? Isn't that what users are for? Microsoft has patched the patch that broke chunks of Windows and emitted fixes for a Patch Tuesday cock-up that left servers rebooting and VPNs disconnected.…

Hardware hacker spots 'ghost in the ethernet optic' Hardware hacker Ben Cox has spotted an interesting bit of kit that we're sure has entirely reasonable uses other than network intrusion: Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP.…

Lynch fears US.gov will add yet more charges against him Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch has branded a judge's decision to not delay the process deadline for his extradition to the US on allegation of fraud as "perverse" and "irrational" – while the US government said his legal arguments were like saying "the Moon is made of cheese."…

Glitch is spilling private data and there's not much Apple users can do about it An improperly implemented API that stores data on browsers has caused a vulnerability in Safari 15 that leaks user internet activity and personal identifiers.…

'Reel'-y cheap – like $0.70 a pop If you only need the smallest of Raspberry Pi chips, but you need a lot of them, you can now buy the gang's RP2040 microcontrollers directly from the farm supplier in lots of 500 or 3,400.…

And for last week's digital graffiti operations, too After last week's website defacements, Ukraine is now being targeted by boot record-wiping malware that looks like ransomware but with one crucial difference: there's no recovery method. Officials have pointed the finger at Belarus.…

Is that an extremely large moon we see outside the solar system, astro-boffins ask themselves Scientists have spotted a new candidate for a moon existing outside of our solar system, with only a 1 per cent chance the observation could be an anomaly.…

IDC figures suggest providers had extra inventory to shift after pandemic panic Spending on compute and storage infrastructure for the cloud rose by 6.6 per cent during the last quarter following a cooldown in the middle of 2021 due to overprovisioning by cloud providers in response to the pandemic.…

'Malicious activity on our network' spotted, says CEO, as some contractors say they've still not been paid Umbrella company Parasol Group has confirmed why it shut down part of its IT last week: it found unauthorised activity from an intruder.…

Sorry, that IP address is on the naughty step Microsoft appears to have delivered the unwanted Christmas gift of email blocklisting to Linode IP addresses, and two weeks into 2022 the company does not seem ready to relent.…

Nobody expects the Linux malposition, do they, Michael Palin? Feeling old yet? Let the Reg ruin your day for you. We are now substantially closer to the 2038 problem (5,849 days) than it has been since the Year 2000 problem (yep, 8,049 days since Y2K).…

Analyst predicts double-digit percentage uptick in '22 Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to see double-digit growth this year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.…

Stop horsing around. Pony up Opinion There's much talk of the Open Source Sustainability Problem. From individual developers to Google's White House lobbying, the issue seems simple but intractable. Is the willingness of volunteer coders a solid enough basis for the long-term health of essential infrastructure?…

Please Mr Hitchcock, no more. The UPS can't take it Who, Me? "Expect the unexpected" is a cliché regularly trotted out during disaster planning. But how far should those plans go? Welcome to an episode of Who, Me? where a reader finds an entirely new failure mode.…

Plus: FIFA 22 players lose their identity and Texas gets phony QR codes In brief Thieves operating for the North Korean government made off with almost $400m in digicash last year in a concerted attack to steal and launder as much currency as they could.…

Plus: AI systems can identify different chess players by their moves and more In brief California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said it’s “revisiting” its opinion of whether Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving feature needs more oversight after a series of videos demonstrate how the technology can be dangerous.…

Laser experiments show their magnetic fields shielding their surfaces from radiation last longer Life on Super-Earths may have more time to develop and evolve, thanks to their long-lasting magnetic fields protecting them against harmful cosmic rays, according to new research published in Science.…

Let's not mention on-premise licences.... ERP specialist SAP saw Q4 cloud revenue jump 28 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier to hit €2.61bn…

Latest iteration of Texas-led antitrust complaint against Google expands claims of bad behavior The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint filed in the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google.…

It's blowback time again China's cold war with the US on chips isn't slowing down the country's rapid growth in semiconductors, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week.…

Machine learning to propel us into glorious era of scientific discovery Alibaba has published a report detailing a number of technology trends the China-based megacorp believes will make an impact across the economy and society at large over the next several years. This includes the use of AI in scientific research, adoption of silicon photonics, the integration of terrestrial, and satellite data networks among others.…

The bill calls for concise, machine readable summaries of how websites and apps use client data Almost no one bothers to read the Terms of Service agreements on websites so a group of US lawmakers on Thursday proposed a bill to require that commercial websites and mobile apps translate their legalese into summaries that can be more easily read by people and by machines.…

Cybercrook gang has 'ceased to exist' says Putin's military service Russia's internal security agency said today it had dismantled the REvil ransomware gang's networks and raided its operators' homes following arrests yesterday in Ukraine.…

It took two years for Big Red to find five breaches A US court has found Oracle support specialist Rimini Street in contempt of court and ordered it to pay $630,000 in sanctions – peanuts for the $40bn-revenue Big Red software company.…

Paperwork needs sorting for a launch from the UK Virgin Orbit has managed a third successful mission as the company deployed seven satellites into orbit from its LauncherOne rocket.…

US (and Canadian) fears are uniquely Leftpondian, it seems 5G mobile phone emissions won't harm airliners, Britain's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has said, dampening down excitement in the US about mobile masts interfering with airliners' altimeters.…

Covered outdoor workspaces can be so... bracing Google is splashing the cash in the UK with a billion-dollar purchase of a London property as the ad biz looks to the office as "a place for in-person collaboration and connection."…

Contractors say they haven't been paid, and are in the dark too Contractors employed via umbrella company Parasol Group are increasingly nervous about a multi-day outage of some IT systems used to process payroll, with several suspecting a security attack as the root cause.…

Despite threatening messages nothing's been leaked, say victims A "massive" cyber attack on Ukraine caught the world's eye this morning as the country's foreign ministry said its website, among others, had been taken down by unidentified hackers.…

Local 5G initiative lets orgs deploy on different frequencies from mobile firms HPE has convinced a Japanese telecoms provider to operate its 5G stack as a testbed for private networks the carrier intends to offer to business customers.…

Home Office IT units confused over who is fulfilling the vital role The UK government's ePassport airport gate upgrade programme has no system integrator, a hardware supplier has said, while the Home Office and two of its IT units seem confused about who should be fulfilling the critical role.…

Time to back up those PDFs you've been hoarding Worrying changes are afoot for e-comics vendor ComiXology as Amazon finally gets round to asserting copy control – meaning no more downloads of unprotected comics, even if you've paid for them.…

Recovery of one out of two bonuses will stop, but what about those already affected? Indian IT services giant HCL Technologies has quietly removed some of the controversial clauses from its HR policy revealed by The Reg last week, which required resigning employees to pay back bonuses.…

Tech giant promises to create an implementation plan based on outcome Microsoft's board of directors has hired a law firm to review its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies and practices following a shareholder proposal.…

So not keen then? Vivaldi will not provide crypto-wallets in its browser because it doesn't want users to participate in digital coin trading – something CEO Jon von Tetzchner desribes as "at best a gamble and at worst a scam".…

Get ready for a new 'experience'... Heads up, OneDrive-using Mac fans: Microsoft has begun rolling out a new Files On-Demand "experience", and you can't disable it.…

The Register talks to co-founder about supply chains and EV assembly Interview Supply chain woes continue to batter the tech industry but that didn't deter the makers of the diminutive Microlino from introducing a new electric vehicle amid a pandemic and chip shortage.…

Stay in your lane? Or check for a shoddy connection job? On Call A warning from the past in today's On Call. Helpfulness is not always rewarded with a pat on the back and a slap-up meal on expenses. Sometimes the Somebody Else's Problem field* is best left alone.…

At the White House Open Source Summit, the Chocolate Factory floated a few ideas to make that happen In conjunction with a White House meeting on Thursday at which technology companies discussed the security of open source software, Google proposed three initiatives to strengthen national cybersecurity.…

Cupertino loses second chip guru Apple's having a problem retaining top chip personnel, with the latest defection being CPU architect Mike Filippo going to Microsoft.…

Customers shouldn't need to wait seven days before being told The US Federal Communications Commission is considering imposing stricter rules requiring telecommunications carriers to report data breaches to customers and law enforcement more quickly.…

Those critical AWS flaws that exposed data and broke tenant separation? All fixed! Two serious security vulnerabilities were recently found in AWS services, but because they were responsibly reported and the cloud biz responded quickly, no harm appears to have been done.…

Indian IT consultancies say biz is booming as more customers consider cloud Three of India's IT service giants – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro – held results calls yesterday revealing a booming business with room for multiple players.…

Execs foresee fewer kinks in the supply chain this year? Perhaps Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will hike capital spending by a nearly third in 2022 to build out production capacity in the expectation that demand for chips keeps flooding in.…

Time to move, but be warned – not everything has survived the 'modern experience' It appears that today's victim of the Chocolate Factory axeman is legacy Google Voice for personal accounts.…

Plus three other suspects nicked in raids today Ukrainian police have arrested five people on suspicion of operating a ransomware gang, including a husband-and-wife team, following tipoffs from UK law enforcement.…

Schrems II ruling continues to trouble transatlantic data sharing The Austrian data protection authority has ruled that use of Google Analytics by a German company is in breach of European law in light of the Schrems II EU-US data sharing ruling.…