The Register

Good news for consumers, exporters, and outsourcers The BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have agreed to smooth the path for e-commerce and trade in services.…

Sorry, vAdmins, you probably don't have an excuse to buy Apple's $699 wheels VMware has announced something a little odd: it won't ever support ESXi running on Apple's 2019 Mac Pro.…

It's not as if politicians' birthdays aren't well known, and they get jabbed on live TV Indonesian authorities have admitted that the COVID-19 vaccination certificate of the nation's President has circulated online and tried to explain that it's an indication of admirable transparency, rather than lamentable security.…

A confluence of recent confusion from around the world that you may have missed ROUNDUP Welcome to this week's gallimaufry of gaucheness, as we present a selection of daft stories to make you glad that you're not that person.…

This isn't over says man pushing for neural networks' rights AI systems cannot be granted patents and will not be recognised as inventors in the eyes of the US law, said a federal judge who decided to uphold a previous ruling by the US Patent and Trademark Office this week.…

Address randomisation not implemented on some, it seems A Norwegian student who went wardriving around Oslo on a pushbike has discovered that several popular models of Bluetooth headphones don't implement MAC address randomisation – meaning they can be used to track their wearers.…

So, do copy that floppy? Software piracy, long a source of anxiety among app makers and large software companies, may have some beneficial effects.…

Amid customer fury, PC maker says it has 'no plans to add any further push notifications' to its stealth adware Lenovo has come under fire for the Tips application on its tablets, which has been likened to indelible adware that forces folks to view ads.…

Firefly Aerospace rounds out a wobbly week for rocket fanciers Video The sudden and explosive end of Firefly Aerospace's first test flight of its Alpha rocket rounded out a hat-trick of woe for rocket fans this week.…

Critics celebrate reconsideration of 'spyPhone' regime Apple on Friday said it intends to delay the introduction of its plan to commandeer customers' own devices to scan their iCloud-bound photos for illegal child exploitation imagery, a concession to the broad backlash that followed from the initiative.…

Harassment, bans on discussing pay, responsibilities slashed, and more alleged Updated The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – which investigates complaints against employers – is to examine claims made by two Apple employees, including allegations of unfair changes to working conditions, harassment, and muzzling pay equity discussions.…

Too many inexperienced project managers and not enough DevSecOps The US Air Force's first ever chief software officer has quit the job after branding it "probably the most challenging and infuriating of my entire career" in a remarkably candid blog post.…

Insiders, they don't like it. Bork the Taskbar, bork the Taskbar Microsoft's efforts to shed as much glory as possible with its Windows 11 release have continued with the sudden breakage of the Start Menu and Taskbar for its happy band of Insiders.…

Average unit prices climbed mid-to-high single digits, confirms chief beanie Hewlett Packard says it filed record gross margins for its latest financial quarter after increasing prices for hardware including servers and networking kit in response to industry-wide component shortages.…

Security biz publishes plans for law reforms Infosec firm Rapid7 has joined the chorus of voices urging reform to the UK's Computer Misuse Act, publishing its detailed proposals intended to change the cobwebby old law for the better.…

Central procurement team tickles the market with tantalising offer... but what for? The UK government is putting the feelers out for a bundle of big data products and services in a move that could kick off £2bn in tendering.…

Here in the UK, Sky broadband users back online Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack.…

No, not the 1980s TV show where Lionel Blair attempted to mime data abstraction to Una Stubbs Retro fans, rejoice! A bit of digital archaeology has turned up a working early version of the CLU programming language and the files needed to create it uploaded to GitHub.…

Founder and promoter accused of running 'Ponzi-like scheme' Cryptocurrency startup BitConnect and two men have been sued by America's financial watchdog, which claims the now-defunct biz swindled investors out of billions by lying to them about an automated trading bot that could reap huge profits.…

We can't deny people are paying up left, right, and centre... Interview Many people outside of IT believe computers will do away with jobs, but the current ransomware plague shows that new and more curious kinds of jobs are created at least as fast. So what sort of background sets you up to talk to people holding your data for ransom?…

Mark your diaries: 1 July 2022 is when stuff stops working Microsoft has deprecated two formerly key authentication APIs for Azure Active Directory and many scripts and applications will stop working after June 30th 2022, including older versions of official utilities.…

Listen to me, Palmer, now listen to me Something for the Weekend, Sir? It has been a quiet week. Apart from the nuclear warning siren, of course.…

Getting hot and steamy in London's Docklands On Call Though the week is over, for some the weekend does not involve frolics and adult beverages but a nerve-wracking 48 hours of watching the company phone. Welcome to On Call.…

Now to enact humanity's cunning interplanetary kidnapping plan NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has successfully drilled into a rock and probably retrieved a sample it's hoped will one day be kidnapped on a one-way trip to Earth.…

Biz defends 'safe and successful' ride America's aviation safety officials have grounded Virgin Galactic flights after its rocket trip that took company founder Richard Branson up into the heavens for a few minutes went off course.…

Open-sources the tool it uses to make that happen and says Intel, Samsung, Open Compute, Western Digital and others are keen to play Facebook has open-sourced code it uses to cache data without relying on DRAM for storage.…

Also banned telly shows from featuring men with an 'abnormal aesthetic' – basically the kind of chap you'd find in a boy band China's President Xi Jinping has signaled a push to export services and promised to share locally developed technology with the world.…

Central banks sign up, even though none has a working digital currency yet The central banks of Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa have signed up to test interoperability of central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments.…

PAC mania A popular NPM code library called Pac-Resolver has been updated to eliminate a severe remote-code execution vulnerability. Developers who have incorporated the package into their applications should make sure to update their dependencies to be rid of the bug, and provide necessary updates to users to secure them.…

Hash cracking reveals verboten slurs, terms like 'liberals, 'Palestine,' and 'socialist' ... and Quake's famous Fast InvSqrt GitHub's Copilot comes with a coded list of 1,170 words to prevent the AI programming assistant from responding to input, or generating output, with offensive terms, while also keeping users safe from words like "Israel," "Palestine," "communist," "liberal," and "socialist," according to new research.…

Insecure systems were compromised by miscreant, too, watchdog said America's trade watchdog today banned stalkerware developer SpyFone and its CEO from the surveillance industry, effectively putting an end to its business.…

Door was opened but nobody stepped inside, luckily Autodesk, makers of computer-aided design (CAD) software for manufacturing, has told the US stock market it was targeted as part of the the supply chain attack on SolarWinds' Orion software.…

Plus: We find out why VMware gave up on running Tanzu Application Service on Kubernetes Interview VMware has previewed Tanzu Application Platform, a bundle of Kubernetes packages which it claims will simplify application delivery – but its plans to run the existing Tanzu Application Service on Kubernetes have been abandoned.…

About time: 51 per cent of databases run on open source now Rimini Street is spreading its tentacles beyond proprietary databases and will provide third party support services to platforms with a distinctly open source flavour, including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.…

Zuckerborg plans to appeal Irish data protection slap WhatsApp has been slapped with a fine of €225m [PDF] following a long and drawn out investigation into whether it had provided the necessary data protection information to users under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Miscreants hacking vulnerable orbital hardware could set living standards back by decades in seconds Feature "Space is an invaluable domain, but it is also increasingly crowded and particularly susceptible to a range of cyber vulnerabilities and threats."…

Thou shalt not infringe upon the Register Standards Soviet An Australian drainage company has made a valiant effort to define a new standard for weights; in this specific case they're measuring sewer fatbergs in hippopotami.…

Finishes FY 2021 with a bang and starts to re-open Hyperconverged upstart Nutanix has made vaccinations mandatory for staff attending its offices, but hasn't made coming to the office mandatory.…

One firm hit with at least two attacks as outages continue Two UK VoIP operators have had their services disrupted over the last couple of days by ongoing, aggressive DDoS attacks.…

Backs away from potential Entity List security issues related to Chinese alliance members Ericsson has voiced its concern over "progress" within the O-RAN Alliance, days after Nokia called a technical timeout with the group amid "compliance-related" concerns.…

Duke University boffins figure out a way to boost the security of recognition networks Boffins from Duke University say they have figured out a way to help protect artificial intelligences from adversarial image-modification attacks: by throwing a few imaginary numbers their way.…

Six-hour slump for Direct Connect caused by 'loss of networking devices' – we'll assume that means they broke, not that they fell behind a couch The AP-NORTHEAST-1 region of Amazon Web Services, located in Tokyo, has endured six hours of sub-optimal performance.…

Not too worried about rogue CEO, unconcerned about biz striking out in new directions, apparently Arm has attempted to downplay an analyst's opinion that its Chinese joint venture conducted a "heist" that damaged its prospects in the Middle Kingdom.…

Why not if you've got the money for it? Google is reportedly designing its own Arm-based system-on-chips for Chromebook laptops and tablets to be launched in 2023.…

'A Republican majority will not forget' The Republican minority leader of the US House of Representatives this week issued a very public threat to cellphone networks and social media giants that were asked to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the storming of the Capitol in January.…

Sophos gazes into the abyss A dropper-as-a-service, which cyber-crime newbies can use to easily get their malware onto thousands of victims' PCs, has been dissected and documented this week.…

Regulator says it's happy book, music, newspaper programs can now whisper of the universe beyond the iOS walled garden Updated Apple has said it will make a small but important change to its App Store worldwide after Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) stuck a probe into the US giant's treatment of so-called reader apps.…

Joby hopes to push its ambitious service live in 2024 NASA is testing electric flying cars for a business that wants to launch a commercial air taxi service in 2024.…

Access should have been revoked ... but wasn't, court told On Tuesday, a woman from Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty to destroying computer data at an unidentified credit union from which she had recently been fired.…

Ten-year agreement kicks off in 2022 to help spies do spying Hewlett Packard Enterprise has scored a $2bn contract with the US National Security Agency to provide the cyber-spies a high-performance-computing-as-a-service via the cloudy biz's GreenLake platform.…