The Register

Prepare to have a very busy weekend of mitigating and patching An unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Apache's Log4j Java-based logging tool is being actively exploited, researchers have warned after it was used to execute code on Minecraft servers.…

Forget software-as-a-hostage! Customers have more choice when it comes to servers, networking, storage Hewlett Packard Enterprise's multi-year efforts to remain relevant against the onslaught of cloud giants hinges on convincing resellers to back its as-a-service (aaS) sales model, and yet progress continues to be painfully slow.…

That time Rootkitting for Dummies might as well have been in Microsoft's Plus! Pack Retired Microsoft engineer, Dave Plummer, offered a blast from the past last week with a look back at the infamous Sony Windows "rootkit" scandal.…

Payment over Mark Hurd dispute hits figures as Ellison bigs up cloud ERP Oracle sales increased nearly 6 per cent to hit $10.4bn in its Q2 results for fiscal 2022, but the company made a loss due in part to a dispute relating to a former CEO.…

Brace yourself, now come years of appeals Julian Assange will be sent stateside for trial on criminal charges after the US government won an appeal against an earlier court order that released him from the threat of extradition.…

Microsoft merch of Christmas Past up for grabs FREE STUFF With the season of giving upon us, the cupboards of Vulture Central are being cleared out and long-forgotten items found that might be of use to our readership. Just think of us as tech tat peddling Gumtree.…

Readers have their say Register debate It is entirely human and in some senses desirable to eliminate as much of the complexity out of the IT stack as makes sense. And it is also entirely human to be accepting of the need for choice and to acknowledge the necessary frustration of complexity.…

Pat McGovern knew his way around a trash can Something for the Weekend, Sir? Spies in space are watching me as I take a shower.…

Taming the multi-tentacled IT beast with spoofing, shell scripts, and a bit of C On Call It's another tale from the world of telephony where everything goes wrong in this week's On Call.…

Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer's two year mission will check out polarization of black holes, neutrons and other celestial objects In the wee hours of Thursday morning, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission into orbit from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.…

Wants comprehensive, consistent, and coordinated regulation to avoid instability The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called for global, comprehensive, consistent, and coordinated regulation to protect the stability of the world's financial systems.…

'Use our logistics service or don't. It'll cost you either way.' Amazon was slapped with a whopping €1.13bn (£963.7m or $1.3bn) fine by Italy’s antitrust regulator on Thursday for “abusing its dominant position” and handicapping sellers that aren’t using its logistics service.…

Frontier Software admitted attack three weeks ago, said data was safe … now it's on the dark web Personal information describing names, addresses, bank account details, and taxation IDs of 38,000 Australian government employees has been leaked to the dark web after a ransomware attack.…

Re-orgs bureaucracy to deliver 'stronger alignment and synchronization' The USA's Department of Defense has created a post of Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAIO) that is expected to encompass three existing leadership offices and develop advanced fighting capabilities.…

Basically a slice of public cloud with better isolation and governance – just like our cloud, says Google Google has given us all a new variety of cloud to consider: a "software-defined community cloud".…

Also China: This one guy sent feedback to the government online, it was adopted, that shows we’re a democracy China has again banned a batch of apps, but this time it's taken action against a service – Douban – that's hosting opinions Beijing finds displeasing.…

Power for the people, and AI The activity around creating a legit graphics processor for RISC-V chip designs, an emerging competitor to x86 and ARM, is gaining steam.…

Woman tells El Reg she discovered the bug during a granny emergency A bizarre bug prevented a woman from calling 911 on her Pixel smartphone when she thought her grandma was having a stroke.…

The RISC-V Summit is over - here's what you need to know China's been scammed for billions by rogues in its chase to become a chip powerhouse, though ironically, a free, open-source CPU architecture is emerging as its best bet to create a powerful homegrown chip.…

And it's really bad news for EV cert vendors in Top 1 Million report Almost a third of the world wide web's top million sites are still not using HTTPS by default, according to infosec researcher Scott Helme's analysis.…

Orbit roughly 100 times wider than that of similar planets in our solar system Scientists have discovered a gas giant planet 10 times the size of Jupiter orbiting the binary system of b Centauri A and B.…

Rough edges, but ground-up design makes sense First look Our first look at Fleet, the new JetBrains core editor and IDE, shows the promise of a minimalist design and an architecture that has collaboration and remote development in mind – but there are plenty of rough edges in the preview.…

Company ousts British Council in running Erasmus replacement Everyone's favourite outsourcing badass Capita is taking control of the £110m Turing student exchange programme formerly run by The British Council, a public corporation.…

Most bizarre names chosen by UK drivers included ZZ Top and The Beast Britain’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has said one in six UK motorists name their car, with those aged 35 to 53 most likely to do so. The results have been disappointing, to say the least.…

Trust us with everything, croons septuple-strong partnership Cyber insurance premiums are increasing and so is infosec's determination to get a slice of that pie: Cloudflare is partnering with Mandiant, Secureworks, and Crowdstrike in a "rapid referral" partnership for under-attack companies.…

Govt hopes for 'mature, world-class' sector, but doubts linger over regulation The UK government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) has published a "roadmap" designed to create an AI assurance industry to support the introduction of automated analysis, decision making, and processes.…

Our wrap-up: Instant Glacier storage, Kubernetes at AWS, Adobe pops up despite Microsoft partnership, and more Re:invent AWS annual customer jamboree, Re:invent, is over, and while the firm impressed some attendees with tech advances, custom hardware like Graviton 3, and an array of new features, many were incremental rather than revolutionary.…

Orbex is still testing, but aiming for the real thing in 2022 UK rocketeers Orbex have thrown their hat in the ring of Blighty's very own space race by kicking off construction of a Scottish launch platform for its Prime rocket.…

Every possible thing that can be tuned must be tuned – and tuned well 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.…

New clauses are menu to pick from, not commandments of stone Infosec industry panic about new cyber insurance model clauses excluding cover for state-back intrusions is wide of the mark, the Lloyd's Market Association has told The Register.…

How to dodge The Great Resignation Research has shown that over half of UK workers would consider quitting their job if, in the future, a hybrid work option were pulled by their employer.…

They'll even run a competition to help this along Officials from the USA and UK have signaled an intention to together shape a new world order for data sharing across borders.…

APNIC and LACNIC worry about who will set the rules of future internetworking The internet remains resilient, and its underlying protocols and technologies dominate global networking – but its relevance may be challenged by the increasing amount of traffic carried on private networks run by Big Tech, or rules imposed by governments.…

Lappies are leaping – albeit a little lower – and gamers are growing, but tablets are turgid While the PC market is cooling following two straight years of double-digit growth spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted shipments will continue to grow over the next five years.…

Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu all growing fast, and Americlouds are about to expand Alibaba continues to dominate China's cloud market, according to analyst firm Canalys.…

Resellers were given exclusive territories to target, and offered tech support Australia's Federal Police force has revealed more about how it distributed a backdoored chat app to criminals.…

Previous injunction that ordered company to allow non-Apple payments systems is suspended Apple will not be required to implement third-party in-app payments systems for its App Store by 9 December, after a federal appeals court temporarily suspended the initial ruling on Wednesday.…

Donated $110K to Democrats in recent years United States president Joe Biden has announced his intention to nominate former HPE and eBay CEO Meg Whitman as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Kenya.…

Meet the new boss A former executive leading Qualcomm's Snapdragon computing platforms has departed the company to become CEO at an AI chip startup.…

Expect flight delays and diversions, US Federal Aviation Administation warns The new 5G C-band wireless broadband service expected to rollout on 5 January 2022 in the US will disrupt local radio signals and make it difficult for airplanes to land safely in harsh weather conditions, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.…

Cross-border op nabbed our man, boast cops and prosecutors A Canadian man is accused of masterminding ransomware attacks that caused "damage" to systems belonging to the US state of Alaska.…

Schrems II starts to be felt in Europe A German court has ruled that sharing IP addresses with US-based servers for the purpose of cookie consent is unlawful under EU data protection law and the EU Court of Justice Schrems II ruling.…

Data watchdog shows it's keeping its PECR up British telco Virgin Media is facing a £50k financial penalty after spamming more than 400,000 opted-out customers urging them to sign back up to receive marketing bumf.…

Must revise visa evaluation process Microsoft has settled with the US Justice Department over immigration-related discrimination claims.…

Microsoft aware of the issue months ago, but not fixed yet Updated Users of Windows 11 are complaining about slow write speeds on NVMe SSD drives, a problem which persists even though it was acknowledged by a Microsoft engineer three months ago.…

Yet another Slack rival goes offline, but text-adventure fans need not panic Twitter has acquired another dotcom – this time business-oriented, low-distraction text/audio/video chat service Quill.chat. Neither company said how much cash changed hands.…

Surely the Great Coming of (Huawei-less) 5G will have happened by then The UK government has announced measures to phase out 2G and 3G networks by 2033 ahead of Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries' meeting with US Secretary for Commerce Gina Raimondo.…

Two Russian men and 15 Does named in Glupteba Enterprise case Google says it has taken legal and technical action against Russia-based botnet Glupteba.…

New e-ink tablet, too. Open mobiles, tablets and laptops are coming... slowly Open-source-hardware vendor Pine64 has started shipping versions of its upgraded smartphone and new e-ink tablet – but so far, only to developers.…

Compute graphs are the way forward 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.…