The Register

But the idea of blockchain-powered money is worth government consideration The International Monetary Fund has called on nations to consider using blockchain tech to improve financial services, but warned that dabbling with private cryptocurrencies is vastly risky.…

Characteristically mum about details Apple on Monday patched a zero-day vulnerability in its iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems, only a week after issuing a set of OS updates addressing about three dozen other flaws.…

It's not a bribe when it's a payment waiver Blue Origins supremo Jeff Bezos has offered NASA a $2bn discount to keep his dream alive of transporting the next American man and first woman to the Moon's surface.…

Energy efficiency rules appears to be limiting the availability of gaming rigs Dell is no longer shipping energy-hungry gaming PCs to certain states in America because they demand more energy than local standards allow.…

Microsoft offers some mitigations for thwarting PetitPotam attacks Microsoft completed a vulnerability hat-trick this month as yet another security weakness was uncovered in its operating systems. And this one doesn't even need authentication to work its magic.…

'The W3C doesn't get to be the boss of anyone, the decisions are going to be made at each of the browsers' Google has updated the schedule for its introduction of "Privacy Sandbox" browser technology and the phasing out of third-party cookies.…

Learn how to democratise storage with this revolutionary webcast Promo The laws of data are pretty universal. Every organisation needs advanced security, performance, and management features that improve over time.…

Fear not! Issue is at the 'highest level of escalation,' says ISP A broadband customer from Leatherhead, Surrey, who was told to "speak to your MP" after his ISP failed to resolve repeated line disconnections has now been informed he can leave his contract without penalty after Openreach failed to resolve the problem.…

Makes sense really Newly released data suggests South Korea is having a silicon and instant noodle renaissance, both thanks to COVID-19.…

End of March for ValueLicensing's jurisdictional defence British software licence reseller ValueLicensing has a trial date for the first part of a £270m legal showdown against Microsoft after accusing the US behemoth of breaking UK and EU competition laws.…

v11 set for mid-August release The Debian Project has set a release date of 14 August for Debian 11, also known as Bullseye.…

Plus: Facial-recognition upstart Clearview raises $30m In brief Deepmind and the European Bioinformatics Institute released a database of more than 350,000 3D protein structures predicted by the biz's AI model AlphaFold.…

Litre of the office essential costs as much as £2,410 – up from £1,700 in 2003, finds Which? Printer ink continues to rank as one of the most expensive liquids around with a litre of the home office essential costing the same as a very high-end bottle of bubbly or an oak-aged Cognac.…

The three horsemen of the borkpocalypse: CMOS error, XP and... death BORK!BORK!BORK! Windows XP is coming up to a 20th birthday yet it is heartening to see that the OS can still be guaranteed to take its place as one of the three horsemen of the borkpocalypse.…

Promise of 'efficiencies' may be appealing to authority facing £100m COVID black hole Kent County Council is inviting IT services companies and BPO specialists to bid for places on a £500m framework agreement set to offer a range of outsourcing services to the English public authority.…

You may know it better as Teams. Giddy up Column You can spot a veteran of the Browser Wars a mile off. These fearsome conflicts, fought across the desktops of the world not 20 years ago, left deep scars. Just whisper "Best viewed in IE6" in any crowd of Generation 95'ers, and watch grown men and women weep like babies as their hands grasp for an invisible mouse to click on that long-gone Close Window.…

You don't mind if we record this, do you? Feature Having shown you some top tips on how people screw up their CVs and interviews, we now move to the weakest link: the interviewer. This article draws on my own experiences from grunt programmer, CTO to headhunter with many years in the recruitment game. Names have been obscured to protect the guilty.…

Troubled Nauka might actually make it after four orbit corrections – since we left work Friday Russia's space agency spent the weekend trying to get one module to the International Space Station and deciding to ditch another.…

Praise be for Firewalls Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, where hallowed ground gets trampled as a reader inadvertently cleans up the collective act of the senior staff.…

Tom Corn heads to Open Systems as Virtzilla hints its SmartNIC push has borne fruit Video VMware's security products boss has bailed.…

Plus: Microsoft responds to another NTLM relay attack technique, and more In brief DEF CON's "Spot the Fed" game is going to be a little easier than usual this year: the head of the US government's Homeland Security is giving a keynote.…

Someone seems to have leaked a draft document that represented a radical reversal The United States Department of Defence (DoD) has reiterated that it thinks drones made by Chinese firm DJI represent a security risk after an internal document suggesting the opposite leaked to the press.…

All levels of industry and government told to get moving, consumers encouraged to buy new Wi-Fi routers China's Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission and Cyberspace Administration have set out a plan for massive adoption of IPv6.…

Lower your prices and play nicer, CDN goliath suggests Cloudflare on Friday accused competitor Amazon Web Services of massive markups and hindering customer data portability, even as it invited the cloud services giant to join its discount data initiative known as the Bandwidth Alliance.…

Google parent hopes to inject AI into factory machines Alphabet today launched its latest tech startup, Intrinsic, which aims to build commercial software that will power industrial robots.…

Programming blunder is the second such snafu this month Bug of the week Google has fixed a bug in Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165 that surfaced on Monday and prevented some users from being able to login to their systems.…

85% of those jobs will be rehired, just in cheaper countries Updated Around 10 per cent of Rackspace staff, predominantly in the US it seems, got an unwelcome email this week informing them they were being let go.…

An unexpectedly vehicular collection of chaos and confusion for your consideration Welcome back for another compendium of tomfoolery from this week for those who enjoy a bit of light-hearted piffle. And let's face it, who doesn't?…

What else is round? Oh yes, holes While the Windows of today may have more holes in it than a 20-year-old pair of underpants, Microsoft has continued plugging away at previews for the upcoming iteration, Windows 11.…

Of course kids are allowed. Whatever gave you the impression they weren't? Open-source audio editor Audacity this week posted an apology on GitHub in response to the entirely predictable furore over the platform's privacy policy.…

We endured enormous cruelty and abuse and feared for our lives, say couple A couple from the US who run a small ecommerce publication have launched legal action against eBay accusing the company of a "coordinated effort to intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence" them to muzzle their coverage.…

Reg reader reveals colossal 821-item collection of Amazon trademarks tucked away on its site Recently, a Reg reader* contacted us at Vulture (virtual) Towers with something odd they'd found online – a page tucked away in the little-visited “Legal Policies” section of Amazon's website containing a "non-exhaustive" list of all the trademarks held by the company.…

Main contractor J McCann insists it takes its obligations 'very seriously' Contractors helping to lay fibre cables under streets in Derby have threatened to scrap their work and "rip up tarmac" they've laid – unless they get paid.…

CBDC would be released in phases to prevent volatility India may be launching a digital currency, an official from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said today.…

CEO reassures punters that $40bn foundry spending will pay off Intel boss Pat Gelsinger reckons global semiconductor shortages that continue to disrupt tech industry supply chains could last until 2023, around the time Chipzilla will at last release its first 7nm process CPU, Meteor Lake.…

Palantir potentially in line for £50m contract with Brit maritime force The Royal Navy is on the hunt, not for enemy submarines in this instance, but for a technology supplier to provide a data integration platform in return for a bounty of £50m.…

400 light-years away, satellites are forming Pic Astronomers have for the first time spotted what appears to be a moon-forming ring of matter around a young exoplanet, and described their findings in a paper published on Thursday.…

German-speaking user group takes dismal view of scheme's value The German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) has published a decidedly downbeat survey revealing attitudes to RISE with SAP, the application company's big sell to get its entrenched customer base to the cloud.…

One of the worst things that could happen to privacy-focused community Criminals have hacked into a Gumtree-style website used for buying and selling firearms, making off with a 111,000-entry database containing partial information from a CRM product used by gun shops across the UK.…

'Funding continues,' despite media reports to the contrary Updated UK Research and Investment (UKRI) has rejected reports it had, on instruction of UK government, cut financial support for Newport Wafer Fab over concerns about its acquisition by Nexperia, offering a simple statement: "funding continues."…

National Audit Office's scathing report blames fails on lack of experience Government IT projects are poorly thought out, often fail to achieve what they're designed to do, and are a waste of taxpayers' money.…

I may consider offering you cash to break it for me Something for the Weekend, Sir? Something is wrong with my eyes. Hang on, no, it's my display that's gone smeary. This is great news.…

Microsoft study says India is most susceptible, other studies suggest the USA cops it most Tech support scam attempts dropped in frequency over the past two years, but remain a threat. And Millennials and Gen Z – not Boomers – fall prey most frequently, according to Microsoft in its 2021 Global Tech Support Scam Research report, released Thursday.…

You killed my data centre, prepare to die On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call in which a contractor's shonky job and a guard's Jedi-like abilities result in an impromptu pager party.…

The Social Network™ has spent years trying to hop from MySQL 5.6 to 8.0 and still isn’t done Facebook has had all sorts of no fun trying to migrate from MySQL 5.6 to version 8.0.…

Boost your morale, business and velocity with this exclusive broadcast Webcast What’s the most important metric for your engineering team? Is it the number of application deployments they make, or the overall failure rate?…

Spends £££ on Silicon Valley cyber risk management firm BT is looking to cash in on ever-growing global concerns over digital crime, and has confirmed making a multi million pound investment in US-based cyber risk management firm Safe Security.…

Turns out the skies can be the limit for machine learning The UK government will, to the tune of £60m, bankroll two major research projects led by the country’s national institute for AI, the Alan Turing Institute: one to automate air traffic control, and the other for banking services.…

Tender issued to wire 361,000 thousand more villages, with $2.5bn subsidies dangled India has issued tenders for a public-private partnership intended to connect another 361,000 villages to the nation's BharatNet fibre optic network.…

Users sent two further updates – one fixing an issue that prevented installation of antivirus software Software-for-services providers business Kaseya has obtained a "universal decryptor key" for the REvil ransomware and is delivering it to clients.…