The Register

Ooh, watch out for splinters On Call It's Carry On Call time this week as a Register reader finds himself dealing with a potentially career-limiting callout.…

Beijing likes space. Big tech? Not so much – at least this week Chinese tech giant Tencent has joined forces with the nation’s National Astronomical Observatories to journey into AI space exploration, CEO Pony Ma told the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday.…

Can we have less infosec theater, please? Dan Abramov, a software engineer at Facebook, this week published a plea to silence a particularly vocal JavaScript security tool – and its creators more or less agreed there's room for improvement.…

Federal Court finds Apple is neither “ornamental” nor “parasitic” and thinks local action is appropriate despite US case Epic Games has had a win in Australia, with the nation’s Federal Court permitting it to sue Apple over its insistence that it alone can process in-app purchases.…

Promises “exponentially more secure” product and cash assistance for customers Beleaguered IT management software vendor Kaseya has delayed the restoration of its SaaS services until Sunday, July 11th.…

As GPU prices crash after crypto-mines shut down in China, we're told The insatiable demand for microchips amid a global supply crunch of semiconductors is perhaps behind the following smuggling capers in China that just happened to catch our eye.…

10 PRINT "ML won't take my job ";: GOTO 10 OpenAI warned that its Codex neural network, like the one that powers GitHub’s code-completion tool Copilot, is likely to generate source that looks plausible but is incorrect, and its performance will decrease as it grows in size.…

Privacy advocates say surgery on bird-themed system must happen in public Google has decided to let the initial test of its FLoC ad technology conclude in a few days to work on improvements – though it isn't inclined to share feedback from test participants.…

Walking sci-fi horror movie plot wants to look inside boffin brains to find way to help ailing grandparents Eleven-year-old Laurent Simons has become the second-youngest college graduate in history after obtaining a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Antwerp.…

Artistic types invited to submit their designs – under very specific guidelines The Linux Foundation, not satisfied with a model that sees world+dog invited to contribute to the open-source kernel that bears its name, is asking for help on another project: designing a T-shirt to celebrate 30 years of the software – and we have little doubt El Reg readers will have some suggestions.…

Judges revive some of the claims A long-running legal case concerning the alleged $265m mis-selling of software licences by IBM to the US tax office has a new lease of life following a ruling by the US Court of Appeal earlier this week [PDF].…

Appeal against January decision to be heard by High Court Julian Assange will remain in a British prison for now after the US government won permission to appeal against a January court ruling that freed him from extradition to America.…

We'd hate to see the litter tray A giant cat has been spotted peering down at onlookers in one of the busiest parts of Tokyo and doing what felines do best – taking catnaps.…

Company caught throttling everyday apps but leaving benchmarks, selected games alone Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has had the shine taken off its latest launches with tests that indicate it is once again trying to fiddle the figures on benchmark results, throttling real-world performance considerably compared to synthetic workloads.…

Blue-light radio network drags on, adding excess £1.2bn to telco's coffers The UK's competition regulator is consulting on whether to launch a probe into the supply of emergency services telecoms and data networks that could deliver £1.2bn in excess profit for Motorola from 2020 to 2026.…

Firm tries to stand up for customers, human rights, sells to M1 and takes a bath Norwegian telco Telenor has quit Myanmar, selling its network there because the recent military coup has made it impossible to operate on its terms in the nation.…

Plus: Fewer people proportion agree 'current laws' sufficiently protect personal information The dodgy use of personal data by rogue organisations in fraud and scams continues to be the biggest data protection bugbear for people in the UK, according to research from the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).…

Threat of national industrial ballot in May forced telco back around negotiating table BT says it has reached an agreement with the Communication Workers Union (CWU) over disputes concerning pay and redundancy - and in doing so looks to have averted the union's threat of running a national ballot for strike action.…

Might be nice if a few more of those adopters turned to contributors, though OpenUK has released the second of its three-part probe into the state of open source in Britain, finding that an overwhelming majority of businesses use the wares – but noticeably fewer are willing to contribute code back.…

Innovative multi-process-node chip sandwich perhaps a little too innovative for its customers Intel has officially discontinued Lakefield, its first Foveros-based "Hybrid Technology" processor, citing shifting demand – but is keeping mum on what that means for the Foveros concept in general.…

It even pushes videos that break the site's own content policies The majority of YouTube videos that netizens taking part in a study said they regretted watching were recommended by the website's space-age AI algorithms.…

The times they are a-changin' The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) today released data revealing that cybercrime accounted for 43 per cent of all crime in the city-state during 2020.…

UK & I shindig has everything: Olympians, Bake-Off stars, and the ever-rising former BT boss Gavin Patterson got his break in marketing by heading up Procter & Gamble’s promotion of its Pantene line of shampoos and conditioners and, just like his voluminous glossy hair, the Salesforce president’s proclivity for self-promotion has never really lost its shine.…

Big brand flagship performance, midrange price, 3.5mm earphone port Review Over the past five years or so, a trend has emerged in the Android space where devices priced towards the middle of the pack have specs that can compete with the most aspirational blowers.…

It's partly for a good reason, though: vaccines Semiconductor supply chain problems are set to continue for at least another six months, according to Dell UK senior vice president and GM, Dayne Turbitt, who pointed to a surprising culprit amid surging demand.…

El Reg revisits those early days of the internet and learns of the NSA tipping off Boeing about French spying Interview Gene Hoffman is one of the founders of PrivNet, which in 1996 developed Internet Fast Forward, the internet's first commercial ad blocking software. He helped found the company as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the help of fellow students Mark Elrod, Jeff Harrell, and James Howard.…

Gang is using custom RATs malware to target government employees, and has an interest in Pakistan, too Cisco’s Talos security unit says it has detected an increased rate of attacks on targets on the Indian subcontinent and named an advanced persistent threat actor named SideCopy as the source.…

Extra-terrestrial service probed Belgian boffins have published a teardown of the Starlink user terminal – also known as Dishy McFlatface – in which they managed to dump the device's firmware that was housed on a eMMC card upon the PCB.…

A sport of patent revenue comes in handy when faced with US sanctions and 5G bans Huawei has announced that its wireless tech is going into 30 million Volkswagen vehicles, thanks to a deal with an unnamed supplier .…

So close, and yet so far One of the vulnerabilities in Kaseya's IT management software VSA that was exploited by miscreants to infect up to 1,500 businesses with ransomware was reported to the vendor in April – and the patch just wasn't ready in time.…

Too big a price to pay for decelerating your epigenetic clock? If you're a gentleman looking to counteract the effects of ageing, a new study on sheep may have the answer – but you're going to have to say goodbye to your family jewels in return for a slowdown of your DNA's ageing process.…

Accounts held in grown-ups’ names targeted if they stay up late Chinese web giant Tencent has started using facial recognition tech to boot kids out of its games.…

Europeans still hoping for Halloween lift-off After years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope may actually launch this year, having passed a "final mission analysis review," we're told.…

Hopes to integrate closed platforms into giant national marketplace and make the lot open-source India has taken aim at Amazon.com, e-commerce platforms like Shopify and even its homegrown e-tail success story Flipkart, by commencing an effort to create an “Open Network for Digital Commerce” that would offer an independent e-commerce platform spanning multiple providers.…

Chocolate Factory rolls its eyes at 'meritless' antitrust lawsuit As expected, Google is facing a fresh legal assault regarding its Play Store, the 30 per cent cut it took from developers' revenues via the software souk, and other rules and restrictions.…

Behind the curtain: Server crashes, thumbs down on Slack, staff compared to shoemaker's kids, and more IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on Wednesday addressed the company's ongoing email woes in his monthly video message to employees.…

Details of flaws now public for miscreants to exploit Admins of on-premises Sage X3 ERP deployments should check they're not exposing the enterprise resource planning suite to the public internet in case they fall victim to an unauthenticated command execution vulnerability.…

Phishing campaign aims to capitalize on slow fix deployment, it seems This month's Kaseya VSA ransomware attack took a turn for the worse on Wednesday with word that miscreants have launched a phishing campaign to ensnare victims with a remote-control tool disguised as a VSA update.…

Newport Wafer Fab sale to Wingtech goes under microscope UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised a national security investigation into a China-backed corporation’s takeover of Britain's largest producer of semiconductors.…

Company donates the whole shooting match to the newly formed foundation, joins as founding member Amazon is abandoning its Lumberyard 3D engine project before it even leaves beta, but in a way that means it could live on for years to come: it's donating it to the newly formed Open 3D Foundation for release and continued development under a permissive open-source licence.…

Golf fan has opinions on America's First Amendment and Section 230 A Florida man held a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Wednesday to announce the filing of lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and corresponding executives Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai – who runs YouTube's parent company.…

'All the subtlety of a GDPR cookie banner and the charm of Clippy' Visual Studio Code program manager Chris Dias has defended an intrusive new "Workspace Trust" dialog, saying it is to "raise awareness that there are many attack opportunities when you download code from the internet."…

I pity the spool Any celebrations that Microsoft's out-of-band patch had put a stop PrintNightmare shenanigans may have been premature.…

Observatory might be able to spot distant stars, but it can't hear a bunch of engineers holding their breath NASA is preparing to have another crack at restoring the veteran Hubble telescope to service with a multi-day test of procedures to fire up back-up hardware aboard the spacecraft.…

Yesterday's settlement was just one of the bigger firms The British Airways data breach not-quite-a-class-action hasn't ended after all, a rival to yesterday's law firm has told The Register.…

Pentagon feels it can counter Chinese electromagnetic projectiles with stuff it already has or will have shortly After more than 15 years of R&D, and half a billion dollars of funding, the United States Navy has decided to give up on the prospect of mounting enormous railguns on its ships. For the moment, at least.…

And those multimillion-dollar payouts Palo Alto Networks' global threat intelligence team, Unit 42, has detailed the tactics ransomware group REvil has employed to great impact so far this year – along with an estimation of the multimillion-dollar payouts it's receiving.…

Not too soon, either. Levels of internet traffic seen in 2017 will have tripled by 2022 Professor Mikkel Thorup of the University of Copenhagen claims his research team has vastly improved a dynamic load balancing algorithm for server workloads that is already used by tech giants like Google and Vimeo.…

Plus: free supercomputing for 5 healthcare partners. Charm offensive to support Arm takeover plans? Nvidia has launched its Cambridge-1 supercomputer, with a focus on AI for healthcare, as part of larger plans to boost AI research in the university city itself and more widely across the UK.…

Adds to soap-stacking, egg-catching, chess-setting, and many more titles A US techie is today raking in global adulation after balancing a garden hoe on his head for more than two and a half hours.…