The Register

Simultaneous localisation and mapping is hard so for the foreseeable future ’bots will remain bolted down Feature Just after lunch on a sweltering summer day in Brisbane, Australia, a dozen scientists and engineers gathered to watch a dog named Bingo stand up and trot gingerly towards a man-made tunnel. At the entrance, Bingo stopped to 'think' for a minute or so before turning its body to walk inside.…

Answers on a postcard below The UK government has published its latest pile of policy-related paperwork that it claims will help shape the UK's growing digital sector.…

Beijing wants tech companies that list offshore to get serious about compliance Infosec concerns have led China’s government to apply closer scrutiny to Chinese companies that list and send data offshore, according to a document written by China’s State Council cabinet and the Communist Party’s General Secretary.…

Data from NASA's 'scope may be years old now though discoveries keep on coming Astronomers have discovered four faraway Earth-mass exoplanets that appear to be floating in space all by themselves without a parent star to orbit.…

Republican National Committee said to be a victim, with Cozy Bear in the frame for the attack Updated Technology distributor SYNNEX has admitted that its systems and Microsoft accounts it tends have been attacked, after the National Committee of the US Republican Party (RNC) named it as the source of a recent security incident.…

No fixes yet for Windows 10 version 1607, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2012 Microsoft has issued out-of-band patches for the PrintNightmare print spooler bug that allows lets remote Windows users execute code as system on your domain controller.…

CEO comes out swinging, says 'people make the story and make the impact of this larger than what it is' Kaseya’s attempt to recover its SaaS services has failed, and its CEO has attempted to play down the significance of the incident that has seen its VSA services offline since July 2nd and over 1,000 ransomware infections.…

NetWire malware used to deliver incriminating letters into obscure directories users could not see Evidence used to charge an Indian man with plotting to assassinate India’s Prime Minister and inciting violence at a 2018 protest was planted on his laptop, according to US digital forensics consultancy Arsenal Computing.…

I've got a brand new combine harvester an' I'll give you the firmware update key President Joe Biden is expected this week to sign an executive order directing the formation of rules that ensure Americans have the right to repair ... their farming equipment, at least.…

Documents detail exec worried that failure to transfer some laid-off workers 'will blow a hole in our rhetoric' An IBM age discrimination lawsuit filed in Texas last year has become a bit less opaque after The Register found an inadequately redacted court document that discusses plans to present evidence obtained from company emails and documents.…

Could be brute-forced due to design blunders, according to infosec outfit Last year, Kaspersky Password Manager (KPM) users got an alert telling them to update their weaker passwords. Now we've found out why that happened.…

Boffins in hospital, official goes to work as normal until social media blows up The head of China Aerospace Investment Holdings has been taken into police custody after a video showing two senior scientists being attacked went viral on China's microblogging site Weibo and TenCent's WeChat last week.…

Good luck with that, 4 New Square Chambers A barristers' chambers hit by a ransomware attack has responded by getting a court order demanding the criminals do not share stolen data.…

That's fancy talk for sensors, software, and autonomous technologies btw Infor has sold its asset management applications business to Hexagon AB, a Swedish industrial tech biz, in a deal valued at $2.75bn.…

Y'know what, a single-vendor IT mega-deal probably isn't the best idea after all, says US military Updated The Pentagon has killed off the $10bn JEDI IT contract that Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and others spent years fighting over.…

Tune in and we'll help you decide when to make the jump Webcast It’s clear that the rapid advance of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on businesses of all types. So what should you be doing to prepare your organisation to embrace AI?…

It's fine: they'll just be used for searching disaster sites, checking structures, spying on people If there is one thing the world doesn't need, more cockroaches would surely be it.…

Microsoft identifies 'ecosystem challenges' as reason for not supporting its own system Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect."…

Staggered keys, your days are numbered Enthusiasts of radical ergonomics, high-speed coders, and keyboard hipsters have cause to rejoice: the market will soon boast the world's first laptop with an ortholinear keyboard layout, thanks to not one but two aftermarket upgrades.…

New name needed. How about Impudence? Or maybe Pluck? Contributors disgruntled with the recent direction of cross-platform FOSS audio software Audacity are forking the sound editor to a version that does not have the features or requirements that have upset some in the community.…

And a third of that's going into the lawyers' pockets British Airways has settled the not-quite-a-class-action* lawsuit against it, paying around £32m to make the data breach case in the High Court of England and Wales go away.…

Great wow factor but is it legal? Is it ethical? Is code that can't be trusted any use? Early testers of GitHub's Copilot, which uses AI to assist programmers to write code, have found problems including alleged spilled secrets, bad code, and copyright concerns, though some see huge potential in the tool.…

COVID-hit body implementing multiple interdependent cloud systems to replace on-prem software The UK's Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is on the hunt for an IT services partner capable of supporting and developing its new data warehouse and CRM systems in a deal that could be worth up to £22m.…

Permissively licensed, the processor's second iteration targets 2GHz at 14nm The Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT CAS) has showcased progress on a fully open-source processor, designed around the RISC-V architecture, which it hopes will offer competition for Arm parts at the performance end of the market.…

Irradiated boars rampage across the internet, leaving jokes, memes, fan art in their wake It seems that the monstrous irradiated boar-pig hybrids that we featured in an article last week have broken out of their former home in the exclusion zone around the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant and are now running riot around the internet.…

Bumpy ride of a keyboard - but that's kind of the point Review This reviewer's desk is a temple of the mechanical. I like my keyboards, and I like them clicky and with oodles of tactile feedback. And yet, for the past couple of weeks or so, I've been using a bog-standard scissor-switch keyboard.…

Er... let's just ask the experts boffins Feature Do the laws of physics trump mathematical complexity, or is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) nothing more than 21st-century enterprise encryption snake oil? The number of QKD news headlines that have included unhackable, uncrackable or unbreakable could certainly lead you towards the former conclusion.…

IDC says on-prem clouds like AWS Outposts will grow from from $140M annual sales to $14B Analyst firm IDC has a new abbreviation for your cloudy dictionary: DCIaaS, which stands for Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service.…

Straight-up copyright complaints, not Big Tech flexing its muscles Boney M’s 1978 disco hit Rasputin and an Indian pop song called Maa Tujhe Salaam (Mother, I Salute You) have been revealed as the reason Twitter briefly suspended the accounts of two Indian politicians.…

Research agency also open-sources FETT hardware bug bounty platform and tools The USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it will fund development of a new type of “event-based” camera that only transmits information about pixels that have changed.…

Hikes numbers of known compromised customers and warns countermeasures will be needed before resuming usage Kaseya has said it’s been unable to find signs its code was maliciously modified, and offered its users a ray of hope with news that it is testing a patch for its on-prem software and is considering restoring its SaaS services on Tuesday, US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).…

Current draft makes staff personally liable and Asia Internet Coalition says that could crimp innovation and hurt the economy The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a lobby group that numbers Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and SAP among its members, has written to Hong Kong’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) and outlined objections to the Special Administrative Region’s proposed anti-doxxing laws.…

'Claims are up, capacity is down, and underwriting profitability is, at best, under pressure' The cost of insurance to protect businesses and organisations against the ever-increasing threat of cybercrimes has soared by a third in the last year, according to international insurance brokers Howden.…

When the Pi was loaded/ with native Windows 11 bling... wasn’t it quite Armful, a somewhat speedy thing The Register's adventures into the world of Pi-powered Windows 11 continued today with the installation of the ARM64 version of Microsoft's popular Office suite.…

'Foo' – not the noise of a passing car The world of Formula 1 racing was livened up over the weekend as the sport's official app sent out some unexpected notifications on the eve of the Austrian Grand Prix.…

Hakuna matata The boss of Arm has moved to tackle prolonged concerns that the British chip designer's proposed $40bn buyout by Nvidia could damage competition and spell disaster for the UK's tech sector.…

Torvalds reckons 'it might be mergeable for 5.14' The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced with use of a beta Rust compiler (as opposed to a nightly build), testing ARM and RISC-V architecture support, new Rust abstractions, and more.…

It's illegal The California Highway Patrol has issued a warning to motorists that, frankly, needn't be said. Don't whack a massive Starlink satellite dish to the hood of your car. It's a bit illegal.…

Crew do some DIY, move a camera, you know, the usual … but in zero gravity The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has announced that two taikonauts successfully exited the Tianhe space station yesterday for China’s second ever spacewalk.…

Contract worth £75m over seven years City of London Police is looking to crack down on cybercrime with the purchase of "next-generation IT services" in the hopes it will beef up the systems supporting Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB).…

Learn how to swap tedium for transformation with this Regcast Webcast Does your tech strategy involve analytics, e-commerce, machine learning or even AI? Great, you’re probably going to need all of those in the future.…

Mmm, musty One of London's tram stations – mothballed in 1952 to make way for diesel buses – is to be opened to the public.…

'Fork.' What did you think we meant? A few more litres of accelerant were poured onto Audacity critics' fire late last week as an update to the sound editor's privacy agreement seeped out to the consternation of users.…

Let's hope this time a shortage can be averted The UK government has awarded a £5m contract to build the second generation of its e-commerce portal to help health providers get hold of personal protection equipment (PPE) during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.…

Hired to boost channel sales and, erm, 'accelerate' that 'growth journey' Google Cloud has poached Adaire Fox-Martin, a veteran from the stuffy world of corporate database sales, to run its EMEA operations.…

Welcome to Madeira, autonomous region of Borkugal Bork!Bork!Bork! As the latest twist in the Windows 11 saga appears to have turned the blue in "Blue Screen of Death" to black, a glimpse into the international world of bork shows that a black background has always been the harbinger of a poorly computer.…

Foundry platform lacks transparency and accountability, sources tell El Reg Researchers at NHS England are being denied access to datasets on the Palantir platform which supports the COVID-19 data store, with no reason given, despite requests for greater transparency on the system.…

Quit financial engineering and go back to your roots, IBM Column A fun evening's entertainment pre-COVID was to find a pub near a large corporation's IT HQ, look for the customers with the haunted, desperate eyes, and ask them gently how "the migration" was going. Didn't matter which company or what migration. They're hard. They go wrong.…

If Muse Group's stewardship takes a wrong turn, there's always the fork button* Updated The quality of software the FOSS community has created is nothing short of amazing.…

Enthusiasm and youth are once again no match for age and cunning Who, Me? With the use of personal email accounts seemingly never out of the political headlines, we present a cautionary tale of their career-shortening possibilities in another edition of Who, Me?…