The Register

IR35 status of 1 in 5 cases still undetermined by 'fundamentally flawed' app The UK tax collector’s controversial Check Employment Status Tool used by contractors to determine their IR35 status returned inconclusive responses for one in five of the million plus times it was called upon in 16 months.…

Trove too tempting for computer criminals while public unaware of their rights, says David Davis A judicial review will inevitability challenge the UK government's plans to extract millions of sensitive medical records held on GP systems in England, according to a high-profile backbench Conservative MP.…

Storage giant fingers 'critical' bug allowing remote factory resets that wipe contents Western Digital has alerted customers to a critical bug on its My Book Live storage drives, warning them to disconnect the devices from the internet to protect the units from being remotely wiped.…

yy/mm/dd. Yep that's £2,104.18 a ride for April beachgoers Hundreds of visitors to Brighton Pier have been left thousands of pounds out of pocket after a Worldpay payment snafu left them less than amused.…

Refuses to give tech giants a five-star rating Google and Amazon are waiting to hear about their own five-star rating today after the UK's competition regulator announced it had opened a formal investigation into fake reviews on their platforms.…

Rubrik Data Security Talks also features Anonymous veteran, top security leaders Promo Despite putting thorough and rigorous defensive security measures in place, ransomware is still getting in and corrupting data, forcing organisations to pay massive ransom fees.…

Get your CVs ready and good luck Job Alert The Register is publishing free job ads to help keep tech professionals in gainful employment during these challenging times.…

She's sitting in a floating popout window for video calls while you get on with your life Browser veteran Opera has taken a break from selling fintech to issue an update codenamed "R5" to its desktop browser - complete with consumer-friendly music streaming and video-calling features.…

Reg readers couldn’t split the argument – perhaps because we kept coming back to containers inside VMs being sensible Register Debate Reg readers have a reputation as never being short of an opinion. So, it is with more than a little surprise that we must declare our latest debate, on the motion Containers will kill Virtual Machines, was a tie!…

Alleged exec meetings with Japanese government detailed in explosive report Toshiba shareholders voted to oust chairman Osamu Nagayama and a member of the company's audit committee, Nobuyuki Kobayashi, during their annual general meeting.…

Data law's transparency requirement currently not being met, according to powerful doctors' union Updated The UK’s influential doctors’ union reckons NHS Digital’s current communication of its controversial plan to extract patients’ medical histories from GP systems is going so well the government agency’s own enforcer of patient confidentiality could step in and halt the programme.…

Who’s to blame: devs or management? And how do we cure application vulnerability epidemic Feature According to a recently published Osterman Research white paper, 81 per cent of developers admit to knowingly releasing vulnerable apps.…

I'm not the robot, pal, you are Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have failed the Turing test – again. Apparently I am unable to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human being.…

Let me draw a picture for you On Call The week may be over, but the capacity of users to stick things where they shouldn't is far from exhausted. Welcome to another edition of On Call.…

SONIC the, er, edge... hog? The Ministry of Fun* has (virtually) cut the ribbon on its latest 5G testing centre to verify the security and resilience of OpenRAN kit seeking a place among the UK's 5G network infrastructure.…

Whatever happened to cloud being a super way to preserve cashflow? Amazon Web Services has started allowing its customers to pay in advance.…

Made-in-Xinjiang feedstock for solar panels and semiconductors is under scrutiny The USA's Customs and Border Patrol on Thursday banned imports of silica products widely used in solar panels, but also useful for other silicon wafers, on grounds they were made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, where it is alleged Muslim-minority Uyghur population conduct forced labor.…

No word on what this means for Android Go or Android One, but Indian mega-carrier Jio is excited about over-the-air updates, Google Assistant and more Google has revealed that it has created an “optimised” version of Android designed specifically for one phone — a device to be launched in September by Indian carrier Jio. But the ads giant has not said what the new phone means for its other efforts to create a version of Android tailored to deployment in hardware at prices accessible for people in developing nations.…

A technical yet demystifying dive into networking tech you can’t avoid Systems Approach I remember when I first heard about Service Meshes in 2017, and wondering what the big deal was. Building cloud applications as a graph of microservices was commonplace, and telcos were hard at work inventing yet other ways to chain together virtualized network functions. Service graphs, service chains, service meshes … how many ways do we really need to talk about composing complex systems from a collection of smaller components?…

We're looking forward to the late 21st-century colony wars Over the next quarter century, China wants to set up a permanent base on Mars for "large scale development of the Red Planet," and install a sci-fi carbon-nanotube elevator to shuttle goods between the surface and spacecraft in orbit.…

Plan to reinvent advertising turns out to be more difficult than expected Google, which makes the only major browser not blocking third-party cookies by default, has revised its commitment to phase out third-party cookies by 2022.…

Well, it's a start The US House Judiciary Committee this week approved half a dozen major bipartisan antitrust bills aimed at clamping down on the growing power of Big Tech and its monopolization of some markets.…

No one wants to be pwned by a drive-by RCE A Berlin startup has disclosed a remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability and a wormable cross-site-scripting (XSS) flaw in Pling, which is used by various Linux desktop theme marketplaces.…

Throws a bone to complex enterprise deployment, too The FIDO Alliance, which operates with no smaller mission than to "reduce the world's over-reliance on passwords", has announced the release of new user experience (UX) guidelines aimed at bringing the more technophobic on board.…

These are networks that are not dragged down by LTE core Vodafone has launched 5G SA (Standalone) trials in London, Manchester, and Cardiff in its largest test of the technology yet.…

The operating system they said shouldn't exist Microsoft on Thursday announced Windows 11, or tried to as an uncooperative video stream left many viewers of the virtual event flummoxed by intermittent transmission gaps in the opening minutes.…

Great powers clash while the rest of us sigh and tut at data feed meddling Russia was back up to its age-old spoofing of GPS tracks earlier this week before a showdown between British destroyer HMS Defender and coastguard ships near occupied Crimea in the Black Sea.…

Full instructions given away for free, to 'nurture natural curiosity' A trio of boffins at the Georg August University Göttingen and Münster University have put together a low-cost yet high-resolution microscope for educational users – using smartphone parts and Lego bricks.…

With this app, I thee stalk Online stalking appears to be as much a part of modern relationships as lovingly sharing a single spoon and dessert in a dimly lit restaurant or arguing over who should put out the bins.…

Security procedures need documenting, improving, and mandating - though they're better than they used to be A report looking into the security of the Linux kernel's release signing process has highlighted a range of areas for improvement, from failing to mandate the use of hardware security keys for authentication to use of static keys for SSH access.…

Even in a shipboard COVID lockdown, chowing down on ailing cabin boys is apparently no longer a thing A British government minister has claimed that cannibalism on the high seas should now be a thing of the past, as modern navigation and safety technology have made it very unlikely sailors will find themselves in circumstances where they might want to eat each other.…

But the hair dye market isn't about to implode, there are limits Researchers have found that stress does indeed turn your hair grey, and that taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot, even reversing the process – a discovery with potential ramifications for our understanding of the ageing process.…

Pet parents asked to fork over £75 for the privilege, though Gloucestershire Constabulary has announced it is the first police force in the world to use a centralised doggy DNA database to clamp down on pet theft - but it's relying entirely on a commercial provider for both the tech and the database.…

Chocolate Factory proposes common interchange format for vulnerability data Google on Thursday introduced a unified vulnerability schema for open source projects, continuing its current campaign to shore up the security of open source software.…

That's £3.50 per GB for anything over 25GB Updated We didn't see this on the side of a bus. Five years to the day that Britain heard the results of the Brexit referendum, O2 has caved as the last of the UK's Big Four networks to re-introduce roaming charges in Europe for its customers.…

Containers are visitors from hyperscale-land. They should respect your ways when you invite them in 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.…

Going backwards to the future Fans eagerly awaiting the emission of Windows 11 have been treated to a teaser of today's big event, ending with Microsoft giving us all... the finger?…

Colour Coat accused of lying, being rude and aggressive, and hanging up on cold-call victims A home improvement biz based in East Sussex is facing a fine of £130,000 for making upwards of 900,000 unsolicited marketing calls to individuals and businesses that had enrolled on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

For the 3% who craved sweet and sour pork balls, it might be time to stop drinking British revellers have been asked for their favourite hangover cures, with some frankly bizarre results.…

Meanwhile, Porterbrook's Hydroflex trials continue A railway pressure group is calling on the UK government to throw its weight behind a new fleet of hydrogen-powered trains to help modernise existing rolling stock and get the nation's transport policy back on track.…

Attack on an internal system shouldn't put customers at risk, company claims Cheeky clothing firm French Connection, also known as FCUK, has become the latest victim of ransomware, with a gang understood to be linked to REvil having penetrated its back-end - making off with a selection of private internal data.…

Deploying the ultimate stateful code in a stateless environment is a 'tricky business' IDC guru opines A leading analyst has warned big, non-tech companies against database deployments in the Kubernetes, dubbing the approach as “emerging technology” for enterprises.…

Allows cloud PABXs, VPNs, and data sharing, so that locals can participate in multinational workflows India’s department of telecommunications has tweaked some rules in the hope they make the nation a more attractive offshoring destination. The revised rules make it possible for call centres and similar businesses to use resources in the cloud, and more easily operate as part of global customer service organisations.…

If only it were that easy The UK’s advertising watchdog has given a socially distanced, liberally hand-sanitised slap to a firm marketing a gizmo it claimed could clear the air of the coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 respiratory disease.…

Admins given a whole month to sort it out. Choose wisely — after July 23rd, users won't be told what's happening Google has advised administrators of its Workspace productivity suite that it’s set to improve security of its Drive cloud storage locker, but that the fix will break links to some files.…

New rules kick in for small businesses on July 1 and, despite three years’ warning, the government still sees a need for extra support South Korea, long known for tolerating extremely long working hours, is on track to reduce the number of hours employers can require from their workforce to 52 per week from July 1st.…

Tablets also flattened as punters resume spending on real-world fun Chromebook sales will continue to boom in 2021, but as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes punters will decide they have more exciting ways to spend their money.…

Perhaps instrument-halting failure is due to compute and interconnect hardware, not memory, after all The Hubble Space Telescope may need to boot up a backup computer that's been dormant since 2009 to carry on operations.…

We got hacked and we'll be right back, duo said ... two months ago Up to $3.6bn in Bitcoin has disappeared from a South African cryptocurrency investment outfit as well as the two brothers who ran it.…

It has to take action on takedowns though, prelim ruling on long-running Sarah Brightman spat finds Europe's leading court has partly sided with YouTube regarding copyrighted works posted illegally online in a case that touches on "profound divisions" in how the internet is used.…