The Register

Maybe turn your phone off if you don't fancy a 'loud, siren-like noise' Mobile networks across the UK are once again set to panic their users this afternoon as part of a test of the government's Emergency Alerts system – causing selected mobiles to "make a loud, siren-like sound."…

TIGRR threatens to bounce through unacceptable changes to the rules The European Union has formally voted for proposals to give the UK "adequate" status in its data protection laws, allowing data sharing to continue in the post-Brexit world.…

Yet spy agency overseer IPCO seems to be working as the public hoped Exclusive MI5's storage of personal data on espionage subjects is still facing "legal compliance risk" issues despite years of warnings from spy agency regulator IPCO, a Home Office report has revealed.…

Not ideal for when you rejoin colleagues in the office Review Tech journalists don't exactly file copy from the front lines, testing software while dodging AK-47 fire. The major risk to our health - like millions of office workers - comes from dozens of Mars Bars or other snacks eaten while tapping away on the keyboard at home.…

Don’t take no for an answer, but be prepared to give it. Feature Monitoring seems easy in principle. There is nothing particularly complex about the software or the protocols it uses to interrogate systems and deliver alerts, nor is deciding what to monitor or the act of setting up your chosen product.…

No word on whether top brass considered just shelling them into submission The United States Air Force (USAF) has issued a strangely specific threat to certain mollusc species living in the area of an upcoming weapons test.…

Picking street signs from a matrix of images is out, cleverer challenges are OK Poll Analyst firm Gartner has advised in favour of the use of CAPTCHAs — but recommends using the least-annoying CAPTCHAs you can find.…

Join this webinar and take control of your multi-cloud future Promo Making the leap onto the cloud is no simple task, but once you’re there, you can pause for breath. Can’t you?…

Code behind LoTR, Planet of the Apes and other flicks wrapped around Autodesk Maya Famed special effects house Weta Digital will offer the tools it uses to make movies as a cloud service.…

Korean giant sees bots as helping it become ‘Smart Mobility Solutions Provider’ Hyundai has acquired a controlling interest in US robotics company Boston Dynamics from Softbank for US$880M.…

Crackdown on global giants comes as UN criticises content takedown rules India’s government has revealed new rules it is proposing to curtail the market power of big e-commerce players.…

All depends on whether your workload is making a lot of system calls or not The mitigations applied to exorcise Spectre, the family of data-leaking processor vulnerabilities, from computers hinders performance enough that disabling protection for the sake of speed may be preferable for some.…

Let's just check BTC-USD, oh yeah, waaay down Prices for graphics processors in China have plummeted following the nation's crackdown on cryptocurrency mining, ownership, and trading.…

File was supposed to be private. It was not. And it was out in the open for months The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the internet registry for the region, has admitted it left at least a portion of its Whois SQL database, which contains sensitive information, facing the public internet for three months.…

Hope no one's created guest networks called '%Free %Coffee at %Starbucks' Joining a Wi-Fi network with a specific sequence of characters in its SSID name will break wireless connectivity for iOS devices. Thankfully the bug looks to be little more than an embarrassment and inconvenience.…

Plus: Impact of ransomware payments, CVS database not secured In brief Chris Inglis was last week appointed America’s national cyber director, responsible for coordinating the government’s computer security strategy and defending its networks. The former deputy director at the NSA, who spent nearly three decades at the agency, was approved by the Senate on Thursday.…

Belgian firm must produce the IP addresses of BitTorrent users Europe’s top court has ruled ISPs can be forced to hand over the details of customers who are alleged to have downloaded material illegally online - but only if they meet certain criteria.…

Ragnarök and roll: Release Candidate boasts significant improvements on 0.3 Version 0.4 of the Yggdrasil networking platform is imminent, bringing with it improved performance and routing.…

Joins queue of regulators peeking into iOS walled garden model Germany's competition watchdog, the Bundeskartellamt, today said it has opened a preliminary investigation into Apple's grip on the market and its walled garden ecosystem.…

It needs 'resources, mentors, and programs ... at scale, anywhere' The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed another casualty: Google Campus, the flash Shoreditch startup hub launched in 2012 to grow London's tech scene.…

We're looking at you, Uncle Sam The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has finalised its guidance to businesses in how they should proceed following the Schrems II ruling which struck down the Privacy Shield data-sharing arrangement between the EU and the US.…

It's the longest day of the year Its work with the UK government has once again proven a boon to troubled outsourcer Capita. The business said today it would sell Axelos – the joint venture set up with the Cabinet Office in 2013 – to assessment and certification outfit PeopleCert for £380m.…

We are hiring a FOSS expert who can pick apart a cloud giant's latest API Ever wanted to fly with the vultures in the editorial department at your favourite daily tech publication? The Register is seeking a full-time journalist to cover the world of free and open-source software, from its development and curation to its orchestration and deployment as a service in the cloud.…

No more managing operating systems and monolithic apps? Where do I sign! 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.…

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Updated The Hubble Space Telescope has continued to resist efforts by NASA last week to bring its payload computer back online.…

Memory is not the only thing leaking from Windows Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a return to familiar ground for the bork desk today as that most common of Windows occurrences turns up in a UK transport hub: a screen of bluest death.…

Let’s talk procedures. Plus: Are you dealing with errors in a way that leaves room for people to own up to them? This correspondent has a confession to make: I’m not perfect and sometimes things don’t go as I hoped.…

From point release to pointless release Column A new version of Windows was once a big deal. Upgrading was expensive for everyone, with warehouses-worth of physical media being pushed into retail channels to displace the old. It couldn't happen very often, so version numbers became signifiers of great importance.…

President blames China for blocking government purchases as tech titans say they'll find five million doses The Taiwanese government has approved a plan for tech titans Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Foxconn to purchase and donate 10 million doses of COVID-19 jabs as the country seeks to increase its rate of vaccination.…

The pain in Spain comes mainly from a lack of training Who, Me? Testing in production has always been a thing, sometimes by accident and sometimes because the powers that be cannot be bothered with multiple environments. And sometimes things go wrong. Welcome to Who, Me?…

NASSCOM says industry has already weathered the worst automation has to offer, but may use different definitions of where jobs are at risk India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has strongly criticised a Bank of America prediction that automation would cause three million job losses in its industry.…

Network invaders haven't stopped learning ... have you? Promo The last year has shown that lock down and travel restrictions are no barrier to learning. After all, when it comes to the cybersecurity world, miscreants seem to have learned plenty.…

Think tank says inconsistencies in story were not a cover-up — just a mistake from “working-level staff” South Korean officials have admitted that government nuclear think tank Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) was hacked in May 2021 by North Korea’s Kimsuky group. The Korean news outlet that broke the story has accused KAERI of a cover-up.…

Minister lashes avian network and suggests its legal protections may have been removed India has again expressed severe displeasure with Twitter, following three different incidents embroiling the micro-blogging service in a complex debate about sovereignty and censorship and possibly making the company liable for its users’ posts.…

Company conspired with government to make life hard for activist foreign investors Japanese industrial giant Toshiba is attempting to recover from its third major corporate governance scandal in six years — and this time the nation's prime minister is alleged to have played a part.…

It's a Jersey thing, you wouldn't understand A New Jersey water park has had to modify its summer reopening plans after one of its star attractions caught fire and partially burned down.…

Plus: Canon has cameras that only let employees into meeting rooms if they smile, and more In brief The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS), which set sail this week from the UK to the US, failed just three days into its journey. It appears a mechanical fault occurred, something the Mayflower's AI can't fix itself.…

Chat-bot maker LivePerson wins lawsuit against call-center outfit [24]7.ai On Thursday, a jury in a federal court in Oakland, California, found call center biz [24]7.ai – as in, 24/7 – guilty of unfair competition and stealing trade secrets from chatbot maker LivePerson, awarding the company more than $30m in damages.…

Keeps small-time devs on the reservation with AWS credits, too Amazon this week said it would reduce its Appstore commission rate for less successful developers, following recent similar moves by Apple and Google, and is sweetening its deal by offering AWS credits to support apps' backend services.…

Crackdown on loopholes that allow 'high-risk' vendors to have equipment approved for use in the US The US Federal Communications Commission is pressing forward with a proposal that would ban telecommunications providers [PDF] from using equipment made by manufacturers deemed to present a risk to national security.…

Fair Repair Act targets all varieties of electronic devices A New York congressman has introduced a federal right-to-repair bill, just a week after the state's Senate passed a bill addressing the same issue. That state bill has failed to progress, we note.…

Booze-fuelled Change.org campaign implores Amazon founder to 'GOBBLE DA LISA!' Ultra-billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has already been the subject of a petition asking him not to return to Earth after he blasts off in his New Shepard rocket on July 20, but even if he is allowed back, Bezos is now facing an even more difficult prospect.…

Plus: Updates to .NET 6, ASP.NET Core, and .NET MAUI Microsoft has unveiled a slew of developer tools, including a preview of the 64-bit Visual Studio 2022, ahead of that developer event set for 24 June.…

Hello, 2002 called with one of the oldest low-tech tricks in the book Malware laced with racial epithets tries to block Windows-based victims from visiting file-sharing sites associated with copyright infringement, according to new Sophos research.…

Biz will develop Magnetized Target Fusion technology at the site General Fusion – the Canadian-based atomic outfit backed by Jeff Bezos and a battalion of other major investors – is to build a test facility in Oxfordshire to showcase its power-generating technology.…

MPs give FCA a telling-off for wasting taxpayer money The UK's financial regulator is refusing to say whether it will accept an offer by Google to pay back more than £600,000 spent on online ads warning people about the dangers of money scams.…

UK infosec accreditation body still won't publish exam cheatsheet scandal report nor be interviewed by El Reg Ian Glover, president of infosec accreditation body CREST, is stepping down from his post, he told the organisation's annual general meeting yesterday.…

$500, 136-piece, tribble-laden Star Trek tribute is immense, but clearly illogical Playmobil is set to boldly go where no three-inch man has gone before with the release of a metre-long replica of the NCC-1701 USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek series.…

'This is shooting Schematron in the heart ... its heart is individual open source developers' The original inventor of a popular XML standard, Rick Jelliffe, who created Schematron, has protested that his open source work is now behind a paywall at standards body ISO.…

Ideal for Apple fans who appreciate little boxes made of clicky-clacky Review Mechanical keyboard manufacturers have typically swerved Mac users. It's not personal, it's just business.…