The Register

Because local democracy is hilarious – oh, and transparency's good too Jackie Weaver and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, have called on the UK government to keep online council meetings legal even as coronavirus restrictions across Britain are eased.…

Oh, you mean the 'features that make it easier for people to find and connect with friends on our services'? Ireland’s Data Protection Commission this week launched an investigation into whether Facebook failed to adequately protect users' personal info – and whether it fell foul of GDPR – when a package of 533 million profiles was given away for free online.…

Seventeen currencies - not just the Greenback - are now just an API call away Microsoft has tweaked its Retail Rates API to offer retail pricing information for all Azure services in currencies other than the US dollar.…

PublicBenefit.uk campaign reports 97 per cent of its supporters behind effort A second extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to fire the remainder of the board of directors of Nominet and replace them with people willing to make long-sought-after reforms now looks like a certainty.…

‘Frank’ reckons it won’t follow Parler’s path to plug-pulling because it has its own servers and ‘the best security’ . But it also uses Cloudflare … A new social media network that promises its users untrammeled free speech won’t allow “The N-word, the C-word, the F-word or God’s name in vain.”…

Meanwhile, ESXi on Arm spotted booting Windows Two new Windows-on-Arm options have come into view.…

One day you too can experience a few minutes of free fall with great visuals... if you can afford it Video Blue Origin has successfully completed a test launch and landing of its reuseable New Shepard rocket with an advanced capsule design, bringing the outfit one step closer to eventually sending up paying passengers.…

‘Market does not appreciate hardware/software combo’ says Big Mike. So virty giant gets freedom, customers are promised no change +Analysis Dell will spin out its stake in VMware, and the two companies will continue to operate without major changes for at least five years. Indeed, they said they plan to deepen their collaboration.…

Firefox 'fully compromised' in 15 minutes via SMASH attack Boffins from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and ETH in Zurich have bypassed memory chip defenses to execute a successful browser-based Rowhammer side-channel attack dubbed SMASH.…

Among the victims: the United Nations A Nigerian email scammer based in New York was on Tuesday sentenced to 40 months in prison, and ordered to pay back $2.7m in stolen money.…

Mozilla-authored code in iOS exploited, since patched, it is claimed Australian security firm Azimuth has been identified as the experts who managed to crack a mass shooter's iPhone that was at the center of an encryption standoff between the FBI and Apple.…

Firm's Griffin lander to do the honours Astrobotic has provided an explanation for another of SpaceX boss Elon Musk's tweets with news that its Griffin lander lander will be riding a Falcon Heavy to the Moon in 2023.…

'Federated Learning of Cohorts' groups users together and is already being tested in Chrome Updated Google's FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) mechanism for ad personalisation, currently being trialled in the Chrome browser, has been rejected as privacy-invasive tracking by other browser makers including Vivaldi and Brave.…

We're sure the comms watchdog will take that on board Huawei has argued that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cannot force US carriers to remove its equipment from their networks, and can only reimburse those that voluntarily choose to do so.…

JS component seems to be focus of researchers and miscreants alike Google has announced new updates to Chrome 89 following the discovery of yet another live exploit for a vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine.…

Shrugs off 21% slump – that's just infra shift, share awards SAP says cloud sales jumped 7 per cent in its Q1 and has upped full-year forecasts on renewed hopes for higher growth, indicating senior execs reckon customers will begin spending in greater numbers this year after projects slowed in pandemic-struck 2020.…

Dictates 3 languages, translates into 6, available only in China Swiss computer peripherals manufacturer Logitech has teamed with Chinese AI and internet company Baidu to make a voice-dictation mouse.…

Hard luck, BT The UK's competition watchdog has provisionally cleared the proposed merger of Virgin Media and O2 after concluding it would not materially impact competition (and thus the price and availability of services) in the telecoms wholesale market.…

Private preview for now, Windows and macOS users sought for testing System76, a US company which markets laptops, PCs and servers running Linux, is developing a new GNOME-based desktop GUI called COSMIC for its Pop!_OS distribution.…

Potential surveillance nightmare could be unfolding in secret, civil-rights warriors fear The US Department of Homeland Security and its law enforcement agencies – Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection – have been sued for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests about their use of Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology.…

For a small fee, of course – and no video or voice yet Exclusive Element Matrix Services (EMS) is asking users tied into Microsoft's Teams platform but who "actually want [end-to-end] encrypted secure comms" to take a stroll over a newly built bridge to its own message network.…

It takes two to tango, says SaaS vendor Maine has accused Workday of showing "no accountability" for its part in a flawed process to replace the US state's HR system.…

Colourful PowerBook 170 was a one-off for Japanese women's golf tournament Another piece of Apple history has been put on the block, this time it's the turn of a weird - and in some eyes, possibly wonderful - limited edition of the PowerBook 170.…

Keep using the provided tools, NCSC says Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat has publicly claimed GCHQ sources told him Gmail was more secure than Parliament’s own Microsoft Office 365 deployment – but both Parliament and a GCHQ offshoot have told him to stop being silly.…

Filling the void left by Huawei Smaller telco kit makers should provide 25 per cent of the equipment used in Britain's 5G networks following the removal of Huawei, according to the recently formed UK.gov-backed Telecoms Diversification Task Force.…

'A huge Tetris' as biz struggles prepping kit for relocation under renewed COVID lockdown OVH is yet to bring all customers affected by its Strasbourg data center fire back online – and the French cloud operator's CFO has described ongoing restoration efforts as a "real nightmare."…

AI algorithms in large-scale astronomy are mandatory, study says A neural network has helped astronomers catalog a whopping 27 million galaxies collected from one of the largest astronomical surveys probing the mysterious nature of dark energy.…

Ride-sharing, food-delivering, payment-processing, home-insuring and money-lending org thanks COVID for pumping up its financials Singaporean superapp Grab announced yesterday that it plans to go public in the United States – through a $39.6bn merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).…

Alibaba was just the beginning, says regulator, as it forbids western web titans' favourite bullying behaviours China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has warned 34 local web “platforms” to make sure they comply with local laws, and take care not to adopt western startups' aggressive tactics, or they may suffer the same kind of smackdowns recently inflicted on Alibaba.…

IT giant is learning to live with repeated sprints rather than mega-deals Tata Consultancy Services won just seven new customers in its fiscal 2021, and went backwards on revenue and profit.…

Many European customers flee, Asia signs up in big numbers Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, operator of the "3" mobile brand across several geographies, has told investors that COVID-19 cut its revenues by 8 per cent and profits by 21 per cent, but it also found bright spots of business around the world.…

Remote-control malware wiped, deployments must still be patched The FBI deleted web shells installed by criminals on hundreds of Microsoft Exchange servers across the United States, it was revealed on Tuesday.…

eSentire warns of remote-access trojans masquerading as PDFs More than 100,000 web pages hosted by Google Sites are being used to trick netizens into opening business documents booby-trapped with a remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes over victims' PCs and hands control to miscreants.…

Want to write for El Reg or help us polish our output? Apply within Job alert The Register has a couple of vacancies open on our editorial team that we would like to fill immediately. Without further ado, here are the details:…

New law implementation, cease-and-desist letters, and mobile companies asked to detail free blocking tools The FCC is finally taking concrete action on the scourge of robocalls after years of dithering on the issue.…

This one seems as well thought-out as his Capitol rally salute US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed his latest anti-Big Tech legislation: a complete ban on mergers and acquisitions for companies valued at over $100bn if it may harm competition in any way possible.…

Existing users covered until 2022 Password specialist 1Password has acquired SecretHub, a secrets management platform aimed at IT engineers, and made a new service called Secrets Automation, previously in beta, generally available.…

100+ fixes for the Windows world – plus holes in SAP, Adobe, FreeBSD, etc Patch Tuesday April showers bring hours of patches as Microsoft delivers its Patch Tuesday fun-fest consisting of over a hundred CVEs, including four Exchange Server vulnerabilities reported to the company by the US National Security Agency (NSA).…

Living on the Edge as SA networks roll out The move to 5G has allowed vendors and carriers to fundamentally rethink how their networks are structured. Once the norm, tightly integrated vendor-specific hardware is gradually being supplanted by virtualized alternatives that run happily on standards-agnostic kit. Jumping on the bandwagon is Japanese provider NEC, which today said it would use RedHat's OpenShift Kubernetes platform for its upcoming 5G hardware.…

It's like the 2000s all over again, sighs Bitdefender Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are stealing browser session cookies and Monero cryptocurrency wallets from tightwads who install the pirated software, Bitdefender has warned.…

Surface Headphones 2+ also available and a range of 'Modern' kit coming in the next few months Microsoft has opened the order books on the fourth generation of its Surface Laptop, replete with Intel-baiting AMD chippery in the line-up.…

Beta expected in a matter of weeks, production release planned for summer AWS has introduced the OpenSearch project, the new name for its open-source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.…

After 17 years into a 13-year mission, that's not bad Northrop Grumman's second Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) has docked with Intelsat's IS-10-02 satellite, potentially extending the life of the latter by five years.…

Support has fallen behind and fixing it is a challenge Unity software developer Josh Peterson has spoken about the future of .NET support in the widely used game development engine.…

Sounds kind of like a vaccination passport for California offices Salesforce has waded into the heated debate over vaccine passports, suggesting they may be a means of getting employees back into the office. Just don't call them vaccine passports.…

'After saying this, I immediately received hostile messages' says pumpking of version 5.x On Monday, the Perl Core developer known as Sawyer X announced his intention to leave the three-person Perl Steering Committee, or Council, and the Perl Core group because of what he described as community hostility.…

Looks like classic case of failing to scale to meet inevitable demand The UK's National Health Service is now offering COVID-19 vaccines to those aged 45 and above however the volume of interest has made the appointment-booking website prone to wobbles.…

A hot £22m for a bit of CAZ-ual software support The UK government is on the hunt for a supplier to support and maintain the software behind its controversial Clean Air Zone (CAZ) policy in a tender that could result in a £22m contract.…

Analysis of Computer Misuse Act cases also draws heavily on El Reg archives An academic researcher has analysed more than 100 Computer Misuse Act cases to paint a picture of the sort of computer-enabled criminals who plague Great Britain’s digital doings in the 21st Century.…

BlazorWebView arrives on desktop applications. Too convoluted? Microsoft has shipped preview 3 of its forthcoming .NET 6 framework with a bunch of updates including the addition of Windows desktop to its Multi-platform App UI (MAUI).…