The Register

I can indeed make things magically disappear if I shout loudly enough On Call A classic case of a user punching themselves in the face via the medium of technology awaits in this week's column dedicated to those brave professionals at the other end of the phone. Welcome to On Call.…

'Drug delivery would certainly be an intriguing application,' prof tells us Tiny so-called microswimmers coated with gold can be moved around in a liquid using a laser system controlled by a machine-learning system – and scientists hope the technique will be used in some way in the future to transport drugs inside humans.…

Crew Dragon briefly thought its power supply had problems. Also on the ISS: an Ethernet upgrade and missing wastewater NASA has suggested that radiation caused a computer malfunction on the International Space Station.…

Meanwhile, Outlook on Windows gets magical email completion powers Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and once again emitted tools to detect and filter out swearing and abuse on its Microsoft 365 cloud.…

Takes number one smartphone sales slot across swathes of Europe Xiaomi has warned semiconductor shortages will shape its product release plans for 2021.…

Law bill to give developers a choice to opt out vanishes this week A law bill proposed in Arizona that would allow app developers to avoid Apple and Google's mandatory in-app payment systems and associated commission fees has stalled – after state senators mysteriously skipped a vote on it.…

Three big telcos also boast 1.3 billion 4G subscriptions, and 400m broadband connections heading to gigabit speeds China’s big three telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom – have said they added more than 300 million 5G subscriptions in 2020, an expansion supported by the construction of more than million new 5G-enabled base transceiver stations (BTS).…

Dive into Huawei’s Industrial Digital Transformation Conference right here to find out Promo If you think digital transformation is just a buzzword, just consider how technology has both enabled and changed the way we work together and collaborate over the last year. As the world teeters on the brink of opening up again, now is a good time to take stock of where we’ve been and to think about what about happens next, whether it’s how we power AI and build it into our decision making, make the cloud more intelligent, or reduce the environmental impact of technology.…

WISPA it softly - seven million people rely on wireless connections America is big. Really big. And for those living in the most rural parts, finding solid broadband can be an uphill struggle, with many opting to ditch fixed-line connections for wireless equivalents.…

Ahead of Fedora 34 release, we talk to project leader Matthew Miller Interview Fedora, the community Linux distro used by Red Hat for early implementation of new technology, is not just for experimentation, project leader Matthew Miller tells us.…

Debian, Ubuntu ahead of the curve in patching at least – don't be late yourself Two high-severity vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL software library were disclosed on Thursday alongside the release of a patched version of the software, OpenSSL 1.1.1k.…

Seeks jury trial and share of profits from IBM's Hybrid Cloud platform Updated IBM's cloud business is the subject of a lawsuit brought by a former employee in the US, who alleges Big Blue lifted his technology and then fired him.…

Revamped desktop and shell based on GTK 4.0 The GNOME project has released version 40 of its Linux desktop, with a new design for finding and launching applications and updated core apps.…

Join our Regcast to learn the power of APIs Webcast The pace of digital evolution can appear overwhelming, all the more so when you still feel weighed down by legacy applications and data stores.…

Watchdog bites Uncle Sam and Lockheed Martin over $14bn-and-counting efforts Agile methodology has not succeeded in speeding up deliveries of onboard software for the F-35 fighter jet, a US government watchdog has warned in a new report.…

Double the bandwidth of DDR4, with 13% less power consumption Samsung has unveiled its first DDR5 DRAM based on a High-K/Metal Gate (HKMG) process, debuting with a 512GB module aimed at the high-performance computing and AI markets.…

'I don’t think I should comment on exactly who did what' UK Prime Minister Boris has backed the country’s commitment to the nation’s Brexit Satellite constellation plan, although he is apparently unwilling to put his name to the deal which helped take satellite communications company OneWeb out of bankruptcy.…

Doc makes all the right noises if you like government support for business In a change from its recent bombastic blather, the British government has published a new Defence Industrial Strategy that looks like it wants to put the infosec industry on a gold-plated pedestal.…

Green Machine gets busy on photons The US military is exploring how machine learning algorithms can clean up quantum communication technologies and help soldiers send encrypted messages to one another on the battlefield.…

Tribute to wartime computer boffin hits circulation on 23 June Two years on from its initial announcement, the Bank of England has unveiled the design of the Alan Turing £50 note.…

Existing customers will continue to receive support, however SUSE is scrapping its Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) product. The German Linux shop has not officially announced the move, but we understand it informed some partners and customers of its decision in December.…

Lawmakers still need to sign off on launch from UK soil, though Scotland-based rocketeers are set to receive £8.5m in funding under the European Space Agency's (ESA) Boost! initiative.…

Free smartwatch? Don't mind if I do NHS Shared Business Services has awarded seats on a mega framework for computer hardware to a long list of suppliers in a deal worth up to £1bn.…

F-Secure confirms nature of email nasty to El Reg BP Chargemaster, purveyors of sockets for electric vehicles, seemingly had its email domain hijacked by criminals who used formerly legitimate addresses to send banking trojans to customers.…

Before 'end of Q1'* judgment we round up all the legalese into one place Updated Judgment Day draws ever closer for ex-Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch. As the promised “end of Q1”* date for judgment in the years-long case draws closer, The Register has collated a handy cut-out-n-keep guide to what the case is all about.…

Devs scramble for replacement mimetype data package On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.…

Droughts and transport bottlenecks reduce supply and hike costs. Can the world survive this crisis? Between a certain virus, the recession it caused, political turmoil in the USA, and the usual round of strife, the last twelve months have been distinctly sub-optimal.…

Fabric from Wright brothers' aircraft makes it to Mars Ingenuity, NASA’s dual-rotor drone right now strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover on Mars, is set to perform humankind's first-ever powered aircraft flight on another planet within the coming weeks.…

Execs say they're unworried by new Chinese regs on monopolies and online loans Chinese web giant Tencent has told investors it's ready for China's new antitrust and lending regulations, as it announced FY 2020 annual revenue of US$73.9bn in revenue, a 28 percent year-on-year jump.…

Netflix gets the 'won't someone think of the children' treatment over show for adults Content regulation and privacy have become hot topics in India, in three dimensions.…

66 percent jump saw $19bn change hands, but they’re just 14 percent of global spend China’s big clouds went on a world-beating spending spree to acquire new infrastructure in 2020, according to analyst firm Canalys.…

Most intimate snap yet of M87's supermassive abyss Pic + video Astronomers have captured the most detailed image yet of a supermassive black hole, demonstrating at an intimate level how its magnetic field polarizes light from the phenomenon.…

Posting pics of 'I got the jab' certs, complete with their QR codes, has authorities worried Indonesian officials have asked its nation's citizens to stop leaking their own personal data on social media by sharing pictures of certificates attesting to their receipt of COVID-19 vaccinations.…

Top legal eagles urge web giants to do more in this life and death matter In testimonies from the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to Congress, published on Wednesday ahead of a hearing this week on internet disinformation, the trio revealed their efforts to remove misinformation from their platforms.…

They’ve switched tactics. With Malwarebytes, we'll show how you can, too Webcast Much of the tech world patted itself on the back last year, as organisations switched virtually overnight to remote working and online collaboration.…

House panel to quiz web giant CEOs this week. Expect a degree of deja vu The heads of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will be questioned in Congress on Thursday by politicians probing "social media's role in promoting extremism and misinformation."…

Chat app that was supposed to save us from unsolicited email warms to unsolicited messaging. Now it's kinda walked that back Updated Slack, which became popular as a team chat app in part because it's not email, is now letting users invite anyone, via email, to correspond using direct messages in the Slack app.…

And now the circle is complete Sync is here for the wafer-thin Venn intersection of Linux users running the Edge browser and those who are happy to sign in using a Microsoft account.…

Developer appeals decision, saying 'the reasons are ridiculous' The Chrome browser extension ClearURLs has been removed from the Chrome Web Store, for reasons its developer describes as "ridiculous."…

At last, The Reg online standards converter's time has come Updated The ship that spawned a thousand IT container jokes has been partially refloated [ah, yeah, see update below – ed.] after becoming wedged across Egypt's Suez Canal, blocking a crucial global trade artery.…

It must be a coincidence BT has decided to dangle a one-time pandemic bonus under the noses of tens of thousands of workers as it stares down the barrel of potential industrial action.…

Expect a bigger display and slimmer body thanks to Apple's M1 silicon Researchers have uncovered references to two unreleased iMac models in the latest beta version of macOS 11.3 Big Sur, raising the prospect of an imminent refresh.…

This from the CEO who says 'five days is too much family time' SaaSy HR and finance software biz Workday is backing its return-to-office plan with a $172.5m property investment on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay - at a time when flexible working seems here to stay.…

'Strictly private and confidential'? SERIOUSLY? British clothes retailer Fatface has infuriated some customers by telling them "an unauthorised third party" gained access to systems holding their data earlier this year, and then asking them to keep news of the blunder to themselves.…

Idea was to shift all departments to Big Red's cloud, but some are on Microsoft, Workday, SAP, Integra, and so on In charge of policing, UK borders and the courts, the Home Office has gone live with Oracle HR as part of the Fusion suite in Big Red's cloud, completing its move to software-as-a-service just as the government shifts plans for moving all central departments onto the SaaS model for ERP.…

Cuz I got a 5G combine harvester, an' I'll give you the key Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has shacked up with UK government-backed rural connectivity initiative 5G RuralDorset to test mmWave-based smart agricultural kit.…

Palo Alto Networks lays bare a year of dastardly digital doings Cybercriminals ruthlessly exploited the coronavirus pandemic to set up phishing websites that posed as Pfizer, BioNTech and other household-name suppliers of vaccines and PPE, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Big Red hopes automation will tempt new customers to its cloud Last week Oracle launched an upgrade to its data-warehousing technology that puts SQL, the language on which the company has more or less built its vast fortune, in the background.…

Privacy. Are we there yet? No, but there's some progress at least When version 90 of Google's Chrome browser arrives in mid-April, initial website visits will default to a secure HTTPS connection in the event the user has failed to specify a preferred URI scheme.…

It's a grim time to be in the commercial real-estate business KPMG's latest survey of global CEOs shows widespread belief that the remote-working trend will linger into 2022 as the world gets to grip with COVID-19.…