The Register

What's £23m compared to £1.35bn? The three most important words in any estate agent's lexicon are: "Location, location, location." The same is true for the UK's mobile carriers, who have just spent £23m to get their choice positions for their recent spectrum purchases.…

Can open innovation work in the automobile industry? IBM tentacle Red Hat has waded into the world of automobiles with the intent of attaching wheels to a continuously certified Linux platform.…

Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I want to bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork knows no borders, be they geographical or technological, as demonstrated by this Ubuntu installation getting funky on the Helsinki metro.…

Traffic + Demand * Bandwidth = $$$ (maybe) If you had 5G and cryptomining on your buzzword bingo cards, crack open the bubbly – FreedomFi gateways will mine the HNT cryptocurrency in exchange for providing 5G cellular coverage to IoT devices and passing users.…

$30m, 100,000-core beast will use third-gen AMD EPYCs and 352 – count 'em – Nvidia A100 GPUs Singapore has picked Hewlett Packard Enterprises to build a new S$40m ($30m) supercomputer for its petascale National Supercomputing Center (NSCC).…

Must see: Dr Holly Cummins and Liz Fong-Jones to deliver keynotes Event We’re really thrilled to announce the first two keynotes for Continuous Lifecycle Online, our three-day – 10-12 May, 2021 – virtual event bringing together some of the DevOps, Containers and CI/CD world’s brightest thinkers and doers.…

Calls for jabs market to be abandoned, and local vaccine IP to be freed India's Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), an organisation that aims to "to protect freedom in the digital world" and advocates for the development and use of open-source software, has helped to prepare a lawsuit that calls for changes to the nation's vaccine pricing policy and rollout plans.…

Micro-dosing among Cali techies ... suddenly it's all starting to make sense The co-founder and CEO of Iterable, a San Francisco marketing tech biz valued at over $2bn, claims he was fired after admitting to micro-dosing LSD at work.…

Quantum experiment may clear the way for viable silicon photonics – chips with electronic and photonic interconnects Researchers in a team led by the University of Surrey reckon they have accidentally found a new way to use silicon as a powerful photonic informational manipulation material, potentially making it possible to produce viable silicon devices that can control multiple lasers.…

Turns out people, orgs are still buying truck loads of kit a year into the pandemic AMD beat Wall Street's expectations for the first quarter of this year as demand for gaming PCs, notebooks, and servers using its x86-64 processors remained high during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Down Under watchdog doesn't call for commission cuts nor suggest major interventions Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has decided that Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile operating systems and probably harm third-party developers ... but has proposed only modest changes to the operations as remedies.…

Big list of requirements to get the financial boost – and no mention of 'cut and paste from the West' China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has defined type of silicon companies it is willing to offer tax credits – and even small outfits are invited to apply if they have some patents in their pockets.…

Profit, sales soar as giant seemingly scales beyond our perception of reality and scrutiny of society Google-parent Alphabet generated $55.3bn in the first three months of 2021, a 34 per cent increase from the year-ago quarter that exceeded financial analysts' expectations and lifted company shares in after-hours trading today.…

'You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target' Poll Project management software maker Basecamp has come under fire for banning its employees from having “societal and political discussions” using their work accounts.…

Vendor claims government failed to provide 'clear direction' for the project The US State of Maine has laid off 15 independent IT contractors, each paid $13,000 a month, who were working on its paused project to implement a new Workday HR and finance system, which is at least two years late and millions of dollars over budget.…

Cites extremely nascent OpenRAN as country's great hope Smaller carriers and networks are the weakest link in America’s telecommunications supply chain, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks claimed while speaking at a supply chain integrity workshop.…

Join us and Nutanix to find out how Webcast There are some technologies that always appear to be the next big thing, but never quite arrive. At least not in the way you think.…

Email provider cock.li called out for harbouring snooping personas Following attribution of the SolarWinds supply chain attack to Russia's APT29, the US CISA infosec agency has published a list of the spies' known tactics – including a penchant for using a naughtily named email provider.…

MPs unite behind call to hold those responsible to account, but minister says it would take too long The UK government has resisted calls for statutory public inquiries into the Post Office Horizon scandal in which subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted over accounting flaws in Fujitsu-built software.…

But hey, the release looks OK Fedora 34, a feature-packed new release of Red Hat's leading edge Linux distribution, was released today, though the main Java package maintainer has quit, urging "affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java."…

Good news for users with disabilities, though there's room for improvement Point releases typically come and go without much fanfare. By their very nature, they're incremental, bringing modest performance and security updates, and not much else. The latest version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 14.5, released yesterday, is different.…

Is it yield to the left or just ram my way through any which way? From Swindon's insane five circles in a circle to the insurance-clause-generating 12-lane monster around the Arc de Triomphe, the roundabout has been easing congestion helping local governments across Europe save their pennies for decades.…

Plus the N2, its first Armv9 blueprint Arm today publicly added two more CPU cores to its Neoverse family of data-center and server-grade processors: the V1 aimed at demanding workloads and vector math, and the N2 for lighter, scale-out systems.…

Newish criminal gang 'trying to make a name for themselves' Ransomware criminals have posted trophy pictures on their Tor blog after attacking the police force for US capital Washington DC.…

Another month, another Teams TITSUP* Updated When the sun is out, thoughts can turn to taking an impromptu day's vacation. Microsoft Teams appears to be no exception to this rule as users noted problems with the collaboration platform this morning.…

So clever that more than half are using their own gear for work, says Gartner In what sounds like an introduction to an episode of Who, Me? Gartner has published the results of a survey showing nearly one in five workers "consider themselves to be digital technology experts".…

Existing supplier was first contracted back in the 1990s Transport Scotland is on the hunt for an IT vendor to support and update traffic management systems in a £47m move that could see the end of a relationship dating back to the 1990s.…

Cheese, pepperoni, and a generous topping of bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's bork comes from the fine Croatian town of Opatija, located on the coast and reminding us of those happy days when overseas holiday were allowed.…

The dead can't see – until you reanimate them The legal remains of one-time PC maker Tiny Computers can sue RAM manufacturers Micron and Infineon for damages over a 2002 price-fixing cartel, the UK Court of Appeal has ruled.…

A cloud called Azure, which appears to be previewing a Chipzilla special Microsoft has started a preview of Intel’s third-generation Xeon Scalable processors in its Azure cloud.…

Office 365 shop? You may be exposed too. Here’s why – according to Sophos Promo If you’re running Microsoft Exchange anywhere in your organisation and you’re not extremely concerned about the threat from Hafnium, you haven’t been paying attention this year.…

Machine-learning algorithms to spot telltale particles in human breath NASA is trying to adapt an air-quality monitor normally found on the International Space Station to detect COVID-19 from people's breath here on Earth.…

Oh what a dealing Toyota has announced that its brand-new Woven Planet Group will buy ride-share company Lyft's self-driving technology unit, "Level 5", for $550m.…

Test code is apparently blazingly fast, but for now Parallels has VMs on Apple silicon to itself VMware is "a few months away" from releasing its macOS desktop hypervisor, Fusion, in a native version for Apple's new M1 silicon.…

The standard is nascent and won’t land for almost a decade. But the jockeying for position is already fierce China's State Intellectual Property Office has proclaimed the nation already dominates the world in development of patents pertinent to sixth-generation mobile networks.…

Creator suspects his app's ad identifier was copied but Google keeping quiet On the last day of March, DroidScript, a popular Android app for writing JavaScript code, had its Google advertising account suspended and a week later was removed from the Google Play Store for alleged ad fraud.…

Empire State plant pledges to alleviate semiconductor shortage US chip maker GlobalFoundries will move its headquarters from Santa Clara, California, to Malta, New York, to be closer to its most advanced plant, Fab 8.…

Picking intellectual property fights with internet backbone biz seldom ends well Cloudflare today offered $100,000 for evidence of prior art to kill off a bunch of patents it is accused of infringing.…

Network advertisement of military addresses by obscure corporation not so exciting after all The unexplained awakening over the past four months of more than 100 million previously dormant US Department of Defense (DoD) IPv4 addresses now has an explanation.…

Among the first of many? Software tools biz reports internal use of credential-stealing script HashiCorp, an open-source company whose Terraform product is widely used for automated cloud deployments, has revealed a private code-signing key was exposed thanks to the compromised Codecov script discovered earlier this month.…

Bug that let malicious files slip past defenses now fixed in Big Sur 11.3 Apple has released macOS 11.3, fixing a serious flaw that allowed an attacker to sneak malicious files past the operating system's Gatekeeper security mechanism.…

Then made a house out of it The Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge – population 2,000 – had its internet-bearing cable chewed through in the early hours of Saturday.…

Say goodbye data silos, hello Yellowbrick Summit Promo Compute doesn’t live in one place anymore, and neither does your data.…

Thoma Bravo follows Sophos purchase with further infosec landgrab Proofpoint has become the latest sizable tech vendor to succumb to private equity after Thoma Bravo succeeded in its $12.3bn grasp for the infosec giant.…

Retailers prep for what could be the biggest sales year on record Notebook, desktop and workstation shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa swelled to almost 24 million units in Q1 as distributors and retailers gear up for potentially the biggest sales year on record for the humble personal computer.…

Filing says most users' devices 'may experience limited water contact' Apple is facing a prospective class-action lawsuit in New York over allegations it misrepresented the levels of water resistance of its iPhones.…

Consumer watchdog blasts platforms for onerous reporting mechanisms UK consumer watchdog Which? has found that ad giants Google and Facebook are failing to remove online scam ads even after victims report them.…

Myriad major regions affected in latest wobble A fresh week and a new crop of cloud woes confronted IBM clients this morning in a bunch of major cities across the planet.…

Pandemic making permanent changes to developer remote working The world has more developers than ever, a new SlashData survey has reported - with 1.4 million more JavaScript developers than six months ago - and developer work patterns have been permanently altered by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Yes that was a Betteridge headline (badoom, tish) Long-running US skit show Saturday Night Live has once again courted controversy by inviting Technoking Elon Musk on to host.…