The Register

Culture secretary talks up pre-Commons reading as UK waits to hear who new leader will be On the day the UK is set to appoint its new prime minister, digital and culture secretary Nadine Dorries is introducing legislation in Parliament she promises will “drop unnecessary box-ticking and measures stifling British businesses.”…

We trawled through the licensing terms and spoke to the vendors so you don't have to Feature For developers, there is no debate. The future of the database is open source. A glance at the 2022 Stack Overflow survey of around 70,000 code-wranglers shows nearly all pros use one of the two leading open source RDBMSes, PostgreSQL (46.5 percent) or MySQL (45.7 percent), although they use other systems as well.…

Just one big GUI mess Opinion The sight of a former executive laying into their old company is rarely less than delicious. And when that company is Microsoft, the exec is head of user experience, and the complaint is about the solid slab of sadness that is the Windows 11 Start menu? This calls for not just regular salted popcorn, but truffle-oil popcorn on a silver platter carried in by a butler.…

Exchange Online face Halloween deadline Don't say you weren't warned.…

Windows Defender update fixed the mess after a weekend of false positive weirdness Microsoft appears to have fixed a problem that saw its Defender antivirus program identify apps based on the Chromium browser engine and/or Electron JavaScript framework as malware, and suggest users remove them.…

‘I had a sharp new suit and a misplaced sense of confidence’ – and made a costly mistake Who,Me? Before you shell out big bucks to engage the services of consultants, perhaps consider this week’s instalment of Who, Me? and the adventures of a reader we’ll call “Norman” for the duration of this tale.…

Pilot scheme running in Europe, APAC, sees ad giant still take a four percent cut Google has started a test of alternative payment systems in its Play store.…

Escalation of targeted threats is an 'emergency' that required 'dangerous' decision 'we are not comfortable with,' says CEO Cloudflare has decided to stop providing its services to Kiwi Farms, just days after defending the site's eligibility for its services.…

PLUS: Australia mints a physical crypto-coin; Alibaba Cloud claims world's biggest DC; India’s space airbags; and more China will conduct a three month blitz to cleanse the local internet of "rumors and false information".…

Top official spells out simply why America is going back to the Moon Interview "There is no SpaceX without NASA," Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator at the US space agency's Science Mission Directorate, told The Register this week as a Falcon 9 lurked in the background at Cape Canaveral.…

Sitting, Leaking Slowly? It was second time unlucky for NASA as its Space Launch System rocket remained rooted to its Florida launch pad following a second scrub of its Moon mission.…

Plus: Use machine learning to understand your cat ... possibly In brief A man won an art competition with an AI-generated image crafted, and some people aren't best pleased about it.…

Plus: Truth Social barred from Play until it shows just one iota of decency Google and its YouTube subsidiary have joined other social media networks pledging to keep the 2022 US midterm elections safe and free from Russian trolls — and anyone else spewing democracy-damaging disinformation – by taking down such content.…

Look who misunderstood the consequences a Solana close command OptiFi, a decentralized options exchange using the Solana blockchain, inadvertently disabled its mainnet service with a misunderstood command and locked up some $661,000 worth of USDC 'digital dollar' tokens.…

Fingers crossed this prodigious test will have a good weather experience Updated NASA will try to launch its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the Moon on Saturday after its first attempt on August 29 was scrubbed due to what turned out to be a faulty sensor on one of its core engines.…

Just days after US rules tackling homemade firearms take effect A US man has admitted he broke the law when he used 3D printers to make components converting semi-automatic guns to full auto.…

More silicon sales for us says Qualcomm Meta’s latest move in the effort to reinvent Second Life, or roll out the metaverse, involves building better VR chips and it's trusting Qualcomm with the job.…

Users will now be able to blur or replace their backgrounds during video meetings or calls Microsoft is making it easier for Teams to work with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in a bid to grow the number of monthly active users on the collaboration platform.…

Letters to FCC confirm what many believed, don't address a bigger problem US mobile carriers know a lot about where their customers every move, and according to letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they routinely store such location data for years, willingly hand it over to law enforcement if served a proper subpoena, and say users can't opt out.…

Outsourced assembly and test a key missing part of supply chain, and foreign entities aren't beyond the pale Stakeholders in the semiconductor industry have a clear-eyed view of the changes that should happen in order for the US to rebuild a leading position in chip manufacturing, and a wide-ranging approach addressing the entire supply chain is needed.…

'Improved algorithm' set to keep miscreants at bay, web-based taxi service promises The taxi offshoot of troubled Russian tech giant Yandex has been hit by online pranksters, who yesterday ordered dozens of cabs to a single address in central Moscow, resulting in a major traffic jam.…

UMC founder Robert Tsao wants to train more than 3m 'civilian warriors' and sharpshooters A Taiwanese semiconductor magnate is to provide the money to prime several million "civilian warriors" and marksmen to help defend the island nation in the event of an invasion by China.…

Judge says that servers being located in Singapore is not a get-out clause A ruling handed down from the Delhi High Court this week declared that Telegram must hand over information such as IP addresses, mobile numbers, and devices used by channels on the platform involved in copyright infringement.…

National Labor Relations Board says company had not met the burden of proof for its objections Amazon's attempt to rerun the election that resulted in workers unionizing at a warehouse in New York City have been shut down by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).…

Or so says a hopeful IDC after releasing latest forecast of doom The pandemic fueled buying frenzy in the PC industry looks to be well and truly over with analysts at IDC forecasting a double digit decline in shipments this year, and growth hopes for next pinned on a Windows 10 enterprise refresh.…

OS support includes Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2021 LTSC and Linux options Intel has made available versions of its 12th-generation Core processors optimized for edge and IoT applications, claiming the purpose-built chips enable smaller form factor designs, but with the AI inferencing performance to analyze data right at the edge.…

What could possibly go wrong? The UK government has suggested IT contractors should challenge errors in their tax status and reclaim overpaid tax through self-assessment yet some experts think the plans are impractical and misguided.…

Rules for devices including phones aimed at reducing environmental impact of scroll addiction The European Union is proposing legislation which will make manufacturers of tablets and smartphones offer longer-life batteries and spare parts for at least five years after the model is removed from the market.…

Brit watchdog says what we're all thinking, motions for deeper investigation Following the launch of a merger inquiry into Microsoft's acquisition of video game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard in July, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said yesterday it had identified potential concerns about the tie-up.…

When the PCs were pilfered by ram raiding rotters, green screens proved their worth On Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s trawl through readers’ reminiscences of tech trials and tribulations.…

vSphere users can start smaller without paying cluster-bucks VMware Explore VMware has made a profound change to its partnership with AWS by removing the need to run its wares on dedicated clusters.…

Not worthy of the name 'smart glasses' and not sold outside China until 2023 Lenovo has launched a face-mounted wearable monitor.…

Increased ‘configuration not supported’ heartbreak sparks move Microsoft’s networking team has made a change to the way certifies network interface cards (NICs) for use in Windows Server.…

You’re going to need new cables and learn to recognize revised logos The USB Promoter Group has announced version 2.0 of the USB4 spec and promises it can carry data at 80Gbps.…

From hero to zero-day ... to plain zero Three former US government cyber-spies who, among other things, illicitly compromised and snooped on Americans' devices for the United Arab Emirates government have been banned from participating in international arms exports under a deal reached with Uncle Sam.…

Producing vital gas out of Red Planet's hostile atmosphere? Truly a test of Perseverance The oxygen-generator onboard NASA's Perseverance rover, which has repeatedly extracted the vital gas from the Martian atmosphere in tests, has been detailed in a scientific paper published this week.…

They were asking for it, energy giant says Thousands of Xcel Energy customers in Colorado this week discovered they’d been locked out of their smart thermostats, unable to adjust their air conditioning systems as local temperatures rose about well above 90°F this week.…

How Fog Data Science sells records of your whereabouts, according to the EFF For less than $10,000, and without a warrant, cops can buy large amounts of location data on private citizens and track people's movements over long periods of time.…

Illinois, Arizona and Iowa are the big winners in connection plan The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it's ready to disburse nearly $800 million to fund rural broadband deployments in 19 states, with Illinois, Arizona and Iowa getting just over half of the total pot. …

$15 billion Idaho facility is the first step as chip biz feeds on CHIPS Act US memory vendor Micron will spend $15 billion over the next decade to construct what it claims is the first memory fab built by a US manufacturer in America in the last 20 years.…

Stephen Thaler is fighting the law, and the law is winning Analysis Stephen Thaler, founder of software biz Imagination Engines, has waged a years-long campaign fighting for machines to be legally recognized as inventors around the world. Now, it looks as though his struggle may have been for nothing.…

Looks like the bird site didn't need Musk's money to get the feature added, after all Twitter's long-awaited edit button is being tested internally, and in the coming weeks will be available to Twitter Blue subscribers before a wider rollout, the social media company said today. …

Not a great look for the state that just vowed to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of battery-powered ones One week after announcing plans to phase out autos powered by gasoline, California energy authorities are facing a heat wave so severe residents are being asked not to charge their electric vehicles during "flex alerts" designed to reduce stress on the grid.…

Latest versions of the KDE Plasma and LXQt desktops now available Kubuntu and Lubuntu desktops have been upgraded but you won't automatically get the new versions. Here's how to get the optional lifts.…

Just weeks after milestone permit to charge for robotaxi rides using autonomous-driving tech General Motors autonomous unit Cruise has issued a Safety Recall report, pulling software that governed how its AVs behave when making an unprotected left turn after one of the vehicles was involved in a crash.…

Apple's web engine to take advantage of Git’s distributed nature, GitHub’s large community Apple web rendering engine WebKit, the basis of its Safari browser, is migrating to Git.…

Affixes magnetically attached Bluetooth unit instead of soft keyboard after feedback Lenovo has exhibited an updated version of its ThinkPad X1 Fold portable, a device that is a mash-up of a folding-screen tablet and a Windows laptop, with a sleeker, slimmer design sporting Intel's 12th-gen Core processors and Windows 11.…

Subsea Cloud boasts 1MW of capacity for up to 90% lower costs compared to landlubber facilities A company called Subsea Cloud is planning to have a commercially available undersea datacenter operating off the coast of the US before the end of 2022, with other deployments planned for the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.…

Buy a new phone or pay food and household energy bills? Shipments to crash in 2022 Smartphone shipments are forecast to shrink globally by 6.5 percent this year as many households feeling the pinch of inflation decide to prioritize paying for food, energy and other essentials over refreshing handsets.…

Starting with Google Firebase and Apache Camel repos Security researchers at Legit Security identified vulnerabilities in the GitHub automated workflows used by Google Firebase and Apache Camel that could have been abused to compromise those open-source projects through their GitHub CI/CD pipeline and insert malicious code.…