The Register

Singer and actor was a trailblazer on and off the screen OBIT Nichelle Nichols, who long ago achieved immortality in her role as Uhura on Star Trek, has died at the age of 89.…

SME financial software vendor acknowledges customers expect systems to work for longer, but fails to appease them Global accounting giant Sage is facing accusations it mis-sold software after customers bought perpetual licenses for products the vendor now says must move to a subscription model for technical reasons.…

Barrier to building homes in overcrowded city? An overdrawn electricity grid Housing in London, western Europe's largest city, is famously in short supply, but it seems there is a new barrier to building more homes in England's capital – the electricity grid can't supply enough power and datacenters are being blamed for using up all the capacity.…

Should we be worried? Well, size isn't everything Opinion After decades trailing the rest of the world in leading-edge chip making, Chinese sand stamper Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) has quietly got into the 7nm business. That's a huge and unexpected leap. Has the West's embargo of the latest fab furniture failed?…

There's nothing to do. Oh look, the chairs have wheels... Who, Me? Welcome to an episode of Who, Me? in which a race between office chairs results in an unexpected escalation rather than the lifting of a trophy.…

A 'sophisticated, global botnet' held an Eastern European biz under siege over 30 days Akamai Technologies squelched the largest-ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in Europe earlier this month against a company that was being consistently hammered over a 30-day period.…

Will also be first cable to go from South America to Australia Chilean state-run infrastructure fund Desarrollo País and Singapore-based BW Digital subsidiary H2 Cable have issued a request for proposals to build a 15,000km submarine cable to connect Latin America, Asia Pacific, Oceania – and Antarctica.…

Can't say what caused cooling failure, admits to re-routing traffic away from working resources Google has revealed the root cause of the outage that disrupted services at its europe-west2-a zone, based in London, during a recent heatwave.…

Yahoo! was blocked too, but … meh Indonesia has blocked access to PayPal, Yahoo!, plus Epic Games and Steam, sparking outrage among local netizens so fierce that the Ministry responsible has wound back its restrictions on PayPal for a few days.…

Something Hunter Biden probably wishes computers had ages ago Samsung has added a "repair mode" to its Galaxy smartphones, hiding users' data when they entrust an ailing device to a technician.…

Local manufacturer to build modest kit for modestly sized supers India's ambition to become self-sufficient in hardware has taken a small step forward after the nation's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) contracted a local manufacturer to build the designed-in-India servers for a future supercomputer project.…

PLUS: India open to space tourism; China/Indonesia infosec pact; Paytm denies breach; Infosys dodges government again; and more Asia In Brief Australia's federal police (AFP) on Friday charged a man with creating and profiting from spyware that allowed total remote control of victims' computers.…

Hails the combo as finally making Arm 'usable as a development platform' Linus Torvalds has released version 5.19 of the project, and hailed Apple's homebrew silicon – and the Asahi Linux distribution that runs on it – for making Arm-powered computers useful for developers.…

Also, malicious VBA macros are out and container files are in, Robin Banks helps criminals rob banks, and more In brief Canadian fast food chain Tim Hortons is settling multiple data privacy class-action lawsuits against it by offering something it knows it's good for: a donut and coffee.…

MSP should just stand for My Server's Pwned! A Russian-language miscreant claims to have hacked their way into a managed service provider, and has asked for help monetizing what's said to be access to the networks and computers of that MSP's 50-plus US customers.…

Mom, what's an eye pad? On the one hand, Apple Mac and iPad revenues are shrinking and the tech goliath is doing less business in China and Japan.…

Popcorn stocks soar Updated The legal showdown between Twitter and Elon Musk is finally set to go to trial on October 17 and will last five days, according to a court schedule published this week.…

Just in time for the midterms The Feds have put up a $10 million reward for information about foreign interference in US elections in general, and more specifically a Russian oligarch and close friend of President Vladimir Putin accused of funding an organization that meddled in the 2016 presidential elections.…

P2P file system makes it more difficult to detect and take down malicious content Threat groups are increasingly turning to InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) peer-to-peer data sites to host their phishing attacks because the decentralized nature of the sharing system means malicious content is more effective and easier to hide.…

With $52 billion on the table, everyone wants their fair share Micron wants a piece of the $52 billion in chips subsidies approved by US Congress this week. The company Friday promised to ramp up domestic memory production over the next few years.…

Power transmission bottlenecks could delay Northern Virginia DC projects into 2026 Updated The largest datacenter market in the US is running into trouble: There isn't enough power transmission capacity in the region to handle all the bit barn projects.…

Quest to reduce environmental impact finds pulp solution Scientists in Switzerland have developed a battery made out of paper which will release its charge when splattered with water.…

Chateau Lafite? Unexpected day off? Unplugging users phones? System Administrator Appreciation Day is here – so what lovely gifts did your employer lavish you with today? Did you arrive at work to a guard of honor? A case of Château Lafite Rothschild? A free holiday?…

No stopping the cloud computing division but losses mount on retail side as consumers catch a cold The unstoppable cloud sales juggernaut that is Amazon Web Services brought in a third more business for its parent firm during its calendar Q2, helping to partially offset losses incurred in the retail side of the Amazon group.…

Amazing how you find the money when military needs a reliable supply Google has linked up with chip fabrication company, SkyWater Technology, on an open source chip technology program with funding from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to build a reliable source of components for defense applications.…

Supports liquid desiccant tech to store energy to smooth bumps in demand, lower greenhouse gas impact A fund founded by Bill Gates is leading a $20 million investment round into an aircon startup which promises to slash the carbon impact of keeping people cool on a heating planet.…

Bags of splashy fun for astronauts in SMEAT's simulation Feature Remember Skylab? How about SMEAT? Fifty years ago, a trio of US astronauts took part in 56-day simulation of a Skylab mission that would prove critical to the success of the US's first crewed space station.…

A new generation learns the hard way that everything is ephemeral Something for the Weekend I have misplaced Britain. A wicked entity has made off with an entire group of islands and all its inhabitants.…

A little hint from a Helldesk friend is all you need Episode 14 "So what's causing it?" the Boss asks, looking down at his screen.…

We would have got away with it too, if hadn't been for your perfectly reasonable user request On Call Do you know where that computer came from? Or that chair? Or that desk? Today's On Call concerns another brush with the long arm of the law that all started with a simple call for help.…

Prepaid one-, three-, or five-year terms preferred for very big bundle VMware will not publicly disclose the price of its vSphere+ and VSAN+ subscription bundles secret from the public, but the virtualization giant’s partners have been given a price to discuss.…

Forget mobile apps – headsets and smart glasses will be able to harvest so much data More thought – or at least some thought – needs to be given to privacy protection in the promised metaverse of connected 3D virtual-reality worlds, experts have concluded.…

Plenty of recent users appear to be from China, and hoping for more leaks of local data The popularity of stolen data bazaar BreachForums surged after it was used to sell a giant database of stolen information describing Chinese citizens, threat intelligence firm Cybersixgill said on Thursday.…

Cover an average of $4.4 million per raid ourselves? No chance, mate The costs incurred by organizations suffering data losses continue to go up, and 60 percent of companies surveyed by IBM said they were passing them onto customers.…

Behold the mutant offspring of the Microsoft Store, Endpoint Manager, and Package Manager Microsoft has promised a new form of private app store that can be used to distribute private apps to your device fleet.…

Effects still being felt today across US government The United States' federal court system "faced an incredibly significant and sophisticated cyber security breach, one which has since had lingering impacts on the department and other agencies."…

Xiao Yaqing had been steering China's chip industry China's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the State Supervision Commission have announced that Xiao Yaqing, the nation's minister for industry and information technology, is "suspected of violating discipline and law" and has been placed under "review and investigation".…

Effort to create a new tier of memory flopped as rivals offered faster and more open alternatives Analysis Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed that Intel will quit its Optane business, ending its attempt to create and promote a tier of memory that's a little slower than RAM but had the virtues of persistence and high IOPS.…

'We must and will do better' CEO pledges amid big losses, Optane axed, expectations slashed Intel stock fell by as much as 11 percent in extended trading today after the chip maker reported disappointing second-quarter 2022 financial results.…

Let's hold off the champagne until an actual drug is developed using this tech The AI-powered protein-folding model AlphaFold has predicted more than 200 million proteins, nearly all such structures known to science, DeepMind said on Thursday.…

Intel and pals can now die happy The US House of Representatives voted Thursday to approve subsidies for domestic chip manufacturing, and to accelerate scientific research, with the passage of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act.…

SEC extracts pocket change from bankers, wags finger, sends them on their way JPMorgan Securities, UBS Financial Services, and TradeStation Securities aren't doing enough to thwart crooks who want to steal customers' identity, says America's financial watchdog.…

May stand a chance of passing as it's simple: Make ISPs Title II common carriers. Boom, done Net neutrality legislation is back before Congress, and the latest bill – push by House and Senate Democrats – only does a single thing: it reclassifies broadband providers as common carriers. …

You might say the police were in their element Spain's national police say they have arrested two former government workers suspected of breaking into the computer network of the country's radioactivity alert system (RAR) and disabling more than a third of its sensors.…

Just what we expect from the iGiant: Reasonably affordable, low margin, mass market technology Apple's poorly-kept-secret automobile project is reportedly getting an injection of exotic car know-how from a 20-year Lamborghini veteran.…

Promise to get themselves into gear by 2040. Plenty of time, right? A group of datacenter operators and industry associations has presented the European Commission (EC) with proposals for minimizing water used in their bit barns as part of a broader initiative to reduce environmental impact.…

This relatively new distro from an Indian founder is smart, capable, fast… and colorful Garuda Linux brings an important feature to the Arch world: snapshots and rollback.…

For the real-time developer that really hates thinking about infrastructure and provisioning San Mateo-headquartered realtime data processing business Hazelcast has gone serverless with a public beta of its Viridian platform.…

Inflation, fear of recession and war in Ukraine dent consumer confidence Smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm is in the eye of a potential economic storm as inflation and fears of a recession pressure consumers to reconsider spending priorities and hold off on that brand new handset.…

Remember when China's tech execs warned lockdown in its biggest city would have 'severe consequences?' More bad news on the PC shipments, with market intel firm Counterpoint Research showing a historic year-on-year decline that echoed Gartner's estimations earlier this month.…