The Register

Long-awaited major release welcomed by users who wish IBM would promote it a little more In the first major upgrade since 2016, IBM is releasing a basket of updates for the edition of its well-established Db2 relational database for the z/OS mainframe operating system. The latest tweaks are designed to use machine learning to make systems more efficient to manage and operate.…

Out of this world service for Musk's satellite broadband It appears that even users of Elon Musk's Starlink service are not immune to the odd bit of borkage as the broadband-from-orbit system suffered an outage at the weekend.…

That's what Thoma Bravo is paying for SailPoint in a mid-pandemic market A $6.9 billion acquisition is putting a hard number on the value of Identity and Access Management (IAM). …

Goal to prevent brain drain of talented computer scientists from region A new Eastern Europe-based research institute aimed at advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and computing is trying to stem the flood of talented computer scientists exiting the region for the West.…

However, 'structural undersupply' might ease in the next six months or so The ongoing supply chain woes in the semiconductor market are set to last through this year and next, according to Volkswagen, which believes underlying structural problems are unlikely to be resolved before 2024.…

Plus: Can algorithms tell us how we're feeling from the sound of our voices and more In brief The EU Commission wants to build a giant facial recognition database that will be shared with law enforcement across different countries.…

Plus: AMD tells El Reg it stopped 'all technical, product support and marketing' in pariah state Swedish network system maker Ericsson has confirmed it has "indefinitely" halted all shipments to clients in Russia, joining the ever growing list of tech organizations protesting the atrocities in Ukraine.…

Sabre deal with Google creates parallel data architecture to support ML-based ecommerce partnerships with airlines and hotel chains Feature The computing and travel industries have traveled hand in hand for decades. For perspective, American Airlines signed a deal with IBM in 1957 which developed the first computer reservation system in 1960, based on two IBM 7090 mainframes.…

Majority of affected users still wondering where their data went The great Atlassian outage is stumbling into a new week, with the company reporting it has "rebuilt functionality for over 35 percent of the users who are impacted by the service outage," meaning the majority of those afflicted remain unable to access their sites.…

Beijing struggles to contain both misinformation and inconvenient dissent amid mass lockdowns The 25 million plus residents of the Chinese city of Shanghai are being warned not to spread rumors online or to complain about conditions during ongoing and strict COVID-19 lockdowns imposed since March 28.…

Plus: Fox News learns to use database passwords, Autodesk patches high-severity bugs, and CISA says retire old D-Link routers In brief Google pulled a slew of Android apps with more than 46 million downloads from its Google Play Store after security researchers notified the cloud giant that the code contained some sneaky data-harvesting code.…

Next stop, French Guiana. Then Jupiter Feature The European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft has kicked off electromagnetic testing in the Airbus Defence and Space cleanrooms in Toulouse.…

Hopes to taps into pool of tech workers who aren't keen to be tied down for 40 hours per week Dell employees in the Netherlands will be able to work four days a week from this month, a director of Dell Technologies Netherlands has confirmed to The Register.…

We answer today's burning question: should YOU buy an IBM z16? Opinion IBM's most exciting mainframe yet, the z16, is finally here. Just three years after the z15, at this rate IBM has until 2212 to buy the z80 trademark from Zilog.…

Where the phrase 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' originates Who, Me? Who has got your back up? Forget comments in code, what do you do when all your source has been packed into the trunk of a family sedan? Welcome to Who, Me?…

Management promises it will keep listening, and Elon shows no sign of going quiet SpaceX and Tesla tycoon Elon Musk won't be joining Twitter's board, despite last week revealing he had acquired a 9.2 per cent stake in the microblogging service.…

Analyst says it's not a 'downward spiral' as sales are still defying predictions Shipments of PCs have finally slowed down after two years of double-digit growth, declining worldwide by 5.1 per cent year-on-year in Q1 2022, market research firm International Data Corp (IDC) said on Monday.…

Shouldn't a company from the same stable as Tata Consulting Services do better with a day one traffic flood? Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Tata has launched its attempt to rival Amazon.com and Walmart's e-commerce efforts, but suffered a bad case of the first day scalability jitters.…

Please dismiss any thoughts you had that increasing regulation might have hurt the economy China's Cyberspace Administration has published statistics to assert that the nation's big technology companies are growing and not laying off thousands of workers.…

Washington looks to private sector help for Open RAN ambitions The US Department of Defense is encouraging companies to build open and interoperable 5G, and it's willing to shell out a portion of $3 million to anyone who provides a solution.…

A model can improve overnight, it just takes pared-down scale and a little human intervention It turns out the machines still need us after all, at least for now. And while the largest systems get the most attention, the secret to truly useful, fair AI are best served small and with plenty of human input.…

The smallest artificial spin ice ever created could be part of novel low-power HPC Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich have managed to accomplish a technological breakthrough that could lead to new forms of low-energy supercomputing.…

ML master pitches trimmed-down deep learning for the masses In 2015, modern AI trailblazer Andrew Ng's recipe for success was to go big on neural networks, data, and monolithic systems. Now that recipe has created a problem: the technology is dominated by only a few rich companies with the money and headcount to build such immense systems.…

Do we have enough toner for barracks in Fort Bliss base in Texas? The US Department of Defense is to construct and try out the largest 3D-printed buildings in the Americas: three barracks in a Lone Star army base.…

FromSoftware's magnum opus, made with input from George R R Martin, invites new and veteran players alike The RPG Greetings, traveler, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. You'll forgive the lateness of this edition because there was really only one game that mattered in March – perhaps the entirety of 2022 – and that game's name is Elden Ring.…

Online attacks follow suspected airspace violation by Russian aircraft Cyberattacks took down Finnish government websites on Friday while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Finland's members of parliament (MPs).…

Microsoft OneDrive: Missing documents? Hold my beer Atlassian is still scrambling to recover from a recent software script fiasco and is hoping no customer data gets lost, which may be more than Microsoft can manage if OneDrive, as some have reported, has been intermittently corrupting large uploads for at least two months.…

Saturday rendezvous planned for historic commercial orbit ride A retired NASA astronaut and three space tourists are right now tucked inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule above Earth for the first-ever purely commercial mission to the International Space Station.…

Batteries, displays, cameras and more, apparently In a nod to right-to-repair efforts, Google is partnering with iFixit to offer spare parts for its Pixel smartphones dating all the way back to 2017.…

Double-standard rules have strengthened iGiant's gatekeeper power Apple's ramp up in iOS privacy measures has affected small data brokers, yet apps can still collect group-oriented data and identify users via device fingerprinting, according to a study out of Oxford.…

Software giant sinkholes systems used by Russian gang Microsoft this week seized seven internet domains run by Russia-linked threat group Strontium, which was using the infrastructure to target Ukrainian institutions as well as think tanks in the US and EU, apparently to support Russian's invasion of its neighbor.…

Goodness, gracious, lots of insights on great balls of fire The US Space Force is publicly releasing nearly 30 years of data on fireball meteors in the hopes it can improve the detection and impact prediction of near-Earth objects (NEOs).…

Special method for production gets cash injection from govt, vendors New techniques for producing lithium could play a vital part in making batteries for applications ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles that are more environmentally friendly than current methods of extraction.…

Some fear they'll lose workstation sales to Lenovo, AMD's exclusive launch partner for the T Pro 5000 Special report If you've been on the hunt for a pre-built workstation with AMD's Ryzen Threadripper processors, there's a chance you've noticed fewer options available and longer lead times from different PC system builders.…

12 years on, rebates-for-not-using-AMD-chips case isn't over yet... The European Commission (EC) is going ahead with an appeal against a court decision earlier this year to drop a $1.2 billion fine imposed against Intel for anti-competitive behavior.…

Default user gone, Bluetooth pairing during setup, and latest LTS Linux kernel An update to the Debian Bullseye-based Raspberry Pi OS is being rolled out with both quality-of-life improvements and one very important tweak: an overdue departure of the default user.…

Remember warning about hurried release to meet Brexit deadline? Never forget Updated A system vital to the flow of goods across the UK's border has suffered a devastating outage following a rush to implement it in time for the Brexit deadline.…

Agency upset YouTube hasn't removed 'fake' videos about activities it won't call 'war' Russia's communications scold is fed up with all the misinformation online, at least with regard to Google and its YouTube subsidiary.…

This week's column coming to you via hologram. Or a spaceship Something for the Weekend How can you tell if a fish is upset? It doesn't grind its pharyngeal teeth, clench its fins or utter moist oaths. And it's not as if you can see tears streaming down its face.…

Standard grants access to public hotspots without having to register each time The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has completed testing to prepare for the deployment of WBA OpenRoaming, a federation service built to give seamless access to Wi-Fi hotspots across Europe's municipal networks.…

Google says Topaz will lower latency, even though both nations already have shorter routes to bit barns Google has revealed it will fund a submarine cable connecting Japan and Canada.…

CWU wants 10% for members, cites biting inflation rises in UK The Communication Workers Union is lining up an industrial action ballot for members working at BT after rejecting the telecom company's offer of a flat rate £1,500 pay rise for 58,000 frontline workers.…

Beijing may have had a hand in attacks in Ukraine, too China has been accused of conducting a long-term cyber attack on India's power grid, and has been implicated in cyber attacks against targets in Ukraine.…

Back up your data, it's later than you think On Call It's a tale from before the times of Bitlocker and TPM in On Call today as a Register reader demonstrates the importance of knowing one's true worth.…

'Opaque and difficult' Google Ad rules cost biz 20 hours profit Google has failed in its bid to dismiss a €150 million fine ordered by France's monopoly watchdog in 2019 for exploiting its position in the search advertising market, a court ruled on Thursday.…

Office 365 and Windows 365 prices to rise in September – one SKU by much more than recent commercial increase Microsoft has hiked the price of Office 365 and Windows 365 versions it offers to non-profit customers, effective September 1, 2022.…

For now, a mere 80 million more citizens can trial the Digital Yuan China's central bank digital currency, the Digital Yuan, has been integrated with Tencent's flagship messaging app WeChat, and appears as a payment option when users employ the super-app shop.…

Appoints independent committee and gives angry investors most of what they want Toshiba has decided it will consider proposals to take the company private, and devise yet another strategy to improve its performance, suggesting alternative proposals for the company's future will be revealed – and perhaps decided - in late June.…

He's the third gangster in crew to face time behind bars Another member of notorious cybercrime ring FIN7 is headed to jail after the gang breached major companies' networks across the US and stole more than $1 billion from these businesses' customers.…

Automated HR in the cross-hairs over discrimination law A newly proposed amendment to California's hiring discrimination laws would make AI-powered employment decision-making software a source of legal liability. …