The Register

Drones, delivery-bots and robo-sprayers at work in locked-down megacity State-controlled media in China is proudly reporting the use of robots to facilitate the “temporary closed-off management” of Shanghai, which has experienced a new surge of COVID.…

'Just the beginning of our Windows and Microsoft cloud integration' says Windows boss Microsoft has revealed plans to make cloudy Windows 11 PCs easily available from, and integrated with, its flagship OS on physical PCs, and hinted at much more integration between Redmond's desktop operating system and its clouds.…

US also charges Russia-based web host owner regarding cyber-crime market US and German federal agencies came down hard on Hydra, the longest-running known dark-web marketplace trafficking in illegal drugs and money-laundering services, with a multi-pronged attack that aimed to cut off multiple heads of the nefarious online beast.…

Amazingly SpaceX isn't on the list Amazon's proposed broadband satellite constellation, Project Kuiper, has inched closer to making it into orbit, even if some of the rockets it intends to use have yet to take their first flights.…

Some in tech industry are ecstatic: 'A historic step forward' and timing 'couldn't be any better' The US State Department this week launched an agency responsible for developing online defense and privacy-protection policies and direction as the Biden administration seeks to integrate cybersecurity into America's foreign relations. …

Filter list reportedly would block 'living wage,' 'pay rises,' 'restroom,' etc Amazon allegedly planned an internal messaging app that filtered words like "union," "pay rise," and "ethics," alongside challenging and offensive terms, but after public disclosure of the project, the biz told The Register the software has not been approved and may never be deployed.…

Not just about revenue figures, we're told: Investment in staff and services matters, too Exclusive While Nvidia is becoming a vertically integrated business by owning several core computing technologies, the GPU giant still relies on third-party companies to sell most of its wares, which is why it goes to great lengths to incentivize and recognize the contributions of these partners.…

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid you can't go out dressed like that Video From the department of "we've got this supercomputer on the space station, what shall we do with it?" comes news of AI technology being used to check the gloves of spacewalkers.…

Repo updates inspected for security blunders before some git can exploit them GitHub is aiming to help users avoid inadvertent leaks of confidential objects like access tokens by scanning repository content for such secrets before a git push is allowed to complete.…

Millions of rows per second in real time, so the legend goes... A data analytics company claiming to be able to process millions of rows per second, in real time, has just closed out a Series A funding round to take-in $37 million.…

US sanctions force company to sell Honor and x86 units, current and retired staff bask in those profits Flush from the sale of various business units, Huawei has distributed a whopping $9.65 billion dividend to current and retired staff under its Employee Shareholders Scheme (ESS).…

RUSI argues for collaboration, while others note all 'scans' compromise secure encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become a global flashpoint in the ongoing debate between the security of private communications versus the need of law enforcement agencies to protect the public from criminals.…

Technology is one part of a larger jam-resistant satellite scheme, important for warfare Boeing has hit a milestone with its anti-jam satellite communications.…

Gelsinger's firm drops details on crypto chip – including hash rate of up to 580GHps Intel has disclosed more details of its Blockscale ASIC, the firm's entry into the realm of cryptocurrency mining with a dedicated chip built to provide users with energy-efficient hashing for proof-of-work consensus networks.…

Syria, Sudan, Belarus, Ukraine came top. Are you starting to see a pattern? In an analysis of 3,356 fixed-line broadband deals in 220 countries, price comparison website Cable.co.uk found that the UK has the 92nd cheapest internet, beating the US, which came in 134th place.…

Linux slinger's gear can now look after ███ ███ ███ in secure ███ ███ Linux slinger Red Hat has achieved Common Criteria certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2.…

For this energy-efficient mega-PaLM, you gotta hand it to them Though AI models will continue to get increasingly more powerful the larger they become, performance improvements from scale have not yet plateaued, according to researchers at Google.…

Big iron also claimed to be 'quantum-safe' to protect against future hacks IBM has lifted the covers off the z16, the newest member of its Z Series mainframe family which focuses on the financial services industry with a new processor that has built-in AI acceleration for real-time fraud detection.…

Judge ponders battle royale between all three to avoid unhelpful overlaps Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won't reach a courtroom until 2024.…

Move is supposed to be double-plus good for supply-chain security Google is planning to tighten the security around its open source Go programming language by requiring two Google employees to be involved in code changes, where previously only one approver needed to be company-affiliated.…

Customers in Indonesia promised warning of wobbles sooner than is otherwise possible Xiaomi has added an earthquake alert system to some of its smartphones, starting with a trial in Indonesia, as a result of a collaboration between the smartphone maker and Indonesian and Chinese government-supported agencies.…

Crooks used RAT to hijack superusers at India's Mahesh Bank, stole millions An Indian bank that did not have a valid firewall license, had not employed phishing protection, lacked an intrusion detection system and eschewed use of any intrusion prevention system has, shockingly, been compromised by criminals who made off with millions of rupees.…

This matters for China – and for HPE, Intel … and possibly Apple A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.…

'Up to 50%' better price-performance than x86 equivalents ... Well, 2% is still up to 50%, we guess Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors. The keywords here are "up to" as it matters whether or not you're relying on hyperthreading on the x86 systems.…

Staff socially engineered into handing over internal system credentials Mailchimp has confirmed a miscreant gained access to one of its internal tools and used it to steal data belonging to 100-plus high-value customers.…

Everything's bigger in Texas, even the flying package-slinging robots Wing will this Thursday launch a commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, a first for the Alphabet-owned startup.…

If your internet megaphone lands you in enough trouble, might as well own part of it Social media service Twitter saw its stock surge on Monday because tech thinkfluencer Elon Musk took a 9.2 percent stake in the company.…

Investors given 'materially incomplete and misleading' info, it is claimed A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google's $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm.…

If your boss is bugging you about this tech, here's how to respond The state of the metaverse, says Forrester, is that there isn't one. Yet.…

Pat Gelsinger won't unlock most of that unless Xeon giant's stock goes sky high In a sign of how badly Intel's board wanted Pat Gelsinger to turn around the storied chipmaker, the company paid the new CEO a whopping $178 million in total compensation last year for his first ten or so months on the job. That is nearly eight times what former CEO Bob Swan made in 2020.…

Web giant's racks and appliances now generally available Google Distributed Cloud Edge (GDCE) has hit general availability.…

Thought Sacha Baron Cohen was a terrible threat actor? Get a load of this: encrypts/steals data, records audio/video and controls keyboard A new remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed "Borat" doesn't come with many laughs but offers bad actors a menu of cyberthreats to choose from.…

Semiconductor drought 'affecting all plants and models' says automaker Volvo is again blaming "chip shortages" after the company experienced a 22.1 percent drop in sales for cars in March compared to the previous year.…

Talks up 'Client-Edge-Cloud-Network-Intelligence' as it looks to consolidate lockdown gains Lenovo says it is looking to hire 12,000 workers in research and development (R&D) roles.…

Community-supported, Red Hat-compatible distro now available to Microsoft fans A Windows Subsystem for Linux-friendly version of AlmaLinux has turned up in the Microsoft Store, adding to an impressive array of options for WSL users.…

One year in, CEO Yuki Kusumi wants diversification and growth Panasonic will invest ¥600 billion ($4.89 billion) in electronic vehicle (EV) batteries, hydrogen energy, workplace digitization and supply chain software in a strategy shift for the 104-year old Japanese multinational.…

Reportedly has already sent a Q&A to Microsoft cloud rivals, customers The European Commission is starting to gently probe allegations against Microsoft of anti-competitive practices in the cloud computing industry as it pertains to the company’s licensing rules.…

Strengthens SDN smarts for hyperscalers, small clouds, and maybe 5G, gives Xilinx some work too AMD has announced it will acquire networking vendor Pensando for $1.9 billion.…

We talk to some players in the Apple device management game MacAD No, it isn't an April Fool's joke we forgot to publish. The Register* actually made it to a recent in-person Apple event: the 2022 Mac Administrator and Developer conference, MacAD. Apple, it seems, may be getting ever more serious about the enterprise.…

Customers wake to a nightmare as payment data pilfered from UK website Emma Sleep Company has confirmed to The Reg that it suffered a Magecart attack which enabled ne'er-do-wells to skim customers' credit or debit card data from its website.…

Who left that bit of rocket there? It's getting a bit crowded in orbit There was a sigh of relief from ESA controllers over the weekend as the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite successfully dodged a decades-old rocket fragment.…

The language wars were fun, but they're done Opinion Here's a recipe for happiness. Don't get overexcited by the latest "C is not a language" kerfuffle.…

Beware the terminated techie: Revenge is a dish best preceded by an asterisk Who, Me? With The Great Resignation upon us, depending on which survey you read, we present a reminder that when a programmer has to go… just let them go. Or face whatever form their vengeance might take. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Unusual move sees regulator open consultation on access to audit documents China's Securities Regulatory Commission has opened a consultation on revised regulations aimed at avoiding trouble for local tech companies that list on US stock markets.…

Meng Wanzhou will get her regular six-month stints in the role, starting who knows when Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou – who was famously held in Canada and is the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei – has quietly been named as one of three people who share the role as chair of the Chinese company's board.…

Asset management outfit Macquarie will buy existing bit barns. But first, check out the shiny new 15.2MW bit barn in Indonesia Japanese giant NTT has found a friend to help it fund the planned expansion of its datacenter fleet.…

Shame it's not finished – Microsoft has promised more hybrid cloud capabilities are coming real soon now Microsoft has quietly slipped System Center 2022 out the door, more than six months after the debut of Windows Server 2022 – but also flagged the product is not in its final state.…

Plus: Improving Google Search and open-source software library for more natural computer speech In brief AI algorithms crushed eight world champions playing the card game Bridge, marking another milestone in machine learning systems becoming better than humans at specific games.…

Plus: Hive hits health-care org, law enforcement ransomware response is lacking, and orgs can't meet new disclosure rules In Brief Cybercriminals have used fake emergency data requests (EDRs) to steal sensitive customer data from service providers and social media firms. At least one report suggests Apple, and Facebook's parent company Meta, were victims of this fraud.…

When does this thing get to unionize? Robotics company Boston Dynamics is making one of its latest robots more generally commercially available: a mobile, autonomous arm called Stretch.…