The Register

Slap-a-teacher and smash-the-school crazes were carefully engineered smears, it is claimed Facebook parent Meta, which has been struggling to compete against TikTok, has reportedly been paying a Republican-oriented consulting firm to encourage negative media reports about the Chinese-owned rival.…

Better late than never The widely used Zlib data-compression library finally has a patch to close a vulnerability that could be exploited to crash applications and services — four years after the vulnerability was first discovered but effectively left unfixed.…

In memo seen by The Register, chip giant seems to be striving for championship yoga-levels of flexibility Intel is going to tell more of its staff to return to their campus desks after many have been working from home or working in the office occasionally, judging by an internal memo sent to employees on Tuesday.…

Now for lawmakers to wrangle over the fine print The US Senate this week passed the America COMPETES Act by a bipartisan 68-28 vote, moving more than $50 billion in semiconductor industry funding closer to President Biden's desk. …

Network equipment maker insists it acted responsibly following intrusion Network equipment maker Ubiquiti on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against infosec journalist Brian Krebs, alleging he defamed the company by falsely accusing the firm of covering up a cyber-attack.…

Lower-end of the family to roll out first – and desktops will have to wait Intel hopes to compete against Nvidia and AMD in the discrete GPU market with now-launched standalone graphics chips for laptops. These components are said to feature a slew of technologies designed to provide smoother gaming experiences and faster content-creation performance.…

Open Infrastructure Foundation boasts of growth, but observers note this is mostly existing users scaling up OpenStack's 25th release brings the usual crop of new features to the open-source cloud platform, including support for DPUs, better integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes, and a handy un-delete feature for file system shares.…

A misconfigured VPN appliance is to blame It turns out the only thing Russian forces needed to knock thousands of Ukrainian satellite broadband customers offline was a misconfigured VPN.…

Mission launched during a pandemic, returned during... oh God, what now? NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth today aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts.…

Miscreants deployed cryptominers, backdoors since late December, Sophos says VMware's Horizon virtualization platform has become an ongoing target of attackers exploiting the high-profile Log4j flaw to install backdoors and cryptomining malware.…

Still can't say goodbye to the legacy browser? Some cookie and COM functionality has been restored Still got that one weird corporate app that simply must use Internet Explorer? Microsoft has tweaked IE mode in its Edge browser to lure the last holdouts.…

Claim NashStore will help Russians access common apps from May 9 A group of Russian developers are planning a Google Play alternative for Android users that will give those based in the country access to paid apps and services lost due to sanctions. …

Plus: It's looking for more Metaverse engineers in Canada Meta's plans to build a 166-hectare 200MW datacenter in the Netherlands' central Flevoland province have been put on hold.…

Konica Minolta maintenance system to be installed across 10 national support companies Swedish ERP and business application provider IFS has signed global contracts with Japanese businesses Konica Minolta and Japan Airlines.…

Post Nvidia deal collapse, Intel expressed similar interest back in February SK Hynix is reportedly considering forming a consortium to acquire UK chip designer Arm, however, the idea is said to be at a very early stage of planning, and Hynix may not actually proceed with the move.…

Cloud and data centre provider's liquidity hit by pandemic, energy costs, intransigent landlords The British division of global cloud and data centre services provider Sungard Availability Services was forced into administration amid a hike in energy bills and after failing to renegotiate landlord rental rates.…

No EVs were damaged in the making of this report Researchers from the University of Oxford published details of a vulnerability in the Combined Charging System that has the potential to abort charging.…

Non-destructively expand or shrink disk partitions while they still contain data GNOME Partition Editor version 1.4 was released this week by lead maintainer Curtis Gedak.…

Gender pay gap narrows, but the US remains top of pay-packet pops Puppet has emitted its seventh annual DevOps salary report, and there is good news: the gender wage gap appears to be narrowing.…

UK and Ireland survey reveals difficulties with housekeeping The majority of UK and Ireland SAP users are finding a lack of preparedness in data management is affecting migrations from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA and/or a push towards automating business processes.…

Rejects offer of flat rate payrise, calling offer a 'relative pay cut' due to inflation BT's largest union is rejecting the offer of a flat rate pay rise and threatening to start laying the groundwork for national "statutory industrial ballot action" to ratchet up the pressure on the telecoms biz.…

Multi-cloud deal 'is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought,' says CIO The United States Department of Defense has delayed awarding a contract for its massive cloud project – known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) – until December.…

Suggests it's prudent to plan for Putin weaponizing Russian products The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has advised users of Russian technology products to reassess the risks it presents.…

Meanwhile, Okta squirms as further details of slow hack response emerge Extortion gang Lapsus$ may to be back at work, despite the arrest of seven alleged operatives.…

Users of Redmond's two older cloudy CDNs told that the only route to future upgrades is migration Microsoft has created a new version of its Azure Front Door content delivery network (CDN), and told users of its existing two cloudy CDNs that if they want updates the way to get them is migrating to the new product.…

Project is a M*A*S*H-up of machine learning and battlefield decision-making A new DARPA initiative aims to ultimately give AI systems the same complex, rapid decision-making capabilities as military medical staff and trauma surgeons who are in the field of battle.…

Program co-lead tells us 'energy efficiency is the greatest need' Big names in tech are collaborating with academics to develop energy-optimized machine-learning and quantum-computing systems under the MIT AI Hardware Program, an initiative announced on Tuesday. …

SQL injection, race condition, bad cryptographic check pave way for infrastructure network takeovers SentinelOne this week detailed a handful of bugs, including two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, it found in Microsoft Azure Defender for IoT.…

US watchdog may do something about so-called blank-check IPO capers The US Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be preparing to adopt rules that would make those overseeing special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) liable for financial exaggerations to investors.…

Other manufacturers may follow after import duties passed onto gamers, enthusiasts The US government's lifting of import tariffs on graphics cards from China has already led to a drop in some prices in America.…

Symantec team warns ransomware and spying could be next Internet fiends are using a relatively new piece of a malicious code dubbed Verblecon to install cryptominers on infected computers. …

Cops say they saw gadget added at family safety center A Tennessee man was arrested on Friday for allegedly trying to track his partner by attaching an Apple Watch to her car to monitor her whereabouts.…

Folks fill out online forms only to be told to upgrade to paid versions Intuit, makers of the tax-filing software TurboTax, deceives folks with false advertising and claims its product is free to use when it isn't always free, the US Federal Trade Commission claimed in a lawsuit filed Monday.…

Cloud giant's Graviton forcing the hand of rivals, according to analysts The increasing adoption of Arm-compatible processors by cloud service providers is expected to grow the CPU architecture's penetration rate in datacenter servers to 22 percent by 2025, according to a report by Taiwan-based research firm TrendForce.…

As with analytics, so with ML – we're keeping everything in the box, says Big Red Oracle has added autoML, real-time elasticity, and price-performance trade-offs to Heatwave, the analytics engine it piggybacks on MySQL transactional database.…

Optional update finally adds one-click default app selection to Windows 11 The latest set of optional cumulative updates for Windows 11 contains an unlisted addition that users have been clamoring for: a one-click default browser change. …

First world problems: Too many NVMe drives, not enough seconds to spare A new Linux kernel patch from a Google engineer resolves a problem caused by a condition that many of us might quite like to experience – having too many NVMe drives.…

Toward making software development 'frictionless' over multiple processors, accelerators Arm says heterogeneous compute architectures – those with a mix of CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and other processor types – pose a challenge for software developers, and greater multi-architecture support is needed to address this.…

Mnuchin to be board chair of Softbank-backed security startup Zimperium Former US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin's private equity firm has announced its plans to buy a controlling stake in a mobile cybersecurity company for more than half a billion dollars.…

It may have an official-sounding name but it's a community effort Rolling Rhino is a new community remix of Ubuntu, but with a unique twist: it has a whole new release model, rather than just a different desktop.…

Operators used social media to distort status of fighting, instill panic in residents Ukraine's security agency has shut down five bot farms since the start of Russia's invasion of the country almost five weeks ago, slowing down a Russian operation designed to spread disinformation in the war-torn country and to sow panic among its frightened residents.…

Stopping Amazon, Google, others from prioritizing own products and services A letter from the Department of Justice to Congress makes it clear where the Biden administration stands on antitrust legislation targeting big tech: They're all for it.…

Aims for consistent management across public and private clouds Microsoft has unveiled a public preview of Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI.…

The GPU giant says it's for the 'most ambitious users' Nvidia is finally releasing its latest monster of a graphics processor, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU, which it said will super-power content creation applications and enable 8K gaming, assuming you're willing to part with a couple thousand dollars.…

Interesting blue sky research aims to put the quant in quantum, although progress in sector isn't rapid IBM is working with HSBC bank to explore potential applications for quantum computing in financial services.…

Crew alleged to have banked over $1m thanks to pandemic-induced usage bumps Some might wish they could go back to the onset of the pandemic and invest in online communication tools. The problem for three software developers facing charges of insider trading is that they worked for one of these companies.…

You can't fool me, young man. It's C all the way down! Believe it or not, not everything is based on C. There are current, shipping, commercial OSes written before C was invented, and now others in both newer and older languages that don't involve C at any level or layer.…

Legit employers don't normally send a check before you've started – or ask you to send money to a Bitcoin address Scammers appear to be targeting university students looking to kickstart their careers, according to research from cybersecurity biz Proofpoint.…

Move follows Microsoft's own tools to find out how things are really done Celonis has bought Process Analytics Factory (PAF), a firm that integrates its technology with Microsoft's Power BI platform, in a deal said to be worth $100m.…

Not the first time the letters POS have been associated with someone's repo Sometimes the best things are the most simple. A case in point: sending GitHub issues to an old thermal POS printer via a Raspberry Pi.…