The Register

US software developer Chetu ordered to pay restitution for employee's unlawful termination A telephone sales rep in the Netherlands has won an unfair dismissal court case against his former employer, US software company Chetu, after he was fired for refusing to spend his work day surveilled by his computer camera.…

To get you upgrading faster, vSphere will now be released for Initial Availability before reaching General Availability VMware has acknowledged what most IT pros have learned the hard way – never buy a first-generation product – with a revised release cadence for its flagship vSphere private cloud suite.…

Emperor penguin swipes Intel's attitude to ECC memory and maybe wimpy Mac performance too If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds's AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.…

PLUS: SK hynix outgasses Putin; Canon's new litho plant; Equinix into Indonesia; and more! Asia In Brief South Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK hynix have reportedly reacted cautiously to the Biden administration's swingeing bans on certain chip tech reaching China.…

RPKI is supposed to verify network routes. Instead, here's how it could be subverted An internet security mechanism called Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), intended to safeguard the routing of data traffic, is broken, according to security experts from Germany's ATHENE, the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity.…

It's not like the good old days with iffy cryptography and begging for keys Comment It's getting difficult these days to find a ransomware group that doesn't steal data and promise not to sell it if a ransom is paid off. What's more, these criminals are going down the extortion-only route, and not even bothering to scramble your files with encryption.…

Plus: US AI Bill of Rights, and a new framework to run models on AMD and Nvidia GPUs more flexibly In brief America's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is looking into how AI technologies can be used to create a "Digital Police Officer" or "D-PO" in the future.…

Also, Albania almost called in NATO over cyber attacks, and Facebook warns of account-stealing mobile apps In brief An executive order signed by President Biden on Friday to setting out fresh rules on how the US and Europe share people's private personal info may still fall short of the EU's wishes, says the privacy advocate who defeated the previous regulations in court.…

Radio comms vulnerabilities detailed A couple of vulnerabilities in Ikea smart lighting systems can be exploited to make lights annoyingly flicker for hours.…

How's your day going? Cryptocurrency exchange Binance temporarily halted its blockchain network on Thursday in response to a cyberattack that led to the theft of two million BNB tokens, notionally exchangeable for $566 million in fiat currency.…

So is this why YMTC's CEO stepped down? Yangtze Memory Technologies Company (YMTC) is one of more than two dozen Chinese companies and institutions targeted in the Biden Administration’s latest round of export restrictions on semiconductor tech.…

Instead of a week of profits, mere days of net income for Cook The record-setting €1.1 billion fine levied against Apple by French authorities has been cut by two-thirds to just €372 million ($363 million) – an even more paltry sum for the world's first company to surpass $3 trillion in market valuation. …

… Including virtual machines as well as physical ones Friday Freeware Fest Elmar Hanlhofer's Plop Boot Managers are a small family of tiny tools to enable booting from media that a computer can't usually boot from.…

Probe takes highest resolution surface shot yet while citizen scientists get busy with their coloring pencils NASA's Juno probe had a close encounter with the Jovian moon Europa on September 29 and this week the space agency released the highest resolution photograph ever taken of its icy crust.…

New hardware? Consultants? You tell us because your infosec is off the grid The US Department of Energy has proposed regulations to financially reward cybersecurity modernization at power plants by offering rate deals for everything from buying new hardware to paying for outside help.…

Isn't it ironic: Potentially helping its former customers to ditch big iron Microsoft and Kyndryl have unveiled a new aspect of their global strategic partnership with plans to help enterprise customers make better use of data held on mainframe systems.…

Ubiquitous database language support continued through third-party tool, users told Fivetran, the automated data integration company once valued at $5.6 billion, has received a volley of criticism for ending direct support for ubiquitous data language SQL, leading to a frank mea culpa from its CEO.…

Made in Taiwan: Only TSMC seems to be dodging the downturn The bad news from the semiconductor industry continues as more chip companies report falling demand, with only TSMC bucking the trend and delivering higher than expected earnings for the quarter just ended.…

The multibillion dollar question: Will it make in-flight Wi-Fi on planes more expensive? Global satellite maker Viasat's proposed $7.3 billion purchase of rival Inmarsat is being held up because Britain's competition regulator is worried about the deal's impact on in-flight passenger Wi-Fi on planes.…

The Great Unresignation as inflation forces hordes of retirees back into work A sustained upswing in the cost of living is forcing hundreds of thousands of retirees across Britain to reconsider a return to the workplace.…

They probably shouldn't be connected in the first place, says database expert Only a third of PostgreSQL databases connected to the internet use SSL for encrypted messaging, according to a cloud database provider.…

But we can say what this upcoming protocol is good for Systems Approach Some might say there's a possibility QUIC will start to replace TCP. This week I want to argue that QUIC is actually solving a different problem than that solved by TCP, and so should be viewed as something other than a TCP replacement.…

They can't be any worse than some human developers Machine-learning models that power next-gen code-completion tools like GitHub Copilot can help software developers write more functional code, without making it less secure.…

What’s worse than absurd support requests at work? Ridiculous requests at home, that’s what On Call As another working week ebbs away into history, dispel any thoughts that your efforts have made no mark in history by wallowing in other readers’ misery in another instalment of On-Call, The Register’s weekly tale of being asked to fix the ridiculous and absurd.…

Kieren's here to chew bubblegum and kick Nominet ass. And he's all out of bubblegum Former Register journo Kieren McCarthy was this week elected to the board of Nominet, the domain registry in charge of the .uk name space.…

Microsoft has four entries on list of shame, Log4j tops the chart Three US national security agencies - CISA, the FBI and the NSA - on Thursday issued a joint advisory naming the 20 infosec exploited by state-sponsored Chinese threat actors since 2020.…

Meanwhile in China, Alibaba runs 500 delivery-bots and they’ve delivered 10 million items to Easy Street E-commerce behemoth Amazon.com has stopped work on its “Scout” parcel delivery robots.…

Q3 revenue still set to be up overall, Ryzen biz says in FYI to Wall St AMD has warned investors its guidance for quarterly revenue was out by $1.1 billion.…

Two Americans, a Japanese bloke and a Russian float into a lab. The bartender says... SpaceX has dropped off another four astronauts at the International Space Station, their Dragon capsule successfully docking just now with the orbiting lab.…

Is it Putin? Is it the Norks? Is it a bored teenager? Roll the dice Lloyd's of London has reset its IT systems and is probing a possible cyberattack against it after detecting worrisome network behavior this week.…

Maybe finally a good use for DRM, eh? Preventing armed modifications Boston Dynamics and five other robot makers have promised in an open letter they won't allow their machines to be weaponized by either themselves or their customers. …

Ambulances diverted, patient records frozen, rhymes with handsome wear America's second-largest nonprofit healthcare org is suffering a security "issue" that has diverted ambulances and shut down electronic records systems at hospitals around the country.…

This and wearables fortified with machine learning to serve you, human On Thursday Google held an event in Brooklyn, New York to introduce revised Pixel phones, along with the Pixel Watch mentioned at the search giant's developer conference in May. There was also a glimpse of a Pixel tablet due next year.…

When the tracking hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a priori Papa John's is being sued by a customer – not for its pizza but for allegedly breaking the US Wiretap Act by snooping on the way he browsed the pie-slinger's website.…

Remember the bad old days when getting X settings wrong could fry your CRT? They're back, kinda A bug in version 5.19.12 of the Linux kernel "may harm" screens on laptops powered by Intel's 12th-generation Core processors.…

We're paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of this week's PR stunt President Joe Biden popped by IBM's latest chipmaking venture this week as Big Blue clearly hopes to keep the White House close and bag a slice of those government semiconductor manufacturing subsidies.…

Kernel live-patching and a full decade of software updates Canonical has opened up its previously paid-for Ubuntu Pro update service. Now it's free of charge for up to five physical boxes.…

I think we can handle one little Russia. We sent two units, they're bringing any attempts down now The FBI and the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) claim any foreign interference in the 2022 US midterm elections is unlikely to disrupt or prevent voting, compromise ballot integrity, or manipulate votes at scale.…

Lots of talk about the automation and digitization of manufacturing chips too Samsung has gone public with new silicon and outlined plans for its semiconductor business at its Samsung Tech Day 2022 in San Jose, including upcoming DRAM and NAND flash developments.…

Whereabouts of wanted cryptobro unknown, but he's reliably on Twitter South Korea issued a publicly available notice on Wednesday to wanted man and Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, demanding he return his passport.…

How Meta, er, meta Google-owned DeepMind has applied reinforced learning techniques to the multiplication of mathematical matrices, beating some human-made algorithms that have lasted 50 years and working toward improvements in computer science.…

They can't hurt us if we stay indoors "Space: the final frontier" – not just for humanity but also marketeers, it would seem, as Russian scientists have undertaken a feasibility study on satellite-displayed advertising. They conclude that not only is it possible, but it could also turn a profit.…

And it wouldn't be a Redmond OS update without printing issues The Windows 11 2022 Update that Microsoft started rolling out in September is in its teething phase, with warnings of unexpected restarts and half-completed out of box setups for users when deploying on new devices.…

Biggest demo yet of single and double quantum dots, x86 claims Intel claims to have achieved a milestone in efforts to produce silicon spin qubit devices using existing manufacturing processes, a move they think might pave the way for large-scale production of quantum computers.…

Customers were allegedly sent texts demanding $1,300 or face having ID used in financial crime Aussie police have cuffed a 19-year-old Sydney resident accused of trying to extort money from victims of the recent cyberattack and digital burglary at national telecommunications provider Optus.…

Brace yourself for a weird future where everything is imagined by magic sand we taught how to think Hot on the heels of Meta's Make-A-Video, Google said on Wednesday it too has built an AI-powered text-to-video system. This one's called Imagen Video.…

UK and Germany among adoption leaders in the region Europe is falling behind global leaders in 5G adoption as rising inflation and war in Ukraine affect infrastructure ambition, according to an industry survey.…

CWU: Just like UK government did a reverse-ferret on tax, so will national telecom titan on staff pay BT strikers protesting over pay should take note that the British government was forced to climbdown on its proposed tax cut for the richest in society, and the national telecom operator will inevitably bow to continued protests too.…

Amid inevitable talk of 'red tape' cutting at ruling party conference, data protection experts are concerned Britain's digital minister says the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is "limiting the potential of our businesses," and is vowing to cut data protection "red tape," for the "newly independent nation free of EU bureaucracy."…

If and when this hits the mainstream, who's going to trust their retinas to random models? AI algorithms can predict whether a patient is at risk of suffering a stroke, heart attack, or dying from heart disease just by studying images of their retinas, according to research out of England.…