The Register

Plus: Namecheap tells customers in Russia they are no longer welcome, citing 'war crimes' In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week, Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, on Monday asked the head of DNS overlord ICANN to disable country code top-level domains associated with Russia.…

Just because it's on Github doesn't mean you can read it. Vendors of the FOSS hardware and software communities are voicing their concerns about closed-source firmware.…

Virtualization giant keen to cash in on cloud-native tech MWC VMware has detailed products and partnerships at Mobile World Congress (MWC) involving service providers and others using its tech to build next-generation networks and services covering applications, the radio access network (RAN), and the network edge.…

Expect to hear more from it as Putin's war wears on As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, the name Maxar has suddenly taken on more significance with detailed eye-in-the-sky images of military movements on the ground being passed to media – including a 40-mile convoy headed for Kyiv. But what is Maxar, and where did it come from?…

Stick a fork in this Socket and zap malicious NPM packages Socket, the biz behind the Wormhole file transfer web app, on Tuesday plans to introduce a security scanning app also called Socket to defend against supply-chain attacks in the JavaScript ecosystem.…

German veteran Software AG buys StreamSets while private equity firm takes over ERP slinger Forterro European mid-market ERP specialist Forterro was bought by Partners Group this morning for €1bn and Germany's Software AG has acquired data integration platform vendor StreamSets for €524m.…

Oh the irony! Insurance companies, even those selling cyber insurance, are attack targets Aon, the British-American provider of insurance and pension administration, has brought in external specialists to help probe a "cyber incident".…

Delivered as a service to reduce risks for enterprises despite lukewarm channel takeup for similar products Cisco has disclosed further details for a dedicated 5G network-as-a-service that customers will pay for based on what they consume – a week after Hewlett Packard Enterprise released its own package.…

Big Red product to become more unstable, unreliable, and less secure after 20 years' use Hull City Council has launched procurement for a £6m SaaS-based ERP system after deciding to ditch an Oracle E-Business Suite it has relied on for 20 years.…

COVID-19 turned many of us into media producers, but the tools favour Windows Column The pandemic changed the way I used computers. For most of the 20 years before 2020, I rarely needed or used more than the browser, the mail app, messaging, and a word processor. Other than that I made the occasional foray into image and/or video editing or PDF preparation tools.…

Azure Operator Distributed Services designed to let telcos run workloads on a single carrier-grade hybrid platform Microsoft has updated its Azure for Operators portfolio aimed at telecoms providers, with Azure Operator Distributed Services enabling those customers to run workloads on a single carrier-grade hybrid platform.…

Rosalind Franklin still can't catch a break The joint ESA-Roscosmos Mars rover Rosalind Franklin is "very unlikely" to launch this year after Russia was hit with fresh economic sanctions for invading Ukraine.…

Architect of rejected three-way split passes the baton as decision day looms Toshiba has made a raft of new executive appointments as its reform plan meets with renewed opposition.…

When he retired with stuff left on his to-do list, he expected fixes would flow. They haven't Early internet pioneer Jack Haverty has described the early structure of the internet as experimental – and said not much has changed since.…

'Daxin' malware creates backdoors and may have been used since 2013 The United States' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), working with security vendor Symantec, has found an extremely sophisticated network attack tool that can invisibly create backdoors, has been plausibly linked to Chinese actors, and may have been in use since 2013.…

Purple! Palace! has! nothing! left! behind! the! Great! Firewall! – not! even! users’! mail! troves! Yahoo has stopped providing email services in China – a decision that means the venerable web company has ceased operations behind the Great Firewall.…

Seeing isn't always believing Netizens are more likely to be duped by misinformation presented in text form compared to video clips created with the help of algorithms, according to a study.…

Incident struck supplier day after officials warned of massive spike in efforts to launch Emotet malware Toyota has closed all 14 plants it operates in Japan due to what it has described as a “system failure” at Kojima Industries Corporation – and local media report the cause of the failure is a cyberattack.…

Crackdown on Moscow won't hurt American semiconductor industry, SIA says If US chip makers are feeling the stress of semiconductor import sanctions on Russia, it isn't showing yet.…

Windows giant says it detected 'destructive cyberattacks', DDoS malware aimed at now occupied nation Microsoft is decrying what it calls the "tragic, unlawful and unjustified invasion of Ukraine" by Russia, and vowed to continue protecting the country from cyberattacks and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.…

When it comes to the privacy of witnesses and attorneys, this Bar is set low Approximately 260,000 nonpublic disciplinary records stored on behalf of The State Bar of California were found to be exposed to the public and to have been republished on Judyrecords.com, a website that aggregates over 630 million public court records.…

If enterprise apps are going into the cloud, someone needs to provide the extra plumbing MWC Verizon Business is adding VMware's software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) offering to a lineup of managed services, the latest move by a major carrier to address the demand for more streamlined networking and security capabilities by increasingly distributed and cloud-centric enterprises.…

Staff sacked after bosses discovered terrorists received money for access to Iraq mobile market A leaked internal report details how Ericsson paid hundreds of millions of pounds to Islamic State terrorists in Iraq, substantiating earlier reports that the company was paying intermediaries to buy off ISIS on its behalf.…

What looks like Jabber chat app files published after pro-Russia pledge Activists have reportedly leaked the contents of internal chats from the Russia-affiliated Conti ransomware gang as the Ukraine war continues.…

Backer of thriving RHEL rebuild also hires senior SUSE architect The AlmaLinux Foundation has announced the availability of a PowerPC version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux rebuild for machines based on IBM's POWER architecture.…

Government said to be looking further north than the Oxford-Cambridge Arc UK efforts to create a high-tech research and development region designed to rival Silicon Valley seem dead in the water as government prioritises other initiatives.…

Open Web Advocacy takes aim at Apple's walled garden On Monday, a group of software engineers plan to launch a group called "Open Web Advocacy" to help online apps compete with native apps and to encourage or compel Apple to relax its iOS browser restrictions.…

CPU giant was waiting to see contents of European Chips Act before making the decision, say analysts Intel has reportedly opted to build a new chip manufacturing mega-fab at a site in Magdeburg in eastern Germany, after considering locations in France, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands.…

A shot in the arm for Windows on Arm – and Microsoft's Pluton security tech is along for the ride too MWC Vendors are rolling out their latest hardware at Mobile World Congress and among them is Lenovo, with its first Snapdragon ThinkPad.…

Eben Upton on RISC-V, supply chains, and what's next for the dinky computers Interview Today marks 10 years since the Raspberry Pi was made available to purchase. We spoke to Pi supremo Eben Upton about the last decade and what the future might hold.…

Block buttons would become mandatory under forthcoming Online Safety Bill, says DCMS The British government has suggested its citizens should hand their passports over to Facebook as a condition for using the service.…

The entrepreneur that sold dial-up modems when no one else thought consumers would care Obituary British internet pioneer Cliff Stanford, founder of Demon Internet, died last week.…

Data security looks very different when your life depends on it Opinion Stress-testing security is the only way to be sure it works. Until then, the worst security looks much the same as the best. As events in Ukraine show, leaving the stress-testing of assumptions until a threat is actually attacking is expensively useless.…

Taking aim at the messenger Who, Me? Wave a cheery hello to Monday with a warning from a Register reader that advice given in a pub is perhaps better limited to which brew is better. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Cupertino seeks signoff on computer and keyboard in one unit – we've seen that somewhere before … Apple has filed a patent application for a device that – wait for it – has the computer and the keyboard all in one unit. Mind. Blowing. Except for one thing: isn't that what all computers used to look like?…

Stock market wipeout followed, so island nation's government has complained India's latest round of bans on Chinese apps has taken down a Singaporean company's apps – and share price – reportedly leaving government officials asking some pointed questions.…

Plus: AI imparts brain surgery skills more effectively than human tutors In brief Controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI plans to employ more staff in order to pursue big lucrative US government contracts worth many millions of dollars. …

And personal sorrow, as the horror of Russian invasion hits home As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, the technology industry is trying to use its services to make a difference – and to keep those services available as the war makes it harder to operate.…

More by known regressions not being addressed by maintainers than Vladimir Putin’s ‘mental breakdown’ Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds is "starting to be a bit worried" by lack of progress on version 5.17 of the project.…

Hello, Bayesian, our old friend Machine learning could one day help energy providers better pinpoint failing or compromised components in power grids, or better identify traffic congestion for local authorities, according to a study.…

Approach with caution The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. For this edition, we're back in MMO territory and, yes, Amazon is involved.…

Gelsinger believes his chip won't make quite a hash of the climate Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger just a few days ago raged against Bitcoin, calling it a "climate crisis."…

Also don't try to unlock your GPU cards with fake mining tool, and more In brief Nvidia is probing what may be a ransomware infection that caused outages within its internal network.…

The 4D chess equivalent of a supply-chain attack How's this for a security threat? A backdoor hidden in lab software that is activated when fed a specially crafted digital DNA sample.…

Scientist's claim that Arvind Krishna unfairly had him axed found plausible enough for trial hearing The judge overseeing an age-discrimination case against IBM has denied the IT giant's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing evidence supporting plaintiff Eugen Schenfeld's claim that CEO Arvind Krishna, then director of IBM research, made the decision to fire him.…

Here's how to catch up with those poisoning machine-learning systems The increasingly wide use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for such computer vision tasks as facial recognition, medical imaging, object detection, and autonomous driving is going to, if not already, catch the attention of cybercriminals.…

While Moscow tells its operators: Treat any infrastructure outage as a 'computer attack' As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, the latter's government is reportedly seeking cybersecurity volunteers to help defend itself. Meanwhile, Russia's CERT has warned critical infrastructure operators that any strange outages should be treated as "a computer attack."…

Comes ahead of Jammy Jellyfish, another bug-squish for current LTS version Ubuntu has put out the latest point release of its stable version, or the fourth bugfix of 20.04.…

Lock, stock and one smoking kernel: YMMV on performance boost, but either way, it's a bit of fun Friday FOSS Fest Looking for a little more desktop responsiveness? Liquorix provides current, easy-to-install desktop-performance-optimised kernels for Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and derivatives… and Arch and Red Hat users can get it, too.…

Servers, storage parts challenges too, according to Q4 earnings call Just when Dell thought it was getting on top of the knotty PC supply chain, the outlook is deteriorating again with the backlog swelling and no relief from pressure due to freight charges – the same dynamics that are at play in its server and storage division.…