The Register

UK government farming department interested in the technology supply market's view of its strategy The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is looking to have a cosy chat with application development and support companies as it prepares up to £750m in new contracts.…

As Optionis Group CEO confirms to contractors their data was leaked online Optionis, the group that includes umbrella and accountancy companies providing services to tech contractors, has confirmed that following last month's digital break-in customer data is being leaked online.…

Shadow foreign secretary says work is visibly overdue The shadow foreign secretary for UK's opposition Labour party, David Lammy MP, has asked why the reform of the Computer Misuse Act appears to have stalled in an open letter to government.…

SoftBank Group opts to take Arm stock public again as CEO Simon Segars announces departure SoftBank Group and Nvidia are terminating the sale of Brit-based chip designer Arm to the US tech firm due to "significant regulatory challenges" amid concerns from the tech industry that a deal would stifle competition.…

Move comes ahead of draft law to turn continent into a center of semiconductor expertise Efforts in Europe to devise sovereign chips has picked up the past two months, with the European Union now coordinating three separate campaigns to make homegrown processors and supercomputer-grade systems.…

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, they said – but Perseverance samples just might make it NASA has picked Lockheed Martin Space as the developer of the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), one of the vehicles that will retrieve samples collected by the Perseverance rover on the Red Planet.…

Strategy to make printer co. its flagbearer dropped, hands that job to infrastructure mega corp Japanese tech giant Toshiba has abandoned its plan to break the company into three parts, opting for a strategy to split into two parts.…

Lured workers with bigger pay. Workers walked – then they talked Update The US Department of Justice announced on Monday that Chinese walkie-talkie manufacturer Hytera had been indicted on 21 counts related to an alleged theft of trade secrets from US-based competitor Motorola Solutions.…

Aims to make life harder for miscreants Microsoft Office will soon block untrusted Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros sourced from the internet by default – a security measure users can still circumvent, permissions allowing.…

Developers fume while competition watchdog issues a third puny €5m fine Apple's idea of complying with the law in the Netherlands offers a glimpse of what developers elsewhere have to look forward to if regulators elsewhere succeed in challenging the company's control of its iOS App Store.…

Strictly Intel and AMD for these hyperscale systems Apple has tipped its hand by posting a job advert that reveals some details of the "next-generation" storage and server equipment it is building in its data centers.…

Uncle Sam takes security, privacy concerns seriously, it says here The Internal Revenue Service has abandoned its plan to verify the identities of US taxpayers using a private contractor's facial recognition technology after both Democrats and Republicans actively opposed the deal.…

Now that's a shot in the Arm Intel is establishing a $1bn fund to support early-stage and established chip companies to develop innovative chip and packaging technologies.…

Lack of endpoints mean firms are ordering 6 or 7, but not 6E Supply chain woes with Wi-Fi 6E products could see organisations miss on deploying network kit with the new standard and instead wait on availability of Wi-Fi 7 equipment expected next year, says Dell'Oro Group.…

Detail emerges on who's funding it ... and for how much Google has partly won a legal bid to uncover the budget behind a not-quite-class-action lawsuit pursuing it for £920m in Britain's Competition Appeal Tribunal.…

Nearly 6 years after previous version It's been a long time coming but version 15 of Slackware finally showed up at the weekend.…

Companies focus on 'broader' ecosystem Organisations are shifting their priorities in cloud procurement as they look beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, with "trust" now apparently the biggest issue.…

This may be time for plan B UK minister for science and research George Freeman has admitted that vital EU funding for research is in limbo while the nation continues to negotiate Brexit sticking points, namely Northern Ireland and fishing rights.…

Brand new and a bit wobbly, but it says good things about Linux's maturity The Nobara Project is a fresh flavour of Fedora 35 aimed at Linux gamers and streamers. It's very new and the website is mostly just a placeholder, but it's already causing controversy.…

Twelve months without refreshment can break an addiction Opinion "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" is an old joke from the former Soviet Union. Many tech journalists feel the same way about earnings stories – the financial reports prepared for investors by big companies. We pretend they're important, you pretend to read them.…

The unbearable persistence of data Who, Me? A reminder to check and check again in today's Who, Me? as a Register reader learns the true meaning of persistence.…

This one was decided on the way the cookies crumbled Australia's Federal Court has described Facebook's explanation of how its tech works as "divorced from reality" in ruling against it in a landmark privacy case.…

GlobalWafers uses cash stashed for stalled Siltronics deal and Toshiba also promises new wafer bakery Taiwan’s GlobalWafers has announced a cheery change of plans after its acquisition of Germany’s Siltronic fell through thanks to German authorities' failure to sign off on the deal - expansion of on existing facilities instead.…

Pram Pravega's 3.3 petaFLOPS should make it India's fourth entrant in the Top500 list The Indian Institute of Science (IISC) has installed and commissioned a supercomputer that ranks among the most powerful and largest on the subcontinent.…

FCC budget to rip and replace Huawei and ZTE kit was $1.9B. It received $5.6B of applications The United States Federal Communications Commission has revealed that carriers have applied for $5.6 billion in funding to rip and replace China-made communications kit.…

Physical to virtual conversion tool will be back once modernised, but this is still quite a moment The "VM" in VMware stands for virtual machine, but the virtualization giant is presently in the rather odd position of having withdrawn its on-ramp to VMs and then introduced an off-ramp from VMs to containers.…

Draft law enters final stages, proposes $52bn injection On Friday the US House of Representatives passed a bill that will to equip America to boost semiconductor production and lift its economy to better compete better with China.…

Three months of mirror alignment gets under way The first photons of starlight have travelled through the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and been detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.…

Removing characters' hands evidently not enough to halt harassment Meta Platforms Inc, better known for its controversial turn as Facebook, says its mission is to, "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." But not too close, it seems.…

Appeals court orders do-over for damages calculation Apple and Broadcom won a new trial to recalculate damages arising from a six-year-old legal battle over Wi-Fi patents developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).…

Now, don't do a Queensland SAP and Deloitte have together won a deal worth AU$220m ($155m) to implement a new SaaS-based HR system for Western Australia Health.…

Read all about it – Beijing probably already has Online work accounts of News Corporation journalists were broken into by snoops seemingly with ties to China, it was claimed today.…

'The remote worker will no longer be a minority' Cisco has rolled out new technologies including Wi-Fi 6E access points and Private 5G services to help organisations adapt to hybrid work scenarios.…

Beta gang might get new toys before Dev Channel and look – a new logo Microsoft is shaking up the Windows Insider programme once again, answering complaints that the Dev Channel doesn't get enough toys while also admitting there could well be some playthings for enthusiasts willing to go hunting.…

Oi, kea! Video An endangered parrot native to New Zealand's alpine region went full David Attenborough on a family enjoying Fiordland National Park by swooping off with their GoPro camera as they tried to film it.…

£1.5m fine is 0.005% of social network's profits British competition regulators have again fined Facebook, this time 0.005 per cent of its annual profits, for ignoring them – a move that's bound to have CEO Mark Zuckerberg sobbing for mercy.…

Swiss, German and Indian companies ready the blockchain for Self-Sovereign Identity The Gaia-X project has awarded work to a consortium including Vereign and DAASI International that takes it one step closer to realising Self Sovereign Identity technology.…

Craft Helm chart, receive secrets A zero-day vulnerability in open-source Kubernetes development tool Argo lets malicious people steal passwords from git-crypt and other sensitive information by simply uploading a crafted Helm chart.…

Most lucrative quarter ever for compute sellers, say analysts Global spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded $50bn for the first time in the Q4 of 2021, according to figures from research outfit Canalys.…

Put your nodes to the grindstone Analysis Amid the semiconductor crunch, there's an interesting cliff forming at 28nm.…

If you don't already feel enough of an under-achiever, read on There are some interesting developments to keep an eye on in the world of Ubuntu: a new client for the community software repo, a tool to help Ubuntu gamers – and Rudra Saraswat, the 12-year-old brains behind them.…

Toyota benefits from 2011 tsunami lessons, according to reports Jaguar Land Rover, the custodian of those iconic British car brands owned by India's Tata Motors, this week announced lost £9m in the final quarter of 2021 in part down to the global semiconductor shortage which followed the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Or maybe we could take a quick look at our servers Something for the Weekend? Go away. I've had enough of you. We no longer connect like we used to. After all this time together, it's as you don't even know who I am.…

We've got to get our flying kicks somewhere Friday FOSS Fest The Reg FOSS desk is, as you might expect, mostly Linux-based, but your correspondent does keep Windows around for things like rooting smartphones and reflashing BIOSes. There are a few things I miss switching from Linux, and the handy functions of the middle mouse button are high on the list. This is where Taekwindow scores.…

Dialog? What dialog? On Call Friday is upon us, bringing with it the promise of the weekend and the jolly times it entails. Start the end of your week with a visit to the On Call archives and the delight of taking a support call from users of software you wrote.…

Cloud colossus accounts for lion's share of Amazonian profits Amazon will run its servers and networking kit for an extra year – for both its own operations and for Amazon Web Services – and expects to save a billion dollars next quarter as a result.…

RV family of routers is in trouble, and fixed software is yet to arrive for some models Cisco has revealed five critical bugs, three of them rated 10/10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, that impact four of its router families aimed at small businesses. And it only has patches available for two of the affected ranges.…

Contracts fit automakers and other manufacturers with 'very sticky products, very long life cycles' – CEO Chip shortages are so bad that customers are willing to sign multiyear non-cancellable, non-returnable (NCNR) contracts to secure supplies, according to semiconductor supplier NXP.…

This is news to the rest of the world Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has offered some more details about the nation’s newly revealed plan to introduce a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the next year.…

Google's take on cross-platform development arrives on Microsoft's desktop Google's cross-platform app framework Flutter has hit version 2.1 and added production support for apps on Windows.…