The Register

Being subcontractors, their working conditions ain't our problem – US giant's stance A group of delivery drivers subcontracting for Amazon in Japan have unionized, claiming the internet titan's AI software often plans routes that are impossible to complete within set deadlines.…

Online booking systems and other services knocked offline amid network intrusion The IT systems of InterContinental Hotels Group, the massive hospitality organization that operates 17 hotel brands around the world, have been compromised, causing ongoing disruption to the corporation's online booking systems and other services.…

Good for the environment? Bad for the customer, say Brazilian officials after fining iGiant, banning certain sales Brazil's government is freezing certain iPhone sales in the country and fining Apple for removing chargers from its smartphones, something officials there have declared a practice harmful to consumers, despite being presented as an act of environmental heroism. …

Plus $39 billion in subsidies for 'domestic' effort that will welcome foreign semiconductor players Leading foundry operators stand to benefit from a 25 percent investment tax credit (ITC) on domestic fab projects, according to a document published by the US Department of Commerce this week.…

Legislation also aims to tackle wage gaps around gender, race, and ethnicity California lawmakers passed a bill that aims to promote pay equity by requiring employers to post salary ranges with job listings in the state.…

FBI and CISA on-site to assist with incident response over Labor Day weekend Updated Cybercriminals hit the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) over the holiday weekend with a ransomware attack that temporarily shut down email, computer systems, and applications.…

Hundreds of 'intentional' violations could cost Zuck and Co $30k each Facebook has been found guilty in Washington of breaking the state's strict campaign finance transparency laws – again – and was defeated in its attempt to get a judge to loosen those laws to favor it. …

Worok uses mix of publicly available tools, custom malware to steal info, gang active since 2020 A cyberespionage group has targeted government agencies and big-name corporations throughout Asia since at least 2020, using the notorious ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange to gain initial access.…

Meta set to the appeal the data protection authority's near $400m penalty Ireland's data protection authority has fined Instagram almost $400 million for mishandling children's data.…

By striking down Google and Facebook, the iMaker's transformation is complete Although Apple's sales pitch for the idea was protecting users' privacy, it appears the company's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative has been kind to its wallet as well, pushing it to the top of the mobile app advertising market in the past year.…

Teams too big, operate in silos, lack subject matter experts and C-suite exec buy-in Public sector technology buyers have the lengthiest average buying cycle of any industry vertical in part due to a lack of vendor specific information on products often hampering the decision making process.…

Lloyd's defends stance as critics say policy tweaks make it less worthwhile to spend on premiums Critics unhappy about insurers excluding certain nation-state attacks from cyber policies should consider the alternative: higher prices, according to Lloyd's of London.…

$50/user/month to bring cloud-like opex delights to midrange on-prem environments IBM has rediscovered IT as-a-service with a subscription service for its System I environment and the POWER servers that run it.…

Leadership believes path to recovery is through investing in times of crisis Chipmaker SK hynix intends to invest nearly $11 billion over the next five years on a new manufacturing plant in South Korea, showing confidence in the future despite the curent dip in demand for semiconductors.…

Hypercloud will be facing some stiff competition in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, say analysts Storage player SoftIron is extending its portfolio to the rest of the datacenter with the launch of a complete cloud infrastructure platform - a bold effort to take on better known brands in their own back yard.…

All except Italy, that is For the second year in a row, the UK is second worst in the G7 league of industrial nations for broadband speed, only faster than Italy, according to a report published today.…

Smartphone software set to link more services to patients despite privacy fears NHS Digital has awarded IBM a £52.4 million ($60.2 million) contract for supporting and developing the NHS App, which the UK government plans to make the standard way for health services to communicate with patients.…

To sell or not to sell... that is the national security assessment, decision delayed once more The UK government has asked for more time to make its final decision on whether to retroactively approve or block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) company to Chinese owners.…

It’s an eight-bit affair for the Apple II, complete with Flying Toasters and many other upgrades Apple will on September 7th stage one of its live infomercials to launch products expected to include this year’s iPhone – complete with satellite messaging capabilities – plus wireless earbuds, an enhanced smart watch, and maybe even some new tablet computers.…

16-year-old feature request to fix it judged so hard it doesn’t offer bang for buck – to Atlassian After The Register covered the eleven years and counting wait for Atlassian to deliver custom domain names for its cloudy products, readers pointed out an even older open request: CONFCLOUD-7247 was filed on November 1st, 2006 and asks the software upstart to allow changes to the author of an existing page of its Confluence corporate Wiki.…

Maybe it's putting the savings into discounts for Windows Server and M365 it's told the channel to sell? Microsoft has told its north American partners they can't pay with checks starting from December 1.…

Also separatism, nationalism, and whether Big Tech does enough to police user-generated content India’s IT minister has picked a fight with Wikipedia after alleging that Pakistani entities edited a page describing a member of the men’s national cricket team in ways that suggest the player has separatist affiliations.…

Can tech hold its own among an overflowing in-tray? Former foreign secretary Liz Truss has been voted in as the UK's next prime minister – at least by about 80,000 Conservative Party members – and will face a barrage of policy decisions. Questions over the cost of living and energy crises will top the agenda, but tech policy also needs her attention.…

From the department of 'what fresh hell?' Weddings already suck, and the tasteful wedding is becoming ever rarer. If the ceremony is not at a Victorian folly that costs more to book than a normal person's annual salary, you could well be in for a different kind of statement.…

Launch postponements also a part of the writeoff as company pins hopes on SpaceX OneWeb has taken a $229.2 million hit after it cancelled launches from Russia's Baikonur facility, and a number of its low Earth orbit satellites that were waiting to be sent to space were not returned.…

Also, Microsoft’s one-click TikTok trick, a 14-year old Aussie cracks ASD encryption in an hour, and more In brief NATO officials are investigating after criminals put up some data for sale on dark forums that they claim is "classified" information stolen from European missile maker MBDA.…

SLS rocket is a mix of old and new NASA's Space Launch System might look like a mishmash of heritage Space Shuttle parts but it's all new hardware, and the team who built the twin boosters and engines have been talking about the challenges of bringing designs from the 1970s into a lunar future.…

Culture secretary talks up pre-Commons reading as UK waits to hear who new leader will be On the day the UK is set to appoint its new prime minister, digital and culture secretary Nadine Dorries is introducing legislation in Parliament she promises will “drop unnecessary box-ticking and measures stifling British businesses.”…

We trawled through the licensing terms and spoke to the vendors so you don't have to Feature For developers, there is no debate. The future of the database is open source. A glance at the 2022 Stack Overflow survey of around 70,000 code-wranglers shows nearly all pros use one of the two leading open source RDBMSes, PostgreSQL (46.5 percent) or MySQL (45.7 percent), although they use other systems as well.…

Just one big GUI mess Opinion The sight of a former executive laying into their old company is rarely less than delicious. And when that company is Microsoft, the exec is head of user experience, and the complaint is about the solid slab of sadness that is the Windows 11 Start menu? This calls for not just regular salted popcorn, but truffle-oil popcorn on a silver platter carried in by a butler.…

Exchange Online face Halloween deadline Don't say you weren't warned.…

Windows Defender update fixed the mess after a weekend of false positive weirdness Microsoft appears to have fixed a problem that saw its Defender antivirus program identify apps based on the Chromium browser engine and/or Electron JavaScript framework as malware, and suggest users remove them.…

‘I had a sharp new suit and a misplaced sense of confidence’ – and made a costly mistake Who,Me? Before you shell out big bucks to engage the services of consultants, perhaps consider this week’s instalment of Who, Me? and the adventures of a reader we’ll call “Norman” for the duration of this tale.…

Pilot scheme running in Europe, APAC, sees ad giant still take a four percent cut Google has started a test of alternative payment systems in its Play store.…

Escalation of targeted threats is an 'emergency' that required 'dangerous' decision 'we are not comfortable with,' says CEO Cloudflare has decided to stop providing its services to Kiwi Farms, just days after defending the site's eligibility for its services.…

PLUS: Australia mints a physical crypto-coin; Alibaba Cloud claims world's biggest DC; India’s space airbags; and more China will conduct a three month blitz to cleanse the local internet of "rumors and false information".…

Top official spells out simply why America is going back to the Moon Interview "There is no SpaceX without NASA," Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator at the US space agency's Science Mission Directorate, told The Register this week as a Falcon 9 lurked in the background at Cape Canaveral.…

Sitting, Leaking Slowly? It was second time unlucky for NASA as its Space Launch System rocket remained rooted to its Florida launch pad following a second scrub of its Moon mission.…

Plus: Use machine learning to understand your cat ... possibly In brief A man won an art competition with an AI-generated image crafted, and some people aren't best pleased about it.…

Plus: Truth Social barred from Play until it shows just one iota of decency Google and its YouTube subsidiary have joined other social media networks pledging to keep the 2022 US midterm elections safe and free from Russian trolls — and anyone else spewing democracy-damaging disinformation – by taking down such content.…

Look who misunderstood the consequences a Solana close command OptiFi, a decentralized options exchange using the Solana blockchain, inadvertently disabled its mainnet service with a misunderstood command and locked up some $661,000 worth of USDC 'digital dollar' tokens.…

Fingers crossed this prodigious test will have a good weather experience Updated NASA will try to launch its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the Moon on Saturday after its first attempt on August 29 was scrubbed due to what turned out to be a faulty sensor on one of its core engines.…

Just days after US rules tackling homemade firearms take effect A US man has admitted he broke the law when he used 3D printers to make components converting semi-automatic guns to full auto.…

More silicon sales for us says Qualcomm Meta’s latest move in the effort to reinvent Second Life, or roll out the metaverse, involves building better VR chips and it's trusting Qualcomm with the job.…

Users will now be able to blur or replace their backgrounds during video meetings or calls Microsoft is making it easier for Teams to work with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in a bid to grow the number of monthly active users on the collaboration platform.…

Letters to FCC confirm what many believed, don't address a bigger problem US mobile carriers know a lot about where their customers every move, and according to letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they routinely store such location data for years, willingly hand it over to law enforcement if served a proper subpoena, and say users can't opt out.…

Outsourced assembly and test a key missing part of supply chain, and foreign entities aren't beyond the pale Stakeholders in the semiconductor industry have a clear-eyed view of the changes that should happen in order for the US to rebuild a leading position in chip manufacturing, and a wide-ranging approach addressing the entire supply chain is needed.…

'Improved algorithm' set to keep miscreants at bay, web-based taxi service promises The taxi offshoot of troubled Russian tech giant Yandex has been hit by online pranksters, who yesterday ordered dozens of cabs to a single address in central Moscow, resulting in a major traffic jam.…

UMC founder Robert Tsao wants to train more than 3m 'civilian warriors' and sharpshooters A Taiwanese semiconductor magnate is to provide the money to prime several million "civilian warriors" and marksmen to help defend the island nation in the event of an invasion by China.…

Judge says that servers being located in Singapore is not a get-out clause A ruling handed down from the Delhi High Court this week declared that Telegram must hand over information such as IP addresses, mobile numbers, and devices used by channels on the platform involved in copyright infringement.…