The Register

Home Office IT units confused over who is fulfilling the vital role The UK government's ePassport airport gate upgrade programme has no system integrator, a hardware supplier has said, while the Home Office and two of its IT units seem confused about who should be fulfilling the critical role.…

Time to back up those PDFs you've been hoarding Worrying changes are afoot for e-comics vendor ComiXology as Amazon finally gets round to asserting copy control – meaning no more downloads of unprotected comics, even if you've paid for them.…

Recovery of one out of two bonuses will stop, but what about those already affected? Indian IT services giant HCL Technologies has quietly removed some of the controversial clauses from its HR policy revealed by The Reg last week, which required resigning employees to pay back bonuses.…

Tech giant promises to create an implementation plan based on outcome Microsoft's board of directors has hired a law firm to review its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies and practices following a shareholder proposal.…

So not keen then? Vivaldi will not provide crypto-wallets in its browser because it doesn't want users to participate in digital coin trading – something CEO Jon von Tetzchner desribes as "at best a gamble and at worst a scam".…

Get ready for a new 'experience'... Heads up, OneDrive-using Mac fans: Microsoft has begun rolling out a new Files On-Demand "experience", and you can't disable it.…

The Register talks to co-founder about supply chains and EV assembly Interview Supply chain woes continue to batter the tech industry but that didn't deter the makers of the diminutive Microlino from introducing a new electric vehicle amid a pandemic and chip shortage.…

Stay in your lane? Or check for a shoddy connection job? On Call A warning from the past in today's On Call. Helpfulness is not always rewarded with a pat on the back and a slap-up meal on expenses. Sometimes the Somebody Else's Problem field* is best left alone.…

At the White House Open Source Summit, the Chocolate Factory floated a few ideas to make that happen In conjunction with a White House meeting on Thursday at which technology companies discussed the security of open source software, Google proposed three initiatives to strengthen national cybersecurity.…

Cupertino loses second chip guru Apple's having a problem retaining top chip personnel, with the latest defection being CPU architect Mike Filippo going to Microsoft.…

Customers shouldn't need to wait seven days before being told The US Federal Communications Commission is considering imposing stricter rules requiring telecommunications carriers to report data breaches to customers and law enforcement more quickly.…

Those critical AWS flaws that exposed data and broke tenant separation? All fixed! Two serious security vulnerabilities were recently found in AWS services, but because they were responsibly reported and the cloud biz responded quickly, no harm appears to have been done.…

Indian IT consultancies say biz is booming as more customers consider cloud Three of India's IT service giants – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro – held results calls yesterday revealing a booming business with room for multiple players.…

Execs foresee fewer kinks in the supply chain this year? Perhaps Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will hike capital spending by a nearly third in 2022 to build out production capacity in the expectation that demand for chips keeps flooding in.…

Time to move, but be warned – not everything has survived the 'modern experience' It appears that today's victim of the Chocolate Factory axeman is legacy Google Voice for personal accounts.…

Plus three other suspects nicked in raids today Ukrainian police have arrested five people on suspicion of operating a ransomware gang, including a husband-and-wife team, following tipoffs from UK law enforcement.…

Schrems II ruling continues to trouble transatlantic data sharing The Austrian data protection authority has ruled that use of Google Analytics by a German company is in breach of European law in light of the Schrems II EU-US data sharing ruling.…

300-year-old institution to be dragged into the 21st century Lloyd's, the world's largest insurance marketplace, has contracted DXC Technology to digitise its processes as part of a multi-year effort to move on from a largely paper-based, analogue way of working.…

Start as you mean to go on, Microsoft Updated Microsoft's first Patch Tuesday of 2022 has, for some folk, broken Hyper-V and sent domain controllers into boot loops.…

The golden days of unbridled growth in Chinese tech companies is over Tencent CEO Pony Ma Huateng referred to his Chinese multinational company as "ordinary" and replaceable in a leaked company speech given at the 2021 end of year employee meeting.…

Plans for new online shop get seal of approval despite Microsoft Dynamics delays UK tabletop wargames specialist Games Workshop has published the latest chapter in the long-running saga of how mighty IT warriors valiantly battled the intransigent forces of ERP.…

Northants man surprised to hear former biz address used Some companies will go to great lengths to hide business expansion plans, but it appears AWS may have namechecked a defunct UK business in efforts to conceal a planning application for a new data centre.…

Because they tried to call it Potify It's back to the drawing board for a cannabis dispensary software company after an attempt to register the trademark "Potify" attracted the ire of music streaming platform Spotify.…

Survey shows majority of UK firms have lost at least half of their contractors over tax reform The number of independent UK contractors assessed with the government's controversial CEST tool has fallen, according to a survey published today.…

Huntress Labs tips some loose change into vuln-spotters' cup The Dutch Initiative for Vulnerability Disclosure has scored $100k towards its founder's hope of a nationwide bug bounty available for anything at all.…

Apache PLC4X creator ends free support, asks for payment for his work Yet another developer of open source software has tired of companies utilizing the code he helps maintain without giving anything back to support the project.…

Angry punter wants his money back Cryptocurrency startup EthereumMax and top celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather Jr are accused in a proposed class-action lawsuit of colluding in a pump-and-dump scheme that scammed victims.…

If at first you don't succeed, you're probably the FTC The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint that Facebook, er, Meta operates as a monopoly will be heard by the courts after the US watchdog's initial lawsuit was dismissed.…

Bernalillo County's Metropolitan Detention Center still recovering from infection Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been unable to comply with the settlement terms of a 27-year-old lawsuit over prison conditions because of a ransomware attack last week that saw prisoners back under manual control.…

Tells investors it has secured supplies to full demand shortfall Nvidia chief financial officer (CFO) Colette Kress says the company has only just begun to make an impact in the server market, and sees a huge opportunity for GPU acceleration there.…

But is industry wealth, a skills shortage or a self-selecting sample creating the result? As the world struggles to free itself from the clutches of a global pandemic, maybe it's possible to look on the bright side — at least if you work for a gang of global tech companies.…

Don't worry, there is a point to this The LibreOffice project has confirmed support for two new languages in the forthcoming version 7.3, Klingon and Interslavic.…

Space is hard While there were whoops and cheers for the James Webb Space Telescope, other missions on Mars and in orbit around the Earth have fared less well in recent weeks.…

Another one who pleaded autism in mitigation A software engineer was this week jailed in the UK for two years after pleading guilty to accessing women and children's webcams, Skype accounts and iCloud backups for more than a decade.…

341 million units sold last year, up 15% The humble PC was one of the hottest selling tech items in 2021 with shipments into the channel jumping 15 per cent globally to 341 million amid a pandemic that continues to force people to work, study, and play at home.…

Jones in the Fast Lane with switch to PAM4 The completed PCIe 6.0 specifications have finally been unleashed by the PCI-SIG consortium, effectively doubling the speed of the PCIe standard by supporting 64 gigatransfers per second (GTps) with 16 lanes running at 256 GBps.…

Want a pay rise and paid leave? Can't help you there. Need better workplace tech? Walk this way... As the 1 February general availability of its Cloud for Retail nears, Microsoft today tweaked its Teams and Viva platforms and published a report highlighting the challenges it believes frontline workers face.…

Company follows in the footsteps of its buddy Google Apple has finally caved to Korea's telecommunication regulator and agreed to allow third-party in-app billing systems in South Korea thus complying with a local law.…

European Commission gives an unconditional green light, but Blighty needs a bit more time If you wanted to speak your brains have your say on Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance, the moment has passed. In the UK at any rate.…

South Korea piqued as FAA grounds west coast aircraft North Korean state-sponsored media has said it launched a third hypersonic missile on Tuesday, hitting a target at sea 1,000km (621 miles) away. According to news agency KCNA, President Kim Jong Un attended the test-fire.…

Or SMSes, if the idea of midnight robot calls worries you An infosec pro fed up of having to follow tedious Twitter accounts to stay on top of cybersecurity developments has set up a website that phones you if there's a new vuln you really need to know about.…

Oh, Snap The Linux Mint distro has been busy. Not only has it pushed out release 20.3, it's also announced a deal with Mozilla, meaning vanilla Mozilla versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.…

It has potential, says one expert A Swedish developer has published code that promises to avoid application downtime during PostgreSQL schema migrations.…

Security is a process, not a product Opinion We're going to be cleaning up Apache Log4j security problems for months to come, but the real problem isn't that it was open-source software. It's how we track and use open-source code.…

It was worth a try Just over 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules there’s a rugby ball-shaped exoplanet orbiting a star. It’s the first time astronomers have been able to detect such an unusual shape of an alien world.…

If the Middle Kingdom lets its data out, Beijing might as well be in control China has earmarked ¥31.8bn ($5bn) to build the first free trade data port in the nation as it tries to bolster and control information flowing across its borders, the country's state-sponsored media says.…

Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and programming errors Patch Tuesday The new year brings the same old chore of shoring up Microsoft software. For its first Patch Tuesday of 2022, Redmond has bestowed 96 new CVEs affecting its Windows products.…

Was no one else available? No one? US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has blasted Intel for scrubbing any mentions of China's Xinjiang region from an annual letter to its suppliers after Chinese netizens threatened on social media to boycott the US chip behemoth.…

Nothing like topping off unauth'd remote code execution with a su password of ... password Technical details and exploitation notes have been published for a remote-code-execution vulnerability in Sonicwall SMA 100 series VPN appliances.…

Call of duty? Not when there's a Snorlax about A California appeals court last week upheld the discharge of two Los Angeles police officers for ignoring a robbery call because they were busy playing Pokémon Go while on duty.…