The Register

Repairability – check. Upgrades? Must try harder Microsoft took its Surface enthusiasts back in time this week with a video demonstrating how to take apart its Surface-for-Schools laptop: SE.…

Space: The final frontier for cybersecurity The European Space Agency (ESA) is inviting applications from attackers who fancy having a crack at its OPS-SAT spacecraft.…

Bank of England watchdog seeks 'more oversight' into 'critical third parties', eyes up outages and cyber attacks Banking regulators in the UK are considering closer scrutiny of cloud providers in light of recent outages and the financial services sector's increasing dependence on the computing model.…

Net closing in on anti-vaxxers as growing band of tech titans get tougher on jabs Facebook parent Meta Platforms is postponing employees' return to US offices until the end of March – when it will require proof of a booster jab from eligible workers before they actually set foot in any of the locations.…

Users complain: We weren't told that LON1 had done one European data centre operator Interxion suffered an outage at its central London campus last night, with no service from its LON1 data centre for several hours and users complaining the company was silent about what was happening.…

Ideal for when you need to stealthily click through memes Review Peripherals purveyor Logitech's Signature M650 is its latest take on a workplace mouse, and The Register has a raked a talon over one.…

Those astards have uggered up my site Updated Beleaguered customers of UK hosting outfit tsoHost have been thrown a fresh curveball. Sites starting with the letter B on its cloud (Gridhost) platform are struggling to load.…

Plus: IBM Watson Health reportedly up for sale over $1bn, and more In brief Using two different free protein-predicting AI algorithms, computer scientists were almost able to model Omicron before the coronavirus variant had been physically mapped.…

Law enforcement agency now has one year to delete any data older than 6 months not related to criminal activity The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has ordered European Union law enforcement agency Europol to delete any data it has on individuals that's over six months old, provided there's no link to criminal activity.…

French vendor joins fellow Aspire alumnus Fujitsu in winning contracts that extend beyond 2022 deadline IT consultancy and services company Capgemini has signed a £51m agreement to continue supporting UK tax systems first created under a contract HMRC has been planning to replace since 2015.…

Good: New requirements in new law. Bad: Grace period Electric car chargers will have to include secure boot and automatic network disconnection if unsigned software runs on the smart devices – but only from 2023, the British government has said.…

Cost of over-run was unknown, but won't be as bad as delays at other authorities, council document claims Norfolk County Council will have to wait a bit longer for that a-ha moment when it finally turns on its new £18m cloud-based Oracle ERP system as the go-live date is delayed until April.…

It's not as though folks haven't been warned about this There have been millions of downloads of outdated, vulnerable Log4j versions despite the emergence of a serious security hole in December 2021, according to figures compiled by the firm that runs Apache Maven's Central Repository.…

Engineers try to clear material so Mars bot can continue drilling NASA engineers have temporarily paused Perseverance’s ability to drill and collect Martian rock samples due to pebbles piling up in the rover’s caching system.…

Plus: Verizon's personal data grab, and more In brief Some mobile networks in Europe, UK, and America have reportedly started blocking Apple's beta-grade Private Relay functionality in iOS 15.…

Super Cali goes ballistic, this deal is atrocious The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) is appealing a judge's ruling that prevented it from intervening in Activision Blizzard’s $18m settlement to end a sex discrimination lawsuit last year.…

Departure comes as app courts controversy by integrating private cryptocurrency scheme Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the Signal secure messaging app, on Monday announced his resignation as CEO of the company.…

25-year veteran Michelle Johnston Holthaus appointed alongside beancounter from Micron Intel today announced a new showrunner for its PC processor business and named its next chief financial officer, who is arriving from Micron.…

Faker.js and colors.js sabotaged by maker Updated Two popular open-source packages were recently sabotaged with mischievous commits, creating confusion among those using the software and exacerbating concerns about the fragility of the open-source software supply chain.…

We're just two chip businesses, standing in front of the regulators, asking them to love us The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published Nvidia and Arm's responses to its renewed probing of the proposed takeover of Arm by Nvidia.…

Who should your PC work for: you, or your antivirus vendor? Germany-based security biz Avira's antivirus has enabled a new feature: "Avira Crypto". It's opt-in, but if you click "yes", the AV will use your computer to mine Ethereum.…

AT&T and Verizon come to agreement with FAA on tech rollout Live close to an airport in US and have a 5G handset? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released a promised list of major American airports to be surrounded by buffer zones that won't have 5G-C band service.…

What happens when you're top of the pile and everyone wants chips TSMC looks set to beat its own revenue guidance for calendar Q4 of 2021 if the latest monthly figures are anything to go by, rounding off a year of strong growth for the semiconductor industry as a whole.…

Week 2 for new CEO, forced to report sliding sales, delayed projects to investors Atos has issued a profit warning following a "major" contract revision with a UK financial services customer, as well as wider project slippages and lower reselling revenue.…

Shock: Nobody likes whiteboard interviews either A survey of nearly 14,000 coders and recruiters has shown that 70 per cent of devs prefer remote work while some headhunters are considering dropping the curriculum vitae (CV) from the hiring process.…

The solution? Click the annoying error messages away and keep printing The ongoing semiconductor shortage has reached the point that it's affecting one of the most-hated aspects of printing – copy-protection chips on ink cartridges.…

Warning comes weeks after govt body accused subsidiary Sam’s Club of 'ulterior motive' in goods stocking spat American budget retailer Walmart was cited for 19 alleged cybersecurity breaches in China, state-sponsored media reported last week.…

Auditor IPCO flagged it up – but then approved 99.94% of state snooping Former foreign secretary Dominic Raab rebuked GCHQ for secretly halting internal compliance audits that ensured the spy agency was obeying the law, a government report has revealed – while just 0.06 per cent of spying requests made by Britain's public sector were refused by its supposed overseer.…

And you thought unfolding the table for Christmas dinner was tricky The gold-coated primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was fully unfurled this weekend, marking the end of the epic major deployments of the spacecraft, but only the beginning of months of alignment and calibration.…

Select committee set to examine causes of the setbacks Surrey County Council is set to incur an additional £3.2m costs on its delayed £22m ERP project that is scheduled to replace an ageing SAP R/3 system with Unit4 software-as-a-service.…

Poetry and WINE – a heady combination The Haiku operating system has an experimental new feature, WINE. Originally a Linux subsystem, WINE can run unmodified Windows programs on other operating systems.…

How sad would you be to see AV go? Us neither Opinion Game knows game. Thus it came as little surprise that Norton's consumer security software not only sprouted a cryptominer that slurps your computer's life essence and skims a cut, but that it's hard to turn it off.…

Hardly a surprise from the team that brought you billion-pound delays to the Emergency Services Network A system designed to keep track of the UK government's ageing application portfolio promised by Joanna Davinson, who was once responsible for overseeing £1bn additional costs on the much-delayed Emergency Services Network, has — you guessed it — been delayed.…

Plug and play, 1970s style Who, Me? Sometimes a shortcut can result in a short circuit. And occasionally a shortened career if one lacks an understanding boss. Welcome to another Register reader confession from the Who, Me? archives.…

Meanwhile Deloitte says semiconductors are 'growing as fast or faster than ever before' Semiconductor sales are expected to return to a more realistic growth trajectory this year after a record-setting 2021, analyst house IC Insights said in a study released this month.…

Boffins in Vienna devise way to make software prove how it behaves Folks at Technische Universität Wien in Austria have devised a formal security framework called WebSpec to analyze browser security.…

And also an import ban America's International Trade Commission has said Google infringed five of Sonos’s patents – and has banned Google from importing into the US products that rip off Sonos’ home speaker intellectual property.…

Want fatuous stuff that treats you with contempt? Look no further Six right-to-repair advocates assembled on Friday morning to present Repair.org's second annual Worst in Show Awards, a selection of the "the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets at CES."…

OTA-21 of mobile OS arrives While some smartphone users are pondering when their next Android or iOS update will hit, the UBports foundation has released one for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system in the form of OTA-21.…

How to type foreign languages without looking stuff up or memorising half of Unicode Friday FOSS Fest In these globally-connected-from-the-spare-bedroom times, sometimes we all need to deal with folks from far-off lands, whose names or addresses contain exotic symbols that Anglophones rarely encounter: from François to František or maybe even ffoulkes.…

Study hopes to take the elitism out media consumption Those attempting a digital detox might settle down with a paper book in the assumption they are nurturing their well-being. But the benefits of traditional versus new media are not as clear as received wisdom leads us to believe.…

Sure, there was a collision detection bug. Turns out somebody then quietly fixed it Veteran Microsoft developer Raymond Chen has revealed a bit more about what went wrong with the 64-bit version of Space Cadet Pinball.…

You know, the browser used by 0.34% of netizens nowadays A key British border IT system used by plant and seed exporters is so ancient that it will only work with Internet Explorer – which was deprecated by Microsoft last year and is used by relatively few people.…

NGO claims staffers who resign are forced to return advance variable pay Pune-based IT labor rights nonprofit Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES) has filed an official government complaint against HCL Technologies, India's third largest IT company, alleging the business has instituted a policy to claw back bonuses from resigning employees.…

Move fast and break things – with help from machine-learning algorithms Adoption of AIOps in IT departments is set to go mainstream, or so says a survey of medium and large enterprises which found 93 per cent of respondents are either already using the tech, or plan to adopt it in the near future.…

If you can't find a Pi on Earth, you could run your code on orbit instead A new batch of AstroPi computers are up and running on board the International Space Station (ISS), set-up by ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer.…

How about 'idiot goggles'? Snap has filed a complaint taking the US Patent Office (USPO) to task as it seeks to trademark the word "Spectacles."…

Investigation finds royalty and licensing fees excluded from transaction values India's Ministry of Finance has ordered Xiaomi to pay ₹6.53bn ($88m) in import taxes after discovering the local arm of the Chinese electronics company was undervaluing its transactions.…

Plan is to use the arm to finish putting the outpost together The China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) says it has completed load-bearing tests on its space station's 10m robotic arm.…

Deepin shows that good things come out of Wuhan, too The newest and quite possibly shiniest Ubuntu remix has kicked a new version out the door. Yes, yet another new desktop, but it's a sign of bigger things to come.…