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We're faster than you. No you're not. Are too. No way! Yes way … can someone take this pair to the principal's office? Content delivery contender Fastly has come out swinging at rival Cloudflare.…

'The last time I did this, I cried' says Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Video Managing a business during the plague years has been tough for many, but one plucky CEO has found a clever and efficient way to execute such an unpleasant task: fire 900 workers at once in a Zoom meeting.…

'Nickel' back in trouble for trying to lift secrets, often by exploiting Microsoft snafus Microsoft has revealed its Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) won court approval to take control of websites a Chinese gang was using to attack targets across the world – often by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft products.…

Someone just accidentally put it there, says the messaging service company Smartphone payment provider LINE Pay announced yesterday that around 133,000 users' payment details were mistakenly published on GitHub between September and November of this year.…

Officials use them for mundane matters, not big emergencies as laws intend India's Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology has slammed state governments' use of internet shutdowns.…

Fingers crossed the telescope will finally take to space on 22 December Engineers have finished pumping the James Webb Space Telescope with fuel, and are now preparing to carefully place the folded instrument inside the top of a rocket, expected to blast off later this month.…

Home-baked silicon is the way forward China is gut punching Moore's Law and the roughly one-year cadence for major chip releases adopted by the Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others.…

Tens of thousands of homeowners and hundreds of businesses were at risk, lawsuit claims The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into whether Tesla failed to tell investors and customers about the fire risks of its faulty solar panels.…

Sweary test on sale as Tesla CEO forgets where he parked his car Elon Musk fans must be all a quiver this week as they finally have the chance to buy a collectible to slide under the bust of their idol's head: papers signed by the man himself.…

Franchisees' closures also affect petrol stations The British arm of Dutch supermarket chain Spar has shut hundreds of shops after suffering an "online attack," the company has confirmed to The Register.…

MongoDB CTO Mark Porter: 'It is 34 per cent compatible, through our tests' Interview Amazon's DocumentDB database service is described by the cloud corp as "MongoDB compatible", but MongoDB CTO Mark Porter has told The Register this is not entirely the case.…

Or it might be nearer $200m. Even the amounts stolen seem to be volatile in the crypto world Cryptocurrency exchange BitMart has coughed to a large-scale security breach relating to ETH and BSC hot wallets. The company reckons that hackers made off with approximately $150m in assets.…

PostgreSQL a better option for open source RDBMS, he claims You've collected your leaving card, novelty presents, and perhaps a bottle of wine – what's next on the list for the departing developer? For one, it's a blog rubbishing the technology he's been working on for five years.…

Free Now taxi app unlawfully registered by regulator – and Ts&Cs didn't comply with the law London taxi-hailing apps cannot dump their legal obligations on gig economy drivers, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales has ruled in a blow to Uber.…

Does anyone have the stones to revive this long-forgotten software? What is old is new again: linking open source Unix-alikes, native cluster OSes for massively parallel computers, and 1980s platform rivalries. You get all this in a somewhat dusty project hoping to "breathe new life" into Helios, a manycore OS from the '90s.…

Hancitor is at play The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says 49 organisations, including some in government, were hit by Cuba ransomware as of early November this year.…

Key to faster, more predictable cloud RE:INVENT AWS had a conviction that "modern processors were not well optimized for modern workloads," the cloud corp's senior veep of Infrastructure, Peter DeSantis, claimed at its latest annual Re:invent gathering in Las Vegas.…

Hurrah, employees can continue to work from home and take calls in pyjamas Googlers can continue working from home and will no longer be required to return to campuses on 10 January 2022 as previously expected.…

How long will we keep reinventing software wheels? Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

Questions for tenants as Ellison's gang executes its OCI strategy Oracle's datacentre in Linlithgow, Scotland is set to close over the next few months, leaving clients faced with a cloud migration or a move to an alternative hosted datacentre.…

Put crypto back in the crypt Opinion In 1960, Theodore H Maiman made the first laser.…

Fidgety fingers and boredom = trouble Who, Me? All aboard for a nautical installment of Who, Me? where the words "Don't Touch That Button!" have an altogether damper meaning.…

Despite being the 27th and 28th launched, they're the first of a dozen first-gen birds The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the successful launch of the 27th and 28th satellites in its Galileo satnav constellation on Sunday.…

Seeks world domination through 'diversified business governance' Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is splitting in two.…

Cube-shaped object is probably just a rock. Yutu will check it out anyway China's Moon rover, Yutu 2, has sent images of a strangely geometric object.…

LinkedIn adds Hindi service to target the world's third-most-spoken language Microsoft's social network LinkedIn has added a Hindi version of its service.…

And a National Blockchain Strategy that calls for gov to host BaaS India's government has revealed a home-grown server design that is unlikely to threaten the pacesetters of high tech, but (it hopes) will attract domestic buyers and manufacturers and help to kickstart the nation's hardware industry.…

Plus: A drug designed by machine learning algorithms to treat liver disease reaches human clinical trials and more In brief Prisons around the US are installing AI speech-to-text models to automatically transcribe conversations with inmates during their phone calls.…

Another terrible launch, but DICE is already working on improvements The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Since the last edition on New World, we hit level cap and the "endgame". Around this time, item duping exploits became rife and every attempt Amazon Games made to fix it just broke something else. The post-level 60 "watermark" system for gear drops is also infuriating and tedious, but not something we were able to address in the column. So bear these things in mind if you were ever tempted. On that note, it's time to look at another newly released shit show – Battlefield 2042.…

Reuters claims nine State Department employees outside the US had their devices hacked The Apple iPhones of at least nine US State Department officials were compromised by an unidentified entity using NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, according to a report published Friday by Reuters.…

All together now - R, A, N, S, O... A US utility company based in Colorado was hit by a ransomware attack in November that wiped out two decades' worth of records and knocked out billing systems that won't be restored until next week at the earliest.…

Alleged scheme said to have netted $20m since 2017 The US Attorney's Office of Arizona on Wednesday announced the indictment of two men on charges that they defrauded musicians and associated companies by claiming more than $20m in royalty payments for songs played on YouTube.…

Your four-legged open-source friend? CIMON says 'Maybe' Linux fans rejoice: the smarts running behind Xiaomi's Not-Spot, CyberDog, emanate from none other than Ubuntu 18.04.…

The end is coming, and nobody wants a homeless 'naut NASA has splashed the cash on design contracts for space stations and a multibillion-dollar job for more Artemis boosters.…

Q&A with the developer of BetterDummy: from macOS secrets to his motivations Interview Folks who use Apple Silicon-powered Macs with some third-party monitors are disappointed with the results: text and icons can appear too tiny or blurry, or the available resolutions are lower than what the displays are capable of.…

A truly rare groove Discerning writers and programmers know that keyboards matter. It's mostly the feel, but the best feel tends to come from mechanical key switches and they make a noise as they activate.…

Don't just install the patch, change your router passwords too Two arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities affecting a number of Netgear routers aimed at small businesses have been patched following research by Immersive Labs.…

Questions remain over data warehouse dependencies and redundancies The UK's Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has gone live on Workday finance and HR systems around three months later than planned, drawing questions over an interdependent data warehouse project.…

Plus: Why company foresees growth of Rust, already widely used internally Re:invent AWS previewed new developer resources at its Re:invent conference, including new SDKs for Rust, Swift, and Kotlin, as well as Amplify Studio for rapid web applications, integrated with the Figma design tool.…

Neutron updated, but the Spectre of SpaceX looms Rocket Lab showed off progress on its Neutron rocket yesterday, with a "Hungry Hippo" fairing design more reminiscent of a '60s spy flick than a'70s table-top kid amuser.…

Is hardware by subscription bad for customers? Readers have their say Register Debate There's a reason why it's called a personal computer, and boy did this week's debate remind us all of the fact. We'd thrown open the motion that Renting Hardware on a Subscription Basis is Bad for Customers.…

Did it during work time and got paid for it, affirms Court of Appeal A Briton has lost an appeal bid to claim copyright over software he wrote for his employer while being handsomely paid for doing so – despite saying he wrote parts of it in his spare time.…

Just being practical here, but maybe they can share a cab? Two Chinese tech companies, China Telecom and DiDi Global, are packing their bags and moving out of the US, one under the ruling of Washington, the other under the thumb of Beijing.…

As with packaging systems, lightweight efficient approaches look set to lose out Analysis A new version of Linux distro NixOS has been released, just one day after a contentious blogpost that asked "Will Nix overtake Docker?"…

Take your breath awayyyyyyyy Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Breathe into the tube, sir." Oh yes, dear reader, I am being breathalysed.…

Angel of the North asteroid story upsets us mightily A local rag in Britain has gone wildly off-piste by measuring the size of an asteroid swinging by the Earth using units of measure derived from a rusting statue.…

Fix the printer, fix the phones On Call A story with a difference from the On Call vaults today. Who do you call when the phones stop working? A Register reader reveals all.…

Updates bare metal Macs-a-service and claims up to 60 per cent better price performance vs cloudy x86 Macs Amazon Web Services has added Apple’s Arm-powered M1 CPU to its range of cloudy desktop offerings.…

Version 4.16 adds first look at TPM 2.0 and better big.LITTLE support The Xen Project has delivered an upgrade to its hypervisor.…

Shares fell over 20 per cent in its first day on NASDAQ Singaporean superapp Grab has signaled an intention to further its digital banking segment and beef up its mapping tech to improve its ride-hailing services, after an underwhelming debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange.…