The Register

Hang on a minute. I've got a great idea On Call Friday is normally the end of the working week – unless you're one of those brave souls dangling from the end of a phone. Welcome to On Call.…

Levy and Robinson are at it again Comment Two notorious characters from the British security services have published a paper that once again suggests breaking end-to-end encryption would be a good thing for society. …

The alternative is a paid subscription service. What's the bet it's more expensive than the current offering? Microsoft has announced it will "sunset" the Windows Information Protection data leak prevention offering baked into its client operating system.…

National Security and Investment Act used to prevent export felt to have nasty defense implications The Government of the United Kingdom has used a national security law to block the licensing of locally-developed technology to a foreign entity, preventing a deal that would have provided a Chinese company with robot vision tech.…

Proposed working group would see Moscow's miltech conglomerate Rostec operate in Tehran Iran's Communications Ministry joined in a pledge with Russian state-owned defence and technology conglomerate Rostec to explore future collaboration in e-government, information security, and other areas.…

Billion-dollar fine for eight billion items lifted from clipboards, 107 million facial recognition files … and more The Cyberspace Administration of China has fined ride-sharing company DiDi global ¥8.026 billion ($1.2 billion) for more than 64 billion illegal acts of data collection that it says were carried out maliciously and threatened national security.…

When the next cloud datacenter fails, will your software go with it? Interview In the wake of Google and Oracle's UK datacenter meltdowns earlier this week, many users undoubtably discovered that deploying their apps in the cloud doesn't automatically make them immune to failure.…

Exec, his brother, and a pal raked in $1.5m in illicit gains, Feds claim A now-former Coinbase manager, his brother, and a friend were today charged with wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud in connection with the first-ever cryptocurrency insider trading scheme in the US.…

It now owns your store, your doctor, and your shopping history. What's next? Amazon is acquiring One Medical, a company operating a chain of primary care clinics, for $3.9 billion in an all-cash deal, as it ramps up efforts to expand its consumer healthcare offerings.…

Plus Mandiant, Cisco Talos uncover digital espionage US Cyber Command has disclosed 20 new strains of malware among the numerous software nasties and cyberattacks being used against Ukrainian targets over the last few months.…

ADPPA doesn't make everyone happy, particularly California America took a step closer to getting a federal privacy law: a bill proposing just the thing is headed to the House of Representatives to debate after clearing an early hurdle. …

Stark warning of a 'deep and immediate recession' if China takes over Taiwan controls most of the world's chip manufacturing capacity, and that worries US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.…

How can you have these worries as a software business? Just ask Cisco Machine automation specialist ABB is hoping supply chain disruption may have peaked and is forecasting a smoother ride from hereon in.…

Computer giant's Project Sputnik extends to the 2022 model series Dell's latest XPS 13 ultrabook is now certified for version 22.04 of Ubuntu's operating system.…

Spying allegations around Chinese comms giant refuse to go away The Biden administration has quietly probed Huawei over fears cell towers outfitted with its hardware could be spying on US military bases and missile silos. …

Sticker shock: Russia, Belarus withdraw to cost it more than initially thought. SAP is downgrading its outlook for the current financial year, saying its decision to withdraw from both Russia and Belarus following the conflict in Ukraine is going to cost it more than initially thought.…

And guess which ACDC classic will blare at the 2024 ribbon cutting? The United Kingdom - or, rather, a 165-mile stretch of it - will soon be the home of the longest autonomous drone highway in the world.…

Screwdriver fiends iFixit ponder the wisdom of a 'fanless, heatspreader-less, non-upgradable laptop' The engineers at iFixit have turned their tools on Apple's flash new M2-powered MacBook Air to find a startling lack of cooling.…

Estimates suggest it could take a $460 million hit on the exchange Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has decided to sell three-quarters of its holdings in Bitcoin just a year after it promoted the "long-term potential" of the controversial cryptocurrency.…

Despite growth and strong demand in these areas, Redmond keeps trimming investment Even Microsoft's rapidly growing cloud business and the strategically important area of security are not immune to cooling economic conditions with previous job openings said to have now closed unfilled.…

How much did Intel fork out last quarter? Records were broken Intel is expanding its lobbying spend as it tries to convince the US government to pass the CHIPS Act, which would open $52 billion in funding to boost chip production in the US.…

As the verification technology weathers ongoing criticism from users, one anti-bot security vendor rolls out its own tool Apple last month gave hope to a large segment of the mobile device-using population when it announced that the upcoming iOS 16 operating system will eliminate the requirement to use CAPTCHAs to verify their humanity before accessing a website.…

New Matter integrations, financial incentives for well-written Skills, and future plans are all on display today Amazon's annual Alexa Live event was staged this week and saw new features revealed for developers and device makers alike. …

People turn amateur sleuths to discover that the source of all those sign-ins seems to be in Redmond Strange things are afoot in the world of Microsoft email with multiple users reporting unusual sign-in notifications for their Outlook accounts.…

This Immersive Labs webinar will make it feel mighty real Webinar The explosion of open-source projects in recent years has allowed organizations to build ever more complex architectures using their pick of components developed by specialists or "the community".…

Perhaps a QC can help us work out why we'd want a QC Systems Approach Back when I was field CTO for VMware in Asia-Pacific and Japan, many of my colleagues expected me to know something about everything in tech, and it was sometimes hard to bring myself to say "I don’t know."…

Steering wheel not required, if desired – or you could add a coffee machine Chinese tech giant Baidu has revealed a self-driving car it claims can be produced for ¥250,000 ($37,000) – a quarter of the cost to manufacture comparable vehicles.…

Americans need more time rebuilding their Moon sound stage, clearly NASA is pushing back the launch of VIPER, a rover designed to hunt for water ice on the Moon, by a year to November 2024.…

A semiconductor empire built under the water-starved Texas sun? What could go wrong? As the US senate prepares to vote on a $50 billion bill to subsidize stateside chip manufacturing, Samsung has lodged an 11th hour proposal to build 11 semiconductor fabs around Austin, Texas over the next two decades, at an estimated total cost of $200 billion.…

Also: Marketplace and Remote Support, for when you'd like an engineer to peer at your infrastructure Microsoft previewed the impending arrival of Azure Stack HCI 22H2 as well as Azure Remote Support and Marketplace during its Inspire partner event.…

Cites flakiness of NFT community and speculative activity as inimical to the game's goals Mojang Studios, the Microsoft-owned-and-operated developer of Minecraft, has decided not to allow integration of non-fungible tokens or other blockchain-related tech in the game.…

Bain and Japan Industrial Partners among those in the running Toshiba announced on Tuesday it has settled on a shortlist of potential buyers, with local reports suggesting its list of suitors includes Bain, Japan Industrial Partners, Brookfield Asset Management and CVC Capital Partners.…

Remember: telephones exist, are handy for collaboration, and usually work Updated Microsoft's Teams collaboration environment is experiencing an outage, depriving unknown numbers of people of the opportunity to enjoy video and/or audio conferences, or to access documents.…

By watching how you use it, Virtzilla might figure out how to sell it VMware will start tracking customers' use of its experimental hypervisor for Arm CPU cores. But don't worry – it's not too creepy.…

Fixes issued, warns it 'has not exhaustively enumerated all potential consequences' Atlassian has warned users of its Bamboo, Bitbucket, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible, and Jira products that a pair of critical-rated flaws threaten their security.…

Cutting Elon story short The Twitter vs Elon Musk trial is set to start in October after a judge granted the social network's request to speed up legal proceedings.…

Euro man allegedly known as 'Virus' faces years behind bars if convicted A man suspected of providing the IT infrastructure behind the Gozi banking trojan has been extradited to the US to face a string of computer fraud charges.…

Larry gets your database, while Satya will take your apps It just got a little easier to stitch together databases in Oracle Cloud with workloads running in Microsoft Azure with the launch of the duo’s multi-cloud database service.…

Or about two and a half Chrome tabs Amazon Web Services is sticking with AMD for its next generation of memory-optimized instances in EC2.…

Don't. Download. Unknown. Apps. Kremlin-backed criminals are trying to trick people into downloading Android malware by spoofing a Ukrainian military group, according to Google security researchers.…

Peek behind the curtain to see SGX implemented, Spectre mitigated, and more Infosec boffins have released a tool to decrypt and unpack the microcode for a class of low-power Intel CPUs, opening up a way to look at how the chipmaker has implemented various security fixes and features as well as things like virtualization.…

Azure soon to follow as Big Blue accomodates a world with many clouds IBM has launched a Db2 operator for Kubernetes running on AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), while promising the same would be available for Azure AKS is targeted for the second half of 2022.…

But supply issues are forcing the lithography system giant to defer revenue past 2022 While sales are starting to wane for certain chips like GPUs, Dutch semiconductor equipment supplier ASML is seeing extraordinary demand for its chipmaking machines, even as the company deals with its own supply constraints that are delaying shipments. …

Decade-old SDKs also among targets for license audits Oracle Java Development Kit 6 and 7 support ends this week, leaving a sizable chunk of developers looking at their options.…

The way forward to Mars is cancelled (you meant the meeting, right?) The European Space Agency (ESA) issued a reminder this week that the future of its ExoMars rover remained very much in the balance following the termination of cooperation with Russian space agency Roscosmos.…

Chemical giant's work with Pasqal could help improve climate change models too A new quantum computing partnership could pave the way to more efficient climate change modeling. …

Blockchain-based Azure Confidential Ledger rounds out latest additions to confidential computing Microsoft is expanding its Azure confidential computing portfolio with virtual machines that use the encryption and memory protection features of AMD's third-gen Epyc processors.…

Money paid by healthcare facilities to North Korean group traced through blockchain and Chinese launderers Federal law enforcement officials this week said they seized about $500,000 that healthcare facilities in the United States paid to the Maui ransomware group.…

Two ways to run the classic word processor on a modern open-source box Just months after getting Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX running on modern Linux, Tavis Ormandy – a white-hat hacker and member of Google's Project Zero team – has conjured the same trick with classic text-mode WordPerfect 7.…

More transparency or just the cost of doing business? For customers whose data must remain Microsoft is previewing a cloud service in acknowledgement of customers' demands that at least some of their data crown jewels remain within the region in which they operate.…