The Register

Promises funds will be used to support struggling students The Netherlands' Maastricht University has managed to recoup the Bitcoin ransom it paid to ransomware scum in 2019 – and has made a tidy profit on the deal.…

China rubbishes NASA suggestion it wants Luna all to itself NASA and commercial space outfits Rocket Lab and Advanced Space have collectively announced that the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment – CAPSTONE – mission has left Earth orbit and is on its way to Luna.…

Appears to have leaked from a cloud thanks to sloppy coding A threat actor has taken to a forum for news and discussion of data breaches with an offer to sell what they assert is a database containing records of over a billion Chinese civilians – allegedly stolen from the Shanghai Police.…

How sad – this looks like a fine excuse to avoid video conferences for a while Google has issued an unexpected update to its Chrome browser to address a zero-day WebRTC flaw that is actively being exploited.…

Identity, payments, data management – the lot – as digital public goods The Indian government has decided to share with the world the many e-governance tools it has created to run the country, under the name Indiastack.global.…

For when the outage lasts so long that your UPS runs out of charge Schneider Electric has teamed up with Dell Technologies on an automated shutdown system for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), based on the integration of its APC PowerChute with Dell's VxRail HCI platform.…

Microsoft says it'll move to 'restrict trials and internal workloads to prioritize growth of existing customers' Microsoft's Azure cloud is having difficulty providing enough capacity to meet demand, according to some customers, with certain regions said to refusing new subscriptions for services.…

Decade-old spat over security tech not over yet as New York institution files for enhanced damages NortonLifeLock and Columbia University's legal tussle over anti-malware patents continued last week, with attorney fees and a new trial in dispute two months after a jury awarded the uni $185 million.…

Microsoft, Amazon and Google all have products showing the damage you do and now so does Softbank offshoot Alibaba is following in the footsteps of larger rivals by launching a tool that customers can use to measure and manage the carbon emissions of their business with the aim of lowering their environmental impact.…

Plus: Activists fight for EU ban on AI lie detectors, and is the age prediction tool used by Meta accurate? In brief Numerous people start to believe they're interacting with something sentient when they talk to AI chatbots, according to the CEO of Replika, an app that allows users to design their own virtual companions.…

The dude who predicted the Enron collapse bets they will Analysis Jim Chanos, the infamous short-seller who predicted Enron's downfall, has said he plans to short datacenter real-estate investment trusts (REIT).…

Turn off chip detection, bypass need for a Microsoft account, change how Explorer works The latest beta of the popular Windows USB creation tool Rufus adds some handy features, such as removing Microsoft account requirements and turning off TPM chip detection – and there are others too.…

Officials could access data to make immigration decisions, European Parliament report suggests The UK has signed up to a US plan for sharing police-held biometric data about citizens with US border officials.…

Hack the future with a meta museum: 1 weird trick to free 50 years of digital life Opinion The word hacker, for most people, means a youth in a hoodie turning off power stations with a sticker-encrusted laptop. This annoys those who know that the true hacker ethos is to make stuff do things it was not designed to do, with bonus points for charm, ingenuity, and the maximum effect for the work put in. …

We've got the whole weekend. What could go wrong? Who, Me? It's Monday, and this week's column contains another reminder to check that those backups really have worked in an unfortunately synchronized episode of Who, Me?…

KDDI advises customers to act like it's 1993 and rediscover landlines and payphones Almost 40 million residents of Japan spent the weekend in The Time Before Smartphones after local telco KDDI Corp. experienced its biggest outage to date – affecting both voice calls and data communications.…

What are the 'main benefits' of Outlook? Whatever they are, that's all you'll get Microsoft is readying a "Lite" version of its flagship messaging and calendar app for Android.…

Constant crackdowns on bad online behavior don't seem to deter crims The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a crackdown on investment fraud platforms on Friday in conjunction with the country's Ministry of Public Security.…

Buyers other than cloud operators remain the dominant source of dollars Analyst outfit IDC has predicted that the world's IT buyers will spend more on infrastructure intended for use in clouds than in other scenarios some time during 2022.…

If you can't defend against crypto bros… The British Army has apologized after its Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised by entities that used them to promote NFTs.…

Industrial systems' security got 99 problems and CVEs are one. Or more The latest threat security research into operational technology (OT) and industrial systems identified a bunch of issues — 56 to be exact — that criminals could use to launch cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. …

openKylin project is latest chapter in Beijing's love-hate relationship with Redmond China’s efforts to end its reliance on Microsoft Windows got a boost with the launch of the openKylin project.…

There are just so many ways to deep fry your chips these days Comment Liquid and immersion cooling have undergone something of a renaissance in the datacenter in recent years as components have grown ever hotter.…

Freedoms eroded, iOS-Android duopoly under fire, chip sources questioned – it's all an opportunity for this phone Interview In June, Purism began shipping a privacy-focused smartphone called Librem 5 USA that runs on a version of Linux called PureOS rather than Android or iOS. As the name suggests, it's made in America – all the electronics are assembled in its Carlsbad, California facility, using as many US-fabricated parts as possible.…

Plus: Cyber-mercenaries said to target legal world, backdoor found on web servers, and more In brief Google on Friday pledged to update its location history system so that visits to medical clinics and similarly sensitive places are automatically deleted.…

We thought you guys were into this whole information hoarding thing TikTok, owned by Chinese outfit ByteDance, last month said it was making an effort to minimize the amount of data from US users that gets transferred outside of America, following reports that company engineers in the Middle Kingdom had access to US customer data.…

Oh no, he DIDn't The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has rejected Google's and Mozilla's objections to the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) proposal, clearing the way for the DID specification to be published a W3C Recommendation next month.…

Software maker GSI took systems offline, affecting thousands of people in as many as 40 states A cyberattack on a software company almost a week ago continues to ripple through labor and workforce agencies in a number of US states, cutting off people from such services as unemployment benefits and job-seeking programs.…

A notebook with an RV SoC is cool enough. Did we really need the Web3 jargon? It seems promoters of RISC-V weren't bluffing when they hinted a laptop using the open-source instruction set architecture would arrive this year.…

Elliptic points to several indicators that suggest the North Korea-linked gang was behind the hack Investigators at a blockchain analysis outfit have linked the theft of $100 million in crypto assets last week to the notorious North Korean-based cybercrime group Lazarus. The company said it had tracked the movement of some of the stolen cryptocurrency to a so-called mixer used to launder such ill-gotten funds.…

Without it, $500b more in investments is needed to reach C-neutrality There's more than one path to net zero emissions by 2050, but the only practical one runs straight through nuclear power, according to the International Energy Agency.…

Thanks to Linux wunderkind Rudra Saraswat, not Canonical, this time Good news for especially determined fans of Ubuntu's formerly in-house desktop: there's a new version.…

Move follows Databricks' donation of Delta Lake 2.0 to Linux Foundation Cloud data lake vendor Cloudera has announced the general availability of Apache Iceberg in its data platform.…

The road to the Moon is paved with... river rock? NASA's Moon rocket is to trundle back into its shed today after a delay caused by concerns over the crawlerway.…

Complainants say financial projections were not disclosed, rendering SEC filing false and misleading Datacenter operator Switch Inc is being sued by investors over claims that it did not disclose key financial details when pursuing an $11 billion deal with DigitalBridge Group and IFM Investors that will see the company taken into private ownership if it goes ahead.…

US developers that qualify could receive more than $200,000 Google is to pay $90 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with US developers over alleged anti-competitive behavior regarding the Google Play Store.…

Final shift set for version 2.357 of developer automation platform It has taken a while, but the Jenkins project confirmed this week that Java 11 will be required from this week's Jenkins 2.357 and for the upcoming September LTS release.…

Already host your own file-sharing tool? Now you can add a web-based office suite on top Collabora has released CODE 22.05, the new Developer Edition of its web-based corporate version of LibreOffice.…

Pandemics and university disinterest apparently no match for ingenuity and determination Dundee Satellite Station's home turf at Scotland's Errol Aerodrome is to host an Optical Ground Station to test and demonstrate satellite quantum secure communications.…

Where should I sit? 'Don't bother me with details, just do it' Something for the Weekend A mouse mat is delivering a speech. "I would like to thank my mom and dad, my trainer Brian, and to my recycled polyester silky surface that ensures unobstructed mouse movement."…

Why would you make carbon copies with a laser printer? On Call "Because that's how we've always done it" is a mantra we've heard all too often. But what happens when you suggest something different? Take a trip back to the days of carbon paper with On Call.…

And throws some cold water on the 'K8s works best inside a VM' argument Amazon Web Services has made a small but important change to its EKS Anywhere on-prem Kubernetes offering – the option to install it on bare metal servers instead of exclusively inside a VMware vSphere environment.…

Stalled marketshare seems to be creeping upwards again in consumer, enterprise – but adoption still a slog Advertising company AdDuplex has published its latest set of Windows usage figures and it looks like there might be light at the end of the tunnel for Windows 11.…

It's called 'i-Care' and it screams 'I don't, actually' Tencent Cloud has released an odd robot-adjacent device designed to provide telemedicine services.…

Somewhat counterintuitively, this is being done to improve security Microsoft has created a window of time in which its partners can – without permission – create new roles for themselves in customers' Active Directory implementations.…

He had one job ... One of Apple's most senior legal executives, whom the iGiant trusted to prevent insider trading, has admitted to insider trading.…

iPhone seller makes changing to a third party payment platform expensive and difficult. We're shocked. Shocked A crack in Apple's walled garden appeared yesterday as the iPhone vendor opened up an option for alternative in-app payment processing within apps distributed in South Korea.…

Walks away from enormous but parochial market, while leaving global development teams in place Accounting software colossus Intuit has decided to pull its QuickBooks product from India.…

India's Reserve Bank no fan of digi-dollars – even its own planned central bank digital currency India's Reserve Bank has offered a scathing assessment of cryptocurrencies in its latest financial stability report – saying the risks they create demand attention before they undermine established institutions.…

Paid-for Copilot trained on FOSS code final straw for Software Freedom Conservancy The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft's GitHub for project hosting – and is urging other software developers to do the same.…