The Register

Chatham House speech targets non-state baddies as well as grey zone and nation states A new national cyber strategy will be launched by year-end, the National Cyber Security Centre's chief exec has promised – while calling out spyware vendor NSO Group as a "red flag" for the UK infosec community.…

Or should that be the community's issues with Microsoft? Analysis .NET Foundation executive director Claire Novotny resigned last week, but board member Shawn Wildermuth said that this did not solve "issues with the community" on which the foundation will now focus.…

Ok, time to call death to PC again? No, definitely not. Did we mention prices due to go up again? Global PC shipments are still expanding but the pace was more moderate in calendar Q3 following a US slowdown in spending caused by the gridlock in the supply chain.…

'Oxidizer and moisture interactions' blamed for iffy spaceship valves NASA and Boeing have put a brave face on things following the choice to send a pair of 'nauts to the ISS with SpaceX's Crew Dragon instead of Starliner, and are insisting Boeing's capsule will launch in the first half of next year.…

Proposed law could 'erode trust and confidence' in healthcare England's National Data Guardian has warned that government plans to allow data sharing between NHS bodies and the police could "erode trust and confidence" in doctors and other healthcare providers.…

Plus two failings this week at Apache and Twitch and nostalgia for Flash fans In brief Hipster beer maker Brewdog has been caught out by a basic, but potentially very expensive, security problem, and the team that discovered it says the Scottish tipple-merchant's response was hardly encouraging.…

If assumed consent is informed consent, it’s individuals who benefit Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers and experts go head to head on 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.…

Zucks to lose your #HugOps Opinion At the time of writing, it has been exactly 100 hours since Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp crept back out of the void onto the internet*. They'd been gone for six hours – or seven billion dollars, if you measure out your life by Zuck's net worth, which we don't recommend.…

Pen-testers, rogue developers, dodgy hosters, etc. etc. Feature This summer, Abnormal Security discovered that some of its customers' staff were receiving emails inviting them to install ransomware on a company computer in return for a $1m share of the "profits".…

Yet another things that was really not better in the old days Who, Me? Facebook went down and Twitch flashed its privates last week thanks to alleged config cockups. However, who among us has not suffered the stomach-dropping fear that follows the ill-advised submission of a seemingly innocuous command?…

Working to have vSphere provide a memory service that tiers pages, claims hardware TCO boost of 30 to 50 per cent VMware is working on a software-defined memory effort and thinks it could lead to the creation of "memory servers" – boxes full of memory that can be shared across a cluster.…

DRAM drama or pricing karma? Whatever your view, kinked supply chains aren't helping The world's fourth-largest memory maker, Taiwan's Nanya Technology Corporation, has predicted a price "correction" in late 2021.…

Judge ordered Cupertino to stop steering users to its payments platform and Apple wants that paused, then erased Apple has appealed one of its disputes against Epic Games, despite having mostly won the case.…

Docs were smuggled past security and sold for $110K of Monero after ProtonMail exchanges between 'Alice and 'Bob' The United States Department of Justice has announced a leak of information pertaining to the design of the nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarine, and the arrest of the alleged leakers.…

Plus: DeepMind makes its first profit... by selling to its stablemates In brief Clearview AI says it has scraped more than 10 billion photographs from people’s public social media accounts for its controversial facial-recognition tool.…

'We don’t host the content of the websites at issue' Cloudflare is not liable for any copyright infringement for content hosted on websites its content-delivery network supports, a US federal judge ruled this week.…

Let's see how the world's largest companies wriggle out of this one The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has finalized a plan on global tax laws that could lead to Big Tech paying more in taxes no matter where they operate.…

Brave of Zuckerberg to switch to a three-day working week The Facebook empire on Friday experienced some aftershocks after its massive Monday outage, leaving some netizens unable to use its apps and websites as expected.…

Definitely not another sub, oh no sir A US nuclear submarine has "struck an object" while submerged in the South China Sea – and the US Navy is insisting that it wasn't a Chinese submarine.…

Now they just have to make it work... Venture capital firms are pouring billions into quantum computing companies, hedging bets that the technology will pay off big time some day.…

Weird all Jorvik Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork – our column of reader-submitted unhappy displays – is celebrating 30 years of Microsoft Money this month with an example of why Windows, .NET and ATMs do not make good bedfellows.…

2 new building-block rack and 3 small footprint towers in DC-optional refresh Dell revealed its latest refresh for its Dell EMC Poweredge servers yesterday, emphasizing their small size and reduced latency for uses in places like hospitals, retail space or offices.…

It isn't just the big dogs preparing to bite, warns Redmond Iran, Turkey and both North and South Korea are bases for nation-state cyber attacks, Microsoft has claimed – as well as old favourite Russia.…

Aims to take kids from Instagram to integration with gamified approach The developers behind popular language education app Duolingo are setting their sights on maths education.…

Outage prompts customer ire, again A British VoIP firm has staggered back to its feet after being smacked with a series of apparent DDoSes a month after suffering a series of sustained attacks it said were delivered by the REvil ransomware gang.…

Senedd Cymru ICT crowd have earned their Friday beers Citizens in Wales are set to be required to comply with COVID-19 passport rules to attend mass events, partly because of an apparent technical glitch in the UK nation's Parliament or Senedd Cymru, in Welsh.…

When you need to do audio, voice or image processing at the network edge or on a battery budget RISC-V looks set to be extended to bring more computing power to applications on smaller devices.…

Dark pattern consent dialog invites users to share their location with advertisers Mozilla is trialling personalised advertising in its Firefox Suggest feature, along with sponsored search results, with users told that it "helps fund Firefox development."…

My next column will be written in spaaaaaace Something for the Weekend, Sir? Look deep into my soil. Hold it, feel it, smell my soil.…

Remember those days when OSes were the be-all and end-all? Canalys Forums With minds fixed on PC shortages and the next looming round of price hikes, there was nary a mention of Microsoft's freshly laid OS by the biggest vendors and resellers at this year's Canalys Forums EMEA 2021 gabfest.…

Your PC is not a fridge On Call Friday brings the promise of a weekend free from the work laptop but likely shackled to the personal laptop instead. Kick off your two days of downtime with another tale from those brave enough to be On Call.…

OECD close to finalising implementation plan hoped to secure a share of revenue from digital multinationals The Republic of Ireland has signed on to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's plans to create harmonised tax laws that stop Big Tech companies reducing their bills by officially conducting their business in low-tax jurisdictions.…

All invited to comment about how operating systems have screwed them Japan's Fair Trade Commission on Wednesday launched an investigation into potential antitrust behavior by mobile OS providers – with Apple and Google at the top of the list.…

Calls for anything connected to the Internet to live in a room controlled by the CISO India has announced a new security policy for its power sector and specified a grade of isolation it says exceeds that offered by air gaps.…

Publishers won't get ads, advertisers won't get a voice, nobody will be spared weeks of tedious culture wars Google has decided not to run any ads alongside content that "contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change".…

Spare parts, repair manuals more easily available in victory for right to repair ... when it happens Microsoft has pledged to help folks independently repair their own broken Surface laptops and Xbox consoles by making spare parts and information more easily available by the end of 2022.…

Next chapter in AI Dungeon saga: Banning gamers for what the bot said Feature Let this be a warning to all AI developers: check your data before you train your model.…

And that's regardless of whether they work from home or are in the office All IBM employees in America must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by December 8 – or they’ll be suspended from work with no pay.…

Jackpot moment for SVR operatives Russia's SVR spy agency made off with information about US counterintelligence investigations in the wake of the SolarWinds hack, according to people familiar with the American government cleanup operation.…

All change on 2022 ride to the ISS NASA has shown its tremendous confidence in Boeing's Starliner by shifting astronauts scheduled to launch aboard the calamity capsule to SpaceX's Crew Dragon.…

Blasts proposals for Secretary of State to approve ICO guidance The UK’s outgoing Information Commissioner has issued a strongly worded statement warning of the future independence of the office in the face of government plans to reform data protection law.…

The number you have dialled has not been recognised Microsoft Teams' Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) integration has fallen over.…

Change is scary There is some good news for enterprises keen on Surface devices, but wary of Windows 11. Microsoft confirmed last night that commercial customers could still select Windows 10 if they wished.…

Firm apparently terminated UAE's contract when it realised Updated Cherie Blair tipped off a Jordanian princess that the royal's estranged husband, the Sheikh of Dubai, had deployed NSO Group's Pegasus malware against her and her lawyers, a series of explosive High Court judgments [PDFs] have revealed.…

'There's no independent search engine really, other than Google and Bing' Interview Four search providers – DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, and Lilo – have penned an open letter to the European Commission claiming that Google is suppressing search engine competition.…

That is merely a 'failure of a single effort' says foundation VMware has stated that the Cloud Foundry-based Tanzu Application Service for Kubernetes did not meet its standards, but despite this Cloud Foundry Foundation said that its Kubernetes transition is alive and well.…

It's not as if gamers care about that sort of stuff Chipmaker AMD has reported that some of its silicon lucky enough to have made the cut for Windows 11 is having difficulty with the new OS.…

Promise to become 'a science and technology superpower' not cutting much ice with Chipzilla Intel is cutting the UK out of its European expansion plans based on the nation's decision to leave the EU, the world's biggest political and trading bloc.…

20m Swedish kronor – close to 2 million quid – to be shared The Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry were this week awarded to scientists for groundbreaking research into climate, complex systems, and a new type of catalyst.…

The kids are alright: 15-year-old scoops top prize The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) has announced the winning entry for its BBC Micro-inspired music challenge.…