The Register

New system hoped to launch next year that will help prioritise spending The UK government currently lacks a central, dynamic list of its legacy computing estate and the risks associated with ageing IT infrastructure and applications, Joanna Davinson, exec director at the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), has told MPs.…

Handbags at 12 o'clock! Er, is that with or without daylight saving? The time zone database hosted at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has been updated following threats, earlier this year, of a fork over a proposal to merge time zones.…

EC2 instances were impaired, Redshift hurt, and some of you may still struggle to access your data Amazon Web Services' largest region yesterday experienced an eight-hour disruption with the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service that impacted several notable web sites and services.…

Netadmins need not assume they can't take a break, as supply chain hassles may persist How much of a national security risk does the USA think Huawei and ZTE pose?…

Astronomers are still figuring out how the planet's storm continues to rage Video The winds whirring round the outer edge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have grown more powerful over the past decade, reaching speeds of at least 400 miles per hour, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown.…

Plus: Other infosec news from this month In brief Emails, chat logs, membership records, donor lists and other files siphoned from a far-right anti-government self-styled militia were leaked online on Monday, it appears.…

Also advised on how smart contracts could help DPRK in US nuke talks A US citizen has admitted to helping the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to establish cryptocurrency capabilities and faces up to 20 years jail for his actions.…

Tokyo's new cyber-security policy names China, Russia, North Korea as sources of increasing threat India and Japan have each flexed their cyber-defence muscles in ways that China can't miss.…

Calls for global approach to curtail self-preferencing behaviour, unhelpful opacity that crimps competition Google utterly dominates Australian advertising, and only new rules can curb the harm its dominance does to local and global markets.…

Redmond reckoned protocol weakness is not a security vulnerability Microsoft Exchange clients like Outlook have been supplying unprotected user credentials if you ask in a particular way since at least 2016. Though aware of this, Microsoft's advice continues to be that customers should communicate only with servers they trust.…

Big Blue to return to the big blue waves The Mayflower, the crewless, autonomous ship built with the help of IBM, will try to sail across the Atlantic again next year, after its first attempt failed shortly after it left the UK for the US.…

From January 2023, add-ons built with Manifest V2 API will fail Google this month said Chrome browser extensions written under its Manifest V2 specification will stop working in January 2023.…

Plus: Why trans gamers are turning to deepfake voices, and more bits and bytes In brief AI cameras inside Amazon’s delivery trucks are denying drivers' bonus pay for errors they shouldn’t be blamed for, it's reported.…

It's dev-ine intervention Google Cloud Platform – the perennially third-placed provider in the infrastructure-as-a-service sales race – will reportedly slash the fees charged to third-party vendors that use its cloud marketplace to punt their own services.…

'Here I am, 100 billion neurons and all you want me to do is calculate all the ways this could possibly go wrong?' Industrial mega-conglomerate Samsung is working to "copy and paste" the structure of the human brain onto computer chips.…

Up to £118,000 and use of Cycle2work scheme for successful applicant Britain's National Crime Agency – charged with thwarting serious and organised crime – is putting out the feelers for a senior figure to head up, among other things, the threat response, analysis, capability exploration and research unit, otherwise known as TRACER.…

Battery still swappable – rest fiddly It wasn't only eager fanbois awaiting their Apple deliveries last week - teardown terror iFixit also got its hands on the iPhone 13 Pro and did what it does best.…

That's authorised push payment – where they get the mark to make the transfer Police have issued an urgent warning after an elderly man was scammed out of £30,000 by phone fraudsters pretending to be from BT.…

Meanwhile, Nirvana baby unchuffed about being Nirvana baby Poor Spencer Elden. Not only does the chap have to live with his "unauthorised" baby pic on the cover of Nirvana's breakthrough record Nevermind – the image has now been immortalised on the streets of Adelaide via GPS exercise tracker Strava.…

Big Blue UK and Ireland cloud man hired as 'interim' CTO, tasked with creating fellowship of the cloud IBM UK and Ireland exec Dan Bailey has been seconded to the Cabinet Office for a six-month contract as interim chief technology officer. His tasks are to include the creation of a pan-government CTO council for the cloud, raising questions of a conflict of interest.…

Now sing with us: Agile, agile, agile... Exclusive Metro Bank has put "less than 90" IT employees at risk of redundancy as it endeavours to "support our new agile way of working" – agile being that nebulous yet overused term that can be heard in certain circles.…

Dear John, I'm leaving you for a robot Feature High-performance computing (HPC) has a very different dynamic to the mainstream. It enables classes of computation of strategic importance to nation states and their agencies, and so it attracts investment and innovation that is to some extent decoupled from market forces.…

'Where are the k8s kids?' ask corporates as they can't pay, won't pay Opinion The tiniest hint of butthurt tinged the Linux Foundation and edX's latest annual Open Source Jobs Report. For the first time, pure Linux skillz were not number one, slipping to second place behind Kubernetes. Container herding is up by 455 per cent, but you just can't get the help.…

An unexpected round of Just A Minute for a unsuspecting Weather Presenter Who, Me? A story from the world of television in this week's edition of Who, Me? as a weather presenter sweats while panic reigns supreme in the backroom.…

Commercial partner's ad-funded expedition plans the ultimate pop-up in 2022 Airbus and the Mexican Space Agency (MSA) have agreed to collaborate on tech to extract resources on the Moon.…

1.6 million people sat teaching eligibility test, chasing 40,000 jobs The Indian state of Rajasthan yesterday cut off internet access to millions of citizens, in order to prevent cheating in an exam.…

Change to universal licenses coming sometime in 2022, says backup vendor, but won't be forced Backup vendor Veeam is almost certainly going to ditch per-socket licensing.…

USA, India, Australia, and Japan pledge to build own 5G tech, share space data, secure rare earth supply chains, and more The Quad group of nations – the USA, India, Australia, and Japan – has announced several joint initiatives to share technology and spur its development, among them a plan to set new global security standards for the technology industry.…

US puts charges on ice, extradition attempt halted Updated Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou has reached a deal with the US Justice Department to drop the fraud and conspiracy charges against her in exchange for admitting that she made false statements about her company's business dealings with Iran.…

Coin prices drop after People's Bank reiterates crackdown China has once again banned cryptocurrencies.…

Security Bounty program slammed over 'broken promises' Upset with Apple's handling of its Security Bounty program, a bug researcher has released proof-of-concept exploit code for three zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple's newly released iOS 15 mobile operating system.…

Hopes to lure users with promise of relieving operational burden Distributed relational database Yugabyte has launched a database-as-a-service product following a rush of inspiration from Facebook, Google and the world of FOSS.…

All said to conduct lithium atoms, may be useful for electric car batteries Chemists have discovered four new materials based on ideas generated from a neural network, according to research published in Nature.…

'Microfliers' could carry sensors to monitor air pollution and more Video As autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere, scientists have shown how tiny connected semiconductors can be distributed on the wind in a similar way to the seasonal spreading of airborne seeds.…

What's that coming over the hill? Is it new hardware? Is it new hardware? Microsoft has followed up a lacklustre Surface hardware event with a Windows 11 Release Preview for Windows Insiders.…

Biodiversity increasing, endangered species gradually returning despite radioactive terror pig presence Studies of biodiversity around the former Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan have shown that a decade after the nuclear incident there in March 2011, the local wildlife, at least, is mostly thriving.…

Join us in October for the next MCubed webcast in which you'll learn all about deploying real-life machine learning in a DevOps world Special series After a great first episode, the MCubed webcast will be back on October 7, 2021 to tackle a whole other beast: Continuous Delivery in Machine Learning.…

Because HPE does not do public cloud? No, no, it is 'for the good' Comment Hewlett Packard Enterprise has posted a "UK Public Sector Manifesto" with nine themes, alongside a campaign hyping the value of hybrid cloud.…

Technical difficulties, please stand by Giant Pay – an umbrella company used by contractors across the UK – has confirmed "suspicious activity" on its platform is behind a days-long ongoing outage that has left folk fretting about whether they'll get paid this month.…

Activate Windows and put up a parking lot Bork!Bork!Bork! Sometimes only the freshest of borks will do, and sometimes the best laid plans of administrators can go awry.…

Twisting and turning like a twisty-turny thing Boatnotes II As HMS Severn continues hosting the Royal Navy's Fleet Navigating Officer's course, The Register has taken a closer look at the precision demanded of naval officers conning their ships in and out of one of the most cramped ports where the Navy routinely operates.…

Also a range of homegrown apps. Still in beta, so plenty of rough edges, though Review One of the reasons Linux has never caught on as a desktop operating system, as Linux fans know, is that Linux isn't a desktop operating system, it's a kernel. And assembling it into a coherent package users can install is the job of a distribution.…

It'll all come out in the wash Something for the Weekend, Sir? Something is out of place; it does not quite fit. I reach down and give it a gentle tug. Ah, that's better.…

New guys can't do a worse job than Capita, right? Right? The UK Armed Forces are looking to restart a £1.7bn procurement for recruitment and onboarding of personnel to cover extensive IT investments as well as process outsourcing.…

Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace is a bit miffed its 'Don't attack the internet core' norm is misunderstood The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) is worried its guidance on preventing the internet and all it connects becoming a casualty of war is being misinterpreted.…

Symbol shenanigans turned out to be the least of the government's problems On Call Fire up the Cossie*! We're going back to the '80s with an On Call tale that combines the drama of a fast Ford motor with the eldritch horror of Unix serial port settings.…

Don’t be a Kubernetes dummy, download this ebook Promo Kubernetes has made developing and managing cloud native applications at scale a far less complex undertaking. The result has been increased agility and flexibility for devs, a productivity boost and lowered risk for ops, and happy C-level execs as time to market for new apps and services is slashed.…

Polymers can transmit at 53Gbps without error correction overheads, and could be just the thing for electric cars Boffins at Japan's Keio University reckon they've built viable optical fibers from plastics.…

Remember iPods? The same bug can bite them, and plenty of older iPhones and iPads too Apple has warned iPhone and Mac users that it's aware of a zero-day bug that's being actively exploited.…

'Broadband' is defined as 512kbps – for now – and just 24 million current connections are wired India's Telecoms Regulatory Authority has revealed that the nation has over 800 million active broadband subscribers.…