The Register

Meaconing, loss of position, and the Royal Navy's response Boatnotes II Learning to fix your position without GPS is one thing. Actively jamming it to induce a deliberate system failure aboard your own ship is quite something else, as we found on Monday.…

FlutterFlow is a visual application builder for the popular framework Interview FlutterFlow, a third-party visual application builder for the Flutter framework, now has custom functions for the addition of Dart code, but developers may still find it too limiting.…

Project wins £50k from government The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is drawing up guidelines so that crash-proof cargo containers can be attached to drones to transport medical items such as blood samples and vaccines.…

Adds security and networking to platform, hoping you use it to repatriate apps Nutanix has used its annual .NEXT conference to advance the argument that public clouds can be wastefully expensive places in which to run workloads – unless they're managed by Nutanix so they can be returned to another environment at your convenience.…

'A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person' The Court of Appeal of England and Wales this week dismissed a man’s plea to have his AI system recognized as the inventor of two patents.…

Full concurrency model at last Apple has emitted version 5.5 of the Swift programming language, described as a "massive release," including async/await keywords, package collections, and improved Objective-C interoperability.…

Digital imports aren't currently taxed at all, and COVID means the government is keen to find new revenue sources The Philippines has become the latest nation to impose a digital services tax.…

Automation is the answer to labor shortages, social distancing, apparently SoftBank Robotics (SBRG) and China's Keenon Robotics are teaming up to make robot waiters the norm in Japan and Singapore, both companies announced on Monday.…

File upload vuln lets miscreants hijack vCenter Server VMware has disclosed a critical bug in its flagship vSphere and vCenter products and urged users to drop everything and patch it. The virtualization giant also offered a workaround.…

Misconfigured Elasticsearch server blamed A database containing personal information on 106 million international travelers to Thailand was exposed to the public internet this year, a Brit biz claimed this week.…

Plus: Chief Legal Officer exits as court battles loom The SEC has launched an investigation into Activision Blizzard, and has subpoenaed several current and former employees, including CEO Bobby Kotick, the California games giant confirmed on Tuesday.…

Russia-based biz targeted in Uncle Sam's crack down on cyber-extortion The US Treasury on Tuesday sanctioned virtual cryptocurrency exchange Suex OTC for handling financial transactions for ransomware operators, an intervention that's part of a broad US government effort to disrupt online extortion and related cyber-crime.…

Platform and individuals charged in first case of its kind US financial watchdogs have launched legal action against a cannabis-related investment scheme said to be the first case involving crowdfunding regulation.…

Two more years! Two more years! There was good news today for administrators looking nervously at their aging Ubuntu boxes. A few more years of support is now on offer as Canonical brings 14.04 and 16.04 LTS into the 10-year fold.…

Nothing to do with little green men, mind, unless they can be defined as state or non-state actors Two intelligence funding appropriation bills currently awaiting approval from the US Congress contain within them sections for the creation of a new office to investigate UFO sightings.…

455% hike in demand for Kubernetes qualifications causes a stir The Linux Foundation and edX's latest annual Open Source Jobs Report highlights an explosion of interest in cloud technologies that has bumped Linux off the skillset top spot for the first time.…

Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the courtroom Oracle has asked the US Supreme court not to dismiss its case over the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, despite the US Department of Defense officially axing the $10bn procurement deal.…

Also buys data replication company HVR for $700m Automated data integration outfit Fivetran has confirmed a $565m funding round – valuing the company at $5.6bn, roughly the GDP of Montenegro.…

How about being an anonymous face in a crowd? Is that not allowed anymore? Facial recognition technology (FRT) may need to be regulated in much the same way as some ethically sensitive medical techniques to ensure there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect people's privacy and freedoms.…

'Our >3,000 customers had to print again' Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update last week was meant to fix print vulnerabilities in Windows but also broke network printing for many, with some admins disabling security or removing the patch to get it working.…

Cash courtesy of Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust, focused on 'the poorest of the poor' Updated The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has received a £33m investment – putting paid to rumours that the company was looking to float on the stock exchange as a means of funding growth.…

We joke about lethal consequences of failure but this isn't funny The UK's Ministry of Defence has launched an internal investigation after committing the classic CC-instead-of-BCC email error – but with the names and contact details of Afghan interpreters trapped in the Taliban-controlled nation.…

Rebranded org now calling itself National Highways National Highways, the UK government-owned company responsible for roads in England, is planning to spend up to £1bn on tech over the next four years via another framework.…

Making sense of blurry lines Edge computing is easy to sell but hard to define. More a philosophy than any single architecture, edge and cloud are on a spectrum, with the current cloud service model often dependent on in-browser processing, and even the most edgy deployments reliant on central infrastructure.…

El Reg follows the Fleet Navigating Officers' course Boatnotes II How do you safely navigate a warship to within a few yards of a planned track? And how do you do that without GPS giving you a precise position readout? The Register has joined the Royal Navy to find out.…

No more pandemic-inspired extensions to exam dates or certs, warns Linux-slinging giant Red Hat has told certified admins they need to re-certify by Christmas – or else.…

Slaps 'em on six tonnes of kit – enough to sustain space station crew for six months – and successfully sends it to Tianhe China has advanced preparations for the next crewed mission to its Tianhe space station, successfully launching a robo-truck carrying enough supplies to sustain a crew for six months.…

Inclusion of Weetabix in charity coffee accompaniment tweet creates predictable brewhaha The Macmillan Cancer Support charity has rocked the normally sedate and comfortable world of Britain's biscuit lovers to its very core by publishing a list of the country's favourite biscuits which includes a foodstuff that is very clearly a breakfast cereal.…

ITU and UN think inclusivity may now trump connectivity; Vodafone agrees but fancies more 4G The Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development has suggested that efforts to close the digital divide should shift from providing connectivity to ensuring access to affordable devices and the education that will help people put them to work.…

Machine could help unlock natural resources for future lunar base dwellers Video NASA has chosen where to send a golf-cart-sized rover to the Moon in 2023 to hunt for water: the western edge of the Nobile impact crater on the south pole.…

Dare we say, these Euro cops ran mobprobe Police arrested 106 people suspected of carrying out online fraud for an organized crime gang linked to the Italian Mafia, Europol said on Monday.…

Not that the Middle Kingdom is singled out directly A private meeting will be held between President Joe Biden and India’s Prime Minister during the first in-person summit of The Quad in Washington DC this Friday, during which semiconductors and a united front against China are likely to be discussed.…

Australian users told first of plans to create 'Seller of Record' subject to regulatory approval Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working to bill its products in a range of Asia-Pacific currencies as necessary, The Register has learned.…

Web biz proposes $800m to disappear accusations of over-promising audience size to investors Twitter has offered to pay $809.5m to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2016 accusing it of misleading investors by falsely inflating its number of monthly active users.…

If you need another reason to try an alternative software suite Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is currently vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability and while the app's source code has been patched, the fix has only been made available as beta software and awaits an official release.…

IT sector at risk of public humiliation if CMA finds they're not up to code TechUK – the UK’s digital trade association representing computer giants and start-ups alike – has called on firms to check their green credentials and make sure they stand up to scrutiny.…

Come for the bork, stay for the burger Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork goes back to its roots today, with a screen of purest blue showing its unwanted face outside a US Burger King branch.…

Tells market not to worry - insurers will pay $58m to 'cover the consequences of the fire' OVH Groupe SAS is edging closer to a potential initial public offering (IPO) expected to value the European hosting and cloud biz at around $4.7bn – months after a fire engulfed part of its data centre real estate.…

IPO was expected last year but then we had a pandemic DevOps darling GitLab has finally filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) as revenues continue to grow and losses widen.…

Most users better off with rolling release, but quarterly build has more quality testing Kali Linux version 2021.3 has been released with new tools, though its makers explain that some features which make it good for penetration testing also make it bad for general use.…

4 stars - did not warn us about 'digitalisation of the economy'* Britain's tow-headed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been granted an audience with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, during which he will discuss the “challenges” of taxing giant tech corporations in a digital economy.…

Plus: US lawmakers get 'in touch with Facebook whistleblower' Facebook has hit back at a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal as it tries to counter a week of damaging headlines which lifted the lid on the inner workings of the social media biz.…

Licensing, integration and security remain challenges, says DSAG survey Less than a third of German-speaking SAP users think the global application vendor is doing a good job of getting its software to work in the cloud.…

The environmental impact, not the smoking crater made by an impact SpaceX took another step towards launching the orbital version of its Starship last week with the release of a Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (DPEA) from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).…

The Register dips another toe in the Flow While browser-makers squabble over standards, privacy and exactly what their User-Agent string should say, Ekioh's clean-room browser, Flow, has continued to quietly advance.…

According to a filing with Brit competition watchdog Any attempt to block Cellnex's takeover of Hutchison UK's tower network could see consumers "significantly worse off" and hamper the progress of Three UK's planned £3bn investment in 5G.…

Honour thy ancestors, and move on Column The death of Sir Clive Sinclair at the end of last week has seen an outburst of nostalgia. Understandably so.…

Flatpak-only app store, two-finger swiping for screen-fondlers... but it's not for the fiddlers Review The elementary OS team recently released its first major update in nearly three years, elementary OS 6, or "Odin" as this release is known. Odin is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and as you would imagine for an update three years in the making, brings a slew of changes.…

When a server crash became a motorway dash Who, Me? The best laid plans of mice or Register readers can founder on the rocks of iffy connectors and wobbly cables, as this week's entrant in the Who, Me? archives discovered.…

Shortages in today's supply chains persist and capacity is all but booked. But the future looks bright Analyst firm IDC says the global semiconductor industry is showing signs of "potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022".…