The Register

Boasts of a world-record SAP SD benchmark result, 'transparent' in-memory encryption IBM's heavy-metal arm has officially brought Power10, its first 7nm chip, to market with the launch of the E1080 – a server system it claims blows x86 rivals out of the water for performance and security.…

Accused served 15 days for 'molestation', says report The People's Procuratorate of Huaiyin District, Jinan City, China, on Monday ended its investigation into a male Alibaba manager's alleged rape of a female colleague.…

Harvard-Accenture study suggests opening up to 'hidden workers' The alleged "talent shortage" depriving companies of workers can be attributed in part to corporate disinterest in paying for job training programs, and to automated recruitment systems that overlook potential hires, a research paper argues.…

'No decision has been made' super-corp reminds El Reg The city of Taylor, Texas, has offered Samsung property tax breaks over the course of 30 years if the South Korean chip giant agrees to build a $17bn fabrication plant on its land.…

ActiveX and MSHTML, the gift that keeps on giving ... to intruders In an advisory issued on Tuesday, Microsoft said some of its users were targeted by poisoned Office documents that exploit an unpatched flaw to hijack their Windows machines.…

Where did people think spam and harassment reports were going? Facebook's WhatsApp states its messages are protected by the Signal encryption protocol. A report published today by investigative non-profit ProPublica contends that WhatsApp communication is less private than users understand or expect.…

Guy Podjarny on the challenges of crafting and shipping secure code Interview In an interview with Snyk founder and president Guy Podjarny on the challenges of secure application development, he told us: "Any solution that predicates on developers becoming security experts is doomed to fail."…

In space, everyone can see you emit brightly shining gas, X-rays, and radio waves A multinational team of astronomers has discovered what happens when a large star accidentally eats a black hole or neutron star: it emits a catastrophically violent, galactic-scale burp that can be detected from over 450 million light years away.…

How many Android apps can you fit on an EC2 instance? Canonical has shrunk its Anbox Cloud Android app container platform with an appliance available on the AWS Marketplace.…

Philip K Dick is rolling in his grave Senior UK lawmakers are being warned of an emerging pushback against the use of smart technology such as facial recognition, increased surveillance, and predictive policing to fight crime.…

Concerns like 'who is Taurus International,' and 'what is Dr. Zhongfu Zhou's relationship with it' UK government has issued a surprise public interest intervention notice against the proposed takeover of Welsh advanced materials specialist Perpetuus Group, claiming it represents a potential threat to national security.…

A pause on community-submitted PRs Cloud darling HashiCorp has temporarily pulled up the drawbridge on community-submitted pull requests to its Terraform project, citing low staffing within the Terraform Core team.…

Proprietary code creep? Microsoft has updated Python support in Visual Studio Code, introducing editing in a web browser. The company has also archived its open-source Python language server in favour of the closed-source Pylance.…

Why are they asking G7 to do their job for them, muses critic Cookies are on the menu today for the G7 as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) proposes to the group of leading global economies that consent pop-ups should be reduced.…

Cops can read the SMTP spec too, y'know Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the user's arrest.…

Verne Global site claimed to be 'one of the most efficient' globally A UK investment company created earlier this year to invest in digital infrastructure assets has splurged £231m to acquire a sizeable data centre in Iceland on the site of a former NATO airfield and naval base.…

Plus: Police aren't treating breaches as terror offence The person who reformatted the Guntrader hack data as a Google Earth-compatible CSV has said they are prepared to go to prison – while denying their actions amounted to a criminal offence.…

Deloitte, Computacenter, KPMG, E&Y among listed suppliers hired by local weather watcher The UK's Met Office has handed seats on a framework contract worth up to £30m to 32 suppliers in a bid to develop a common data platform over the next four years.…

DialADeal is no longer operating A Glasgow-based company is facing a £150,000 penalty handed down by the UK's data watchdog for making more than half a million nuisance calls about bogus green energy deals.…

Some refined their CVs relentlessly. Others studied. Many wept, more than once. But most see an upside to their changed circumstances COVID Logfile III Rick Bryant* cried when he was offered a new job.…

Chair of UK Financial Conduct Authority says more regulation will help innovation to flourish Big Tech and the likes of Kim Kardashian need to be named and shamed so that innovative digital tokens can flourish, according to Charles Randell, chair of the UKs Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Payments Systems Regulator (PSR).…

Rural revitalisation and long-term strategy await founder of mega e-tailer JD.com The founder and CEO of colossal Chinese e-tailer JD.com, Richard Qiangdong Liu, will step down from his leadership positions.…

Special administrative region to share economic zone located on Chinese soil China has revealed plans to create a special economic zone that focuses on development and manufacturing of semiconductors – and will create some fabulous geopolitical interest along the way.…

Open source business model problems for modern-day HyperCard Interview An easy to use programming language that was made open source in 2014 after a successful crowdfunding campaign is going back to closed source after too many customers switched to using it for free.…

Sets sights on third party support and managed services for Oracle, SAP and Microsoft SAP and Oracle services firm Spinnaker Support has launched into database management with the purchase of Dobler Consulting.…

'Arrived' back on the planet quite a bit sooner than expected, sure Firefly Aerospace has confirmed that one of its Reaver engines shut down shortly after its Alpha rocket left the pad last week, resulting in the destruction of the vehicle in spectacular fashion just after reaching supersonic velocity.…

Software 'enhancement' on the way after triple touchdown TITSUP Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.…

How was your weekend? Got some patching done? The Jenkins team issued a reminder over the weekend that one should keep one's systems patched as it found itself with a compromised Confluence service.…

Sponsor Red Bull supposedly gives you wings, but that doesn't mean you have to use them everywhere While most of Europe was still in bed at the weekend, Italian stunt pilot Dario Costa got up early, climbed into his aeroplane and, apropos of nothing, flew it through two Turkish motorway tunnels, becoming the first person on Earth to do so.…

Also: Compiler warnings now treated as errors by default in kernel builds Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges."…

Plus: Google Health app for NHS hospitals discontinued, and Tesla under the spotlight In Brief Facebook has apologized for an "an unacceptable error" after its AI systems asked folks who watched a British video about a Black man if they wanted to view more content on "primates."…

What happened to transferring £1,000-per-day consultant work to the civil service? Flying in the face of a commitment to wean itself off consultants, the NHS Test and Trace programme has awarded Accenture a £4.8m contract extension to keep its much-criticised COVID-19 Test and Trace system up and running for another year.…

Taking the Pis in Paris Bork!Bork!Bork! It is time for le Bork de Paris today as the curse of the cock-up fairy spreads beyond the shores of the UK to blight the Pis of France.…

Don't trust the insurer's techies, take the blame and other practical tips Feature When I first became a company chief techie, the finance director patronisingly explained the basic asymmetry of prevention vs cure. Spending money on assets to stop an attack come out of capex, but spending after the disaster would be up to the insurer, with premiums deducted out of opex. Also, prevention costs reduced current bonuses.…

Tiers of a clown – or the early days of a better service model? Opinion Docker has a problem: too few whales. Its user demographic is hugely skewed to free plan subscribers, while heavier users (meaning corporate customers) are too thin on the ground to generate enough money through their paid-for tiers.…

SMIC's 28nm colossus won't get China closer to self-sufficiency in stuff it buys from Intel and AMD, will help in other ways China's largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has announced it will spend $8.87 billion on a new fabrication facility that will become China's largest such facility used for products other than memory.…

Bump and grind in the server racks Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and with it comes a cautionary tale of how one Register reader's overconfidence led to his undoing, thanks to an unexpected interfacing with a belt buckle, in today's edition of Who, Me?…

Good news for consumers, exporters, and outsourcers The BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have agreed to smooth the path for e-commerce and trade in services.…

Sorry, vAdmins, you probably don't have an excuse to buy Apple's $699 wheels VMware has announced something a little odd: it won't ever support ESXi running on Apple's 2019 Mac Pro.…

It's not as if politicians' birthdays aren't well known, and they get jabbed on live TV Indonesian authorities have admitted that the COVID-19 vaccination certificate of the nation's President has circulated online and tried to explain that it's an indication of admirable transparency, rather than lamentable security.…

A confluence of recent confusion from around the world that you may have missed ROUNDUP Welcome to this week's gallimaufry of gaucheness, as we present a selection of daft stories to make you glad that you're not that person.…

This isn't over says man pushing for neural networks' rights AI systems cannot be granted patents and will not be recognised as inventors in the eyes of the US law, said a federal judge who decided to uphold a previous ruling by the US Patent and Trademark Office this week.…

Address randomisation not implemented on some, it seems A Norwegian student who went wardriving around Oslo on a pushbike has discovered that several popular models of Bluetooth headphones don't implement MAC address randomisation – meaning they can be used to track their wearers.…

So, do copy that floppy? Software piracy, long a source of anxiety among app makers and large software companies, may have some beneficial effects.…

Amid customer fury, PC maker says it has 'no plans to add any further push notifications' to its stealth adware Lenovo has come under fire for the Tips application on its tablets, which has been likened to indelible adware that forces folks to view ads.…

Firefly Aerospace rounds out a wobbly week for rocket fanciers Video The sudden and explosive end of Firefly Aerospace's first test flight of its Alpha rocket rounded out a hat-trick of woe for rocket fans this week.…

Critics celebrate reconsideration of 'spyPhone' regime Apple on Friday said it intends to delay the introduction of its plan to commandeer customers' own devices to scan their iCloud-bound photos for illegal child exploitation imagery, a concession to the broad backlash that followed from the initiative.…

Harassment, bans on discussing pay, responsibilities slashed, and more alleged Updated The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – which investigates complaints against employers – is to examine claims made by two Apple employees, including allegations of unfair changes to working conditions, harassment, and muzzling pay equity discussions.…

Too many inexperienced project managers and not enough DevSecOps The US Air Force's first ever chief software officer has quit the job after branding it "probably the most challenging and infuriating of my entire career" in a remarkably candid blog post.…

Insiders, they don't like it. Bork the Taskbar, bork the Taskbar Microsoft's efforts to shed as much glory as possible with its Windows 11 release have continued with the sudden breakage of the Start Menu and Taskbar for its happy band of Insiders.…