The Register

Average unit prices climbed mid-to-high single digits, confirms chief beanie Hewlett Packard says it filed record gross margins for its latest financial quarter after increasing prices for hardware including servers and networking kit in response to industry-wide component shortages.…

Security biz publishes plans for law reforms Infosec firm Rapid7 has joined the chorus of voices urging reform to the UK's Computer Misuse Act, publishing its detailed proposals intended to change the cobwebby old law for the better.…

Central procurement team tickles the market with tantalising offer... but what for? The UK government is putting the feelers out for a bundle of big data products and services in a move that could kick off £2bn in tendering.…

Here in the UK, Sky broadband users back online Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack.…

No, not the 1980s TV show where Lionel Blair attempted to mime data abstraction to Una Stubbs Retro fans, rejoice! A bit of digital archaeology has turned up a working early version of the CLU programming language and the files needed to create it uploaded to GitHub.…

Founder and promoter accused of running 'Ponzi-like scheme' Cryptocurrency startup BitConnect and two men have been sued by America's financial watchdog, which claims the now-defunct biz swindled investors out of billions by lying to them about an automated trading bot that could reap huge profits.…

We can't deny people are paying up left, right, and centre... Interview Many people outside of IT believe computers will do away with jobs, but the current ransomware plague shows that new and more curious kinds of jobs are created at least as fast. So what sort of background sets you up to talk to people holding your data for ransom?…

Mark your diaries: 1 July 2022 is when stuff stops working Microsoft has deprecated two formerly key authentication APIs for Azure Active Directory and many scripts and applications will stop working after June 30th 2022, including older versions of official utilities.…

Listen to me, Palmer, now listen to me Something for the Weekend, Sir? It has been a quiet week. Apart from the nuclear warning siren, of course.…

Getting hot and steamy in London's Docklands On Call Though the week is over, for some the weekend does not involve frolics and adult beverages but a nerve-wracking 48 hours of watching the company phone. Welcome to On Call.…

Now to enact humanity's cunning interplanetary kidnapping plan NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has successfully drilled into a rock and probably retrieved a sample it's hoped will one day be kidnapped on a one-way trip to Earth.…

Biz defends 'safe and successful' ride America's aviation safety officials have grounded Virgin Galactic flights after its rocket trip that took company founder Richard Branson up into the heavens for a few minutes went off course.…

Open-sources the tool it uses to make that happen and says Intel, Samsung, Open Compute, Western Digital and others are keen to play Facebook has open-sourced code it uses to cache data without relying on DRAM for storage.…

Also banned telly shows from featuring men with an 'abnormal aesthetic' – basically the kind of chap you'd find in a boy band China's President Xi Jinping has signaled a push to export services and promised to share locally developed technology with the world.…

Central banks sign up, even though none has a working digital currency yet The central banks of Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa have signed up to test interoperability of central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments.…

PAC mania A popular NPM code library called Pac-Resolver has been updated to eliminate a severe remote-code execution vulnerability. Developers who have incorporated the package into their applications should make sure to update their dependencies to be rid of the bug, and provide necessary updates to users to secure them.…

Hash cracking reveals verboten slurs, terms like 'liberals, 'Palestine,' and 'socialist' ... and Quake's famous Fast InvSqrt GitHub's Copilot comes with a coded list of 1,170 words to prevent the AI programming assistant from responding to input, or generating output, with offensive terms, while also keeping users safe from words like "Israel," "Palestine," "communist," "liberal," and "socialist," according to new research.…

Insecure systems were compromised by miscreant, too, watchdog said America's trade watchdog today banned stalkerware developer SpyFone and its CEO from the surveillance industry, effectively putting an end to its business.…

Door was opened but nobody stepped inside, luckily Autodesk, makers of computer-aided design (CAD) software for manufacturing, has told the US stock market it was targeted as part of the the supply chain attack on SolarWinds' Orion software.…

Plus: We find out why VMware gave up on running Tanzu Application Service on Kubernetes Interview VMware has previewed Tanzu Application Platform, a bundle of Kubernetes packages which it claims will simplify application delivery – but its plans to run the existing Tanzu Application Service on Kubernetes have been abandoned.…

About time: 51 per cent of databases run on open source now Rimini Street is spreading its tentacles beyond proprietary databases and will provide third party support services to platforms with a distinctly open source flavour, including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.…

Zuckerborg plans to appeal Irish data protection slap WhatsApp has been slapped with a fine of €225m [PDF] following a long and drawn out investigation into whether it had provided the necessary data protection information to users under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Miscreants hacking vulnerable orbital hardware could set living standards back by decades in seconds Feature "Space is an invaluable domain, but it is also increasingly crowded and particularly susceptible to a range of cyber vulnerabilities and threats."…

Thou shalt not infringe upon the Register Standards Soviet An Australian drainage company has made a valiant effort to define a new standard for weights; in this specific case they're measuring sewer fatbergs in hippopotami.…

Finishes FY 2021 with a bang and starts to re-open Hyperconverged upstart Nutanix has made vaccinations mandatory for staff attending its offices, but hasn't made coming to the office mandatory.…

One firm hit with at least two attacks as outages continue Two UK VoIP operators have had their services disrupted over the last couple of days by ongoing, aggressive DDoS attacks.…

Backs away from potential Entity List security issues related to Chinese alliance members Ericsson has voiced its concern over "progress" within the O-RAN Alliance, days after Nokia called a technical timeout with the group amid "compliance-related" concerns.…

Duke University boffins figure out a way to boost the security of recognition networks Boffins from Duke University say they have figured out a way to help protect artificial intelligences from adversarial image-modification attacks: by throwing a few imaginary numbers their way.…

Six-hour slump for Direct Connect caused by 'loss of networking devices' – we'll assume that means they broke, not that they fell behind a couch The AP-NORTHEAST-1 region of Amazon Web Services, located in Tokyo, has endured six hours of sub-optimal performance.…

Not too worried about rogue CEO, unconcerned about biz striking out in new directions, apparently Arm has attempted to downplay an analyst's opinion that its Chinese joint venture conducted a "heist" that damaged its prospects in the Middle Kingdom.…

Why not if you've got the money for it? Google is reportedly designing its own Arm-based system-on-chips for Chromebook laptops and tablets to be launched in 2023.…

'A Republican majority will not forget' The Republican minority leader of the US House of Representatives this week issued a very public threat to cellphone networks and social media giants that were asked to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the storming of the Capitol in January.…

Sophos gazes into the abyss A dropper-as-a-service, which cyber-crime newbies can use to easily get their malware onto thousands of victims' PCs, has been dissected and documented this week.…

Regulator says it's happy book, music, newspaper programs can now whisper of the universe beyond the iOS walled garden Updated Apple has said it will make a small but important change to its App Store worldwide after Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) stuck a probe into the US giant's treatment of so-called reader apps.…

Joby hopes to push its ambitious service live in 2024 NASA is testing electric flying cars for a business that wants to launch a commercial air taxi service in 2024.…

Access should have been revoked ... but wasn't, court told On Tuesday, a woman from Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty to destroying computer data at an unidentified credit union from which she had recently been fired.…

Ten-year agreement kicks off in 2022 to help spies do spying Hewlett Packard Enterprise has scored a $2bn contract with the US National Security Agency to provide the cyber-spies a high-performance-computing-as-a-service via the cloudy biz's GreenLake platform.…

Data scientist told he faces ban, biz insists otherwise after pushback On Tuesday, Tariq Rashid, a UK-based data scientist and author, tried to create a t-shirt design using on-demand print shop Spring to celebrate the Riemann zeta function, which is widely known among mathematicians and technical types.…

Workaround available for problem which started a week ago Microsoft is still completing a fix for an issue with its OneDrive cloud storage that "affects a large subset of users worldwide, who have a storage quota that exceeds 1TB," in which files become read-only.…

Then again, it would say that America's National Security Agency has published an FAQ about quantum cryptography, saying it does not know "when or even if" a quantum computer will ever exist to "exploit" public-key cryptography.…

Qualcomm, Texas Instruments alleged to be leaving Bluetooth chips open to attack White-hat hackers have disclosed a bunch of security vulnerabilities, dubbed BrakTooth, affecting commercial Bluetooth devices - and are raising red flags about some vendors' unwillingness to patch the flaws.…

Browser-based editor will open files on GitHub, Azure repositories or from the local device Microsoft is previewing Visual Studio Code for the Web, a code editor that runs entirely in the browser.…

Environmentally damaging old bangers to be replaced with greener veggie versions.. in 1 of its canteens, at least Updated German motor manufacturing megalith Volkswagen has been involved in a major collision with public sentiment over the future of its most popular product: its VW-branded currywurst sausage.…

Startup co-founded by former Applied Micro X-Gene execs emerges from stealth A Silicon Valley startup is stepping out of stealth mode today, publicly vowing to supply high-performance data-center-class RISC-V processors.…

First experiences suggest connection strength less good than claimed Logitech has introduced a new range of business peripherals supporting Bolt, a secure Bluetooth Low Energy protocol - but they will not connect to the existing "Unifying Receiver".…

New flash-and-platter architecture offers 'breakthrough in storage that works differently,' firm claims Western Digital has announced a "breakthrough in storage that works differently," in the form of a new architecture combining traditional platters with solid-state flash: OptiNAND.…

'Universal processor' startup still no nearer to proving bold claims of tenfold performance gain over Chipzilla, AMD Tachyum has announced a milestone on the road to finally launching its much-vaunted high-performance "universal processor," Prodigy, with a first-boot into Linux - but its FPGA prototype is still a long way away from proving the company's bold claims.…

Hold onto your hats, tinfoil brigade! Researchers in Japan have developed a means of wireless charging that would enable electronic devices to be pumped with power anywhere within a room.…

Makes prediction as revenue sinks and profits evaporate at UK trading arm IBM reckons both the pandemic and Brexit could play to its strengths in 2021 – making a claim about turning threats into opportunity in the latest profit and loss accounts filed for its loss-making UK operation.…

Hey kids? Wanna play with the future of electro-robotic transport? You get to do it two years before Lyft South Korean automaker Hyundai has unveiled its fully driverless electric IONIQ 5 Robotaxi.…