The Register

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.…

Gadget due to be tested this week Video Space-flight researchers are ready to test a prototype drag sail that could one day be used to prevent spacecraft turning into hazardous junk stuck for years in Earth's orbit.…

Apple's growth outpaces Android's, and 5G shipments are surging despite hefty prices 1.37 billion smartphones will ship in 2021, says analyst firm IDC, and 570 million of them will be 5G-ready.…

64-core AMD Epycs win again as upgrade delivers performance boost without slurping more 'leccy Internet-grooming company Cloudflare has revealed that it was unable to put Intel inside its new home-brew servers, because they just used too much energy.…

Someone didn't secure an Elasticsearch database, researchers allege Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Informatics is investigating a leak of over a million records from the nation's COVID-19 quarantine management app.…

HackerOne gets the gig Singapore's governmental digital services arm, GovTech, has launched a "rewards programme" to further crowdsource tests of the nation's cybersecurity.…

Big Tech warns favoring SK players won't go down well – yet South Korea loves its software South Korea's parliament has passed a law that requires Apple and Google to offer third-party payment options in their app stores.…

Judge asks prospective jurors whether they have experience with intimate partner violence The long anticipated fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of biomed upstart Theranos, got underway in San Jose, California, on Tuesday with Judge Edward Davila asking prospective jurors whether they have experienced "intimate partner violence or abuse" or know anyone has.…

Head of Russia's segment says it's time for Roscosmos to build its own orbiting lab Cracks characterized as superficial by Russia have been discovered in the nation's portion of the International Space Station.…

When it a contact not a contract? When it's an incentive plan letter IBM has been sued by sales manager Mark Briggs for allegedly capping sales commission payments despite a written commitment not to do so, joining dozens of cases claiming Big Blue screws its sales staff.…

Chocolate Factory says never-ending pandemic threw spanner in October plan Google has delayed recalling its staff to their office desks until at least January 10, 2022.…

Plus: T-Mobile US apologizes, security holes found in medical pumps, and more In brief The massive attack on Microsoft Exchange servers in March may have been China harvesting information to train AI systems, according to US government officials and computer-security experts who talked to NPR.…

Staged updates mean potential wait till 2022 – particularly for those looking forward to Android app support Microsoft has named October 5 as rollout day for Windows 11, though the IT giant's determination to support only relatively recent hardware will limit adoption.…

Search for sustainable business model continues, but most usage will still be free Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.…

Bang out of order Updated The names and home addresses of 111,000 British firearm owners have been dumped online as a Google Earth-compatible CSV file that pinpoints domestic homes as likely firearm storage locations – a worst-case scenario for victims of the breach.…

'Unprecedented public demand' as dear leaders heave services for world+dog online Gartner is forecasting that governments the world over will splash more than half a trillion dollars on IT next year, a year-on-year growth in spending of 6.5 per cent.…

Bach to basics: The well-funded IPO-er Enterprise application minnow Freshworks has filed for IPO in the hopes that its SaaSy software can take on the likes of Salesforce.…

Critics, meanwhile, voice incredulity over how little data has been shared The National Data Guardian declined to endorse NHS England's effort to be transparent with its recently published detail on data flows from a patient medical information project that put US spy-tech firm Palantir at the heart of the government's response to the pandemic.…

Use third-party tools 'at your own risk' – but what of the risk of Exchange itself? Comment Microsoft customers who use Exchange Online for all their email still often have to run on-premises Exchange to be supported – and that is a burden they could do without as new vulnerabilities appear.…

He's not just a Big Cheese. He's a very naughty boy Who, Me? "Be careful what you wish for." Words that might strike a chord with the IT boss in today's edition of Who, Me?…

Lean in for a tale of shell companies, fake CEOs, bribes, prison time and $3.6m in fines A former Cisco executive was this month sentenced to 36 months in a US prison, and ordered to pay more than $3.6m in fines, for wire fraud and tax violations.…

Orbiter nearly built ahead of ride with SpaceX in August '22. But first, a home-grown rocket launch in a month or so South Korea's first lunar expedition is on track for lift-off in August 2022.…

Partial credit card numbers appear and, worse still, passengers' meal preferences Bangkok Airways has revealed it was the victim of a cyberattack from ransomware group LockBit on August 23rd, resulting in the publishing of stolen data.…

Yet again, Microsoft tries to make your world more Azure-centric Analysis Microsoft won't ship a new version of Hyper-V Server – the free tool it offers alongside Windows Server to build hybrid clouds and manage fleets of virtual machines – with Windows Server 2022.…

Meanwhile, Amazon gripes about SpaceX's constellation plans It's claimed Apple’s upcoming iPhone 13 can use satellites in low Earth orbit for communication.…

Beijing limits kids to three hours a week, suggests they use it to play Chess, Go or coding China has introduced regulations that restrict children under 18 to just three hours of online gaming each week, one hour max each day.…

Reentrancy attack siphoned off millions CREAM Finance, a decentralized loan platform, lost at least $18m in cryptocurrency on Monday to an unidentified thief.…

More human guides recruited, trained to keep eyes on machines, athletes Toyota’s autonomous shuttle service at the Paralympic games in Japan this year has recruited more humans to oversee its vehicles after one of the machines ran over an athlete.…

Chip biz's fix involves performance-inhibiting LFENCE, if warranted Computer scientists at TU Dresden in Germany have found that AMD's Zen processor family is vulnerable to a data-bothering Meltdown-like attack after all.…

'996' culture and its assumption of six twelve hour days - without overtime - labelled abusive and illegal China's Supreme People's Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security have released a lengthy document condemning China's "996" work culture as labour violations that deprive workers of overtime payments.…

You've gotta have standards Opinion We are teetering on the brink of a golden age of AI. It must be true, we keep being told so. This week's preacher is Samsung, which says it has integrated processors with memory to achieve stellar AI numbers: "Approximately twice the performance in AI-based recommendation applications and a 40 per cent decrease in system-wide energy usage."…

297M are rural, 983M use instant messaging, 469M order food online, and they average 26.9 hours online every week More than a billion Chinese citizens now use the internet, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre's 48th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.…

Ancient 'Who owns Unix?' case puts a $14.25M price tag on making some claims go away One strand of the ancient and convoluted SCO versus IBM legal mess that sought to determine who owns UNIX – and perhaps has a claim over Linux – may be about to end.…

One engine failed a second into flight, but it still managed to reach 50km altitude Video Ever wondered what happens when one of an orbital class rocket's main engines fails a second into a flight?…

Says regulatory changes requiring local ownership made it impossible to continue, but fancies a comeback Yahoo!'s Indian outpost has stopped publishing news – even news about cricket.…

'We have another 30 years to look forward to,' says Emperor Penguin – and less to worry about as Spectre-proofing code arrives Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has released version 5.14 of the Linux kernel.…

Plus: Mortgage algorithm bias, and an AI-guided play comes to London In brief Clearview AI’s controversial facial-recognition system has been trialed, at least, by police, government agencies, and universities around the world, according to newly leaked files.…

2014 stealth-em-up hasn't aged a day The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Not that anybody noticed but we skipped the last edition for a number of reasons. 1) Too many betas. Though we were monitoring developments in potential World of Warcraft killer New World and Left 4 Dead's spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood, we didn't see anything that could be discussed fairly. 2) Generally no new full releases of interest. 3) We had to RMA a graphics card and got sad. However, when setting out the vision for this column, there were no hard and fast rules about what got covered. So this time we're headed back to 2014 and a crumbling space station where something extremely violent and dangerous lurks in the shadows……

Squirrely semiconductor swaps make performance difficult to predict Samsung has altered the parts used to make its 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD card, leading a version manufactured in June 2021 to perform differently than an older formulation from April 2021.…

Some tactics never change much Microsoft has warned that it has been tracking a widespread credential-phishing campaign that relies on open redirector links, while simultaneously suggesting it can defend against such schemes.…

Hopefully this'll be the sample that eventually gets sent back to Earth NASA’s Perseverance rover will make a second attempt at collecting a sample of Mars rock for eventual return to Earth – though it's going to scratch its latest target first to make sure it's worth bothering.…

Hardware requirements loophole left in Microsoft doesn't want to say it publicly but it will not stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older or otherwise incompatible PCs.…

Dell's results were upbeat, HP's flat, but investors still worried over supply chain HP Inc and Dell both raised concerns over ongoing component shortages when they reported their July quarters yesterday, with the Palo Alto firm citing "unprecedented demand that is way ahead of supply right now" and Round Rock saying "demand was ahead of revenue growth as we managed supply constraints."…

A sprinkling of Rust and presto! A new multi-language web site appears The GNOME project has created Apps for GNOME, a website to "feature the best applications in the GNOME ecosystem," according to creator Sophie Herold.…

Hot on heels of 'significant concerns' from the UK Nvidia told The Reg it would work "with the European Commission to address any concerns they may have" after reports it is set open a formal competition law investigation into the AI firm's purchase of Arm from Softbank.…

Two 'historic' incidents nearly a decade ago, says statement British infosec firm NCC Group has been rapped over the knuckles after infosec accreditation body CREST found it was "vicariously responsible" for employees who helped staff cheat certification exams.…

Tune in on Sept 2 to find out more about Benford’s distribution Special series If you enjoy our AI & ML conference MCubed, you might also like our brand new monthly webcast on all things machine learning from a software development perspective. There's just one more week until episode one hits and drags you into the depths of data analytics.…

Next stop, Kourou It's been a big week for the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as testing of the observatory was completed and operations to ship the spacecraft to the Kourou launchpad began.…

Announcing the return of El Reg's Boatnotes series with the RN Boatnotes Ahead of the upcoming second edition of The Register's Boatnotes series, the crew of Royal Navy warship HMS Severn has shared a glimpse with the wider world of the food served aboard ship – and it really looks rather good.…

Could help boost deployment times, says analyst Real-time analytical database slinger Rockset has introduced SQL transforms to livestreaming along with a method for rolling up data it claimed will offer users a reduction in the cost of storage and querying.…