The Register

Fixing laptops and solving UX conundra – all in a night’s work Something for the Weekend, Sir? Having a screw on the kitchen table is an everyday thing in our household. The problem is not having a dedicated workbench for those small hardware repair jobs.…

Building the missing spacecraft in Lego's NASA collection Feature The Register's Lego Space odyssey continues with the addition of an Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) to the official Lego Lunar Module kit.…

Buys in to 'AtmaNirbhar Bharat' self-sufficiency drive and ups capacity for servers while it's at it The PC market is on the rise in India, prompting Lenovo to expand its local manufacturing capabilities, the company announced this week.…

When you have eliminated the impossible... On Call Welcome to another in The Register's series of confessions from readers who were either possessed by the pager or all too happy to fire off a demand for On Call support.…

Also offers free mice, power bricks, lap pillows and fast WiFi in cars rated to allow 300km/h video chat The Central Japan Railway Company will replace smoking rooms on some of its Shinkansen bullet trains with Zooming cars.…

Still, that'll be 100 quid, please Scientists in Japan have 3D printed an approximation of one of the nation's delicacies, Wagyu beef, in an experiment involving bovine stem cells.…

Malaysian fake news laws didn't work well, so Big Tech should have to do better at spotting and stopping bad actors Society should treat disinformation as the product of an industry worthy of regulation, not a crime committed by individuals, according to Dr Ross Tapsell, a senior lecturer and researcher at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific.…

Allows direct contact between devs and users, promises transparency and better search – but only in the USA Apple has announced the settlement of an anti-trust case brought by a group of developers, and while Cupertino has made concessions the result will not be huge changes in the way the App Store operates or the company's practices.…

Stealthy flash, firmware transplant in WD Blue SN550 attracts attention Western Digital says it will alert customers when it reformulates its products by modifying their firmware and electronics, as opposed to burying salient changes on a spec sheet without any public announcement.…

Microsoft warns customers of ChaosDB hole that lay dormant for months Infosec outfit Wiz has revealed that Microsoft’s flagship Azure database Cosmos DB could have been exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access – including the ability to read, write, and delete data – to any Cosmos DB instance on Azure. Without authorization. For months.…

Co-founder of mobile dev biz HeadSpin Manish Lachwani charged with fraud The US Department of Justice and the SEC on Wednesday charged the former CEO and co-founder of mobile development testing biz HeadSpin with defrauding investors.…

If you want all these new fabs, you're gonna pay for 'em, pal TSMC is reportedly increasing its chip manufacturing prices by as much as 20 per cent in the near future.…

Tech Transparency Project accuses iGiant of lip service to child safety Apple, having recently invoked the "think of the children" defense against rivals seeking to open competing iOS App Stores, has been accused of not thinking of the children.…

Korean firms also keen to be your Seoul provider, says expert South Korea is potentially on its way to tweaking its Telecommunications Business Act to stop Apple and Google from taking a cut of in-app purchases after a bill was approved by a committee of its National Assembly.…

That went well California-based ML data pipeline company Splice Machine has begun insolvency proceedings, according to a statement on its website.…

Don't poke the bear! Or urinate on it If you're ever holidaying in the frigid wastes of Finnmark – where the borders of Norway, Finland, and Russia meet – don't do the whole "now I'm in Norway, now I'm in Russia" skit because in Norway they don't tolerate that kind of crap.…

'People wanted a cleaner and simpler Start' said Microsoft, but not everyone's happy Windows 11 users are unsure of the merits of the new Start menu, according to feedback so far.…

Decade-old policy starting to look silly amid myriad of online late-night vices available to them South Korea is lightening up on a 2011 law that blocked video game access from midnight until 6 am for players under the age of 16 in an effort to curb adolescent gaming addiction.…

This is your one-year warning It is less than a year until support for Java 7 finally comes to an end, and Microsoft has reminded users running apps in the language on its cloud that it is time to move on.…

New Information Commissioner to be given licence to promote 'innovation and growth' The UK has named a new Information Commissioner and announced a bullish approach to reforming data laws post-Brexit. That is, if it's all OK with the European Union.…

Using that CSP 2.0 feature? You may have received a worrying missive The director of a tiny UK company has apologised after sending letters to businesses suggesting they had infringed his patents that he claimed covered an age-old web standard.…

Two-day hackathon to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and where to put them The UK's venerable Ordnance Survey is to fling open its electronic doors in an effort to tackle infrastructure challenges faced by the UK's rollout of electric vehicles (EVs).…

Excession chief exec testifies in High Court of England and Wales A company is suing the Police Digital Service (PDS) over a framework worth up to £18m after losing a bid to provide a mass surveillance platform, claiming police managers broke laws on the awarding of public contracts.…

The usual suspects The commercial wing of the UK government has named the winners on a £3.5bn framework to provide public-sector contact centres, including enterprise and infrastructure software to support them.…

After White House summit, AWS promises MFA tokens, Google and Microsoft spray money, IBM 'announces' snapshots against ransomware US President Joe Biden staged a cyber security summit at the White House, and it's produced quick results in the form of big tech making vague promises about stuff they think will improve the nation's security…

And it's a sequel to the Tinder stalking flaw Up until this year, dating app Bumble inadvertently provided a way to find the exact location of its internet lonely-hearts, much in the same way one could geo-locate Tinder users back in 2014.…

9.8-rated bug allows arbitrary code execution – possibly without authentication Atlassian has warned users of its Confluence Server that they need to patch the product to remedy a Critical-rated flaw.…

Hands Zuck its second-largest fine ever, also makes Netflix pay up and warns Google to be more obvious about privacy Facebook, Netflix and Google have all received reprimands or fines, and an order to make corrective action, from South Korea's government data protection watchdog, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC).…

Bright denies all in this odd tale of a leaky VPN, creepy proxy networks, 8Chan, clouds hosting wonky workloads, and Swedish digital rights org Qurium Updated Swedish digital rights organisation Qurium has alleged that an Israeli company called Bright Data has helped the government of the Philippines to DDOS local human rights organisation Karapatan.…

Can't keep up with software licence payments but says it's been on top of VMware payments for at least a whole year now Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue has stated that a recent outage of its public-facing applications was not caused by pirated software, but admitted it's not always on top of licences and some of its code may be unsupported.…

44-PFLOPS Polaris 'testbed' ordered ahead of Chipzilla-powered Aurora Uncle Sam's Argonne National Laboratory has ordered Polaris – a supercomputer to be built from AMD Epyc processors and Nvidia GPUs – to test its applications in anticipation of eventually getting the Intel-delayed Aurora super.…

It may hurt community policing, too Police responding to ShotSpotter's AI-generated alerts of gunfire find evidence of actual gun-related crime only about one time in ten, a Chicago public watchdog has found.…

Multi-use toolkit deployed on victims' networks across Asia, North America ESET and TrendMicro have identified a novel and sophisticated backdoor tool that miscreants have slipped onto compromised Windows computers in companies mostly in Asia but also in North America.…

Researchers warn of Dark.IoT's rapidly evolving nasty A denial-of-service vulnerability affecting SDKs for Realtek chipsets used in 65 vendors' IoT devices has been incorporated into a son-of-Mirai botnet, according to new research.…

Sounds sus to us – most talked about maybe Python is the "de facto platform for new technologies," according to research by the IEEE in its Spectrum publication.…

Business Class a bit too costly but Free a little limited? Here comes Standard Atlassian has fiddled with its Trello pricing tiers and added a new one for customers who found the leap from Free to Business Class a jump too far.…

Big Blue continues to reap rewards from pandemic in the UK IBM has been awarded a contract extension to provide its Strategic Trace Solution to the NHS Test and Trace service for England, securing additional fees of around £20m on the deal signed last year.…

Monitoring UN's Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space among use cases Forty-five years after the United States entered into the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, one of its citizens has some doubts about the way it's working out.…

Unless you like shipping buggy or vulnerable code, keep your hands on the wheel Academics have put GitHub's Copilot to the test on the security front, and said they found that roughly 40 per cent of the time, code generated by the programming assistant is, at best, buggy, and at worst, potentially vulnerable to attack.…

Now Google reckons security isn't good enough, and Android is proprietary On the 30th anniversary of the announcement of Linux by Linus Torvalds, Red Hat has said that it worked because of the way the OS was licensed.…

Microsoft would like to know your location. Bedroom furniture or homewares? Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft Windows flaunts itself upon the screens of IKEA as the not-at-all creepy setup screens pose an unanswerable question – can we use your location?…

Suggests standard for this stuff should land in 2022 and tech improves performance by 40 per cent or more Samsung has advanced its plans to relieve devices of the tedious chore that is moving data out of memory and into a processor – by putting more processing power into memory. It's already running in servers and should become a standard of sorts next year.…

Now to get the rest of ASEAN bloc interested, says Singapore government exec Four regions and provinces in China have announced they are joining an existing dedicated internet connectivity facility linking the Middle Kingdom and Singapore.…

Greg Kroah-Hartman talks to El Reg about world domination, what was, and what may be for the kernel Interview On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby.…

Apologises for slow processing, says those invited for further tests will hear by November The European Space Agency's astronaut recruitment project has far exceeded its most optimistic forecasts by generating 23,000 applications.…

Never mind that semiconductor foundries require lots of water and that Arizona is a desert state The US city of Phoenix, Arizona is getting more semiconductor factories – if all goes according to the plan lined up yesterday by Taiwan economic development officials and an Arizona economic group.…

australia-southeast2 has a big wobble less than a month after launch On July 25th, Google cloud launched a new region with all sorts of fanfare about how the new facility – australia-southeast2 in Melbourne – would accelerate the nation's digital transformation and make the world a better place in myriad ways.…

ISS installation work to be carried out some other time NASA on Tuesday postponed a spacewalk after one of the astronauts due to work outside the International Space Station had a “pinched nerve” in his neck.…

In battery containment bags we trust Passengers escaped an Alaska Airlines jet via emergency slides on Monday night after a malfunctioning smartphone filled the cabin with smoke.…

Scumbag spent years tricking victims into handing over login details A California man this month admitted he hoarded hundreds of thousands of photos and videos stolen from strangers' Apple iCloud accounts to find and share images of nude young women.…