The Register

Also: After over 10 years, last stable release of GNOME 3.x The next release of GNOME desktop, version 41, is now in beta and its features and API are frozen.…

Terminally dumb tellies now ... if they switch on the Wi-Fi Samsung is remotely bricking smart TVs it said were looted from one of its South African warehouses amid violent unrest in the nation.…

A Baltic bork in the Republic of Lithuania Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork takes a trip to the Baltic today, with a wraparound bit of digital signage demonstrating that all is not well in the Republic of Lithuania.…

Jury finds message-filtering tech misappropriation was 'wilful and malicious' Infosec firm Proofpoint has won $14m from a former vice president and his new employer after a jury found they had unlawfully used its trade secrets when he moved to the other company.…

Will this nightmare ever cease? Sugar fiends headed to the Golden Arches for a sweet treat were to be disappointed today as McDonald's admitted its restaurants in Great Britain had run out of milkshakes.…

Open-source rival shows it can compete with Microsoft's GitHub GitLab has updated its code repository and DevOps platform to version 14.2, including a private beta of a macOS "build cloud" for compiling applications for Apple's operating system.…

Apparently the revolution is now, and it is well funded Samsung announced today it would invest over $200bn (₩240 trillion) in strategic businesses like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, communication networks, and IT research.…

VMware-packaged AI suite now on sale Nvidia has extended its on-premises AI push into the wonderful world of hyperconverged infrastructure.…

We never managed to fix our Game Boy, but maybe we could repair this? Summer is often referred to as "The Silly Season" and so it was with delight that we noted the iFixit team had turned their screwdrivers onto the gaming nostalgia-fest that is the upcoming Playdate.…

Altered priorities ahead Fifteen years ago, Amazon rolled out the public beta of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ushering in a new era of cloud computing ... and overspending on clouds of every flavour, according to a Hashicorp report.…

Omnipresent analyst house returns to the source Comment It always comes around sooner than you think. With a large slice of fantasy, cultural mythology, and suspension of disbelief, it's time to get out the tinsel and celebrate the arrival of this year's Gartner hype cycle.…

Contract first signed in 1996 comes to an end in 2025 The UK's Department for Education is to retender the outsourcing contract for teachers' pensions in a deal worth £185m to replace a relationship with Capita that has lasted 25 years.…

Thought you were all set to return? Yeah, about that Cloud directory and identity management outfit JumpCloud has released a survey that extends a big, fat middle finger to proponents of a rush back to the office: 71 per cent of the UK's small and medium-sized enterprises will keep home-working a thing. Indefinitely.…

Driver assistance feature was engaged in level-2 autonomous car at time of incident Police are investigating an electrical vehicle company in China following claims that car data was tampered with following a fatal collision.…

Advice and more from our friends at OutSystems and AWS Promo It’s easy to say you want to deliver frictionless experiences for your customers across multiple channels. But what does that even mean?…

Boffins ponder where Usain Bolt of space rocks came from Astronomers have discovered the fastest asteroid orbiting the Sun yet, a one-kilometre-wide space rock that completes a lap of our star every 113 Earth days.…

Chipzilla gets to make 'em and crow that it has a really prestigious foundry customer The United States' National Security Technology Accelerator (NXTA) has picked Qualcomm and Intel to help it develop and construct chips for use by the nation’s military.…

Rolling out test fleet of 1000 in low-traffic locations across China Alibaba has revealed one reason it's decided to deploy 1000 rolling delivery robots across China: they don't stop work to smoke.…

Services giant given three weeks to fix it after emergency maintenance led to outage India's government has summoned the CEO of Infosys to explain why a tax portal built by the services giant remains a glitchy mess ten weeks after launch.…

The plod needs a lesson in keeping air traffic controllers in the loop, it seems A police drone hit and significantly damaged a Cessna coming in for landing in Canada earlier this month.…

'I'm quitting the show' says mystery thief Poly Network says virtually all of the crypto-currency funds, valued at $610m, stolen from it by a thief have been returned.…

Plus: Cloudflare tackles huge DDoS attack, Apple and CSAM, and more In brief Razer is working on an updated installer after it was discovered you can gain admin privileges on Windows by plugging in one of the gaming gear maker's mice or keyboards.…

Low-code platform comes with high expectations that folks understand security Forty-seven government entities and privacy companies, including Microsoft, exposed 38 million sensitive data records online by misconfiguring the Windows giant's Power Apps, a low-code service that promises an easy way to build professional applications.…

An interplanetary ESCAPADE via Photon spacecraft and a NASA commercial rocket Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab has been tapped to provide a pair of Photon spacecraft for a mission to Mars in 2024.…

Find out more at Nasuni CloudBound21 Promo If you’re still not convinced of the need to reexamine your whole approach to file management, perhaps a ransomware attack will change your mind.…

Mirroring UK, US efforts to crack down on cheap 'n' cheerful internet gadgets Infosec pros and other technically minded folk have just under a week left to comment on EU plans to introduce new regulations obligating consumer IoT device makers to address online security issues, data protection, privacy and fraud prevention.…

HMRC's 'fundamentally flawed' Check Employment Status Tool strikes again Updated Her Majesty's Courts & Tribunal Service has been forced to pay the UK taxman £12.5m due to incorrect assessments regarding the employment status of contractors under controversial IR35 rules.…

Should 'run like a dream' when everything's done, says dev A member of the Asahi Linux team has shown the GNOME desktop running on the Apple M1 chip, reporting that it is "not great, but usable."…

ASCII selfies and hands-on action in the heart of Cambridge Double-u, double-u, double-u. "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," as the great Douglas Adams once said.…

'The absolute best sales pitch for Redis that I have ever seen' AWS has introduced MemoryDB, a Redis-compatible database manager that combines in-memory performance with persistence.…

What do we want? Rockets! When do we want them? In the next few years Scotland has taken another step towards commercial vertical launch capability with the dismissal of objections instigated by Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen.…

Kamala Harris brings message of recommitment to Indo-Pacific amid Afghanistan crisis The United States and Singapore will cooperate to improve cybersecurity and supply chains in an era defined by the pandemic and climate crisis, said US Vice President Kamala Harris in a joint press conference with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong today.…

From single points of failure to training and policies, Percy Liang covers a wide range of topics in this Q&A Interview Even if you haven't heard of "foundation models" in AI, you've probably encountered one or more of them in some way. They could be rather pivotal for the future of not only machine learning and computer science but also society as a whole.…

Only one company can make VR so bad it makes MS Teams look good – Facebook Opinion You can say a lot about Facebook's insane parasitism of human society. Like the fungus that infects an ant and takes over its nervous system, making it climb to the top of a plant and erupt in an explosion of spores, Facebook has mindlessly evolved to exploit us with maximal efficiency.…

The neverending battle betweeen youthful optimism and aged cyncism Who, Me? Start your Monday with a cautionary tale from the files of Who, Me? and a warning (if one were needed) that hiring a teenager to write your operating system might not go so well.…

But first, a holiday while Mars is on the other side of the Sun China's National Space Administration has announced that the Zhurong Mars rover has ticked off everything on its to-do list, and is still ticking over, so has been assigned an extended mission.…

Regs coming into effect from November 1 even give your family rights to your data after you log off this mortal coil China has passed a law that authorities say "further perfects" existing arrangements for protection of personal data.…

Linus Torvalds also has fun medical advice about not whacking yourself with sharp objects Version 5.14 of the Linux kernel seems set to debut next week, after a very calm development process.…

Then published its successor and claimed that was its debut effort Facebook has revealed a report that shows the most-shared link on the platform in the first three months of 2021 described questionable interpretation of a death attributed to a COVID-19 vaccination – but only did so after publishing a later and more flattering report.…

Who knew that verifiable and digital documentation might move a little faster than paper? Singapore and Australia have trialled – and quite liked – blockchain as a means of verifying the Certificates of Origin (COO) that document international trade.…

Plus: Intel winds down RealSense, and more In brief The case against a man accused of murder has been thrown out by a judge after prosecutors withdrew disputed evidence of an AI-identified gunshot sound.…

Academics find algorithmic surveillance just isn't worth it A committee at the University of Texas in Austin has advised against using AI software to oversee students' online tests, citing the psychological toll on students and the financial toll on academic institutions.…

Stores of iThings will stay open, though Apple has again pushed back the date for its staff to return to their offices, this time from October until at least January 2022, as the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread in America and beyond.…

Read the allegations web giant tried to keep secret from the public Epic Games' objections to Google's business practices became clearer on Thursday with the release of previously redacted accusations in the gaming giant's lawsuit against the internet goliath.…

Look away from those price rises and look at our new toys! Microsoft attempted to derail the bad news train last night by releasing another Windows 11 update – replete with ISOs – and unveiling a preview of the wunder-OS on Azure Virtual Desktop.…

US agency agrees to pause in exchange for 'expedited' schedule. That'll be a first for Artemis NASA is calling a halt to work on its Human Landing System for more than two months while the legal shenanigans triggered by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin run their course.…

We knew this was coming but from Britain? Odd Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has thrown a spanner into Nvidia's buyout of Arm, saying the deal presented "significant competition concerns" in a report published today.…

Founder of The Spaghetti Detective apologises for config blunder A 3D printer remote monitoring company accidentally exposed users' printers to each other after a cloud reconfiguration snafu.…

Suppliers need to support bathing water widgets, among other things The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wants to get to know some tech suppliers able to support its ambition to upgrade its data services platform in a deal which could be worth £10m.…

Hope to address the noise of airflows over flaps and other parts as that can be louder than engines The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has teamed with Boeing on a joint research project to make quieter mid-sized passenger planes – by figuring out how to cut the noise generated by their airframes.…