The Register

We can't rewind, we've gone too far Something for the Weekend, Sir? My house has gone missing. Where it used to be, there is just an absence, a nothing. I guess you could call it a gap in the housing market.…

Eye-catching letter exchange revealed The China-based surveillance equipment manufacturer accused of being linked to the human rights abuse of the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang has denied any wrongdoing in a heated exchange with the UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner.…

The Register talks to Eben Upton about supply, demand, and hand-to-hand combat until 2023 Interview "It's hand-to-hand combat" was the phrase used by Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton when talking to The Register about meeting demand amid the ongoing chip supply challenges faced by the computer industry.…

May have unbeatable powers of distraction as automaker talks up its coming-soon-now AI supercomputer and glosses over product delays Tesla has posted a lengthy job ad for its AI efforts by announcing it's going to build a humaniform robot prototype.…

You know that thing that's supposed to put out the fire? On Call Welcome to another edition of The Register's On Call in which incompetence saves a reader's bacon from a close encounter with the frying pan.…

Carriers are sharing kit to preserve cash – now for the private 5G boom China had over half a billion 5G subscribers and over a million 5G base stations as of June 30, but the nation's big three mobile carriers have warned of a slowdown.…

Q2 saw Sammy lean into the booming memory market while Intel’s chip sales remain stagnant Samsung has taken the sales lead as the world's largest semiconductor supplier in 2021's second quarter after a ten per cent jump allowed it to leapfrog Intel in the rankings, said semiconductor-centric analyst firm IC Insights.…

Current issues aren't stopping it from growing fast – or 400Gbit Ethernet sales booming Cisco has wrapped its 2021 financial year with better-than-expected revenue, and a warning that supply chain constraints could persist until this time next year.…

Microsoft 365, Office 365 to cost a little bit more from next March Microsoft, burdened by growing demand for its cloud services and healthy revenue, said on Thursday that it will raise commercial prices for Microsoft 365 in six months.…

Plus: Toyota, Volkswagen to cut production due to component drought GlobalFoundries is reportedly planning to debut on the stock market in early 2022, chilling rumors Intel was set to absorb the US chip manufacturer in a $30bn deal.…

Yes, it involves VR. Meanwhile, in the real world, the FTC would like a chat about competition Facebook, a company perhaps not top of mind when it comes to enterprise applications, trust, or privacy, sees an opportunity to make the unloved video conferencing experience more convoluted, costly, and cartoonish.…

Letter to Cook & Co warns image-probing tech could also harm kids More than ninety human rights groups from around the world have signed a letter condemning Apple's plans to scan devices for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) – and warned Cupertino could usher in "censorship, surveillance and persecution on a global basis."…

Join us online and your next migration could be plain sailing Webcast When you’re dealing with large amounts of, shall we say, semi-structured data, a JSON database can be a life saver. And, in theory at least, it’s all something you can manage yourself, whether on-prem or in the cloud.…

Yep. It's Microsoft. Other big guns investing might see it as 'check-off item or loss leader,' claims Forrester Microsoft is set to be the only firm among the enterprise tech giants investing in robotic process automation (RPA) tools to make a significant impact, a report from Forrester claims.…

Massive shift requiring masses of backup... not backed up in cold storage medium's numbers Despite a record year in 2019 that many analysts believed would only be topped in 2020, a report by tape storage heavyweights at the LTO org says the medium's sales dropped significantly last year – by nearly 8 per cent – with 105,198PB of total tape capacity (compressed) shipped.…

Company keen to flog Azure and subscription licensing even for on-premises Microsoft has released Windows Server 2022, an LTS edition that has five years mainstream support and 10 years extended support.…

Regulator send out one more ping The British government has intervened in the US buyout of defence supplier Ultra Electronics, temporarily halting the acquisition and prohibiting any tech transfer overseas.…

Reveals new Efficient and Performance cores, blended on Alder Lake chips, Sapphire Rapids multi-CPUs for servers and clouds Intel has revealed some details about its upcoming chip designs, and claims they are the biggest and most significant change to its products for years.…

Also: Native for Apple Silicon but with health warning The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.2, including a native build for Apple Silicon though users are warned not to use it "for any critical purpose."…

Supercomputing above the clouds Microsoft and HPE were cock-a-hoop yesterday with the trumpeting of data bursts from HPE hardware aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to Microsoft's Azure, starting with the inevitable "hello world".…

Caution from NHS grandee came before programme was even launched Before the UK government launched its programme to extract patient data from GP systems in England and Wales – now twice-delayed – the National Data Guardian (NDG) warned the government could be "perceived as trying to introduce changes 'under the radar'".…

Second-gen silicon to be more accessible for devs and applications Baidu, China's biggest search engine company, says it has started making an AI chip that will enable applications ranging from cloud services to autonomous cars.…

'It blocks a migration to Office 64 here, because we cannot get our code out' A compiler bug in 64-bit Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) on Windows has existed unfixed for years, a user complained, and is blocking migration to 64-bit Office.…

Plus: Pearson settles case for $1m alleging it misled investors over data spillage The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Wednesday it charged three former Netflix employees and two of their contacts with insider trading that resulted in a net profit of over US$3 million.…

Sometimes you need a little help with those big questions Promo When you’re constantly told that data is your organisation’s most precious resource, it’s natural to want to gather as much of it as you can, to hoard it, keep it safe. But all that data is meaningless unless you and your colleagues have the tools to make sense of it.…

China is ahead of US and Europe on regulation, says company prez The President of Chinese web giant Tencent has predicted that Beijing has more regulations in store for the nation's internet companies, and welcomed whatever's coming.…

Remote sensing data to be shared among BRICS bloc, so they can all watch the world from above The space agencies of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have agreed to share some satellite sensing data.…

Four months after Microsoft went public, ex-RIM biz puts its hand up BlackBerry this week issued a critical security advisory for past versions of its QNX Real Time Operating System (RTOS), used in more than 175m cars, medical equipment, and industrial systems.…

The day before Elon's big party, too Two US senators have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla over concerns the automaker is misleading people by exaggerating or misrepresenting the abilities of its vehicles' Autopilot and Full-Self Driving (FSD) features.…

Starting with: Neural net already found in iOS, hash collisions, and more Apple's system to scan iCloud-bound photos on iOS devices to find illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is supposed to ship in iOS 15 later this year.…

Could it be a trap? The mysterious thief who stole $600m-plus in cryptocurrencies from Poly Network has been offered the role of Chief Security Advisor at the Chinese blockchain biz.…

Stripped-down OS prepares to unroll the birthday bunting Microsoft has updated its internal-use (and now public) container Linux, CBL-Mariner.…

Mitigation: Don't let randomers from the internet log in to your firewall Updated A command injection vulnerability exists in Fortinet's management interface for its FortiWeb web app firewall, according to infosec firm Rapid7.…

The Reg speaks to chief scientist in fuel-compression experiment The US government's nuclear physicists say they are closing in on fusion ignition – the point at which a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining – in the lab by compressing matter with lasers.…

Looking forward to bright, IE-less future. Kind of Microsoft has pulled another block from the Internet Explorer Jenga, with the end of support for IE11 in Microsoft 365.…

18 months after controversial project began, non-departmental public body finally gives up the goods The health and social care data watchdog for England chastised the UK government for failing to publish details of information released from the Palantir-based COVID-19 data store within a year of the project's start.…

Affected users to get free McAfee ID protection, so that's OK then T-Mobile US has begun admitting to the theft of 100 million user accounts in stages, confessing overnight that 8 million people's personal details had been stolen from its servers.…

Essential reading for developers in search of performance and efficiency The forthcoming .NET 6 will be significantly faster than its predecessors, according to a monster post by Microsoft Partner Software Engineer Stephen Toub.…

Harry Potter and the Unstoppable Simpletons A misguided attempt to "seize" Edinburgh Castle yesterday evening under "Magna Carta" – a Latin royal charter signed by King John of England in 1215 – proved short-lived.…

Fascinating project but will it ever be practical? Developer Hector Martin has reported on progress with Asahi Linux, a port for Apple Silicon Macs, and said that the OS now works but with some limitations, notably a lack of accelerated graphics.…

Capita won current deal worth £325m to run public-sector networks until 2023 The Scottish government is re-tendering the deal giving public bodies access to wide-area network services in contracts that could be worth up to £350m.…

Almost any org that could expose data needs a dedicated security team with an obligation to report breaches China's government has introduced rules for protection of critical information infrastructure.…

Tune in on the first Thursday of every month to learn about algorithms, tools, and services from field experts Special series Join us for a series of practitioner-led webcasts on all things software development and machine learning, inspired by our MCubed conference series.…

Sarah Connor is safe for now Video Boston Dynamics has released its flashiest promo video yet: a one-minute clip of not one but two Atlas robots competently completing a parkour obstacle course.…

Claim members already pay plenty, and might build fewer networks if asked to pay more Telco lobby groups have argued that their members should be exempt from proposed global tax rules that aim to stop multinational companies – especially large technology outfits – legally but cynically avoiding tax by conducting online activities in low-tax jurisdictions.…

Internet standards body admits to gender issues, communications problems, pledges fix for undefined 'high priority concerns' The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the open standards organisation that defines and develops internet standards, has surveyed its membership, and found that many of its key efforts are merely "minimally acceptable" – rather than efficient or inclusive.…

Terrorists' complaint service a bridge too far for encrypted chat biz For months, Facebook's WhatsApp paid no attention to the way the Taliban used the messaging service to sell surrender to the people of Afghanistan.…

Because what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas After going entirely virtual this year, the Consumer Electronics Show has said it will hold a physical mega-event in 2022 – and you'll need proof of vaccination against the coronavirus to attend in person.…

Here's $15,000 to make that third-party inspection happen, says Florida outfit Updated Last week, Apple essentially invited security researchers to probe its forthcoming technology that's supposed to help thwart the spread of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM).…

Those other AlmaLinux offerings with 'software plans'? Not affiliated, says community leader CentOS replacement AlmaLinux will be available on Azure Marketplace at no extra software cost, and Microsoft will sponsor a global mirror network for the operating system, it was announced today.…