The Register

Lighter lockdowns meant more effective manufacturing and logistics India PC and smartphones shipments grew significantly in Q2 2021 as the world carried on with COVID, a little less rattled by lockdowns and adapting to work and learn-from-home policies.…

Help me, officer, I’m lost! 'No problem, sir, you’re right in front of me' Something for the Weekend, Sir? "This website is requesting permission to access your location. Yes/No?" Absolutely not. My personal details are sacred!…

One of issues with public sector IT? Technical debt. £2.3bn to keep lights on in 2019, and £22bn more over next 5 years Management consultancy McKinsey appears to be well placed to influence UK government’s future technology strategy after winning a £3m, eight-week contract to build business cases ahead of the Spending Review ’21.…

But I hired the most expensive of contractors – how could this have happened? On Call Just one more day to go – the weekend is creeping into a view. Unless, of course, you're one of those brave souls cursed to be forever On Call.…

Suggests the world to sort out a ban to preserve human rights, issues sternly worded 'Please Explain' to Israel The United Nations has called for a moratorium on the sale of "life threatening" surveillance technology and singled out the NSO Group and Israel for criticism.…

Fault injection technique presents risk in cloud environments from rogue admins AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) scheme is not as secure as its name suggests.…

Hands-off driving detectors required, over-the-air updates to be strictly regulated China has drafted new rules required of its autonomous and networked vehicle builders.…

BTW is that pronounced Jiffy or? The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority wants Facebook to sell Giphy to prevent the Silicon Valley giant from tyrannizing the happiest place on the internet: the land of GIFs.…

Organizational structure, piecemeal approach and hiring practices all need to change, says Borg security bigwig A senior Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) advisor at Cisco has penned a commentary on the state of US cybersecurity frameworks, criticizing current government infosec and advocating for more autonomy for CISOs and a better understanding of the task at hand from those creating policies.…

Pledges to 'strengthen organizational guardrails' with raft of new policy and training initiatives Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has published a letter sent to its 250,000-plus staff in which it explains its reaction to recent news of a harrowing sexual assault allegedly perpetrated by a company manager – and the company's response includes self-defense training for staff.…

Allegations of purloined trade secrets, unfair competition, national security threats, and more packed into lawsuit A California-based IT consultancy has sued Huawei and its subsidiary in Pakistan alleging the Chinese telecom firm stole its trade secrets and failed to honor a contract to develop technology for Pakistani authorities.…

It's the Social distancing Network™ Facebook has delayed recalling its workers to their offices in the US and beyond until January next year at the earliest.…

Plus: eBPF Foundation emerges, Exchange severs probed for ProxyShell holes, and more In brief If your Git operations start failing on Friday, August 13 with GitHub, it may well be because you're still using password authentication – and you need to change that.…

Not a hardware or software bug, for a change Mars rover Perseverance failed in its first attempt to collect a sample of rock from the Red Planet because the material crumbled to dust, NASA scientists have said.…

Judge wrong to prevent Uncle Sam from challenging psychiatrist's suicide risk report, says High Court Analysis Julian Assange has lost a legal scrap in court, this time over the US government's attempt to expand its grounds for extraditing him from England to stand trial in America.…

Project said to be well resourced, lots of tweaks in new version, plenty more to do Thunderbird 91 has been released with support for Apple Silicon and other enhancements.…

5150: Not just a medical emergency, also the beginning of the office brick It is 40 years today since the IBM Model 5150 was unleashed upon the world, creating a tsunami of beige that washed over offices everywhere.…

Zoom in on zero trust by tuning in and finding out Webcast Being hit by ransomware is gut wrenching enough, but it’ll be ten times worse if it coincides with the realization that your data protection systems just aren’t up the job anymore.…

SaaSy HR firm gets around a bit Workday has jumped into bed with Google Cloud, making it the preferred provider to run workloads for core industry in a public cloud environment - five years after talking in similarly glowing terms about AWS.…

No word on whether gang got their mitts on data, though Outsourcing and accounting firm Accenture has been struck by Lockbit ransomware.…

Teams and Enterprise only for now GitHub's Codespaces, cloud-based development environments that have been in preview since May 2020, are finally here. Prices range from $0.18 to $2.88 per hour.…

PostgreSQL acceleration outfit Swarm64 also nabbed ServiceNow has done some digging between the sofa cushions and found enough loose change to bag a couple of acquisitions.…

Tsai Ing-wen also expressed desire to attract external tech talent in rare interview Taiwan's need to pull in external tech talent and the nation's supply chain dependence on China were two topics covered in a rare interview with President Tsai Ing-wen by Japanese outlet Bungei Shunju.…

Principled Linux distro with curated apps, but spartan install may flummox newbies Elementary has released version 6 of its Ubuntu-based operating system, named Odin, on a "pay what you want" model.…

Vaccine deceit is infectious The number of COVID cases in the US and elsewhere is again rising, thanks to the Delta Variant, lagging vaccination rates, and mask resistance among some.…

Who needs pesky buttons when the Internet of Bork is here? Bork!Bork!Bork! There are times when a bork is elevated from amusing to downright sinister. What code is lurking behind the scenes on your elevator?…

Plus: Visual Studio rolls out preview 3 of 2022 version Microsoft has released preview 7 of its .NET 6 developer platform and declared new features "done" ahead of an expected arrival for this long-term support version in November.…

Netflix and friends are probably safe as only shows revealed so far are fronted by staff or streamed from its own conference When you put up your feet at the end of a hard day's toil, Salesforce wants you to consider some inspirational business content it will soon start pumping onto the internet with its very own video streaming service — called "Salesforce+".…

Want to rewrite your tech future? Chapter 2 starts here Webcast Lifting and shifting your virtualized infrastructure to the cloud is no mean achievement. Once you’ve done that, you can sit back, pat yourself on the back … and start planning for the real work.…

Monopoly review, digital IDs and more on agenda in new plan from Central Committee and State Council The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the nation's State Council have sketched out a direction for new regulation of its technology industry – and indeed the entire nation.…

Don't get your hopes up about that Sept 24, 2182 end-of-world party Bennu, already considered the second most dangerous asteroid in the Solar System, has a slightly increased chance of hitting Earth in the coming centuries, NASA said this week.…

StarHub's breach announcement came a month after discovery of customer file on dump site Singapore pay TV, internet and mobile phone provider StarHub is in the process of notifying 57,191 customers via email that they are victims of a cyber attack that leaked national identity card numbers, mobile numbers and email addresses.…

Upper stage didn't ignite, Earth observation satellite likely lost India's return to space has failed, after the upper stage of a Thursday launch went awry.…

Work drinking culture also criticised in wake of Alibaba sexual assault incident China has announced a crackdown on naughty karaoke.…

It was just a prank, bro Whoever drained roughly $600m in cryptocurrencies from Poly Network is said to have returned at least $260m so far.…

Challenge to VMs abandoned amid legal and regulatory threats Apple has agreed to settle its copyright lawsuit against Corellium, a Florida-based provider of iOS virtual machines and other developer-oriented services.…

The idea was to remove central points of failure, not introduce them Systems Approach Anyone who studies internet technology quickly learns about the importance of distributed algorithms to its design and operation. Routing protocols are an obvious example of such algorithms.…

Déjà vu time as $10bn contract award attracts the inevitable bid protest In a classic role reversal, Microsoft is protesting the award of a lucrative contract by the US National Security Agency to AWS.…

Social media giant unveils specs for Open Compute Time Appliance Facebook has taken a break from its social media shenanigans to open-source the specifications for its timekeeping device, the Open Compute Time Appliance.…

That spells trouble for up to one in five workers expected to be WFH Google may push through reductions in pay for employees that sidestep a return to the same office and instead choose to work from home permanently post-pandemic.…

Plus: How the S Pen will work outside the Note – by slipping into a case Samsung has revealed a new pair of foldable smartphones at prices that are no longer outrageous to city traders, but still up there, at $1,799 and $999 respectively.…

Extended support release brings a handful of new features, but browser is still struggling for market share Mozilla has released Firefox 91, with single sign-on for Microsoft 365, improved cookie clearing, automatic switch to HTTPS in private windows, and more, but the browser's market share remains small despite a redesign.…

Potentially putting the squeeze on already constrained supply chains Nine months after Huawei sold off smartphone subsidiary Honor due to "tremendous" supply chain pressure, Republican lawmakers in the US are seeking to put the squeeze back on the low-end handset biz.…

Have they forgotten SysAdmin Appreciation Day so soon? Microsoft appears intent on turning the print spooler remote code execution vulnerability known as "PrintNightmare" into an AdminNightmare, judging by its latest mitigation, which requires administrator privileges for Point and Print driver installation and update.…

'Facing the temptation of interests, he lost his principles' The director of public relations at Sina Weibo – China's equivalent to Twitter – was arrested on suspicion of bribery and fraud, Chinese state media reported on Tuesday.…

An unexpected bork in the boarding area Bork!Bork!Bork! We're all a bit jittery about travel as things in the UK open up. Paperwork is needed and there's always that worry that a surprise visit to one of Her Majesty's Hotels might be needed. Still, at least you aren't the person responsible for today's instalment of signage silage.…

Longevity, PostgreSQL, and 'the default relational database of choice' Interview Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Azure Data, Rohan Kumar, told The Reg the org had no “thought process” around changing current long-term support terms for SQL Server. We were talking to the corporate veep as Microsoft slapped the Azure Arc sticker onto its veteran SQL product, with Kumar discussing both the update and the future of the enterprise database software.…

It's wonderful that code written for Windows 3.1 still works well today Column In preparation for a big SIGGRAPH talk about all of the ways augmented reality will convert us into data-gathering drones for Mark Zuckerberg – if we're not careful – I scoured through some old archives.…

FireEye says Israeli defense agencies were alert to compromises as China works to protect Belt and Road investments Security vendor FireEye says it has spotted a Chinese espionage group that successfully compromised targets within Israel, and that trying to make its efforts look like the work of Iranian actors is part of the group's modus operandi.…

'Google has agreed to become more transparent' - over optimistic? Google has agreed to "major privacy improvements" following a threat to ban the use of Google Workspace in education by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA).…