The Register

Government project watchdog signals red rating for case management system and warns about 'ageing' HMRC datacenter A UK Home Office plan to modernize its immigration technology to achieve "operational efficiencies" and "optimize use of data" received a red rating from the government's projects watchdog as it struggles to process Ukrainian refugees.…

Miscreants boast of 78GB haul, officials say everything's fine The LockBit ransomware crew is claiming to have stolen 78GB of data from Italy's tax agency and is threatening to leak it if a ransom isn't paid by July 31.…

Officials came right out and said this is all about scoring a global win China has decided it needs a fast charging standard for devices sold inside the Middle Kingdom, and hopes its efforts will see its preferred tech rule the world.…

Or an eight-core AMD Ryzen. Not made for personal use, but what's stopping you? There's something satisfying about fitting a decent processor in a small form factor, and the latest example is a credit card-sized single-board computer that uses an 11-gen Intel Core part.…

Are you not enough of a time thief already, Zuckerberg? Meta's engineering team has proposed doing away with leap seconds.…

As NASA launches 11th annual ISS Research and Development Conference NASA will have to continue relying on international cooperation to keep the International Space Station (ISS) ticking over to 2030 and beyond, despite plans to replace the laboratory with private commercial space stations. …

Expect it to be bundled into managed desktop services from HP Inc. HP Inc.'s late 2021 acquisition of Teradici has borne fruit with the creation of a product called HP Anyware that will replace HP's own zCentral Remote Boost.…

About 250 automotive applications in two decades – a fraction of what it files in a single year, mind Is Apple really getting into the automotive business? A joint investigation between Japanese financial publication Nikkei and Tokyo analytics company Intellectual Property Landscape found that Apple has filed patents – at least 248 of them – for everything from seats and windows to vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology that allows smart cars to talk to each other. …

And ponders more listings in China – the day after Beijing announces super-regulator for tech Chinese web giant Alibaba has announced it wants to upgrade its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE) to primary status – putting it on par with its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) presence.…

GPU giant promises to make ML accessible to even the most modest biz Nvidia aims to take the pain out of machine-learning development this week with the latest release of its AI Enterprise suite, which includes a low-code toolkit for machine-learning workloads.…

Lack of patent rights waiver in CC0 cited as problematic Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license.…

Boffins find common code constructs that may be exploitable to achieve remote code execution Back in March, security researchers reported a critical command injection vulnerability in Parse Server, an open-source backend for Node.js environments.…

Oops, did the Un-carrier under-count by 29m punters? T-Mobile US has agreed to pay about $550 million to end legal action against it and improve its security after crooks infiltrated the self-described Un-carrier last summer and harvested personal data belonging to almost 77 million customers.…

And yes, Musk is back in the headlines, denying another affair Twitter is investigating claims that a near-seven-month-old vulnerability in its software has been exploited to obtain the phone numbers and email addresses of a reported 5.4 million users. …

Routers flooded with internet traffic in filter blunder, watchdog told Canadian telecom giant Rogers will spend C$10 billion ($7.7 billion) to ensure that day-long outage earlier this month doesn't happen again, its CEO has said.…

'Closed loop' ordered to keep fabs and manufacturing plants running amid COVID-19 outbreaks Employees at Shenzhen facilities owned by Chinese chipmaking giant SMIC and other manufacturers will have to sleep at work this week due to the local government reportedly ordering the companies to enter a "closed-loop" operating mode.…

If only we'd had this kind of compute before we launched Hubble Fujitsu says its supercomputing cloud is ready for action, after pitting the Arm-based system against a series of complex electromagnetic interference (EMI) simulations.…

Emerging threat group offers a broad range of attack services An emerging and fast-growing threat group is using a unique business model to offer cybercriminals a broad range of services that span from leaked databases and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to hacking scripts and, in the future, potentially ransomware.…

A 9% levy on content slingers will stand in The Windy City – are others next? A lawsuit settled last week between Apple and Chicago will be meaningful for streaming services around the US.…

The race for first space launch from UK soil (or airspace) continues The UK's Civilian Aviation Authority has launched a public consultation on the environmental effects of the plans of Virgin Orbit at a base on the southwest coast of England.…

If you use Putty, there's a good chance you've visited Chiark There are some complexities involved in upgrading what the Reg FOSS desk suspects may be the world's oldest running Linux installation: an OS install dating back to 1993.…

Plus: Ukrainian fake news and Uber admits covering up data breach In Brief Google's legally fraught journey to buy cybersecurity business Mandiant is in its final stretch, with the US Department of Justice closing its investigation and giving the go-ahead for the sale to proceed.…

Known Issue Rollback for affected Windows 11 users Microsoft has admitted its last Patch Tuesday (and update previews) broke the Start Menu for some Windows 11 users and issued a Known Issue Rollback to solve the problem.…

Clouds form over PICNIC (Problem In Chair Not In Computer) Microsoft has blamed "operator error" for the multi-hour outage of its cloud SQL Server in Europe last week.…

US looks forward to 8% increase while consumer prices spike around the globe Oracle support prices are set to rise by 8 percent in the US, and the company will also impose increases commensurate with inflation in other regions.…

Cost of optical cable more than doubles in 16 months as demand goes through roof The price of fiber optic cables is shooting up, more than doubling in just 16 months due to massive demand from datacenter and network providers with supply shortfall exacerbated by disruption in production.…

If you build it they will come Unless you happen to be running a cloud or hyperscale datacenter, Intel’s infrastructure processing units (IPU) probably aren’t for you, at least not yet.…

Many of last week's security stories tell the same tale Opinion The calls are coming from inside the house! Lately, Outlook users have been getting their own version of this classic urban horror myth. The email system is alerting them to suspicious activity on their accounts, and helpfully providing the IP addresses responsible.…

Small market share there anyway or Indian regulatory crackdown? Chinese majority state-owned smartphone company Honor is pulling its team out of India, CEO Zhao Ming has confirmed.…

British government wants to boost innovation but lawyers warn of risk to adequacy ruling Browsers will need to satisfy two different data regimes in Europe under UK legislation proposed to replace EU laws.…

This will be the x86 giant's first major foundry customer Intel will manufacture chips for Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek, making the latter the first major silicon customer for Intel's revitalized contract chip manufacturing business.…

Or: How to give 1,000 workers an extended lunchbreak Who, Me? A warning in this week's edition of Who, Me? concerning the overuse of messaging and the dangers of a careless character or two. Or three.…

But don't get all 'Rise of the Machines' on this one – Russian media says the 'bot has played for years without problems A Russian chess robot has broken the finger of a child.…

Business is good at TCS, Wipro, Infosys and HCL – but margin pressure and staff attrition are big problems India's big four outsourcers are worried about rising labor costs and their impact on profits, according to their most recent quarterly financial statements.…

We currently make muons at CERN, so this is quite the miniaturization job The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a program it hopes will create a portable muon generator.…

Probes to see if Facebook and Insta could operate with less info than required by revised legalese South Korean authorities have taken issue with Facebook and Instagram's new terms and conditions, which come into effect on Tuesday, July 26.…

Claims Redmond still prices rivals out of the market even after allowances for Euro-clouds A senior exec at Amazon Web Services has accused Microsoft of making cosmetic licence changes to appease regulators, but continuing to ensure its wares are more expensive when run in rivals' clouds.…

Plus: Amazon and Alibaba risk Indonesia ban; Pegasus in Thailand; South Korea's semiconductor education surge; and more Asia In Brief Microsoft has ordered a review of its resilience regime for Microsoft 365 after finding an outage to the service in India was caused by "a physical fiber networking event" at a partner's edge datacenter location.…

Plus: How writers are using AI tools to help them write fiction more quickly In brief Google has reportedly fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who was placed on administrative leave after insisting the web giant's LaMDA chatbot was sentient.…

It costs relatively next to nothing to hire devs on the other side of the planet Wondering where software developers are – or aren't – earning top dollar? Just look at a list of the leading outsourcers and their most popular outsourcing destinations. …

Just as NASA urged to reuse Musk hardware no more than five times A SpaceX flight sending the next bunch of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has been pushed back a few weeks after the Falcon 9 rocket to be used for the journey was damaged during transportation.…

Con man blew victims' cash on antiques, artwork, other riches A crook who created a business called My Big Coin to cheat victims out of more than $6 million has been found guilty by a jury.…

Blockade against VBA scripts in downloaded files is back on by default Microsoft is trying to shut the door on a couple of routes cybercriminals have used to attack users and networks.…

Liquidity scams cost victims more than $70m, agents say The FBI has warned cryptocurrency owners and would-be owners about a scam involving phony liquidity mining that the bureau says has cost victims more than $70 million in combined losses since 2019.…

No, we're not reverting to steam power – lignin just makes great cathodes A Swedish-Finnish commercial partnership could be the first step toward commercially viable wood-derived batteries for electric vehicles.…

CEO claims 60 percent of deployments are new buyers. It may all depend on how you define deployment In a week when SAP lowered its profit outlook due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one analyst firm highlighted “deeper issues” with the global ERP vendor’s plans to move customers to its latest software.…

Foiled again, Team America Chinese semiconductor giant SMIC has reportedly been manufacturing 7-nanometer chips since last year, the best sign yet that China has found a way to develop advanced components despite US efforts to curb the country's homegrown silicon capabilities.…

Clinical systems 10 years old, new software due to go live next year Doctors at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, one of the UK's largest healthcare organizations, were this week left unable to access patient records and forced to cancel appointments following an IT outage caused by the extreme heatwave.…

Dell certifies certain models for Linux, but if yours isn't, all is not lost Some of the changes in modern kit, especially portables, seem to be intentionally obstructive to Linux users however you can mostly work around them.…

US datacenter demand holding up, floundering in China. Consumers? 'Spending money on other things' Seagate's share price plunged this morning on the back of a lower than expected financial forecast that signals more cautious tech spending amid buyers' fears of a sustained global economic slowdown.…