The Register

Surprisingly a real-life scenario and not a plotline from The Simpsons A reactor at Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Taiwan malfunctioned on Tuesday morning, triggering an auto shutdown that resulted in the loss of 985 megawatts of power – all due to the misplacement of a chair.…

Some customers have a 'unique set of needs' SaaSy vendor says Amazon has halted plans to roll out a company-wide HR system based on SaaS from Workday, highlighting the challenges of migrating to the in-vogue application model.…

'The road to recovery will be a winding one' Cook predicts Apple reported record revenue in Q3 of its fiscal 2021, but admitted it is being hit by industry-wide component shortages – and things are only going to worsen in the quarter to come, costing the company billions of dollars.…

Pandemic offers chance to change focus just four years after £10m deal UK pub and hotel chain Fuller's has bet the farm on Microsoft Dynamics to run its core finance system after it kicked out a £10m Infor system following the sell-off of its brewery business.…

Infrastructure needs to be increased tenfold before traditional motors banned in 2030, says market study The UK needs to increase the number of charging points across the country tenfold if it is to support an electric vehicle (EV) economy starting with the ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.…

Reg tiptoes through the Zulip to review open source chat and collab software Review IRC is crusty, ancient, and still far and away the best group chat system currently available. IRC is the best chat system precisely because it is a system. It is a protocol, not just an app, and even better it is a loosely federated protocol.…

Fortune favours the flexible in the new normal Column During the first and second waves of the pandemic, a certain cohort of my more paranoid friends grew increasingly alarmed at a thought balloon floated by the World Economic Forum – the billionaires' club that used to meet annually in Davos.…

May need to upgrade 'bunfight' into 'cake-flinging war' over this one Parliamentary criticism of the National Cyber Security Centre's "image over cost" London HQ is being shrugged off by the government because of the GCHQ offshoot's successful response to the WannaCry ransomware outbreak.…

Announces that it's paid out for 11,000 bugs in under eleven years Google has revealed that its bug bounty program – which it styles a "Vulnerability Reward Program" – has paid out for 11,055 bugs found in its services since 2010.…

Quito Court finds numerous irregularities in naturalization process Former couch-surfing world record contender Julian Assange has had his Ecuadorian citizenship revoked.…

Suggests incident 'of great consequence' in the real world could be a tipping point United States President Joe Biden has shared his view that a "real shooting war" could be sparked by a severe cyber attack.…

Version 2.5 adds lots of love for hybrid cloud, Linux containers, and even a COBOL/Java combo IBM has made it official: a major update to its z/OS operating system for mainframes will debut in September.…

iPhones, iPads about to hit global chip supply wall others have felt, though AMD reported strong financial figures on Tuesday, showing continued demand for its Ryzen CPUs and GPUs and Epyc server processors during the pandemic and its various stay-at-home rules.…

Promises everything will be back to normal sometime in early August Chinese web giant Tencent has suspended new signups to its WeChat messaging service.…

Four others at online tat bazaar admit trying to silence newsletter couple, two senior execs fight charges The former global security manager for eBay was sentenced on Tuesday to 18 months in prison and was ordered to pay a $15,000 fine for his role in the cyber-stalking and harassment of a Massachusetts couple who published a newsletter critical of the internet yard sale.…

Fellowship funding comes in the wake of Youtube-DL fiasco GitHub has pledged $1m to, among other things, provide developers facing copyright takedown claims with free legal advice from a top US university, it announced on Tuesday.…

Robust cloud, business not enough to overcome concerns about decline in Windows hardware maker revenue Microsoft's $46.2bn in revenue for its fourth quarter of 2021, and profits rising 47 per cent to $16.5bn, shows the continued strength in its cloud business, investors were told on Tuesday.…

18GB of Dutch fishing supplier's data left in unsecured server Dutch fishing supply specialist Raven Hengelsport left details of around 246,000 customers visible to anyone on a misconfigured Microsoft Azure cloud server for months.…

'It was pretty convincing until the very end,' says host Jim Browning The Tech Support Scams YouTube channel has been erased from existence in a blaze of irony as host and creator Jim Browning fell victim to a tech support scam that convinced him to secure his account – by deleting it.…

Reports of skin problems and a recall in Australia move social ad biz to action Before Facebook can "bring the metaverse to life," it will first have to deal with customers dismantling their Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets for repairs because their faces have been irritated.…

Breach reporting law might have effect on overseas operators too The British government wants to make Amazon, Google, and other digital service providers report cybersecurity breaches to the Information Commissioner, according to newly published plans.…

Speed and stability top list of NoSQL database's features, Netflix dev says After an Apple engineer called an 11th-hour halt to the release, Cassandra 4.0 has finally launched flaunting newfound stability, speed and consistency, according to the open-source project's users and contributors.…

Microblogging site turned off its website for Build 2011 attendees Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has reminded us of the time when Twitter misdetected the overexcited developer emissions from the 2011 Build conference as a denial-of-service attack and hit the mute button.…

Risky and annoying? Microsoft has a new app store coming to both Windows 10 and 11, but some applications will use their own update mechanisms, raising security and user experience concerns.…

Operator shall talk unto operator or the big stick will be wielded UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom has kicked off a consultation process regarding licence applications for non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) systems such as Starlink and OneWeb.…

Commercial EUV LPDDR4 modules in the works now, but the 1anm node is still being treated as a test-bed Memory maker SK Hynix has boasted of its best sales quarter since prior to the pandemic, and confirmed the start of volume production on its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) product line.…

Accoutancy software goes TITSUP* as biz users can't invoice customers nor see who's paid their bills Hundreds of thousands of small businesses are having trouble raising invoices and sorting out their monthly payroll following an outage at accounting software-as-a-service outfit Xero.…

Competition in celebration of the BBC Micro's 40th anniversary The UK's National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is running a competition aimed at recreating the bleeps, whistles, and flatulent squawks of video game music from years gone by.…

First-timer wins maximum payout through HackerOne programme Shopify has forked out $50,000 (£36,150) in a bug bounty payment to computer science student Augusto Zanellato following the discovery of a publicly available access token which gave world+dog read-and-write access to the company's source code repositories.…

Hints at new Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip models too A Samsung rep has confirmed the Korean giant won't deliver a new Note phablet this year, but has disclosed a pair of new folding phones and the company's first S Pen for foldables, which will debut in August.…

Force still stinging after CGI fiasco ended up costing more than hoped for North Wales Police is tendering for new workplace, data centre, and network support contracts in deals potentially worth up to £40m after a five-year agreement with CGI offered opaque results.…

The silicon is weak, but the iron is strong Bork!Bork!Bork! "Steam powered" is occasionally used in an unkind fashion to describe computer hardware past its best. Today's entry in the bork archives takes the phrase to a whole other place.…

Right-to-repair activists welcome policy wins with caution Feature It was the middle of harvest, and Sarah Rachor wasn't happy. Rachor, who runs a farm with her father in Sidney, Montana, was baling hay in the field when the tractor she was using shut down without warning. The culprit was a sensor that detected the tractor was overheating. In reality, it wasn't.…

Decentralised comms is where it's at As Microsoft doubles down on efforts to kill Skype persuade users to chat with Teams, former Skype developer Jaan Tallinn has dropped some cash into the latest funding round for open-source IM client Element.…

Customers are afraid of commitment, so new rules for enterprise APIs promise to stick around until you ride off into the sunset Google has acknowledged that it makes life hard for users when killing off little-loved products, by announcing an API policy that will keep its cloudy interfaces alive for as long as customers are using them.…

Try the SANS DFIR-ence in Berlin this October Promo Whether it’s hunting for threats, tracking down security breaches, or gathering evidence, intuition helps though a thorough grounding in the latest techniques and tools for the platform in question is essential.…

Reveals tech roadmap that contains some real change, some renaming Intel has announced that Amazon Web Services has become the first customer for its foundry services packaging solutions, and that Qualcomm has become a partner of sorts in a silicon manufacturing process said to represent a step change beyond current Intel tech.…

We speak to the scientists involved Plumes of water vapor on Ganymede have been spotted for the first time in the atmosphere of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.…

'Avatars' that roam around space station, or do work with high performance hands, to be controllable from the ground The International Space Station is getting mobile robot “space avatars” controllable by the public from Earth, courtesy of a joint project between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and ANA Holdings’ telepresence start-up avatarin.…

Has since been recovered, and Scaleway now ships disks with GPS trackers It sounds like a "dog ate my homework" excuse for the cloud age, but Euro-cloud Scaleway says one of its solid-state disks was stolen from a truck, turned up in the hands of a YouTuber, and has now made its way back home.…

But the idea of blockchain-powered money is worth government consideration The International Monetary Fund has called on nations to consider using blockchain tech to improve financial services, but warned that dabbling with private cryptocurrencies is vastly risky.…

Characteristically mum about details Apple on Monday patched a zero-day vulnerability in its iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems, only a week after issuing a set of OS updates addressing about three dozen other flaws.…

It's not a bribe when it's a payment waiver Blue Origins supremo Jeff Bezos has offered NASA a $2bn discount to keep his dream alive of transporting the next American man and first woman to the Moon's surface.…

Energy efficiency rules appears to be limiting the availability of gaming rigs Dell is no longer shipping energy-hungry gaming PCs to certain states in America because they demand more energy than local standards allow.…

Microsoft offers some mitigations for thwarting PetitPotam attacks Microsoft completed a vulnerability hat-trick this month as yet another security weakness was uncovered in its operating systems. And this one doesn't even need authentication to work its magic.…

'The W3C doesn't get to be the boss of anyone, the decisions are going to be made at each of the browsers' Google has updated the schedule for its introduction of "Privacy Sandbox" browser technology and the phasing out of third-party cookies.…

Learn how to democratise storage with this revolutionary webcast Promo The laws of data are pretty universal. Every organisation needs advanced security, performance, and management features that improve over time.…

Fear not! Issue is at the 'highest level of escalation,' says ISP A broadband customer from Leatherhead, Surrey, who was told to "speak to your MP" after his ISP failed to resolve repeated line disconnections has now been informed he can leave his contract without penalty after Openreach failed to resolve the problem.…

Makes sense really Newly released data suggests South Korea is having a silicon and instant noodle renaissance, both thanks to COVID-19.…

End of March for ValueLicensing's jurisdictional defence British software licence reseller ValueLicensing has a trial date for the first part of a £270m legal showdown against Microsoft after accusing the US behemoth of breaking UK and EU competition laws.…