The Register

Don't get too excited, filesystem fans – there are limits ZFS has been around for 16 years and has a solid reputation, but it does have limitations compared to its rivals. One of these is in the process of being lifted: soon it will be possible to add space to an existing ZFS array. As long as you're using FreeBSD, anyway.…

NAO says £263m in IR35 tax mistakes is just the start... UK IT contractors have been given no guidance on how to claw back tax erroneously taken by employers under IR35 rules, which already cost central government bodies £263m when they failed to correctly adhere to the guidelines.…

Suggests accounting'n'umbrella firm didn't pay ransom What appears to be stolen data belonging to customers of accounting conglomerate Optionis Group has surfaced on the dark web weeks after the firm confirmed intruders had broken into its systems.…

Ex-IBMer leaves behind no clear plan for sprawling legacy estate Former IBM and Home Office tech supremo Joanna Davinson is set to stand down as the UK government's chief digital officer, leaving the Cabinet Office with no one to wrangle its unmanaged legacy estate.…

It’s amazing [thud] I don’t even [thud] have to watch the road [thud] Something for the Weekend? Er… a lamppost, some clouds and… whoah, another car! Screeeeeee.…

For those times when being On Call means more than just cycling the power On Call Sometimes some systems just have to work, and there is always a Register reader to save the day. Welcome to On Call.…

Neither party is willing to talk about the operating model Singapore is getting its first sovereign cloud, thanks to a partnership between the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) and Microsoft that was signed into existence on Thursday.…

We're shocked, shocked to find unjustified collection and access is going on in here Two US senators have gone public with evidence of what they assert is a previously secret bulk data collection effort by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conducted outside the law and without oversight.…

Amid much droning on about self-sufficiency, components will still be able to cross the border India wants to promote locally-made drones, so has banned almost all imports of the aircraft, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry announced on Wednesday.…

Lithography titan ASML names DongFang JingYuan Electron as a worry The world's top manufacturer of lithography equipment, Dutch company Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASML), has warned that it believes a Chinese company may be selling chipmaking equipment that infringes its intellectual property rights.…

Coming out party for Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and independent cable builder and operator Inligo Networks have signed a memorandum of understanding to construct an 18,000km submarine cable linking Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, Japan, and the US.…

The slogan 'Privacy is built in' was more an aspiration until now Apple on Thursday said it is modifying its AirTag tracking devices to prevent them from being used for the wrong sort of tracking.…

A whole different kettle of phish For the past decade, unidentified miscreants have been planting incriminating evidence on the devices of human-rights advocates, lawyers, and academics in India seemingly to get them arrested.…

While Nvidia loses an Arm, this acquisition has legs AMD on Tuesday said it has passed all the regulatory hurdles to complete its $35bn acquisition of Xilinx, which will close on Monday.…

How to get nothing for something SaaS CRM provider Salesforce has proposed to launch a platform for trading non-fungible tokens (NFTs).…

But should free tier users in universities not invest in their own IT infrastructure? Educational users of Google Workspace will soon be facing a new storage policy that limits the free tier to 100TB shared between all users at a site, and some are expressing their dissatisfaction with the change.…

Easier observability for when you have eggs in many baskets Application monitoring outfit Dynatrace has extended its platform's support for serverless architectures to cover all the major cloud platforms, providing observability for developers working with multi-cloud application deployments.…

€1.9bn goodwill writedown, another profit warning, going to focus on cloud, digital and security from now on The bad news keeps rolling for Atos after its third financial warning in eight months, this time accompanied by confirmation the French integrator will start to lessen its focus on "classic infrastructure services" and unified comms in favour of the cloud.…

Unnamed website manager given 1 month to strip GA from his site French data protection authority CNIL has declared that Google Analytics breaches Euro privacy law the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it transfers European netizens' data to America.…

Big Zoomer is listening to us, complain users Apple Mac users running the Zoom meetings app are reporting that it's keeping their computer's microphone on when they aren't using it.…

Pick a language, any language (from a list of 38) Fancy some Windows 365 Cloud PC in your life, but less than keen on throwing yourself into the world of Azure infrastructure? Microsoft has added AD Join as a Cloud PC join type option.…

Operations at Yokkaichi and Kitakami affected Production at Kioxia and Western Digital's 3D NAND fabrication facilities in Japan is being disrupted by chemical contamination, with at least 6.5 exabytes of capacity lost.…

Historical drama as Cabinet Office crowns Crown Hosting Data Centres The UK government's Cabinet Office is seeking to negotiate a new agreement for hosting services for public-sector customers, but appears set to award the contract to its own joint venture with Ark Data Centres.…

Party like it's 2007 Wafer builders have just enjoyed their best year since 2007, according to industry body SEMI.…

Plucky probe exceeded expectations. What's your excuse for that keyboard? Recent photos from NASA's Mars InSight lander demonstrate that even the Register readers' filthiest PCs cannot compare to the effects of Martian dust.…

Questions remain over whether Surrey's £3.2m budget increase will avoid further delay A Surrey councillor has slammed his county council's £1bn-budget effort to replace its ERP system, describing it as "inept project management."…

Opinion so controversial the Party may have had it pulled A report from a major Chinese research university has asserted that China currently trails the US's technological prowess, and that progress towards matching its rival will be slowed by the current "decoupling" of the two nations. That opinion appears to have proven so controversial that the research paper expressing it has been taken down by the the institution that published the document, possibly after pressure from on high.…

Internal letter reveals detailed strategy for combining with TIBCO can wait until deal is done Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital, the two private equiteers behind the plan to take Citrix private and merge it with TIBCO have given assurances to Citrix staff their benefits aren't in immediate peril – but warned workers on H-1B visas they'll likely face a review…

Warns that foreign interference needs more attention than terrorism Nations running online foreign influence campaigns have turned to dating apps to recruit people privy to sensitive information, according to the director general of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the nation's security agency directed against external threats and a key partner in the Five Eyes security alliance.…

Vietnam, India, Philippines set to outpace Middle Kingdom China's tech market growth will slow from 9.7 per cent in 2021 to 8.2 per cent in 2022, in large part thanks to the Middle Kingdom's zero-COVID strategy, analyst firm Forrester predicted in a report released this week.…

Won't say why world's fastest-growing region doesn't deserve its own management nor detail impact on customers Data management and protection software vendor CommVault has merged its Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region into its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) operations.…

Video killed the radio star, pictures came and broke your car In January, drivers of older model Mazdas in the area around Seattle, Washington, started seeing their HD Radio receivers crash upon tuning to the local public radio station.…

Windows giant will say anything at this point to protect $69bn deal – and stick boot into Google, Apple Microsoft, a monopolist of yore that recently disallowed third-party browsers from handling a protocol associated with its Edge browser, has pledged to uphold a set of Open App Store Principles for the Microsoft Store on Windows and future game marketplaces.…

UEFI support adds attractions for the security-minded, GUI goes fully virtual The Qubes compartmentalised operating system developers have put out version 4.1.0. The new version has experimental support for running the GUI and audio server in their own VMs, and an optional remote-support facility.…

I want to be your SledgeMAMR Toshiba plans to use its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR, MAS-MAMR, and disk stacking tech to lift nearline HDD capacities to 30TB from the end of its 2023 fiscal year. …

New version of the desktop brings in major new features to rival GNOME The new release of KDE's Plasma desktop brings a GNOME Shell-like instant overview and other improvements.…

Don't pay extortionists? Firms shelled out $5bn in Bitcoin in 6 months Ransomware attacks are proliferating as criminals turn to gangs providing turnkey post-compromise services, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned.…

Shiny new kit a bit more environmentally conscious Samsung sought to show off its eco credentials as it released the latest set of smartphones and tablets ahead of the Mobile World Congress.…

£500m tech consultancy procurement in the offing The UK health secretary has invoked "the latest technology" to clear a 6-million-strong waiting list in England as the National Health Service struggles with a patient backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

UK.gov flings cash at software solution to local planning problem New 5G cell sites will be sprouting from streetlights, traffic signals, and CCTV poles across the country as part of Britain's plans to spread low-latency mobile connectivity to the masses.…

Don't all rush to sign up, DC operators Data centre operators could deploy uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems which link up with the electricity grid so as to increase its reliability by smoothing out the unpredictability of renewable energy resources, according to research firm Omdia.…

Next stop, ITER? Scientists and engineers running the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford have announced a record-breaking 59 megajoules of heat energy from fusion, more than double the previous record achieved by JET.…

How could you put down a chapter that intones: The information here is not of great interest to most users Systems Approach If, like me, you were a computer-science graduate student who cut your teeth on Berkeley Unix – complete with the first open-source implementation of TCP/IP – you know Section 8 as the cryptic System Maintenance Commands section of the Unix User's Manual.…

Finds half of public-sector orgs determine contractors' IR35 tax status without outside help Britain's tax collection agency has released a survey whose results downplay the impact of IR35 tax reforms in the public sector, apparently showing those in the private sector that everything went swimmingly.…

Devs and maintainers getting paid – but not to concentrate on security Column Open-source software has always been more secure than proprietary software, but that doesn't mean it's "secure." To lock it down, we need to invest serious cash in developers and maintainers.…

This is the final software update from Google for the Pixel 3, 3 XL, too The February edition of Google's monthly Android security update tackles, among other vulnerabilities, an eyebrow-raising critical flaw in Android 12.…

Biometric IDs for all, cross-border interoperability not on the table Sri Lanka has decided to adopt a national digital identity framework based on biometric data and will ask India if it can implement that nation’s Aadhaar scheme.…

Beta for now, but Pi from the cloud will eventually become a factory option The minds behind the Raspberry Pi have revealed a beta version of its bootloader that allows network installation of an OS.…

SpaceX launched even though the space weatherman predicted tricky conditions could follow a solar flare SpaceX last week launched 49 shiny new Starlink broadband-beaming satellites, which is good. But 40 of them have already, or will shortly, meet their demise due to a geomagnetic storm that struck a few days after their ascent. Which is bad.…

ByteDance's Douyin strikes up a conversation with Apple's digital assistant The publisher of TikTok, China's ByteDance, has revealed it has enlisted Apple's Siri digital assistant to power its first voice search service.…