The Register

A tale of command line booby traps and bored engineers Who, Me? Take a trip back to when mainframes and terminals were all the rage and The Cloud was the smoke produced by the mainframe when a washing-machine-sized disk was about to let go. Welcome to another Who, Me? confession.…

Deep Space Network scope tilts to find its targets, or to dispose of the effects of recent rain Video The venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft is currently more than 19 billion kilometres from Earth, travels at 15 kilometres per second and talks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) at a torturously slow 160 bits per second.…

Offers $2 million bug bounty and hopes perps see that record payout, and a clean conscience, as reasons to sacrifice $78m Another week, another crypto upstart admitting its lax security has been exploited and parties unknown have made off with millions. But this time there's a twist: the crypto upstart has appealed for the return of its assets by appealing to the thieves' consciences.…

Big Tech gets hauled in and reminded of its responsibility to keep China's internet nice The Chinese government has unveiled a draft law clamping down on deepfakes – the practice of using AI to adapt existing digital content into realistic simulations of humans.…

Pledges work on 'mutually agreed commercial initiatives' – such as figuring out how to use 5G Google has dipped into its $10 billion India Digitization Fund to have local wireless carrier Bharti Airtel work with it on "mutually agreed commercial initiatives."…

35 US States, more than 50 academics, Microsoft, others take aim at iGiant and its grip on the iOS ecosystem Analysis Epic Games' legal campaign to break Apple's near absolute control over its iOS ecosystem received reinforcement this week from 35 US states, Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen, and more than 50 academics, among others.…

The migration of PlayStation exclusives continues to be a great idea The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Long may this trajectory of PlayStation titles eventually coming to PC continue – because we now have God of War.…

Brit tycoon's bad Friday just got worse UK Home Secretary Priti Patel tonight approved Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's extradition to America to face criminal charges over the multi-billion-dollar sale of his tech biz to Hewlett-Packard.…

Where Britain leads, America follows The US Navy has managed to drop an F-35C fighter jet off one of its aircraft carriers into the South China Sea, just months after the Royal Navy did the same thing with an F-35B in the Mediterranean.…

Not enough money going into 40nm+ process nodes Semiconductor shortage issues will continue through the first half of 2022 as the industry attempts to build up inventory to normal levels, according to research firm IDC.…

Exorcising the ghost of Windows past Microsoft has dropped another Windows 11 Insider build into the hands of unpaid testers, demonstrating it is serious about tidying up the mismatch of user interface cues in its flagship operating system.…

Federal appeals court upholds decision not to block connection protection rules The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's refusal to block California's net neutrality law (SB 822), affirming that state laws can regulate internet connectivity where federal law has gone silent.…

Hobby project sees Hello Games' first baby return at the request of a dedicated dad In these times of political uncertainty, economic upheaval, and an ongoing pandemic, it’s heartening to reveal a human story in software development.…

Oh boy While Microsoft's Azure Quantum continues to hover between vapourware and hardware – a state of quantum if you will – NASA boffins have been putting tech inspired by the research to work in spacecraft communications.…

All that and improved energy efficiency The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has published the official standards for HBM3 memory, the latest update to the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Standard.…

€500m cloud investments drag on profit SAP's operating profit has fallen 45 per cent year-on-year in the fourth calendar quarter pf 2021 to €1.47bn as cloud investments drag on profitability.…

Where to begin when you're ready to get your K8s on Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.…

Time to get out ISO 22300:2021, Security and resilience – Vocabulary The great International Organization for Standardization outage is entering its third day as consultants find themselves bereft of technical documents with which to beat engineers.…

Remainder of Capita's Portfolio of unwanted businesses to be expunged by year end, says CEO Capita is again clearing out another of the previous CEO’s past conquests with confirmation this morning that it is offloading software licensing and hardware reseller Trustmarque to One Equity Partners for £111m.…

Plus: Cops' surveillance is used against drug gangs and not child abusers, says Tutanota Britain's controversial Online Safety Bill will leave Britons more exposed to internet harms than ever before, the Internet Society has said, while data from other countries suggests surveillance mostly isn't used to target child abusers online, despite this being a key cited rationale of linked measures.…

All eyes turn to Priti Patel as midnight extradition deadline looms Updated Hewlett Packard Enterprise "substantially succeeded" in its multi-billion pound lawsuit against Autonomy founder Mike Lynch for fraud over that startup's accounts.…

'Incalculable cost' of non-participation in Horizon programme 'continues to rise' The UK's European Scrutiny Committee has published the government's response to concerns over the Brexit divorce bill and the impact on the UK's participation in EU programmes.…

*They're probably fine Poll Boffins from UCL's Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) have linked arms with London e-scooter providers to decide on a "universal sound" for the silent but deadly transport mode.…

Mme D finally takes to the Web 2.0 stage and becomes a bad actor Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Is it in yet?"…

Sure, you can program an autopilot but will you be defeated by a Dell? On Call Some users are less than bright, and some are just slightly dim. But few are quite as dim as this high-flying employee of the world's formerly favourite airline. Welcome to On Call.…

Cook & Co made $384M profit per day during latest quarter Apple is hauling in the cash as Mac users escape Intel x86 processors and upgrade to Cupertino's homegrown Arm-compatible M1 chips in record numbers.…

Together with Japanese space agency, now imagining optical comms terminals on sats Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) and the Japanese space agency have conducted an experiment to transmit data from the stratosphere to space and declared the results promising as a complete file was delivered at 446 megabits per second.…

At last, a worm that improves security Silk could become a means of authentication and unbreakable encryption, according to South Korean boffins.…

Driver drama is done, new dev practices should prevent repeats, says Virtzilla VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.…

Billions spent on weapons and boondoggles while service members battle away on cheapo PCs A US Air Force director of ops this week blasted the Pentagon for failing to overhaul its outdated computer IT infrastructure after his work machine apparently took an hour to send an email and completely froze when he tried to use Microsoft Excel.…

Cheesed-off customers have 'alleged enough facts at this stage' to allow legal battle to continue, says judge Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers.…

As commissioner suggests watchdog gets ability to crack down further on China-controlled data centers Updated Citing national security concerns, America's Federal Communications Commission has barred Chinese carrier China Unicom from providing telecoms services in the United States.…

Plus: Apple patches exploited-in-the-wild bug, White House zero-trust order, and more In brief A US Department of Defense staffer with top-secret clearance stole the identities of dozens of people from a work SharePoint system to apply for loans totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars.…

Facebook-born blockchain payment system's day well and truly seized Diem, the spurned cryptocurrency payment system spawned under the name Libra by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook (itself now operating as Meta) will reportedly sell its assets to Silvergate Capital Corporation. …

hurdles <= hurdles - 1; Chip megadeals have become daunting, with governments looking at transactions suspiciously, though AMD can breathe a sigh of relief: the path to acquire FPGA giant Xilinx is now clearer.…

Expects more stability but warns of potential fab lockdowns on road ahead Samsung blamed disruptions in the global supply chain for failing to meet its own guidance for DRAM and NAND shipments during final three months of 2021, nevertheless racked up a record quarterly sales at group level.…

'Script was adding the cc: to msg.000 not msg.0000' A small SNAFU in Linux kernel land meant that a notification regarding the stable review cycle for the 5.16.3 release didn't reach everyone it should have.…

Nasty demands hefty Bitcoin ransom QNAP has urged NAS users to act "immediately" to install its latest updates and enable security protections after warning that product-specific ransomware called Deadbolt is targeting users' boxen.…

Customers in mid-tier band facing up to 50% higher fees... and they're delighted HP is hiking the UK price of Instant Ink monthly plans by more than 50 per cent in some cases, although the company website is still showing the cost of the soon-to-be out-of-date bands.…

While creators were stripping away annoying styling, users started to make Geminispace a bunker, says engineer Project Gemini is a new internet protocol designed to be simpler and lighter to make it easier for people to design, run, and use their own websites.…

Wait – is this the same company that gave us Windows? Microsoft has cancelled the latest release of Azure Sphere OS, its take on securing IoT devices, citing problems reported by a customer during evaluation.…

It's as if Bill McDermott's SAP tenure never happened In a reminder – if ever one were needed – of the sheer brass neck of celebrity tech CEOs, Bill McDermott, head honcho at helpdesk-cum-workflow-slinger ServiceNow, has informed investors that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are bad for tech integration and engineers hate them.…

But work at US security-linked lab falls short of true ignition. 'This is physics,' they say US scientists have succeeded in demonstrating self-heating plasma in a crucial step towards self-sustaining fusion energy.…

Bitter contract dispute revealed HLR lookup capability baked into agreement Exclusive Britain's tax collection agency asked a contractor to use the SS7 mobile phone signalling protocol that would make available location data of alleged tax defaulters, a High Court lawsuit has revealed.…

We love it when a plan comes together It seems we're a step closer to system-on-chips containing a mix of RISC-V CPU cores and a mainstream GPU powering Linux devices and the like.…

With microcode intact so it can work with an original operator's console Hardware guru Ken Shirriff is working on a simulator for the IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe, launched in April 1964. His program runs the original machine's microcode so it can control and be controlled by an original front panel.…

Hurdle or driver for modernisation? A bit of both, apparently For highly regulated industries, compliance is seen as a hurdle to digital transformation yet it's also viewed as one of the key drivers for modernisation efforts, at least according to an IBM study.…

'This experience has taught me that it's worth trying out looking at the sky in entirely new ways' Astronomers have picked up something strange we've never seen before in space: bright bursts of low-frequency radio waves emitted three times an hour from a source within our Milky Way.…

Advises citizens to avoid 'Ponzi schemes' Another week, another big economy restricting cryptocurrency. This time Indonesia has barred financial services firms from offering bit-buck-related services to their customers.…

Ah, y'know what, maybe those rebates for not using AMD chips weren't so anti-competitive after all, eh? Intel Corporation no longer has to pay a €1.06bn ($1.2bn, £890m) fine imposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2009 for abusing its dominance of the chip market.…