The Register

Conservative MPs offer tweaks to stamp out suspect practices Conservative MPs David Davis, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, and Andrew Rosindell have put forward amendments to the UK's 2021 Finance Bill in a bid to rein in umbrella companies said to be skimming off earnings from contractors and holding back holiday pay.…

I've worked hard all day on-call... you drive me round the bend On Call Friday is here, and with it a story from the On Call archives to remind the unwary of the fiscal penalties that can arise when the patience of those at the other end of the line is tested.…

Like, you wouldn't filter out pages by Black people, right? Cloudflare's internet filter service Gateway will no longer offer to block LGBTQ content, with the biz saying it was all an accident caused by one or more third-party suppliers.…

Oh what a feeling, and in the same week as automaker announced new production pauses Toyota has admitted to a pair of cyber-attacks.…

Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act swings into action Singapore’s Ministry of Health has invoked the island nation's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act and required social media companies and media to refute reports that a local variant of the Coronavirus has been detected.…

Big buyers understand infrastructure economics – and aren’t afraid to screw down providers' prices Tencent has told investors that big cloud buyers are turning the screws on infrastructure-as-a-service pricing, and so it will pursue PaaS and SaaS instead.…

Welcome to the real world, Neo American businesses that receive payments in cryptocurrencies worth $10,000 or more will have to report those transactions to the Internal Revenue Service, the United States' Treasury mentioned on Thursday.…

Who's Reader? I don't know any Reader. Do you know any Reader? In 2013, Google discontinued its RSS app Google Reader, eliciting widespread criticism. On Wednesday, the search advertising biz reversed its recent disinterest in RSS and announced plans to experiment with an RSS-based content subscription feature in the Android version of Chrome.…

After that whole, y'know, unanimous Supreme Court decision thing that told us not to do that anymore America's consumer watchdog has pleaded with lawmakers to pass legislation to restore its ability to recover ill-gotten gains from scammers and pass the money back to victims cheated by the crooks.…

Mothership checks out, so VSS Unity will fly again As bidding intensifies for a seat on Blue Origin's first crewed hop into space, Virgin Galactic has announced the next rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo test flight will take place on May 22.…

One of these days we'll automate these outage articles with some kind of AI Updated Microsoft's Azure portal and some related products are down right now for unlucky customers. The Windows giant is said to be working on a fix to bring systems back online.…

Not just Chuck struggling under the switch, rival Arista's supply chain has 'never been so constrained' Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says he is about to pass the rising cost of components onto customers amid the most dramatic rebound in product demand for almost a decade.…

Editors enraged by tweaks to Word's commenting feature Microsoft's attempt to fiddle with the commenting in Word could teach the software biz an important lesson: Never, ever mess with editors.…

Bank made $1.4bn in profits alone last quarter American Express has been fined 0.009 per cent of its annual profits by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after spamming people who opted out of its marketing emails with 4.1 million unwanted messages.…

Replacing such cooling measures are the PC equivalent of an oil change Laptop and motherboard maker ASUS has earned the scorn of the right-to-repair crowd after telling a customer the dimensions of a thermal pad are proprietary information and that replacing it might void his warranty.…

Warfare 365? Ball Aerospace and Microsoft have shown off tech that uses commercial cloud computing to process downlinked data and deliver "actionable information" direct to the battlefield.…

Minimal risk to MVNO or backhaul customers, probe finds The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has greenlit the proposed £31bn merger between Virgin Media and O2.…

Crown Commercial Service not wedded to plans until it has had a nice chat with suppliers The UK government is slapping £650m of taxpayer's money on the table to see what the ravenous tech market can offer in terms of mobile data and voice services.…

Is Gartner ahead of its time, or just bonkers? You. Be. The. Judge. Emerging from a niche in the database market, graph technology could actually be the thing to help us make sense of all the AI we're using to understand the world and our business in it, according to Gartner.…

Something Wasm this way comes QCON The BBC is researching a rebuild of its iPlayer catch-up service client in WebAssembly.…

Caters to those desperate for a physical keyboard but nothing about it is intuitive Review The Unihertz Titan Pocket – a small ruggedised Android 11 phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard – is a bit like when you ask your mum to buy you a Big Mac meal from McDonald's and she instead makes you one at home. Sure, it might be a great burger, but it's not the same.…

Altra Max revealed with smaller core counts than previously disclosed Ampere has revealed that it has developed its own “Arm-compliant” compute core that it will begin to manufacture in 2022 and hopes will eventually challenge Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s EPYC in the cloud.…

Expensive free fall experience plus 'astronaut' bragging rights Comment If you want to spend a few minutes in free fall and get a view few others have seen in person, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space tourism venture has set its price for just such an experience – $1.4m (£1m) or best offer.…

Tweaking QEMU to handle Apple’s XNU kernel was just the beginning BlackBerry’s Cylance unit claims it has virtualised macOS Big Sur for Apple’s own Arm-powered M1 silicon on an Intel x86 processor.…

June 15th 2022 is the happy day, but Windows Server and Win 10 long-term servicing channels aren't necessarily invited As of June 15, 2022, Microsoft will retire its Internet Explorer 11 desktop application for certain versions of Windows 10.…

Author is tired of world+dog assuming all task force docs are definitive, wrote a really weird one to make the point anyone can put anything in 'em Warren Kumari has had it with Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) drafts being held up as canonical statements that reveal the organisation's thinking or position, so has written his own hilarious draft to make the point that such documents are not normative.…

When we logged in for the status report, IBM was touting $25 gift vouchers to customers brave enough to review its cloud Are you hungry? And what do you think of IBM Cloud? The Register asks because Big Blue is offering US$25 gift vouchers – enough for a decent lunch – for customers that review its cloud.…

Telcos behaving badly? Lack of subsidies? Whatever the cause, nation wants it fixed to handle flood of video India is revisiting how to stimulate more investment in wired broadband.…

Trashing your desktop OS to save the iOS walled garden – it's a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off for 'em Apple's software supremo Craig Federighi on Wednesday condemned the security of macOS in an astonishing attempt to defend the walled garden that is the iOS App Store.…

Boxes stop working, admins may be locked out after 28,224 hours – and then every 1,008 hours after that Cisco has detailed a bug that causes 43 models in its Firepower security appliance range to stop passing traffic and perhaps also prevent logins to the devices’ management console.…

ISP denies wrongdoing, notes how difficult it is to get wires to rural areas ISP Frontier Communications was sued on Wednesday by the US Federal Trade Commission and law enforcement agencies six states for allegedly misrepresenting the speed of its internet service and for billing customers for service it didn't provide.…

And that's why we've let humans take back control Twitter said its AI-powered image-cropping algorithm is slightly biased in favor of White people and women after all, and has taken steps to ditch its reliance on the machine-learning code.…

Crown Prince and network boss Andrew Lee disputes claims made by those leaving the internet chat community Most of the volunteer staff of Freenode, an internet relay chat (IRC) network dating back to 1995, have resigned in protest over what they describe as a hostile takeover of the chat service.…

Honor, iQOO,OPPO, Realme, Xiaomi, Motorola onboard so far Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 778G 5G system-on-chip for next generation mid-to-high-end smartphones at its annual 5G Summit, which kicked off on Wednesday.…

Time to rethink your data protection strategy Webcast We don’t think anyone goes out of their way not to protect their data. But if you’ve embraced the cloud without taking a long hard look at your data protection and recovery policies, you could be doing just that.…

Fortnite maker 'has no factual, expert, or legal support for its theory' Apple is seeking to dismiss one of the fundamental claims in its long-running legal spat with Epic Games.…

'We feel bad about what happened' The sound of rumbling rubber could be heard today as Salesforce threw an engineer responsible for a change that knocked it offline under a passing bus.…

Google Cloud Run envy? AWS has introduced App Runner, with immediate general availability, for quick deployment of container-based applications.…

'Government's got to take responsibility for this,' rages opposition MP A statutory public inquiry will be held into the Post Office Horizon scandal, the UK government said today – and MPs want to know why Fujitsu has largely been out of the limelight in the case so far.…

Google Pixel phone not required Google has flicked "publish" on its Android 12 beta, with the bleeding-edge OS winging its way to enrolled devices.…

Probe's cams show red planet's surface while clips capture descent The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released images and video snapped during the landing process and checkout of its Zhurong Mars rover.…

New MagicBook 14 and 15 include 11th-gen Intel chippery, Xe graphics The Reg hasn't heard much from Honor since it broke away from parent company Huawei last November. Save for a fitness band here, or a China-exclusive phone there, it's been rather quiet on the Western Front.…

Being slow to patch just means you'll get pwned faster Attackers began scanning for vulnerabilities just five minutes after Microsoft announced there were four zero-days in Exchange Server, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Tweak only affects shared runners and new users signed up after 17 May In a bid to tackle cryptocurrency miners slurping free pipeline minutes, GitLab will expect users to provide a valid credit or debit card number to use shared runners on its platform.…

Multi-cloud for data is too complicated Analyst house Gartner has warned users not to mix and match data management products from the three largest cloud hyperscalers.…

The biggest challenge? 'Backwards compatibility of features that we might not even know we have' Interview Python creator Guido van Rossum last week introduced a project to make CPython, the official implementation, five times faster in four years. Now Mark Shannon – one of the three initial members of the project – has opened up about the why and the how.…

But beware the SLA: Just how much would an outage actually cost you? Microsoft has added another 9 to its availability guarantee for Azure Key Vault, taking the service to 99.99 per cent availability.…

Dude, where's my unlocked bootloader? It's a sad, pointless, and frankly wasteful cycle. You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another. The old phone goes into a drawer, where it sits until you eventually get around to recycling it.…

Tested.me Ltd broke the PECR, says Information Commissioner's Office The UK's data watchdog has fined a company £8,000 for sending 84,000 direct marketing emails without consent to people who had provided their personal data for contact tracing purposes.…

Hounds can sniff out SIM cards that a human might miss Australia's Federal Police (AFP) is getting more help from some very good boys with four paws, wagging tails, and the ability to sniff out tech equipment with their highly sensitive noses.…