The Register

Researchers comb through code execution flaw found in malicious document Infosec researchers have idenitied a zero-day code execution vulnerability in Microsoft's ubiquitous Office software.…

Considered to be preferable to sale to China-owned Nexperia, say sources UK government officials are mulling a sale of chipmaker Newport Wafer Fab to a US consortium instead of allowing its agreed deal with China-owned Nexperia to stand.…

HPE-built system to be used by Uncle Sam for material science, renewables, and more Nvidia will reveal more details about its Venado supercomputer project today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.…

Texas school shooting should prompt a rethink in commercial ties with powerful gun-lobby group, workers urge management Around 4,000 Salesforce staff have signed an open letter calling for the CRM giant to stop working with the National Rifle Association, the powerful US gun-lobby organisation.…

Claims partnerships will drive development and adoption of exascale computing in Europe European microprocessor designer SiPearl revealed deals with Nvidia and HPE today, saying they would up the development of high-performance compute (HPC) and exascale systems on the continent.…

Data Protection Impact Assessment merely a 'standard step' A year after the Dutch data protector said there were too many "legal obstacles" for its civil servants to use Google Workspace, a re-worked agreement will permit the public sector to fire up the productivity suite.…

CEO talks up 'great economics to franchisees ... through the power of software... AI and creative construct' IBM says it is rolling out its natural language processing software to a greater number of McDonalds' drive-thrus months after buying the automated order technology unit from the fast food chain, along with the team that developed it.…

Focuses on 600 users, lets smaller outfits slide, trims R&D spend, slashes sales expenses Broadcom's stated strategy is very simple: focus on 600 customers who will struggle to change suppliers, reap vastly lower sales and marketing costs by focusing on that small pool, and trim R&D by not thinking about the needs of other customers – who can be let go if necessary without much harm to the bottom line.…

Startup Rezilion suggests enterprises should change prioritization strategies Enterprise security teams being overrun by the rising numbers of vulnerabilities uncovered each day could vastly reduce their patching workload by changing how they prioritize the flaws, according to recent research from vulnerability startup Rezilion.…

HR boss admits news may be 'disappointing' for the 'significant' population of former staff IBM has confirmed to former staff that it will no longer provide grants for the Retired Employee Club, meaning no more subsidized short trips to the Italian Riviera or golf days.…

Ingenuity footage sent back to Earth via Perseverance, despite looming battery problem Video On Friday NASA released footage of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flying further and faster than ever before.…

Consultation asks for contributions from industry to better understand digital threats The UK government has kicked off a consultation to collate feedback on strengthening the security and resilience of local datacenters and cloud services to protect against outages and national security threats.…

Interesting Moon experiment raises cool questions about disposal of hidden value Opinion Making a call on the quality of a new idea in tech can be hard. But if you ask me, not in the case of Lonestar Data Holdings, whose plan to build datacenters on the Moon is literal lunacy.…

How do you spell 'backup' again? 'D' 'R' 'O' 'P'... Who, Me? A reminder of the devastation a simple DROP can do and that backups truly are a DBA's best friend in this morning's "there but for the grace of..." Who, Me?…

Big beast also claims top spot in the Green500 The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.…

Government authority forced to backtrack warning that photocopied Aadhaar cards represent a risk The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces.…

China needs this as much as the rest of the world China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.…

Eleven industry associations, representing every tech vendor that matters, warns of economic harm Eleven significant tech-aligned industry associations from around the world have reportedly written to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to call for revision of the nation’s new infosec reporting and data retention rules, which they criticise as inconsistent, onerous, unlikely to improve security within India, and possibly harmful to the nations economy.…

Also: Uni details its malware-catching AI, signs of China poking the Russian cyber-bear, and more In brief Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data.…

Teleportation of quantum information key to future secure data transfer Researchers in the Netherlands have shown they can transmit quantum information via an intermediary node, a feature necessary to make the so-called quantum internet possible.…

Zhuhai Cloud will carry 50 flying and diving machines it can control with minimal human assistance Chinese academics have christened an ocean research vessel that has a twist: it will sail the seas with a complement of aerial and ocean-going drones and no human crew.…

Plus: Police release deepfake of murdered teen in cold case, and more In-brief Governments around the world should pass intellectual property laws that grant rights to AI systems, two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia argued.…

Nuke incoming? Quick break out the plans for rationing, censorship, property seizures, and more More papers describing the orders and messages the US President can issue in the event of apocalyptic crises, such as a devastating nuclear attack, have been declassified and released for all to see.…

Forget dark-web souks, thousands of these are already being traded on public bazaars Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.…

Study claims Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft work to derail data rules Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.…

Meanwhile, social network's board rejects resignation of one its directors America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. …

Time to play blame bingo: Markets? Profits? Too much growth? Russia? Space aliens? Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.…

Entire swaths of gear relies on vulnerability-laden Open Automation Software (OAS) A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.…

CEO acknowledges impact of war, pandemic but says fundamentals ‘are really good’ Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.…

That's the second in a week following similar system in Munich also aimed at researchers HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.…

Figures disappoint analysts as SaaSy HR and finance application vendor navigates economic uncertainty HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.…

Another probe? Mountain View is starting to look like a pincushion at this rate The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.…

'Making sure the right resources are aligned to the right opportunity' ahead of next fiscal year Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.…

Staving off entropy with digital transformation, hybrid office, and automation projects Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.…

Unrelated to the OAuth token attack, but still troubling as org reveals details of around 100,000 users were grabbed by the baddies GitHub has revealed it stored a "number of plaintext user credentials for the npm registry" in internal logs following the integration of the JavaScript package registry into GitHub's logging systems.…

And that's a bit odd, says Red Canary A strain of Windows uses PowerShell to add a malicious extension to a victim's Chrome browser for nefarious purposes. A macOS variant exists that uses Bash to achieve the same and also targets Safari.…

It's a shame still nothing can be done about all the false positives, though Something for the Weekend WE BRING ENGLISH TO YOUR FEET! reads the email.…

Even non-sysadmins may find this Linux live ISO handy Clonezilla 3 is a new version of an (almost) universal disk-imaging and duplication tool which can copy, or image, almost any mass storage device.…

It says 'Do Not Touch,' not 'Rip Out My Guts' On Call Sure, you might use words like "boom" and "explode" when it comes to errors with your system. But could a whoopsie have the potential to render a chunk of a country uninhabitable? Welcome to On Call.…

Chinese giants' enterprise businesses do well despite lockdowns. Other segments? Strap in for a bumpy ride Ever since Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server business in 2014, one thing has proven elusive: profit.…

Another day, another DDoS attack that tries to scare the victim into paying up with mention of dreaded gang Akamai has spoken of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault against one of its customers during which the attackers astonishingly claimed to be associated with REvil, the notorious ransomware-as-a-service gang.…

So small, you can't feel it crawl Video Robot boffins have revealed they've created a half-millimeter wide remote-controlled walking robot that resembles a crab, and hope it will one day perform tasks in tiny crevices.…

Whaddayaknow? It's made it more than halfway to America The autonomous Mayflower ship is making another attempt at a transatlantic journey from the UK to the US, after engineers hauled the vessel to port and fixed a technical glitch. …

I think we can all agree that China is not alone in wishing it had an alternative to Microsoft Windows China has identified "chokepoints" that leave it dependent on foreign countries for key technologies, and the US-based Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) claims to have translated and published key document that name the technologies about which Beijing is most worried.…

Promises modular kit gets you up and running in six to nine months, with AI-powered ops to make it efficient Huawei has entered the data center construction business with an offering that it claims can be built in half the time required by competing methods, then run more efficiently.…

Sure, they’re small Pacific nations, but they’re in very strategic locations China has begun talking to ten nations in the South Pacific with an offer to help them improve their network infrastructure, cyber security, digital forensics and other capabilities – all with the help of Chinese tech vendors.…

Offers comforting vision for core customers, products, channel – though warns efficiencies are coming Broadcom has signaled its $61 billion acquisition of VMware will involve a “rapid transition from perpetual licenses to subscriptions.”…

Voltage glitch here, glitch there, now you can fiddle with location disc's firmware At the Workshop on Offensive Technologies 2022 (WOOT) on Thursday, security researchers demonstrated how to meddle with AirTags, Apple's coin-sized tracking devices.…

Shut up and take ... poor kids to KFC? In what is either a creepy, weird spin on Robin Hood or something from a Black Mirror episode, we're told a ransomware gang is encrypting data and then forcing each victim to perform three good deeds before they can download a decryption tool.…

Windows giant carries a PyTorch for chip designer and its rival Nvidia Microsoft Build Microsoft Azure on Thursday revealed it will use AMD's top-tier MI200 Instinct GPUs to perform “large-scale” AI training in the cloud.…