The Register

Space is hard While there were whoops and cheers for the James Webb Space Telescope, other missions on Mars and in orbit around the Earth have fared less well in recent weeks.…

Another one who pleaded autism in mitigation A software engineer was this week jailed in the UK for two years after pleading guilty to accessing women and children's webcams, Skype accounts and iCloud backups for more than a decade.…

341 million units sold last year, up 15% The humble PC was one of the hottest selling tech items in 2021 with shipments into the channel jumping 15 per cent globally to 341 million amid a pandemic that continues to force people to work, study, and play at home.…

Jones in the Fast Lane with switch to PAM4 The completed PCIe 6.0 specifications have finally been unleashed by the PCI-SIG consortium, effectively doubling the speed of the PCIe standard by supporting 64 gigatransfers per second (GTps) with 16 lanes running at 256 GBps.…

Want a pay rise and paid leave? Can't help you there. Need better workplace tech? Walk this way... As the 1 February general availability of its Cloud for Retail nears, Microsoft today tweaked its Teams and Viva platforms and published a report highlighting the challenges it believes frontline workers face.…

Company follows in the footsteps of its buddy Google Apple has finally caved to Korea's telecommunication regulator and agreed to allow third-party in-app billing systems in South Korea thus complying with a local law.…

European Commission gives an unconditional green light, but Blighty needs a bit more time If you wanted to speak your brains have your say on Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance, the moment has passed. In the UK at any rate.…

South Korea piqued as FAA grounds west coast aircraft North Korean state-sponsored media has said it launched a third hypersonic missile on Tuesday, hitting a target at sea 1,000km (621 miles) away. According to news agency KCNA, President Kim Jong Un attended the test-fire.…

Or SMSes, if the idea of midnight robot calls worries you An infosec pro fed up of having to follow tedious Twitter accounts to stay on top of cybersecurity developments has set up a website that phones you if there's a new vuln you really need to know about.…

Oh, Snap The Linux Mint distro has been busy. Not only has it pushed out release 20.3, it's also announced a deal with Mozilla, meaning vanilla Mozilla versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.…

It has potential, says one expert A Swedish developer has published code that promises to avoid application downtime during PostgreSQL schema migrations.…

Security is a process, not a product Opinion We're going to be cleaning up Apache Log4j security problems for months to come, but the real problem isn't that it was open-source software. It's how we track and use open-source code.…

It was worth a try Just over 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules there’s a rugby ball-shaped exoplanet orbiting a star. It’s the first time astronomers have been able to detect such an unusual shape of an alien world.…

If the Middle Kingdom lets its data out, Beijing might as well be in control China has earmarked ¥31.8bn ($5bn) to build the first free trade data port in the nation as it tries to bolster and control information flowing across its borders, the country's state-sponsored media says.…

Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and programming errors Patch Tuesday The new year brings the same old chore of shoring up Microsoft software. For its first Patch Tuesday of 2022, Redmond has bestowed 96 new CVEs affecting its Windows products.…

Was no one else available? No one? US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has blasted Intel for scrubbing any mentions of China's Xinjiang region from an annual letter to its suppliers after Chinese netizens threatened on social media to boycott the US chip behemoth.…

Nothing like topping off unauth'd remote code execution with a su password of ... password Technical details and exploitation notes have been published for a remote-code-execution vulnerability in Sonicwall SMA 100 series VPN appliances.…

Call of duty? Not when there's a Snorlax about A California appeals court last week upheld the discharge of two Los Angeles police officers for ignoring a robbery call because they were busy playing Pokémon Go while on duty.…

Repairability – check. Upgrades? Must try harder Microsoft took its Surface enthusiasts back in time this week with a video demonstrating how to take apart its Surface-for-Schools laptop: SE.…

Space: The final frontier for cybersecurity The European Space Agency (ESA) is inviting applications from attackers who fancy having a crack at its OPS-SAT spacecraft.…

Bank of England watchdog seeks 'more oversight' into 'critical third parties', eyes up outages and cyber attacks Banking regulators in the UK are considering closer scrutiny of cloud providers in light of recent outages and the financial services sector's increasing dependence on the computing model.…

Net closing in on anti-vaxxers as growing band of tech titans get tougher on jabs Facebook parent Meta Platforms is postponing employees' return to US offices until the end of March – when it will require proof of a booster jab from eligible workers before they actually set foot in any of the locations.…

Users complain: We weren't told that LON1 had done one European data centre operator Interxion suffered an outage at its central London campus last night, with no service from its LON1 data centre for several hours and users complaining the company was silent about what was happening.…

Ideal for when you need to stealthily click through memes Review Peripherals purveyor Logitech's Signature M650 is its latest take on a workplace mouse, and The Register has a raked a talon over one.…

Those astards have uggered up my site Updated Beleaguered customers of UK hosting outfit tsoHost have been thrown a fresh curveball. Sites starting with the letter B on its cloud (Gridhost) platform are struggling to load.…

Plus: IBM Watson Health reportedly up for sale over $1bn, and more In brief Using two different free protein-predicting AI algorithms, computer scientists were almost able to model Omicron before the coronavirus variant had been physically mapped.…

Law enforcement agency now has one year to delete any data older than 6 months not related to criminal activity The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has ordered European Union law enforcement agency Europol to delete any data it has on individuals that's over six months old, provided there's no link to criminal activity.…

French vendor joins fellow Aspire alumnus Fujitsu in winning contracts that extend beyond 2022 deadline IT consultancy and services company Capgemini has signed a £51m agreement to continue supporting UK tax systems first created under a contract HMRC has been planning to replace since 2015.…

Good: New requirements in new law. Bad: Grace period Electric car chargers will have to include secure boot and automatic network disconnection if unsigned software runs on the smart devices – but only from 2023, the British government has said.…

Cost of over-run was unknown, but won't be as bad as delays at other authorities, council document claims Norfolk County Council will have to wait a bit longer for that a-ha moment when it finally turns on its new £18m cloud-based Oracle ERP system as the go-live date is delayed until April.…

It's not as though folks haven't been warned about this There have been millions of downloads of outdated, vulnerable Log4j versions despite the emergence of a serious security hole in December 2021, according to figures compiled by the firm that runs Apache Maven's Central Repository.…

Engineers try to clear material so Mars bot can continue drilling NASA engineers have temporarily paused Perseverance’s ability to drill and collect Martian rock samples due to pebbles piling up in the rover’s caching system.…

Plus: Verizon's personal data grab, and more In brief Some mobile networks in Europe, UK, and America have reportedly started blocking Apple's beta-grade Private Relay functionality in iOS 15.…

Super Cali goes ballistic, this deal is atrocious The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) is appealing a judge's ruling that prevented it from intervening in Activision Blizzard’s $18m settlement to end a sex discrimination lawsuit last year.…

Departure comes as app courts controversy by integrating private cryptocurrency scheme Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the Signal secure messaging app, on Monday announced his resignation as CEO of the company.…

25-year veteran Michelle Johnston Holthaus appointed alongside beancounter from Micron Intel today announced a new showrunner for its PC processor business and named its next chief financial officer, who is arriving from Micron.…

Faker.js and colors.js sabotaged by maker Updated Two popular open-source packages were recently sabotaged with mischievous commits, creating confusion among those using the software and exacerbating concerns about the fragility of the open-source software supply chain.…

We're just two chip businesses, standing in front of the regulators, asking them to love us The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published Nvidia and Arm's responses to its renewed probing of the proposed takeover of Arm by Nvidia.…

Who should your PC work for: you, or your antivirus vendor? Germany-based security biz Avira's antivirus has enabled a new feature: "Avira Crypto". It's opt-in, but if you click "yes", the AV will use your computer to mine Ethereum.…

AT&T and Verizon come to agreement with FAA on tech rollout Live close to an airport in US and have a 5G handset? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released a promised list of major American airports to be surrounded by buffer zones that won't have 5G-C band service.…

What happens when you're top of the pile and everyone wants chips TSMC looks set to beat its own revenue guidance for calendar Q4 of 2021 if the latest monthly figures are anything to go by, rounding off a year of strong growth for the semiconductor industry as a whole.…

Week 2 for new CEO, forced to report sliding sales, delayed projects to investors Atos has issued a profit warning following a "major" contract revision with a UK financial services customer, as well as wider project slippages and lower reselling revenue.…

Shock: Nobody likes whiteboard interviews either A survey of nearly 14,000 coders and recruiters has shown that 70 per cent of devs prefer remote work while some headhunters are considering dropping the curriculum vitae (CV) from the hiring process.…

The solution? Click the annoying error messages away and keep printing The ongoing semiconductor shortage has reached the point that it's affecting one of the most-hated aspects of printing – copy-protection chips on ink cartridges.…

Warning comes weeks after govt body accused subsidiary Sam’s Club of 'ulterior motive' in goods stocking spat American budget retailer Walmart was cited for 19 alleged cybersecurity breaches in China, state-sponsored media reported last week.…

Auditor IPCO flagged it up – but then approved 99.94% of state snooping Former foreign secretary Dominic Raab rebuked GCHQ for secretly halting internal compliance audits that ensured the spy agency was obeying the law, a government report has revealed – while just 0.06 per cent of spying requests made by Britain's public sector were refused by its supposed overseer.…

And you thought unfolding the table for Christmas dinner was tricky The gold-coated primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was fully unfurled this weekend, marking the end of the epic major deployments of the spacecraft, but only the beginning of months of alignment and calibration.…

Select committee set to examine causes of the setbacks Surrey County Council is set to incur an additional £3.2m costs on its delayed £22m ERP project that is scheduled to replace an ageing SAP R/3 system with Unit4 software-as-a-service.…

Poetry and WINE – a heady combination The Haiku operating system has an experimental new feature, WINE. Originally a Linux subsystem, WINE can run unmodified Windows programs on other operating systems.…

How sad would you be to see AV go? Us neither Opinion Game knows game. Thus it came as little surprise that Norton's consumer security software not only sprouted a cryptominer that slurps your computer's life essence and skims a cut, but that it's hard to turn it off.…