The Register

Report claims Huawei techs working for Chinese intelligence compromised Australian telco Suspicions about the integrity of Huawei products among US government officials can be attributed in part to a 2012 incident involving a Huawei software update that compromised the network of a major Australian telecom company with malicious code, according to a report published by Bloomberg.…

Maybe you're not too cool for intuitive FOSS Fest Tilde is a plain text editor for the Linux console. The difference is that even if you've never seen it before, you already know how to use this one.…

Federal agencies have a week to get their systems patched The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday escalated its call to fix the Apache Log4j vulnerability with an emergency directive requiring federal agencies to take corrective action by 5 pm EST on December 23, 2021.…

Gullible conspiracists find that stupid is as stupid does The Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Regulation Protection has banned a list of so-called anti-5G necklaces, wristbands and eye masks because they could harm their gullible users.…

That makes 4 concurrent court cases over hotly disputed 2011 buyout Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's extradition has been temporarily halted after the British software millionaire filed a judicial review challenging legal findings against him.…

£200k Anglo-French heat-seeking missile does its thing The RAF has scored its first air-to-air "kill" – where an aircraft downs an enemy aircraft – for almost 40 years after shooting down a drone over Syria.…

Big Red targets health records specialist Cerner in $30bn takeover bid Oracle has reportedly set its sights on the $30bn acquisition of US electronic health records specialist Cerner as it tries to further penetrate the medical sector.…

Plus: Quad9 loses German DNS-blocking injunction pause attempt Admiral, the UK-based insurance company, has been refused legal access to a non-customer's mobile phone location data after claiming it would help decide whether or not a policyholder was committing fraud.…

It looks like you're going to be isolating over Christmas. Would you like some help with that? Our back-of-the-cupboard Microsoft knitwear is winging its way to a lucky(?) reader. Naturally, the winning entry for next year's theme was Clippy-related but there were some crackers from the Reg readership.…

It’s FAQing annoying to tell the truth Something for the Weekend, Sir? Do you need help?…

One to wheel out when those friend tech support calls get too much On Call IT folk don't so much give gifts as recycle old hardware. A worthy endeavour, until the inevitable call for help comes on. Our response? Depends on how evil we're feeling at the time. Welcome to On Call.…

It’s massive and fun to fly in, but expensive to run and not as nimble as rivals The last bolts have been fastened to the last Airbus A380, marking the end of manufacture for the world's most capacious passenger aircraft.…

Academy of Military Medical Sciences lands on the Entity List for its role, along with 36 other orgs The USA has added another 37 organizations – 34 of them from China – to its list of businesses with which US interests can't interact without a license, with 12 of them earning their places for developing "mind control weapons."…

No crypto, no sex, no clips from the telly. Enthusiastic and historically accurate socialism welcome China's Netcasting Services Association has issued a list of 100 topics local netizens must not include in short videos posted online.…

Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management can leak info via server-side request forgery VMware customers have probably had a busy week because more than 100 of the IT giant's products are impacted by the Log4j bug.…

Meta adverse to internet mercenaries using its social networks to help governments violate human rights Facebook successor Meta on Thursday said it canceled 1,500 social media accounts used by seven surveillance-for-hire firms to conduct online attacks against government critics and members of civil society.…

Alleges it and seven other Middle Kingdom tech outfits aid systematic oppression of Uyghur minority The US Treasury today banned American investment in eight entities – including prosumer drone maker DJI – that Uncle Sam claims are “part of the Chinese military-industrial complex” and active participants in surveillance and repression of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province.…

Have all those scientists been naughty ... or nice? Updated The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been confirmed for December 24* after engineers investigated and fixed up a communications problem on board the booster and spacecraft combo.…

Somehow people keep buying into dodgy crypto projects that vanish with investor funds First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors' funds.…

Millipede? Has something been bugging you about the name? Not any more Pedantic observers of arthropods can finally sleep at night as scientists have discovered a millipede with more than 1,000 legs.…

You can really tell System76 is a hardware vendor Stateside Linux laptop vendor System76 has released a new version of its own distro, which promptly messed up this hack's test laptop.…

Bank migrating thousands of apps and 100k+ workloads to new platform Hewlett Packard Enterprise's direct salesforce has inked a 10-year contract with Barclays Bank to provide a global private cloud via its GreenLake platform.…

App runs off a database, and databases are run by humans British police have made a series of arrests over the past few months after people with apparent access to NHS databases allegedly sold fake vaccination status entries on the NHS vaccine passport app.…

Fiasco replacing fire, police and ambulance comms already costing £550m for each year of delay The UK government has extended its contract with Samsung to provide LTE handsets for the much-troubled rollout of vital emergency services communications infrastructure.…

Handily, the team spotted a bug in Linux's ARM SMMU support too 2022 looks set to be the year of Linux on the desktop. By which we mean the Mac M1 desktop, judging by this week's emission from the Asahi Linux team.…

Both WWE and Reddit have cult-like followings, so why not? Comment Reddit says it has "confidentially" filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of the process to list publicly.…

'Cloud-native' outfit munches up $278m in new funding Cockroach Labs, the unfortunately named firm behind the distributed RDBMS CockroachDB, is ending the year as it began – with a massive inhalation of investor cash.…

Settles claims relating to cyber attack and data leak, court hears British Mensa Limited has paid former CTO Eugene Hopkinson defamation damages and costs settling his claims of libel, malicious falsehood, and breach of his rights under the UK GDPR relating to a series of statements it made on the subject of a January 2021 cyber-attack and a data leak at the org.…

Lack of recognition and support for quality engineering part of science's reproducibility problem, MPs hear Lack of support for software engineering is holding back efforts to improve reproducibility and openness in the UK's scientific research, a panel of MPs was reliably informed yesterday.…

Don't worry, it'll be carbon neutral ... In an appropriately nebulous blog post, Kickstarter, the non-profit crowdfunding site, has announced it will move to a decentralised model via the dreaded blockchain.…

First five full releases took 20 years, this one arrived in 18 months Text editor GNU Nano has reached version 6.0.…

And potentially an increase in UK state-backed hacks The British government has launched a £2.6bn National Cyber Strategy, intended to steer the state's thinking on cyber attack, defence and technology for the next three years – and there's some good news if you run a tech company.…

Looks a lot like a response to messaging services passing data through China Social media and search engine operators in Japan will be required to specify the countries in which users' data is physically stored, under a planned tweak to local laws.…

Ingenuity clocks up 30 minutes flying in the Martian skies NASA has revealed that Ingenuity – the experimental helicopter sent to Mars with the Perseverance Rover – has clocked up a whole half-hour of flight in the Red Planet's meanly thin atmosphere.…

Which isn't a lot – a single fab can cost more than the entire subsidy pool. India wants four built soon India has unveiled a $10 billion subsidy scheme designed to lure semiconductor manufacturers to its shores.…

Company behind cloud-native DB munches up $273m in new funding Cockroach Labs, the unfortunately named firm behind the distributed RDBMS CockroachDB, is ending the year as it began – with a massive inhalation of investor cash.…

But still allows limited harvesting Meta has expanded its bug bounty program to include payouts for reports of scraping attacks on Facebook – but hold your applause.…

Non-consensual on-device image analysis perhaps was difficult to reconcile with privacy protests Updated Apple evidently has decided against forcing customers to run its sex crime detection software on their iPhones in order to refer those stashing illegal child abuse images in iCloud to authorities.…

Microsoft says cyber-spies linked to Beijing, Tehran are getting busy with security flaw along with world + dog Microsoft reckons government cyber-spies in China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey are actively exploiting the Log4j 2.x remote-code execution hole.…

Other terminals welcome Microsoft is to make its new Windows Terminal the default for command line applications in Windows 11.…

Not so much JEDI lightsabers, more magic WANDS The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed why it upheld Microsoft's challenge over the award of a $10bn National Security Agency (NSA) cloud contract to arch-rival AWS.…

Export controls aren't enough, Dems say: Bring on the Global Magnitsky Act Eighteen US Democratic lawmakers have asked the Treasury Department and State Department to punish Israel-based spyware maker NSO Group and three other surveillance software firms for enabling human rights abuses.…

Not getting a COVID-19 jab? That's not very googley of you Updated Google has given its anti-vax workers an ultimatum: you're fired unless you comply with its COVID-19 vaccination rules.…

If you're wondering why you couldn't access a website, app, or service for about 30 minutes today, this may be it Amazon Web Services gave everyone a scare today as it once again suffered a partial IT breakdown, briefly taking down a chunk of the web with it. If you found you were unable to use your favorite website or app for a moment today, this may have been why.…

Wanna play on a US stock exchange? You'll need US regulators on side South Korean semiconductor company Magnachip has terminated its planned merger with Chinese private equity firm Wise Road Capital.…

And online flea market had IDOR in an iOS-focused API UK online used goods bazaar Gumtree exposed its users' home addresses in the source code of its webpages, and then tried to squirm out of a bug bounty after infosec bods alerted it to the flaw.…

High price and no ARM64 yet. We quiz boss on whether it makes sense Interview Azul, a provider of OpenJDK (Java runtime) builds, has introduced a "Cloud Native Compiler" which offers remote compilation of Java to native code, claiming it can reduce compute resources by up to 50 per cent.…

It isn't just the products that are embarrassing Microsoft's Raymond Chen has continued his odyssey through the Windows vendor's back catalogue of awkward product names with the story behind WinCE.…

REST-to-GraphQL data hub also on offer and looking for more contributions Hasura, a vendor specialising in the GraphQL data-fetching query language, has created a low-code approach to connecting existing REST endpoints into a unified GraphQL API.…

'Event imputation' draws on lots of other sources to fill in gaps CompSci boffins think they've come up with a novel way to recreate missing entries in log files.…