The Register

Register reader finds that some Apple fans are... not very bright? On Call The weekend is upon us, and we can think of no better time to celebrate the efforts of those courageous individuals tasked with sorting the problems of users. Be they Mac or PC-based. Welcome to On Call.…

UCL astronomer tells us: 'We were surprised by our discovery' Mysterious X-rays have been spotted emanating from Uranus for the first time, according to the latest observations made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.…

Good times for NVMe-based flash arrays and Cisco India’s overall network and storage market both showed declines in the final quarter of 2020 due to lingering work and school from home measures and banking organizations spending less on storage.…

It's not DNS. There's no way it can be DNS... It was DNS Updated Unlucky netizens are right now unable to log into Microsoft's online services, including Azure, Teams, Dynamics, and Xbox Live, due to an ongoing global outage.…

Chatty digital assistant can still be found on Outlook, Teams, Windows It's the end of the line for the Android and iOS incarnations of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana.…

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Asking for a friend's machine-learning code Top datasets used to train AI models and benchmark how the technology has progressed over time are riddled with labeling errors, a study shows.…

'The regulatory frameworks we rely on to support these efforts are dated' FCC acting commissh Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed giving the US commercial space industry a dedicated block of spectrum in order to support future rocket launches.…

And drought in Taiwan threatens supply. Good news for firm's wallet, not so much for chip buyers Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has warned about a "severe shortage" of supply in the DRAM memory market, with the situation expected to worsen as the year progresses.…

Handy in an emergency, but only for Nitro instances and requires work in advance AWS has introduced the "interactive EC2 Serial Console", enabling troubleshooting of virtual machines when normal SSH access is not working, with one user gushing: "I have been waiting 10 years for this moment."…

Join us with Red Hat and IBM – and find out how to deploy your workloads on Kubernetes and much more Webcast The world of cloud native might look very different to traditional enterprise computing, with the promise of enhanced scalability, increased automation, and blurred lines between public and private infrastructure.…

Thousands of people's personal information purloined after UAE hotels compromised The Netherlands Data Protection Authority has fined Booking.com €475,000 for notifying it too late that criminals had accessed the data of 4,109 people who booked a hotel room via the website.…

Mere months to go before 1.21 arrives Kubernetes 1.20 has finally put in an appearance on Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), just squeaking into March and a good few months since the upstream release.…

Hey, we heard you like machine learning. So we put a machine-learning system in your machine-learning system Self-driving cars could be equipped with a trained early-warning system that alerts the person behind the wheel whenever it realizes it's entering a situation where a human driver has had to take over before.…

But no official Linux GUI support yet Canonical has released a Community Preview of Ubuntu on Windows as "a sandbox for experimenting with new features and functionality" on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2.…

Updates on its blow-up space station while Bigelow threatens to burst NASA's bubble Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has unveiled plans for an enormous inflatable space station tended by cargo and crew carrying versions of its Dream Chaser spaceplane.…

Also: Accessibility improvements and cosmetic tweaks included A new version of Visual Studio Code has arrived just in time for Chocolate Egg Day featuring "official support for Raspberry Pi OS", which might come as a surprise to those who have spent the last month or so complaining about it.…

Plus other improvements to the Linux service manager Version 248 of systemd, a widely used system and service manager for Linux, adds a feature called system extension images, designed to allow system files to be added, or appear to be added, even on read-only file systems.…

Remembering airports of the past and borked kiosks of today Bork!Bork!Bork! In some parts of the world a festival involving chocolate eggs and bunnies is about to begin. For this poor kiosk, it appears festivities are temporarily at a halt.…

BT Group arm says it'll 'encourage' switch to modern kit; ISP says consumers on legacy CAN'T switch Openreach has said it will raise the cost of installing and delivering certain “legacy” wholesale products, including FTTC and copper, in order to spread the cost of the ongoing full-fibre rollout.…

The hidden cost of multi-cloud, and how full open source reduces lock-in The X.Org Foundation has successfully completed a migration from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to Packet, which it reckoned "should save us around $30 per day."…

Crackdown on offshore payments to freelancers hits a nerve Pakistan’s minister for IT and Telecom, Syed Aminul Haque, has protested the government’s new tax treatment for IT companies.…

Search giant insists it's necessary, iTitan didn't have anything to say Android and iOS phones transmit telemetry back to Google and Apple, even when users have chosen not to send analytics data.…

Capitalizing on preparing digitally novice businesses for post COVID era Hitachi announced it will purchase US software deevloper GlobalLogic for US$9.6B.…

Extraordinary response by .uk registry operator effectively dares members to fire the rest of them Nominet has rejected calls for serious change at the .uk registry operator despite losing its CEO, chairman, and three board members to a membership vote earlier this month.…

Says customer data wasn't touched, doesn't say much about being rooted Wi-Fi kit-slinger Ubiquiti has suggested the attacker that accessed some of its cloud-hosted systems in January 2021 may have made off with source code and employee logins, not the customer data it initially warned could be in peril.…

Programming pioneers bag $1m prize This year’s Turing Award has gone to two men who helped create the foundation on which modern software is built.…

Best not to go long on printer shares, IDC predicts copy shops will rise again Analyst firm IDC has spotted up an uptick in the Asia Pacific region's printer market, thanks to a certain virus you may read about in the news of late.…

Gives Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning Microsoft has agreed to supply at least 120,000 production units of its HoloLens augmented-reality headsets to the US Army.…

Big Blue and its claret-capped subsidiary accused of nicking UnixWare blueprints, lying, and conspiring Updated Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.…

Plus $50bn pledge to boost chip R&D and fabbing in Land of the Free A new national infrastructure plan outlined by US President Joe Biden on Wednesday equates fast internet access – broadband – with other utilities including water and power.…

It's all about driving down costs on OCI... so it can compete with AWS, claims analyst Oracle has launched a free service it hopes will convince more customers to shift their applications to the cloud – Oracle’s cloud, that is.…

Global pandemic and sanctions? Yes, they played a bit part too Huawei was forced to rely solely on the buying power of its domestic customers in calendar 2020 as foreign trade melted away in the face of US-led sanctions and a global pandemic.…

That schedule, however, is looking a lot less shiny The ambitiously named Virgin Galactic has unveiled the latest vehicle in its fleet – the Spaceship III named VSS Imagine.…

Falls back on ancient mainframe as Workday protests state has 'no basis to terminate our agreement' The US state of Maine is requesting an official review of its $54.6m project to renew its HR system, currently being built by Workday under a contract the state is threatening to cancel, a move which could leave the state government continuing to rely on its 30-year-old mainframe-based system.…

Planting that Bezos flag in the newest cloud sector: spaaaaaace Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is known for his proclivity towards all things space, and now the Web Services wing of his empire has earmarked $1m in cloud credits that will be evenly distributed to 10 space startups.…

...but only on clouds it controls. Multi-cloud licensing is still all sorts of fun VMware has taken another step towards turning its crown jewels into a subscription service, but the path it has chosen to walk is narrow.…

A fine Australian tradition stomped on A school in Perth, Western Australia, has turned arbiter of fashion and declared something we all know deep down to be true – that the mullet is "not acceptable".…

Welcome to the new bland People who listen to rock or hip hop are harder for music recommendation algorithms to please, according to a study by machine-learning experts and data scientists.…

No new plaintiffs allowed to join IBM will have to face several civil claims of age discrimination filed in a collective action by former workers, a federal judge has ruled, while rejecting Big Blue’s attempt to entirely dismiss the action.…

That and the $950k salary Poor old Safra Catz has had to find some way of making ends meet since she was offered no increase in her salary, no bonus, no new equity grant, and no performance-based equity vesting for her role as CEO of $40bn-revenue Oracle.…

One final update for its 'couple of thousand' users then it's just a hobby It's a bad week for anyone still using a PowerPC-based Mac. The developer of TenFourFox, the last real modern browser for the platform, has thrown in the towel.…

Security and privacy still left to fix, preferably before launch In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors, capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed by their signals.…

Alleges staff took down the internet when investigators visited, even got a little physical South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has recommended Apple’s local outpost be prosecuted for hampering its investigations into its affairs and slapped it with a 300 million Won (US$264,000) fine.…

Then issuing tens of millions in fake invoices A duo in China has been accused of tricking a government-run identity verification system to create fake invoices.…

Also reveals first foldable with U-shaped hinge to lighten things up Logowatch Chinese consumer tech enfant terrible has pledged to build electric cars.…

Talk about living in hope Indian payment app maker MobiKwik has denied its security has been breached, saying that if it's true, as has been claimed, that its customers' information has appeared on the dark web, then some other platform was totally responsible for that.…

Was it a coded message? The password for accessing nukes? Nope A cryptic message sent from the Twitter account of the US Strategic Command, then deleted, could have been many things.…

Research agency and housing board sign a deal as COVID-19 makes manpower and materials scarce Singapore's industrial research agency has started work on 5G-enabled drones that use LiDAR and cameras to monitor construction sites, then send the data they collect to systems that create digital models of buildings that change in real time.…

High stakes battle could go on for days There are a maximum of 6,000 votes to count but the push by workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama to unionize could take days as the high-stakes battle acts as a much larger proxy across America.…

FTC cites 'significant headwinds' in trying to fight the San Diego chipmaker Updated The Federal Trade Commission has given up its antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm although the US watchdog still claims the chip maker violated fair competition laws.…