The Register

And they're packing a new dirty RAT as well A prolific email phishing threat actor – TA505 – is back from the dead, according to enterprise security software slinger Proofpoint.…

Cloud directory start-up valued at $2.65bn JumpCloud, a provider of cloud directory services, has sucked up $66m from investors including Jira developer Atlassian.…

Treat customers fairly when it comes to auto-renewal. Or else The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has unveiled compliance principles to curb locally some of the sharper auto-renewal practices of antivirus software firms.…

Decides switches need help performing network functions, just like servers need their CPUs free for core workloads HPE's networking subsidiary Aruba has added data processing units to a switch.…

New iconography, minimalism, less text – and at least it is not Paint 3D Microsoft's redesigned user interface for Paint in Windows 11 is prettier but perhaps a little less useable than the previous version.…

Got a Disaster Recovery plan? Ever tested it? You probably should... Confusion continues to reign in the world of television, including UK national broadcaster Channel 4, weeks after a broadcast centre cockup wrought havoc upon servers.…

Cloud data market heats up as company lures $60m in Series C funding Finnish open-source-as-a-service provider Aiven has attracted a $60m extension to its Series C funding which now values the firm at $2bn.…

Watchdog is getting comfortable with its new digital remit The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said this morning it would be carrying out a market study into the music streaming industry.…

Utility biz has £28m to spend on replacement system Utility provider Northern Ireland Water (NIW) has set aside £28m to replace its current Oracle E-business Suite with a new HR and finance system.…

Alternative headline: Yet another widely used project maintained thanklessly by 'some random person in Nebraska' Come Sunday, October 24, 2021, those using applications that rely on gpsd for handling time data may find that they're living 1,024 weeks – 19.6 years – in the past.…

The answer is rarely obvious. Take part in our short poll and we'll find out together Reg Reader Survey The introduction of new systems into an organization is essential. If we stay still, if we continue to rely on legacy systems, if we fail to innovate – well, we (or, in reality, the company) will die. As business guru Sir John Harvey-Jones once put it: “If you are doing things the same way as two years ago, you are almost certainly doing them wrong.”…

And they're almost certainly better than a laptop jowel-cam Review It has been a long 20 months since Lockdown 1.0, and despite the best efforts of Google and Zoom et al to filter out the worst effects of built-in laptop webcams, a replacement might be in order for the long haul ahead.…

Google won the patent battle against ART+COM, but we were left with little more than a toy Column I used to think technology could change the world. Google's vision is different: it just wants you to sort of play with the world. That's fun, but it's not as powerful as it could be.…

Sneaking in programming under the guise of plastic bricks There is good news for the intersection of Lego and Raspberry Pi fans today, as a new HAT (the delightfully named Hardware Attached on Top) will be unveiled for the diminutive computer to control Technic motors and sensors.…

Home quarantine week was the price for an overseas trip, ongoing observation is the price of COVID-19 Feature My family and I recently returned to Singapore after an overseas trip that, for the first time in over a year, did not require the ordeal of two weeks of quarantine in a hotel room.…

It might enable activation of entirely new features on existing Xeon CPUs … or, you know, not Intel has teased a new tech it calls "Software Defined Silicon" (SDSi) but is saying almost nothing about it – and has told The Register it could amount to nothing.…

Where we're going, we don't need 5nm Analysis Cars are gaining momentum as computers on wheels, though chip manufacturers' auto focus isn't on making components using the latest and greatest fabrication nodes.…

Also plans to open-source current XuanTie RISC-V cores and future designs Alibaba Cloud has revealed a home-grown CPU for servers, based on the Arm architecture, that it has already deployed powering its cloud services.…

Sent user data to China without once thinking Beijing might decide to snoop, lied about server location Line, the Japan-based messaging and payments app with millions of users around Southeast Asia, has conceded that its data protection regimes had multiple shortcomings, and therefore put users' personal information at risk.…

We can't wait to see the logic gymnastics needed to justify this Canon USA has been accused of forcing customers to buy ink cartridges when they only want to scan and fax documents using the manufacturer's so-called All-In-One multi-function printers.…

x86 is an eighty-sixed ex Apple on Monday announced 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models armed with Arm-compatible Apple Silicon chips, extending its platform architecture transition, and Intel exodus, for its high-end notebooks.…

This better be a Prime delivery US House representatives say they are ready to call upon the Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon executives, including ex-CEO Jeff Bezos, lied to Congress about whether the internet giant unfairly uses customer data to create and market its own products.…

Spacecraft otherwise stable and working well NASA's Lucy is on its way to the Trojan asteroids, but engineers have already spotted a problem with one of the probe's 7.3-metre solar arrays.…

Infosec pro: 'OneDrive abuse has been going on for years' Microsoft has been branded as "the world's best malware hoster for about a decade," thanks to abuse of the Office 365 and Live platform, as well as its slow response to reports by security researchers.…

Plus: Australian telescope precursor finds weird waves in the middle of the galaxy The governments of South Africa and Australia have signed agreements formalizing the construction and operation of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) telescopes by the Observatory's governing body.…

Which it isn't, as illustrated by exec director of the F# Foundation The troubled .NET Foundation was intended to "borrow as much as possible from the GNOME Foundation," according to Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of GNOME and now at Microsoft, who was involved in its original design.…

Developers, start your engines Arm is putting virtual models of its chip designs in the cloud so developers can write and test applications before the physical hardware gets into their hands.…

Announcement uses the phrase 'world-leading' without referring to UK once Brit political has-been and Facebook global affairs veep Nick Clegg fired off a missive over the weekend announcing that the antisocial network would be hiring 10,000 people from across the European Union to help "BUILD THE METAVERSE" (VERSE-VERSE-VERSE-VERSE).…

System 'operating outside of the original design specification' said AAIB An EasyJet flight to Edinburgh Airport took off with wrongly loaded passengers and baggage because of IT network congestion causing computer systems to interact "in a manner which had neither been designed nor predicted."…

Saving the forests by making printing even harder Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows 11, appears to be just as iffy when it comes to printing as its predecessors.…

Facial recognition for meal payment system works for kids, supplier says Updated Facial recognition technology is being employed in more UK schools to allow pupils to pay for their meals, according to reports today.…

UK Cabinet Office organises latest print hardware and supplies mega framework The UK government has awarded a contract worth up to £875m for a range of printer hardware and multi-function devices in a move which again raises questions about whether the paperless office was a dream that has faded in the recesses of our collective memory.…

Plus: Rounded corners make GNOME 40 look like Windows 11 Review Canonical has released Ubuntu 21.10, or "Impish Indri" as this one is known. This is the last major version before next year's long-term support release of Ubuntu 22.04, and serves as a good preview of some of the changes coming for those who stick with LTS releases.…

Jamie and Amanda have a new co-presenter to contend with There can be few things worse than Microsoft Windows elbowing itself into a presenting partnership, as seen in this digital signage for the Heart breakfast show.…

Information wants to be free, and it's making its escape Opinion Forget the Singularity. That modern myth where AI learns to improve itself in an exponential feedback loop towards evil godhood ain't gonna happen. Spacetime itself sets hard limits on how fast information can be gathered and processed, no matter how clever you are.…

Say what you mean NSFW Who, Me? Ever written that angry email and accidentally hit send instead of delete? Take a trip back to the 1990s equivalent with a slightly NSFW Who, Me?…

Ongoing crackdown saw apps 1.83 million apps tested, 4,200 told to clean up their act, pop-up ads popped China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Xiao Yaqing, has given a rare interview in which he signalled the nation's crackdown on the internet and predatory companies will continue.…

Despite modern labour laws, 72-hour work weeks are still common Chinese software developers have crowdsourced a spreadsheet that dishes the dirt on working conditions at hundreds of employers.…

Names and bars crypto exchange SUEX, warns paying ransoms could spell trouble Ransomware extracted at least $590 million for the miscreants who create and distribute it in the first half of 2021 alone – more than the $416 million tracked in all of 2020, according to the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Total ransomware-related financial activity may have reached $5.2 billion.…

Crew successfully de-orbited on Sunday carrying vital payload: footage for a movie shot in space The International Space Station has again had to compensate for unexpected thrusting by a Russian spacecraft.…

Plus rifle-toting robot dogs, but makers insist they're really dumb In brief Whether or not non-fungible tokens are a flash in the pan or forever, malware operators have been keen to weaponise the technology.…

Plus: Microsoft Translator machine learning software now supports over 100 languages In brief Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice's help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice.…

Michigan man arrested for borrowing costly textbooks and selling them A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them.…

Academics advised to consider excluding certain terminology for the sake of inclusivity A working group in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has proposed a series of steps to "decolonize" the Informatics curriculum, which includes trying "to avoid using predominantly Western names such as Alice/Bob (as is common in the computer security literature)."…

Car makers facing increasingly tough times until supply catches up Toyota said it would cut car production by up to 150,000 vehicles due to ongoing semiconductor shortages and restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Salus populi suprema lex esto ... or perhaps not A Missouri politician has been relentlessly mocked on Twitter after demanding the prosecution of a journalist who found and responsibly reported a vulnerability in a state website.…

Global handset market slips in Q3 on sliding chipset availability, says Canalys Crippling component shortages caused smartphone shipments to dip in calendar Q3, though it was the also-rans, vendors outside of the top five biggest brands with the lowest economies of scale, that suffered most.…

This webcast will help you comply WEBCAST So, it can be a bit of a shock for Microsoft 365 customers to find out that the platform’s native security and data protection tools can be somewhat … lacking. Oh, and inconsistent, with different apps having different retention periods.…

Washington Metro admin has taken an early lunch Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a whole new world for bork today as a Washington Metro platform indicator suggests an alternative to the usual train for weary commuters. How about getting a bit more out of Windows?…

He hasn't got $2.5bn to hand to the DoJ, unlike his bosses A Boeing 737 Max test pilot has been charged with obstructing US aviation safety regulators, according to the US Department of Justice, and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.…