The Register

Brit rocketeers get ever closer to that first launch from UK soil A space race of a sort in the UK has picked up pace in recent weeks, as aerospace company Orbex showed off its Kinloss launchpad in February and Skyrora this week opened its Midlothian rocket engine testing facility.…

US biz's license to operate in London up for renewal this month Gig workers have urged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to force Uber to pay drivers at least minimum wage as the ride-hailing biz seeks to renew its license to operate in the British capital.…

Hitting big targets, untouchable, technically proficient. Who will it inspire next? Analysis The Lapsus$ cyber-crime gang, believed to be based in Brazil, until recently was best known for attacks on that country's Ministry of Health and Portuguese media outlets SIC Noticias and Expresso.…

When this baby hits 88 GHz, you're going to see some serious stuff AI hardware slinger SambaNova and software biz DeLorean AI have teamed up to provide smart predictive tools to help clinicians hopefully better care for patients suffering kidney problems.…

$10,000 and Efabless may be what you're looking for Interview The likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft can design custom chips and have them manufactured using their billions of dollars in the bank.…

If you want your own custom SmartNIC, knock yourself out, says x86 giant Intel is discontinuing its original lineup of Programmable Acceleration Cards as it turns to an "ecosystem first" strategy that helps customers create their own FPGA-based products, including SmartNICs.…

Watchdog demands $500,000 after millions of people's info stolen and sold The FTC wants the former owner of CafePress to cough up $500,000 after the customizable merch bazaar not only tried to cover up a major computer security breach involving millions of netizens, it failed to safeguard customers' personal information.…

Features aimed at industrial, IoT, autonomous needs MathWorks, maker of the long-standing MATLAB suite, is focusing its latest software updates on reaching beyond its traditional scientific base – and eyeing up autonomous vehicle developers, makers of devices with wireless communications, and others.…

BlackBerry says extortionists erase documents if ransom unpaid BlackBerry security researchers have identified a ransomware family targeting English-speaking victims that is capable of erasing all non-system files from infected Windows PCs.…

IBM's Linux distro giant unable to wrestle domain name from owner IBM's Red Hat cannot prevent Daniel Pocock and his Software Freedom Institute SA from using the domain name WeMakeFedora.org, according to a ruling on Monday.…

An all-FOSS, direct-to-binary compiler for the 63-year-old programming language The newly announced gcobol compiler is a fresh front end for GCC, and builds native binary executables.…

Doing all it can to catch up with AWS and Microsoft Azure for enterprise users Google Cloud is joining VMware's Cloud Universal program, the aim being to make it easier for enterprises to migrate VMware-based workloads to the cloud while allowing them to re-use on-premises license investments.…

Even the sharpest of models fail to melt ice or build a circuit Think your AI agents are actually learning to solve problems? A new benchmark sheds light on what is real when it comes to sophisticated AI.…

On a plus side, their code's not very good A new Linux botnet is using the infamous Log4j vulnerability to install rootkits and steal data.…

Mike Burrows exits Chipzilla to lead advanced graphics at Radeon biz Intel has hired a lot of top graphics talent from rival AMD to build out its discrete GPU business, though apparently it's now AMD's turn to take from the semiconductor giant.…

Aimed at nixing non-compliance penalties, cloud overage costs IBM and IT management specialist Flexera are more closely integrating their respective tech to boost the use of AI and automation to modernize management of IT assets and operations within organizations.…

Permanent daylight savings could be the glitch of the (new) century The US Senate has passed legislation aimed at making Daylight Saving Time permanent, leaving the country in the "spring forward" state from 2023.…

Here’s another reason to do hyperscale thing of offloading network functions to an accelerator Software-defined networking contender Pluribus has ported its Netvisor ONE OS network operating system to Nvidia's BlueField-2 data processing units, a new role for the accelerators.…

Patch flaws and enforce authentication policies, CISA and FBI warn State-sponsored threat actors from Russia over the last year breached a non-governmental organization (NGO) by leveraging multifactor authentication (MFA) defaults and exploiting the PrintNightmare vulnerability in Windows Print Spooler.…

You can trust them, they probably know all the weak spots. Ahem. If Kubernetes is so complicated that even Google is automating its setup, then it's worth paying attention when U.S. spy giant, the National Security Agency (NSA) points to strengthening it.…

Intel to slip into top 10 list with Tower takeover Contract chip manufacturers grew revenue in the fourth quarter of last calendar year largely by raising the prices of wafers in the face of overloaded factories as the semiconductor industry continued its breakneck pace.…

The go-to desktop for Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE improves its fit and polish After the project reorganized its version numbering, GNOME 42 consolidates the ongoing modernization effort. Bear in mind, we're describing the release candidate, so some of the details might change before it comes out.…

Work Trend Index report indicates that things are about to get a little 'messy' Microsoft's second annual Work Trend Index report is out, and it highlights a massive disconnect between leaders, managers and employees.…

US-China research collaborations and startup investments on the up, too AI systems are becoming increasingly larger and complex, but despite the technology's progress, they exhibit higher levels of toxic behaviors, according to the latest AI Index Report.…

Data protection watchdog imposes fine on half-trillion dollar valued Facebook firm Following a breach of data privacy European law, Facebook parent company Meta has received an $18.6m (€17m) fine — representing around 0.055 percent of its quarterly revenue.…

CEO tells The Reg his engineers still have sights on phones to servers SiFive is pulling in nearly $400m in funding this year between a new investment round and the proceeds of a business sale with the ambitious mission of eclipsing rival Arm – and the x86 world of Intel and AMD – with processor designs for everything from smartphones to servers.…

Security vendors now have 5 working days to explain to the Competition and Markets Authority why it's wrong The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) merger inquiry into NortonLifeLock's proposed $8bn acquisition of rival antivirus provider Avast has now closed, with the regulator concluding that a tie-up could indeed reduce competition in the marketplace.…

A $4 microcontroller, you say? Will it run you-know-what? It is with a sense of inevitability that we can confirm somebody has managed to make Doom work on the diminutive RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board.…

Despite girls outperforming boys when they choose the subject New research by the British Computer Society (BCS) has found girls are outnumbered six to one by boys in computer science classes across the UK.…

A bolt of lightning has caused me days of misery, because the fix requires too much proprietary tech Column I heard an electric discharge, a bit like a Jacob's ladder, immediately before a deafening crack of thunder. I'd never been so close to a lightning strike! All of the lights in the house went bright, then dimmed, then went back to normal. "Uh-oh," I thought, "I'm in trouble now." Everything in the house had been hit by a nasty surge and the oft-spoken aphorism that broadband services are now a utility to rank with water and electricity was suddenly very, very, real to me.…

To the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency, at least If you've been wondering about the fate of Ukraine's nuclear power stations amid Russia's full-on invasion of the nation, you're not alone. Here's an update from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).…

Vote held after red-tape targeting proof-of-work assets removed Europe's lawmakers this week moved ahead with their proposed cryptocurrency regulations, having ditched a rule that might have banned financial services from dealing in Bitcoin and Ethereum.…

Ingenuity's Earth-side coding team has expanded, and so has its rover-assistance mission NASA has extended the mission of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter and given it the task of assisting the Perseverance rover, thanks to past and future software updates.…

CRM giant pleased to be named yet again on World's Most Ethical Companies list Salesforce has become a defendant in a case brought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that seeks to prevent the release of information revealing communications within the Republican Party related to the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.…

Government agencies impersonated, fake antivirus, another wiper, backdoors As Ukraine fights for survival against invading Russian forces, here's a taste of some of the malware the nation's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is battling.…

App already banned, now it's getting very close supervision China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has taken unusually strong action against a social network that has long been considered a thorn in the side of the nation's elites.…

Plus: Face ID can recognize you with a mask on, kinda This week Apple released software revisions for its desktop, mobile, watch, and TV operating systems, along with application updates and security patches.…

Cr8escape priv-escalation bug opens the door to cluster takeovers A vulnerability in the container runtime engine CRI-O can be exploited by a rogue user to gain root-level access on a host.…

Bad data can throw vulnerable apps and services for an infinite loop A bug in OpenSSL certificate parsing leaves systems open to denial-of-service attacks from anyone wielding an explicit curve. …

Planned deprecation didn't go as planned, cloud biz aims to try again at the end of March Microsoft's Azure DevOps team has undone the deprecation of outdated Transport Layer Security (TLS) that occurred at the end of January because of unspecified "unexpected issues" that arose following the change.…

Security consolidation du jour SentinelOne reached a $616.5m deal to buy identity security vendor Attivo Networks, the companies announced today.…

Home Secretary ponders putting WikiLeaker on one-way US flight Julian Assange has all but lost his fight against extradition from Britain to America after the UK Supreme Court said his case "did not raise an arguable point of law."…

A state of emergency is declared as officials assess the damage and look for culprits A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack forced Israeli officials Monday to temporarily take down several government websites and to declare a state of online emergency to assess the damage and begin investigating who was behind the incident.…

Rolls out first Epyc products the same week Google announces cloud infra price rise Cloud hosting provider Vultr has expanded its portfolio of cloud infrastructure with an new range of high-performance virtual machine instances, including its first products based on AMD Epyc processors, all with NVMe SSD storage.…

Sub-$299 Zen 3 desktop chips throw wrench into Intel wheelhouse AMD is doling out a handful of new Ryzen desktop processors, including the first to use the chip designer's 3D die stacking technology.…

Nation's cybersecurity agency has doubts about Russian firm's reliability Germany's BSI federal cybersecurity agency has warned the country's citizens not to install Russian-owned Kaspersky antivirus, saying it has "doubts about the reliability of the manufacturer."…

x86 giant also expands manufacturing in Ireland, plus R&D and packaging across Europe Intel has laid down its grand plans to build chip factories in Europe, which will start with a €17bn ($19bn) mega-site in the city of Magdeburg, Germany.…

Virtual iron curtains are a lot harder to keep free of holes Research by Top10VPN, which regularly publishes data on virtual private newtork (VPN) usage around the world, has highlighted unprecedented demand in Russia and Ukraine.…

Analyst view: 4Q21 drop plus strains from war mean component shortages drag on The telecoms kit market had a good 2021 with revenues close to $100bn, up more than 20 percent since 2017, but growth is now slowing, according to analyst Dell'Oro Group. Huawei is also starting to feel the effect of sanctions, but still leads the global market by a fair margin.…

It was a mistake, vendor tells The Register Updated Microsoft appears to be experimenting with more adverts in Windows 11 after eagle-eyed Insider users spotted helpful hints turning up in File Explorer.…