The Register

Still plans to make life hard for Beijing, but wants to reduce the chances of domestic division The United States' National Security Division will wind up its "China Initiative" – an effort to combat what then-attorney general Jeff Sessions described in 2018 as "systematic and calculated threats" posed by Beijing-backed economic espionage.…

Launches Alder Lake P, U-series processors – with muted claims about battery life Intel has applied the Evo specification it uses to define thin and light consumer-grade laptops to PCs that employ the vPro standard it uses for business kit.…

'Radio altimeters cannot be relied upon to function' – gulp The US Federal Aviation Administration warned on Wednesday that 5G C-band transmissions may interfere with landing operations at a limited set of airports for most Boeing 737 aircraft.…

He probably knows a thing or two about nobody understanding him Meta has had a bad start to the year.…

Of course you realize, this means war Hundreds of computers in Ukraine have been infected with data-wiping Windows malware, say researchers at ESET.…

There's gold in them thar forms Government agencies and industry groups are putting increasing pressure on enterprises to ensure their systems, and the vast amounts of data they are holding, are protected against the growing threat of ransomware and others cyber-attacks.…

Bvp47 of yore said to have used BPF to conceal comms in network traffic Pangu Lab has identified what it claims is a sophisticated backdoor that was used by the NSA to subvert highly targeted Linux systems around the world for more than a decade.…

Digital skirmishes continue as tension mounts in Eastern Europe The EU has sent a cyber response team to Ukraine as rumours of a planned Russian invasion reach fever pitch. Meanwhile, IBM's infosec division says the UK was one of the most targeted countries in Europe for cyberattacks last year.…

And let me clue you in: I am the one who CloudKnox Microsoft Defender's tentacles have spread to include the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – and beefed up visibility with a public preview of CloudKnox Permissions.…

Previously separate capabilities bundled into a single platform Arrcus has released version 2.0 of its Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE), a network platform aimed at core-to-edge infrastructure deployments, which now bundles previously separate capabilities into a single unit.…

As long as it translates into a better user experience Americans are outspoken in their concerns about what companies are doing with the vast amounts of personal data they're collecting, but more than half are apparently OK with allowing organizations access if doing so gives them a better user experience.…

Update those boxes pronto – yes, we're looking at you, users of Trusty Tahr and Xenial Xerus Ubuntu has issued a batch of updates that cover the default as well as the AWS and KVM flavours for the current short-term release 21.10, both the original 5.04 and OEM 5.14 builds for the current 20.04 LTS release, as well as 18.04, and, surprisingly, even 16.04 and 14.04.…

Massive language models will be big businesses in decade ahead It is hard to ignore the buzz around massive language models like GPT-3. These are not your typical natural language processing (NLP) engines that power enterprise chatbots or call centers. This is a dramatic step forward, one that makes traditional NLP output look like a simple parroting back of trained answers.…

NoSQL slinger sees future in edge and IoT – and 'eventual consistency' NoSQL database vendor Couchbase is about to launch the third upgrade to its mobile database, with new features promising REST-based remote administration support for large multi-tenant edge applications.…

Will be able to integrate with corporate Wi-Fi networks, but not a replacement, it says HPE has introduced a Private 5G network for organisations with requirements such as broad geographic coverage or high reliability, plus the ability to integrate with corporate Wi-Fi networks.…

Framework deal to cut across software, services and systems integration Universities across Scotland are clubbing together to soften up the market in preparation for an enterprise software procurement estimated to be worth £42m.…

You need to switch on E2EE in group meetings, watch out for US Cloud Act, warns impact assessment A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) has been published by a Dutch ministry, noting that Microsoft still has work to do if the country's institutions are to use the company's products without all manner of mitigations.…

DOS ain't dead... and it's more fun than ever Nearly six years after its last release, FreeDOS 1.3 came out at the weekend… in case you're feeling nostalgic for a 1980s enterprise-grade OS.…

Anticipates 'increased pressure on input costs' on raw materials, labour, and freight Schneider Electric is the latest tech biz to blame supply chain constraints for holding back its trading output, despite claiming record revenues of €28.9bn ($32.78bn) in its full year results for 2021 [PDF].…

Firewalls are supposed to update so they block new threats – miss this deadline and they might not Cisco has warned users of its Firepower firewalls – physical and virtual – that they may need to upgrade their kit within a four-day window or miss out on security intelligence updates.…

Black ink has proven elusive since 2014 acquisition of IBM's x86 server business Lenovo's data center and infrastructure business has turned a profit for the first time.…

Operation Cache Panda went after software used by majority of industry players China's state-sponsored snoops conducted a two-month campaign against Taiwanese financial services firms, according to CyCraft, a security consultancy from the island nation.…

But hey, new rules on deleting your selfies America's Internal Revenue Service has confirmed taxpayers will not be forced to use facial recognition to verify their identity. The agency also set out rules for which images will be deleted.…

Plus: Rogue CEO's outfit could derail public listing Allen Wu, chairman and CEO of Arm's Chinese joint-venture Arm China, thinks the collapse of Nvidia’s attempt to buy Arm will be better for the worldwide technology industry – and for China.…

Academics found TrustZone-level code could not be trusted to keep secrets Academics at Tel Aviv University in Israel have found that recent Android-based Samsung phones shipped with design flaws that allow the extraction of secret cryptographic keys.…

America may block chip exports if Moscow steps up aggression The US government has imposed further sanctions on Russia after the Kremlin sent tanks into Ukraine’s breakaway regions today. Uncle Sam also left the door open to block chip exports to Russia.…

Get ready for robot lobbyists to persuade robot lawmakers to pass robot-friendly laws? AI algorithms cannot copyright the digital artwork they generate, the US Copyright Office has insisted.…

Checks checks your privilege privileges Google's in-house incubator Area 120 has introduced a service called Checks to help mobile app developers understand how their applications handle data and automate privacy compliance.…

25,000 GitHub stars since its introduction in 2017 Hasura, which provides tools for the GraphQL data language, has pulled in $100m funding that gives it a nominal valuation of $1bn.…

Affected users: Is this a not-so-subtle hint from the boss? Slack has fallen over for a subset of users, as the messaging platform admitted that "something's not quite right" with a number of its critical services.…

What do we want? Static typing! The State of JavaScript 2021 survey has arrived, a little later than planned (no jokes about language performance, please) and in the wake of a somewhat embarrassing data leak.…

HPE and Qualcomm did likewise last week, because vanilla x86 isn’t going to cut it on the edge Dell and Marvell have linked arms to create an accelerator card for servers used in 5G networks.…

Challenges to blanket bans on PSCs could face long road to redemption IT contractors who have faced blanket bans on employment via their personal services companies (PSCs) could face years trying to challenge the decision, according to officials from the UK's tax collector.…

Open source + public key generation = no alerts, says infosec startup An infosec startup says it has built an Apple Airtag clone that bypasses anti-stalking protection features while running on Apple's Find My protocol.…

Good luck finding public support for that one Lawyers for EncroChat encrypted phone users have begged the EU to halt court cases using evidence from the compromised mobile network, saying evidence disclosure breaches the political bloc's laws.…

Something for the school holidays? A group of The Register's writers (only just) escaped The National Museum of Computing's Escape Room Experience after learning a bit about cryptography and testing the patience of the museum's volunteers.…

But local services remain spotty after volcanic eruption The Kingdom of Tonga's sole submarine cable connection to the world has been restored.…

Shifting to measuring results of its trademark workflows, not just building 'em. And it comes with a 'bat-phone' ServiceNow will soon release mobile apps that allow real-time tracking of metrics, so business leaders can see the progress of digital transformation initiatives.…

'Singularity' uses novel scheduling to wring more work out of infrastructure Microsoft has revealed it operates a planet-scale distributed scheduling service for AI workloads that it has modestly dubbed "Singularity".…

Wants latency-tolerant apps moved to new datacenters in remote western regions, other workloads out of big cities China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has outlined plans for a massive migration of computing resources to more efficient facilities.…

Business demand creates double whammy on recruitment pressure Skills-related issues have hit a quarter of SAP users, in some cases putting projects on hold, according to a survey of companies in the Americas.…

Windows giant promises 20 more years on 20th anniversary of the tech Microsoft says the first preview of .NET 7 is on its way.…

Data centre workloads going up, so US govt agency gives $$ for better thermal architecture With ever more compute power needed all over the world, Bell Labs has been tasked by the US Department of Energy (DoE) to develop ways of making data centres more energy efficient.…

Feisty indies that do too well don't stay indie for long Opinion The one thing AWS can't offer is not being AWS. Google and Microsoft can, but then you're stuck with Google and Microsoft. Each of these cloud infrastructure options – AWS, GCP and Azure – are big, centralised components of bigger organisations with other things on their minds, and a deep aversion to sharing customers.…

Redundancy may not be a bad idea after damage to sister links Construction has begun on a 19,200km submarine cable running from Singapore to France, Singaporean telco Singtel said on Monday.…

Back online after a week, but users not impressed with tech refresh Users have complained of missing data and trouble logging in after the UK government updated its old probate search service.…

Plus advice for Cisco admins from the NSA and blurring's not the best In brief If you're using the UpdraftPlus WordPress plugin to back up your systems, you'll need it patched – or else risk sharing your backups with strangers.…

'If it works already, why pay' says the boss... because of course he does Who, Me? Time bombs and shareware feature in today's edition of Who, Me? as a boss's big spendy vehicle leaves a coder out of pocket.…

Alleges Middle Kingdom's courts make it impossible to chase manufacturers who won't respect IP rights The European Union has signaled its intention to file a dispute with the World Trade Organization (WTO) over China's treatment of intellectual property used in mobile phones.…

The uncanny valley has become shallow and short Humans can no longer reliably tell the difference between a real human face and an image of a face generated by artificial intelligence, according to a pair of researchers.…