The Register

Packing app tech fans asked to huddle under the Windows umbrella Microsoft is "realigning" the MSIX tech community and cramming all the existing discussion spaces into a single place within the Windows Tech Community.…

Oracle and Microsoft remain silent on involvement in existing installations SAP is continuing to support Russian businesses and government-owned organisations as war rages in Ukraine.…

Plus: You can now turn photos of your dead relatives into talking, blinking deepfakes In brief Conversations with chatbots are still pretty clumsy today, but they're improving – especially in customer service – and could be worth big money.…

Joins Xiaomi and Huawei in making EVs, but IM L7s not available on e-commerce sites yet Chinese multinational Alibaba has begun mass production of smart electric vehicles (EVs), the latest addition to a product portfolio that includes e-commerce sites, internet services, media ventures, and more.…

Cloud giant will spread its largesse more widely – and thinly – amongst non-profits Exclusive Amazon has cut in half the amount of credit it offers to charities in order for them to access IT services operated by Amazon Web Services, sources have told The Reg.…

Delayed system 'vital component' of Brexit govt's enactment of the Northern Ireland Protocol Capgemini has won a contract worth a maximum of £30m to integrate the UK tax collector's much-delayed customs platform with its other systems.…

Where in the stack should sanctions start? Opinion Trade embargoes are powerful weapons, especially in wartime. They used to be very visible: naval blockades had huge impacts against the Confederacy in the American Civil War and, 50 years later, Germany in the First World War.…

Walls? Check. Windows? Check. Did we forget something? Yes, but just feel the carpet Who, Me? The weekend is over. Distract yourself with another tale of messenger termination in today's Register reader confession.…

Cloud migrations can therefore be cost-effective, even with Big Red’s nasty licenses Microsoft thinks it has cracked the code for cost-effective Oracle-to-cloud migrations.…

KPMG and PwC follow DXC and Accenture, leaving 14,500 staff – probably – without a gig Four top global consultancies, all with big IT practices, have quit Russia.…

Digital karma at its finest A datacenter fire resulted in internet outages across Iran for around three hours last Friday, and it appears the cause was the nation's surveillance apparatus.…

Cuts taxes, offers subsidies, defers military service for developers – and preps for internet isolation Russia's Ministry of Digital Development has acknowledged that sanctions may send its tech businesses to the wall, and announced a raft of measures designed to stop that happening – among them ending dependency on internet infrastructure hosted offshore and disconnecting from the global internet.…

TikTok, Netflix and major games houses also quit, but Ukraine wants more help from Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google More big technology industry players have cut off services to Russia, in protest at its illegal invasion of Ukraine and a new media law imposed to stop the flow of news from the war zone.…

Switching demand high as new speeds filter down faster than expected The rising tide of pandemic-driven digitization has lifted all datacenter boats.…

70k staff email addresses and NTLM password hashes also dumped online An Nvidia code-signing certificate was among the mountain of files stolen and leaked online by criminals who ransacked the GPU giant's internal systems.…

Bill Gates among those plowing funds into AI supercomputing tech Luminous Computing, a startup using photonics to drive artificial intelligence, has raised venture capital backing, pulling in $105m in Series A funding from a range of investors that includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.…

Critical infrastructure, federal agencies must report intrusions, ransomware payments within hours, draft rules state Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the possibility that the Kremlin may escalate its cyberespionage against the West after being heavily sanctioned, has convinced the US Senate to unanimously pass a bipartisan cybersecurity bill.…

Details still up in the air, unlike whatever hit our natural satellite A chunk of Chinese space junk today crashed into the far side of the Moon, according to a maker of astrometry software.…

Biz cites 'unwarranted and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine' ... also crippling sanctions Cogent Communications will pull the plug on its connectivity to customers in Russia in response to President Putin's invasion of Ukraine.…

Departure follows GitHub CEO exit Just months after Nat Friedman quit as CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, his Xamarin co-founder has also ejected from the Windows giant.…

Middle Kingdom gets another Azure region, Putin gets the middle finger Microsoft has opened a fifth Azure region in China with one hand while putting a stop to new sales in Russia with the other.…

Don't send a mobile chip to do a high-end CPU, GPU job. Unless you have no choice. With the largest data center chipmakers locking Russia out of next-generation devices, not to mention the withdrawal of mobile and software makers from that market, it is no surprise Russian researchers are on the fast track to develop ways around the new technologies that will drive the rest of the world.…

Back to the future with short wave radio, plus Russia drop internet Iron Curtain Russia has reportedly blocked access to Western media outlets including the BBC to netizens within its borders, as suspicions rise that the country has begun implementing a "splinternet" plan to seal itself off from the wider internet.…

But warns sample size is a bit small to leap to big conclusions Backblaze has published the first SSD edition of its regular drive statistics report, which appears to show that flash drives are as reliable as spinning disks, although with surprising failure rates for some models.…

No data or code stored in Moscow and St Petersburg tech operations, bank says International trade sanctions threaten to cut off Deutsche Bank from its near-shore IT support and software development unit in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.…

IT and data arm now part of NHS England, which could be pressured into data sharing without proper oversight Ten months after attempts first began to extract the medical information of 55 million citizens in England, NHS Digital's former chairman is warning the merger of the agency with NHS England threatens the privacy of people's personal data.…

Probe builds on one already in process for Instagram Reports that ByteDance-owned social media platform TikTok is harmful to children are under investigation by a number of US attorneys general.…

Sorry about it. You know how it is with supply chains. Aroogah, arooogah.... Something for the Weekend? My laptop has just spoken to me. It said: "Ba-ding!" It hasn't said that before and I don't know what it means. Whatever does it want?…

The Words are Perfect, the keyboard action less so On Call Welcome to the weekend, wherein you will doubtless be called upon by friends and family to demonstrate your IT prowess when you'd far rather be sipping on a beverage in a hammock.…

For actual headaches, not tech messes, but hasn't said why its staff have a problem that needed tackling Fujitsu has been hailed as the world's leading company by the International Headache Society's World Patient Support Association.…

Google's local pal enters JV with contract kit-maker Sanmina – storage and appliance supplier to the stars Indian conglomerate Reliance, which among its many activities is Google's partner for an India-only cut of Android, is getting into contract manufacturing of datacenter products.…

Our R&D is in an occupied nation, Corsair also warns investors While the top chip and hardware makers may have moved to minimize the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on their operations, smaller companies are mapping out their worse-case scenarios arising from a prolonged conflict.…

What to know and what not to panic about Updated Fire broke out at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – Europe's largest such facility and one of the biggest of its kind in the world – on Thursday after being shelled by Russian military, according to Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba.…

To keep FOSS developers and non-commercial users (almost) caught up with continuous release cadence Oracle has created an additional version of the Solaris operating system it acquired in 2009, when it bought Sun Microsystems.…

Browser makers set aside differences Browser makers Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, along with software consultancies Bocoup and Igalia, have agreed to work together to make web design technologies perform in a more consistent way across different platforms.…

Hey, who remembers those multi-million-dollar offices, huh? Mountain View remembers Google employees in the United States must be in the office at least three days a week from April 4 as the internet giant winds down its work-from-home policy.…

Even if we wanted to, which we don't, we can't, so we won't, says boss ICANN on Wednesday rebuffed a request from Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, to revoke all Russian web domains, shut down Russian DNS root servers, and invalidate associated TLS/SSL certificates in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.…

This isn't the artificial intelligence we were promised Without a critical update, Amazon Alexa devices could wake themselves up and start executing audio commands issued by a remote attacker, according to infosec researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London.…

Local police want to head off any worries about possible sabotage A Swiss data centre operated by financial messaging service SWIFT is under guard by police following the exclusion of key Russian banks from the system.…

And, because sometimes less is more, extends it to Chromebooks, too Intel has updated its vPro PC management platform, created a less capable edition, and brought the product to Chromebooks.…

Plus $800m Streamlit acquisition – just don't expect a revenue contribution any time soon Cloud-native data warehouse outfit Snowflake – once valued at a heart-thumping $120bn following its 2020 IPO – saw 30 per cent wiped off its value in after-hours trading yesterday as it lowered guidance on revenue forecasts.…

It's not easy to run standard Linux on a lot of single-board computers, but Armbian can help The latest update to Armbian brings a mainline-kernel based Ubuntu- and Debian-compatible environment to dozens of small single-board computers.…

One day after Roscosmos said 'hostile' UK govt should withdraw stake in satellite firm The board of satellite constellation provider OneWeb this morning said it had voted to suspend all launches from Baikonur, a day after Russia's space agency said this weekend's lift-off was in doubt.…

One-in-ten respondents hadn't even heard of it Reader survey results When we published the questions for this survey, our view was that zero trust, or ZT, has finally begun to become a thing – as a real technology in real companies.…

Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions questions if gains may be negated by data creation Modern 5G network infrastructure is more power efficient than prior generations but the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) says it isn't clear if this will deliver a cut in overall energy consumption, or whether consumption may in fact rise.…

Potential mass internet surveillance idea dropped after ISP pushback, uncertainty about final measures linger While the world watches Ukraine, the British government has quietly dropped a requirement for mass surveillance of UK internet users by their service providers.…

Today we walk you through the fascinating world of upcoming text-generating rivals Analysis Text-generating language models are difficult to control. These systems have no sense of morality: they can spew hate speech and misinformation. Despite this, numerous companies believe this kind of software is good enough to sell. Are these organizations, and the wider world, ready for it?…

We found some servers? Quick: buy some software! Here’s something a little ironic: Nutanix, a company that first championed abstraction of hardware with software, then backed away from hardware, has now noticed that some customers’ software buying behavior is tied to hardware availability.…

Whitegoods and cars also allowed to cross the border South Korea's Ministry of Trade has revealed that after discussions with the US Department of Commerce, the nation that is home to Samsung is confident that smartphones are exempt from new bans on exporting technology to Russia.…

Infosys and Wipro bet that makers of metaverses and cloudy cars want ready-to-roll platforms Two of India’s global service giants have announced platforms on which to build emerging technologies, continuing their move towards acting as software vendors.…