The Register

Nice if you want to store extra attributes with changing relational schema, but not a threat to NoSQL specialists Google Cloud has introduced support for JSON documents in its distributed RDBMS Spanner – a move the Chocolate Factory says offers advantages in adding new data attributes without changing the schema.…

Swale Borough Council faced with hefty bill for junior IT hero's whimsical afternoon's work A borough council in the English county of Kent is fuming after a software test on the council's website led to five nonsensical dummy planning application documents being mistakenly published as legally binding decisions.…

Like Windows Movie Maker on the web Microsoft has purchased Clipchamp, maker of browser-based video editing tools, and claimed it is "a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365."…

4 million holes dug in the UK each year... many in the wrong place The UK is pushing ahead with the next phase of a project to map the UK’s underground utility pipes and cables as part of its National Underground Asset Register (NUAR).…

You can't reduce such a vital issue to concern over paedophiles and terrorists Opinion The British government is preparing to launch a full-scale policy assault against Facebook as the company gears up to introduce end-to-end encryption across all of its services.…

Quietly adds that it hasn't yet received regulatory approval Intel's Mobileye arm has announced a partnership with car rental giant Sixt to launch a fully autonomous robotaxi in Munich, showcasing the tech at the IAA Mobility conference this week – before admitting the platform won't open to the public until regulatory approvals are granted.…

Chimaera toolkit found on 'thousands' of Windows, Linux, and container systems worldwide AT&T's Alien Labs security division has sounded the alarm on a malware campaign from TeamTNT which, it claims, has gone almost entirely undetected by anti-virus systems - and which is turning target devices into cryptocurrency miners.…

'Years of pain' behind the change, said Torvalds, but with Clang a problem it has been weakened Pushback from the Linux kernel community over defaulting to -Werror (make all warnings into errors) for compiling has resulted in a compromise where this default only applies to test builds.…

Chartered Institute of Information Security reveals what you're all thinking The COVID-19 pandemic was good for business, according to British infosec workers – although half of them still say they feel burnt out amid the surge in work.…

Crackdown on open-ended, unfiltered simulations branded 'a hyper-moral stance' In-depth “OpenAI is the company running the text completion engine that makes you possible,” Jason Rohrer, an indie games developer, typed out in a message to Samantha.…

Microsoft's finest just needs a nudge Bork!Bork!Bork! Our overseas adventures in bork continue today with Microsoft's finest supplanting one of The Netherlands' funnymen in the entrance of retailer Lidl.…

Am I only dreaming, or is this burning an Eternal Blue? Some vulnerabilities remain unreported for the longest time. The 12-year-old Dell SupportAssist remote code execution (RCE) flaw – which was finally unearthed earlier this year – would be one example.…

Looking beyond the programmers Is Linus Torvalds important to open-source software? Of course. Guido van Rossum, who created the popular programming language Python? Sure! Michael "Monty" Widenius of MySQL fame? Certainly. OK, what about Robert Love? Eben Moglen? Or Jono Bacon?…

CPU cores, memory, and disk now PAYG if you want, and so are new hybrid offerings with VMware and Microsoft Lenovo has thrown everything it's got into its TruScale IT-as-a-service platform.…

Plans to cut patent renewal time from five days to five minutes The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has awarded two new contracts in it's bid to get up to speed in the 21st Century.…

Fujifilm and HPE selling cartridges, Quantum selling drives, IBM tape libraries add support The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) organisation has signed off on efforts by Fujifilm and Sony to create tapes that conform with the LTO-9 standard – meaning that new-generation tapes with 45 terabytes of capacity are now on sale.…

CEO also said it'll use its fab in Ireland to crank out parts for automakers amid shortages Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday said he would be willing to pour up to €80bn (£68.8bn, $94.7bn) into its semiconductor fabs in Europe to increase capacity over the next decade.…

22-megawatt rig to be built by Mitsubishi – apparently the first direct sale agreement of its sort in Japan Amazon's Japan outpost will power its operations with over 450 solar plants under a power purchase agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation's retail energy arm, MC Retail Energy.…

Boasts of a world-record SAP SD benchmark result, 'transparent' in-memory encryption IBM's heavy-metal arm has officially brought Power10, its first 7nm chip, to market with the launch of the E1080 – a server system it claims blows x86 rivals out of the water for performance and security.…

Accused served 15 days for 'molestation', says report The People's Procuratorate of Huaiyin District, Jinan City, China, on Monday ended its investigation into a male Alibaba manager's alleged rape of a female colleague.…

Harvard-Accenture study suggests opening up to 'hidden workers' The alleged "talent shortage" depriving companies of workers can be attributed in part to corporate disinterest in paying for job training programs, and to automated recruitment systems that overlook potential hires, a research paper argues.…

'No decision has been made' super-corp reminds El Reg The city of Taylor, Texas, has offered Samsung property tax breaks over the course of 30 years if the South Korean chip giant agrees to build a $17bn fabrication plant on its land.…

ActiveX and MSHTML, the gift that keeps on giving ... to intruders In an advisory issued on Tuesday, Microsoft said some of its users were targeted by poisoned Office documents that exploit an unpatched flaw to hijack their Windows machines.…

Where did people think spam and harassment reports were going? Facebook's WhatsApp states its messages are protected by the Signal encryption protocol. A report published today by investigative non-profit ProPublica contends that WhatsApp communication is less private than users understand or expect.…

Guy Podjarny on the challenges of crafting and shipping secure code Interview In an interview with Snyk founder and president Guy Podjarny on the challenges of secure application development, he told us: "Any solution that predicates on developers becoming security experts is doomed to fail."…

In space, everyone can see you emit brightly shining gas, X-rays, and radio waves A multinational team of astronomers has discovered what happens when a large star accidentally eats a black hole or neutron star: it emits a catastrophically violent, galactic-scale burp that can be detected from over 450 million light years away.…

How many Android apps can you fit on an EC2 instance? Canonical has shrunk its Anbox Cloud Android app container platform with an appliance available on the AWS Marketplace.…

Philip K Dick is rolling in his grave Senior UK lawmakers are being warned of an emerging pushback against the use of smart technology such as facial recognition, increased surveillance, and predictive policing to fight crime.…

Concerns like 'who is Taurus International,' and 'what is Dr. Zhongfu Zhou's relationship with it' UK government has issued a surprise public interest intervention notice against the proposed takeover of Welsh advanced materials specialist Perpetuus Group, claiming it represents a potential threat to national security.…

A pause on community-submitted PRs Cloud darling HashiCorp has temporarily pulled up the drawbridge on community-submitted pull requests to its Terraform project, citing low staffing within the Terraform Core team.…

Proprietary code creep? Microsoft has updated Python support in Visual Studio Code, introducing editing in a web browser. The company has also archived its open-source Python language server in favour of the closed-source Pylance.…

Why are they asking G7 to do their job for them, muses critic Cookies are on the menu today for the G7 as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) proposes to the group of leading global economies that consent pop-ups should be reduced.…

Cops can read the SMTP spec too, y'know Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the user's arrest.…

Verne Global site claimed to be 'one of the most efficient' globally A UK investment company created earlier this year to invest in digital infrastructure assets has splurged £231m to acquire a sizeable data centre in Iceland on the site of a former NATO airfield and naval base.…

Plus: Police aren't treating breaches as terror offence The person who reformatted the Guntrader hack data as a Google Earth-compatible CSV has said they are prepared to go to prison – while denying their actions amounted to a criminal offence.…

Deloitte, Computacenter, KPMG, E&Y among listed suppliers hired by local weather watcher The UK's Met Office has handed seats on a framework contract worth up to £30m to 32 suppliers in a bid to develop a common data platform over the next four years.…

DialADeal is no longer operating A Glasgow-based company is facing a £150,000 penalty handed down by the UK's data watchdog for making more than half a million nuisance calls about bogus green energy deals.…

Some refined their CVs relentlessly. Others studied. Many wept, more than once. But most see an upside to their changed circumstances COVID Logfile III Rick Bryant* cried when he was offered a new job.…

Chair of UK Financial Conduct Authority says more regulation will help innovation to flourish Big Tech and the likes of Kim Kardashian need to be named and shamed so that innovative digital tokens can flourish, according to Charles Randell, chair of the UKs Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Payments Systems Regulator (PSR).…

Rural revitalisation and long-term strategy await founder of mega e-tailer JD.com The founder and CEO of colossal Chinese e-tailer JD.com, Richard Qiangdong Liu, will step down from his leadership positions.…

Special administrative region to share economic zone located on Chinese soil China has revealed plans to create a special economic zone that focuses on development and manufacturing of semiconductors – and will create some fabulous geopolitical interest along the way.…

Open source business model problems for modern-day HyperCard Interview An easy to use programming language that was made open source in 2014 after a successful crowdfunding campaign is going back to closed source after too many customers switched to using it for free.…

Sets sights on third party support and managed services for Oracle, SAP and Microsoft SAP and Oracle services firm Spinnaker Support has launched into database management with the purchase of Dobler Consulting.…

'Arrived' back on the planet quite a bit sooner than expected, sure Firefly Aerospace has confirmed that one of its Reaver engines shut down shortly after its Alpha rocket left the pad last week, resulting in the destruction of the vehicle in spectacular fashion just after reaching supersonic velocity.…

Software 'enhancement' on the way after triple touchdown TITSUP Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.…

How was your weekend? Got some patching done? The Jenkins team issued a reminder over the weekend that one should keep one's systems patched as it found itself with a compromised Confluence service.…

Sponsor Red Bull supposedly gives you wings, but that doesn't mean you have to use them everywhere While most of Europe was still in bed at the weekend, Italian stunt pilot Dario Costa got up early, climbed into his aeroplane and, apropos of nothing, flew it through two Turkish motorway tunnels, becoming the first person on Earth to do so.…

Also: Compiler warnings now treated as errors by default in kernel builds Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges."…

Plus: Google Health app for NHS hospitals discontinued, and Tesla under the spotlight In Brief Facebook has apologized for an "an unacceptable error" after its AI systems asked folks who watched a British video about a Black man if they wanted to view more content on "primates."…

What happened to transferring £1,000-per-day consultant work to the civil service? Flying in the face of a commitment to wean itself off consultants, the NHS Test and Trace programme has awarded Accenture a £4.8m contract extension to keep its much-criticised COVID-19 Test and Trace system up and running for another year.…