The Register

I'll just pay the- OH MY GOD 12BoC We take a trip to the seaside in our 12 Borks of Christmas as a parking machine touchscreen goes rogue... with inevitable consequences.…

This won't buy me beer 12BoC Welcome to The Register's Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC), a final festive hurrah for digital signage silage and, behind today's window, a reminder that wherever Windows might turn up, Notepad has always got your back.…

Let’s take a look into the future cher-cher-cher… Something for the Weekend, Sir? Twas the night after Christmas, but I felt all alone.

More 0898 than 0208 in 1998 On Call Welcome to On Call, and a telephone mystery solved only after an innocent party found themselves on the receiving end of a most unexpected conversation.…

Three years of R&D and design work to be tested with plans to build native ‘super in 2023 The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has concluded the first phase of its efforts to create made-in-Europe chips, an effort it is hoped will reduce reliance on imports, improve sovereign capabilities, and create the continent's first exascale supercomputer.…

Firm that found the flaw also spotted ChaosDB and OMIGOD, confident this one’s been exploited Microsoft has revealed a vulnerability in its Azure App Service for Linux allowed the download of files that users almost certainly did not intend to be made public.…

Hey Elon, it's no secret that distracted driving is a major cause of US car fatalities A software upgrade will disable a "feature" that allows the touchscreen on Tesla cars to play video games - even while the vehicles are in motion- after the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated a complaint about the tech.…

Don’t mention the human rights abuses, focus on the need for compliance Intel has expressed regret for the way its warning its suppliers not to use labour, or source goods, from China’s Xinjiang region, has been interpreted inside the Middle Kingdom.…

Surprise dividend for shareholders may also yield approval from monopoly-wary Beijing While Chinese web giant Tencent has announced an unheralded special dividend: shares in giant Chinese e-tailer JD.com.…

Cloud-native RDBMS is coming, on AWS and Azure. Yet IBM's only preaching to the choir It's the time of year when one might wonder what happened to that avuncular family figure whose existence was so reliably dull they passed into history almost forgotten - a little like Db2, IBM's flagship relational database that has faded from users' collective memory.…

Firm admits problem and then tries to cash in from own screwup Members of the British Armed Forces Soldiers have reacted with anger after a British Wi-Fi provider failed to automatically end their time-limited contracts before charging them for consuming data "without subscription".…

‘Chatter’ can be bugged thanks to kindergarten-grade security A Bluetooth phone designed to evoke the carefree days of early childhood has been found to instead threaten the very adult prospect of being surveilled in your home.…

Beijing's not saying what cloudy contender did wrong China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has suspended Alibaba Cloud's membership of an influential security board to protest its handling of the Log4j flaw.…

New launch date could be a marvelous Christmas gift to humanity The James Webb Telescope has been cleared for launch, only for weather to delay its ascent for at least a day.…

Intel, Nvidia, and others have figured out you need help getting started with AI Some chip makers are starting to supply data as a value-added service.…

Some servers and EBS volumes won’t make it back A small group of sysadmins have a disaster recovery job on their hands, on top of Log4J fun, thanks to a power outage at Amazon Web Services’ USE1-AZ4 Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.…

With Vivaldi. While parked Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has ported its eponymous Android Tablet browser to Android Automotive, making it the first web browser on the operating system and available in the Polestar 2 electric car.…

The five grams of Ryugu we got suggests it's made of the same stuff as the outer Sun Researchers have published the first analyses of samples plucked from asteroid 162173 Ryugu by Japan's spacecraft Hayabusa2, revealing, for the first time, the physical properties and composition of a carbonaceous asteroid.…

Empty your inboxes, people, we can duck this problem together Column It’s often said that the second most important job in Australia – behind Prime Minister – is captain of the Australian men’s cricket team.…

But did so operating as NICs – the real fun starts in mid-2022 when VMware’s hypervisor for SmartNICs should land Nvidia has claimed a world record for storage IOPS using its Bluefield data processing units (DPUs).…

The Ellume COVID-19 Home Test was connected to the internet of woefully insecure things for a while Security vendor F-Secure has faked a COVID test result on a Bluetooth-equipped home COVID Test. Thankfully the vendor’s since fixed the device.…

More advanced manufacturing processes will attract the big rupees, but scheme seems unlikely to make India a major player India’s government has revealed more details about its plans to become a major chip manufacturing hub .…

Alternative route will skip the Suez Canal and other tricky spots In the 15th century, European traders that hoped to reach Asia had problems: a round trip by land or sea took years and involved many lethal perils. Navigators of the day therefore imagined sailing the “Northwest Passage,” a route across the Atlantic, then over the top of North America, before sliding south to Japan.…

Just four months on, 6.1 is Odin with a facelift Review A new minor version of Elementary OS, a rather modernist and minimalist Ubuntu derivative, fixes a lot of small details. The Register took it for a quick spin.…

Central government still struggling with its own off-payroll tax rules Updated The UK government's own employment checker tool and guidance has led to wrong calls on the tax status of freelance workers, costing £120m across two Whitehall departments.…

Perpetrators' ID unknown, however The Belgian Ministry of Defence has suffered a cyber attack after miscreants exploited one of the vulnerabilities in Log4j. The attack marks the first occasion that a NATO country's defence ministry has fallen victim to the flaws.…

Meanwhile, search for service partner stalls after early engagement over possible £80m contract Updated Just two and a half years after upgrading its Unit4 HR and finance system, the University of Nottingham has awarded a £29.75m deal to Oracle partner Evolutionary Systems.…

Shares them with Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned after sweeping them up from ‘compromised cloud storage’ The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and National Cyber Crime Unit have uncovered a colossal trove of stolen passwords.…

Open source, offers fast, lossless compression, and has a very charming name A developer named Dominic Szablewski has given the world a new file format with a splendid name: the Quite OK Image Format (QOI).…

Deal will see Cerner's systems shifted to the Big Red Cloud and medicos given hands-free voice interface Rumours that Oracle planned to buy healthcare software concern Cerner have proven correct.…

Other Chinese properties also doing very well TikTok became the world’s most popular web site during 2021, according to Cloudflare’s Radar service.…

Who's TT when it's at home? The DoJ, Defense dept, and Homeland Security Security agencies in the United States have recommended the FCC approves the switch-on of a mega US-to-APAC undersea cable after Google and Meta agreed to restrict China-based firm Pacific Light Data Communications Co Ltd's "access to information and infrastructure."…

Swiss cough up accused crim while Russia is 'deeply disappointed' The US Attorney's Office of Massachusetts on Monday announced the extradition of Vladislav Klyushin, a Russian business executive with ties to the Kremlin, on charges of hacking US computer networks and committing securities fraud by trading on undisclosed financial data.…

Santa leaving coal in enthusiasts' stockings Online retailers may not be able to send you a specific Raspberry Pi 4B model even for next year's Christmas.…

Plans afoot to integrate financial management with retail UK accounting software outfit Sage today said it had agreed to acquire the remaining stake in Brightpearl, providers of cloud-based retail software, for $299m (£225m).…

Scottish MSP Dacoll was hit, however The Clop ransomware gang pwned a managed service provider with access to the UK's Police National Computer, dumping data on its dark web leaks site – but officials deny that police data was compromised.…

Box shifter argues it's not clear what it is supposed to change Amazon is set for an early Christmas present as a Luxembourg judge suspended a court order requiring a daily $750,000 payment towards a disputed $844m (€746m) fine.…

Those enabling piracy may be guilty until they prove otherwise Malaysia's House of Representatives has passed an amendment to a 1987 Copyright Act that makes enabling illegal streaming punishable by fine, prison or both.…

That which does not kill us can still ruin our Christmas Opinion Infosec takes many cues from the human immune system. The analogies and metaphors are useful and apt: viruses, vectors, evolving a defence where learning is part of the response...…

It's all open source's fault! Or is it? Who, Me? Welcome to another edition of Who, Me? in which a Register reader makes the impossible possible and actually gets Wi-Fi working on Linux.…

Major update has passed quality control and will catch up to platform and app updates Data protection vendor Veeam has revealed it’s working to productise the Salesforce backup tools built for its own use.…

Plus: Deep dive into the NSO Group's zero-click exploit and 'Hack the DHS!' In Brief VMware has warned users a flaw in its VMware Verify two-factor authentication product could allow a malicious actor with a first-factor authentication credential to obtain a second factor from its VMware Verify product.…

WfH kit has all been bought, but the pressure is now on to upgrade For the first time since the global pandemic began, the PC monitor market has shown a year-on-year decline, according to analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) last week.…

Regulator says US giant lied about deal with Future Coupons, which responded by stabbing Amazon in the front India’s competition regulator has revoked approval for Amazon.com’s alliance with local retail giant Future Group, alleging that the American company fibbed quite a lot in filings about the deal.…

Confirms version 5.16 will receive an eighth release candidate Linus Torvalds has confirmed that version 5.16 of the Linux kernel will take a little longer to develop than usual, thanks to Christmas.…

Third major fix in ten days is an infinite recursion flaw rated 7.5/10 The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has revealed a third bug in its Log4 Java-based open-source logging library Log4j.…

Report claims Huawei techs working for Chinese intelligence compromised Australian telco Suspicions about the integrity of Huawei products among US government officials can be attributed in part to a 2012 incident involving a Huawei software update that compromised the network of a major Australian telecom company with malicious code, according to a report published by Bloomberg.…

Maybe you're not too cool for intuitive FOSS Fest Tilde is a plain text editor for the Linux console. The difference is that even if you've never seen it before, you already know how to use this one.…

Federal agencies have a week to get their systems patched The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday escalated its call to fix the Apache Log4j vulnerability with an emergency directive requiring federal agencies to take corrective action by 5 pm EST on December 23, 2021.…

Gullible conspiracists find that stupid is as stupid does The Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Regulation Protection has banned a list of so-called anti-5G necklaces, wristbands and eye masks because they could harm their gullible users.…