The Register

Decision to affect Google's, Amazon's and Microsoft's online ads biz All data collected through the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) must now be deleted by the 1,000+ firms that pay international digital marketing and advertising association IAB Europe to use it. This includes Google's, Amazon's and Microsoft's online advertising businesses.…

Solved today's in two? Now try and exit Vim We are delighted to note that a version of the word game the New York Times bought for seven figures can now be played via a 50-line Bash script.…

Plumber's right did not lapse 'but carried over and accumulated until termination of the contract' A former worker for Pimlico Plumbers has won a case in the Court of Appeal over the right for backdated holiday pay in a case set to help employees of umbrella companies in all sectors, including information technology.…

But what of the domestic launchers? Updated The UK government is to spend an extra £1.4bn on space defence on top of the £5bn allocated to upgrade the Skynet satellite communication system.…

'Global benefit' chief: Broadcom buyout means pay your own way Brocade sacked a former Sales Manager of the Year who was suffering from cancer when the company was bought by Broadcom – a decision that led to the man's health insurance being cancelled.…

And better compatibility with some more proprietary word processors Six months after LibreOffice 7.2, version 7.3 is out with faster and more accurate file importing and rendering for improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.…

Researcher tells world after being stonewalled There is a live cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in takedowns website DMCA-dot-com's user interface. It's existed for more than a year and the site's operators don't appear to be interested in fixing it.…

Good candidate for fly-by, say scientists, and we’ve got 4,000 years to do it Scientists have confirmed the discovery of Earth's second Trojan asteroid leading the planet in its orbit around its nearest star.…

A familiar face in an unfamiliar place On the last day of January, Oracle Linux 8.5, the current version of Big Red's RHEL-alike, quietly appeared on the Windows Store.…

Take part in this short survey and let's find out together Reg Reader Survey Like many concepts in cyber-security, Zero Trust (hereafter "ZT") has come to prominence recently. The concept is reckoned to have first been used in the mid-1990s, though it came to prominence around 2010 and has really started to take off in the past three years or so.…

Parent company Alphabet hails first year of revenue above $250B Google Cloud has racked up another 12 months of losses, despite extending the life of its hardware by a year.…

China's slow signoff didn't help matters one bit A deal that would have brought a German silicon wafer manufacturer under Taiwanese control has been scuppered by German regulators – with help from China.…

Designates data centres as infrastructure to attract more outside investment India's government has ordered its Reserve Bank to have a digital rupee into circulation by next year, and outlined plans to raise revenue with a 30 per cent income tax on cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens.…

Legislation to punish online services for users' illegal content would damage speech and encryption, it's claimed The EARN IT Act, a legislative bill intended "to encourage the tech industry to take online child sexual exploitation seriously" has been revived in the US Senate after it died in committee back in 2020.…

Snoopware maker suggests remarks made 'in jest' as congressman refers allegations to prosecutors A whistleblower's allegations about spyware maker NSO Group should be investigated by American prosecutors, US House Rep Ted Lieu (D-CA) has said.…

How do you sell a product like Maria? How do you cash out within the cloud? MariaDB Corporation Ab, which sells the popular open source database by the same name, said on Tuesday that it intends to become a public company with the help of Angel Pond Holdings Corporation.…

Slowing to a crawl like a human not actually allowed Tesla will switch off a feature in its Full Self-Driving software, present in more than 50,000 vehicles in the US, that allowed the cars and SUVs to roll past stop signs at junctions without coming to a halt.…

Forget the Blue Screen of Death. How about the Red Lines of Discovery? Although the majority of Microsoft's desktop trumpeting is about Windows 11, the company's PowerToys project has quietly become a very handy addition to the user's toolbox.…

Failure can be factored in when you're doing your sums, says vendor Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has released a comprehensive report detailing reliability statistics for the hard drives it operated during the whole of 2021, with an interesting finding on its older kit.…

Shell station logistics supplier Oiltanking 'operating with limited capacity' Two companies owned by Hamburg-based company fuel group Marquard & Bahls are battling cyberattackers, with loading and unloading systems at the German arm of petrol tank terminal provider Oiltanking affected.…

To lose an entire Moderation Team might be considered bad luck. But three of the Core Team? There is only drama in the open source community when the day has a "y" in it, and sure enough a trio of members have decided to step back from the Rust Core Team, including a nine-year veteran of the language.…

Vendors shipped more but demand outstripped supply, says Gartner Semiconductor supply shortages last year led to the world's top original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) spending 25.2 per cent more on chips than the previous year, with Apple and Samsung heading up the list.…

You must be this small to ride Some out-of-this world generosity emerged out of Florida this week as it was revealed that one of the passengers on SpaceX's first space tourist flight in September was actually given his ticket by a friend.…

It wasn't what Microsoft promised... but it wasn't all bad either On January 30 2007, 15 years ago this week, the delayed and delayed again Windows Vista was released.…

Muscle-flexing rather than publicised 'sabotage right here' plan A Russian naval exercise in the Atlantic, near several submarine cables between Britain, France and the US, is more likely to be sabre-rattling than an attempt to sabotage critical communication links.…

One streaked across 750km of sky, the other set a duration record The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations' weather watching agency, has certified two new world records for lightning.…

$600M sale to new owner created and funded just to handle mobile, networking, and messaging IP BlackBerry, once a byword for the world's most ubiquitous mobile messaging devices, has decided the tech that propelled it to the top of the charts is now a non-core legacy asset and disposed of it for $600 million.…

Allege content delivery network enables piracy Four major Manga publishers are set to sue internet-grooming firm Cloudflare, on grounds its content delivery network facilitates piracy of their wares.…

Developer overwhelmed by game's runaway success, doesn't oppose future paywall Viral online puzzle game Wordle has been acquired by The New York Times Company (NYTCo), publisher of The New York Times.…

Supply chain management is back at the forefront Unnerved by a pre-pandemic electronics materials shortage, STMicroelectronics took the decision to start bringing its supply chain for silicon carbide in house, from substrates to end products.…

Bullet-proof hosting? Can't help you there. Will you settle for rapid repairs? Comcast Xfinity technicians have restored service to customers in Oakland, California, after the cableco's cables were pierced by gunfire early Sunday morning.…

A timeline of the x86 giant's stumbles – and commitments for the future Analysis Intel is cranking up its research spending to fix past mistakes, catch up with and overtake the competition, and build a foundation to grow in future.…

Now that's egg on your typeface Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website €100 ($110, £84) for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font.…

Semiconductor shortage helps cause reshuffle at the top The semiconductor shortage helped smartphone and memory chips in 2021, and Samsung toppled Intel to become the world's largest chip company, according to Counterpoint Research.…

PC makers ditch Google OS portables for higher-margin Windows machines as component shortages linger Chromebook shipments collapsed in calendar Q4 as the channel – with an eye on market saturation – ordered in lower volumes and PC makers moved available components to higher-margin builds running on Windows.…

Oracle replacement project continues as SLC opts for SaaS model Workday has pocketed a £9.8m contract for the second phase in an ERP project intended to improve efficiency in finance and HR management at the UK's Student Loans Company (SLC).…

Go-private deal with gang it previously bought Wrike from Citrix is to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital in a deal worth $16.5bn. The move will see Citrix taken into private ownership and combined with Tibco, another firm already in Vista's portfolio.…

Claims it will make it easier to amend ‘retained EU law’ The UK government is having a second pass at flogging the benefits of Brexit, as much as they exist, in a new bill that promises to accelerate work on AI and gene editing.…

Plus: Non-profit suicide hotline criticised for sharing mental health crisis texts with AI startup, and more In brief Waymo is suing California's Department of Motor Vehicles in an attempt to keep information about its autonomous car crashes and other operational details private, arguing that the data is a trade secret.…

Next: How to throw it a million miles without anything falling off A double helping of plastic playtime this Monday as we honour the achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope by building one out of Lego and an ESA astronaut takes some Playmobil on a tour of the ISS.…

Data at rest should remain at rest Dell believes that technologies such as computational storage will soon play a part in high-performance computing (HPC) in response to ever-growing volumes of data. It doesn't see the general-purpose CPU disappearing any time soon, but says it will be complemented with specialised processors for specific tasks, with composability seen as both an opportunity and a problem.…

The doctor won't see you now Opinion It started in Jeopardy and ended in loss. IBM's flagship AI Watson Health has been sold to venture capitalists for an undisclosed sum thought to be around a billion dollars, or a quarter of what the division cost IBM in acquisitions alone since it was spun off in 2015.…

'Save and replay memories'? Not quite, say boffins... Publicity-shy self-proclaimed technoking Elon Musk reluctantly hit the headlines last week as his brain wiring startup Neuralink launched recruitment for clinical trials.…

A tale of command line booby traps and bored engineers Who, Me? Take a trip back to when mainframes and terminals were all the rage and The Cloud was the smoke produced by the mainframe when a washing-machine-sized disk was about to let go. Welcome to another Who, Me? confession.…

Deep Space Network scope tilts to find its targets, or to dispose of the effects of recent rain Video The venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft is currently more than 19 billion kilometres from Earth, travels at 15 kilometres per second and talks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) at a torturously slow 160 bits per second.…

Offers $2 million bug bounty and hopes perps see that record payout, and a clean conscience, as reasons to sacrifice $78m Another week, another crypto upstart admitting its lax security has been exploited and parties unknown have made off with millions. But this time there's a twist: the crypto upstart has appealed for the return of its assets by appealing to the thieves' consciences.…

Big Tech gets hauled in and reminded of its responsibility to keep China's internet nice The Chinese government has unveiled a draft law clamping down on deepfakes – the practice of using AI to adapt existing digital content into realistic simulations of humans.…

Pledges work on 'mutually agreed commercial initiatives' – such as figuring out how to use 5G Google has dipped into its $10 billion India Digitization Fund to have local wireless carrier Bharti Airtel work with it on "mutually agreed commercial initiatives."…

35 US States, more than 50 academics, Microsoft, others take aim at iGiant and its grip on the iOS ecosystem Analysis Epic Games' legal campaign to break Apple's near absolute control over its iOS ecosystem received reinforcement this week from 35 US states, Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen, and more than 50 academics, among others.…