The Register

Meanwhile Intel reportedly eyes off buying Global Foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) has posted typically robust results, and revealed how it hopes to cope with the twin challenges of COVID-19 and simmering geopolitical tensions.…

Prepares to enact its anti-doxxing laws – without amendments requested by Big Tech Hong Kong’s Customs and Excise Department yesterday arrested four men over alleged money-laundering using cryptocurrency.…

100+ dissidents, politicians, journos targeted by Israeli espionage toolkit Analysis Software patches from Microsoft this week closed two vulnerabilities exploited by spyware said to have been sold to governments by Israeli developer Candiru.…

Buckle up, the great switchover starts today Good news, Hubble fans – NASA reckons it may have worked out what has upset the orbiting observatory: an iffy Power Control Unit (PCU).…

Machines will function more as colleagues than tools, and we're spending $1.5bn to get there The world is entering a new stage of AI and the race to get there is between China and the United States, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has said.…

Fancy a spot of weekend tinkering? Amid the puffery over Windows 365, Microsoft also released the second preview of Visual Studio 2022 with some intriguing features for Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 users.…

24-page complaint lists thousands of products deemed to be unsafe Amazon is facing legal action in the US from a consumer protection group over the sale of allegedly faulty goods including carbon monoxide detectors and hairdryers.…

Rostec throws rubles on the table for a possible 60,000 units a year Russia's Yadro and subsidiary Syntacore have announced an effort to develop homegrown processors based on the free and open RISC-V architecture.…

'It's only for building rockets, what's it got to do with you?' pouts stroppy interplanetary aspirant biz The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has warned SpaceX it has not completed an environmental review of a new tower currently under construction at its launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, indicating the tower might have to be demolished.…

ICO raids homes, seizes computers after UK Department of Health leak Two homes in South England have been searched by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today after pictures of former health secretary Matt Hancock kissing a colleague appeared in a Brit newspaper.…

Linux wrangler's post-$500m Rancher acquisition numbers otherwise 'in line with expectations' Veteran Linux wrangler SUSE has swung into the red largely due to shares-based payments related to its lacklustre IPO in May.…

House Committee on the Judiciary told until there is a proper regime, there will be 'misuse, and mistrust' of the tech The role of facial-recognition technology (FRT) was put under the microscope earlier this week after the US House Committee on the Judiciary heard evidence about how it's used by law enforcement agencies.…

Also: New built-in UNO inspector. What's UNO? Read on... The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.2 RC1, including a large number of fixes intended to improve import and export compatibility with Microsoft Office.…

Stroke victim 'talks' for first time in 16 years, but The Social Network can't see a route to market Updated Facebook is abandoning a project to develop a brain-computer interface (BCI), even as the researchers it funded have showcased the device helping someone with severe speech loss communicate with nothing more than thought.…

After a troubled birth, infamous but effective code becomes an inconvience UK government has admitted it is in the dark about how many citizens have downloaded the NHS Test and Trace App or switched off their Bluetooth that renders it obselete.…

What's another £33.6m when entire programme projected to cost £132bn? The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has awarded a £33.6m contract to London Stock Exchange-listed reseller Softcat for Microsoft software licences and Azure cloud services.…

Sorry, how much do you charge?! America's United Airlines and regional carrier Mesa Airlines have together ordered 200 electric aircraft from an aerospace startup for short-distance passenger flights.…

Company now has 28 days to make up its mind NortonLifeLock, the somewhat clunky moniker adopted by the former consumer business arm of the Symantec Corporation, has announced "advanced discussions" with rival Avast over a possible merger.…

Palo Alto's Unit 42 rejects claims group has shifted to ransomware-as-a-service Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has probed the methods and tactics of the Mespinoza ransomware group, finding its messaging "cocky" and its tools blessed with "creative names" – but turned up no evidence to suggest the group has shifted to ransomware-as-a-service.…

Opting out of data monetisation is neither easy nor cheap Column A colleague was recently required to spend 10 days in a public-health-mandated quarantine after authorities used credit card receipts to determine he'd visited a location that had also hosted a known coronavirus case.…

'Are they fearful of coming inside museums? There's a lot to consider, and I don't think we can offer any more' Feature The National Museum of Computing and Centre for Computing History have finally reopened with the relaxing of coronavirus restrictions so The Register paid both a visit to see what had and had not changed.…

Cos 4G and 5G will be all hunky-dory by then, yeah? BT is going to wind down 3G connectivity by 2023 as it looks to increase its 4G and 5G coverage across most of the UK by 2028.…

Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking labels network observability and SDN vendor jargon IPv6 is still five to ten years away from ascending to analyst firm Gartner’s plateau of productivity, and remains a technology employed by only “early mainstream” users.…

750 cases among workers sees labour force asked to stay on-site Saigon Hi-Tech Park, a Vietnamese electronics factory complex, has been forced to shut down and require workers to live on-site after more than 750 employees tested positive for COVID-19.…

This may explain why Redmond recently updated a trademark to cover Clippy-as-a-service Microsoft has turned to the “wisdom” of the Instagram crowd and Twitter to seek permission to restore its much-reviled Office Assistant “Clippy” to a place of prominence.…

Free if you move ’em to Azure, but on-prem costs will exceed licence fees in third and final year of new offer Microsoft has announced Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2008 and 2012, and for SQL Server 2012 – and made it free if you run them in its Azure cloud.…

Redeploy in circular filing cabinet if you cannot patch SonicWall has warned that its older Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series and Secure Remote Access (SRA) gateways are being attacked in the wild by crooks to spread ransomware – and as some of those devices are end-of-life, don't expect any patches to protect them.…

Alleges it blew a deadline to secure data – by almost three years India’s Reserve Bank yesterday barred credit card giant Mastercard from signing up any new customers in the nation.…

We sum up Middle Kingdom's massive crackdown on bug reports Chinese makers of network software and hardware must alert Beijing within two days of learning of a security vulnerability in their products under rules coming into force in China this year.…

There's a time and place for wireless tech, but it still can't compete Feature IEEE 802.11ax-2021 (more commonly known as IEEE 802.11ax or, more familiarly "Wi-Fi 6") was approved on 9 February 2021, with a top speed of 1.2Gbit/sec per single stream (think "stream" as synonymous with "channel"). As seems to happen each time a new Wi-Fi technology comes out, people are yet again asking whether this is the one that will finally tip us over the edge and entice us away from cables and onto wireless.…

What's wrong with plugging it in? Brainiacs at UC San Diego say they have created a wearable designed to turn your horrid sweaty hands into a charge for your electronic devices – while you barely have to lift a finger.…

US retailers accused of privacy invasion Civil rights campaigners in the US have called on retailers to stop using facial-recognition technology amid worrying privacy concerns and fears that it could lead to people being wrongly arrested.…

Operating system now more flexible in how you get online Privacy and security-focused Linux distribution Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, has announced a major new release completely overhauling how it connects users to the Tor network.…

Meanwhile, Minnesota city authorities evict dozens of monster goldfish from murky local lake Authorities in the US state of Utah have released video of an extreme method they have devised to stock inaccessible lakes in its mountainous regions: a specially adapted aircraft that makes it rain fish.…

Here’s how to not get left behind Webcast Even the most cynical observers have to concede that AI technology is developing at a truly staggering pace.…

Like 'thoughts and prayers' but for web hosting Brit hosting outfit tsoHost has rendered some websites and bits of the company's all-important client area inaccessible since yesterday.…

Nothing to see here, says gargantuan online retailer, thrilled as ever to chat with a union Unite – the UK's largest trade union, with some 1.4 million members – has accused Amazon of inflating prices for items such as hand sanitiser and other health products during the pandemic.…

The good: It's a Windows PC running in the cloud. The bad: It's a Windows PC running in the cloud Microsoft today introduced Windows 365 at its Inspire event: a desktop-as-a-service set for general availability on 2 August.…

Extended version of POCL now supports everything from high-end parts to embedded chips A quartet of computer science boffins have showcased work on bringing the OpenCL programming framework to a wide range of RISC-V chips – improving their suitability for highly parallel workloads in science and beyond.…

Stakes claim for neutral territory after Databricks and cloud vendors make play to manage your data Informatica has launched a SaaS product that aims to manage data governance and catalogues in a single system.…

Procedure on stricken space telescope may be attempted later this week NASA has completed a formal review of what engineers will have to do to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to its backup hardware.…

Ubuntu snatches top spot in 2020 OpenStack User Survey Canonical is cock-a-hoop after Ubuntu snatched first place for OpenStack deployment from the CentOS Linux distribution – but according to some the victory might ring hollow.…

Cellnex already 'largest' phone mast supplier, says UK regulator Two bigwigs in the UK's mobile phone biz have been given just five days to provide "legally binding proposals" that the proposed sale of thousands of phone masts won't damage competition and harm consumers.…

El Reg grabs a moment in time with ExoMars trundlebot's chief engineer Helicopters on Mars have captured the imagination of nerds everywhere, however, an even more ambitious mission to return samples from the Red Planet to Earth is gathering pace.…

An alternative history of the computer revolution Column Looking back over the last 40 years of computing, it's hard to imagine how things could have been different. When Steve Jobs travelled up the Valley in late 1979 to visit Xerox PARC, he found the missing piece of the puzzle that had eaten away at him ever since Woz hacked together the first Apple I: how to make a computer that everyone could use.…

What a whopper Review Most phones are compromised in some way, which makes it all too easy to overlook the good bits. An example of this would be the Huawei Mate 40 Pro, which was near perfect, except for the lack of apps.…

Lessons of Agile still relevant, still not being applied A report on the wellbeing of UK software engineers (developers and DevOps professionals) found 83 per cent suffering from some degree of burnout, with most agreeing that COVID-19 was partly to blame.…

App currently used for 110 government services, more to come Hong Kong’s Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) has revealed that the territory is investigating the use of its digital ID in mainland China.…

If the Chocolate Factory doesn't play ball soon it'll be an extra €1m a day Google was fined €500m ($590m, £425m) by the French Competition Authority on Tuesday for failing to negotiate fees with news publishers for using their content.…

SK Telecom's ‘Ifland’ offers 66 facial expressions, 800 fashion items, plans to offer more serious collaboration real soon now South Korea’s top Telco, SK Telecom, has launched a “metaverse” virtual environment and plans to grow it from a fun place to hang online into a forum for more serious collaboration.…