The Register

It's fine: they'll just be used for searching disaster sites, checking structures, spying on people If there is one thing the world doesn't need, more cockroaches would surely be it.…

Microsoft identifies 'ecosystem challenges' as reason for not supporting its own system Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect."…

Staggered keys, your days are numbered Enthusiasts of radical ergonomics, high-speed coders, and keyboard hipsters have cause to rejoice: the market will soon boast the world's first laptop with an ortholinear keyboard layout, thanks to not one but two aftermarket upgrades.…

New name needed. How about Impudence? Or maybe Pluck? Contributors disgruntled with the recent direction of cross-platform FOSS audio software Audacity are forking the sound editor to a version that does not have the features or requirements that have upset some in the community.…

And a third of that's going into the lawyers' pockets British Airways has settled the not-quite-a-class-action* lawsuit against it, paying around £32m to make the data breach case in the High Court of England and Wales go away.…

Great wow factor but is it legal? Is it ethical? Is code that can't be trusted any use? Early testers of GitHub's Copilot, which uses AI to assist programmers to write code, have found problems including alleged spilled secrets, bad code, and copyright concerns, though some see huge potential in the tool.…

COVID-hit body implementing multiple interdependent cloud systems to replace on-prem software The UK's Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is on the hunt for an IT services partner capable of supporting and developing its new data warehouse and CRM systems in a deal that could be worth up to £22m.…

Permissively licensed, the processor's second iteration targets 2GHz at 14nm The Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT CAS) has showcased progress on a fully open-source processor, designed around the RISC-V architecture, which it hopes will offer competition for Arm parts at the performance end of the market.…

Irradiated boars rampage across the internet, leaving jokes, memes, fan art in their wake It seems that the monstrous irradiated boar-pig hybrids that we featured in an article last week have broken out of their former home in the exclusion zone around the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant and are now running riot around the internet.…

Bumpy ride of a keyboard - but that's kind of the point Review This reviewer's desk is a temple of the mechanical. I like my keyboards, and I like them clicky and with oodles of tactile feedback. And yet, for the past couple of weeks or so, I've been using a bog-standard scissor-switch keyboard.…

Er... let's just ask the experts boffins Feature Do the laws of physics trump mathematical complexity, or is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) nothing more than 21st-century enterprise encryption snake oil? The number of QKD news headlines that have included unhackable, uncrackable or unbreakable could certainly lead you towards the former conclusion.…

IDC says on-prem clouds like AWS Outposts will grow from from $140M annual sales to $14B Analyst firm IDC has a new abbreviation for your cloudy dictionary: DCIaaS, which stands for Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service.…

Straight-up copyright complaints, not Big Tech flexing its muscles Boney M’s 1978 disco hit Rasputin and an Indian pop song called Maa Tujhe Salaam (Mother, I Salute You) have been revealed as the reason Twitter briefly suspended the accounts of two Indian politicians.…

Research agency also open-sources FETT hardware bug bounty platform and tools The USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it will fund development of a new type of “event-based” camera that only transmits information about pixels that have changed.…

Hikes numbers of known compromised customers and warns countermeasures will be needed before resuming usage Kaseya has said it’s been unable to find signs its code was maliciously modified, and offered its users a ray of hope with news that it is testing a patch for its on-prem software and is considering restoring its SaaS services on Tuesday, US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).…

Current draft makes staff personally liable and Asia Internet Coalition says that could crimp innovation and hurt the economy The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a lobby group that numbers Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and SAP among its members, has written to Hong Kong’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) and outlined objections to the Special Administrative Region’s proposed anti-doxxing laws.…

'Claims are up, capacity is down, and underwriting profitability is, at best, under pressure' The cost of insurance to protect businesses and organisations against the ever-increasing threat of cybercrimes has soared by a third in the last year, according to international insurance brokers Howden.…

When the Pi was loaded/ with native Windows 11 bling... wasn’t it quite Armful, a somewhat speedy thing The Register's adventures into the world of Pi-powered Windows 11 continued today with the installation of the ARM64 version of Microsoft's popular Office suite.…

'Foo' – not the noise of a passing car The world of Formula 1 racing was livened up over the weekend as the sport's official app sent out some unexpected notifications on the eve of the Austrian Grand Prix.…

Hakuna matata The boss of Arm has moved to tackle prolonged concerns that the British chip designer's proposed $40bn buyout by Nvidia could damage competition and spell disaster for the UK's tech sector.…

Torvalds reckons 'it might be mergeable for 5.14' The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced with use of a beta Rust compiler (as opposed to a nightly build), testing ARM and RISC-V architecture support, new Rust abstractions, and more.…

It's illegal The California Highway Patrol has issued a warning to motorists that, frankly, needn't be said. Don't whack a massive Starlink satellite dish to the hood of your car. It's a bit illegal.…

Crew do some DIY, move a camera, you know, the usual … but in zero gravity The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has announced that two taikonauts successfully exited the Tianhe space station yesterday for China’s second ever spacewalk.…

Contract worth £75m over seven years City of London Police is looking to crack down on cybercrime with the purchase of "next-generation IT services" in the hopes it will beef up the systems supporting Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB).…

Learn how to swap tedium for transformation with this Regcast Webcast Does your tech strategy involve analytics, e-commerce, machine learning or even AI? Great, you’re probably going to need all of those in the future.…

Mmm, musty One of London's tram stations – mothballed in 1952 to make way for diesel buses – is to be opened to the public.…

'Fork.' What did you think we meant? A few more litres of accelerant were poured onto Audacity critics' fire late last week as an update to the sound editor's privacy agreement seeped out to the consternation of users.…

Let's hope this time a shortage can be averted The UK government has awarded a £5m contract to build the second generation of its e-commerce portal to help health providers get hold of personal protection equipment (PPE) during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.…

Hired to boost channel sales and, erm, 'accelerate' that 'growth journey' Google Cloud has poached Adaire Fox-Martin, a veteran from the stuffy world of corporate database sales, to run its EMEA operations.…

Welcome to Madeira, autonomous region of Borkugal Bork!Bork!Bork! As the latest twist in the Windows 11 saga appears to have turned the blue in "Blue Screen of Death" to black, a glimpse into the international world of bork shows that a black background has always been the harbinger of a poorly computer.…

Foundry platform lacks transparency and accountability, sources tell El Reg Researchers at NHS England are being denied access to datasets on the Palantir platform which supports the COVID-19 data store, with no reason given, despite requests for greater transparency on the system.…

Quit financial engineering and go back to your roots, IBM Column A fun evening's entertainment pre-COVID was to find a pub near a large corporation's IT HQ, look for the customers with the haunted, desperate eyes, and ask them gently how "the migration" was going. Didn't matter which company or what migration. They're hard. They go wrong.…

If Muse Group's stewardship takes a wrong turn, there's always the fork button* Updated The quality of software the FOSS community has created is nothing short of amazing.…

Enthusiasm and youth are once again no match for age and cunning Who, Me? With the use of personal email accounts seemingly never out of the political headlines, we present a cautionary tale of their career-shortening possibilities in another edition of Who, Me?…

Bakes in VPN, ad-blocker, even a crypto wallet, and claims it’s the only non-Chrome browser to harmonise with Google’s lightweight lappies Norwegian web developer Opera has created a version of its software optimised for Google’s ChromeOS.…

And so were two other app-makers that also happen to have listed in the USA lately Updated Chinese ride hailing app DiDi Chuxing was on Sunday removed from local app stores on on grounds that it did not comply with data protection laws. The ban came less than a week after the company’s US stock market debut.…

REvil ransomware rampages through managed services providers and perhaps 1,000 clients IT management software provider Kaseya has deferred an announcement about restoration of its SaaS services, after falling victim to a supply chain attack that has seen its products become a delivery mechanism for the REvil ransomware.…

Reg chats to developer whose joke that mere mention of a new prod would appear in job ads came true and spawned books, songs, forks, cryptocoin, and more A tweeted musing that merely mentioning a new AWS product would be enough to see it appear in job ads has come true — even though the product mentioned is made up.…

Plus: Cops seize 3D printers 'used to print guns', and more bits and bytes In brief In what's looking like a nasty supply-chain attack, IT systems management biz Kaseya was compromised by miscreants, which then used its VSA product to infect its own customers and then their customers with ransomware.…

Plus: SoftBank halts Pepper the robot production In brief The latest results by benchmarking consortium MLPerf, tracking the best chips for training the most popular neural networks, are out and a new player has entered the game: Graphcore.…

Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State, no fish involved Last week, third-party cookies received a stay of execution from Google that will allow them to survive until late 2023 – almost two years beyond their previously declared decommission date. But the search-ads-and-apps biz is already planning a resurrection of sorts because third-party cookies are just too useful.…

Krishna: 'Our hybrid cloud and AI strategy is strongly resonating with clients' - no, really, it is Former president and CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, is quitting the biz less than two years after rocking up at Big Blue, the hard-pressed business claimed today.…

Critic points out that restrictive T&Cs just make it 'Twitter without the porn' Former Trump campaign communications strategist and expert DNA communicator Jason Miller has launched a new social media platform he hopes will be the long-awaited free-speech utopia to rival Big Tech's supposedly crushing grip on public discourse.…

IP address inside Department of Science and Technology ran a vulnerability scan on target Qurium Media Foundation has reported a campaign of DDoS attacks on Filipino media outlets and human rights organisations that appear to be coming from the country's Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and Army.…

Technology has outpaced laws, says House committee chairman The US House Committee on the Judiciary met on Wednesday to hear testimony on the government's practice of secretly subpoenaing cloud service providers, and Microsoft was happy to oblige.…

In-store/work-from-home arrangement extended to Apple Store Geniuses Megacorp Apple will reportedly allow its blue-T-shirted retail elves to work from home in a similar manner to its office workers.…

Don't be allured by the siren sound of inclusion and lasting efficiency gains, says report The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) warned about Big Tech's potential to dominate the financial services sector and overrun banks in its Financial Stability Report released yesterday.…

Big Red and Amazon just can't let $10bn cloud award go Oracle has filed a fresh petition with the Supreme Court of the United States, opening another chapter in its year-long battle with the Pentagon over the award of a $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft.…

Next version of iPhone software boasts plenty of changes, but experience will be buggy for now If you aren't afraid of life on the bleeding edge, Apple has rolled out the first public beta version of iOS 15, allowing anyone with a taste for buggy pre-release software to get their fix.…

Being remote doesn’t mean you can’t keep IT close Webcast People were talking about the network edge well before 2020, though the past 18 months has really shoved what's “out there” to the centre of discussion.…