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Resellers were given exclusive territories to target, and offered tech support Australia's Federal Police force has revealed more about how it distributed a backdoored chat app to criminals.…

Previous injunction that ordered company to allow non-Apple payments systems is suspended Apple will not be required to implement third-party in-app payments systems for its App Store by 9 December, after a federal appeals court temporarily suspended the initial ruling on Wednesday.…

Donated $110K to Democrats in recent years United States president Joe Biden has announced his intention to nominate former HPE and eBay CEO Meg Whitman as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Kenya.…

Meet the new boss A former executive leading Qualcomm's Snapdragon computing platforms has departed the company to become CEO at an AI chip startup.…

Expect flight delays and diversions, US Federal Aviation Administation warns The new 5G C-band wireless broadband service expected to rollout on 5 January 2022 in the US will disrupt local radio signals and make it difficult for airplanes to land safely in harsh weather conditions, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.…

Cross-border op nabbed our man, boast cops and prosecutors A Canadian man is accused of masterminding ransomware attacks that caused "damage" to systems belonging to the US state of Alaska.…

Schrems II starts to be felt in Europe A German court has ruled that sharing IP addresses with US-based servers for the purpose of cookie consent is unlawful under EU data protection law and the EU Court of Justice Schrems II ruling.…

Data watchdog shows it's keeping its PECR up British telco Virgin Media is facing a £50k financial penalty after spamming more than 400,000 opted-out customers urging them to sign back up to receive marketing bumf.…

Must revise visa evaluation process Microsoft has settled with the US Justice Department over immigration-related discrimination claims.…

Microsoft aware of the issue months ago, but not fixed yet Updated Users of Windows 11 are complaining about slow write speeds on NVMe SSD drives, a problem which persists even though it was acknowledged by a Microsoft engineer three months ago.…

Yet another Slack rival goes offline, but text-adventure fans need not panic Twitter has acquired another dotcom – this time business-oriented, low-distraction text/audio/video chat service Quill.chat. Neither company said how much cash changed hands.…

Surely the Great Coming of (Huawei-less) 5G will have happened by then The UK government has announced measures to phase out 2G and 3G networks by 2033 ahead of Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries' meeting with US Secretary for Commerce Gina Raimondo.…

Two Russian men and 15 Does named in Glupteba Enterprise case Google says it has taken legal and technical action against Russia-based botnet Glupteba.…

New e-ink tablet, too. Open mobiles, tablets and laptops are coming... slowly Open-source-hardware vendor Pine64 has started shipping versions of its upgraded smartphone and new e-ink tablet – but so far, only to developers.…

Compute graphs are the way forward Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

Even the best of ideas can take their own sweet time making it into the kernel Maybe someday – maybe – Zero Trust will solve many of our network security problems. But for now, if you want to make sure you don't have an eavesdropper on your network, you need a Virtual Private Network (VPN).…

This is fine Those of us who fear future enslavement by robot overlords may have one more reason not to sleep at night: engineers have demonstrated a few of the legless, floppy variety making some serious leaps.…

Yeah, right, Chipzilla: we totally believe your line this isn’t a real plan, even though PCI supports it Intel has updated the code it says allows the implementation of “software-defined silicon” (SDSi).…

Wants Google, Meta, Netflix and locals to work harder on uptime, warn locals of outages in Korean South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has offered Big Tech some advice on how to make their services suitably resilient, and added an obligation to notify users – in Korean - when they fail.…

Certifies hardware with malware-crimping spec, already common in PCs, for Azure Stack and Windows Server Microsoft has extended the Secured-core concept it applied to PCs in 2019 to servers, and to Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI.…

Adds fun for CTRL-Z freaks, Dark Mode, improved Find and Replace Microsoft has released an update for its venerable Notepad text editor.…

And open sources Yun on Chip IoT silicon and ecosystem Alibaba's DAMO Academy has teased a chip that stacks logic and memory in 3D, and Chinese press suggest it represents an architecture that can bust the Von Neumann bottleneck.…

Nearly 20 year-old software used to protect humanity gets an upgrade NASA has upgraded its near-Earth asteroid monitoring algorithm to model hazardous space rocks more accurately after nearly two decades, it announced on Tuesday.…

Lawsuit claims social media giant's algos helped Myanmar military crackdown on the Rohingya Meta was sued on Tuesday for a whopping $150 billion in a class-action lawsuit for allegedly amplifying hate speech and aiding the Myanmar military in the genocide of the Rohingya people.…

Couple of cents-worth of kit causing big problems for the year to come The shortage of power management chips is worsening and holding back companies from building cars, PCs and items with batteries or an on-off switch, Trendforce said in a study this week.…

Yet losses grow at NoSQL database biz NoSQL database slinger MongoDB has seen its share price bounce 15 per cent following a hefty upturn in sales for Q3 and better-than-expected forecasts for the final three months of its current financial year.…

Experimental – but good enough to start writing 'drivers and other modules' A new patch was this week submitted to the Linux Kernel mailing list, progressing the Rust for Linux Kernel project.…

'We have identified the root cause and we are actively working towards recovery' Updated Technical errors with the US-EAST-1 region of Amazon Web Services have caused widespread woes for customers, including difficulty accessing the management console and some other service problems.…

They went full science. Always go full science The Hubble Space Telescope team has triumphed once again and returned the veteran observatory to service.…

So says Sophos in warning about Tor2Mine Monero malware Cryptominer malware removal is a routine piece of the cybersecurity landscape these days. Yet if criminals are hijacking your compute cycles to mine cryptocurrencies, chances are there's something worse lurking on your network too.…

And the cheapest? Libya In a surprise to no bill-payers in the UK, except perhaps those huddling in homes without power for days on end, Blighty has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.…

Only one respondent 'noticeably reduced the capacity of their systems' Reg Reader Survey We decided to look at the science – or perhaps the art – of capacity management for our recent Reg Reader Survey.…

Contributed to dysfunction as diplomats and soldiers struggled to get Afghan helpers out of reach of Taliban Diplomats and soldiers were left grappling with appallingly inadequate IT and secure communications support as thousands of Afghans struggled to get help from the UK during the fall of the capital Kabul in August.…

Smartphones and consumer electronics now under one roof Samsung is splitting into two internal divisions – a semiconductor unit and one for smartphones, TVs and other consumer electronics – appointing two CEOs in what appears to be the biggest operational shake-up in years.…

Chipzilla to keep its hands on the wheel Intel will take its Mobileye tentacle public next year, five years after spending $15bn to buy the sensor company.…

£37m signed up for soon-to-be-defunct non-dept public body It may be winding down as a government unit, but NHS Digital has not stopped its tech spending, signing up suppliers for around £37m in work for the coming years.…

No good reason for vendors to play ball with each other Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

A post-Halloween spooktacular as users face the 'Ghost in the Machine' Lenovo is about to complete a full year of customers complaining about the Trackpoint on the company's popular ThinkPad business laptops.…

Watchdog says tenders to be published by September – but HMRC procurement show that's not going to plan Documents released by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) suggest its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink re-procurement of £7.1bn in IT spending is slipping, according to a timetable set by UK.gov's major projects watchdog.…

We're faster than you. No you're not. Are too. No way! Yes way … can someone take this pair to the principal's office? Content delivery contender Fastly has come out swinging at rival Cloudflare.…

'The last time I did this, I cried' says Better.com CEO Vishal Garg Video Managing a business during the plague years has been tough for many, but one plucky CEO has found a clever and efficient way to execute such an unpleasant task: fire 900 workers at once in a Zoom meeting.…

'Nickel' back in trouble for trying to lift secrets, often by exploiting Microsoft snafus Microsoft has revealed its Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) won court approval to take control of websites a Chinese gang was using to attack targets across the world – often by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft products.…

Someone just accidentally put it there, says the messaging service company Smartphone payment provider LINE Pay announced yesterday that around 133,000 users' payment details were mistakenly published on GitHub between September and November of this year.…

Officials use them for mundane matters, not big emergencies as laws intend India's Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology has slammed state governments' use of internet shutdowns.…

Fingers crossed the telescope will finally take to space on 22 December Engineers have finished pumping the James Webb Space Telescope with fuel, and are now preparing to carefully place the folded instrument inside the top of a rocket, expected to blast off later this month.…

Home-baked silicon is the way forward China is gut punching Moore's Law and the roughly one-year cadence for major chip releases adopted by the Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others.…

Tens of thousands of homeowners and hundreds of businesses were at risk, lawsuit claims The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into whether Tesla failed to tell investors and customers about the fire risks of its faulty solar panels.…

Sweary test on sale as Tesla CEO forgets where he parked his car Elon Musk fans must be all a quiver this week as they finally have the chance to buy a collectible to slide under the bust of their idol's head: papers signed by the man himself.…

Franchisees' closures also affect petrol stations The British arm of Dutch supermarket chain Spar has shut hundreds of shops after suffering an "online attack," the company has confirmed to The Register.…

MongoDB CTO Mark Porter: 'It is 34 per cent compatible, through our tests' Interview Amazon's DocumentDB database service is described by the cloud corp as "MongoDB compatible", but MongoDB CTO Mark Porter has told The Register this is not entirely the case.…