The Register

Plus: Beware bogus crypto-mining phone apps, and more In brief Late last week, President Biden said he brought up the epidemic of ransomware hitting American businesses in a phone call with his Russian counterpart, and hinted America may start hitting back.…

'Single threat actor' already abusing RCE flaw, Microsoft reports SolarWinds has issued an emergency patch after a critical security hole in its Serv-U Managed File Transfer and Serv-U Secure FTP was spotted being exploited in the wild.…

New release also brings a few refreshed apps and refinements Version 20.2 of Linux Mint has attempted to address the sticky subject of system update notifications and automation.…

Eco-friendly convenience repays deposits using world's first craptocurrency A professor at South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), presumably fed up with students at the university flushing their money down the drain, has come up with a system that manages to reverse that action.…

Controlling a Scalextric car with the mighty power of the Vulture brain Suffering from sore thumbs after a serious session of table-top electric car racing? The Reg took a look at the logical conclusion of wearable electroencephalography: controlling Scalextric cars with thought.…

SANS Institute touches down for August and September visits Promo If you’re going to be near London in August or September, like pitting your wits against cyber attackers, and love exchanging experiences vividly with your peers even more, here’s some really good news.…

v1.58 is a sizeable update that also brings terminals in the editor Microsoft has released version 1.58 of Visual Studio Code with the ability to open terminals in the editor panel and an official integrated web server extension.…

HALO to form the crew habitat module of the Gateway outpost NASA has inked a $935m contract with Northrop Grumman to build the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module for the Lunar Gateway.…

Tax-efficient tech giants in firing line Global plans to ensure that big international companies such as Amazon and Google pay their "fair share of tax" have passed another hurdle following a meeting in Venice of the world's leading finance ministers.…

Redmond acknowledges £270m sueball – so the battle's on Microsoft's attempts to kill off resellable perpetual software licences infringe the EU constitution and UK competition law alike, according to the legal filings of a reseller suing Redmond for £270m in London's High Court.…

Anonymous Liverpudlian building was once home to the strategists who beat Germany's U-boats Geek's Guide To Britain Walking down the ramp into the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool you are faced with a quote from American journalist David Fairbanks White, author of Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945. It states boldly that Derby House is where the Second World War was won. That's quite a claim for a rather bland 11-storey office block in the Stripped Classicism style that most people have never heard of.…

Foxconn's Terry Gou says deal had no guidance nor interference from Beijing Foxconn and TSMC have inked a procurement deal with Pfizer distributor Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group for 10 million vaccines on behalf of Taiwan, a plan approved by the Taiwanese government late last month.…

Feedback determined by software, making this ideal for work and play Review Personal taste plays a huge role in one's mechanical keyboard of choice. While some drool over tactile feedback and samba-like clacking, others prefer silent, linear switches.…

Linux user dips toe in Microsoft OS Column I have been a Linux user for decades. Last week, I bought a Windows computer.…

It's certainly not for that Who, Me? Monday is upon us, the weekend is receding, and the rest of the week is stretching out into an unbroken chain of managerial mayhem. Take a moment to watch a newly minted member of management come unstuck in today's Who, Me?…

HP missed the boom for both, posted 2.7 per cent growth as market surged 13 points over 2020 The PC market racked up another boom quarter in Q2 2021, but analyst firm IDC also found “mixed signals” about future demand.…

More crackdowns on tech companies planning an IPO, as foreshadowed by the Cyberspace Administration of China The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has announced further restrictions for Chinese tech companies, including a compulsory security audit for companies with more than one million registered users that plan to list overseas.…

Went into space and made it home in time for lunch British billionaire Sir Richard “Beardy” Branson on Sunday made a round trip of just over 170 kilometres in around 90 minutes.…

Patch for on-prem is out, too, but company asks users to pause work to review late documentation changes Beleaguered IT management firm Kaseya says sixty per cent of its SaaS services have been successfully restored.…

Experiment shows that a few more plants make for a lot less stress Researchers at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University have used virtual reality to simulate urban greenery, and believe their work proves that the presence of plants can make us all a little calmer.…

Please ignore pesky AMD GPU hardware description header files, says Linus Torvalds Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.14 of the Linux kernel,…

Plus: A tool that automatically shames politicians distracted by their phones during official business In Brief The Biden Administration has cracked down on Chinese AI companies over their links to human rights abuses against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.…

Veteran technologist Terence Eden recalls upstart's solicitation for shills Years ago, prior to his UK government service and AMP rebel period, Terrence Eden was running a mobile technology consultancy when a London-based startup offered to pay him to take job interviews with no intention of accepting any offers.…

28 days at sea alone with nothing to look at but the waves and ocean floor A human-free autonomous boat known as the Saildrone Surveyor has successfully sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii to cross the Pacific Ocean while mapping the topography of the seabed, an achievement made less than a month after a similar IBM-powered boat failed.…

Late Carboniferous period critters used wings to reflect light and make sound Scientists have discovered fossilised insect wings which suggest the flying creatures they belong to may have been communicating 310 million years ago – 50 million years before the first known insect comms.…

Market dominance of tech giants in President's cross-hairs US President Joseph Biden on Friday signed a sweeping executive order directing government agencies to take steps intended to enhance economic competition and prevent anticompetitive practices, among the tech industry as well as others.…

Subsidiary kicked out of Big Red's friend OPN club following audit Oracle is seeking more than $7m in damages from long-time software partner NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) – a subsidiary of tech Japan-based tech giant NEC Corp – over a complaint about copyright and breach of contract.…

Capital piles into chip fabs as pandemic recovery pushes demand Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co has seen quarterly revenue hit NT$372.1bn ($13.3bn), nearly 20 per cent up from a year earlier as the manufacturer struggles to cope with mountainous demand in the pandemic recovery.…

In celebration of STS-135 and the final launch of Atlantis It is now more than 10 years since a Space Shuttle last launched from Kennedy Space Center, marking the end of the reusable orbiter era.…

Warning: Article may contain controversial cooking techniques and songs by The Fall We know how much most of you Reg readers enjoy a full English breakfast. The crispy saltiness of the bacon. The savoury runniness of the fried egg. The soft sweetness of the baked beans. A proper full English fry-up is a work of culinary art when done well.…

Sandwiched between cheese and prawns in UK post-Brexit trade deal In good news for Brits concerned about hitting roaming caps the next time they visit the EU, the UK has sorted out that particular issue in a post-Brexit trade deal with Norway, Iceland, and, er, Liechtenstein.…

Trust us, CircleCI and Redmonk to take the drama out of metrics Webcast Everyone agrees that they want to develop high-performing technology delivery teams. But how exactly do we actually measure that high performance?…

New DevOps buy to support OpenShift push IBM has splashed yet more cash on cloud after confirming it plans to acquire BoxBoat Technologies – the Maryland-based DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes certified service provider.…

Greg Kurtzer: Red Hat did the right thing and the new scenario is better than the old Interview Greg Kurtzer, co-founder of CentOS and founder of Rocky Linux, has told The Register that despite the "negative effect" around the end of CentOS 8, he now believes that the focus on CentOS Stream is better for the community.…

Welcome to Cineworld in the leafy UK town of Harlow Essex Bork!Bork!Bork! The UK's cinemas may be reopening, but it looks to us like The Terminator is still showing. Or perhaps that perennial Microsoft favourite – Bork: The Movie.…

Acquisition will bring query processing for data sources HPE is adding SQL processing power across different data sources to its Ezmeral portfolio by buying startup Ampool.…

Sources fear Big Blue lacks knowledge to keep systems running smoothly Teradata is outsourcing field-based support on both sides of the pond to IBM, much to the alarm of some customers who fear a loss of knowledge in keeping its trusted on-prem systems up and running.…

Nudge that potted plant a little to the left aaaaand… action! Something for the Weekend, Sir? Take a good look at my junk. Nice, isn’t it? OK you can stop staring at it now. No, really, stop. Hey, my eyes are right here, pal.…

The Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid and Roidmi X20s – the latter is sadly not a steroid dispenser Review A few weeks ago, Chinese smart home (and batteries, cables, and headphones) manufacturer Anker asked us if we would be interested in reviewing its latest robot vacuum cleaner.…

5G is messing with the market and keeping less-capable cameras snapping at the heels of 108MP monsters Developers focussed on smartphones can assume that most of the devices on the market have at least a 13-megapixel camera, and that almost 40 per cent of them have a 48-megapixel monster to play with.…

Ooh, watch out for splinters On Call It's Carry On Call time this week as a Register reader finds himself dealing with a potentially career-limiting callout.…

Beijing likes space. Big tech? Not so much – at least this week Chinese tech giant Tencent has joined forces with the nation’s National Astronomical Observatories to journey into AI space exploration, CEO Pony Ma told the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday.…

Can we have less infosec theater, please? Dan Abramov, a software engineer at Facebook, this week published a plea to silence a particularly vocal JavaScript security tool – and its creators more or less agreed there's room for improvement.…

Federal Court finds Apple is neither “ornamental” nor “parasitic” and thinks local action is appropriate despite US case Epic Games has had a win in Australia, with the nation’s Federal Court permitting it to sue Apple over its insistence that it alone can process in-app purchases.…

Promises “exponentially more secure” product and cash assistance for customers Beleaguered IT management software vendor Kaseya has delayed the restoration of its SaaS services until Sunday, July 11th.…

As GPU prices crash after crypto-mines shut down in China, we're told The insatiable demand for microchips amid a global supply crunch of semiconductors is perhaps behind the following smuggling capers in China that just happened to catch our eye.…

10 PRINT "ML won't take my job ";: GOTO 10 OpenAI warned that its Codex neural network, like the one that powers GitHub’s code-completion tool Copilot, is likely to generate source that looks plausible but is incorrect, and its performance will decrease as it grows in size.…

Privacy advocates say surgery on bird-themed system must happen in public Google has decided to let the initial test of its FLoC ad technology conclude in a few days to work on improvements – though it isn't inclined to share feedback from test participants.…

Walking sci-fi horror movie plot wants to look inside boffin brains to find way to help ailing grandparents Eleven-year-old Laurent Simons has become the second-youngest college graduate in history after obtaining a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Antwerp.…

Artistic types invited to submit their designs – under very specific guidelines The Linux Foundation, not satisfied with a model that sees world+dog invited to contribute to the open-source kernel that bears its name, is asking for help on another project: designing a T-shirt to celebrate 30 years of the software – and we have little doubt El Reg readers will have some suggestions.…