The Register

On the other hand, he did have two years to raise watchdog's profile The former head of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has put the boot into his old employer, saying it lacks the necessary clout to take on the world's biggest digital companies.…

That printer plugged into your domain controller? Yeah, you might not be using that for a while Microsoft has assigned CVE-2021-34527 to the print spooler remote code execution vulnerability known as "PrintNightmare" and confirmed that the offending code is lurking in all versions of Windows.…

Self-signed invoices let him cream off hundreds of thousands An IT manager who defrauded an Essex hospital trust out of more than £800,000 using two fake companies set up to commit his crimes has been jailed – after a court heard that he had previous convictions for dishonesty.…

The flight of the bearded one means Shepard will be second. Again Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson is set to take his first jaunt to the edge of space ahead of commercial spaceflight rival Jeff Bezos, with an 11 July trip aboard VSS Unity.…

Who has the best RHEL clone? Rivals jostle for position Rocky Linux 8.4, which was made generally available early last week, attracted 80,000 downloads within 72 hours, but disaffected CentOS users are wondering whether Rocky, rival AlmaLinux, or some other OS, is the right next move.…

Mi Smart Band 6 needs to be slicker, bigger, and brighter to really get you faster and fitter Review Xiaomi's Mi Smart Band 6 fitness wearable is a pleasant device but is too small and finicky to satisfy those who take athletic performance seriously.…

These things really get my goat Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Sign with the devil here." Do what? "Church of Satan. Jot your name on the form and we’ll email you details."…

316 people complained to the Information Commissioner's Office A Leeds-based claims management firm has been fined £200,000 for making more than 11 million unwanted PPI calls, the UK's data watchdog announced today.…

When a user really is holier than thou On Call We round out the week with a spiritual On Call from a reader who was on the receiving end of a higher calling. By phone.…

Finding could boost performance and efficiency of future gadgets The latest Apple fondleslab is thin, sure, but it could be thinner – like what boffins at Tel Aviv University have hailed as "the world's tiniest technology," measuring just two atoms thick.…

Focus is on persuading desktop developers to refresh applications for Windows 11 Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), once touted as the future of Windows development, will not be getting updated for WinUI 3 according to current plans, software giant said in a community call.…

AutoNav performs 'thinking while driving' – any chance we could get more of that on Earth ... for humans? As Perseverance begins to roll its way around Mars, NASA engineers are gradually allowing the rover to drive autonomously, to a degree, using computer algorithms running on a navigation computer.…

Hear how real users are doing this: Watch the Nutanix Database Summit on-demand Webcast Moving to hybrid cloud should open up a world of possibilities for transforming your technology infrastructure and your organization as a whole.…

Digital vax record stored on user's smartphone Android will soon have the ability to store and display proof of Covid-19 vaccination, Google has said.…

While Uncle Sam recommends shutting down print spooler service Another potential mitigation has emerged for the PrintNightmare zero-day vuln, which lets low-privileged users execute code as SYSTEM on Windows domain controllers: remove those people from a backwards-compatibility group.…

Unreliable messaging interferes with contract completion, we're told, as Slack channels flooded with memes IBM's email migration misadventure has been worse than the IT titan has let on, current and former staff have told us.…

Thanks, Vlad, for the cyber-check-up and the containerization case study US and UK intelligence and law enforcement agencies on Thursday issued a joint cybersecurity advisory [PDF] warning that Russian military intelligence is using Kubernetes clusters cloaked by various VPN services and Tor relays to conduct brute force attacks on enterprise and cloud environments.…

Niggles continue even after problem was quietly fixed The Dell SupportAssist RCE furore has rumbled on after infosec outfit Eclypsium snapped back at Microsoft's statement on the matter.…

Human resettlement after 2011's nuclear disaster facing opposition from indestructible, betusked interlopers Scientists have uncovered a new threat to humanity emerging in the area surrounding the former Fukushima nuclear power plant: indestructible radioactive hybrid terror pigs.…

Questions all got a bit too much, although nothing legally wrong with the holding The charity set up by Hasso Plattner, co-founder and formerly long-serving CEO of SAP, has decided it no longer wishes to invest in a joint venture set up by the German ERP giant.…

'Complaint is noticeably devoid of factual allegations' Attorneys for Google have called for a would-be class action lawsuit linked to its COVID-19 tracking software to be thrown out on grounds that any alleged data breaches are both "theoretical" and "hypothetical".…

Gadget capable of 'opening the gates for attackers to roam untethered through an entire organisation' Netgear has patched serious security vulnerabilities in its DGN2200v1 network router, following the discovery of "very odd behaviour" by a Microsoft security research team - a somewhat understated way of saying that attackers can gain "complete control over the router."…

Alrighty... that's OK then? Amazon's carbon emissions grew by almost a fifth last year as its business was buoyed by a pandemic-related sales spike and an ever-growing shift to online activity.…

Boffins point to benefits of putting rad-hardened ASICs in orbit Boffins from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and European Space Agency (ESA) have penned a paper detailing the design of a processor they hope could run deep neural networks in space – building on the free and open-source RISC-V architecture and its vector extensions.…

UK.gov's carrots and sticks never came to pass, author tells us Cyber insurance isn't forcing organisations to improve their infosec practices, a think-tank has warned – and some insurers are thinking of giving up thanks to the impact of ransomware.…

60 years after Alan Shepard made his Mercury flight, one of the Mercury 13 will get her turn Jeff Bezos has upped the ante in the battle of the billionaire bros by handing a seat in the first crewed New Shepard flight to Virgin Galactic customer and member of the Mercury 13, Wally Funk.…

Nation's broadband plumber increasingly desperate to ditch its copper network In an attempt to pull costly support from its copper network, Openreach has agreed to cap wholesale costs for providers who stop selling copper-based broadband products in areas where FTTP is available.…

Lifespan of 3 to 5 years falls short of what's needed for a Mars mission NASA has demonstrated the first trapped-ion space clock in a move that could pave the way for real-time navigation in deep space.…

Android App Bundle required, APK submission no longer allowed Google will require mobile developers to use an Android App Bundle for submitting applications to its Play Store from August 2021, optimising distribution and also requiring Google to hold the developer's private signing key.…

Oh, and it would like everyone to know it had a fantastic sales quarter, natch Memory-maker Micron intends to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in its fabrication plants by 2024.…

Proceeds to go towards charitable causes, Father of the Web confirms The auction of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's source code for the World Wide Web as a cryptographically backed Non-Fungible Token (NFT) has concluded, with the web daddy pocketing $5,434,500 for something already public.…

System trains itself to spot suicidal behavior and alert a controller South Korea's capital and largest metropolis has turned to AI for suicide detection and prevention on popular bridges along the prominent Han River, according to the system's developers at the Seoul Institute of Technology (SIT).…

New technique quicker and greener, but needs batteries to be designed for dismantling Boffins have laid claim to a "ground-breaking invention" which they say will make it considerably easier to recycle batteries from electric vehicles, laptops, and the like – an ultrasonic delaminator.…

For educational purposes, of course Exoskeleton startup Auxivo is aiming to encourage the next generation of cyborgs with the launch of an educational kit dubbed the EduExo Pro, a complete exoskeleton for one arm.…

PSTN to be axed in 2025 UK businesses must prepare for the retirement of the copper-based phone network that may cause devices to stop working.…

Voluntary location-tracking to crimp COVID is too good a tool to waste Column Five years ago I visited Shanghai, to see what the future might look like. I came back wondering how the rest of us had missed QR codes.…

NHTSA sets 24-hour deadline for reporting significant crashes America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will now require details of any and all crashes involving self-driving cars from automakers within one day of them knowing about the accident.…

Fixing the talent pipeline so that finding rocket scientists doesn't have to be rocket science NASA has been set the ambitious targets of taking humans back to the Moon by 2024, then to later make the order-of-magnitude leap on to Mars. Even for the globally renowned space agency, it is a struggle.…

FINRA cites suicide of man who was 'inaccurately' told by the app he was $750k in debt Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.…

'This technology is too dangerous to be regulated, it shouldn’t be used at all' Feature The State of Maine has enacted what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes as the strongest state facial-recognition law in the US amid growing concern over the unconstrained use of facial-recognition systems by the public and private sector.…

We're still keeping everything crossed that the engineers extract a rabbit from a hat once again Updated The outlook continues to look a little bleak for NASA's veteran Hubble telescope as a former astronaut and a Space Shuttle manager weighed in on repair options and the possibility of a fix.…

Amazon's AWS next cloud platform in line for adversarial tactics framework MITRE's Centre for Threat-Informed Defence (CTID) and Microsoft have jointly rolled out Security Stack Mappings for Azure, aimed at bringing the former's Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) framework into the latter's cloud platform – with rival platforms to follow.…

Desert storm of entirely the wrong kind lands unfortunate Egyptian national in very hot water A man has been arrested in Kuwait for allegedly insulting the weather on social media app TikTok.…

So what's with the TPM malarky? The enthusiast community has thumbed a nose at Microsoft's hardware requirements for Windows 11, with Insider builds demonstrated on Raspberry Pi hardware and the inevitable mobile phone.…

Thousands struggle with intermittent failure of multiple messaging services IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days.…

Vendor claimed not to log user data – we'll see Europol, the US Department of Justice, and Britain's National Crime Agency have taken down a VPN service they claimed was mainly used by criminals – boasting that they hoovered up "personal information, logs and statistics" from the site.…

New take on GNOME designed for productivity System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04, based on Ubuntu 21.04 but with a distinctive desktop called COSMIC.…

Internet Explorer 11 and the Adobe Reader plug-in? Is this bork bingo? Internet Explorer 11 may only have a year left, but Microsoft still found itself releasing a patch to resolve some PDF issues in the elderly browser.…

Cupertino insists it works best when they're all together It's safe to say that many Apple employees aren't particularly enthused about the return to the office but HQ isn't backing down, as demonstrated by a leaked video message sent to the workforce.…

Kill this service immediately An infosec firm accidentally published a proof-of-concept exploit for a critical Windows print spooler vulnerability that can be abused by rogue users to compromise Active Directory domain controllers.…