The Register

Lights, cones, illuminated arrows all involved, say investigators A US government agency has formally opened a probe into Tesla's so-called Autopilot system following a spate of well-publicised crashes over the past few years.…

Plus: Self-driving Humvees funded by US Army to the tune of millions In Brief OpenAI has released its new and improved version of Codex, its AI code-completion model, to beta testers through an API.…

Murder trial affected last week A bungled data migration of a network drive caused the deletion of 22 terabytes of information from a US police force's systems – including case files in a murder trial, according to local reports.…

Most searches were fine, but certain test cases now take 'seconds, not days' GNU grep 3.7 has been released with a fix for a bug causing "extreme performance degradation" in certain types of search.…

Microsoft's OS once again where it shouldn't be Bork!Bork!Bork! There are some things in life that are not meant to be touched – museum exhibits, the biscuit tin that you're not supposed to know about, Microsoft Windows...…

Complaints of 'retaliation and irregular termination' over whistleblowing backed by committee, admits governing body Exclusive The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) has settled a dispute with former CIO Wei Lei whose employment was terminated under "irregular" circumstances after he blew the whistle on its former director general's alleged dodgy procurement.…

Cupertino can see things you people wouldn't believe Opinion For a company built around helping people communicate, Apple sure has problems talking to folk. It pole-vaulted itself feet first into the minefield of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), saying that it was going to be checking everybody's images whether they liked it or not.…

Desk detritus baffles even the brainiest of boffins Who, Me? Hurrah! A fresh week awaits! Who knows what delights lurk within. One thing is for sure, it all starts with a tale from the Who, Me? mailbag.…

Revisit the browser wars, we shall. Microsoft's first serious attempt at a web browser, Internet Explorer 3.0, turned 25 on August 13th. And one of the developers on the team that created it – Hadi Partovi – has revealed how the product came to be, the mad rush to get it to market, and the cost of that effort.…

COVID’s been harder on airlines than space companies Richard Branson last week offloaded 10.4 million shares of Virgin Galactic, worth US$300M, to prop up his other businesses including pandemic-damaged airline Virgin Atlantic.…

USA's Clean Networks plan appears to have scuppered Chinese participation in 108Tbit/sec CAP-1 cable Amazon Data Services Inc. and Facebook contractor Edge Cable Holdings USA have applied to operate a submarine cable linking the Philippines to California, after China Mobile (CMI) bowed out of the project.…

Less-than-literal versions of the past criticised, because somebody needs to think of the children State-run China National Radio has called for a stronger vetting of online video games and zero tolerance towards those that misrepresent historical events.…

11,294 packages added, 9,519 removed, and five years of support starting … now! The Debian project has released the eleventh version of its Linux distribution.…

Doesn't hurt that taking clunkers off the road will address India's other health emergency: foul air in Delhi India has come up with a novel way of getting its hands on some rare earths – by junking cars.…

Blockchain exchange biz says it's working to have all the purloined assets returned The mysterious miscreant who exploited a software vulnerability in Poly Network to drain $600m in crypto-assets, claims the Chinese blockchain company offered them $500,000 as a reward for discovering the weakness.…

A tour of UK tech HQs courtesy of some saucy Anglo-Saxonisms NSFW Some internet clown has satirised current UK controversy over mapping app What3words by making a version that uses four swearwords to name each 3x3 metre block of Great Britain.…

And US trade judge reckons Google ripped off Sonos's tech This week ended with two separate patent-related blows against Apple and Google in the United States.…

AlgorithmWatch ends newsfeed study after 'thinly veiled threat' AlgorithmWatch, a non-profit group based in Germany, said it has been forced to end its efforts to monitor Instagram's newsfeed after parent company Facebook intervened.…

E-goliath's subsidiary drops 'draconian' contract terms that absorbed personal work, demanded license rights Analysis Amazon Game Studios has reportedly dropped terms in its employment contract that gave the internet giant a license to the intellectual property created by employees, even to games they develop on their own time.…

This isn't Boeing very well, is it? Boeing's troubled CST-100 Starliner capsule, once expected to ferry astronauts to and from space, is heading back to the workshop after suffering mechanical failures.…

Borked module and fingerpointing puts space relationship with US under strain Opinion NASA's relationship with its Russian International Space Station (ISS) partner is under a similar strain to, say, an orbiting outpost that has been given a surprise spin by a malfunctioning module.…

Brit tax collection agency's IT estate contains 'significant risk' Britain's tax collection agency has handed £150m in contracts to integrator and consultant Cognizant, including work to assist with the implementation of Pega low-code and automation systems.…

Join us online before you start your migration Webcast If you’ve been self-managing your JSON workloads, it’s probably time for a little self-care – or to put it another way, drop the problems of patching, upgrading, licensing, and more, into someone else’s lap.…

COO also talks of recruiting and irradiating the next David Banners of the tech world For an AI biz associated with the CIA and the much-criticised US immigration agency ICE, whose founder helped finance impeached ex-president and alleged insurrectionist Donald Trump, it might be fair to assume Palantir would endevour to avoid giving the wrong impression.…

Hey MoD, nice to hear from you. What? Not secret any more, you say? A job ad blunder by the UK's Ministry of Defence has accidentally revealed the existence of a secret SAS mobile hacker squad.…

New Windows 11 toys, fresh new CVE pops out Microsoft has released a number of Windows 11 updates even as it acknowledges yet more holes found in its flagship operating systems by researchers.…

'Ethical insight and competitive advantage' in the pipes if project goes to plan UK water company United Utilities is in the market for control, monitoring and analytics platforms in a deals that could be worth up to £270m.…

People just won't quit quitting The bloodletting within the Perl community has continued in the wake of Community Affairs Team chair Samantha McVey's resignation.…

Lighter lockdowns meant more effective manufacturing and logistics India PC and smartphones shipments grew significantly in Q2 2021 as the world carried on with COVID, a little less rattled by lockdowns and adapting to work and learn-from-home policies.…

Help me, officer, I’m lost! 'No problem, sir, you’re right in front of me' Something for the Weekend, Sir? "This website is requesting permission to access your location. Yes/No?" Absolutely not. My personal details are sacred!…

One of issues with public sector IT? Technical debt. £2.3bn to keep lights on in 2019, and £22bn more over next 5 years Management consultancy McKinsey appears to be well placed to influence UK government’s future technology strategy after winning a £3m, eight-week contract to build business cases ahead of the Spending Review ’21.…

But I hired the most expensive of contractors – how could this have happened? On Call Just one more day to go – the weekend is creeping into a view. Unless, of course, you're one of those brave souls cursed to be forever On Call.…

Suggests the world to sort out a ban to preserve human rights, issues sternly worded 'Please Explain' to Israel The United Nations has called for a moratorium on the sale of "life threatening" surveillance technology and singled out the NSO Group and Israel for criticism.…

Fault injection technique presents risk in cloud environments from rogue admins AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) scheme is not as secure as its name suggests.…

Hands-off driving detectors required, over-the-air updates to be strictly regulated China has drafted new rules required of its autonomous and networked vehicle builders.…

BTW is that pronounced Jiffy or? The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority wants Facebook to sell Giphy to prevent the Silicon Valley giant from tyrannizing the happiest place on the internet: the land of GIFs.…

Organizational structure, piecemeal approach and hiring practices all need to change, says Borg security bigwig A senior Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) advisor at Cisco has penned a commentary on the state of US cybersecurity frameworks, criticizing current government infosec and advocating for more autonomy for CISOs and a better understanding of the task at hand from those creating policies.…

Pledges to 'strengthen organizational guardrails' with raft of new policy and training initiatives Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has published a letter sent to its 250,000-plus staff in which it explains its reaction to recent news of a harrowing sexual assault allegedly perpetrated by a company manager – and the company's response includes self-defense training for staff.…

Allegations of purloined trade secrets, unfair competition, national security threats, and more packed into lawsuit A California-based IT consultancy has sued Huawei and its subsidiary in Pakistan alleging the Chinese telecom firm stole its trade secrets and failed to honor a contract to develop technology for Pakistani authorities.…

It's the Social distancing Network™ Facebook has delayed recalling its workers to their offices in the US and beyond until January next year at the earliest.…

Plus: eBPF Foundation emerges, Exchange severs probed for ProxyShell holes, and more In brief If your Git operations start failing on Friday, August 13 with GitHub, it may well be because you're still using password authentication – and you need to change that.…

Not a hardware or software bug, for a change Mars rover Perseverance failed in its first attempt to collect a sample of rock from the Red Planet because the material crumbled to dust, NASA scientists have said.…

Judge wrong to prevent Uncle Sam from challenging psychiatrist's suicide risk report, says High Court Analysis Julian Assange has lost a legal scrap in court, this time over the US government's attempt to expand its grounds for extraditing him from England to stand trial in America.…

Project said to be well resourced, lots of tweaks in new version, plenty more to do Thunderbird 91 has been released with support for Apple Silicon and other enhancements.…

5150: Not just a medical emergency, also the beginning of the office brick It is 40 years today since the IBM Model 5150 was unleashed upon the world, creating a tsunami of beige that washed over offices everywhere.…

Zoom in on zero trust by tuning in and finding out Webcast Being hit by ransomware is gut wrenching enough, but it’ll be ten times worse if it coincides with the realization that your data protection systems just aren’t up the job anymore.…

SaaSy HR firm gets around a bit Workday has jumped into bed with Google Cloud, making it the preferred provider to run workloads for core industry in a public cloud environment - five years after talking in similarly glowing terms about AWS.…

No word on whether gang got their mitts on data, though Outsourcing and accounting firm Accenture has been struck by Lockbit ransomware.…

Teams and Enterprise only for now GitHub's Codespaces, cloud-based development environments that have been in preview since May 2020, are finally here. Prices range from $0.18 to $2.88 per hour.…

PostgreSQL acceleration outfit Swarm64 also nabbed ServiceNow has done some digging between the sofa cushions and found enough loose change to bag a couple of acquisitions.…