The Register

Why are they asking G7 to do their job for them, muses critic Cookies are on the menu today for the G7 as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) proposes to the group of leading global economies that consent pop-ups should be reduced.…

Cops can read the SMTP spec too, y'know Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the user's arrest.…

Verne Global site claimed to be 'one of the most efficient' globally A UK investment company created earlier this year to invest in digital infrastructure assets has splurged £231m to acquire a sizeable data centre in Iceland on the site of a former NATO airfield and naval base.…

Plus: Police aren't treating breaches as terror offence The person who reformatted the Guntrader hack data as a Google Earth-compatible CSV has said they are prepared to go to prison – while denying their actions amounted to a criminal offence.…

Deloitte, Computacenter, KPMG, E&Y among listed suppliers hired by local weather watcher The UK's Met Office has handed seats on a framework contract worth up to £30m to 32 suppliers in a bid to develop a common data platform over the next four years.…

DialADeal is no longer operating A Glasgow-based company is facing a £150,000 penalty handed down by the UK's data watchdog for making more than half a million nuisance calls about bogus green energy deals.…

Some refined their CVs relentlessly. Others studied. Many wept, more than once. But most see an upside to their changed circumstances COVID Logfile III Rick Bryant* cried when he was offered a new job.…

Chair of UK Financial Conduct Authority says more regulation will help innovation to flourish Big Tech and the likes of Kim Kardashian need to be named and shamed so that innovative digital tokens can flourish, according to Charles Randell, chair of the UKs Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Payments Systems Regulator (PSR).…

Rural revitalisation and long-term strategy await founder of mega e-tailer JD.com The founder and CEO of colossal Chinese e-tailer JD.com, Richard Qiangdong Liu, will step down from his leadership positions.…

Special administrative region to share economic zone located on Chinese soil China has revealed plans to create a special economic zone that focuses on development and manufacturing of semiconductors – and will create some fabulous geopolitical interest along the way.…

Open source business model problems for modern-day HyperCard Interview An easy to use programming language that was made open source in 2014 after a successful crowdfunding campaign is going back to closed source after too many customers switched to using it for free.…

Sets sights on third party support and managed services for Oracle, SAP and Microsoft SAP and Oracle services firm Spinnaker Support has launched into database management with the purchase of Dobler Consulting.…

'Arrived' back on the planet quite a bit sooner than expected, sure Firefly Aerospace has confirmed that one of its Reaver engines shut down shortly after its Alpha rocket left the pad last week, resulting in the destruction of the vehicle in spectacular fashion just after reaching supersonic velocity.…

Software 'enhancement' on the way after triple touchdown TITSUP Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.…

How was your weekend? Got some patching done? The Jenkins team issued a reminder over the weekend that one should keep one's systems patched as it found itself with a compromised Confluence service.…

Sponsor Red Bull supposedly gives you wings, but that doesn't mean you have to use them everywhere While most of Europe was still in bed at the weekend, Italian stunt pilot Dario Costa got up early, climbed into his aeroplane and, apropos of nothing, flew it through two Turkish motorway tunnels, becoming the first person on Earth to do so.…

Also: Compiler warnings now treated as errors by default in kernel builds Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges."…

Plus: Google Health app for NHS hospitals discontinued, and Tesla under the spotlight In Brief Facebook has apologized for an "an unacceptable error" after its AI systems asked folks who watched a British video about a Black man if they wanted to view more content on "primates."…

What happened to transferring £1,000-per-day consultant work to the civil service? Flying in the face of a commitment to wean itself off consultants, the NHS Test and Trace programme has awarded Accenture a £4.8m contract extension to keep its much-criticised COVID-19 Test and Trace system up and running for another year.…

Taking the Pis in Paris Bork!Bork!Bork! It is time for le Bork de Paris today as the curse of the cock-up fairy spreads beyond the shores of the UK to blight the Pis of France.…

Don't trust the insurer's techies, take the blame and other practical tips Feature When I first became a company chief techie, the finance director patronisingly explained the basic asymmetry of prevention vs cure. Spending money on assets to stop an attack come out of capex, but spending after the disaster would be up to the insurer, with premiums deducted out of opex. Also, prevention costs reduced current bonuses.…

Tiers of a clown – or the early days of a better service model? Opinion Docker has a problem: too few whales. Its user demographic is hugely skewed to free plan subscribers, while heavier users (meaning corporate customers) are too thin on the ground to generate enough money through their paid-for tiers.…

SMIC's 28nm colossus won't get China closer to self-sufficiency in stuff it buys from Intel and AMD, will help in other ways China's largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has announced it will spend $8.87 billion on a new fabrication facility that will become China's largest such facility used for products other than memory.…

Bump and grind in the server racks Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and with it comes a cautionary tale of how one Register reader's overconfidence led to his undoing, thanks to an unexpected interfacing with a belt buckle, in today's edition of Who, Me?…

Good news for consumers, exporters, and outsourcers The BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have agreed to smooth the path for e-commerce and trade in services.…

Sorry, vAdmins, you probably don't have an excuse to buy Apple's $699 wheels VMware has announced something a little odd: it won't ever support ESXi running on Apple's 2019 Mac Pro.…

It's not as if politicians' birthdays aren't well known, and they get jabbed on live TV Indonesian authorities have admitted that the COVID-19 vaccination certificate of the nation's President has circulated online and tried to explain that it's an indication of admirable transparency, rather than lamentable security.…

A confluence of recent confusion from around the world that you may have missed ROUNDUP Welcome to this week's gallimaufry of gaucheness, as we present a selection of daft stories to make you glad that you're not that person.…

This isn't over says man pushing for neural networks' rights AI systems cannot be granted patents and will not be recognised as inventors in the eyes of the US law, said a federal judge who decided to uphold a previous ruling by the US Patent and Trademark Office this week.…

Address randomisation not implemented on some, it seems A Norwegian student who went wardriving around Oslo on a pushbike has discovered that several popular models of Bluetooth headphones don't implement MAC address randomisation – meaning they can be used to track their wearers.…

So, do copy that floppy? Software piracy, long a source of anxiety among app makers and large software companies, may have some beneficial effects.…

Amid customer fury, PC maker says it has 'no plans to add any further push notifications' to its stealth adware Lenovo has come under fire for the Tips application on its tablets, which has been likened to indelible adware that forces folks to view ads.…

Firefly Aerospace rounds out a wobbly week for rocket fanciers Video The sudden and explosive end of Firefly Aerospace's first test flight of its Alpha rocket rounded out a hat-trick of woe for rocket fans this week.…

Critics celebrate reconsideration of 'spyPhone' regime Apple on Friday said it intends to delay the introduction of its plan to commandeer customers' own devices to scan their iCloud-bound photos for illegal child exploitation imagery, a concession to the broad backlash that followed from the initiative.…

Harassment, bans on discussing pay, responsibilities slashed, and more alleged Updated The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – which investigates complaints against employers – is to examine claims made by two Apple employees, including allegations of unfair changes to working conditions, harassment, and muzzling pay equity discussions.…

Too many inexperienced project managers and not enough DevSecOps The US Air Force's first ever chief software officer has quit the job after branding it "probably the most challenging and infuriating of my entire career" in a remarkably candid blog post.…

Insiders, they don't like it. Bork the Taskbar, bork the Taskbar Microsoft's efforts to shed as much glory as possible with its Windows 11 release have continued with the sudden breakage of the Start Menu and Taskbar for its happy band of Insiders.…

Average unit prices climbed mid-to-high single digits, confirms chief beanie Hewlett Packard says it filed record gross margins for its latest financial quarter after increasing prices for hardware including servers and networking kit in response to industry-wide component shortages.…

Security biz publishes plans for law reforms Infosec firm Rapid7 has joined the chorus of voices urging reform to the UK's Computer Misuse Act, publishing its detailed proposals intended to change the cobwebby old law for the better.…

Central procurement team tickles the market with tantalising offer... but what for? The UK government is putting the feelers out for a bundle of big data products and services in a move that could kick off £2bn in tendering.…

Here in the UK, Sky broadband users back online Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack.…

No, not the 1980s TV show where Lionel Blair attempted to mime data abstraction to Una Stubbs Retro fans, rejoice! A bit of digital archaeology has turned up a working early version of the CLU programming language and the files needed to create it uploaded to GitHub.…

Founder and promoter accused of running 'Ponzi-like scheme' Cryptocurrency startup BitConnect and two men have been sued by America's financial watchdog, which claims the now-defunct biz swindled investors out of billions by lying to them about an automated trading bot that could reap huge profits.…

We can't deny people are paying up left, right, and centre... Interview Many people outside of IT believe computers will do away with jobs, but the current ransomware plague shows that new and more curious kinds of jobs are created at least as fast. So what sort of background sets you up to talk to people holding your data for ransom?…

Mark your diaries: 1 July 2022 is when stuff stops working Microsoft has deprecated two formerly key authentication APIs for Azure Active Directory and many scripts and applications will stop working after June 30th 2022, including older versions of official utilities.…

Listen to me, Palmer, now listen to me Something for the Weekend, Sir? It has been a quiet week. Apart from the nuclear warning siren, of course.…

Getting hot and steamy in London's Docklands On Call Though the week is over, for some the weekend does not involve frolics and adult beverages but a nerve-wracking 48 hours of watching the company phone. Welcome to On Call.…

Now to enact humanity's cunning interplanetary kidnapping plan NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has successfully drilled into a rock and probably retrieved a sample it's hoped will one day be kidnapped on a one-way trip to Earth.…

Biz defends 'safe and successful' ride America's aviation safety officials have grounded Virgin Galactic flights after its rocket trip that took company founder Richard Branson up into the heavens for a few minutes went off course.…

Open-sources the tool it uses to make that happen and says Intel, Samsung, Open Compute, Western Digital and others are keen to play Facebook has open-sourced code it uses to cache data without relying on DRAM for storage.…