The Register

Hardware capabilities, latest feature updates? You'll get what you pay for Intel's vision of the computing architecture of autonomous vehicles is similar to that of PCs, with pricey models getting better hardware and the latest software, and cheaper self-driving cars getting the bare minimum.…

Espionage motive mooted in attacks which hit industry, government too Researchers at security specialist ESET claim to have found a shiny new advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed FamousSparrow - after discovering its custom backdoor, SparrowDoor, on hotels and government systems around the world.…

Up above the streets and houses, XP's flying high Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows XP continues to hang in there – quite literally – as the operating system does what it does best some 90 metres above the London's River Thames.…

The Register speaks to Canonical about running the OS in the cloud Interview Developers targeting Android are spoiled for choice with their platforms.…

Deadline came and went, but over 750 'resources' are still hard at work Infosys has admitted it has missed the Indian government's deadline to fix the tax portal it built, but which has been a glitchy mess since its June 2021 launch.…

What tools are available? What are the benefits? Let's find out Systems Approach In 1984, artificial intelligence was having a moment. There was enough optimism around it to inspire me to explore the role of AI in chip design for my undergraduate thesis, but there were also early signs that the optimism was unjustified.…

Forget wiring cities with IoT devices – this could be how wide-scale sensing gets done Imagine an optic fiber that can sense the presence of a nearby jackhammer and warn its owner that it is in danger of being dug up, just in time to tell diggers not to sink another shaft. Next, imagine that an entire city's installed base of fiber could be turned into sensors that will make planners think twice before installing IoT devices.…

Inside the software built to figure out groups of potentially infected, asymptomatic passengers Faced with limited resources in a pandemic, Greece turned to machine-learning software to decide which sorts of travelers to test for COVID-19 as they arrived in the country.…

Between COVID and corvids, locked-down Aussies can't catch a break - or a coffee lowered from the treetops Some of Google parent company Alphabet's Wing delivery drones have been grounded by angry Australian birds.…

Firm says 40 per cent of a server's bill of material costs are tied to memory Prices for DRAM and NAND flash are set to fall, sharply, in the second half of 2022 according to analyst firm Gartner.…

Hopes three availability zones will be hobbit-forming for local businesses and government agencies Amazon Web Services has announced it will build a Region in New Zealand and light it up by the year 2024.…

Laptops added or refreshed, and another go at making dual-screen phones a thing Microsoft has introduced the Surface Laptop Studio, and if you mistook it for a tablet with a trackpad stand, you'd be forgiven.…

Unexplained service issue blamed after customers unable to leave gratuities electronically Square's payment system malfunctioned over the weekend for several hours, a glitch that cost workers at affected businesses a meaningful portion of their earnings during the most lucrative day of the week.…

Vid-chat giant's ties to China under the microscope by AG-led panel Zoom’s ties to China are at the center of a US government investigation into the video-conferencing giant's $15bn plan to take over Five9, a California call-center-in-the-cloud.…

file:// is blocked? Oh OK, we'll just use File:// or fiLE://... Apple's macOS Finder application is currently vulnerable to a remote code execution bug, despite an apparent attempt to fix the problem.…

Apropos of nothing, here's Lionel Ritchie Comment Salesforce execs get so bowled over by Dreamforce, the SaaS org's annual gabfest, that they seem to lose all perception of time and space.…

Aw, look. It wants to be a 'global science superpower' The UK government has published its much-awaited National AI Strategy in pursuit of "global science superpower" status.…

Baltic state's cyber security centre uncovers remote censorship blocklist function in Mi 10T handset Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre has told its citizens to get rid of Xiaomi-made mobile devices amid fears that the Chinese company could remotely enable censorship tools.…

Back from the brink with new features More than three years after X.Org Server 1.20, released in May 2018, a release candidate for 21.1.0 has been posted.…

Break free from the silos at Nasuni CloudBound21 PROMO If you’re running enterprise ops at any scale, you’re likely either using the public cloud or attempting to emulate its best characteristics across your own infrastructure.…

What in the blazes? Two Catholic monks from the Rhône region in southern France have been charged with setting fire to 5G phone masts amid concerns the mobile technology could pose a health risk to humans.…

Hopes to tempt roboticists over to its Jetson platform with new simulation features, drop-in acceleration code Nvidia has linked up with Open Robotics to drive new artificial intelligence capabilities in the Robot Operating System (ROS).…

25-year-strong collection of 2,000 handsets covers 1984 to the present day A very-literally-mobile museum boasting over 2,000 exhibits is to go online and on the streets this year to show off the evolution of the mobile phone from 1984 to the present day - and its founders are looking for donations to fill a few gaps in the collection.…

'Warning: this report contains highly offensive language and discussion of content which may cause offence' NSFW UK comms regulator Ofcom has taken the unusual step of employing survey company Ipsos MORI to swear 186 times at 368 different members of the public and record what they thought about it.…

This could very well be the last release based on 16.04 Ubuntu Touch was Canonical's attempt at a mobile version of its OS, subsequently ditched by the Linux outfit and now maintained by UBports, which has just released the latest update, OTA-19.…

EPAC accelerator runs its first 'Hello, World!' in-silico The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has run the successful first test of its RISC-V-based European Processor Accelerator (EPAC), touting it as the initial step towards homegrown supercomputing hardware.…

Three or four unconnected systems required for casework leading – unsurprisingly – to errors UK spending watchdog the National Audit Office has found that a 34-year-old computer system was one of the causes of a scandal which led to more than £1bn of state pensions not being paid.…

Email clients fail over to unexpected domains if they can't find the right resources A flaw in Microsoft's Autodiscover protocol, used to configure Exchange clients like Outlook, can cause user credentials to leak to miscreants in certain circumstances.…

Mozilla, Apple register dismay as worries surface over privacy, potential crypto mining behind user's back Google has released Chrome 94 for desktop and Android, complete with an "Idle Detection" API to detect user inactivity, despite privacy concerns expressed by Mozilla and Apple.…

Report from the Government Office for Science lays out the hurdles to supercomputing relevance A report from the Government Office for Science has proposed the formation of an in-house team dedicated to large-scale computing, as it bemoans the nation's weak standing in the international supercomputing sector and makes a series of recommendations for improving matters.…

Apple-flavored approach running as test 'for a small percentage of users' Analysis Google has been spotted testing a web technology that a former staffer fears will further undermine the already often ignored choices people make about their browsers.…

Digitisation of the justice system still delivering value for money The public body that runs the courts in England and Wales has awarded Version 1 Solutions a contract valued at £9.6m to build an end-to-end digital service for civil claims and damages.…

Meaconing, loss of position, and the Royal Navy's response Boatnotes II Learning to fix your position without GPS is one thing. Actively jamming it to induce a deliberate system failure aboard your own ship is quite something else, as we found on Monday.…

FlutterFlow is a visual application builder for the popular framework Interview FlutterFlow, a third-party visual application builder for the Flutter framework, now has custom functions for the addition of Dart code, but developers may still find it too limiting.…

Project wins £50k from government The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is drawing up guidelines so that crash-proof cargo containers can be attached to drones to transport medical items such as blood samples and vaccines.…

Adds security and networking to platform, hoping you use it to repatriate apps Nutanix has used its annual .NEXT conference to advance the argument that public clouds can be wastefully expensive places in which to run workloads – unless they're managed by Nutanix so they can be returned to another environment at your convenience.…

'A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person' The Court of Appeal of England and Wales this week dismissed a man’s plea to have his AI system recognized as the inventor of two patents.…

Full concurrency model at last Apple has emitted version 5.5 of the Swift programming language, described as a "massive release," including async/await keywords, package collections, and improved Objective-C interoperability.…

Digital imports aren't currently taxed at all, and COVID means the government is keen to find new revenue sources The Philippines has become the latest nation to impose a digital services tax.…

Automation is the answer to labor shortages, social distancing, apparently SoftBank Robotics (SBRG) and China's Keenon Robotics are teaming up to make robot waiters the norm in Japan and Singapore, both companies announced on Monday.…

File upload vuln lets miscreants hijack vCenter Server VMware has disclosed a critical bug in its flagship vSphere and vCenter products and urged users to drop everything and patch it. The virtualization giant also offered a workaround.…

Misconfigured Elasticsearch server blamed A database containing personal information on 106 million international travelers to Thailand was exposed to the public internet this year, a Brit biz claimed this week.…

Plus: Chief Legal Officer exits as court battles loom The SEC has launched an investigation into Activision Blizzard, and has subpoenaed several current and former employees, including CEO Bobby Kotick, the California games giant confirmed on Tuesday.…

Russia-based biz targeted in Uncle Sam's crack down on cyber-extortion The US Treasury on Tuesday sanctioned virtual cryptocurrency exchange Suex OTC for handling financial transactions for ransomware operators, an intervention that's part of a broad US government effort to disrupt online extortion and related cyber-crime.…

Platform and individuals charged in first case of its kind US financial watchdogs have launched legal action against a cannabis-related investment scheme said to be the first case involving crowdfunding regulation.…

Two more years! Two more years! There was good news today for administrators looking nervously at their aging Ubuntu boxes. A few more years of support is now on offer as Canonical brings 14.04 and 16.04 LTS into the 10-year fold.…

Nothing to do with little green men, mind, unless they can be defined as state or non-state actors Two intelligence funding appropriation bills currently awaiting approval from the US Congress contain within them sections for the creation of a new office to investigate UFO sightings.…

455% hike in demand for Kubernetes qualifications causes a stir The Linux Foundation and edX's latest annual Open Source Jobs Report highlights an explosion of interest in cloud technologies that has bumped Linux off the skillset top spot for the first time.…

Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the courtroom Oracle has asked the US Supreme court not to dismiss its case over the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, despite the US Department of Defense officially axing the $10bn procurement deal.…

Also buys data replication company HVR for $700m Automated data integration outfit Fivetran has confirmed a $565m funding round – valuing the company at $5.6bn, roughly the GDP of Montenegro.…