The Register

No, not the US government's task force ... the other one The Institute for Security and Technology's Ransomware Task Force (RTF) on Thursday published an 81-page report presenting policy makers with 48 recommendations to disrupt the ransomware business and mitigate the effect of such attacks.…

Who knows whether algorithms really harm society? Analysis Big tech's approach to avoiding AI regulation looks a lot like Big Tobacco's campaign to shape smoking rules, according to academics who say machine-learning ethics standards need to be developed outside of the influence of corporate sponsors.…

None of them are Comic Sans, or likely to provoke similar passion Microsoft has decided that Calibri’s days as its default font are numbered.…

New starter or mid-career switcher? Here’s where to start Promo Cyber attackers are a diverse lot. They can strike from anywhere in the world, and may be motivated by greed, politics, status, or pure malevolence. And their techniques range from the dazzlingly sophisticated to the frankly crude, technically speaking.…

Expected to host three astronauts for a decade, starting in 2022 China has placed the first module of a crewed space station in orbit.…

Panto season comes early in Redmond as TLS tweaks revive software Is the OneDrive desktop sync client supported under Windows 7? Despite evidence to the contrary, it appears so.…

Hey, look, it's the galaxy's Florida Evidence of what was once possibly water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere in a distant world for the first time – though one of the scientists involved in the discovery told us this would-be interstellar getaway is "completely inhospitable."…

Users weren't warned conversations on chat apps were being used to build a bot. And parents weren't told their young kids had signed up South Korea has issued its first ever sanction against an AI technology company for the “indiscreet processing of personal information.”…

First that IPO and now this Digital Ocean on Wednesday said someone was able to snoop on some of its cloud subscribers' billing information via a now-patched vulnerability.…

$600m in patent royalty payments pour in to help margins pop Huawei has posted its Q1 2021 results – and the headline figure is a 16.5 per cent year-on-year revenue drop to CNY152.2bn (US$23.5bn).…

But for now, have some thin, light x86 Galaxy Pro laptops Samsung is touting some more Wintel laptops – the Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 – and also teased a collaboration on new silicon.…

#ResignModi posts hidden amid heartbreaking COVID-19 crisis Facebook temporarily blocked netizens from viewing posts calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India as a COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak devastates the nation.…

Yes, AWS is still fighting for this $10bn deal Updated The US Court for Federal Claims on Wednesday denied motions by the Department of Justice and Microsoft to dismiss an Amazon Web Services lawsuit challenging the Defense Department's decision to award its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract to the Windows giant.…

Buzz Aldrin sole remaining survivor of Apollo 11 Moon landing Obit Michael Collins, the one Apollo 11 astronaut too few remember, has died of cancer at the age of 90.…

Kubernetes takes centre stage as open-source giant aims to offer OpenShift everywhere Red Hat introduced new managed cloud services at its 2021 summit and expanded the OpenShift Kubernetes platform with improved security, management, and Edge deployment features.…

But at less than 37mph, don't expect anything to be quick Limited to speeds of up to 37mph on motorways, Automated Lane Keeping Systems in vehicles have been offered a route to their legal introduction on UK roads.…

Low enough to witness Musk's Twitter trolling of Jeff Bezos? America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted an application by SpaceX to bring some of its broadband satellites closer to Earth.…

HR, finance, marketing and more in the crosshairs for Jira Work Management Atlassian has released Jira Work Management, which it plans to slip into fields beyond the usual IT and software suspects.…

Hasn't stopped the trains, though Brit railway company Merseyrail is understood to have suffered a ransomware attack – and the crooks responsible reportedly pwned a director's Office 365 account to email employees and journalists about it.…

Electronics retailer 'confident' workers can be offered opportunities elsewhere in the business Dixons Carphone is to permanently ground its airport stores that employ 398 staff, amid mounting losses and following the British government's discontinuation of airside tax-free shopping at the start of 2021.…

Transport minister confirms use of the NHS app for just that when citizens travel abroad With Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove expected to announce app-based "COVID status certificates," the UK's post-lockdown plan looks set to come under fierce attack.…

Highly anticipated details of stock division still unavailable Heirs of Samsung patriarch billionaire Lee Kun-hee issued a statement today partially detailing their inheritance tax strategy alongside financial and art charity contributions.…

Maybe we can make software modular, secure, speedy all at the same time The Bytecode Alliance, formed by Fastly, Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat to move WebAssembly beyond the browser, has created a non-profit organization with the help of Microsoft to further their cause.…

Cloud migration and winner-takes-all integration drive more coins into Redmond's pocket Microsoft has reported a 19 per cent year-on-year revenue jump in Q3 financial results covering January to March 2021, driven by Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions.…

Regulator inviting comments on implications for local goods and services Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating SK Hynix's agreed $9bn purchase of Intel's NAND and SSD businesses to ascertain if the deal would negatively impact the local buyers.…

What's £23m compared to £1.35bn? The three most important words in any estate agent's lexicon are: "Location, location, location." The same is true for the UK's mobile carriers, who have just spent £23m to get their choice positions for their recent spectrum purchases.…

Can open innovation work in the automobile industry? IBM tentacle Red Hat has waded into the world of automobiles with the intent of attaching wheels to a continuously certified Linux platform.…

Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I want to bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork knows no borders, be they geographical or technological, as demonstrated by this Ubuntu installation getting funky on the Helsinki metro.…

Traffic + Demand * Bandwidth = $$$ (maybe) If you had 5G and cryptomining on your buzzword bingo cards, crack open the bubbly – FreedomFi gateways will mine the HNT cryptocurrency in exchange for providing 5G cellular coverage to IoT devices and passing users.…

$30m, 100,000-core beast will use third-gen AMD EPYCs and 352 – count 'em – Nvidia A100 GPUs Singapore has picked Hewlett Packard Enterprises to build a new S$40m ($30m) supercomputer for its petascale National Supercomputing Center (NSCC).…

Must see: Dr Holly Cummins and Liz Fong-Jones to deliver keynotes Event We’re really thrilled to announce the first two keynotes for Continuous Lifecycle Online, our three-day – 10-12 May, 2021 – virtual event bringing together some of the DevOps, Containers and CI/CD world’s brightest thinkers and doers.…

Calls for jabs market to be abandoned, and local vaccine IP to be freed India's Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), an organisation that aims to "to protect freedom in the digital world" and advocates for the development and use of open-source software, has helped to prepare a lawsuit that calls for changes to the nation's vaccine pricing policy and rollout plans.…

Micro-dosing among Cali techies ... suddenly it's all starting to make sense The co-founder and CEO of Iterable, a San Francisco marketing tech biz valued at over $2bn, claims he was fired after admitting to micro-dosing LSD at work.…

Quantum experiment may clear the way for viable silicon photonics – chips with electronic and photonic interconnects Researchers in a team led by the University of Surrey reckon they have accidentally found a new way to use silicon as a powerful photonic informational manipulation material, potentially making it possible to produce viable silicon devices that can control multiple lasers.…

Turns out people, orgs are still buying truck loads of kit a year into the pandemic AMD beat Wall Street's expectations for the first quarter of this year as demand for gaming PCs, notebooks, and servers using its x86-64 processors remained high during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Down Under watchdog doesn't call for commission cuts nor suggest major interventions Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has decided that Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile operating systems and probably harm third-party developers ... but has proposed only modest changes to the operations as remedies.…

Big list of requirements to get the financial boost – and no mention of 'cut and paste from the West' China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has defined type of silicon companies it is willing to offer tax credits – and even small outfits are invited to apply if they have some patents in their pockets.…

Profit, sales soar as giant seemingly scales beyond our perception of reality and scrutiny of society Google-parent Alphabet generated $55.3bn in the first three months of 2021, a 34 per cent increase from the year-ago quarter that exceeded financial analysts' expectations and lifted company shares in after-hours trading today.…

'You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target' Poll Project management software maker Basecamp has come under fire for banning its employees from having “societal and political discussions” using their work accounts.…

Vendor claims government failed to provide 'clear direction' for the project The US State of Maine has laid off 15 independent IT contractors, each paid $13,000 a month, who were working on its paused project to implement a new Workday HR and finance system, which is at least two years late and millions of dollars over budget.…

Cites extremely nascent OpenRAN as country's great hope Smaller carriers and networks are the weakest link in America’s telecommunications supply chain, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks claimed while speaking at a supply chain integrity workshop.…

Join us and Nutanix to find out how Webcast There are some technologies that always appear to be the next big thing, but never quite arrive. At least not in the way you think.…

Email provider cock.li called out for harbouring snooping personas Following attribution of the SolarWinds supply chain attack to Russia's APT29, the US CISA infosec agency has published a list of the spies' known tactics – including a penchant for using a naughtily named email provider.…

MPs unite behind call to hold those responsible to account, but minister says it would take too long The UK government has resisted calls for statutory public inquiries into the Post Office Horizon scandal in which subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted over accounting flaws in Fujitsu-built software.…

But hey, the release looks OK Fedora 34, a feature-packed new release of Red Hat's leading edge Linux distribution, was released today, though the main Java package maintainer has quit, urging "affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java."…

Good news for users with disabilities, though there's room for improvement Point releases typically come and go without much fanfare. By their very nature, they're incremental, bringing modest performance and security updates, and not much else. The latest version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 14.5, released yesterday, is different.…

Is it yield to the left or just ram my way through any which way? From Swindon's insane five circles in a circle to the insurance-clause-generating 12-lane monster around the Arc de Triomphe, the roundabout has been easing congestion helping local governments across Europe save their pennies for decades.…

Plus the N2, its first Armv9 blueprint Arm today publicly added two more CPU cores to its Neoverse family of data-center and server-grade processors: the V1 aimed at demanding workloads and vector math, and the N2 for lighter, scale-out systems.…

Newish criminal gang 'trying to make a name for themselves' Ransomware criminals have posted trophy pictures on their Tor blog after attacking the police force for US capital Washington DC.…

Another month, another Teams TITSUP* Updated When the sun is out, thoughts can turn to taking an impromptu day's vacation. Microsoft Teams appears to be no exception to this rule as users noted problems with the collaboration platform this morning.…