The Register

Got a link? Change the last character and bingo, it's blackmail time Exclusive Bulk SMS messages sent by local councils across the UK contained weblinks leading to pages that freely exposed to the public thousands of taxpayers' names, addresses, and outstanding debts, The Register can reveal.…

Sun, sea and software? UK south coast authority goes all in on Redmond Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council has awarded reseller Bytes Software Services a three-year contract for Microsoft software and cloud services that could be worth up to £18m.…

Student numbers have plunged 40% since 2015 Think tank WorldSkills UK has claimed Britain is facing a digital skills shortage as fewer young people opt to study IT-related subjects at GCSE and A Level.…

Magnetic tech could be used to deorbit debris Video Astroboffins are gearing up to test a method to remove future space junk from Earth's orbit with the launch of ELSA-d, an experimental spacecraft that uses magnetism to snare debris.…

App has common code base for three versions: one global edition; one for south-east Asian; one for China TikTok is likely no more of a threat to users than Facebook, according to an analysis by academic research group Citizen Lab that analyzed the video-sharing social networking service’s app to probe for security, privacy and censorship issues.…

Ad giant’s compute rigs ‘at inflection point’, custom motherboards no longer suffice at G-scale Google has signalled it intends to design its own server-grade systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), because it sees the technology as its next-generation compute platform.…

Restoration of some services at destroyed data centre promised for this week, SBG1 data centre status in doubt again French cloud company OVH has pledged to create a lab to model the effects of data centre fires – less than two weeks after one of its data centres was destroyed by fire.…

Seok-Hee Lee tips Compute Express Link memory to become the next big thing The CEO of SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory manufacturer behind Samsung, has tipped the merger of RAM and CPUs, and the rise of the Compute Express Link standard.…

Caesar Sengupta says it's time to take off Google's 'training wheels' as he both literally and metaphorically plans his next bike ride Caesar Sengupta, Google's vice president and general manager for Payments and the Next Billion Users initiative, will leave the company.…

Class action accusing antisocial media giant of privacy infringement will now move forward The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Facebook to halt a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit that claims the social media giant illegally tracked users.…

Ittt i so hrd to tpe onnnnnnnnnnn th bloddy thng Lawsuits alleging Apple knowingly sold laptops with its defective butterfly keyboard mechanism will go ahead as a single class action.…

Failed firm was full of it, Feds say Jessica Richman, 46, and Zachary Apte, 36, co-founders of San Francisco-based medical testing startup uBiome, have been indicted on civil and criminal charges for allegedly bilking investors out of $60m.…

May! crush! super-app! dreams! of! the! company! formerly! known! as! Yahoo! Japan! Less than a year after selecting the messaging app LINE as its preferred app COVID-era telemedicine, Japan has decided the app is too risky for government use over fears it leaks data.…

Senior management also booted off board in extraordinary vote Special report The CEO and chairman of Nominet have been ousted by the .uk internet registry operator's membership.…

'We’re aware of at least one case where an entity voted more than once' The Open Source Initiative (OSI) on Friday said it will redo its recent Board Election after uncovering a voting irregularity that affected the results.…

Plus: Report shows soft opening next cannot come soon enough for some Microsoft has firmed up plans to reopen its facilities and set 29 March as the date when employees might once again set foot in its Redmond-based HQ.…

Cross-platform appeal outweighs performance penalty, argues Linux flinger With an aim to expand the Linux app ecosystem, Ubuntu desktop engineering manager Ken VanDine has popped up in marketing material for Flutter to say that Google's cross-platform framework is Canonical's "default choice for future desktop and mobile apps".…

LTE it be: Nobody seems to care, so off the 15,000 lines go Greg Kroah-Hartman, responsible for maintaining the stable branch of the Linux kernel, has nudged WiMAX a little nearer the precipice with a commit to Linux staging to strip the technology from the operating system.…

Existing leadership to continue while majority shareholder exits stake Dutch business application biz Unit4 has been bought by private equity group TA Associates in a deal said to be in the region of $2bn.…

'Cases like this... stifle innovation and ultimately harm consumers,' says iGiant A jury in the Eastern District of Texas has ruled that Apple infringed upon a patent held by Personalized Media Communications (PMC) LLC, ordering it to pay over $308 million in damages.…

It's just 'Opera on iOS' now Opera has pushed out an update for its iOS browser, dropping the "Touch" in Opera Touch to become just plain old Opera on iOS.…

Try, try, try to understand, it's a Magic WAN Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare on Monday plans to launch a service called Magic WAN to allow companies to bring geographically dispersed data centers, offices, devices, and cloud services under a single cloud-managed wide area network.…

'Some of you will be happy at this, and some might be disappointed' Updated Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), announced at the organisation's LibrePlanet virtual event that he has rejoined the board and does not intend to resign again.…

Plus: Young female Japanese biker turns out to be boring 50-year-old uncle In brief AI proto-boffins can now rent up to 16 GPUs, the largest amount on any single virtual machine currently available, via Google Cloud.…

Plus: Exchange and SolarWinds autopatch tools and shocking news! In Brief Graham Ivan Clark, part of the crew that hijacked around 130 high-profile Twitter accounts and used them to collect cryptocurrency, has been sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the scam.…

On the plus side: Can't laser-cut that Live Laugh Love slogan into chipboard without software Column It takes a lot to stir the peaceable men and women of Makerhood into angry revolt, but 2D robo-snippers Cricut did it last week. Cricut makes desktop thingies that can print, cut and score a variety of flexible materials, which produce 2D templates you then glue, sew or otherwise fashion into 3D things like baseball caps for Etsy.…

What's wrong with Dynamics 365, huh? Meanwhile, SAP is on ServiceNow Sometimes vendors struggle to see the world as it really is – complex, messy, and for the most part filled with technology that so often falls short of its initial promise.…

When fixing legacy bugs turns out to be a career-limiting move Who, Me? The weekend is no more so start your working week with a Who, Me? tale about the hazards of simply trying to do the right thing.…

Not quite, says peer-reviewed journal, but with prices well below rivals the 80 percent of hearing impaired people with no helpful tech will be listening Samsung says a study of Samsung's Galaxy Buds Pro, conducted by the Samsung Medical Center, suggest its wireless earbuds could be a handy substitute for hearing aids. Samsung does not make hearing aids.…

iPad doodle offered as a ‘cryptic currency’ non-fungible token, natch Comedian John Cleese has jumped aboard the non-fungible token bandwagon, with an offer to sell a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge for $69,346,250.50 using the newfangled blockchain-infused digital certificates of ownership for digital goods.…

Pirate papers site is best blocked on grounds it threatens university security The City of London Police, which has responsibility for intellectual property crime across the UK, has warned universities and scientists not to use “open science” site Sci-Hub and called for it to be blocked by universities.…

Customers concerned over 2017 posts describing power outage, confession to sub-par design OVH has written off a second data centre because of the March 10th fire that destroyed its SBG2 facility.…

Five percent of clean room cooked, hopes to be back in a month A fire has damaged a fabrication plant belonging Japanese chipmaker Renesas.…

Even though its Great Red Spot appears to be shrinking, the storm behind it will probably live on Terrifying winds rip across Jupiter’s poles reaching speeds of up to 400 metres per second, or 900 miles an hour, three times faster than the most powerful tornadoes on Earth, according to the first direct measurements of the gas giant's turbulent stratosphere.…

Pre-release code ready for validation and enablement Microsoft has made the next version of Windows, known as 21H1, available to commercial customers ahead of its release to General Availability.…

At last, after a year, my PhD is finally complee- bzzt! Think you're having a bad day? Spare a thought for the IT team at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington who accidentally managed to wipe files stored on desktop computers last week.…

It's keeping a low profile (ahem), but yes, it's an actual clickety laptop A keyboard can make or break a computer -- just ask Apple. On that note, Dell has partnered with German outfit Cherry to bring its mechanical Cherry MX keyswitches to its Alienware m15 R4 ultrabook.…

Social ad biz is working to restore service, for better or worse Updated On Friday, shortly after 1700 UTC, users of Facebook and its WhatApp and Instagram subsidiaries began reporting difficulties connecting to the respective services.…

You have less than a week left to bid on the offending document The world is close to discovering how much a person is willing to pay for a brush with the Jesus phone's Maker - a job application penned by heroic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is about to go under the hammer later this month.…

Money for nothing but your nicked IP In-depth The latest passive income trend, we're told by Lithuania-based internet biz IPRoyal, is internet sharing, a term that here means "subletting" or "reselling."…

Are we at the tipping point? Does anyone care? Six out of every 10 servers sold worldwide in 2020 were placed in the racks of data centres owned or rented by the world’s purveyors of fluffy white services, signifying a tipping for business clouds.…

Tough luck if you're in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales To quote the Mancunian philosopher Stephen Patrick Morrissey: "Stop me if you've heard this one before." The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has promised a fresh tranche of funding for rural full-fibre internet in a new initiative called Project Gigabit.…

Keep those vacancies coming in and we'll promote them for free Job alert The Register is publishing free job ads to help keep tech professionals in gainful employment during these unusual times.…

But there are legal protections... right? The Ministry of Defence has ordered its contractors not to answer certain questions on the UK's once-in-a-decade census – despite threats of £1,000 fines being handed to people who don't complete the national survey.…

Deal inked 'without competition' due to COVID, says dept The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a £14.5m year-long contract to Tata Consultancy Services without any competition.…

Could slow the spread of misinformation without needing draconian law Research including a Twitter field experiment has found social media organisations might have a 3rd option that doesn't involve the banhammer or a laissez faire attitude to tackling the fake news plague infecting platforms.…

Major upgrade for sound editor – as long as you don't need FAT32 support Open-source audio editor Audacity was upgraded to version 3.0 this week with a new single-file project format emitted alongside other fresh features and fixes.…

Space agency now that much closer to the Moon tossing multi-million dollar Space Shuttle engines in sea NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) core stage has finally completed its test, taking the Artemis program one step closer to the Moon and relieving nervous engineers across Stennis Space Center and beyond.…

I hope he doesn't call me Pedoking Something for the Weekend, Sir? You know my name. Look on my works and despair. "Does he get paid for that?" Yup, I can hear you despairing right now.…

Alternatively: Python's pickle pilloried with prudent premonition of poisoning Evan Sultanik, a computer security researcher with Trail of Bits and an adjunct computer science professor at America's Drexel University, has unpacked the Python world's pickle data format and found it distasteful.…