The Register

Main contractor J McCann insists it takes its obligations 'very seriously' Contractors helping to lay fibre cables under streets in Derby have threatened to scrap their work and "rip up tarmac" they've laid – unless they get paid.…

CBDC would be released in phases to prevent volatility India may be launching a digital currency, an official from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said today.…

CEO reassures punters that $40bn foundry spending will pay off Intel boss Pat Gelsinger reckons global semiconductor shortages that continue to disrupt tech industry supply chains could last until 2023, around the time Chipzilla will at last release its first 7nm process CPU, Meteor Lake.…

Palantir potentially in line for £50m contract with Brit maritime force The Royal Navy is on the hunt, not for enemy submarines in this instance, but for a technology supplier to provide a data integration platform in return for a bounty of £50m.…

400 light-years away, satellites are forming Pic Astronomers have for the first time spotted what appears to be a moon-forming ring of matter around a young exoplanet, and described their findings in a paper published on Thursday.…

German-speaking user group takes dismal view of scheme's value The German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) has published a decidedly downbeat survey revealing attitudes to RISE with SAP, the application company's big sell to get its entrenched customer base to the cloud.…

One of the worst things that could happen to privacy-focused community Criminals have hacked into a Gumtree-style website used for buying and selling firearms, making off with a 111,000-entry database containing partial information from a CRM product used by gun shops across the UK.…

'Funding continues,' despite media reports to the contrary Updated UK Research and Investment (UKRI) has rejected reports it had, on instruction of UK government, cut financial support for Newport Wafer Fab over concerns about its acquisition by Nexperia, offering a simple statement: "funding continues."…

National Audit Office's scathing report blames fails on lack of experience Government IT projects are poorly thought out, often fail to achieve what they're designed to do, and are a waste of taxpayers' money.…

I may consider offering you cash to break it for me Something for the Weekend, Sir? Something is wrong with my eyes. Hang on, no, it's my display that's gone smeary. This is great news.…

Microsoft study says India is most susceptible, other studies suggest the USA cops it most Tech support scam attempts dropped in frequency over the past two years, but remain a threat. And Millennials and Gen Z – not Boomers – fall prey most frequently, according to Microsoft in its 2021 Global Tech Support Scam Research report, released Thursday.…

You killed my data centre, prepare to die On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call in which a contractor's shonky job and a guard's Jedi-like abilities result in an impromptu pager party.…

The Social Network™ has spent years trying to hop from MySQL 5.6 to 8.0 and still isn’t done Facebook has had all sorts of no fun trying to migrate from MySQL 5.6 to version 8.0.…

Boost your morale, business and velocity with this exclusive broadcast Webcast What’s the most important metric for your engineering team? Is it the number of application deployments they make, or the overall failure rate?…

Spends £££ on Silicon Valley cyber risk management firm BT is looking to cash in on ever-growing global concerns over digital crime, and has confirmed making a multi million pound investment in US-based cyber risk management firm Safe Security.…

Turns out the skies can be the limit for machine learning The UK government will, to the tune of £60m, bankroll two major research projects led by the country’s national institute for AI, the Alan Turing Institute: one to automate air traffic control, and the other for banking services.…

Tender issued to wire 361,000 thousand more villages, with $2.5bn subsidies dangled India has issued tenders for a public-private partnership intended to connect another 361,000 villages to the nation's BharatNet fibre optic network.…

Users sent two further updates – one fixing an issue that prevented installation of antivirus software Software-for-services providers business Kaseya has obtained a "universal decryptor key" for the REvil ransomware and is delivering it to clients.…

Biz insists it's trying as hard as possible to scrub clean its IRC-for-the-2020s Sophos on Thursday warned that internet instant-chat service Discord is becoming an increasingly popular malware distribution channel.…

Games giant pushes back on claims of poor pay, harassment, and more in discrimination lawsuit California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Thursday sued Activision Blizzard and its subsidiaries, alleging the company fostered a "frat boy" culture that led to lower pay for female employees, sex and race discrimination, and sexual harassment.…

From vid.me to f&*% me?! The domain name of a now-defunct website used by news publishers and others to inline videos in articles has been configured to inject porn into those pages.…

Learn tricks of the trade at SANS Singapore 2021 – and treat yourself to a discount Promo Whisper it softly, but we’re fast forwarding through the second half of 2021, which means the holiday shopping season – and accompanying hacking season – is not far behind.…

Giant news org megaphone persuades dim algos they're talking about the other sort of hoes A Facebook group dedicated to gardening in western New York state is celebrating a victory over the company's algorithms after having been repeatedly threatened with censure and deletion due to use of the word "hoe".…

'We need to hold each other to account when we're talking through these issues' A survey of astronomers and geophysicists has unveiled a "systemic bullying problem" which is "disproportionately worse" for women and members of minority groups, already under-represented in the field.…

Update now – and maybe firewall the thing off while you're at it Atlassian has warned Jira Data Center users of a critical vulnerability, offering attackers the opportunity for arbitrary remote code execution – and they're easily exploited over the network.…

It's the only way to be sure After setting the "days since a security cock-up" counter back to zero, Microsoft has published an official workaround for its Access Control Lists (ACLs) vulnerability (CVE-2021-36934).…

If you're wondering why some websites disappeared today Updated Akamai's Edge DNS service went down on Thursday morning, US West Coast time, knocking over its customers' websites as it fell.…

At least Redmond is taking some security seriously Microsoft has snapped up cloud security outfit CloudKnox while researchers continue to poke holes in its down-to-earth Windows operating system.…

Nauka? More like 'Borka!' Geddit? Russia's latest contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), successfully launched yesterday, but appears to have run into problems on orbit.…

Some of the stuff going on in the industry is completely out of order A new initiative aims to make it easier to report personal abuse and harassment within the information security industry – without the involvement of social media mobs.…

Learn how to thrive with modern file storage – check out Nasuni CloudBound21 Promo 2020 was an impactful year for file storage. Almost overnight, companies were forced to rethink how they manage, access, and derive value from data, casting a bright light on the advantages of cloud-based technologies. After navigating unforeseen business challenges, including ransomware attacks, remote work environments, and more, it is time to discover how to apply those lessons learned.…

UK Home Sec must now sign it off and then it's a High Court matter Mike Lynch, former chief exec of Autonomy, has reportedly lost his US extradition fight at its earliest stage in London's Westminster Magistrates' Court.…

Head start from pre-pandemic guesswork running out, and mass production potentially years ago Texas Instruments is flexing its chip-making muscles, boasting of impressive foresight in avoiding the worst of the component shortages and its progress in bringing two new fabs online – but admits it could be years before either begin producing in volume.…

Not just the legacy HR and finance systems being booted The UK’s consumer guardian for the financial services sector looks set to chop 38 jobs from its IT department in favour of buying Workday cloud-based HR and hiring an external service provider to support its compute plans.…

Swings and roundabouts: They also drove a 58% boost to business revenue Netgear has blamed a noticeable slump in one market sector on a surprising cause: the COVID-19 vaccination programme in the UK and US.…

Cloud apps giant sets off to invent the future of work and beat Microsoft Teams Salesforce has completed its long-awaited mega-slurp of Slack Technologies, Inc for an eye-watering $27.7bn.…

'Well that went well' A post on why using Kubernetes to scale would mean "doing mostly the same things but in a more complicated way" was so popular that the site hosting the article went down due to the sheer volume of traffic.…

It's probably still true, though, says formal methods expert "Software research is a train wreck," says Hillel Wayne, a Chicago-based software consultant who specialises in formal methods, instancing the received wisdom that bugs are way more expensive to fix once software is deployed.…

We've come a long way from Terry Wogan's celeb interviews Feature Terry Wogan has a lot to answer for. From 1982 to 1992, he presented an eponymous chat show on BBC1 where he would often interview celebrities via satellite in front of an unconvincing backdrop of the Hollywood sign.…

Would you like to pay with a poke? Thales has announced what it claims is the "world's first" payment card to include an onboard fingerprint sensor, promising improved security and usability – and an end to contactless payment limits.…

Commercial exploitation of a person's inner thoughts 'particularly worrisome' Researchers at Imperial College London have sounded the alarm over a "bleak panorama" surrounding brain-computer interfaces (BCI), warning of a potential future in which BCI-equipped cyborgs divide the world – or have their inner thoughts harvested for commercial exploitation.…

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson says 53 per cent of cyber attacks on China come from the US China has very firmly pushed back against the accusation it paid contractors to attack Microsoft's Exchange Server.…

Won't someone please think of the ch, er, money laundering The European Commission has put forward legislation requiring cryptocurrency exchanges and other companies to ensure crypto-asset transfers include the personal details of the customers involved.…

Perseverance prepares to snaffle first sample for eventual retrieval NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has started the process of acquiring its first sample of Martian rock.…

Creator of QWK format suffered fatal heart attack as cops surrounded home A teenager in the US has been jailed for five years for his role in the harassment and swatting of the owner of a desirable Twitter handle – a swoop that led to the netizen's death.…

Denies everything, as governments open probes into the company and its wares The NSO Group, a purveyor of spyware it hopes governments and law enforcement bodies will use to fight terrorism, has announced it will not answer any further questions about allegations raised by Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories that its products have been widely misused.…

Meanwhile, Tokyo games ticket holder data leaks, and those affected can't even use their seats Three US senators have written to their nation's Olympic Committee with a request that it "forbid American athletes from receiving or using Digital Yuan during the Beijing Olympics" – a reference to the Winter Games scheduled to commence on February 4th, 2022.…

Password-stealing package outed by security firm evokes sense of déjà vu Another malicious library has been spotted in the JavaScript-oriented NPM registry, underscoring the continued fragility of today's software supply chain.…

Another year, and Chinese tech bogeyman is still on the blocklist Huawei says it is looking to facilitate a "deeper, mutual understanding" with the US government despite remaining on the security naughty step, and is continuing to spend millions lobbying American officials in areas such as broadband and mobile technology.…

SubT Challenge pits high-tech rescue drones against one another in upsettingly non-violent combat Legendarily loopy US military (and now also non-military) ideas factory DARPA has launched a $1m competition for underground robots.…