The Register

Will deal make goods, services less competitive? Regulator wants to hear from interested parties Britain’s competition regulator has belatedly stuck a probe in AMD’s $35bn all-stock proposal to purchase Xilinx, more than a month after investors in both businesses gave the transaction their seal of approval.…

Plus: Student cripples EU bio lab and IRS goes after cryptocurrency In brief The United States' Department of Defense has opened up all of its publicly facing systems and apps to investigation under a bug bounty program.…

Much of the OSS world is critically underfunded yet critically important It's been nearly five months since the SolarWinds hack came to light, causing lots of chin-scratching about vulnerabilities in the software supply chain.…

Top dog Neo4j just wouldn't scale, says car giant's data boss Car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover rejected leading graph database Neo4j over scalability concerns, according to its head of data and analytics.…

It'll do great things in the future, just don't impose timeframes on when Column It is said that the more you know about a subject, the less you trust newspapers about it. This is said because it is true.…

Also we fixed SS7 use by British telcos. How? Why? Not saying Domains'n'hosting outfit Namecheap harboured more than a quarter of all known phishing sites that falsely posed as UK government web presences during 2020, according to the National Cyber Security Centre today.…

It soothed this raging roomful of wannabe lawyers anyway Who, Me? The oversized rear of Monday is obstructing our view of the receding weekend. Never mind, pour yourself a beverage, select a pastry and settle in for a morning with the Regomiser and another edition of Who, Me?…

Azure icon gets the Fluid Design treatment Logowatch Microsoft has given Azure’s logo a tweak for the second time in four years.…

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Dev team doesn’t have necessary hardware, and even if they could afford it eBay is empty OpenSolaris ‘spork’ Illumos has decided to deprecate support for SPARC CPUs.…

At least you won’t have to check in with a QR Code China has revealed that it will enforce its border on the peak of Mount Everest, as a precaution against climbers transmitting the Coronavirus when they reach the summit.…

Long March 5B lands 45km from the Maldives Bits of China's Long March 5B rocket have returned to Earth without inconveniencing anyone, but did irritate NASA enough for the agency to issue a sternly-worded statement.…

Trump-era Executive Order gets China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile kicked off bourse China’s top three telcos – China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom – have warned investors they are about to be delisted by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).…

Oil transport by road allowed after Colonial Pipeline goes down, operator says recovery is under way but offers no recovery date One of the USA’s largest oil pipelines has been shut by ransomware, leading the nation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to issue an regional emergency declaration permitting the transport of fuel by road.…

NASA records, shares sound of Ingenuity drone on Mars, like we're in some kind of sci-fi flick Video One of the microphones on Perseverance, NASA’s latest and greatest Mars rover, has recorded the sounds of its autonomous helicopter Ingenuity flying on the Red Planet, providing scientists with the first ever audio samples of an aircraft operating on another planet.…

'Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality' states poorly redacted report Tesla CEO Elon Musk's public statements about the state of his automaker's Autopilot assistive driving technology overestimate the system's capabilities, according to documents released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).…

Antisocial giant insists 'Help keep FB free of charge' messaging is merely educational The number of Facebook and Instagram users on iOS agreeing to be tracked by the social networking behemoth for targeted ads has fallen drastically in the week since Apple's iOS 14.5 debuted – and Zuck & Co have hit back.…

But beware lock-in-as-a-service, analyst warns MariaDB has added proprietary bells and whistles, in the form of distributed SQL, for its DBaaS and supposedly developer-friendly front end.…

Plus: NCSC warns of how hostile powers may exploit smart city infrastructure Russian spies from APT29 responded to Western agencies outing their tactics by adopting a red-teaming tool to blend into targets' networks as a legitimate pentesting exercise.…

Biz expected 4,000 signups, got 60,000, system couldn't cope GitLab says a surge in demand and a technical shortcoming resulted in the DevOps outfit yanking a free certification offer barely two days after turning on the tap.…

Totally Sucks, Buddy: Debit payments held up since April, online and app still wobbly, say readers TSB admitted today it still hadn't fixed a transaction processing issue that has for days held up customers' payments, with users continuing to have issues at the time of publication.…

Software giant vows data processing of EU cloud services to stay in EU, which means that currently... Microsoft has announced plans to ensure data processing of EU cloud services within the borders of the political bloc in a move that expert observers claim reveals problems with the firm's existing setup.…

I thought we were friends An Apple exec has spoken of his shock after Fortnite creator Epic Games installed a hotfix that allowed it to deploy its own payment methods, thus skirting the 30 per cent App Store tax.…

Move comes days after firm acquired by Muse Group Open source audio software outfit Audacity, now under new management, is adding some "basic telemetry", much to the alarm of many of its community.…

Just four years to go before planned switch-off The tiny Suffolk town of Mildenhall is the second place where Openreach has stopped selling copper products as the company develops its strategy for withdrawing legacy telephone lines.…

A reminder of golden Start Menu days Bork!Bork!Bork! There are certain things that do not belong in pizza. One is pineapple. Another is the Windows Start Menu.…

Now that's a Buffett overflow error Bug of the week Here's a programming gremlin that caught our eye this week: a share price exceeded the 32-bit unsigned integer limit of a stock exchange's code.…

We're nicer in person, we swear In an attempt to make Twitter feel less like a small-town Wetherspoons at closing time, the company will start asking users to reconsider sending tweets its algorithms perceive to be mean.…

No lessons learned from (literally) decades of media format wars Something for the Weekend, Sir? Argh, where did I put that old comic? Someone told me it's a collector's item! It has value!…

'Discriminatory or harassing conduct will not be tolerated' A permaban from Perl events over "unacceptable" behaviour has been reduced to a year for the developer concerned, named by several separate Perl sources as Matt Trout.…

Algos guiding self-driving cars don’t expect to see a STOP sign next to food. So if someone put a pic showing apples at a busy intersection ... Black Hat Asia Computer vision systems display “correlation bias” that makes it possible to create adversarial images, that could have real-world consequences such as messing with self-driving cars’ ability to accurately interpret road signs.…

I'll talk you through the steps... oh sh- On Call Corporal Cockup meets Major Outage in this week's episode of On Call as a reader's helpful walkthrough takes down the telephony server.…

Satellite shootdown test still causing operational and diplomatic hassles after 14 years Tired of space junk and weapons, US military commanders presented to Congress on Wednesday an argument to create a framework for rules-based order in space.…

You know the drill: shake your head in disbelief, then figure out if patching will wipe out a weekend or be merely inconvenient Cisco has revealed a pair of critical bugs in its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure product.…

Asia is already short millions of trainees; expert warns talent pipeline will dry up in response to government snooping Black Hat Asia Asian nations in which governments are keen on citizen surveillance struggle to develop ethical hackers, as prospective workers fear their activities may be misunderstood, according to security specialist Mika Devonshire.…

Why are you giving yourself a kick in the innovation economy? China has protested India’s decision to prevent local carriers using made-in-China 5G kit in network trials.…

Developers want to do this, says Google. Ummm ... guys, you do remember the thousands of malware nightmares you’ve hosted and sold? Google has decided the time has come to require app developers to disclose the data their wares collect, and their security practices, in their Play Store listings.…

'There is scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for restrictions' America's consumer watchdog, the FTC, today scolded technology makers for their anti-repair practices, and signaled it will support new legislation that ensures people can mend their own stuff without penalty.…

World Password Day returns to remind us how much passwords suck Google has marked World Password Day by declaring "passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security," and announcing plans to automatically add multi-step authentication to its users' accounts.…

Coming to a computer near you ... this decade ... maybe IBM Research says it's made the world’s first 2nm process node chips, squeezing 50 billion transistors onto each of the fingernail-sized dies.…

While some teen generated 7.7m bogus pro-NN notes to US broadband regulator Broadband companies in 2017 launched an $8.2m campaign to repeal America's net neutrality rules that spent $4.2m to sway policymakers with millions of fake comments. But only their hired guns are being held accountable.…

Wanna find out if Jane Brit has had a shot? Just lob her postcode and DoB into this NHS site An NHS Digital-run vaccine-booking website exposed just how many vaccines individual people had received – and did so with no authentication, according to the Guardian.…

Official CPython is slow, but there are many ways to get better performance Facebook has released Cinder, used internally in Instagram to improve Python performance, while another faster Python, called Pyston, has released version 2.2 and made the project open source (again).…

Good thing researchers spotted it, no evidence of exploit in the wild A heap overflow vulnerability in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 system-on-chip modem firmware, used in Android devices, could be exploited by baddies to run arbitrary code on unsuspecting users' devices, according to Check Point.…

Free breakfast, lunch and dinner? Listening to Ryan Reynolds talk shit? Massages for gratis? Why the hell wouldn't they return One in five Googlers will be permanently working from home once the pandemic abates but for the majority it seems free meals in staff canteens, guest celebrity speaker appearances, resident gyms and massage therapy are irresistible lures.…

Microsoft Xbox exec called up to explain differences with gaming console The legal spat between Epic Games and Apple entered somewhat philosophical territory on Wednesday as the battling sides debated over whether the iPhone legitimately constitutes a general-purpose computing device, or is merely a locked-down platform with a specific purpose, such as a games console.…

They were not the cloud we were looking for, says DoD in brief to Supreme Court In another chapter to a saga that refuses to die, the US government has recommended [PDF] that the Supreme Court rejects Oracle’s efforts to overturn a Department of Defense decision to award the $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft.…

Among the findings, WPF remains most-used desktop framework despite years of promotion for UWP The Microsoft-sponsored .NET Foundation has released a survey-based "State of .NET" report showing that efforts to broaden the appeal of the technology beyond its own platform have had limited success so far.…

(Almost) Why? Kickstarter and nostalgia of those who have forgotten the pain The beast is back... almost. A "100 per cent compatible Visual Basic 6 solution" has been promised to the backers of a Kickstarter. There is, however, no word on how much it would cost to ensure it stayed dead.…

Default passwords, no updates, and your data's flowing through these Consumer org Which? reckons more than two million Britons are connected to the internet through routers that were last updated in 2016.…