The Register

'Claims are up, capacity is down, and underwriting profitability is, at best, under pressure' The cost of insurance to protect businesses and organisations against the ever-increasing threat of cybercrimes has soared by a third in the last year, according to international insurance brokers Howden.…

When the Pi was loaded/ with native Windows 11 bling... wasn’t it quite Armful, a somewhat speedy thing The Register's adventures into the world of Pi-powered Windows 11 continued today with the installation of the ARM64 version of Microsoft's popular Office suite.…

'Foo' – not the noise of a passing car The world of Formula 1 racing was livened up over the weekend as the sport's official app sent out some unexpected notifications on the eve of the Austrian Grand Prix.…

Hakuna matata The boss of Arm has moved to tackle prolonged concerns that the British chip designer's proposed $40bn buyout by Nvidia could damage competition and spell disaster for the UK's tech sector.…

Torvalds reckons 'it might be mergeable for 5.14' The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced with use of a beta Rust compiler (as opposed to a nightly build), testing ARM and RISC-V architecture support, new Rust abstractions, and more.…

It's illegal The California Highway Patrol has issued a warning to motorists that, frankly, needn't be said. Don't whack a massive Starlink satellite dish to the hood of your car. It's a bit illegal.…

Crew do some DIY, move a camera, you know, the usual … but in zero gravity The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has announced that two taikonauts successfully exited the Tianhe space station yesterday for China’s second ever spacewalk.…

Contract worth £75m over seven years City of London Police is looking to crack down on cybercrime with the purchase of "next-generation IT services" in the hopes it will beef up the systems supporting Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB).…

Learn how to swap tedium for transformation with this Regcast Webcast Does your tech strategy involve analytics, e-commerce, machine learning or even AI? Great, you’re probably going to need all of those in the future.…

Mmm, musty One of London's tram stations – mothballed in 1952 to make way for diesel buses – is to be opened to the public.…

'Fork.' What did you think we meant? A few more litres of accelerant were poured onto Audacity critics' fire late last week as an update to the sound editor's privacy agreement seeped out to the consternation of users.…

Let's hope this time a shortage can be averted The UK government has awarded a £5m contract to build the second generation of its e-commerce portal to help health providers get hold of personal protection equipment (PPE) during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.…

Hired to boost channel sales and, erm, 'accelerate' that 'growth journey' Google Cloud has poached Adaire Fox-Martin, a veteran from the stuffy world of corporate database sales, to run its EMEA operations.…

Welcome to Madeira, autonomous region of Borkugal Bork!Bork!Bork! As the latest twist in the Windows 11 saga appears to have turned the blue in "Blue Screen of Death" to black, a glimpse into the international world of bork shows that a black background has always been the harbinger of a poorly computer.…

Foundry platform lacks transparency and accountability, sources tell El Reg Researchers at NHS England are being denied access to datasets on the Palantir platform which supports the COVID-19 data store, with no reason given, despite requests for greater transparency on the system.…

Quit financial engineering and go back to your roots, IBM Column A fun evening's entertainment pre-COVID was to find a pub near a large corporation's IT HQ, look for the customers with the haunted, desperate eyes, and ask them gently how "the migration" was going. Didn't matter which company or what migration. They're hard. They go wrong.…

If Muse Group's stewardship takes a wrong turn, there's always the fork button* Updated The quality of software the FOSS community has created is nothing short of amazing.…

Enthusiasm and youth are once again no match for age and cunning Who, Me? With the use of personal email accounts seemingly never out of the political headlines, we present a cautionary tale of their career-shortening possibilities in another edition of Who, Me?…

Bakes in VPN, ad-blocker, even a crypto wallet, and claims it’s the only non-Chrome browser to harmonise with Google’s lightweight lappies Norwegian web developer Opera has created a version of its software optimised for Google’s ChromeOS.…

And so were two other app-makers that also happen to have listed in the USA lately Updated Chinese ride hailing app DiDi Chuxing was on Sunday removed from local app stores on on grounds that it did not comply with data protection laws. The ban came less than a week after the company’s US stock market debut.…

REvil ransomware rampages through managed services providers and perhaps 1,000 clients IT management software provider Kaseya has deferred an announcement about restoration of its SaaS services, after falling victim to a supply chain attack that has seen its products become a delivery mechanism for the REvil ransomware.…

Reg chats to developer whose joke that mere mention of a new prod would appear in job ads came true and spawned books, songs, forks, cryptocoin, and more A tweeted musing that merely mentioning a new AWS product would be enough to see it appear in job ads has come true — even though the product mentioned is made up.…

Plus: Cops seize 3D printers 'used to print guns', and more bits and bytes In brief In what's looking like a nasty supply-chain attack, IT systems management biz Kaseya was compromised by miscreants, which then used its VSA product to infect its own customers and then their customers with ransomware.…

Plus: SoftBank halts Pepper the robot production In brief The latest results by benchmarking consortium MLPerf, tracking the best chips for training the most popular neural networks, are out and a new player has entered the game: Graphcore.…

Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State, no fish involved Last week, third-party cookies received a stay of execution from Google that will allow them to survive until late 2023 – almost two years beyond their previously declared decommission date. But the search-ads-and-apps biz is already planning a resurrection of sorts because third-party cookies are just too useful.…

Krishna: 'Our hybrid cloud and AI strategy is strongly resonating with clients' - no, really, it is Former president and CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, is quitting the biz less than two years after rocking up at Big Blue, the hard-pressed business claimed today.…

Critic points out that restrictive T&Cs just make it 'Twitter without the porn' Former Trump campaign communications strategist and expert DNA communicator Jason Miller has launched a new social media platform he hopes will be the long-awaited free-speech utopia to rival Big Tech's supposedly crushing grip on public discourse.…

IP address inside Department of Science and Technology ran a vulnerability scan on target Qurium Media Foundation has reported a campaign of DDoS attacks on Filipino media outlets and human rights organisations that appear to be coming from the country's Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and Army.…

Technology has outpaced laws, says House committee chairman The US House Committee on the Judiciary met on Wednesday to hear testimony on the government's practice of secretly subpoenaing cloud service providers, and Microsoft was happy to oblige.…

In-store/work-from-home arrangement extended to Apple Store Geniuses Megacorp Apple will reportedly allow its blue-T-shirted retail elves to work from home in a similar manner to its office workers.…

Don't be allured by the siren sound of inclusion and lasting efficiency gains, says report The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) warned about Big Tech's potential to dominate the financial services sector and overrun banks in its Financial Stability Report released yesterday.…

Big Red and Amazon just can't let $10bn cloud award go Oracle has filed a fresh petition with the Supreme Court of the United States, opening another chapter in its year-long battle with the Pentagon over the award of a $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft.…

Next version of iPhone software boasts plenty of changes, but experience will be buggy for now If you aren't afraid of life on the bleeding edge, Apple has rolled out the first public beta version of iOS 15, allowing anyone with a taste for buggy pre-release software to get their fix.…

Being remote doesn’t mean you can’t keep IT close Webcast People were talking about the network edge well before 2020, though the past 18 months has really shoved what's “out there” to the centre of discussion.…

On the other hand, he did have two years to raise watchdog's profile The former head of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has put the boot into his old employer, saying it lacks the necessary clout to take on the world's biggest digital companies.…

That printer plugged into your domain controller? Yeah, you might not be using that for a while Microsoft has assigned CVE-2021-34527 to the print spooler remote code execution vulnerability known as "PrintNightmare" and confirmed that the offending code is lurking in all versions of Windows.…

Self-signed invoices let him cream off hundreds of thousands An IT manager who defrauded an Essex hospital trust out of more than £800,000 using two fake companies set up to commit his crimes has been jailed – after a court heard that he had previous convictions for dishonesty.…

The flight of the bearded one means Shepard will be second. Again Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson is set to take his first jaunt to the edge of space ahead of commercial spaceflight rival Jeff Bezos, with an 11 July trip aboard VSS Unity.…

Who has the best RHEL clone? Rivals jostle for position Rocky Linux 8.4, which was made generally available early last week, attracted 80,000 downloads within 72 hours, but disaffected CentOS users are wondering whether Rocky, rival AlmaLinux, or some other OS, is the right next move.…

Mi Smart Band 6 needs to be slicker, bigger, and brighter to really get you faster and fitter Review Xiaomi's Mi Smart Band 6 fitness wearable is a pleasant device but is too small and finicky to satisfy those who take athletic performance seriously.…

These things really get my goat Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Sign with the devil here." Do what? "Church of Satan. Jot your name on the form and we’ll email you details."…

316 people complained to the Information Commissioner's Office A Leeds-based claims management firm has been fined £200,000 for making more than 11 million unwanted PPI calls, the UK's data watchdog announced today.…

When a user really is holier than thou On Call We round out the week with a spiritual On Call from a reader who was on the receiving end of a higher calling. By phone.…

Finding could boost performance and efficiency of future gadgets The latest Apple fondleslab is thin, sure, but it could be thinner – like what boffins at Tel Aviv University have hailed as "the world's tiniest technology," measuring just two atoms thick.…

Focus is on persuading desktop developers to refresh applications for Windows 11 Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), once touted as the future of Windows development, will not be getting updated for WinUI 3 according to current plans, software giant said in a community call.…

AutoNav performs 'thinking while driving' – any chance we could get more of that on Earth ... for humans? As Perseverance begins to roll its way around Mars, NASA engineers are gradually allowing the rover to drive autonomously, to a degree, using computer algorithms running on a navigation computer.…

Hear how real users are doing this: Watch the Nutanix Database Summit on-demand Webcast Moving to hybrid cloud should open up a world of possibilities for transforming your technology infrastructure and your organization as a whole.…

Digital vax record stored on user's smartphone Android will soon have the ability to store and display proof of Covid-19 vaccination, Google has said.…

While Uncle Sam recommends shutting down print spooler service Another potential mitigation has emerged for the PrintNightmare zero-day vuln, which lets low-privileged users execute code as SYSTEM on Windows domain controllers: remove those people from a backwards-compatibility group.…

Unreliable messaging interferes with contract completion, we're told, as Slack channels flooded with memes IBM's email migration misadventure has been worse than the IT titan has let on, current and former staff have told us.…