The Register

UK.gov's carrots and sticks never came to pass, author tells us Cyber insurance isn't forcing organisations to improve their infosec practices, a think-tank has warned – and some insurers are thinking of giving up thanks to the impact of ransomware.…

60 years after Alan Shepard made his Mercury flight, one of the Mercury 13 will get her turn Jeff Bezos has upped the ante in the battle of the billionaire bros by handing a seat in the first crewed New Shepard flight to Virgin Galactic customer and member of the Mercury 13, Wally Funk.…

Nation's broadband plumber increasingly desperate to ditch its copper network In an attempt to pull costly support from its copper network, Openreach has agreed to cap wholesale costs for providers who stop selling copper-based broadband products in areas where FTTP is available.…

Lifespan of 3 to 5 years falls short of what's needed for a Mars mission NASA has demonstrated the first trapped-ion space clock in a move that could pave the way for real-time navigation in deep space.…

Android App Bundle required, APK submission no longer allowed Google will require mobile developers to use an Android App Bundle for submitting applications to its Play Store from August 2021, optimising distribution and also requiring Google to hold the developer's private signing key.…

Oh, and it would like everyone to know it had a fantastic sales quarter, natch Memory-maker Micron intends to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in its fabrication plants by 2024.…

Proceeds to go towards charitable causes, Father of the Web confirms The auction of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's source code for the World Wide Web as a cryptographically backed Non-Fungible Token (NFT) has concluded, with the web daddy pocketing $5,434,500 for something already public.…

System trains itself to spot suicidal behavior and alert a controller South Korea's capital and largest metropolis has turned to AI for suicide detection and prevention on popular bridges along the prominent Han River, according to the system's developers at the Seoul Institute of Technology (SIT).…

New technique quicker and greener, but needs batteries to be designed for dismantling Boffins have laid claim to a "ground-breaking invention" which they say will make it considerably easier to recycle batteries from electric vehicles, laptops, and the like – an ultrasonic delaminator.…

For educational purposes, of course Exoskeleton startup Auxivo is aiming to encourage the next generation of cyborgs with the launch of an educational kit dubbed the EduExo Pro, a complete exoskeleton for one arm.…

PSTN to be axed in 2025 UK businesses must prepare for the retirement of the copper-based phone network that may cause devices to stop working.…

Voluntary location-tracking to crimp COVID is too good a tool to waste Column Five years ago I visited Shanghai, to see what the future might look like. I came back wondering how the rest of us had missed QR codes.…

NHTSA sets 24-hour deadline for reporting significant crashes America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will now require details of any and all crashes involving self-driving cars from automakers within one day of them knowing about the accident.…

Fixing the talent pipeline so that finding rocket scientists doesn't have to be rocket science NASA has been set the ambitious targets of taking humans back to the Moon by 2024, then to later make the order-of-magnitude leap on to Mars. Even for the globally renowned space agency, it is a struggle.…

FINRA cites suicide of man who was 'inaccurately' told by the app he was $750k in debt Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.…

'This technology is too dangerous to be regulated, it shouldn’t be used at all' Feature The State of Maine has enacted what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes as the strongest state facial-recognition law in the US amid growing concern over the unconstrained use of facial-recognition systems by the public and private sector.…

We're still keeping everything crossed that the engineers extract a rabbit from a hat once again Updated The outlook continues to look a little bleak for NASA's veteran Hubble telescope as a former astronaut and a Space Shuttle manager weighed in on repair options and the possibility of a fix.…

Amazon's AWS next cloud platform in line for adversarial tactics framework MITRE's Centre for Threat-Informed Defence (CTID) and Microsoft have jointly rolled out Security Stack Mappings for Azure, aimed at bringing the former's Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) framework into the latter's cloud platform – with rival platforms to follow.…

Desert storm of entirely the wrong kind lands unfortunate Egyptian national in very hot water A man has been arrested in Kuwait for allegedly insulting the weather on social media app TikTok.…

So what's with the TPM malarky? The enthusiast community has thumbed a nose at Microsoft's hardware requirements for Windows 11, with Insider builds demonstrated on Raspberry Pi hardware and the inevitable mobile phone.…

Thousands struggle with intermittent failure of multiple messaging services IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days.…

Vendor claimed not to log user data – we'll see Europol, the US Department of Justice, and Britain's National Crime Agency have taken down a VPN service they claimed was mainly used by criminals – boasting that they hoovered up "personal information, logs and statistics" from the site.…

New take on GNOME designed for productivity System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04, based on Ubuntu 21.04 but with a distinctive desktop called COSMIC.…

Internet Explorer 11 and the Adobe Reader plug-in? Is this bork bingo? Internet Explorer 11 may only have a year left, but Microsoft still found itself releasing a patch to resolve some PDF issues in the elderly browser.…

Cupertino insists it works best when they're all together It's safe to say that many Apple employees aren't particularly enthused about the return to the office but HQ isn't backing down, as demonstrated by a leaked video message sent to the workforce.…

Kill this service immediately An infosec firm accidentally published a proof-of-concept exploit for a critical Windows print spooler vulnerability that can be abused by rogue users to compromise Active Directory domain controllers.…

But mobile biz continues to wane The boss of Dixons Carphone has delivered a bullish assessment of the UK retailer's performance in a year when online tech sales spiked and revenues from its ebbing mobile business continued to slide.…

Shifts strategy to work more closely with industry on digital projects Singapore wants to change the role of industry to co-develop digital projects alongside government and leave behind the days of wholesale outsourcing, or so says GovTech, the city-state's digital services arm.…

Now banned from using Tor or VPNs – and 'vanity' handles on social media A British script kiddie who DDoS'd a Labour Party parliamentary candidate's website in the runup to the last general election has been banned from using the Tor browser.…

Well-travelled billionaire's likeness very likely to follow recent examples of other questionable public art The city of New York received an addition to its trove of often obscure and peculiar statuary when a life-sized polyester resin figure of famously charismatic Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was unveiled in Downtown Manhattan.…

Vuln thankfully patched following Google Project Zero disclosure Google's Project Zero has emitted another vulnerability report, showing off a proof-of-concept exploit against the open-source KVM hypervisor that allows an attacker to escape a virtual machine on AMD-based servers – taking control of the underlying host system.…

Won't someone think of the children Former Microsoft engineer and creator of the Windows Task Manager Dave Plummer has issued a reminder to all programmers to take care over the imagery conjured up by a quickly typed description.…

That's tough talk – especially after the amazing reversal on £680k it spent on anti-fraud ads with search giant The UK's financial regulator has given a lukewarm response to Google's plans to tighten the promotion of scams on its platforms.…

Christian org becomes latest victim of latter-day IT scourge Exclusive Criminals infected the Salvation Army in the UK with ransomware and siphoned the organisation's data, The Register has learned.…

Turn off. Tune out. Relax Feature Just because the internet is always on doesn't mean that we should be. People need time away from work to relax and recharge, unencumbered by phone and email when working outside the office.…

Concerned researchers suggest some form of subtle regulation to prevent end of humanity as we know it A group of 17 researchers from a wide cross-section of different disciplines have come together to contribute to a paper suggesting social media might be a risk to humanity's continued existence as we know it.…

But only in India, and only in English … for now at least Google has announced SMS-grooming tech that it will only offer in India.…

Well, that was a busy month for gravitational wave boffins Gravitational wave detectors have reportedly spotted the merger of a black hole and a neutron star – not once but twice in the same month.…

Global median score jumped by ten per cent in two years — and just as well The United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published its 2020 Global Cyber Security Index on Tuesday, and listed the US first in overall ranking, followed by a tie for second place tie between the UK and Saudi Arabia.…

United Airlines buys 200 planes — plans to give ’em ten inches of entertainment and a double dose of wireless US-based mega-airline United Airlines has announced it will purchase 200 new planes — a mixture of Boeing 737 Max and Airbus A320 Neos — and equip the lot with in-seat Bluetooth.…

An eager queue has already formed in Asia, Latin America, and Africa — but do those nations know about the glitches, or the digital divide issues? India has decided to open-source the Co-WIN platform it created to arrange bookings for COVID-19 vaccinations.…

Admins tend to forget that subdomains don’t inherit security controls, leaving the likes of CNN, Harvard, Cisco, and US health authorities with vulnerabilities Abandoned or ignored subdomains often include overlooked vulnerabilities that leave organisations open to attack, according to a team of infosec researchers from the Vienna University of Technology and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The team’s work will be presented at the 30th USENIX Security Symposium this August.…

Maybe call it backseat programming for now? GitHub on Tuesday unveiled a code-completion tool called Copilot that shows promise though still has some way to go to meet its AI pair programming goal.…

An Ocean's 11 of exploitation involving guessable random numbers and hostname shenanigans Google Compute Engine virtual machines can be hijacked and made to hand over root shell access via a cunning DHCP attack, according to security researcher Imre Rad.…

NewsBlur RSS tracker accidentally left MongoDB store facing public internet during migration to containers NewsBlur, an RSS news reading app for the web and mobile devices, recently had one of its databases deleted thanks to an insecure default setting that has dogged developers using Docker since 2014.…

Impressive, but it's still no Apple Samsung today committed to provide its enterprise-edition flagships with half a decade's worth of security updates.…

Only academics, researchers, nonprofits need apply to AIER initiative AMD has rolled out a programme that it hopes will tempt scientific computing types away from Nvidia and the CUDA ecosystem and onto its own Instinct accelerator range and ROCm run-anywhere software platform: the AMD Instinct Education and Research (AIER) initiative.…

Localised brain sleeping behind wakeful forgetfulness and poor atten Neuroscientists have developed a method for predicting when your mind might go blank or completely forget whatever it was we were talking about.…

Plus: 10nm Sapphire Rapids Xeon chips delayed to Q1 2022 Intel has officially sounded the death knell for Transactional Synchronisation Extensions (TSX) on a selection of processors from Skylake to Coffee Lake – a security-enhancing move which will have an oversized performance impact on certain workloads.…

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