The Register

Tencent, ByteDance, pals invited to meeting without coffee over ‘disorderly expansion of capital’ China has again moved to ensure its web giants don’t prove too disruptive to its economy, hauling 13 of them in for “supervision interviews” with a panel of regulators.…

'RotaJakiro' now on infosec world's radar, its impact has yet to be determined Chinese security outfit Qihoo 360 Netlab on Wednesday said it has identified Linux backdoor malware that has remained undetected for a number of years.…

Integer overflows leave IoT, OT, medical gear vulnerable to heap-seeking missiles Microsoft has taken a look at memory management code used in a wide range of equipment, from industrial control systems to healthcare gear, and found it can be potentially exploited to hijack devices.…

Biden administration rules expected in the next week or so A federal appeals court has overturned a district court order preventing plans for 3D-printed guns from being shared online.…

A certain Chinese juggernaut's woes helped a bit, too San Diego HQ'd chipmaker Qualcomm has reported [PDF] quarterly financials that impressed even the worthless stock traders, courtesy of a recovery in phone sales and a strong output in China.…

Dive into the Anywhere Workspace Event Promo After more than a year of working from home, is it time for some normalcy to return to IT? Unlikely, as the existing demands of digital transformation are now intertwined with what seems like an permanent shift in how organisations organise themselves.…

It's safe with us, says Microsoft - but wasn't that what Red Hat said about CoreOS Container Linux? Microsoft has acquired Kinvolk, a German open source company whose best known project is Flatcar Container Linux, a distribution designed for container workloads.…

No free plan: That's one way to avoid crypto-mining abuse of build minutes JetBrains has released TeamCity Cloud, a hosted version of its Continuous Integration (CI) tool, with support for Kotlin DSL (Domain Specific Language) for configuring build pipelines.…

Not a good look for company 'at the epicentre of the workflow revolution' ServiceNow has spooked investors by adding fewer high-value contracts in the first calendar quarter of 2021 than it did the previous quarter.…

Cupertino brought in more for Q2 than HPE did for all of 2020 so go figure Apple is having one helluva pandemic. The world's most valuable tech brand last night reported stellar numbers for its Q2 of fiscal 2021 [PDF] ended 27 March, with revenue up 53 per cent to $89.584bn and profit more than doubling.…

Makes good on its promise to inflict News and Interests on older versions Buckle up, it's that time again. Microsoft is set to unleash Windows 10 21H1 upon an expectant world, as well as inflict its weird obsession with News and Interests on existing users.…

Plus: Browser sends Google's FLoC straight to the blacklist The latest release of Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has extended ad blocking to handle cookie warning dialogs and sent a shot across the bows of Google's ad technology, FLoC.…

Biggest data protection case for years teeters on brink Google has urged the UK's Supreme Court to throw out a £3bn lawsuit brought by an ex-Which director over secretly planted tracking cookies on devices running Safari, on the grounds that local law doesn’t allow for opt-out class action lawsuits.…

Many owe thanks to Huawei ducking out under what IDC calls 'increased weight of US sanctions’ People are buying smartphones again, according to figures from analyst IDC which show the market grew 25 per cent year-on-year in Q1 2021.…

No, not the US government's task force ... the other one The Institute for Security and Technology's Ransomware Task Force (RTF) on Thursday published an 81-page report presenting policy makers with 48 recommendations to disrupt the ransomware business and mitigate the effect of such attacks.…

Who knows whether algorithms really harm society? Analysis Big tech's approach to avoiding AI regulation looks a lot like Big Tobacco's campaign to shape smoking rules, according to academics who say machine-learning ethics standards need to be developed outside of the influence of corporate sponsors.…

None of them are Comic Sans, or likely to provoke similar passion Microsoft has decided that Calibri’s days as its default font are numbered.…

New starter or mid-career switcher? Here’s where to start Promo Cyber attackers are a diverse lot. They can strike from anywhere in the world, and may be motivated by greed, politics, status, or pure malevolence. And their techniques range from the dazzlingly sophisticated to the frankly crude, technically speaking.…

Expected to host three astronauts for a decade, starting in 2022 China has placed the first module of a crewed space station in orbit.…

Panto season comes early in Redmond as TLS tweaks revive software Is the OneDrive desktop sync client supported under Windows 7? Despite evidence to the contrary, it appears so.…

Hey, look, it's the galaxy's Florida Evidence of what was once possibly water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere in a distant world for the first time – though one of the scientists involved in the discovery told us this would-be interstellar getaway is "completely inhospitable."…

Users weren't warned conversations on chat apps were being used to build a bot. And parents weren't told their young kids had signed up South Korea has issued its first ever sanction against an AI technology company for the “indiscreet processing of personal information.”…

First that IPO and now this Digital Ocean on Wednesday said someone was able to snoop on some of its cloud subscribers' billing information via a now-patched vulnerability.…

$600m in patent royalty payments pour in to help margins pop Huawei has posted its Q1 2021 results – and the headline figure is a 16.5 per cent year-on-year revenue drop to CNY152.2bn (US$23.5bn).…

But for now, have some thin, light x86 Galaxy Pro laptops Samsung is touting some more Wintel laptops – the Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 – and also teased a collaboration on new silicon.…

#ResignModi posts hidden amid heartbreaking COVID-19 crisis Facebook temporarily blocked netizens from viewing posts calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India as a COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak devastates the nation.…

Yes, AWS is still fighting for this $10bn deal Updated The US Court for Federal Claims on Wednesday denied motions by the Department of Justice and Microsoft to dismiss an Amazon Web Services lawsuit challenging the Defense Department's decision to award its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract to the Windows giant.…

Buzz Aldrin sole remaining survivor of Apollo 11 Moon landing Obit Michael Collins, the one Apollo 11 astronaut too few remember, has died of cancer at the age of 90.…

Kubernetes takes centre stage as open-source giant aims to offer OpenShift everywhere Red Hat introduced new managed cloud services at its 2021 summit and expanded the OpenShift Kubernetes platform with improved security, management, and Edge deployment features.…

But at less than 37mph, don't expect anything to be quick Limited to speeds of up to 37mph on motorways, Automated Lane Keeping Systems in vehicles have been offered a route to their legal introduction on UK roads.…

Low enough to witness Musk's Twitter trolling of Jeff Bezos? America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted an application by SpaceX to bring some of its broadband satellites closer to Earth.…

HR, finance, marketing and more in the crosshairs for Jira Work Management Atlassian has released Jira Work Management, which it plans to slip into fields beyond the usual IT and software suspects.…

Hasn't stopped the trains, though Brit railway company Merseyrail is understood to have suffered a ransomware attack – and the crooks responsible reportedly pwned a director's Office 365 account to email employees and journalists about it.…

Electronics retailer 'confident' workers can be offered opportunities elsewhere in the business Dixons Carphone is to permanently ground its airport stores that employ 398 staff, amid mounting losses and following the British government's discontinuation of airside tax-free shopping at the start of 2021.…

Transport minister confirms use of the NHS app for just that when citizens travel abroad With Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove expected to announce app-based "COVID status certificates," the UK's post-lockdown plan looks set to come under fierce attack.…

Highly anticipated details of stock division still unavailable Heirs of Samsung patriarch billionaire Lee Kun-hee issued a statement today partially detailing their inheritance tax strategy alongside financial and art charity contributions.…

Maybe we can make software modular, secure, speedy all at the same time The Bytecode Alliance, formed by Fastly, Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat to move WebAssembly beyond the browser, has created a non-profit organization with the help of Microsoft to further their cause.…

Cloud migration and winner-takes-all integration drive more coins into Redmond's pocket Microsoft has reported a 19 per cent year-on-year revenue jump in Q3 financial results covering January to March 2021, driven by Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions.…

Regulator inviting comments on implications for local goods and services Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating SK Hynix's agreed $9bn purchase of Intel's NAND and SSD businesses to ascertain if the deal would negatively impact the local buyers.…

What's £23m compared to £1.35bn? The three most important words in any estate agent's lexicon are: "Location, location, location." The same is true for the UK's mobile carriers, who have just spent £23m to get their choice positions for their recent spectrum purchases.…

Can open innovation work in the automobile industry? IBM tentacle Red Hat has waded into the world of automobiles with the intent of attaching wheels to a continuously certified Linux platform.…

Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I want to bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork knows no borders, be they geographical or technological, as demonstrated by this Ubuntu installation getting funky on the Helsinki metro.…

Traffic + Demand * Bandwidth = $$$ (maybe) If you had 5G and cryptomining on your buzzword bingo cards, crack open the bubbly – FreedomFi gateways will mine the HNT cryptocurrency in exchange for providing 5G cellular coverage to IoT devices and passing users.…

$30m, 100,000-core beast will use third-gen AMD EPYCs and 352 – count 'em – Nvidia A100 GPUs Singapore has picked Hewlett Packard Enterprises to build a new S$40m ($30m) supercomputer for its petascale National Supercomputing Center (NSCC).…

Must see: Dr Holly Cummins and Liz Fong-Jones to deliver keynotes Event We’re really thrilled to announce the first two keynotes for Continuous Lifecycle Online, our three-day – 10-12 May, 2021 – virtual event bringing together some of the DevOps, Containers and CI/CD world’s brightest thinkers and doers.…

Calls for jabs market to be abandoned, and local vaccine IP to be freed India's Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), an organisation that aims to "to protect freedom in the digital world" and advocates for the development and use of open-source software, has helped to prepare a lawsuit that calls for changes to the nation's vaccine pricing policy and rollout plans.…

Micro-dosing among Cali techies ... suddenly it's all starting to make sense The co-founder and CEO of Iterable, a San Francisco marketing tech biz valued at over $2bn, claims he was fired after admitting to micro-dosing LSD at work.…

Quantum experiment may clear the way for viable silicon photonics – chips with electronic and photonic interconnects Researchers in a team led by the University of Surrey reckon they have accidentally found a new way to use silicon as a powerful photonic informational manipulation material, potentially making it possible to produce viable silicon devices that can control multiple lasers.…

Turns out people, orgs are still buying truck loads of kit a year into the pandemic AMD beat Wall Street's expectations for the first quarter of this year as demand for gaming PCs, notebooks, and servers using its x86-64 processors remained high during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Down Under watchdog doesn't call for commission cuts nor suggest major interventions Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has decided that Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile operating systems and probably harm third-party developers ... but has proposed only modest changes to the operations as remedies.…