The Register

We talk to the experts after US Treasury's OCC blesses blockchains, digi-bucks Feature The US Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Monday published a letter clarifying how federally chartered banking groups can use cryptocurrency and associated technology to manage financial transactions.…

American goliath vows to overturn ruling at Middle Kingdom's Supreme People’s Court Amazon hopes to overturn a ruling in China that not only banned it from using its AWS acronym and logo in the Middle Kingdom but also ordered the US giant to pay Chinese cloud outfit ActionSoft $12m for trademark infringement.…

Plus: US intelligence names and shames Russia as probable culprit SolarWinds – the network monitoring biz thoroughly hacked as part of a wider espionage operation – has been sued by its shareholders who claim bosses failed to tell them about its numerous security woes.…

Only three months after latest OS version released Blackberry Cylance's consumer antivirus product will not support macOS Big Sur until the end of January – three months after the Apple operating system’s latest version was released.…

Service restored, code silo gets license to serve Iranian programmers On Tuesday, startup service firm Pure Labs regained access to its GitHub account, which had been shut down since December 30 for an apparent breach of Iranian sanctions.…

So long, and thanks for all the fish Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf will step down later this year, handing control of the company to current president Cristiano Amon.…

But hasn't said why The New York Stock Exchange has reversed an earlier decision to delist China's three largest telecommunications companies.…

Here’s how to call time on aging databases, according to Pure Storage Webcast Depending on your point of view, it’s the time of the year for new beginnings or finally facing up to reality.…

'Unexpected spike in user traffic' causes Tuesday tumble The outfits might be arch-rivals in the messaging space, but Microsoft 365 showed a bit of solidarity with Slack this afternoon as its administration portal fell over for users in the UK and some of Europe.…

Messaging app makes inadvertent oversharing too easy A researcher who noted that using the "People Nearby" feature of popular messaging app Telegram exposed the exact location of the user has been told that it's working as expected.…

Chinese giant continues to feel bite of supply chain pressures Analyst house TrendForce has warned that Huawei will slip out of the top six smartphone vendors this year with shipments forecast to drop from 170 million in 2020 to 45 million.…

Without competition due to 'extreme urgency' around pandemic Updated The UK's NHS Digital – an executive non-departmental public body for health service tech support – has awarded an £8m contract without competition to X-Lab, which builds healthcare software systems.…

Offences alleged to have happened a decade ago, say police Lawrence Jones, the former chief exec of Manchester-HQ’d hosting firm UKFast, has been charged with rape and sexual assault.…

'There'll be no more work from external/unpaid contributors' – dev The Qt Company has followed up on its plan to make long-term support releases commercial-only by closing the source for 5.15 today, earning protests from open-source contributors who say that the 6.0 release, which remains open, is not yet usable.…

FCC won't mull law reform this month Section 230 – the liability shield that more or less prevents websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, from being sued in the US for their users’ content – is going to survive the Trump era despite furious last-ditch efforts by the President.…

One owned by every 13-year-old with dreams of slinging an axe Bass. Treble. Mid. Volume. Erm, footswitch and... 5G FREQ?! We've got it, people, we've found the top-secret diagram of the "COVID-19 5G chip" that Bill Gates is going to insert into our brains!…

Though that might not be the workaround it needs The Scottish government is sizing up the market for suppliers to develop on its low-code technology platform and support its social security overhaul.…

A reminder that XP was both frugal and prone to falling over 12BoC With the Twelfth Night approaching, we finish our 12 Borks of Christmas* (12BoC) series by waxing a little Dickensian as the ghost of operating systems past pays a visit.…

Let's see Gartner top this Column This time last year, it would have been a simple matter to predict that the world's supply chain would be disrupted for all things tech, and that it would not be Trump who did it, but a sudden, unexpected pandemic that impacted every aspect of our working and personal lives. Right, Gartner? So what does 2021 hold for tech's big players? Let's hazard a guess.…

Doing lockdown with bags and bags of Chinese plastic bricks When one has a Lego Saturn V and a launch platform and tower to go with it, where does one go next? A crawler to transport the thing obviously.…

144Hz refresh rate and a 108MP camera? Review Released late last year with a price tag of £599 (about $812), Xiaomi’s Mi 10T Pro is an aspirational sub-flagship 5G phone that focuses on photography and performance.…

Chang'e-4 and Yutu rover are still exploring, and NASA will need their support satellite China has celebrated the beginning of a third year of exploration on the far side of the moon.…

This year’s New Year Resolution: Update your GIAC certs Promo You know you’re good in the trenches when it comes to cybersecurity. You might even have done a stack load of courses to ensure that you’ve filled in any gaps in your knowledge. Your colleagues know they can depend on you.…

Jio blames rivals for vandalising infrastructure in rural areas during protests Top India telco Reliance Jio Infocomm has taken the unusual step of vigorously denying it wants to diversify into farming.…

After years of waffle, potentially thousands of web addresses suspended Tens of thousands of .eu domains have been officially suspended due to Brexit.…

A new year, another, er, billionaire goes missing? Former CEO and founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Jack Ma has vanished from public view, fueling fears Beijing is punishing the cloud mogul for speaking out against the Chinese government.…

Privacy policy re-written, which is somewhat scary given Singapore has made trackers just-about-mandatory The Singapore government has decided to use data gathered by its TraceTogether COVID-19-coronavirus contact-tracing app in criminal investigations.…

What do we want? That whole 'don't be evil' thing. When do we want it? As soon as 30% agree to an election and then... Hundreds of Googlers have started forming a labor union at the internet giant and its Alphabet stablemates.…

Outdated clients stop working, organizations with thousands of end-points told to switch out .sys files It wasn't the best of New Year's Day mornings for some Check Point customers; in addition to possible hangovers, those who lagged with their patching had been left with inoperable systems and a tough fix ahead for some.…

Tech slinger upset it can't unload $560,000 worth of flying Chipzilla gizmos A drone reseller has sued Intel for hyping its Falcon 8+ drone system and for delivering a supposedly subpar product without the promised capabilities.…

Applicants will need to hold off until March at the earliest President Trump has thrown his anti-immigrant policies into the incoming Biden administration's lap, extending a ban on work visas until March 31.…

Also: Hints of Windows 10X, and don't press that red button, Dougal In brief Advertising platform AdDuplex rounded out 2020 with a fresh set of figures showing the latest incarnation of Windows 10 cresting double digits as the last three versions accounted for nearly 90 per cent of the 80,000 PCs surveyed.…

Where are the documents? I'm waiting! Fancy a coffee? Happy new year! Updated Messaging platform Slack is first out of the gates of 2021 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*.…

But DMCA claims about circumventing security protections still stand A judge has ruled against Apple in its copyright battle with Corellium, a Florida startup that offers virtualized iOS instances for security researchers.…

'No concrete solutions' as of mid-December Teaching assistants at Canada's McGill University spent Christmas waiting to be paid as the institution struggled with a new Workday HR and payroll system, according to the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM).…

Why do most PCs not support error-correcting code? Chipzilla is to blame, says Linux don Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation."…

Extra support, extra options, designed for hard work but won’t disgrace itself in everyday life Imagine if Samsung offered a semi-secret phone that it hardly ever allows to appear in shops, and which gets longer, stronger, support than is offered for its other devices. Imagine that phone delivers most of the experience of a premium Galaxy device but keeps a 3.5mm headphone jack and replaceable battery. It even boasts a docking feature not available in other phones and sells for less than Samsung's premium consumer handsets.…

But it's not over yet: Next step is Uncle Sam's appeal to London's High Court Accused hacker and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be extradited to the US to stand trial, Westminster Magistrates' Court has ruled.…

'Because I said so' There is at last a definitive answer to the question of why the Windows UI slapped a 32GB limit on the formatting of FAT32 volumes and it's "because I said so," according to the engineer responsible.…

The new internets of Iran, China, and Russia are nothing like the original Feature Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore said that the internet routed around censorship. But what if the net stopped being one big, connected thing? National governments are busy walling off their own sections, and in some cases changing the technologies that underpin it. What's more, they're not stopping at their own borders.…

Crossing the LogoWatch and Borkage streams: A Bork averted 12BoC Our journey across 12 festive fu-, um, screwups in our 12 Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series* nears its end as a Register reader regales us with an unfortunate choice of logo and a predictable Big Blue reaction.…

Everything is Windows' fault. Even when it really isn't Who, Me? The perils of dusty old kit, a cashing-in of brownie points and if in doubt, blame Microsoft! Start the week with another Register reader Who, Me? confession.…

CISA flags ‘further hardening’ advice as Microsoft reveals internal account compromises The extent and impact of the SolarWinds hack became even more apparent – and terrifying – over the holiday break.…

As China launches Alibaba antitrust probe, warns Tencent, and the clock keeps TikTok-ing for Oracle The Register’s writers and readers may have taken a few days off, but the US/China trade war rumbled on regardless. So let’s get caught up, shall we?…

Legal geniuses behind case ask for extra time to convert between Google Docs and MS Word The legal minds behind a so-far-failed attempt to sue United States vice-president Mike Pence so he can challenge the result of the nation’s presidential election have not only failed to put forward a convincing legal argument, but they also struggled convert documents from one format to another.…

Linus Torvalds has been back at work for a week and already has a second release candidate ready. What’s your excuse? Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has urged developers to “crawl out from under all the xmas wrapping paper piles and go test” after releasing release candidate two of version 5.11 of the Linux kernel.”…

For whom the return key tolls 12BoC Ah, Christmas dos. Remember them? A chance to humiliate oneself in front of colleagues and make the odd drunken confession or two. Welcome to the tenth whoopsie of our Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series*…

'You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. 'Tell me why?' 12BoC It's that Christmas feeling: scrabbling around for the correct cable to attach a poppet's new toy to the family TV. Getting into the swing of things, today's bork, the ninth in our Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series*, sees something similar on a screen outside Waitrose.…

It has everything most normal people would want and costs £279 It's never been harder to buy a new phone. Five years ago flagships did everything, mid-rangers had obvious compromises, and sub-£200 handsets were trash.…

Tell you what, let’s have a meeting about it Something for the Weekend, Sir? Don’t wish me a Happy New Year: it doesn’t work. In fact, I think your annual good wishes may be hexing them.…