The Register

For everyone else, get back to work and ordering those Amazon Prime deals Blue Origin is planning to launch its first crew into space on July 20 – and a seat on this inaugural spaceflight is up for auction.…

Remote code execution possible on vRealize Business for Cloud – which knows a lot about your private and public platforms VMware has admitted its vRealize Business for Cloud product includes an “unauthorised VAMI API” that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the virtual appliance. The security flaw is rated critical, scoring 9.8 on the ten-point Common Vulnerability Scoring System.…

Code for the Baidu Apollo brains of the service is yours for the taking on GitHub, too Chinese web giant Baidu has commenced operations of actual autonomous taxis on the streets of Beijing.…

Counterfit automatically creates adversarial inputs to find weaknesses Microsoft this week released a Python tool that probes AI models to see if they can be hoodwinked by malicious input data.…

Antisocial giant dismisses chat app rival's 'stunt' in escalating war of words Encrypted messaging service Signal on Tuesday made a show of trolling Instagram and its parent company Facebook by creating ads that incorporated audience targeting categories into its ad copy.…

30% of employees reportedly walked out following sudden rule change Jason Fried, CEO of project management tool Basecamp, has issued a public apology following a major bust-up over new policies that discouraged employees from discussing "societal politics" at work.…

Seriously, it's time to move on Amazon is the latest to drive a knife into the twitching corpse of Python 2 with an announcement that AWS Chalice will follow Lambda in nudging customers to later versions.…

New Spark 3.0 connector will appeal to users too, analyst says Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike is introducing set indexes and SQL operations within expressions in the pursuit of greater machine learning efficiency via its Apache Spark 3.0 connector.…

Nearly 4 million to be exact, say researchers Researchers at security biz Qualys discovered 21 vulnerabilities in Exim, a popular mail server, which can be chained to obtain "a full remote unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim Server."…

Add yet another Chromium browser to your collection Microsoft's Edge browser has taken another step to stability on Linux with the addition of the operating system to its Beta Channel.…

Looks like you can safely ignore that friend request... forever The Facebook Oversight Board has upheld former President Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram - but not before advising the platform to look at its own role in the Capitol-storming mess.…

'Was a Mailchimp sub too hard?!' asks Reg reader A local authority in East London has committed a classic privacy blunder by emailing what appear to be thousands of residents – while forgetting to use the BCC field and exposing all of the email addresseses to each recipient.…

Crossing the chasm into mainstream computing Shipments of Chromebooks reached 12 million globally in the first three months of 2021, according to analyst outfit Canalys, which pegged the year-on-year growth at a stratospheric 275 per cent.…

Used the GitHub Codecov Action? Credentials may have been pilfered Cloud comms platform Twilio has confirmed its private GitHub repositories were cloned after it became the latest casualty of the compromised credential-stealing Codecov script.…

The bug: IF Tier = Free THEN PRINT "Can we offer you an upgrade?" Microsoft has had its very own Who, Me? moment after being forced to apologise for a bug that spammed administrators of Teams Free organisations to suggest they should upgrade to avoid imminent deletion of data.…

Neural networks can be aimed to misbehave when squeezed Boffins in China and the US have developed a technique to hide a backdoor in a machine-learning model so it only appears when the model is compressed for deployment on a mobile device.…

Planning a post-lockdown trip to the isle off England's south coast? Don't miss the interesting bits Geek's Guide to Britain Guglielmo Marconi is famous for sending the first transatlantic wireless signal from Cornwall to Newfoundland, with his two radio stations on the Lizard peninsula covered by a previous Geek's Guide. But he worked up to this achievement on the Isle of Wight, the England-in-miniature that lies just off the south coast of Hampshire.…

Which is a lot of money for this crap In the long history of crowdfunding disasters, few stories spring quite as quickly to mind as Retro Computers Limited's ZX Spectrum Vega+. The premise was simple: bring the joy of 1980s 8-bit gaming to a pocketable form factor. Around 4,500 people collectively stumped up £513,000 to bring it to life.…

Redshift, Cloudera among preferred platforms, but after 7 years Big Red's system refuses to die The UK's Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed it no longer runs a single data warehouse after moving analytics products off its Oracle system to a range of services for AWS, Oracle Cloud, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.…

Majority aren't GDPR compliant and Google Play categorises them badly, leading to lax practices Hundreds of millions of women turn to fertility apps to conceive or prevent pregnancy, and according to a new study those apps may leak very personal information including miscarriages, abortions, sexual history, potential infertility and pregnancy.…

Tales from less-conventional bunkers at the height of the pandemic Covid Logfile II Darren Ellis spent eight weeks of 2020 quarantined in hotel rooms. James McParlane spent seven months of the year in a Croatian castle. Bruce Davie and Josh Odgers spent 111 days unable to travel more than five kilometres from home or spend more than an hour a day outside.…

India wanted five global players. And it got only five applications from qualifying companies India has met its target to lure five global server, PC, and tablet computer manufacturers to its shores, but in a slightly unusual way.…

We speak to IT outsourcing giants as human malware grips nation India's big tech companies have mobilized to protect their workforces as the nation experiences a terrifying second wave of COVID-19.…

Government department wants carriers to facilitate testing of homegrown tech for India-specific use cases India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has finally granted approval for service providers to start 5G trials.…

Military coup creates such a nasty environment it’s hung up on $780 million of assets Norwegian telco Telenor has written off its entire mobile business in Myanmar, citing the “deteriorating security and human rights situation,” after the military seized control of the nation’s government in February and imposed rolling internet blackouts.…

Plus: Register.com, Network Solutions DNS down and Cloudflare has a wobble Government and academic websites and IT services in Belgium were down for hours on Tuesday after their internet provider Belnet was hit by a significant distributed denial-of-service tsunami.…

Copper State turns silicon? TSMC is said to be considering building up to five additional chip plants in Arizona as well as the one it announced last year.…

Get used to it, kid The majority of Android and iOS apps created for US public and private schools send student data to assorted third parties, researchers have found, calling into question privacy commitments from Apple and Google as app store stewards.…

Five vulnerabilities lay undetected for almost a dozen years in Windows driver code Dell desktops, laptops, and tablets built since 2009 and running Windows can be exploited to grant rogue users and malware system-administrator-level access to the computers. We're told this amounts of hundreds of millions of machines that can be completely hijacked.…

More goodies for OpenShift, plus Konveyor to Kubernetes in association with IBM Kubecon Europe As Kubecon Europe gets under way, Red Hat has pushed out StackRox, the Kubernetes security product it acquired earlier this year, as an open-source project which will be the upstream for its Advanced Cluster Security for OpenShift.…

Updates designed to ease 'expensive and challenging' software, analyst says Low-code, automation and workflow company Pega is releasing tools it says will help users tweak back-end processes without developers having to worry too much about breaking front-end UIs.…

Goodnight, sweet prince: Awesome life expectancy for an Android, but now it's time to move on Four years after it first hit shelves, Samsung has finally stopped issuing security patches for the venerable Galaxy S8. The phone, first released in early 2017, no longer features on the company's list of supported devices, signifying its end of life.…

Friends don't drop rocket remnants on friends, m'kay? The spent booster stage responsible for placing the first module of China's next space station into orbit is set to make an uncontrolled rendezvous with Earth.…

The race to keep up with AWSs and Microsoft of this world. HPE is trying to up its Greenlake public cloud-like game by launching a storage-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with data service software abstraction layers operating on new Alletra storage arrays.…

'Hello? I would please like Fortnite Mobile back...' Apple and Epic Games met in California federal court on Monday, kicking off a bench trial with potentially radical consequences for how software is distributed and monetised on closed mobile ecosystems like iOS.…

For testing only - but new distro compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux getting close to release The Rocky Linux project, kicked off by original CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer, has released RC1 of its distribution, which aims to be 100 per cent compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.…

How was this allowed to happen? Ah right, food delivery app publicity stunt Scotland is brimming with valuable cultural exports. Among them, whacking wee baws doon a field, offal stuffed in offal, men's skirts, and deep-frying things that have no business being deep-fried.…

Which is good because that's why the audio editing software is so popular Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.…

76.23kWh per-transaction footprint... WTF, people? In the art world this spring, there's just one phrase on everyone's facemasks: the non-fungible token (NFT). When artist Mike Winkelman sold a JPG embedded into a cryptocurrency token for $69m in Ether (he pocketed $53m of it) jaws hit floors. But what is an NFT, exactly, and should you care, or just roll your eyes and go about your business?…

Non-quoted string vest? Don't mind if we do Column Enterprise IT is about solving problems, but for those who work in the field there's an index of irony in that statement. The further you go towards sales and marketing, the more problems are solved; the further towards the engine room of making this stuff work, the more problems appear.…

Hardware supporting ageing system is mired in performance issues East Sussex County Council is set to be at least six months late in appointing a vendor to replace its ageing R/3 SAP system, which is showing its age and struggling with performance issues.…

Find out at the Anywhere Workspace Event Promo The last year has blown apart any pretence of having a perimeter behind which you can corral your users, keeping them both focused on the job and secure.…

Samsung in turn asks for access to clean 'leccy at high-level love-in A high-level meeting between the Vietnamese government and Samsung has seen each party make a mutually beneficial request of the other, highlighting the success of the relationship - and the fact that both see room for improvement.…

Promises personalised services, software-driven networks, all the fun of an SAP migration to Google cloud Vodafone has signed up for another six years of fun with Google and its cloud.…

Tellie-maker Skyworth says it was duped by analytics service Chinese TV-maker Skyworth has admitted that some of its Android-powered smart televisions shared more data than it agreed to send to a third-party organisation.…

2FA hasn’t kept pace with registration and real-world biometric capture The Philippines’ attempt to expand its national ID program has stumbled thanks to scaling issues with its two-factor authentication tools.…

Blue Origin, Dynetics cry foul NASA’s $2.89bn contract awarded to SpaceX for its Starship rocket to send the first American woman and next man to the Moon has been put on ice after SpaceX’s competitors complained to the US Government Accountability Office.…

Plus: Micro-op CPU caches abused to leak data, and more In Brief Apple on Monday patched security flaws in its software said to have been exploited in the wild by miscreants to hijack gear.…

Safari savaged for failing behind in web APIs Epic Games and Apple faced off in an Oakland, California, courtroom on Monday to resolve the gaming giant's antitrust claim that Apple's App Store represents an illegal monopoly.…

We know the pandemic has been tough on relationships but... Bill Gates has announced his marriage has suffered a BSoD – the Blue Screen of Divorce – after 27 years with his partner Melinda.…