The Register

When contractors go bored: Stuffing the timesheet with shenanigans Who, Me? Start your week the right way, with a Who, Me? reader confession and an improvement made to some bodice-ripping fiction.…

It’s a cloudy world and Dell has now offloaded almost all its software assets Dell has announced the sale of its Boomi Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) outfit.…

Berkshire Hathaway’s annual Q&A also smashed Robinhood, tweaked Elon Musk, fawned over Apple Bitcoin is "disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization" according to Charlie Munger, vice-chair of holding company Berkshire Hathaway.…

Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu among those in strife China says it has identified 33 apps that illegally collect information not necessary to their services, and has given their operators ten days to perform “rectification”.…

Plus: Deepfake satellite images and Google fails to cite relevant research in its own large language model paper In brief An AI system has bested nearly 1,300 human competitors in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament to achieve the top score.…

You sure have to press 'A' a lot The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. 2021 continues to move slowly for the world's biggest entertainment industry and while we did ask Square Enix for a copy of new looter-shooter Outriders, they blanked us. So instead we are picking up a style of game Square is better known for – Octopath Traveler, originally a Nintendo Switch exclusive now on PC.…

Plus: Workers axed at '$4bn' Patreon, techies walk away from Basecamp The Lambda School, an online coding bootcamp based in San Francisco, on Thursday said it will lay off 65 employees, about a third of the workforce.…

Digidog will be returned to its Boston Dynamics owners The New York Police Department has ended its $94,000 contract testing a robot canine named Digidog and is returning it to its makers, Boston Dynamics, after facing harsh criticism from residents and top politicians.…

'If you think age is an advantage in this job, you are mistaken' A former Intel engineer, laid off in 2015, has sued the chipmaker claiming that he was dismissed because of his age.…

The spotty 13-year old app shack finally growing up? Better late than never Google is warning developers it won’t allow misleading or hyperbolic app descriptions by year-end, in an attempt to make the world’s biggest app bazaar feel less like the feedback section of an eBay profile.…

Sometimes the love of ICE and UK.gov is not enough CEO and co-founder of controversial AI and data analytics firm Palantir Alexander Karp raked in a total of $1.10bn following the company’s September IPO, filings have revealed.…

Two words: Digital transformation. Stop gagging. It's about how we learned to love the cloud Customers' infrastructure cloud spending splurge smashed through the $40bn barrier globally for Q1 as business continue to digitise processes and workflows - with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google the major recipients of the cash.…

Act gives government powers to scrutinise, alter, and block transactions where there is a risk to national security In a move akin to calling the fire brigade after your house has burned down, the UK government today announced the passage of a bill that would afford it powers to intervene in potentially hostile direct investment.…

Plus: Anti-Chocolate Factory campaign says it'll collect all the class-action damages, thank you A barrister for the Information Commissioner's Office hinted the regulator would stop enforcing the law on data breaches if the Supreme Court sides with Google in a case about class-action lawsuits.…

AI infosec start-up avoids same opening day peril as Deliveroo British AI-powered security startup Darktrace has enjoyed a bumper IPO Friday as its shares climbed 40 per cent on its London Stock Exchange debut.…

If found guilty, Cupertino could have to cough over $27bn The European Commission today said it believes Apple has abused its absolute control of app distribution on iOS, resulting in the disadvantage of third-party streaming services that compete with Apple Music.…

Send jobs in - based anywhere in the world - and we'll publish them for free Job Alert The Register is publishing free job ads to help keep tech professionals in gainful employment during Global Pandemic V3.0.…

Confirmation happened at pace. Shame the same can't be said for Artemis Former US Senator Bill Nelson has been confirmed as NASA administrator with breath-taking speed (compared to his predecessor).…

'We accept full responsibility for past conduct,' says German software giant SAP has agreed to pay penalties of $8m for providing Iranian users with access to software upgrades, patches and cloud services in breach of US sanctions laws.…

Violet, you're turning ... to our digital workflows! Trust enterprise software CEO Bill McDermott to pick the right man to lead his marketing. Megalomaniac, eccentric, prone to linguistic sleight of hand and always promising the impossible, Willy Wonka has been selected by ServiceNow as the figurehead of its latest campaign.…

And it was poorly secured, allowing someone to analyze players' private fantasies AI Dungeon, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 to create online text adventures with players, has a habit of acting out sexual encounters with not just fictional adults but also children, prompting the developer to add a content filter.…

Think we already made a Stockholm syndrome joke the other day so... Bork!Bork!Bork! Scandi noir may have been all the rage in recent years, but what of Swedish signage? It is time for... Scandi Bork.…

The Zoom meeting I’m missing is already miles away Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Do you know who I am?"…

NASA chose not to re-install OS and live with a 15 percent failure rate Software issues prevented the fourth scheduled flight of NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter.…

Goodbye, Mr Chips On Call There are few things worse than when someone nicks your chips, be they of the potato or silicon variety as our latest delve into the annals of On Call reveals.…

Big Blue also slurps Turbonomic to give hybrid clouds an injection of AI automation IBM has made some interesting container-and-hybrid-cloud-centric moves.…

Vows to make safe C++-alike 'a mainstream language of choice' as hundreds of devs wield it Video Facebook is joining the Rust Foundation at its highest member level – and vowed to help make Rust "a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond.”…

Cloud revenues growing by over 30 per cent, bring in 13 per cent of all Bezos bucks Amazon.com recorded $108.5bn in sales for the first quarter of its 2021 financial year, $13.5bn of which came from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) operation.…

Chaebol's Q1 revenue reaches new all-time high of US$59bn Samsung has vowed to maximize its silicon production by starting mass production of 5nm and 7nm products at its Pyeongtaek production line in the second half of 2021.…

Virtzilla also admits to essentially merging Apple silicon efforts with ESXi on Arm VMware has revealed that surging second wave of COVID-19 infections in India has impacted at least one of its products.…

By eight they should be telling you not to upload geo-tagged photos of them in school uniform Australia has decided that six-year-old children need education on cyber-security, even as it removes other material from the national curriculum.…

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.…