The Register

Taiwan was COVID-free for almost a year. Now the virus is out and edging towards major silicon production centres The world’s leading provider of chip testing services, Taiwan’s King Yuan Electronics (KYEC), has suspended production for two days due to a COVID-19 outbreak among the company’s foreign workers.…

Plus: DARPA wants to spend $1m on AI research studying information warfare In brief Machines are like humans – they’re lazy. When given the chance to take the easy route to complete an easy task, they will.…

Emperor Penguin hopes ‘fairly average’ release will ‘start shrinking now’ The fifth release candidate for version 5.13 of the Linux kernel has emerged, and project boss Linus Torvalds has expressed only mild concern about progress.…

Facebook’s Libra project kicked to the kerb until international rules on stabelcoins are set The G7 group of nations has proposed a 15 per cent tax rate for multinational entities and the removal of digital services taxes.…

Donald, you're fired. Again Facebook on Friday announced that former US President Donald Trump will be banned from its platform until at least January 7, 2023, having deemed two-years the appropriate period of exile for statements interpreted as an effort "to provoke further violence," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it when the ban was announced.…

Let's be clear what it's talking about though. It is patting itself on back for not taking a cut of Uber's cut Comment Apple and Epic Games have delivered their final arguments in their California bench trial, but Cupertino is still ratcheting up the charm offensive, revealing the App Store "facilitated" a 24 per cent hike in billings and sales in 2020 to a record $643bn.…

Coincidentally, it's the 32nd anniversary of the 1989 massacre in Beijing Thirty-two years ago, on June 4, 1989, Chinese troops killed and arrested thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, putting an end to demonstrations that began that April.…

'Is that a dong on a drone?' A week is a schlong time in politics – just ask Bernalillo County Sheriff, Manuel Gonzales III, who may be primed to face heckling at political rallies but handling a flying dildo is a different matter.…

US president calls China’s military-industrial complex 'a threat' and condemns surveillance technology for human rights abuse US president Joe Biden has issued an executive order to expand the Trump-era ban preventing Chinese tech and defence companies from receiving American investment, upping it from 31 to 59 named entities.…

Blame Rightmove instead It would be fair to say that the recent decades have not been kind to the newspaper industry.…

Plaintiffs say they would've gone elsewhere had they known iGiant was just using Amazon, Microsoft or Google A US judge has approved a limited class action against Apple for breach of contract following a complaint that its iCloud used third-party servers, including "cloud storage facilities belonging to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google," to host customers' data rather than using its own machines.…

New approach against malware pushers mirrors how American authorities handle terrorism cases The White House has issued a communique to business leaders [PDF] urging them to take the threat of ransomware a bit more seriously.…

Did the anti-social network use advertiser info to compete with rivals? Facebook is facing a twin investigation by UK and EU officials into allegations that it breached competition rules by using data gathered from advertisers on its social media network to compete with rivals.…

BMA separately calls for a delay to the programme The British Medical Association and Royal College of GPs today told NHS Digital they do not endorse the UK government's imminent haul of English GP data – dubbed "the biggest data grab in the history" of the service.…

Twitter Blue only works properly on iOS and just one feature is useful First Look Twitter has announced its first subscription service.…

Latest version ups stablity but also makes it easier to migrate to commercial wares Version 15.3 of openSUSE Leap is out - this being the community version of SUSE Linux Enterprise and the first to be built with the same binary packages as its commercial cousin.…

Claims Russia's FSB was poking around an Eastern European ministry While enterprises stagger under sustained ransomware attacks, Android users are increasingly being targeted by banking malware, with Slovakian infosec firm ESET reckoning it had seen a 159 per cent increase in such malicious software over the last few months.…

Analysts say S/4HANA upgrades remain sluggish, and users want to see things RISE shine before committing Sapphire Now The 60,000 member-strong German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) has issued a strongly worded statement in response to SAP’s lack of clarity on its RISE cloud upgrade at the annual Sapphire Now event.…

Networking giant alone taken for $3.5m A scammer who convinced some of the world's biggest tech businesses to send him replacement kit has been sentenced to seven years and eight months in the US prison system.…

I don’t care if the football’s on, we’ll have to watch whatever the TV wants us to Something for the Weekend, Sir? My television wants me dead. It’s doing this by playing dead itself. Only one of us will get out of this alive.…

Never again is what you swore... the time before If you rely on your insurer to pay off crooks after a successful ransomware attack, you wouldn't be the only one.…

Sofa, not-so-good: Angry customers still can't access systems, phones, and deliveries delayed Furniture Village – the UK's largest independent furniture retailer with 54 stores nationwide – has been hit by a "cyber-attack", the company confirmed to The Register.…

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! On Call What's worse than having to deal with an idiot over the phone? Having to drive thousands of miles to deal with the same idiot, face to face. Welcome to another Register reader's experience of helping those who won't help themselves in On Call.…

It’s actually just a stick, but maintenance staff love ‘em Australian airline QANTAS has developed a piece of technology dubbed a “wheel whacker” to help stop snakes and scorpions boarding planes it has parked due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Tell us whether you’re ecstatic or exasperated, or somewhere in between Reader survey There is no doubt that more and more applications are being hosted in the cloud. Hyperscalers are seen as the example to follow when it comes to managing infrastructure, while cloud-native organisations dominate the agenda at industry conferences.…

Looks forward to nicely lowered costs as production ramps up, but they're still hyperscaler-only for now For about three years, disk-making giant Seagate has been talking up tech called “MACH.2” – a conventional disk drive that offers considerable speed improvements. And now the disk giant has found that the tech also cuts its costs, raising the prospect that big, fast, hard disk drives might emerge at keen prices.…

After some heated exchanges, tensions seem to have cooled (for now) between Chinese government and Jack Ma’s empire Months after Beijing’s regulators stepped in and forced Alibaba's finance arm Ant Group to restructure its consumer loans business, China's Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission has granted the outfit permission to operate a consumer finance company.…

Shine chaebol's FOSSlight on your projects, careful what you find Korean mega-corp LG has open-sourced the in-house toolbox it uses identify and manage open-source software licences within its own business.…

Millions of Rust, JavaScript, Go, Maven repositories scanned and visualized Google has built an online tool that maps out all the dependencies in millions of open-source software libraries and flags up any unpatched vulnerabilities.…

Rarely seen miscalculations now crop up frequently at cloud hyperscale Computer chips have advanced to the point that they're no longer reliable: they've become "mercurial," as Google puts it, and may not perform their calculations in a predictable manner.…

Not a fan of homosexuality, either, judging from 2007 blog posts A Googler who was supposed to steer diversity efforts at the internet titan has been removed from his post – after netizens found a 2007 blog post in which he suggested Jewish people had an “insatiable appetite for war and killing" when acting in self-defense.…

We'll explain everything for you The US Supreme Court on Thursday limited the scope of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in a ruling that found a former sergeant did not violate the law by misusing his access to a police database.…

And if you ask your cloud provider, the answer might shock you Webcast What’s the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to protecting your data in the cloud? Probably assuming that it’s protected just because it’s in the cloud.…

Forget Seattle, Microsoft 'Round Island One' lives in Bermuda A subsidiary of Microsoft in Ireland has paid no corporation tax because it is "resident" in Bermuda for tax purposes – despite making a whopping $314.73bn in profit.…

You don't spend $5bn on a shiny glass Ive-designed HQ and leave it empty Tim Cook has issued a memo to Apple staffers warning that their days of shirking-from-home in the pandemic are over. From early September, employees will be expected to spend at least three days a week in the office, with Wednesdays and Fridays open to remote working for some.…

Mobile provider Orange fingers 'technical issue' on a router A technical issue with French mobile provider Orange, fixed early this morning, resulted in members of the public being temporarily unable to contact the emergency services.…

June 24 event to preview Win Tech: The Next Generation Microsoft will reveal "what's next for Windows" at a virtual event on June 24th, rumoured to include a UI refresh codenamed "Sun Valley".…

For once, Boris Johnson ignored calls of PECR Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is facing a £10,000 fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for dispatching marketing emails to unwilling recipients, 51 of whom complained to the regulator.…

Analyst: 'They need to blow up the obsolete Ariba engine first' Sapphire Now As customers, SIs and analysts demand more detail on SAP’s cloud lift-and-shift and transformation package, the German vendor came to the table at its Sapphire annual conference with a mixed spread of announcements.…

VERITAS and DAVINCI+ chosen and funded as part of agency's concept selection NASA announced yesterday that it will fund two new missions to Venus to study its atmosphere and topography, both chosen from the Discovery Program.…

Another big name buyout by STG FireEye has been sold for $1.2bn to the same American private equity fund that bought McAfee’s enterprise security business, severing it from infosec stablemate Mandiant.…

We wanted to post a dad joke about sodium, but we thought: Na, people will groan... TerraPower – the Bill Gates-founded nuclear company – and Warren Buffett-owned PacifiCorp are hooking up to build a Natrium reactor at a decommissioned coal plant in Wyoming.…

When it works well enough in the real world, that is Computer scientists have built an algorithm to predict deadly explosions within blazes before they occur in the hope it can one day serve as a warning system for firefighters tackling burning buildings.…

No, literally, let's make illegal Four in five Brits wants to make it illegal to force employees to work from the office, according to an extensive survey, providing further evidence that a shift in working patterns may be permanent.…

As Sapphire Now kicks off, users, SIs and analysts see unanswered questions Five months after SAP launched its RISE plan, a half-loaf cloud lift-'n-shift + business transformation service, the German software company is still struggling with unanswered questions.…

It is Thursday and it's framework-tastic Pheonix Software, Deloitte and Computeam are among the 17 winners sticking their snouts into a £100m pork barrel framework for outsourcing in the UK’s education sector.…

Plus: Judgement in immigration exemption case makes things worse Comment Almost two weeks ago, the European Parliament took the step of objecting to the Commission decisions to grant the UK data adequacy.…

Hello, my name is Mr Snrub, and I come from, uh ... someplace far away Analysis Huawei on Wednesday introduced its first tablets and smartphones running its HarmonyOS 2 software – and said 100 or so other devices will be able to upgrade to the totally-not-but-really-is-Android OS.…

Down continues to be the new up NortonLifeLock, the company that offers the consumer products Broadcom didn’t want when it bought Symantec, has started to offer Ethereum mining as a feature of its Norton 360 security suite.…

Applies pressure as negotiations on harmonized global web levies near conclusion Countries whose digital services taxes disproportionately affect the US tech industry have been slapped with 25 per cent tariffs on up to US$2bn of their goods by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR).…