The Register

Yep, UK.gov to build literal flagship - for about £200m Boatnotes Britain is to get a new ocean-going gin palace to schmooze VIPs, negotiate trade deals and fly the flag for UK Plc, the government confirmed at the weekend.…

We've kind of got a lot going on right now with vaccinating etc... maybe you could do the comms bit, huh? The UK's Royal College of GPs (RCGP) has written to NHS Digital to call for better communication with the public about their rights in opting out of what has been dubbed the "biggest data grab in NHS history."…

Fond memories of the before times and Windows Aero at a shuttered McDonald's order point Bork!Bork!Bork! Today marks a return of an old favourite as the DNS of bork, McDonald's, pops up again to show us how unattended kiosks should be run nowadays.…

So says the UK's Employment Tribunal in unfair dismissal case A “very highly qualified and experienced expert in artificial intelligence” who founded a misinformation-fighting startup has lost a legal case against Facebook in London for unfair dismissal.…

Will its vision for unified analytics fly? Databricks, the commercial company founded around the popular Apache Spark data lake, is making a strike for new class workloads and enterprise data management jobs in its make-or-break IPO year.…

Success, disagreement, forking, success... it's the c-IRC-le of liiiiiiiiiife Column IRC is the open secret of open software. IRC - internet Relay Chat - started in Finland in 1988 and quickly became the Internet’s first widespread real-time chat system.…

40k units now, but 'serious volume' to arrive after the summer Short of silicon? The Raspberry team has elected bring forward the availability of its RP2040 chippery to a wider audience, with an eye on potential customers who are struggling to secure supplies of microcontrollers.…

Cars are becoming computers on wheels, but car-makers aren't tuned into the silicon innovation cycle Feature In February 2021, giant automakers Nissan and Honda warned shareholders that revenue was set to fall. The cause of the imminent fall was not economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic but a boom in demand for semiconductors that left them unable to secure the components they needed to make their products.…

Space boffin tells Reg it's stupidly hard to clean up orbiting trash after Canadarm2 survives encounter with item too small to be tracked The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has revealed that a piece of space debris had punctured the Canadarm2 robotic on the International Space Station (ISS).…

They’ll be hosted by Equinix, owned by NVIDIA, and include NetApp storage Computex NVIDIA has decided to become an IaaS provider, at least for its own DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputers.…

CEO reveals new Teslas include AMD silicon and that Samsung has signed to pack RDNA 2 graphics into Exynos SoCs COMPUTEX AMD has revealed a new 3D chip stacking technology it claims delivers the equivalent performance boost to a new generation of chip architecture.…

TSMC is well on truly on top with 55 percent market share The world's top 10 semiconductor foundries set new records for combined revenue in 1Q21 by growing one percent quarter-on-quarter to reach US$22.75B, thanks to price hikes and full utilization of chip stocks, market research firm TrendForce said on Monday.…

Plus: More Rowhammer research, Feds warn of Fortinet attacks, etc In brief The creator of the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) website, which alerts you if it turns out your credentials have been swiped and leaked from an account database, has open sourced the project's internals.…

Appears to have taken first step by appointing grievance officer Twitter has been given three weeks to comply with India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 – which came into effect last week.…

Plus: Ex-OpenAI employees launch machine-learning research org In brief Nearly a hundred counties, towns and cities across the US have purchased surveillance cameras from Chinese companies blocked by the federal government over the human rights abuse of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.…

Sometimes honesty is the best policy Who, Me? Let's take a step back in time for today's Who, Me? with a trip to the dying days of manual credit card imprinting.…

Google spawned it, Cloudflare backed it, Microsoft made its own cut. Boffins worry it didn't improve privacy Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) have graduated to Internet Engineering Task Force’s standards track.…

Teases Alder Lake architecture – which mixes different types of CPU – in mobile PCs. Also reveals some 5G fun Computex Intel has found another pair of 11th-gen Core processors and announced them at Taiwan’s Computex conference, then revealed its 12th-gen “Alder Lake” architecture is “just on the horizon.”…

Double-mutant strain puts electronics factories at risk Vietnam’s government has asked Samsung to find COVID-19 vaccinations to protect workers in provinces that are home to industrial parks, a request that reflects the co-dependence between the Korean Chaebol and the rapidly developing nation.…

Cops weren’t total dopes: chronic electricity theft means they still smoked crims West Midlands Police in the UK has revealed that its officers raided a suspected cannabis growing operation and ended up smoking out a Bitcoin mine run on stolen electricity.…

Decent port of a PlayStation 4 'exclusive', but it's far from original The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. In May, the industry finally pushed some hot properties out the door including Resident Evil Village, Biomutant, and the Mass Effect remasters. But we opted to check out something just a little bit older.…

Theft spree repeatedly blamed on wrong guy – lawsuit Apple and its security contractor Security Industry Specialists (SIS) were sued on Friday in Massachusetts as part of a multijurisdictional defamation and malicious prosecution complaint brought on behalf of Ousmane Bah, a New York resident misidentified as a shoplifter multiple times in 2018 and 2019.…

Legal challenge now on behalf of more than 10,000 others A lawsuit spearheaded by four female Google ex-employees claiming the ad giant pays men higher wages for doing the same job was granted class-action status this week.…

Disney and Comcast get a pass from the Sunshine State, though Two technology grade groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter among others, on Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a new Florida law, SB 7072, that prohibits social media companies from deplatforming state political candidates and establishes a right for citizens to sue over platform moderation decisions.…

Leaked data proves very educational Details of some US nuclear missile bunkers in Europe, which contain live warheads, along with secret codewords used by guards to signal that they’re being threatened by enemies, were exposed for nearly a decade through online flashcards used for education, but which were left publicly available.…

Claims of ignoring NDA will be tried by High Court, rules judge London’s High Court has refused to hear parts of a software copyright case after a Spanish startup Trappit claimed American Express ignored an NDA and unlawfully copied its flight rebooking software.…

There are 'advantages', but you must submit to 'the Google way of doing things,' warns analyst Google is promising to capture data logs from Oracle and other on-prem SQL data systems for monitoring, data integration and ML pipelines.…

Not the first plane trip you wanted to do post-lockdown, but there you are Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual tech jamboree, is back, in person and it is multiplying.…

Amazing how being able to write off 130% of infrastructure deployment focuses minds BT-owned Openreach threw rural Britain a bone today, announcing it would double the number of country premises expected to receive FTTP access by the end of 2026.…

Invoices from his own companies were just less than the amount he was able to sign off. Services never delivered A former senior IT manager has pleaded guilty to defrauding the UK’s National Health Service of £800,000 over seven years.…

So if the generals would lend us a few bob to fix it that'd be nice of them The Ministry of Defence’s IT systems are “too fragmented, fragile, insecure and obsolescent” and its operators are “mired in industrial age processes and culture,” according to a new digital strategy document.…

Yes, you read that right The retro computing craze spiked during the pandemic. With the usual watering holes closed, some techies occupied their time by painstakingly restoring the old Performa towers cluttering their lofts.…

...the vast emptiness of Notepad Bork!Bork!Bork! A novel way of entering your PIN features in today's entry into the pantheon of problem-hit computers as a veteran Windows application makes its presence felt in the modern world.…

Amazon's cloud arm criticised by users facing unexpected bills Analysis Amazon Web Services has come under fire for lack of hard spending limits on accounts, after some users reported unexpected bills from what they thought were tutorial accounts.…

Lenovo ops chief adds: 'Everything that is able to be built is selling' Planning on buying one of those cheaper laptop PCs? Some of you might have to settle for something altogether more desk-based due to the component shortages.…

Food for thought for obese minds Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Your favourite chef is worried about you!"…

Microsoft says Nobelium scored access to Constant Contact email marketing tool Nobelium, the Russia-aligned gang identified as the perpetrators of the supply chain attack on SolarWinds' Orion software, has struck again, Microsoft vice president Tom Burt in a blogpost Thursday.…

The sound of silence? No, no, it's stupidity On Call A reminder of who is really in charge and how one should set one's priorities awaits in today's episode of On Call.…

Hopes to start selling ‘em too, because China and Japan are heading the same direction and aren’t good at sharing South Korea today announced a National Ultra High Performance Computing Innovation Strategy that aims to have the company build an exascale supercomputer by 2030, using plenty of home-grown parts.…

Just make sure you read this guide first Promo After not seeing your colleagues face to face for a year or more, does the prospect of working “closely” with people who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away really seem like an issue anymore?…

And why would he change when quarterly revenue just cracked $3bn for the first time? VMware’s incoming CEO Raghu Raghuram has outlined his plans for the company on its Q1 2022 earnings call, essentially promising more of the same – but even better once the virtualisation giant is spun out of Dell.…

Not everyone is celebrating Uber has officially recognized the trade union GMB, clearing the way for as many as 70,000 Uber drivers in the UK to collectively bargain for higher wages and better working conditions.…

Special Administrative Region recorded plunge in ransomware attacks Criminals tried to exploit Hong Kong residents' COVID-related anxiety, according to new security data released yesterday by the Special Administrative Region's secretary for innovation and technology Alfred Sit.…

Government lashes WhatsApp, too, in free speech vs sovereignty debate Twitter has taken issue with India’s Digital Media Ethics Code – and India’s government has responded with a forcefully worded press release that accuses the micro-blogging site of defying and defaming the nation.…

Three years to go and space agency is way behind schedule The chances of NASA sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024 is looking less and less likely, according to a report this month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).…

Mozilla says Google's content-filter API doesn't meet developer needs, others agree Firefox maker Mozilla on Thursday said it plans to mostly adopt Manifest v3, a controversial revision of the Chrome browser extension framework that Google undertook to address the glaring security problems in the browser.…

We need to solve underlying problems, not increase complexity with point fixes Systems Approach I’ve been interested in architecture – of the physical building variety, as distinct from computer or network architecture – for as long as I can remember. So I was pretty excited when I got to work in a Frank-Gehry-designed building at MIT in the late 2000s.…

Three weeks and counting for Cupertino to update Safari's engine A vulnerability in the open-source WebKit rendering engine used by Apple's Safari browser remains unfixed three weeks after a patch repaired the flaw in the WebKit source code.…

He remains fabulously wealthy, for now We all tightened our belts a little bit in 2020, not least the iconoclastic SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, who saw his annual remuneration cut by over half [PDF] during the turbulent year.…

Wonder no more if there’s an easier way Webcast It’s easy to think that moving to the cloud is a simple case of lifting and shifting your existing setup onto somebody else’s platform.…