The Register

'There is scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for restrictions' America's consumer watchdog, the FTC, today scolded technology makers for their anti-repair practices, and signaled it will support new legislation that ensures people can mend their own stuff without penalty.…

World Password Day returns to remind us how much passwords suck Google has marked World Password Day by declaring "passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security," and announcing plans to automatically add multi-step authentication to its users' accounts.…

Coming to a computer near you ... this decade ... maybe IBM Research says it's made the world’s first 2nm process node chips, squeezing 50 billion transistors onto each of the fingernail-sized dies.…

While some teen generated 7.7m bogus pro-NN notes to US broadband regulator Broadband companies in 2017 launched an $8.2m campaign to repeal America's net neutrality rules that spent $4.2m to sway policymakers with millions of fake comments. But only their hired guns are being held accountable.…

Wanna find out if Jane Brit has had a shot? Just lob her postcode and DoB into this NHS site An NHS Digital-run vaccine-booking website exposed just how many vaccines individual people had received – and did so with no authentication, according to the Guardian.…

Official CPython is slow, but there are many ways to get better performance Facebook has released Cinder, used internally in Instagram to improve Python performance, while another faster Python, called Pyston, has released version 2.2 and made the project open source (again).…

Good thing researchers spotted it, no evidence of exploit in the wild A heap overflow vulnerability in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 system-on-chip modem firmware, used in Android devices, could be exploited by baddies to run arbitrary code on unsuspecting users' devices, according to Check Point.…

Free breakfast, lunch and dinner? Listening to Ryan Reynolds talk shit? Massages for gratis? Why the hell wouldn't they return One in five Googlers will be permanently working from home once the pandemic abates but for the majority it seems free meals in staff canteens, guest celebrity speaker appearances, resident gyms and massage therapy are irresistible lures.…

Microsoft Xbox exec called up to explain differences with gaming console The legal spat between Epic Games and Apple entered somewhat philosophical territory on Wednesday as the battling sides debated over whether the iPhone legitimately constitutes a general-purpose computing device, or is merely a locked-down platform with a specific purpose, such as a games console.…

They were not the cloud we were looking for, says DoD in brief to Supreme Court In another chapter to a saga that refuses to die, the US government has recommended [PDF] that the Supreme Court rejects Oracle’s efforts to overturn a Department of Defense decision to award the $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft.…

Among the findings, WPF remains most-used desktop framework despite years of promotion for UWP The Microsoft-sponsored .NET Foundation has released a survey-based "State of .NET" report showing that efforts to broaden the appeal of the technology beyond its own platform have had limited success so far.…

(Almost) Why? Kickstarter and nostalgia of those who have forgotten the pain The beast is back... almost. A "100 per cent compatible Visual Basic 6 solution" has been promised to the backers of a Kickstarter. There is, however, no word on how much it would cost to ensure it stayed dead.…

Default passwords, no updates, and your data's flowing through these Consumer org Which? reckons more than two million Britons are connected to the internet through routers that were last updated in 2016.…

Please insert tape number 363 of 4087* French cloud provider OVH has outlined a three-point plan designed to avoid a repeat of the loss of data and services resulting from the fire which engulfed its Strasbourg operations on 10 March.…

There are so many reasons to join us next week at our tip-top DevOps conference, get your ticket now Event We’re checking the lighting, tapping the mikes, and ironing out the gremlins before kicking off Continuous Lifecycle Online on Monday, May 10 from 0900 BST – and we’d really like to see you there.…

On the other hand he was fine Graphic images Everyone knows the trope. The baddies smash their way in and gun down the guard standing in front of the vault. "Dammit," says the lead bad guy, "it's a biometric scanner, we'll never get in!" His most grizzled henchman turns round, holding up the dead guard's lifeless arm. "Oh yes we will…"…

Whoever came up with the SWEEP acronym can have a job at El Reg Highways England, the authority responsible for the nation's roads and related infrastructure, is asking tech vendors to bid for a project worth up to £15m to replace its ageing pavement information management systems.…

What a time to be alive Singapore’s dominant ride-sharing app Grab has added a service for large dogs, or humans who own large numbers of dogs.…

Terms and conditions apply Version 90 of Google's Chrome browser includes a bit of extra security for users of recent versions of Windows and the latest x86 processors, in the form of hardware-enforced stack protection.…

There was just a little fire. But not enough to worry anybody Video SpaceX’s latest test of its Starship vehicle has stuck its landing for the first time.…

Trio claim database queries can lead to remote code execution Black Hat Asia A trio of researchers at Palo Alto Networks has detailed vulnerabilities in the JET database engine, and demonstrated how those flaws can be exploited to ultimately execute malicious code on systems running Microsoft’s SQL Server and Internet Information Services web server.…

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.…