The Register

Burning dollars faster than liquid oxygen and hydrogen $28m has secured someone a seat on the first crewed flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard, with the mystery bidder scoring the right to breathe the same air as fellow passenger Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.…

My God! It's full of Bork! Bork!Bork!Bork! A black oblong of purest bork glares balefully over shoppers in Plymouth, southwest England. An echo from an alternative future or just big-screen borkage?…

Sutherland Spaceport: A Prime location? Interview British rocketeeer Orbex has spent the best part of the last half decade or so moving towards the goal of a first commercial orbital launch from home soil. While others have shown off engine firings and sub-orbital lobs, Orbex is aiming for orbit with its Prime rocket.…

If we trust it, crooks will too – meaning Plod can get their kiloscrote nab Column Back in October, a call by spy agencies to weaken end-to-end encryption "because of the children" provoked a bit of analysis on how many times UK Home Secretaries had banged the same drum. All of them, it turned out. All of the time.…

Pandemic has opened a can of worms for our work goals with what comes next Feature It may not be your fault that your broadband is crap, but it is your problem when you're interviewing over Zoom or even Teams.…

UPS = Uninterruptable Pager Spying Who, Me? We go Down Under for today's Who, Me? with a slightly NSFW tale of an incomplete checklist, a surprise outage, and an even more surprised gerbil.…

How to bust the bottlenecks without breaking the bank Webcast We all know HPC and AI datasets are going to be massive. But they’re also very different, the former being focused around large, sequential files, while the former are much more random.…

Crims now know what not to trust, and how to stymie future infiltrations Comment In April 1943, Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed when the US Air Force shot down the plane carrying him to Balalae Airfield in the Solomon Islands.…

Dr Rachid Yazami shares his predictions for EV batteries with The Register Feature Morocco-born Dr Rachid Yazami has lived all over the world, thanks to an invention he made in his first year as a PhD student – the graphite anode – which is one of the key components that make lithium-ion batteries perform so well.…

As in it's stopped selling the ladders needed to clamber up and do maintenance. Thankfully the internet can help IBM has pulled up the ladder behind customers of its Blue Gene/Q supercomputers.…

There was no big bang – and it could happen to you Feature When designing systems that our businesses will rely on, we do so with resilience in mind.…

Delivery drives to get refund The US Federal Trade Commission on Friday announced the approval a consent order against Amazon that requires the company to pay $61.7m to resolve charges that for two and a half years it took tips intended for Amazon Flex drivers and concealed the diversion of funds.…

Couple now definitely past their Prime The husband of an Amazon financial executive was sentenced on Thursday to 26 months behind bars for insider trading of the web giant's stock.…

And its CAPTCHA alternative challenged by security researcher Following in the rickety footsteps of Fastly, bedeviled by a bug earlier this week, network services biz Cloudflare briefly stumbled on Friday as an elevated error rate interfered with connectivity for customers in Chicago and Los Angeles.…

'Unforeseen server conditions' blamed Attendees at this week's Women In Technology Online Festival were trying to watch keynote speaker Michelle Obama when the stream crashed within seconds of starting, leaving many unable to see the former US First Lady at all.…

Utilities watchdog launches consultation that may affect green island's mega bit barns Ireland could be facing frequent power cuts following a warning from the country's Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) that data centres are having a "major impact on the Irish electricity system."…

Well, that's one way to do it The government of Pakistan's Punjab region has a new weapon up its sleeve in the fight against vaccine hesitancy: blocking the mobile service of anyone who refuses to get jabbed.…

... lower house, the State Assembly, is not likely to pass the bill The New York State Senate has approved landmark right-to-repair legislation which forces original equipment manufacturers to provide schematics, parts, and tools to independent repair providers and consumers.…

Even nuclear missile attacks came with a 4-minute heads-up Comment Britain has told the UN that international cyber law should allow zero-notice digital punishment directed at countries that attack others' infrastructure.…

While social media gets a portion of the blame for COVID-19's initial spread The impact of lockdowns during a global pandemic appears to be making itself known in a variety of ways – subtle and otherwise – including increased drinking and swearing. Or, as we like to call it, "the weekend".…

CMA claims to have taken 'oversight role' over removal of third-party cookies The UK's competition regulator intends to keep a weather eye on Google as it works to address concerns around its proposals to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser.…

Communication Workers Union believes 'scores of employees' will be placed 'at risk' under proposals Tesco Mobile has extended its customer management contract with Capita for another three years as part of ongoing plans to streamline the grocer-cum-telco's customer service operation.…

Tii Technologies claims hamfisted BT bods caused problems, not their kit BT is suing a supplier for £72m after it delivered nearly 100,000 defective landline connection blocks that caused ADSL broadband outages, London's High Court has heard.…

Now they've got £5m to try to stop it falling over again The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has signed contract extensions worth £5m with Digidentity and the Post Office for an online identity service which recently fell over.…

'Surprise stealing mechanics' made short work of network perimeter security EA Games, publisher of Battlefield, The Sims and FIFA, has admitted to a "recent incident of intrusion into our network" in which attackers reportedly stole game source code and software development kits.…

A trip to beautiful Snowdonia lakes takes in early hydroelectric experiment... and a tragedy for a village Geek's Guide To Britain They say that it is the history on one's doorstep which is most often overlooked. So it is with my latest piece for El Reg's Geek's Guide to Britain which concerns events in a quiet Welsh village that I called home between the ages of five and 18.…

Plus ça change The UK's Passport Office has awarded a £21m contract to Atos IT Services purportedly for business intelligence and infrastructure.…

Meanwhile users complain their IPs are being flagged for suspicious traffic Users of BT’s Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi range-extender discs have noticed their devices are making hundreds of thousands of daily DNS lookups for big tech companies’ websites – causing problems for some wanting to access Gmail and Microsoft services.…

You never did learn to play guitar, did you? Too late now... Something for the Weekend, Sir? Smile! We're all going back to the office!…

Three availability zones prophesied to open in the first half of 2023 Amazon Web Services has announced it will bring a full region to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.…

It must be working, look at the LED On Call An On Call reminder this week that all must worship the mystery beige box with the single baleful LED eye, no matter what one thinks it is used for.…

RCMP said it only used technology to rescue children, but regulator says that's wrong and Privacy Act was breached Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) announced yesterday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law by using Clearview AI facial-recognition software.…

Error handling? Nah, let's just unlock everything and be done with it A seven-year-old privilege escalation vulnerability that's been lurking in several Linux distributions was patched last week in a coordinated disclosure.…

As local search engines stop providing results on crypto-keywords China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation’s Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services.…

All systems check out, it's time to science the s**t out of Mars NASA has finished the Perseverance Mars rover's post-landing shakedown and the vehicle has therefore embarked on its first sample collection mission, the space agency confirmed on Wednesday.…

'Any Linux discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me' Linus Torvalds has used some of his strongest language in years to smack down a Linux Kernel Mailing List poster who made some odd remarks about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.…

Cloud colossus says aircon fail caused kit to shut down, networks dropped out and EC2 instances went dark Updated A single availability zone in Amazon Web Services’ EU-Central region (EUC_AZ-1) has experienced a major outage.…

Would you like a lawsuit with that? McDonald’s has been accused of illegally collecting and processing customers' voice recordings without their consent in the US state of Illinois.…

Enterprise newcomer has its work cut out in the data marketplace field Among the blizzard of new language support for Snowflake's data warehouse this week was a plan to beef up its data marketplace, which promises users somewhere to buy, sell, and otherwise share data on the platform. The problem is that it is far from the only game in town.…

Maker of industrial lift gear claims fraud as software project sinks Advance Lifts, an Illinois-based maker of industrial lift machinery, has sued Oracle, its IT implementation partner Folio3, and its finance partner Banc of America Leasing & Capital, claiming that the trio breached their contract and committed fraud by delivering a NetSuite system that lacked promised features.…

Someone's got to keep Altera company Intel offered more than $2bn to acquire RISC-V chip designer SiFive, it was reported today.…

No one expects the Worldwide Loyalty Team! During the development of iOS 15, Apple reportedly limited the extent to which engineers could see features being worked on by other colleagues to prevent potential leaks.…

Still, it's this or iOS Android 12 Beta 2 is here and contains many of the features that were teased during May's Google I/O shindig including an overhauled control panel and additional privacy tools.…

'The group is united in making RISC-V an option in HPC,' says SIG-HPC chair RISC-V International, the nonprofit at the helm of the free and open-source CPU instruction set architecture, says it is writing a high-performance computing (HPC) roadmap of "new features and capabilities."…

Brood X vents frustration at missed opportunity on free press, random Ohio drivers Following The Reg's recent exclusive coverage of the growing cicada threat to humanity, we can now reveal that US President Joe Biden narrowly missed being literally decapitated by a lone cicada assassin.…

How to bust the bottlenecks without breaking the bank Webcast We all know HPC and AI datasets are going to be massive. But they’re also very different — the former built from large, sequential files, while the latter from much more random info.…

It's not the size that counts, it's how you use it Samsung today introduced its latest imaging sensor, the 50-megapixel ISOCELL JN1, which it claims has the smallest individual pixels in the industry.…

Show me the money! say campaigners hoping to stamp out nefarious practices At the eleventh hour, UK government has detailed plans to regulate umbrella companies, some of which stand accused of dodgy dealings as their use grows among IT contractors after IR35 tax rule changes.…

Q1 WLAN sales rose by 16.7 per cent year-on-year A surge in wireless LAN sales in the opening three months of 2021 signals businesses are preparing to have you return to the office, according to IDC.…

AMD hoping to grow its $38bn Xilinx acquisition as it seeks to compete with Intel's Altera AMD-owned FPGA specialist Xilinx has announced the acquisition of Silexica, a 2014-era academic spinout founded on a promise to "democratise accelerated computing" – primarily through its SLX FPGA tool suite.…