The Register

Don't call it growth Global smartphone shipments recovered in the first quarter of this year following a dismal 2020 for the mobile hardware industry.…

What's that? Letting people know just weeks before was a bad idea? The UK government has conducted an embarrassing climbdown by agreeing to delay the implementation of NHS Digital's controversial grab of GP patient data by two months.…

Cloud data outfit realises SQL-centric approach won’t attract the developers it needs to grow Snowflake Summit Cloudy data-wrangling outfit Snowflake has opened itself up to Java and Scala developers.…

If your IoT kit employs RabbitMQ, EMQ X or VerneMQ, it's time to get patching Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Centre (CyRC) has warned of easily triggered denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities in three popular open-source Internet of Things message brokers: RabbitMQ, EMQ X, and VerneMQ.…

Chocolate Factory competition-squashing tactics receive a firm 'Non' from Paris Google is to change the way it operates its advertising business, after the internet giant was slapped with a €220m (£189m) fine by French competition regulators for abusing its dominant position.…

Residents near Western Digital, Seagate HQs deafened by popping of Champagne corks The launch of the cryptocurrency Chia has caused demand for hard disk drives in the European market to blow up, according to research firm Context.…

'Potential impact to performance' drops some of the world's biggest websites offline Updated A not-inconsiderable chunk of the World Wide Web, including news sites, social networks, developer sites, and even the UK government's primary portal, has been knocked offline by an apparent outage at edge cloud specialist Fastly – though your indefatigable The Register remains aloft.…

From pictures of shattered glass to patterns on doors and much more A US designer has sued for damages of around $12m amid allegations that Japanese games developer Capcom breached copyright by using her photos in titles including the massively popular Resident Evil.…

'When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, it's not reliable anymore' Version 8.0 of the popular Windows editor Notepad++ has arrived with new features including Dark Mode, a native build for ARM64, and optional new toolbar icons using the Fluent UI.…

When I grow up, I want to be an Identity and Access Management specialist – said no one ever Feature A search on LinkedIn's UK job site just now (1 June 2021) returned 5,265 roles for a network manager; 2,204 for a system administrator; 4,964 for a web developer; and 10,776 for a business analyst. None of these are a particular surprise – they're popular, sought-after careers.…

Linux and macOS guests will be doable, and iGiant even appears to have added an XKCD Easter Egg Desktop virtualization is not the kind of thing that gets a mention in Apple’s big product announcements, and today's effort that revealed macOS 12 — code-named Monterey — was no exception. But sharp-eyed observers have spotted some changes that will make Macs, including those powered by Apple’s own Arm-compatible silicon, more adept at running guest operating systems.…

Tell us what’s holding you back from the cloud or pushing you forward Reader survey It’s one thing being born in the cloud. It can be quite another contemplating moving an established infrastructure and suite of applications off premises.…

It’s now a cloud-native, low-code product that’s growing and offers a viable Exchange alternative, apparently HCL has launched version 12 of Domino, the groupware server it inherited from IBM, which in turn acquired it along with Lotus Software in 1995.…

Hybrid Instagram/Amazon app Xiaohongshu may just have been making mirthful TGIF post Popular Chinese shopping app Xiaohongshu has seen its software banished from app stores and its social media accounts crimped, a few hours after issuing a controversial post on June 4th that asked, “Tell me loudly, what is the date today?”…

For now you have to cope with 100Gb/s and 400Gb/s over single-mode fiber, and brace for 100Gb/s over 80kms The Ethernet Alliance has wrapped up its 2021 Technology Exploration Forum and revealed it’s heading off in pursuit of speeds beyond 400Gb/s.…

All thanks to FBI that somehow had wallet's private key The US Department of Justice on Monday said it has recovered 63.7 Bitcoins, right now worth $2.1m and falling, of the 75 or so BTC the Colonial Pipeline operators paid the ransomware miscreants who infected the fuel provider's computers.…

Hundreds of arrests already in Oz, details of European and US ops to be revealed soon The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has revealed it was able to decrypt messages sent on a supposedly secure messaging app that was seeded into the criminal underworld and promoted as providing snoop-proof comms.…

Feds, facing pushback over constitutional concerns, say they no longer need the data after all The FBI on Saturday withdrew a subpoena issued to USA Today's parent company Gannett in April to find out who read an online news story published in February about a shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and the wounding of three others.…

No new hardware though loads of bits and bytes for software makers WWDC Apple on Monday opened its 2021 Worldwide Developer Conference by promising a raft of operating system and privacy improvements – including a relay system to anonymize Safari connections, and randomized email addresses for online account signups.…

Plus: FBI boss says ransomware is terrorism 2.0, and more In brief Plans by the German government to allow the police to deploy malware on any target's devices, and force the tech world to help them, has run into some opposition, funnily enough.…

Gonna need a little Mo security over here US House Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) seemingly revealed his Gmail password and a PIN in a Sunday rage tweet about a lawsuit regarding the January 6 insurrection attempt.…

With his brother in tow, poor sod Jeff Bezos has confirmed he will buckle up with his brother, Mark, next month and head into space as part of the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.…

Not too difficult to get in, but component serialisation could still be a hurdle iFixit has published a preliminary teardown of the M1 iPad Pro, touted by Apple as a potential crossover, combining the portability of a tablet with the unbridled power of the same processor used in the MacBook Pro. But take a look at its innards and you'll find things largely appear the same.…

Breeding season takes a tern for the worse Two drone crashes at a nature reserve in Orange County, California, are being blamed for a colony of some 3,000 sea birds abandoning their nests.…

Which pours cold water over Cupertino's insistence that third-party fixes violate privacy Apple has paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to an unnamed Oregon college student after one of its outsourced repair facilities posted explicit pictures and videos of her to her Facebook page.…

The usual suspects are accused of anti-competitive behaviour, naughtiness with data South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has set up a new team dedicated to investigating abuse of dominance and competition concerns in online ads.…

Basically, it doesn't work Microsoft has closed a long-standing request to port Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to .NET Core, stating that it "will not be updating VSTO or the COM Add-in platform to use .NET Core."…

Plus: National watchdog says pseudonymisation is data processing The UK government's opposition Labour Party has backed calls for a delay to NHS Digital's controversial slurp of data held by family doctors as new guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office sheds light on the legality of the process.…

Has the hacktivist group had enough of Musk's manipulative crypto-Tweets, or has someone just donned the mask to protest their crashed Bitcoin balance? Entities using the name and iconography of hacktivist collective Anonymous have deemed Elon Musk's recent crypto-tweeting worthy of a re-emergence.…

Yep. The exec responsible for shambolic Test and Trace programme, and TalkTalk's 2015 mega-breach Baroness Dido "Queen of Carnage" Harding, former TalkTalk CEO and current head of NHS Test and Trace, is reportedly eyeing the top job at NHS England.…

At least it was more popular than Skype... just More judges prefer using Microsoft Teams for remote court hearings than a made-to-order video platform bought as part of a £1.2bn Ministry of Justice digitisation initiative, an internal survey has revealed.…

Plus: CyberUp campaign writes to Home Sec British infosec businessees mostly support beefing up the Computer Misuse Act to directly tackle the ransomware crisis – while reform campaign CyberUp has written to Home Secretary Priti Patel offering “support” for “a renewed, forward looking framework”.…

Can be viewed in any light. Bargain Readers of El Reg are nothing if not cultured and frequent dabblers of the avant-garde. Which is why it will come as no surprise that an artist has recently sold an "invisible" sculpture for a reported €15,000 (£13,000).…

Extra performance wrung out, but we wouldn't rush to eBay The benchmarks don't lie. Apple Silicon is fast. The M1 processor outperforms Intel’s competing i5 and i7 chips in virtually every metric you would care to mention, from CPU performance to graphics rendering. With that in mind, one may ask why anyone would want to buy an x86 Mac.…

Big Red wanted TXO Systems dragged to court for years, say legal papers Oracle has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a British reseller that — it claims — infringed Sun Microsystems’ intellectual property by engaging in grey market reselling.…

One can’t spell shit without IT, but for Pete's sake it doesn't need to be in your endpoints Column Fans of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy know how top military secrets are extracted from the enemy. Senior figures are turned in operations run by the most secret brains in the country, bluff and double-bluff mix with incredible feats of bravery, treachery and psychological manipulation.…

At least nobody said 'watch this!' Who, Me? Another tale involving buttons of the big and red variety arrives for today's deposit in the Who, Me? archives. There are some things that are best left unsaid. And unpressed.…

Social network lashed for ‘inglorious’, ‘dogged refusal’ to comply India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has written to Twitter with a final warning after the micro-blogging service offshored and outsourced some of its obligations under the nation’s content takedown laws.…

Here's a short and sweet summit by Nutanix to set you in the right direction Promo Very few tech leaders can really say that hybrid cloud is not going to account for an increasing part of their corporate infrastructure over the coming years.…

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.…