The Register

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.…

Upgraded build-it-yourself kit now includes 80-character mode, improved video output options Nostalgia-fuelled vintage computing specialists The Future Was 8bit and Tynemouth Software have opened pre-orders for a new computer kit based on Commodore's venerable PET, featuring everything you need to compute like it's the 1970s – just bring your own flares.…

Buy-in comes after (nearly) 24 years of living next door to Altice Altice – the French telecoms outfit that operates fibre and mobile networks serving more than 40 million punters in the US, France, Portugal and Israel – has bought a £2bn chunk of BT, it announced today.…

Let's hope Sachin Jogia sticks around longer than his predecessor Ofcom is to get a new full-time CTO this autumn in Sachin Jogia, who has spent the last nine years at Amazon and is currently GM of the Alexa Smart Home product management and business teams.…

How to make software ch-ch-ch-changes easier Feature Anyone who has worked in medium or large organisations will know that there are three levels of change control when it comes to code: (a) the organisation doesn’t have any, (b) the organisation has change control but does it sub-optimally, and (c) change is managed well.…

FoI request details £76,800 in training fees, most of which went to staff security-specific departments The Student Loans Company (SLC) spent £76,800 on cybersecurity training over its previous two fiscal years – including a sudden and unsurprising interest in security in a work-from-home environment.…

Wine64 support arrives for the Apple M1 Fans of Apple's M1 silicon have some more code to play with as the Wine team emitted version 6.0.1 of the Windows-running platform with support for wine64 on the new chippery.…

Hotshot snotbot shows grotty terror plot buzzbots what's what Until recently, the variously camouflaged, partially stealthed and fully invisibility-cloaked boffins at DARPA – Uncle Sam's most famous left-field military research institute – had a problem.…

Why does it always... That's why. That's why it's raining on you UK government proposals to create a workers' watchdog have been slammed by campaigners for not adequately covering umbrella companies, some of which have been accused of sharp practices as the IR35 off-payroll tax revamp expands their usage among contractors.…

Plans fintech infusion for local banking sector, plus data-sharing infrastructure Hong Kong has revealed a strategy to give its financial services sector a fintech infusion.…

Russia, Greenland, northern Canada will get the Full Monty Dust off your funky eclipse sunglasses and your homemade pinhole projector – a partial solar eclipse is set to cast a blurry shadow across parts of the UK on Thursday.…

Fines, fines, everywhere there's fines Microsoft and five other companies have received fines totaling US$75K from South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), for running afoul of local data protection laws.…

Company also says large and well-funded IT department sorted recovery swiftly JBS Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, has revealed it handed over “the equivalent of $11 million” to resolve a ransomware infection that disrupted operations in Australia, the USA, and Canada.…

None were illegal, but they did put civil servants in awkward ethical territory and execs knew it Japanese tech and telecoms giant NTT has temporarily slashed the pay of several top executives, to reprimand them for paying too much of the bill at $500-a-head lunches with government officials.…

Sure, you can apply to work from home in the middle of nowhere, just don't expect Silicon Valley pay Facebook, like other Silicon Valley mega-corps, is ready to get its workers back in the office, setting October as the time when business returns somewhat to normal.…

Also sent lovely flowers as US$22bn GoTo Group cut driver bonuses Drivers who work for Indonesia’s Uber equivalent, Gojek, have gone on strike for three days in response to some of the payments they receive being halved.…

FBI reveals undercover employee sold him fake explosives before arrest Seth Aaron Pendley, the 28-year-old Texas man accused of planning to blow up an Amazon Web Services data centre, admitted on Wednesday he planned to destroy a building with an explosive.…

But executive order expands on supply chain security initiative with call for evidence-based vetting of technology The White House on Tuesday revoked stalled Trump-era orders that sought to ban social media apps TikTok, WeChat, and others in the United States as national security threats.…

Boffins find flaw in web security that enables certificate confusion Academics from three German universities have found a vulnerability in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that under limited circumstances allows the theft of session cookies and enables cross-site scripting attacks.…

The first based in China Huawei has opened another cyber security centre and, despite facing a crisis of trust in the West, has chosen to do so for the first time in its Chinese heartland.…

Sierra Nevada Corporation eyes a landing site in the UK Sierra Nevada Corporation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Spaceport Cornwall aimed at landing its Dream Chaser spacecraft on a strip in the southwest county of England.…

Have you tried simply being more powerful and wealthy? The leak of US federal tax returns filed by the world's richest tycoons sent shock waves this week. To put it simply, the headlines stemming from the ProPublica report appear damning.…

Criminal operators emerged from woodwork just as COVID hit the West The Nefilim ransomware gang might not be the best known or most prolific online extortion crew but their penchant for attacking small numbers of $1bn+ turnover firms is paying off, according to latest research.…

From July you'll be able to swipe credit card for kit at 'Experience Centers' Microsoft is set to reopen some of its stores for sales to the general public.…

Impressive working computer from the corpse of a rarity Video Faced with dwindling sales to education customers in the late 1990s, Apple introduced the eMate 300.…

Raspberry Pi-powered prototype proves 95% accurate, 100% private, claim boffins Researchers at the University of Michigan have proposed a way to have your privacy cake and eat your home automation too. They've found a means of using a voice-activated smart speaker system without it having to listen to everything you say – and no, it's not "pressing a button."…

FPGA-driven prototypes yet to prove the company's bold performance and power-draw claims Tachyum, which has been promising a "universal processor" dubbed Prodigy for the past three years, said it was one step closer to delivering on that pledge with the development of a motherboard for its FPGA emulator that allows customers to test a complete Prodigy system.…

Mandiant investigation says crims gained access through legacy VPN The boss of Colonial Pipeline has appeared before a Senate Committee to explain the events which led to US East Coast fuel supplies running dry last month and some $5m being handed over in ransom.…

Malicious crew targets ME and Asia but also tries evading Chinese AV suites ESET has published details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) crew that appears to have deployed recent supply chain attack methods against targets including "electronics manufacturers," although it didn't specify which.…

OK, we see where this is going Google claims not only has it made an AI that's faster and as good as if not better than humans at designing chips, the web giant is using it to design chips for faster and better AI.…

Regulator airs country's muddy laundry - including fact it rarely unplugs The UK is a nation of online shoppers who – when not spending a whopping £113bn over the past 12 months – spent more time online than any other grown-ups across Europe last year.…

We want to give your property better internets for free, pls respond The UK's Department of Fun – aka Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – has opened a consultation on legislation designed to improve access to gigabit broadband in apartment blocks.…

Plus: UAVs that can smell your poop – both for benign purposes, mind Researchers at Fraunhofer FKIE have unveiled a system that teaches drones to hunt down humans by listening to their screams.…

Reports through Chipzilla's bug bounty scheme growing, but still in the minority Intel has pushed out a raft of security advisories for June, bringing its total discovered "potential vulnerabilities" for the year to date to 132, only a quarter of which were reported by external contributors and the company's bug bounty programme.…

The history of computing is all change, all the time. Yet silicon-slingers let the chips fail where they may Column Unless you've been hiding under a (non-silicate) rock, you know there's a massive global shortage of semiconductors. Automobile production lines have stalled. New computers are launched late. Gamers can't get their hands on the latest bits of kit. And we're told that this won't clear up until 2023. If we're lucky.…