The Register

Research agency and housing board sign a deal as COVID-19 makes manpower and materials scarce Singapore's industrial research agency has started work on 5G-enabled drones that use LiDAR and cameras to monitor construction sites, then send the data they collect to systems that create digital models of buildings that change in real time.…

High stakes battle could go on for days There are a maximum of 6,000 votes to count but the push by workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama to unionize could take days as the high-stakes battle acts as a much larger proxy across America.…

FTC cites 'significant headwinds' in trying to fight the San Diego chipmaker Updated The Federal Trade Commission has given up its antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm although the US watchdog still claims the chip maker violated fair competition laws.…

Privacy don't like it, block the tracker, block the tracker Eliminating third-party cookies will not stop companies from tracking web users, says DuckDuckGo, which claims it can help with its desktop browser extensions and mobile apps.…

Staff quit as board refuses to budge on controversial decision Updated Three key staff members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have resigned in protest at the organization’s decision to reinstall Richard Stallman as a board member.…

Apple fans will need to wait just a little longer Mozilla's attempts to augment its income continued apace with an update to the company's VPN subscription service.…

Join Lenovo at Nvidia's GTC '21 and accelerate your learning Promo Mention GPUs these days, and you’ll naturally think about how they can accelerate the most challenging AI and machine learning workloads in addition to gaming platforms.…

CEO reckons this tech will be used in 300 billion chips Arm has set out its stall for the first major new version of its instruction set architecture – Armv9 – in about a decade, and promised compatible chips will have improved machine-learning and security capabilities.…

Explosions in the mist SpaceX continued its rich tradition of destroying Starship prototypes with SN11 succumbing to an explosive end during a high-altitude flight test.…

Team is 'SUPER EXCITED' but will devs welcome another Windows-only, incompatible framework? Microsoft has released an early version of Project Reunion with support for production use – provided developers do not target Universal Windows Platform (UWP).…

ThousandEyes agent to run on switches that don't do Docker, hook into AppDynamics to monitor all the things Cisco has baked network monitoring and visibility tools it bought along with ThousandEyes into its Catalyst 9300 and 9400 switches, and integrated ThousandEyes with its AppDynamics application performance monitoring line.…

New CloudLinux-sponsored distribution hits GA ahead of Rocky Linux The AlmaLinux project, sponsored by CloudLinux, has issued its first stable release along with details of a new open-source foundation set up to manage the project.…

A small victory, but campaigners say they will be keeping a close eye The UK government has caved at the threat of a judicial review into its £23m contract with controversial US AI firm Palantir in setting up the NHS COVID-19 datastore.…

Two ingredients that don't really go together. Like, er, AI and Ethics? RoTM Following Microsoft's 2019 foray into whisky-making, Google has got into the AI-infused consumables game with the frankly horrific-sounding Marmite and Maltesers® cake.…

The Harris Federation learns infosec lessons the hard way The Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity responsible for running 50 primary and secondary academies in London and Essex, has become the latest UK education body to fall victim to ransomware.…

C-suites need a kick up the proverbial, says Lindy Cameron in first speech So-called cyber-attack insurance "cannot be a substitute for better basic cybersecurity," the National Cyber Security Centre's chief exec has said in her first major speech since taking office.…

Developers liked WPF but Microsoft neglected it. Avalonia is a possible solution Interview Avalonia, a cross-platform framework for desktop applications, has built up a considerable user community but is it a viable alternative to Microsoft's official solutions?…

Microsoft's finest takes a break in the US retail space Bork!Bork!Bork! The column that will not die returns with a bork guaranteed to send shivers down even the most hardened IT pro's spine – not only a sad-looking Windows, but a dread sticky note stuck to the screen.…

No prior experience of working with the intelligence community? 'Knowledge of the technological landscape' will do The UK's Home Office is on the hunt for a supplier to help support applications running on its counter-terrorism data network to fulfil a contract that could be worth up to £32m.…

Tune in and find out more from F5 Networks Webcast A web application firewall (WAF) is your first line of defence when it comes to protecting your organization from an array of potential threats.…

Applicants sought from Afghanistan to Vietnam – even Moscow and Myanmar – with the rest of world allowed later this year Apple has announced an expansion of its Independent Repair Provider program, the scheme that provides authorised third-party companies to repair out-of-warranty iThings.…

Boston Dynamics: From Terminator to Amazon worker replacement Analysis Those fearing a takeover of the human race by robots may have failed to adequately account for the drudgery of modern capitalism.…

Simulated Bifurcation Machine burns algorithms onto FPGAs, pops 'em into a vanilla workstation, and offers 10x performance for some problems Toshiba has brought its kind-of-quantum computers out of the clouds and onto Japanese desktops.…

Zuck tired of US gov blocking his cables to Hong Kong, goes another route Facebook has announced that it will build two new subsea cables to connect North America with Indonesia and Singapore. The two cables, named Echo and Bifrost, will be the first transpacific cables through the Java Sea.…

Nice economy you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if growth slowed Big Tech’s Asian lobby group, The Asia Internet Coalition, has issued a statement calling for Vietnam to consult on the impact of its proposed tax laws and then rewrite them.…

Rules are tight, but also leave plenty to the imagination China has set new rules that spell out data that local app-makers can collect and store, but won't sanction apps that go beyond the permitted data collection regime.…

Session monitoring scripts prompt dozens of privacy lawsuits against Big Biz, mainly in California and Florida Intel is among the growing list of companies being sued for allegedly violating American wiretapping laws by running third-party code to track interactions, such as keystrokes, click events, and cursor movements, on its website.…

Another day, another data nightmare Royal Dutch Shell is the latest corporation to be infected by the Clop ransomware. The criminals behind the malware have siphoned internal documents from the oil giant, and publicly leaked some of the data – notably a selection of workers' passport and visa scans – to chivy the corporation along to pay the ransom.…

Goodbye darkness, my old friend Constellations of satellites and chunks of space debris orbiting Earth and reflecting sunlight may have lightened our night skies by more than 10 per cent, scientists say. We're also told the light pollution is increasing.…

'Uber of private investigators' failed to live up to its name A tech CEO who lied to investors to get funding and then blew millions of it on maintaining a luxury lifestyle, which included private jets and top seats at sporting events, has been sentenced to just over eight years in prison.…

If the license doesn't fit, you must commit The maintainers of Rails, a Ruby-based framework for making web apps, have released three new versions to resolve a software licensing conflict that surfaced last week.…

Are you local? Catastrophically local? The widely used npm library netmask has a networking vulnerability arising from how it parses IP addresses with a leading zero, leaving an estimated 278 million projects at risk.…

Gamma-ray burst technique could figure out how commonplace these tricksy customers are Scientists have shown that explosions from the early universe might help in solving black holes' middle sibling problem.…

Why, you ask? Why not? With enough love (and isopropyl alcohol), you can make even the oldest computer feel like it came straight from the factory. But when the restoration is done, vintage computing restorers are left with a difficult question: What next?…

Estimate of damaged fab equipment revised upwards by 54% Japanese automotive chipmaker Renesas has said the blaze at its factory in Japan earlier this month may be worse than expected, with 17 fabrication machines affected rather than the 11 originally indicated.…

Cops should be exempted from regulatory safeguards, says lawyer The UK's Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws is again advising the removal of legal safeguards around a controversial law that allows people to be jailed if they refuse police demands for forced decryption of their devices.…

Plus: Amazon delivery drivers forced to consent to being surveilled by AI In Brief The backlash Google faces over ousting two female co-lead researchers at its Ethical AI unit has continued as another of their peers turned away Mountain View's money.…

Freeeedommm! (for your data) Alex Salmond's Alba Party has got off to a rocky start after a coding error on its website appeared to expose the names of those signed up.…

Backdoor quickly spotted and reverted The main code repository for PHP, which powers nearly 80 per cent of the internet, was breached to add malicious code and is now being moved to GitHub as a precaution.…

So that's why they're not named alongside Lynch and Hussain Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise settled its potential lawsuit against Autonomy auditors Deloitte for $45m in 2016, The Register can reveal – shedding new light on how the $5bn lawsuit against former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and ex-CFO Sushovan Hussain came about.…

Plus: Did Google expose a Western hacking op? Who cares? You're safer In brief Apple has issued critical security patches for all supported phones, fondleslabs, and watches after being alerted to multiple possible intrusions by Google.…

It's still totally bananas, though Column One of the many joys of blockchain is that it generates even more heat online than a Chinese Bitcoin mine pumps into the atmosphere. This month's posterchild is the NFT, the Non-Fungible Token, which is seen by all the right-thinking fold as practically the fundamental particle of crypto-scam physics.…

Hmmm. Shared services... that always works out really well, right? The UK’s Ministry of Justice is ditching a £100m ERP procurement as it strives to get in step with a new Cabinet Office shared service strategy for enterprise applications.…

Quite a few have come back online, but it takes seven hours to restore each rack French cloud operator OVH has revealed how it is cleaning every server it thinks can be returned to service in its fire-affected Strasbourg data centres.…

The house always wins. Even in the Casino back office Who, Me? The weekend has waddled into the distance and Monday is with us once more. Join us for another episode in our Who, Me? series where a reader finds himself with a plum contract and no other bidders. What could go wrong? What indeed.…

Which is why you need to apply a little big data Webcast No matter what size your organisation is, when it comes to cybersecurity, your attack surface is bigger than ever.…

And not just the obvious ones about containers The ship that’s blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week has shifted.…

Led by proper CompSci boffin who wants to create a software development industry capable of earning billions Taiwanese officials have announced plans to create a new Ministry of Digital Development.…

Death of Flash means vAdmins still have work to do to stay alive even with relaxed new deadline VMware has extended support for vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.5 by a year, and says it needs to do so because customers are struggling to upgrade while their teams work from home/live in their offices.…

Driver and networking changes keep coming and io_uring is being noisy Linus Torvalds has expressed concern that work on 5.12 of the Linux kernel is moving at an uncomfortably slow pace.…