The Register

Titbit for domestic consumption looks darn silly from abroad Opinion The US government might have subtly signalled that it likely won't hack Russia this month – by telling credulous journalists it has a "clandestine" plan to, er, launch an attack against its rival before April.…

For those who find wearing the things so damn difficult Microsoft has added mask detection, in preview form, to Azure Cognitive Services.…

Cryptographic software assurance backed by Google, Red Hat, Purdue U The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.…

Also: SaaS provider completes acquisition of employee feedback platform Peakon The northeastern US state of Maine is threatening to cancel a contract with enterprise SaaS provider Workday and request a $21m refund.…

Sales of €950m in shares already agreed as float day looms The Vodafone Group told the market today it hopes to raise between €2bn and €2.8bn from the planned IPO of its infrastructure business, Vantage Towers.…

They're 'much too big' says Musk Elon Musk's satellite internet constellation biz, Starlink, wants to sell its end-user station devices and services for use in vehicles, judging by a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).…

Servers breached but no data 'compromised', claims org The European Banking Authority (EBA) has confirmed it is another victim on the list of organisations affected by vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange.…

As new best bud NVIDIA releases AI on-ramp bundle that only runs with vSphere VMware has unconverged hyperconverged infrastructure with a new cut of its vSAN virtual storage array.…

Here's what you could have won A bumpy 2020 has hit SAP boss Christian Klein in the pocket, wiping millions of euros from his pay packet.…

And for my next trick... an M1 Macintosh Color Classic? The iMac G5 was once a formidable piece of computer hardware. Improbably thin for the time, it packed a 64-bit Motorola PowerPC 970 processor, and had room for a relatively extravagant 2GB RAM.…

The votes have been cast and counted... and it's a landslide Register debate Last week, we argued over whether or not the media, including El Reg, should stop using the word hacker as a pejorative.…

But still some way to go before standards-based tech can match mainstream products Last year Vodafone bet big on OpenRAN, announcing it would shift a huge portion of its tower estate to the standards-based tech. Now Andrew Dona, the telco's director of network and development, has shed some light on how this will work.…

Takes a 'different approach' to YouTube's Vitess to munch complex transactions in microseconds Swedish startup Logical Clocks is launching a new key-value database as a managed service, based on the MySQL derivative MySQL NDB Cluster.…

Quasiparticle eggheads were 'caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment' A paper published in Nature two years ago and spearheaded by a Microsoft scientist has been retracted after it emerged that the data presented simply didn't add up.…

Other fun bits: An 'asteroid patrol', brain:computer fusion, DNA storage, enhanced privacy laws China has put quantum communications networks and a brain:machine interface on its to-do list in plans unveiled at its annual "Two Sessions" parliamentary sittings.…

Is Spain really ready for 50,000 people at one venue? Sounds like a super spreader event ready to happen Mobile World Congress appears determined to run its annual Barcelona super-conference as an in-person event this year, mid-pandemic, posting a safety plan online on Monday.…

Don’t panic: Fewer than 0.001% of sessions compromised through flaw that couldn’t be maliciously triggered If you visit GitHub today you’ll be asked to authenticate anew because the code collaboration locker has squished a bug that sometimes “misrouted a user’s session to the browser of another authenticated user, giving them the valid and authenticated session cookie for another user.”…

Take that, rootkits and other low-level nasties - if they take a crack at fresh VMs, on certain instance types under a handful of OSes Microsoft has revealed that its Azure IaaS platform now offers free a virtual trusted platform module.…

Service options decline starting next year... so there may be a Nexus 9K switch in your future Cisco has in recent days issued a blizzard of end-of-life and end-of-sale announcement for switches in its Nexus 3000 and Nexus 7000 ranges.…

Plus: Chrome also patched, Microsoft and Intel team up for homomorphic encryption, and more In brief Apple on Monday released security patches for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and Safari to fix up a vulnerability that can be exploited by malicious web pages to run malware on victims' computers and gadgets.…

'This is going to be a lot of work ... a reasonable set of mitigation primitives exists today, ready and waiting for use' After the disclosure of the 2018 Spectre family of vulnerabilities in modern microprocessor chips, hardware vendor and operating system makers scrambled to reduce the impact of data-leaking side-channel attacks designed to exploit the way chips try to predict future instructions.…

That's the people who own Bethesda, Doom, Fallout, etc The European Commission and the US Securities and Exchange Commission have approved Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax, a US video game holding biz behind top titles like Doom and Fallout, in a deal worth a whopping $7.5bn.…

While its namesake founder is indicted for fraud and money laundering McAfee will sell off its enterprise business to private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) for $4bn in cash, the venerable security biz announced on Monday.…

And here's us thinking 640KB was enough for anyone South Korea's SK Hynix has started mass production of its first 18GB LPDDR5 memory chip.…

High price and poor upgradability made this an unattractive alternative to the 2019 Mac Pro The iMac Pro is dead. Apple has stopped allowing prospective customers to create their own custom configurations of the premium all-in-one box.…

Buy one enterprise software division, get one sueball absolutely free Micro Focus International has told the London Stock Exchange it intends to appeal judgments resulting from a verdict of a patent infringement against it in the US.…

No obvious replacement yet either Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to customer feedback by, er, shutting down some of its UserVoice forums.…

Paging Mr Heath Robinson A Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 user has solved the premium hardware's heating issues with the aid of elastic bands, a USB fan, and $50 handed over to Amazon.…

Plus: AI Index 2021 report takeaways, Chocolate Factory banished from top ethics conference, and more In brief US government should avoid hastily banning AI-powered autonomous weapons and instead step up its efforts in developing such systems to keep up with foreign enemies, according to the National Security Commission on AI.…

Ten letters, starts with R, ends with E, three syllables The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland is fending off "an ongoing cyber incident" that has shut down its campuses.…

Metropolitan police hand keys to French outsourcer Capgemini has won a £600m IT infrastructure deal from the UK's Metropolitan Police to run a service desk, data centres, and services management including the integration of other suppliers.…

You're naming yourself wrong? An iCloud customer says she spent more than six hours on the phone to Apple after being locked out of the service because her name is apparently incompatible with the application code.…

Plus: McAfee's in serious trouble over claimed cryptocurrency scam In brief Another form of malware installed in servers backdoored in the SolarWinds' Orion fiasco has been spotted in the wild.…

IT pros from orgs large and small tell The Reg the tech delivered, mostly, but couriers and home Wi-Fi suddenly became your problem Covid Logfile Brianna Haley was given one day to be ready to roll out Zoom for 13,000 users at over 1,000 sites.…

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (as Windows crashes again) BORK!BORK!BORK! Getting astronauts to the Moon or Mars is the least of NASA's problems. Persuading Microsoft Windows not to fall over along the way is apparently a far greater challenge.…

Time to fix those legacy evils, though.... right? Column It is the monster which corrupts all it touches. It is an energy-sucking vampire that thrives on the pain it promotes. It cannot be killed, but grows afresh as each manifestation outdoes the last in awfulness and horror. It is Microsoft Exchange and its drooling minion, Outlook.…

Leads Works Ltd and Valca Vehicle and Life Cover Agency tried to exploit household finance fears in lockdown, says data watchdog Two businesses that dispatched more than 2.6 million nuisance text messages seeking to exploit lower household incomes during Britain’s first lockdown are nursing a combined financial penalty of £330,000 from the UK’s data watchdog.…

Let us tell you a tale of the Mailman's Apprentice Who, Me? The weekend is over and Monday is here. Celebrate your IT prowess with another there-but-for-the-grace confession from the Who, Me? archives.…

Perseverance takes first drive around landing spot named in honor of seminal sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler NASA’s Perseverance rover trekked across Mars for the first time last Thursday, March 4, 2021.…

Without Honor, or 5G silicon, there can be no victory Oppo has become China’s top smartphone brand for the first time, according to analyst house Counterpoint.…

Don't just patch, check for p0wnage, says top natsec team The Biden administration has urged users of Microsoft's Exchange mail and messaging server to ensure they have not fallen victim to the recently-detected "Hafnium" attack on Exchange Server that Microsoft says originated in China.…

Will go live in 2022 and ‘effectively double’ capacity in the Middle Kingdom Microsoft has revealed it plans to open a fifth Azure region in China.…

Side-channel ring race 'hard to mitigate with existing defenses' Chip-busting boffins in America have devised yet another way to filch sensitive data by exploiting Intel's processor design choices.…

‘Subtle and very nasty bug’ meant 5.12 rc1 could trash entire filesystems Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has rushed out a new release candidate of Linux 5.12 after the first in the new series was found to include a ‘subtle and very nasty bug’ that was so serious he marked rc1 as unsuitable for use.…

Proof-of-concept SEER taught over eight days using 512 GPUs Facebook has trained its most advanced semi-supervised computer vision system yet on a dataset of a billion public images taken from Instagram, its other social network.…

Trick future robot overlords by scribbling 'superuser' on your forehead OpenAI researchers believe they have discovered a shockingly easy way to hoodwink their object-recognition software, and it requires just pen and paper to carry out.…

'That is not the world we want, nor the one users deserve' With the arrival of Google Chrome v89 on Tuesday, Google is preparing to test a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that it hopes will replace increasingly shunned, privacy-denying third-party cookies.…

Why are cellular networks so worried about batt life during lockdown? US telco Verizon recently splashed $45bn on 5G spectrum and then advised its customers to use LTE to save device battery life. Not to be outdone, rival carrier T-Mobile is recommending battery-anxious punters use 2G instead of the latest-and-greatest in cellular connectivity.…

SaaS pusher says it has locked up social media account after 'unauthorised access' Near ubiquitous SaaS CRM pusher Salesforce got a rude awakening this week when its carefully curated image of a business addressing racial equality was shattered by its clearly hacked LinkedIn page.…

Deep sea submersible may help humans explore deepest oceans Researchers in China have developed flexible submersible robots that experts say might one day help humans reveal the secrets to unexplored depths of the Earth's vast oceans.…