The Register

Perpetual licence still offered, but with downgraded features Mac-only drawing application Sketch is being repositioned as "a fully integrated platform for design and collaboration," though non-subscription users now have downgraded licences.…

Foundation is 'passive investor' alongside private equity firm Dediq, firm says SAP chairman Hasso Plattner's charitable foundation has said it invested in a joint venture between private equity firm Dediq and SAP designed to develop technology for the financial services market.…

Well, the telco always said it's good to talk: Negotiations over jobs, pay, grading, and more set for this month Exclusive BT has halted all compulsory redundancies on the eve of a national ballot for strike action across the group, the telco and union CWU today confirmed. It follows 15 days of strikes waged by a small band of engineers in Openreach.…

Company continues to make losses without troubling space Virgin Galactic reckons it has dealt with an electromagnetic interference (EMI) problem that aborted a recent test flight just as another technical gremlin rears its head.…

So says Foreign Secretary in lacklustre speech to NCSC faithful CyberUK 21 Britain is to spend £22m on training African and Indo-Pacific nations to stave off cyber influences from "authoritarian regimes", foreign secretary Dominic Raab said today.…

Q1 revenue up, losses widen, boss says new Elastic Engineering cloud product selling fast There are two things that typically make Wall Street investment analysts go weak at the knees when it comes to quarterly conference calls with tech execs: expanding cloud services and gory details of cost pruning.…

Creator deletes posts alleging 'mismanagement' to blame The open-source Babel JavaScript compiler project is running out of money with big sponsors having pulled out, according to its core team. And its creator yesterday threw a spanner into the works by claiming on Twitter that he believed funds were "misallocated."…

Broadcom unveils an HBA to complete the set of seventh-gen kit Fibre Channel hasn't been exciting since storage area networks were young, hot, and pretty. But the protocol is still around, still has devotees, and just got an upgrade.…

Another satellite constellation prepares for launch, this one aimed at next-gen connectivity for IoT devices 5G IoT operator OQ Technology has inked a deal with satellite firm NanoAvionics to build what OQ boss Omar Qaise described as a "flying cell tower in orbit."…

Amazon's cloud factory hits £300m under 'One Government' agreement NHS Education for Scotland has awarded AWS a £15m contract to host its National Digital Platform, an architecture to share data across the nation's health service.…

And make publishing personal data as an act of protest illegal into the bargain Hong Kong’s Legislative Bureau has proposed amendments to local laws that strengthen penalties for doxxing, and empower its Privacy Commissioner to request content removal from platforms and legally enforce compliance.…

Preserving privacy is hard. I know because when I tried, I quickly learned not to play with weapons Column Nearly a decade ago I decided to try my hand as a cryptographer. It went about as well as you might expect. I’d gotten the crazy idea to write a tool that would encrypt Twitter’s direct messages - sent in the clear - so that your private communications would truly be private, visible to no one, including Twitter.…

Big Blue hopes to create the ImageNet of training resources for AI-powered programming tools Think IBM has assembled a massive silo of source code for teaching machine-learning programs about programming.…

India and Singapore are first destinations, teams with Western Union and Wise to target 200 nations The verb “To Google” may soon have new meaning, as the ads-and-search giant has added the ability to “Google” money across borders with its Pay app.…

Online lending apps and more given fifteen days to ‘rectify’ behaviour China’s Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission has named 84 apps it says breach local privacy laws and given their developers 15 days to “rectify” their code.…

No prizes for guessing why, as Colonial Pipeline outage stretches patience and looks like lasting a week South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Energy and Infrastructure has ordered a review of the cybersecurity preparedness of the nation’s energy infrastructure.…

It’s not DNS. There is no way it’s DNS. It was DNS Salesforce is digging itself out of a multi-hour outage right now that it has blamed on a DNS issue.…

Dozen design, implementation blunders date back 24 years A dozen Wi-Fi design and implementation flaws make it possible for miscreants to steal transmitted data and bypass firewalls to attack devices on home networks, according to security researcher Mathy Vanhoef.…

Here's an unofficial fix for those who need their messages now Microsoft says its Outlook desktop client is suffering serious “email visibility issues” today, with a fix yet to be rolled out. Users have reported either whole emails missing, chunks of data gone, or just seeing the first line of messages.…

Zuck gets tough just as Germany blocks privacy policy roll-out WhatsApp users who refuse to accept its new privacy policy will slowly but surely be cut off from the chat app, the social network has confirmed.…

'This can happen to anybody. There's always learning in any crisis. And we were no exception' CyberUK 21 SolarWinds’ chief exec has described the 18,000 customers who downloaded backdoored versions of its Orion software as a “very small” number while giving a speech to an infosec event.…

Plus: Grab your updates for Adobe, SAP, Android, Intel Patch Tuesday Microsoft's May Patch Tuesday brought a lighter-than-usual load of 55 fixes for 32 of the Windows giant's applications and services, which is about half what was served up in April.…

AI here, there and everywhere Think IBM's latest attempt at relevance in the cloud world continued at its Think conference by giving its Cloud Pak for Data another beating with the AI stick and unleashing Watson on IT pros.…

Sorry, there's no nuclear missile inbound. You have to go to work Birds chirping, the gentle burbling of coffee brewing – these are the sounds we typically associate with the dawn hours.…

Priti Patel doesn't say a word about encryption, though CyberUK 21 Priti Patel has promised a government review of the UK's 30-year-old Computer Misuse Act "this year" as well as condemning companies that buy off ransomware criminals.…

Big Brother Watch warns app contains too much sensitive medical information Folks in England can from next week use the NHS App to confer their vaccination status, in the face of warnings that the technology could lead to identifiable medical information being exposed.…

You can't buy this kind of service. No, literally BT-owned infrastructure provider Openreach has confirmed plans to stop sales of copper-based phone and broadband services in 77 exchange locations across the UK, affecting roughly 700,000 premises.…

The data is in: most users do not opt in to third-party tracking Mobile app analytics company Flurry is measuring how many users of iOS 14.5 are opting in to allow apps to request to track them - and so far only 15 per cent worldwide have done so.…

Spent money in the walled garden since October 2015? The day ends with "y" so Apple is facing fresh legal scrutiny of its App Store policies. This time the battleground is the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal, where a potential collective action is being launched on behalf of circa 20 million users over claims Apple's 30 per cent "tax" is excessive and unjustified.…

Probable cause of accident and fire still under investigation The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has published a preliminary report into last month's fatal crash involving a 2019 Tesla Model S in Texas.…

11th-gen Core H has nice new touches, but pitch is usual 'a new PC will be faster and smaller and lighter than an old PC' promise Intel is talking up a new generation of laptop and mobile workstation CPUs that it says will deliver modest performance gains and lighten laptops for power users.…

What is Geordie for bork? Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a blessed respite for Microsoft's wares today as it appears that it is Java's turn to disgrace itself on platform 1 of Newcastle upon Tyne's Central Station.…

Gazing into the void for at least a few more years yet Nearly nine years after leaving the solar system, and decades beyond its original mission, Voyager 1 is still gathering valuable data, providing plasma readings to continuously sample the density of the interstellar medium.…

Patch your devi... oh, hang on a sec A computer science professor from Sweden has discovered an arbitrary code execution vuln in the Universal Turing Machine, one of the earliest computer designs in history – though he admits it has "no real-world implications".…

Launches open tender for new £60m deal Northern Ireland Libraries is launching a formal procurement of a £60m IT contract to replace incumbent supplier Fujitsu following a two-year delay costing taxpayers some £12m.…

Someone at West Midlands Trains approved nasty cybersecurity drill UK rail operator West Midlands Trains sent an email to 2,500 employees to thank them for hard work during COVID and promised a one-time bonus as a reward, but that lovely news turned out to be phishing training. Needless to say, it did not go over well.…

This early-stage project is not a fork, Redmond insists Microsoft on Monday launched an open source project to make a Linux kernel tool known as eBPF, short for Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, work on Windows.…

Suggests terabyte-packing servers that move data at astounding speed aren’t far off Samsung has shown off a picture of what it says is the first DDR5 DRAM-based memory module that can talk the language of Compute Express Link (CXL).…

And just like that, the Digital Yuan has its route into the mainstream Alibaba’s controversial financial services arm, the Ant Group, has been welcomed into trials of China’s digital currency.…

No breakthroughs left to make in electronics, says CEO as company eyes off IPO-by-SPAC Vietnam's largest industry conglomerate, Vingroup, has announced it will no longer develop televisions and smartphones under its VinSmart brand and instead redirect resources toward its electric vehicle unit, VinFast.…

Another auto-exploit saw rPi push Telegram messages over CAN bus to brick a car Black Hat Asia Researchers have used the Black Hat Asia conference to demonstrate the awesome power of the Raspberry Pi as a car-p0wning platform.…

But won’t reveal who it wants banned from social media over less obvious disinformation As COVID-19 continues to ravage India, the nation’s government has told it populace that 5G signals have nothing to do with the spread of the virus – if only because no 5G networks operate in India.…

Blames spam filters for brownout, warns fix could be 'disruptive' Trend Micro’s hosted email security product is experiencing a global brownout.…

Internet souk said it only approved 6% of new sellers Amazon's latest brand protection report states it destroyed more than two million pieces of counterfeit goods last year and denied most would-be sellers from setting up shop in its online souk.…

Boffins will have to wait until September 2023 to get their hands on the goodies OSIRIS-REx, the spacecraft carrying NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample, has started its two-year journey back to Earth, the space agency confirmed on Monday.…

Freely available to use, from the hardware schematics to RISC-V cores on an FPGA, to the firmware on top The OpenPOWER Foundation, formed to promote IBM's open-source POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), on Monday said it is putting together a new working group to develop LibreBMC, claimed to be the first baseboard management controller (BMC) designed with open source software and hardware.…

But we heard the message loud and clear – it's pretty much the standard runtime platform now Kubecon A session on how to hack into a Kubernetes cluster was among the highlights of a Kubecon where the main events were generally bland and corporate affairs, perhaps indicative of the technology now being a de facto infrastructure standard among enterprises.…

Plus: Google boffin who resigned over AI ethics controversy, joins Apple In Brief What do you know? The US Postal Service uses AI technology and have GPU servers running computer vision algorithms to track items being delivered across the country.…

Really, three years should be the bare minimum at this point Analysis Almost seven months after the brand splashed down in the UK market, mobile maker Vivo is making some bold promises about the longevity of its upcoming phones.…

5.10 lifespan also extended to six years, up from two Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for Linux 5.13 with the first release candidate, which includes initial support for Apple's M1 processor along with "a fair amount of stuff, all over the place."…