The Register

Special Administrative Region recorded plunge in ransomware attacks Criminals tried to exploit Hong Kong residents' COVID-related anxiety, according to new security data released yesterday by the Special Administrative Region's secretary for innovation and technology Alfred Sit.…

Government lashes WhatsApp, too, in free speech vs sovereignty debate Twitter has taken issue with India’s Digital Media Ethics Code – and India’s government has responded with a forcefully worded press release that accuses the micro-blogging site of defying and defaming the nation.…

Three years to go and space agency is way behind schedule The chances of NASA sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024 is looking less and less likely, according to a report this month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).…

Mozilla says Google's content-filter API doesn't meet developer needs, others agree Firefox maker Mozilla on Thursday said it plans to mostly adopt Manifest v3, a controversial revision of the Chrome browser extension framework that Google undertook to address the glaring security problems in the browser.…

We need to solve underlying problems, not increase complexity with point fixes Systems Approach I’ve been interested in architecture – of the physical building variety, as distinct from computer or network architecture – for as long as I can remember. So I was pretty excited when I got to work in a Frank-Gehry-designed building at MIT in the late 2000s.…

Three weeks and counting for Cupertino to update Safari's engine A vulnerability in the open-source WebKit rendering engine used by Apple's Safari browser remains unfixed three weeks after a patch repaired the flaw in the WebKit source code.…

He remains fabulously wealthy, for now We all tightened our belts a little bit in 2020, not least the iconoclastic SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, who saw his annual remuneration cut by over half [PDF] during the turbulent year.…

Wonder no more if there’s an easier way Webcast It’s easy to think that moving to the cloud is a simple case of lifting and shifting your existing setup onto somebody else’s platform.…

But you can pull down your dev environment from Docker. Is it solving a problem that doesn't exist, though? DockerCon Virtual DockerCon kicked off today, at which the company introduced Docker Development Environments, calling them "the foundation of Docker's new collaborative team development experience."…

Perlmutter will help scientists study dark energy and more Nvidia on Thursday unveiled what it called the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer yet, a giant machine named Perlmutter for NERSC, aka the US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.…

Competition for EV makers heats up in Middle Kingdom, where Tesla is the foreigner Tesla has said it will build a data centre in China where it will house all info generated by local Tesla owners.…

Heads up guidance system since certified but plane maker still violated US airworthiness regs Boeing has paid the US Federal Aviation Administration $17m after fitting hundreds of 737 NG and Max airliners with heads-up guidance system sensors (HUGSS) that hadn’t been properly certified as safe for use.…

Close to half a billion pounds spent on 5G spectrum worth it for EE? Months after spending £452m on 5G spectrum, EE has again come out top in the 5G performance leader table, according to the latest report from network sniffers IHS Markit RootMetrics.…

The desk and chain awaits those extra 2,500 people... the lucky blighters SaaSy HR and finance vendor Workday says it's hiring 2,500 people to drill into a well of overdue projects as more organisations eye up a potential return to the place where dreams are made: the office.…

Is that a tuning Fork we hear? The saga of the Audacity takeover continued this week with the announcement of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) by the project's new owners.…

Nice try, but package management will never work as well on Windows as it does on Linux Microsoft has released Windows Package Manager 1.0, better known as winget, a command line tool for adding, removing and updating what is installed on the system.…

No sign of ransomware - or attacker's identity, so far A Fujitsu project management suite is causing red faces at the Japanese company’s HQ after “unauthorised access” resulted in data being stolen from government agencies, local reports say.…

Transition interrupted by 'hostile takeover' One of the bigger beasts of the Linux world, Ubuntu, has abruptly jumped ship to Libera Chat from the Freenode IRC network after what the Ubuntu Community Council described as a "hostile takeover" of its namespaces.…

Privacy groups claim images are stored 'indefinitely', even after deletion, in GDPR breach Updated Data rights groups have filed complaints in the UK, France, Austria, Greece and Italy against Clearview AI, claiming its scraped and searchable database of biometric profiles breaches both the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Faster Entity Framework, complete C++ 20 support in Visual Studio, but complications remain Build Microsoft has previewed Hot Reload for .NET development, enabling on-the-fly changes to source code that are applied to a running application. The company also set the date for the first production release of .NET 6: November 9.…

Hyperconverged upstart says subscription transition remains on track and emerging products booming Nutanix has claimed its homebrew AHV hypervisor now runs on 52 percent of nodes used by its customers.…

Former UK.gov spin doctor talks of mess in response to crisis The UK’s Health Secretary put plans to create the test and trace system to combat the spread of COVID-19 back by more than month by needlessly introducing his own targets, the Prime Minister's former advisor claims.…

One charger to rule them all … eventually, maybe The USB Promoter Group has announced the completion of USB Power Delivery Specification Revision 3.1.…

$18bn investment plan also calls for 160 million entertainment customers to become a billion Sony has detailed plans to expand its sensors business and make it more relevant to edge computing and the internet of things, while also outlining growth plans in gaming, anime, and electric cars.…

Demand for 'leccy also lifted by dry season that's seen more farmers pumping water Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has declared a four-month moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, a practice the government has encouraged in the past.…

Four of six current bit barn builds by cloud colossus ring the Indian Ocean Amazon Web Services has announced it’s close to bringing a full three Availability Zone region to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).…

It’s a pathfinder for Toyota’s planned self-driving moon buggy, and tiny compared to Optimus Prime Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will send a transforming robot to the Moon.…

Facebook-owned messaging service says – without irony – that people want companies to hold less personal information WhatsApp has sued India’s government in an attempt to strike down some provisions of the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code that requires messaging services to identify “the first originator” of information if called upon to do so by law enforcement authorities.…

M1RACLES flaw looks more embarrassing than dangerous Apple's Arm-based M1 chip, much ballyhooed for its performance, contains a design flaw that can be exploited to allow different processes to quietly communicate with one another, in violation of operating system security principles.…

Wow, we finally found a fan of XML Documents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office should be in .DOCX format starting from next year – and if you want to stick to PDFs, that will cost extra.…

'Our proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms may lead to unintentional bias and discrimination,' it told SEC Updated An insurance biz has retracted boasts of how it uses AI algorithms to study videos of customers for “non-verbal cues” that their claims are fraudulent. The marketing U-turn came after the ethics of this approach was called publicly and loudly into question.…

Gentoo and Raku call foul Updated Following the Freenode schism last week that saw most of the IRC network's volunteer staff leave to form rival network Libera Chat, Freenode on Tuesday commandeered hundreds of channels used by various open source software projects and fiddled with their permissions.…

'This is why we can't have nice things' A further indignity has been heaped upon Russia's Buran Space Shuttle as images surfaced showing at least one of the surviving Soviet-era spacecraft was defaced by a graffiti "artist".…

For Bezos, clearly the world is not enough The streaming wars have gone up a notch after Amazon confirmed its intent to acquire veteran filmmaker MGM for $8.45bn.…

Faster WebAssembly, and last stages of trial to test Trust Tokens Google has released Chrome 91, and although there's little new on the surface, there are key changes for developers including WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, a Gravity Sensor API, and read-only access to files on the clipboard.…

If only there were an AI to do what Microsoft's engineers don't seem to be able to As Microsoft's public-facing engineers were basking in the, er, glow of the company's Build event, those in the backrooms were scrambling to shore up the cloud giant's perennially wobbling services.…

Explosive Whitehall testimony also reveals former Faculty data scientist Ben Warner’s influence on decision making during national emergency Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, is said to have been instrumental in convincing the UK prime minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings to “hit the panic button and ditch the official plan” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020.…

Raiding the iPhone's parts bin: $$. Making sure users can't upgrade a desktop computer? Priceless Having ripped into Apple's new M1 iMac, the iFixit gang turned its attention to the device's keyboard and the all-important Touch ID sensor. Sensitive eyes may, however, wish to look away from the final repairability score.…

For now it's full send... but what will things look like when the smoke clears? It’s almost over. On Monday, Epic Games and Apple wrapped up their arguments in the high-stakes bench trial taking place in Oakland’s Federal Court.…

The CIO does not decide how soon you need to respond. 'The person who decides is the attacker' QCon Plus Automated testing and rapid deployment are critical to defending against vulnerabilities in open source software, said David Wheeler, director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation.…

What do I do for a living? I'm a marketing exec. Yeah, didn't think you'd have any questions Like ticket inspectors on a London bus, people who work for MI6 could be anyone, and are #secretlyjustlikeyou. We see no reason why our readers shouldn’t put themselves up for the job (just remember to tip us off securely here when you’re tasked with making Vista work “just one more year” on a dusty PC behind a red door at SIS HQ.)…

Unclear if 'space' is on the green, amber or red list Good news for wannabe Brit rocket operators: regulations have finally arrived before UK lawmakers aimed at allowing commercial operators to launch from local soil.…

Bug-hunting industry wants to know a bit more before doing that, though Businesses operating in the word of infosec have been urged to write to the Home Office and support a public interest defence being added to the Computer Misuse Act.…

Poorly defined business requirements, failure in documentation, independent report finds An independent review of a technology failure that led to the loss of 413,000 records of evidence from the UK’s Police National Computer (PNC) has found a lack of reviews and effective testing contributed to the debacle.…

Pumice-like stuff spotted by Japanese Hayabusa2 probe would float on water Asteroid Ryugu, the rock from which Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe brought home some samples, is home to highly porous boulders that might just have been the stuff of which planets were made.…

24 out of 26 tools vulnerable – with bonus JavaScript attack for Adobe A pair of techniques to surreptitiously alter the content of certified PDFs have been detailed by researchers in Germany.…

Drive looks to be an industrial model, so probably not a wider threat Cisco has named Micron as the supplier of solid-state disks that put themselves to sleep after 28,224 hours of operation.…

Sixth big outage in seven weeks, this time users were unable to access more than a dozen services IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.…

Hasn't said which brands have signed up, but is happy to have them make 2G and 3G kit for a decade Analysis Pakistan has announced it has secured 19 cellphone manufacturers willing to work on its soil, and that their efforts will improve device affordability and availability for locals and help the nation’s prospects as a tech exporter.…

Unauthenticated remote code execution possible thanks to vSphere Client bug VMware has revealed a critical bug that can be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in the very core of a virtualised system – vCenter Server.…