The Register

New laws needed to cut off incentive to crooks, argues Marcus Willett Increasing numbers of senior ex-GCHQ people have called for laws preventing businesses using cyber insurance to buy off ransomware attackers – with the money merely perpetuating the criminals' business model.…

All inventions should be demonstrated by a puppet doing a Tommy Cooper impression Something for the Weekend, Sir? If the future was a song, it would be a mashup.…

Duplo exercise provides vital insight into flawed human heuristic Scientists working on the psychology of problem solving may have hit upon why things always seem to get more complicated.…

Slated for inclusion in version 5.13, due about three months from now The Asahi Linux project, an effort to bring the Linux kernel to Apple’s M1 silicon, has merged its work and is on track to have it accepted in version 5.13 of the kernel.…

Before smartphones and LCD displays there were... green lights and red lights On Call There was a time before phones went wireless (and before Apple made sure we all carried a spare charge cable.) Take a trip back to those halcyon days with another entry in the pages of On Call.…

For compute and SD-WAN only, with plenty of details not yet in place Cisco has taken steps towards IT-as-a-service with a new “Plus” offering launched last week at Cisco Live.…

Safer than eyeballs or fingerprints, apparently India’s National Health Authority has commenced a pilot of facial recognition software as a means of identifying people as they queue in the nation's COVID-19 vaccine centres.…

It’s not The Register asking. The question comes from the official Australian government vaccine advice service (and the answer is ‘No’) Australia’s Department of Health has included the question “Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?” on its vaccine advice page.…

Government hopes to cash in on free trade agreement with B2B e-commerce Vietnam has launched its own e-commerce platform to help in-country businesses access European Union markets.…

Public Suffix List halts submissions from those seeking reprieve from iGiant's rules Marketers frantic to preserve their ad tracking capabilities in advance of Apple's iOS 14.5 privacy restrictions have overwhelmed a volunteer-maintained database used to oversee domain names and improve web security.…

Organizations added to Entity list The US government's Department of Commerce has added seven Chinese supercomputing companies to its Entity list, meaning American businesses need a special licence to work with them.…

'It’s an exciting prospect, but too early to say so definitively' professor tells us Physicists are this week giddy with excitement after a decade-long experiment looking at the inner-workings of a muon, a type of particle similar to the electron, hints that there may be another fundamental particle or force waiting to be discovered.…

Weight blunder led to wrong thrust used on takeoff, says UK watchdog A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.…

First Party Sets 'harmful to the web in its current form' A Google proposal which enables a web browser to treat a group of domains as one for privacy and security reasons has been opposed by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).…

Eskom disputes results of Big Red audit South African electric utility Eskom is set to appeal against a court decision that refused to force Oracle to support software used by the firm while a licensing and payment dispute is settled.…

Teases new ‘Hyperlaunch’ tech that will allow booting of whole VM fleets The Xen project has released another upgrade to its open source hypervisor.…

'Creepy' videos liken CMS giant to 'absent, drunken father' – but its market share is only rising Hosting company Wix is apparently running a bizarre campaign in an attempt to win over WordPress customers, causing WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to accuse Wix of "dirty tricks."…

You cannot kill what does not die Microsoft Paint has followed its long-lived chum Notepad into the howling wilderness of the Microsoft Store.…

'Allowing everyone to use their favourite IDE just makes a lot of sense' Gitpod, which provides remote environments for testing and debugging code, has shifted to Visual Studio Code from Eclipse Theia and is sponsoring a new event called DevX Conf, focused on the developer experience.…

Expensive bike, earpods can now be tracked from inside the walled garden An upgrade to Apple's Find My app has added support for devices from third-party manufacturers including gadget-tracking startup Chipolo, Belkin, and niche Dutch bike maker VanMoof.…

ValueLicensing also calls for action to 'restore and maintain competition and choice in the market' Updated Microsoft is being sued by UK reseller ValueLicensing for £270m in damages over claims of restrictive contractual practices and abuse of dominance.…

Euro cops take $1.65bn of blow off the streets after poring over messages The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn (£1.2bn, $1.65bn) from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers' messages.…

Company acted fairly and reasonably, rules judge Two men who quit software development firm Geeks Ltd failed to prove the company unlawfully withheld more than £2,000 from each of them to claw back its training costs, a tribunal has ruled.…

Though framework agreement 'cannot guarantee any business' The UK government has awarded 25 suppliers places on a framework deal for software design and implementation which could be worth up to £1.5bn.…

Reports of Cloud team's demise may be premature Chinese giant Huawei has conducted an internal re-organisation and The Register understands one result is its cloud and business computing groups have come together under new leadership.…

Take the heat out of your firewall deployment Webcast If you’ve got an application which faces the web, no one would dispute that you should probably have a web application firewall sitting in front of it.…

Terms and conditions 'not transparent or fair', High Court judge says The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that bookmaker Betfred must pay a Lincolnshire blackjack player £1.7m ($2.3m) in winnings that the betting site withheld because of a supposed software glitch.…

Wait... what? Strap in for the story of an Australian rare earth miner, partly owned by China, and worries about uranium dust The future of a China-backed rare-earth mining operation in southern Greenland has become uncertain following an election in which one of the winning party's key policies was opposition to an Australian mining company.…

Working to improve 'cyberwalls', but for now swift recovery is main strategy Video The highest-ranked officer in India’s armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation’s defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor.…

And ponders whether to let itself be bought by private equiteer CVC for $20bn Toshiba has received an offer to go private.…

Let's see what the regulators say Shareholders in AMD and Xilinx on Wednesday approved their massive proposed merger.…

The trick is to get buddies to decline low-paying jobs and check old code DoorDash drivers are encouraging one another to turn down food delivery jobs below a minimum threshold of $7 in an attempt to game the company’s in-app payment algorithm.…

Software nasty also 'persists after a factory reset' Android smartphones from Gigaset have been infected by malware direct from the manufacturer in what appears to be a supply-chain attack.…

Or the cost triples, which is one way to encourage concise programming AWS has declared Python support in its automated code review system CodeGuru production ready, as well as reducing the price by "up to 90 per cent."…

DeeperVision software coming to Azure Marketplace Microsoft has buddied up with Thales Alenia Space as it continues to set up ground stations in its data centres as part of its Azure Orbital push.…

Now sulky teens can TikTok while you marvel at boring nature stuff AccessParks, broadband provider to the US National Park Service, has signed up FreedomFi to deploy 5G networking over hundreds of sites using Magma open source 5G software.…

Crypto-mining jerks at least partly to blame Engineers around the world have been given a few hours off today, assuming they are using Microsoft's Azure DevOps Hosted Pools, as the platform buckled under a second wave of attacks.…

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 steps up to boost the coffers of NoSQL database biz Redis Labs, a commercial backer of the open-source key-value store database Redis, has secured $110m in funding, with backers including Softbank Vision Fund 2.…

Digital Markets Unit takes aim at giants' conduct with users and advertisers The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today launched its Digital Markets Unit (DMU) watchdog, which aims to regulate large online platforms like Google and Facebook, and create rules governing their conduct with users and advertisers.…

Emulation could save you from a complete meltdown Webcast No-one likes to have a silo of specialized but aging kit that requires special care and attention embedded in the heart of their computing infrastructure.…

Possible culprit: Ancient code running in production. A vuln 'would not be terribly surprising' says maintainer PHP maintainer Nikita Popov has posted an update concerning how the source code was compromised and malicious code inserted – blaming a user database leak rather than a problem with the server itself.…

Aww, did the big bad criminals get a little lockdown burnout too? Compromising every web-connected server and service you can find gets tiring after a while – and by the end of 2021 internet criminals targeting British companies were as fatigued as the rest of us, according to Bitdefender.…

Swarm programming with audio, video, and everyone editing at once – what could go wrong? JetBrains today pushed out Code With Me, formerly in preview, a plugin to support remote collaborative coding, as well as updates to its Java and Ruby IDEs.…

Not rewriting the whole OS, of course, but using the language going forward Google has signalled support for the Rust programming language in low-level system code to limit the prevalence of memory-based security vulnerabilities.…

Tracking ID placed on mobile device without informed consent, says campaign group Privacy group noyb, founded by rights advocate Max Schrems, has instigated a new complaint about Google's use of the Android Advertising ID (AAID) to track users.…

Yes, that Horizon branch office management IT system The UK Post Office has awarded Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension to run the Horizon IT system, faults in which led to dozens of subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted.…

Windows whinging? Take your mind off it with a sausage roll Bork!Bork!Bork! The Easter Bunny has been and left us with a basket of bork in the form of Microsoft's Windows 7 End of Support (EOS) fairy.…

Ball gazers don't see devices flying off shelves in 2022. Do they know something we don't? Analysts are forecasting worldwide IT spending to top $4 trillion in 2021 with devices leading the charge as organisations adapt to changing workforce demands.…

Expresses fondness for Biden administration infrastructure plan that would help parcels be delivered faster and boost broadband speeds Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said he supports increasing corporate tax rates after receiving criticism, yet again, from US President Joe Biden.…

We might just be witnessing a final state of these incredible space rocks Not only did a telescope on Earth spot, for the first time in history, an extinct comet on a close fly-by of our home world but scientists now reckon the space rock is covered in a substance similar to talcum powder.…