The Register

A few final tests then it's bags packed for French Guiana – and about time too ESA, CSA and NASA's James Webb Telescope opened its giant primary mirror one last time on Earth ahead of being packed up for long awaited launch later this year.…

Read my blips Video A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface.…

They are personal data, you know. Wait – you did know that, right? Exclusive Manchester City Council exposed online the number plates of more than 60,000 cars slapped with parking tickets, breaking data protection laws as it did so.…

'More data, more breadth, more depth... it's the whole f&*king deal' Updated The NHS is preparing for the "biggest data grab" in the history of the service, giving patients little information or warning about the planned transfer of medical records from GP surgeries in England to a central store for research purposes – and with no prospect of the data being deleted.…

Also: Why Rust in Android will use the Soong build system, not Cargo The Rust 2021 Edition Working Group has scheduled the new version for release in October, with what it says are small changes that amount to a significant improvement.…

'My Number' identifier to become central to myriad government services if the plan works Japan has passed laws that will allow it to create a new Agency to lead a national digital transformation effort.…

HTML and CSS? What is this, 2003? Analysis Over the next few months, Google plans to change the way its online word processor Docs renders its pages in web browsers, and collateral damage is expected.…

Says picking a replacement is your next step. Seriously, that’s Redmond's first piece of advice. Eventually it recommends Quorum Microsoft has announced the imminent death of its Azure Blockchain service.…

It’s faulty, struggling to scale, lacks a dedicated privacy policy As India struggles to cope with its savage second wave of COVID-19 infections, its government is being criticised for an API that critics say is creating inequities in the nation’s vaccination program.…

CEO wakes up to BTC's connection to coal, holds onto the stash until mining becomes more eco friendly Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced his electric car maker will stop accepting Bitcoin payments for its vehicles.…

Get ready for SANS Institute's biggest ever Asia-Pacific training event Promo Whatever your plans for the third quarter of 2021, an emerging security vulnerability or a network security breach has the potential to throw them into disarray. Unless, of course, you’ve made the effort to hone your existing skills or expand your knowledge into new areas ahead of time.…

If only there was a business to consult about chip shortages? Ah, that's right. Huawei, awks America's communications watchdog has issued a public request for comments from telco providers and suppliers to see how they're faring amid the ongoing chip crunch.…

Biz to be removed from naughty list following out-of-court settlement The Pentagon has agreed it will no longer label Xiaomi a Communist Chinese military company after the smartphone maker sued Uncle Sam to overturn the designation.…

Chip in if you want more chips, analyst house suggests Gartner indicated today the ongoing chip shortages are likely to persist until the second quarter of 2022 as production simply can't keep pace with orders.…

You gotta work hard for those three-bytes-a-second transfers, though Apple's Find My network, used to locate iOS and macOS devices – and more recently AirTags and other kit – also turns out to be a potential espionage tool.…

vRangarajan vRaghuram is vBoss after vMotion to vTop VMware has announced a new CEO and a major shakeup in its management team following the departure of Pat Gelsinger to head up Intel.…

Unlimited picture-hosting service suddenly gets very limited Amazon has confirmed people are unable to upload files to its Photos storage service, and believes it will be fixed sometime today.…

Fortnite maker wheels out economist to explain how Apple works The ongoing federal court trial in California between Apple and Epic Games has provided some unprecedented levels of insight into the iOS platform and iPhone. But most of all, it has confirmed things we already knew.…

The Wicker man: US Commerce Committee senator questions Toshiba, Seagate and WD Updated US Commerce Committee Senator Roger Wicker is on a mission to find out if HDD makers stateside are shipping drives to Huawei, and has fired off questions to Seagate, Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) and Western Digital.…

Join us online and learn about modern extortionware and how to frustrate it Webcast It’s shocking how blasé ransomware-toting criminals can be about freezing the operations of any organisation they can insinuate themselves into, including critical utilities or medical facilities.…

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.…