The Register

Minimal risk to MVNO or backhaul customers, probe finds The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has greenlit the proposed £31bn merger between Virgin Media and O2.…

Crown Commercial Service not wedded to plans until it has had a nice chat with suppliers The UK government is slapping £650m of taxpayer's money on the table to see what the ravenous tech market can offer in terms of mobile data and voice services.…

Is Gartner ahead of its time, or just bonkers? You. Be. The. Judge. Emerging from a niche in the database market, graph technology could actually be the thing to help us make sense of all the AI we're using to understand the world and our business in it, according to Gartner.…

Something Wasm this way comes QCON The BBC is researching a rebuild of its iPlayer catch-up service client in WebAssembly.…

Caters to those desperate for a physical keyboard but nothing about it is intuitive Review The Unihertz Titan Pocket – a small ruggedised Android 11 phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard – is a bit like when you ask your mum to buy you a Big Mac meal from McDonald's and she instead makes you one at home. Sure, it might be a great burger, but it's not the same.…

Altra Max revealed with smaller core counts than previously disclosed Ampere has revealed that it has developed its own “Arm-compliant” compute core that it will begin to manufacture in 2022 and hopes will eventually challenge Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s EPYC in the cloud.…

Expensive free fall experience plus 'astronaut' bragging rights Comment If you want to spend a few minutes in free fall and get a view few others have seen in person, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space tourism venture has set its price for just such an experience – $1.4m (£1m) or best offer.…

Tweaking QEMU to handle Apple’s XNU kernel was just the beginning BlackBerry’s Cylance unit claims it has virtualised macOS Big Sur for Apple’s own Arm-powered M1 silicon on an Intel x86 processor.…

June 15th 2022 is the happy day, but Windows Server and Win 10 long-term servicing channels aren't necessarily invited As of June 15, 2022, Microsoft will retire its Internet Explorer 11 desktop application for certain versions of Windows 10.…

Author is tired of world+dog assuming all task force docs are definitive, wrote a really weird one to make the point anyone can put anything in 'em Warren Kumari has had it with Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) drafts being held up as canonical statements that reveal the organisation's thinking or position, so has written his own hilarious draft to make the point that such documents are not normative.…

When we logged in for the status report, IBM was touting $25 gift vouchers to customers brave enough to review its cloud Are you hungry? And what do you think of IBM Cloud? The Register asks because Big Blue is offering US$25 gift vouchers – enough for a decent lunch – for customers that review its cloud.…

Telcos behaving badly? Lack of subsidies? Whatever the cause, nation wants it fixed to handle flood of video India is revisiting how to stimulate more investment in wired broadband.…

Trashing your desktop OS to save the iOS walled garden – it's a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off for 'em Apple's software supremo Craig Federighi on Wednesday condemned the security of macOS in an astonishing attempt to defend the walled garden that is the iOS App Store.…

Boxes stop working, admins may be locked out after 28,224 hours – and then every 1,008 hours after that Cisco has detailed a bug that causes 43 models in its Firepower security appliance range to stop passing traffic and perhaps also prevent logins to the devices’ management console.…

ISP denies wrongdoing, notes how difficult it is to get wires to rural areas ISP Frontier Communications was sued on Wednesday by the US Federal Trade Commission and law enforcement agencies six states for allegedly misrepresenting the speed of its internet service and for billing customers for service it didn't provide.…

And that's why we've let humans take back control Twitter said its AI-powered image-cropping algorithm is slightly biased in favor of White people and women after all, and has taken steps to ditch its reliance on the machine-learning code.…

Crown Prince and network boss Andrew Lee disputes claims made by those leaving the internet chat community Most of the volunteer staff of Freenode, an internet relay chat (IRC) network dating back to 1995, have resigned in protest over what they describe as a hostile takeover of the chat service.…

Honor, iQOO,OPPO, Realme, Xiaomi, Motorola onboard so far Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 778G 5G system-on-chip for next generation mid-to-high-end smartphones at its annual 5G Summit, which kicked off on Wednesday.…

Time to rethink your data protection strategy Webcast We don’t think anyone goes out of their way not to protect their data. But if you’ve embraced the cloud without taking a long hard look at your data protection and recovery policies, you could be doing just that.…

Fortnite maker 'has no factual, expert, or legal support for its theory' Apple is seeking to dismiss one of the fundamental claims in its long-running legal spat with Epic Games.…

'We feel bad about what happened' The sound of rumbling rubber could be heard today as Salesforce threw an engineer responsible for a change that knocked it offline under a passing bus.…

Google Cloud Run envy? AWS has introduced App Runner, with immediate general availability, for quick deployment of container-based applications.…

'Government's got to take responsibility for this,' rages opposition MP A statutory public inquiry will be held into the Post Office Horizon scandal, the UK government said today – and MPs want to know why Fujitsu has largely been out of the limelight in the case so far.…

Google Pixel phone not required Google has flicked "publish" on its Android 12 beta, with the bleeding-edge OS winging its way to enrolled devices.…

Probe's cams show red planet's surface while clips capture descent The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released images and video snapped during the landing process and checkout of its Zhurong Mars rover.…

New MagicBook 14 and 15 include 11th-gen Intel chippery, Xe graphics The Reg hasn't heard much from Honor since it broke away from parent company Huawei last November. Save for a fitness band here, or a China-exclusive phone there, it's been rather quiet on the Western Front.…

Being slow to patch just means you'll get pwned faster Attackers began scanning for vulnerabilities just five minutes after Microsoft announced there were four zero-days in Exchange Server, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Tweak only affects shared runners and new users signed up after 17 May In a bid to tackle cryptocurrency miners slurping free pipeline minutes, GitLab will expect users to provide a valid credit or debit card number to use shared runners on its platform.…

Multi-cloud for data is too complicated Analyst house Gartner has warned users not to mix and match data management products from the three largest cloud hyperscalers.…

The biggest challenge? 'Backwards compatibility of features that we might not even know we have' Interview Python creator Guido van Rossum last week introduced a project to make CPython, the official implementation, five times faster in four years. Now Mark Shannon – one of the three initial members of the project – has opened up about the why and the how.…

But beware the SLA: Just how much would an outage actually cost you? Microsoft has added another 9 to its availability guarantee for Azure Key Vault, taking the service to 99.99 per cent availability.…

Dude, where's my unlocked bootloader? It's a sad, pointless, and frankly wasteful cycle. You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another. The old phone goes into a drawer, where it sits until you eventually get around to recycling it.…

Tested.me Ltd broke the PECR, says Information Commissioner's Office The UK's data watchdog has fined a company £8,000 for sending 84,000 direct marketing emails without consent to people who had provided their personal data for contact tracing purposes.…

Hounds can sniff out SIM cards that a human might miss Australia's Federal Police (AFP) is getting more help from some very good boys with four paws, wagging tails, and the ability to sniff out tech equipment with their highly sensitive noses.…

'Constructive comment ranking model' can detect bias, promote respectful contributions, already zaps 20,000 posts a day Yahoo! Japan has flicked the switch on an AI-driven comment-moderation-as-a-service API.…

Guess they'll let anyone in here The trustworthiness of Google's Chrome Store was again called into question after an extension billing itself as Microsoft Authenticator was published by the software souk without the simplest of checks.…

Even World of Warcraft is getting on the RISC-y bandwagon Oracle has teased a further tie-up with Arm server processor aspirant Ampere Computing, perhaps around the latter's upcoming Altra Max silicon that comes in 10 variants packing up to 128 CPU cores and running at speeds between 2.4 and 3GHz.…

Intrusion believed to have entered through email New Zealand's Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has been hit with a strain of ransomware that took down most IT services Tuesday morning and drastically reduced services at six of its affiliate hospitals.…

Who could possibly have predicted that developers would shun two small ecosystems? Samsung and Google have decided to combine their wearable operating system efforts in what looks like an admission that developers don't care about either.…

Without harming the ad business, natch Google IO At Google IO 2021 on Tuesday, the ad giant reiterated its web privacy commitments and talked up technologies aimed at narrowing the performance gap between web apps and their native counterparts.…

Banks told not to transact, web platforms blocked from hosting or advertising, citizens told to look elsewhere for investments Beijing has all but banned cryptocurrencies.…

It was just so good, we're cannibalizing it for parts, says Redmond Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10X, its somewhat streamlined operating system initially designed for a new wave of dual-screen mobile PCs, is being killed off.…

Great, another tech thing that sounds like 'lambda' Google IO Google today opened its developer conference, the aptly named Google IO, with a somber nod to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.…

Hash rate halved for 'LHR' cards in fresh bid to force down outrageous retail prices Nvidia says it will slash the cryptocurrency-mining abilities of newly made RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards.…

Just dealing with the aftermath The Colonial Pipeline is in a bit of trouble again. The oil conduit that shut down this month after its operators were hit with ransomware suffered glitches with its technology on Tuesday while trying to sort out its IT woes.…

Hint: He doesn't care if you personally think it's rubbish, and here's why A Russian spymaster has denied that his agency carried out the infamous SolarWinds supply chain attack in a public relations move worthy of the Internet Research Agency.…

Who's recommending investment? The man who already has a $1bn stake Wikipedia says MicroStrategy is a company that provides business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services, but that wouldn't be the first outdated information on the crowdsourced knowledge repository.…

Oh, and remember when Tim Sweeney himself demonstrated Metal API? Awks Three weeks have passed since the high-stakes California bench trial between Epic Games and Apple commenced. On Monday, it was the turn of Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow and former senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, to take the stand.…

And you're invited to speak your brains on Computer Misuse Act changes +Comment The British government has vowed to create a legally binding cybersecurity framework for managed service providers (MSPs) – and if you want to tell gov.UK what you think, you've only got a few weeks to act.…

Demand growing for scale-y transactional monster, say analysts YouTube-developed distributed relational database Vitess is getting a DBaaS makeover, putting it in the hands of developers without having to worry about engaging with a DBA.…