The Register

Plus: Stalkerware even more scummy and ExifTool needs patching In brief CNA Financial, the US insurance conglomerate, has apparently paid $40m to ransomware operators to gets its files back.…

I have you now, Samsung The European Commission has approved SK Hynix’s acquisition of Intel’s NAND flash and solid-state drive businesses, bringing the Korean semiconductor biz one step closer to officially closing the $9bn takeover.…

Series of 8 spin-torque oscillators improves efficiency, but parallel design better for wireless transmission A research team from the National University of Singapore and Japan’s Tohoku University say they have improved on the use of spin-torque oscillators (STO) to harvest and convert Wi-Fi signals into energy through a series configuration that lit up a battery-less LED.…

Tech firms, other companies must reveal salary info in job ads if Coloradans are eligible DigitalOcean is looking to hire a front-end software engineer who, if working remotely, is free to live anywhere in America, Canada, Germany, or Netherlands, but not in Colorado.…

Another NASA-awarded mission. Lucky those first stages are reusable, eh? SpaceX has notched up another order for a mission to the Moon, this time from Firefly Aerospace for a 2023 launch for its lunar lander, Blue Ghost.…

Patches to land in Linux 5.13 Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent in a pull request for Linux 5.13 aimed at dealing with grief caused by the antics of some students at the University of Minnesota.…

Textbooks aren't everything A couple of Swedish scientists have been able to show that practising maths is not the only way to get better at the subject.…

Get ready for the New York Chocolate Factory experience Google is to open its first physical retail store in New York, giving eager customers a chance to fondle the company's products in person.…

And less than a fifth of CMA crims copped jail terms Prosecutions under the UK's Computer Misuse Act (CMA) dropped by a fifth in 2020 even as conviction rates soared to 95 per cent during the year of the pandemic, new statistics have revealed.…

Never mind the Clacton-on-Sea pier. They've got £600k to build power plant butlers The University of Essex has secured £600,000 in funding to develop radiation-resistant robots for use in nuclear facilities.…

Hall of Shame as IT buyers admit to paying £110 for a £14 mouse and keyboard Whether it was price gouging or the laws of supply and demand playing out - or both - the average margin paid to IT suppliers during the pandemic were five times higher than in the months before it.…

Surrey Satellite and Airbus to ponder a fleet of Moonlight satellites The European Space Agency (ESA) has inked a deal with a pair of consortia aimed at providing telecommunication and navigation services for Moon missions.…

In-flight entertainment system ran Windows NT4 – and almost defied access attempts Researchers from infosec biz Pen Test Partners established a persistent shell on an in-flight entertainment (IFE) system from a Boeing 747 airliner after using a vulnerability dating back to 1999.…

FLoC is not for our benefit, says Chocolate Factory, it's for everyone else Google conducted an "Ask me anything" panel on its controversial Privacy Sandbox proposals at its online I/O event.…

Meet Guillaume Rozier - a bit like Captain Tom but 76 years younger and no chance of a medal Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Congratulations, Mrs Necessity, you have a child. Have you thought of a name? Really? Hmm, unusual. Is that Slavic?"…

Local paper reports £15m heist demand amid Colonial Pipeline chaos A Doncaster insurance company has been hit by ransomware from the Darkside crew – whose "press release" declaring it was shutting down its operations last week was taken at face value by some pundits.…

Conservative MPs offer tweaks to stamp out suspect practices Conservative MPs David Davis, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, and Andrew Rosindell have put forward amendments to the UK's 2021 Finance Bill in a bid to rein in umbrella companies said to be skimming off earnings from contractors and holding back holiday pay.…

I've worked hard all day on-call... you drive me round the bend On Call Friday is here, and with it a story from the On Call archives to remind the unwary of the fiscal penalties that can arise when the patience of those at the other end of the line is tested.…

Like, you wouldn't filter out pages by Black people, right? Cloudflare's internet filter service Gateway will no longer offer to block LGBTQ content, with the biz saying it was all an accident caused by one or more third-party suppliers.…

Oh what a feeling, and in the same week as automaker announced new production pauses Toyota has admitted to a pair of cyber-attacks.…

Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act swings into action Singapore’s Ministry of Health has invoked the island nation's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act and required social media companies and media to refute reports that a local variant of the Coronavirus has been detected.…

Big buyers understand infrastructure economics – and aren’t afraid to screw down providers' prices Tencent has told investors that big cloud buyers are turning the screws on infrastructure-as-a-service pricing, and so it will pursue PaaS and SaaS instead.…

Welcome to the real world, Neo American businesses that receive payments in cryptocurrencies worth $10,000 or more will have to report those transactions to the Internal Revenue Service, the United States' Treasury mentioned on Thursday.…

Who's Reader? I don't know any Reader. Do you know any Reader? In 2013, Google discontinued its RSS app Google Reader, eliciting widespread criticism. On Wednesday, the search advertising biz reversed its recent disinterest in RSS and announced plans to experiment with an RSS-based content subscription feature in the Android version of Chrome.…

After that whole, y'know, unanimous Supreme Court decision thing that told us not to do that anymore America's consumer watchdog has pleaded with lawmakers to pass legislation to restore its ability to recover ill-gotten gains from scammers and pass the money back to victims cheated by the crooks.…

Mothership checks out, so VSS Unity will fly again As bidding intensifies for a seat on Blue Origin's first crewed hop into space, Virgin Galactic has announced the next rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo test flight will take place on May 22.…

One of these days we'll automate these outage articles with some kind of AI Updated Microsoft's Azure portal and some related products are down right now for unlucky customers. The Windows giant is said to be working on a fix to bring systems back online.…

Not just Chuck struggling under the switch, rival Arista's supply chain has 'never been so constrained' Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says he is about to pass the rising cost of components onto customers amid the most dramatic rebound in product demand for almost a decade.…

Editors enraged by tweaks to Word's commenting feature Microsoft's attempt to fiddle with the commenting in Word could teach the software biz an important lesson: Never, ever mess with editors.…

Bank made $1.4bn in profits alone last quarter American Express has been fined 0.009 per cent of its annual profits by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after spamming people who opted out of its marketing emails with 4.1 million unwanted messages.…

Replacing such cooling measures are the PC equivalent of an oil change Laptop and motherboard maker ASUS has earned the scorn of the right-to-repair crowd after telling a customer the dimensions of a thermal pad are proprietary information and that replacing it might void his warranty.…

Warfare 365? Ball Aerospace and Microsoft have shown off tech that uses commercial cloud computing to process downlinked data and deliver "actionable information" direct to the battlefield.…

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.…