The Register

Neanderthal ear scans support idea they could hear us and had a 'type of human language' Computerised tomography scans and auditory bioengineering models of fossilised Neanderthals ears suggest our closest extinct cousins had a hearing range necessary to process human speech.…

Feeds growing market for edge kit with gear rated for temps below freezing Lenovo has updated its edge computing hardware portfolio, adding two rugged compact machines to its ThinkEdge line-up.…

Microsoft's OS might be time-expired, but the pastry is, well, far too edible Bork!Bork!Bork! While the French may project their borkage as art onto the wall of a Lyon tunnel, Brits seem to prefer theirs glaring down balefully from a screen in a sausage roll emporium in Yateley.…

It's your computer, not ours – but we may go ahead and update it for you, says team The Linux Mint team has introduced a fix for a memory leak it does not fully understand: restarting the Cinnamon desktop.…

And they're getting into the ransomware game too, warns Sophos Gootkit financial malware has been resurrected to fling ransomware payloads at unwitting marks, according to Sophos.…

Network Solutions hasn't confirmed what happened, though The short-lived theft of Perl.com in late January is believed to have been the result of a social engineering attack that convinced registrar Network Solutions to alter the domain's records without valid authorization.…

Special vote to sack UK internet registry's CEO and chairman coming later this month The board of .uk internet registry operator Nominet is again under pressure after support to fire the organisation’s CEO and chairman hit a critical milestone.…

Goes deep on Docker and adopts ‘strangler fig’ pattern to replace legacy platform Netflix has revealed it’s built a new media ingestion and distribution platform and expects to spend much of 2021 on a migration from what it describes as a “large and complicated legacy system”.…

Matter held not for long... but for long enough Video Physicists have trapped a sliver of the world’s coldest plasma in a magnetic "bottle" for the first time, taking the first tentative steps towards building increasingly realistic simulations of the interiors of stars.…

Japan doubles up for AWS, Indonesia warms up for Microsoft as Alibaba and Google lie in wait AWS and Microsoft have expanded their Asian cloud presences.…

Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor’s 7nm ambitions are dust One of China’s next-generation chipmakers appears to have collapsed, potentially hampering the nation’s march to silicon-self-sufficiency.…

Online banking and thousands of machines went offline while the mess was cleaned up Japan’s Mizuho Bank has apologised after data migration work turned its ATMs into card-eating monsters, prevented customers from withdrawing their cash and impacted online banking.…

Stops well short of ordering govt action as fresh discrimination lawsuit filed President Joe Biden has weighed into a battle over unionization taking place at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, posting a video in which he warns that “it's not up to an employer to decide” if their workers’ unionize and that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda.”…

Bug keeps Mercedes, Venturi teams out of qualifying race Swiss Formula E driver Edoardo Mortara ended up in hospital after a software error left him driving into a safety wall at the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship in Diriyah, Saudia Arabia, on Saturday.…

Hong Kong-based suspect wanted to create rival startup using pilfered silicon carbide MOSFET blueprints – claim A Chinese businessman has been accused by the US government of trying to steal silicon secrets from General Electric (GE).…

But the Chocolate Factory has workers' privacy at heart. No, really Google is nudging its G Suite Workspace tools further toward a hybrid workplace with the addition of services aimed at frontline workers, among other tweaks and enhancements.…

'BigQuery is pretty fast anyway so you'd really need to value the extra speed' Google has introduced a caching layer in Big Query - its cloud data warehouse - designed to speed up responses to users as they explore and experiment with data.…

Hmm. Fancy new phone you've got there... shame if nothing were to happen to it Fed up with Apple’s walled garden? Fancy running some unauthorised code on your shiny new iPhone? Unafraid of major security risks? The team behind iOS jailbreaking tool unc0ver just released version 6.0.0, bringing with it support for iOS versions 11 to 14.3.…

Something for rocket fans and rocket financiers to chew on Small-satellite flinger Rocket Lab today confirmed a merger with Vector Acquisition Corporation, as well as plans for a considerably heftier launcher.…

The fun started at the same time as border skirmishes Security intelligence firm Recorded Future's Insikt Group has written a paper alleging China was behind attacks on India's electricity grid.…

Big Blue extends its cloud to run anywhere - including competing public clouds Interview IBM's multi-cloud (and on-premise) Satellite service is now available, a managed Kubernetes product "rooted in Red Hat OpenShift," according to the company's Cloud CTO Jason McGee.…

You've just got to have 5G... except when you don't US telco Verizon is advising customers to not access its 5G network – for the sake of their phone's battery life – mere days after spending $45bn on new radio spectrum.…

Plus: Deepfake Tom Cruise has arrived on TikTok, and new ML algo that beats humans at classic Atari games In Brief Lawyers at Google have been criticised by the company’s AI researchers for watering down negative language in their academic papers.…

Future punters won't need to comb landfill for their bitcoin, we suppose Britain's government is mulling a proposal from the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) that would force online retailers to collect old electronics from customers for recycling.…

Pinch, punch, first day of the month Code automation stalwarts have endured a frustrating start to the week after GitHub Action began tottering this morning, taking a number of carefully crafted workflows down with it.…

Vulture trounced at Revs and Elite, hopes to admire ancient kit in May The UK's cathedrals of geekdom are set to reopen in May as The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) celebrated the successful conclusion of its retro-themed Microlympics.…

Nope, COVID-19 is not a catch-all excuse for backdoor deals Column The news that openDemocracy is calling for a legal review of Matt Hancock’s allegedly illegal deal with Palantir is a sign of two things: that things have gone wrong and are going wronger in government health policy; and that there are still ways to start to put it right.…

We'll never know but he was spared the whiteboard of shame Who, Me? It's March again and we're still (mostly) indoors. Let us take your mind off the long, dark teatime of the soul (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) with another reader confession in The Register's Who, Me? column.…

Merged Potevio and CETC do drones, 5G, satnav, lots of military software, and have been told to accelerate R&D Late last Wednesday evening a regulatory announcement appeared on the Shanghai Stock Exchange that may well have signaled a major change in China’s approach to developing key technologies.…

If you want the lowdown on managed detection and response, clock this Promo One thing you can say about cyber-attackers. They don’t keep office hours. They – or their code – will chip away at your systems, all day, every day, looking for a way in before quietly exploiting it for as long as possible.…

Plus: Critical Cisco flaw, NSA advice, and someone hacked Gab? In Brief The murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which is said to be have been aided by digital surveillance, was ordered by the head of the Saudi Arabian government, US intelligence has publicly asserted.…

Tech already used to verify university degrees, will soon be compulsory at the border Singapore has proposed a blockchain-based document verification system developed by its GovTech agency to provide proof of recent negative COVID-19 tests, and hopes it becomes used to offer proof of vaccination status around the world.…

Biased words can't be ‘Grandfathered’ in – that’s also a term on vendor's new list of words best avoided Analytics vendor Splunk has followed up on its 2020 decision to stop using the terms “master” and “slave” with a new guide to writing “unbiased documentation”.…

Devs told if they really, really, need more time for merges they can have it Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel.…

CARBON SPIDER and SPRITE SPIDER give you extra reasons to patch last week’s critical vCenter bug Two strains of ransomware have recently been updated to target VMware’s ESXi hypervisor and encrypt virtual machine files, says security vendor CrowdStrike.…

Never mind the glue and soldered RAM Apple, on its French website, is now publishing repairability scores for its notoriously difficult to repair products, in accordance with a Gallic environmental law enacted a year ago.…

Keeping family members out of the country deemed harmful President Biden has issued a proclamation revoking a series of Trump administration proclamations that halted the issuance of green cards for immigrants. The rule change, however, left in place limitations on temporary work visas for skilled foreign workers.…

Or about five days of annual operating profit ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has offered to pay less than $100m to settle multiple privacy class-action lawsuits in the US.…

Not literally and all in the name of education Ever idly wonder if a marmot could bring down an ant-eater? Would a fox be foxed by a badger? Could a badger out-badger a fox?…

Uh huh... it's a good time to be in enterprise security analytics Tired of keeping up with security alerts from your system? Worried that your Security Operations Centre (SOC) is getting deluged in low-level reporting? Fear not: Imperva has produced an aggregator aggregation product that sits over the top of all your other alert-generating security software.…

Still, it's probably best to stick with eye-wateringly expensive official peripherals In addition to various minor bug fixes, Apple's 11.2.2 update to macOS Big Sur addresses an issue where newer MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models could be damaged by dodgy third-party USB-C accessories.…

Also: Old age a bigger risk for Branson's passengers as Virgin Galactic slips again What do you buy the richest man in the world? A ticket to ride on Elon Musk's rocket, judging by the latest delay announced by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.…

Though company insists it is 'not a car manufacturer' With its carrier and mobile businesses in turmoil, and no sign of a reprieve from crushing US sanctions, China's Huawei is reportedly lurching into the growing electric vehicle market.…

Yes, we will never mention the death of the PC again, at least until next time Dell Technologies spent tens billions of dollars to diversify its kit bag beyond computers, yet it was the humble notebook that broke its sales records in 2020.…

Now, this might shock you, but it's something we like to call 'fun' (if you have friends) The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Loath as I am to feature another early access survival-exploration-crafting adventure for the second month in a row, February's sleeper smash-hit, Valheim, has forced my hand. So onwards, now, to the 10th realm of Norse mythology. Yeah, there was an extra one, didn't you hear?…

Yeah, you did great, but you should have done better Salesforce shares slid yesterday despite posting revenues of $5.82bn for Q4 of its fiscal '21, up 20 per cent on the same period last year.…

Worldwide vacancies if you're looking for work – and free ads if you want workers Job Alert We're running free job ads to try and keep techies in gainful employment during these testing times.…

Specialist databases will still be necessary, analyst says EDB, a prominant backer of the PostgreSQL open-source database, expects to focus on graph, JSON, and time-series data in the upcoming autumn release. Analysts, however, are sceptical about its ability to optimise for different data models ahead of built for purpose databases.…

Plus: Full ruling in $5bn High Court case expected by end of Q1 Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants a High Court judge to formally consider a damning report which found that Deloitte auditors committed misconduct when they signed off British software firm Autonomy's annual accounts.…

Lidar-equipped spherical probes or solar panel-powered cranes, perhaps? The European Space Agency is investigating sending an army of autonomous rovers into underground caves and lava tubes on the Moon.…