The Register

But there are legal protections... right? The Ministry of Defence has ordered its contractors not to answer certain questions on the UK's once-in-a-decade census – despite threats of £1,000 fines being handed to people who don't complete the national survey.…

Deal inked 'without competition' due to COVID, says dept The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a £14.5m year-long contract to Tata Consultancy Services without any competition.…

Could slow the spread of misinformation without needing draconian law Research including a Twitter field experiment has found social media organisations might have a 3rd option that doesn't involve the banhammer or a laissez faire attitude to tackling the fake news plague infecting platforms.…

Major upgrade for sound editor – as long as you don't need FAT32 support Open-source audio editor Audacity was upgraded to version 3.0 this week with a new single-file project format emitted alongside other fresh features and fixes.…

Space agency now that much closer to the Moon tossing multi-million dollar Space Shuttle engines in sea NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) core stage has finally completed its test, taking the Artemis program one step closer to the Moon and relieving nervous engineers across Stennis Space Center and beyond.…

I hope he doesn't call me Pedoking Something for the Weekend, Sir? You know my name. Look on my works and despair. "Does he get paid for that?" Yup, I can hear you despairing right now.…

Alternatively: Python's pickle pilloried with prudent premonition of poisoning Evan Sultanik, a computer security researcher with Trail of Bits and an adjunct computer science professor at America's Drexel University, has unpacked the Python world's pickle data format and found it distasteful.…

Here's looking at you, kid On Call It's Friday! Pour yourself a beverage, break out the end-of-week treats, and enjoy a reader's tale of international intrigue and derring-do that began with an innocent stint On Call.…

Chipzilla hints at bringing 10nm ASIC FAB to US soil to sate desire for faster and cheaper custom silicon The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced an effort to “expand access to domestic manufacturing capabilities to tackle challenges hampering the secure development of custom chips for defense systems.”…

Tell us more about those services you say were stealing your brand Encrypted phone network Sky Global has seemingly shut down after European police swooped on users and distributors, and its chief exec was indicted by American prosecutors.…

Russian chap tried to crack Tesla security, SpaceX engineer traded dodgy info on dark web stock tipping forums The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has revealed that two sets of crooks have confessed to conspiracies against companies led by Elon Musk.…

Remember the dream of microscale machines? They may look like this Video Measuring just 60 microns across – about the width of a single strand of human hair – the world’s smallest self-folding origami bird is a feat of engineering.…

Till Kottmann may also have helped with Verkada vid-cam exploit and other cracks, now accused of fraud on top of merry pranking The US Department of Justice says a grand jury has indicted Swiss security provocateur Till Kottmann over multiple exploits and attempts at fraud, and authorities have quickly moved to rule out free speech as a defence.…

Calls for YouTube to cough up, plus Facebook and Google India may be on the way to adopting Australia’s legislation that compels Facebook and Google to pay local news publishers or face forced arbitration.…

Supply chain hardships hit the region harder than most, and 2019 had already been a bumper PC-buying year PC shipments in the Asia Pacific region flatlined in 2020, even as global rates soared. But buried in the data is a marked shift from desktop to notebook sales.…

FlickType claims it's being squeezed to force an acquisition A tiny startup that develops virtual keyboards for the visually impaired has accused Apple of unfair competition and negligence by booting its software out of the App Store.…

Terminal and Power Automate elevated to inbox status, Auto HDR for gamers Microsoft has thrown its long-suffering unpaid testers a bone in the form of a fresh Windows 10 insider build with tweaks to Virtual Desktops, a preview of Auto HDR and changes to what comes in the box.…

Ugh, it's so opinionated, sometimes in an arbitrary way Amazon Web Services has previewed an "opinionated deployment tool for .NET" as part of its pitch to attract .NET developers to its cloud services.…

World's most used mobile phone OS gets some new toys Google has rolled out the second Android 12 developer preview, with the pre-release version of the mobile OS largely focusing on security and UI tweaks.…

Rolling over the Martian stones toward a drop-off for the Ingenuity Helicopter Ever wondered what it sounds like to drive on Mars? The answer involves clonks, squeaks, and a distressing amount of scratching.…

Bugs, patchually: Just when you thought it was safe to print from Windows Microsoft continues to demonstrate its impressive commitment to Windows quality by admitting the patch it released to patch the patch that broke printing was, er, itself broken.…

How to curb GPT-3's tongue Special report OpenAI is building a content filter to prevent GPT-3, its latest and largest text-generating neural network, from inadvertently revealing people's personal information as it prepares to commercialize the software through an API.…

Ex-BAE engineer refused to give Brit cops his VeraCrypt key A former missile software engineer who boasted about leaking critical defence secrets to hostile foreign powers and refused to give police his VeraCrypt key has had his prison sentence nearly doubled by the UK Court of Appeal.…

Conservative peer praises CyberUp for potential industry benefits A Conservative peer has joined calls to reform the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) days after the government declared that infosec and "cyber power" are the key to British foreign and industrial policy for the 2020s.…

Who's looking after my code? JiHu, that's who... GitLab has licensed its technology to a Chinese company as the DevOps darling looks to drive adoption of its platform in the most populated country in the world.…

Analyst: 'Ultimate winner is BT as it's avoided cost-based regulation for next half decade' UK comms regulator Ofcom has confirmed it will limit pricing restrictions on Openreach's full-fibre wholesale products during the gigabit rollout period.…

Youngsters rise to the bait after restaurant chain's promotion So it turns out there is such a thing as a free lunch – if you're Taiwanese and are OK with changing your ID card to include "salmon".…

.UK registry operator leaves itself open to vote rigging accusations Analysis By being uncooperative and opaque, Nominet is opening itself to allegations that it manipulated the outcome of next week's vote to fire its CEO and board chairman.…

Linux for smartphones: OTA-16 brings fixes for brave Android avoiders UBports, a community project to build Ubuntu for smartphones, has released OTA-16, a new version of Ubuntu Touch with numerous updates – yet the dream of a viable alternative to iOS and Android seems as distant as ever.…

Competition? We've heard of it The Northern Ireland government is paying Fujitsu up to £87m to roll over support for an Oracle HR system that dates back to 2006 in a contract awarded without competition.…

Good news for Mancunian infosec and chip design bods, but we're raising an eyebrow on the nukes The British government has published its Integrated Review into defence and security policy – and though you'll like it if you're in the UK infosec industry, threats of nuking North Korea in revenge for WannaCry are very wide of the mark.…

'There should be a dialogue – not a double-barreled shotgun' Interview On Monday, an extraordinary vote will take place at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the .uk internet registry operator, Nominet.…

Here’s how to work out what your new security model should look like Webcast Upheaval always brings opportunity. And no one knows how to exploit the opportunity that upheaval brings the way cybercriminals do.…

Fake Huawei and Flash sites helped steal info about 5G tech Security vendor McAfee has detected an attack it believes was likely aimed at telecoms companies in the hope of stealing information related to 5G networks.…

With kill switches to stop the gear going off the rails Canadian boffins are testing semi-autonomous exoskeletons that could help people with limited mobility walk again without the need for implanted sensors.…

More car delays due to chip crunch, Texan weather wipeout hasn't helped either The effects of the global semiconductor drought became more apparent this week amid a rise in purchases brought on by reduced COVID-19 anxieties.…

Python still welcome, though Oracle has updated its cloudy data warehouse and made structured query language harder to find, in the name of having database administrators spend less time working with the product.…

‘You swipe left and right and there’s another option if you want to have intimacy’ says commissioner The police commissioner of New South Wales in Australia has floated the idea of a smartphone app to record consent to sexual activity.…

City-state also deploys new contact tracing boxes at entrances to public places Singapore has announced plans to improve cross-border data flows and increase digitalisation of local industry to combat the economic effects of COVID-19.…

New science challenges theory of liquid lost in space Up to 99 per cent of the water once in the ancient lakes and oceans on Mars is trapped in the planet’s crust and was not lost to space, according to a study in Science this week.…

Looking for a service-level agreement? Have we got a deal for you The Wikimedia Foundation, built over the past two decades with the donated labor of its Wikipedia community, plans to offer corporate enterprises programmatic access to its content through paid API packages.…

Middle Kingdom tests backup plan for when iGiant starts blocking app stalkers The Chinese Advertising Association has developed an identifier called the China Anonymization ID, or CAID, to ensure the continued ability to track iOS users after Apple implements its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework.…

Tune in, join our APAC editor and Malwarebytes – and learn how to start fighting back Webcast The shift to remote working over the last year hasn’t been all bad – it’s forced the pace of digital transformation and encouraged many organisations to rethink the way they operate.…

China Unicom, Pacific Networks, ComNet all due for removal America's telecom market federal regulator, the FCC, today initiated the final step in a booting three Chinese telcos from the Land of the Free, saying they had failed to allay national security concerns.…

Just look at how Microsoft has grown since (but don't look at our results) Google has bitten back at fresh reports that the ad giant had a fortuitous escape nearly a decade ago, when American antitrust regulators opted not to sue. It has also seized the opportunity to take another swipe at its arch-rival, Microsoft.…

Wot?! No new luxury phablet?! Samsung Electronics is contemplating skipping this year's Galaxy Note flagship as the business grapples with an industry-wide shortage of semiconductors.…

Signs up for Cisco, says some encrypted creds were stolen Email security biz Mimecast has dumped SolarWinds' network monitoring tool in favour of Cisco's Netflow product after falling victim to the infamous December supply chain attack.…

Second hot-fire scheduled for (checks weather) tomorrow... maybe NASA has fired up the avionics of the Artemis I core stage ahead of tomorrow's planned redo of the prematurely terminated hotfire test.…

It's all about developers Ahead of its release next month, the Fedora community has posted details of what is coming in Fedora 34, Red Hat's bleeding-edge Linux distro.…

Welcome to the Great Fire sale of old London town Corporate pantomime baddie Capita is again carving up its operations, creating specific divisions for private and public sector customers and a third that will house non-core businesses it wants to sell.…