The Register

Innovation and Competition Act aims to keep America ahead of China and passes with unusual bipartisan support The United States Senate has passed the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, a sweeping stimulus program that seeks to secure supply chains and stimulate industry — especially high-technology industries — to ensure America remains ahead of China.…

Yup, just a Republican wanting a private business to be subjected to more government regulation Dave Yost, Ohio's top government legal eagle, has filed a lawsuit that asks the courts to declare Google Search a public utility and the company as a whole a common carrier — ie: more subject to government regulation.…

Admits 'potential losses' may result, says they won’t be significant South Korean chip maker SK Hynix has admitted some of its DRAM components included defects, though it says accounts of the issue are overblown.…

Adobe, Intel, SAP, Android emit vulnerability fixes, too Patch Tuesday Microsoft's traditional Patch Tuesday saw the software giant release fixes for 50 flaws, and a reminder to apply updates as soon as possible because six of them are being exploited in the wild by miscreants.…

From hidden master keys to pineapples stuffed with Bolivian marching powder — this story has it all The FBI has revealed how it managed to hoodwink the criminal underworld with its secretly backdoored AN0M encrypted chat app, leading to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of 32 tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, more than $148M, and even cocaine-filled pineapples.…

The problem started when those ridiculous users ... oh, hang on. It started in the IT department Feature The concept of "shadow IT" is a familiar one. One of my favourite descriptions of it comes from security vendor Forcepoint, which says shadow IT is "the use of information technology systems, devices, software, applications, and services without explicit IT department approval."…

Departure from Apple's usual iron-fist approach to iPhone software With the launch of iOS 15, Apple will give users the option to upgrade to the latest software or stick with iOS 14 while continuing to receive crucial security updates.…

Software porting efforts aim to make sure Android, Linux, Firefox, and Chrome work well ahead of time The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is working to build 2,000 laptops using the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture by the end of next year, as the nation looks to reduce its reliance on foreign technology giants like Arm and Intel.…

We're gonna need a bigger rolled-up newspaper Threats to humanity's dominance on Earth are oft-featured here at The Register, with aspiring usurpers ranging from dancing robots to peckish rats.…

Also announces buttload of new products at Cloud Summit event Alibaba proclaimed at its Cloud Summit 2021 that it is ploughing $1bn into "Project AsiaForward", an initiative focused on expansion and development in Southeast Asia.…

The highs, the lows, the acquisitions, the resignations, and more Encryption and verification package Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has celebrated a troubled 30 years of securing secrets and giving cypherpunks an excuse to meet in person, with original developer and security specialist Phil Zimmermann toasting a world where encryption is common but, he warns, still under threat.…

But it seems the iPhone 6 and SE will be looked after until the end of time With the launch of MacOS Monterey, Apple plans to ditch support for a slew of machines, including all MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops released prior to 2015.…

Using techniques Microsoft had previously considered 'not a vulnerability' A reverse engineer has discovered what is claimed to be "the first known malware targeting Windows containers to compromise cloud environments," a sentence to put any system administrator on edge.…

Don't call it growth Global smartphone shipments recovered in the first quarter of this year following a dismal 2020 for the mobile hardware industry.…

What's that? Letting people know just weeks before was a bad idea? The UK government has conducted an embarrassing climbdown by agreeing to delay the implementation of NHS Digital's controversial grab of GP patient data by two months.…

Cloud data outfit realises SQL-centric approach won’t attract the developers it needs to grow Snowflake Summit Cloudy data-wrangling outfit Snowflake has opened itself up to Java and Scala developers.…

If your IoT kit employs RabbitMQ, EMQ X or VerneMQ, it's time to get patching Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Centre (CyRC) has warned of easily triggered denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities in three popular open-source Internet of Things message brokers: RabbitMQ, EMQ X, and VerneMQ.…

Chocolate Factory competition-squashing tactics receive a firm 'Non' from Paris Google is to change the way it operates its advertising business, after the internet giant was slapped with a €220m (£189m) fine by French competition regulators for abusing its dominant position.…

Residents near Western Digital, Seagate HQs deafened by popping of Champagne corks The launch of the cryptocurrency Chia has caused demand for hard disk drives in the European market to blow up, according to research firm Context.…

'Potential impact to performance' drops some of the world's biggest websites offline Updated A not-inconsiderable chunk of the World Wide Web, including news sites, social networks, developer sites, and even the UK government's primary portal, has been knocked offline by an apparent outage at edge cloud specialist Fastly – though your indefatigable The Register remains aloft.…

From pictures of shattered glass to patterns on doors and much more A US designer has sued for damages of around $12m amid allegations that Japanese games developer Capcom breached copyright by using her photos in titles including the massively popular Resident Evil.…

'When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, it's not reliable anymore' Version 8.0 of the popular Windows editor Notepad++ has arrived with new features including Dark Mode, a native build for ARM64, and optional new toolbar icons using the Fluent UI.…

When I grow up, I want to be an Identity and Access Management specialist – said no one ever Feature A search on LinkedIn's UK job site just now (1 June 2021) returned 5,265 roles for a network manager; 2,204 for a system administrator; 4,964 for a web developer; and 10,776 for a business analyst. None of these are a particular surprise – they're popular, sought-after careers.…

Linux and macOS guests will be doable, and iGiant even appears to have added an XKCD Easter Egg Desktop virtualization is not the kind of thing that gets a mention in Apple’s big product announcements, and today's effort that revealed macOS 12 — code-named Monterey — was no exception. But sharp-eyed observers have spotted some changes that will make Macs, including those powered by Apple’s own Arm-compatible silicon, more adept at running guest operating systems.…

Tell us what’s holding you back from the cloud or pushing you forward Reader survey It’s one thing being born in the cloud. It can be quite another contemplating moving an established infrastructure and suite of applications off premises.…

It’s now a cloud-native, low-code product that’s growing and offers a viable Exchange alternative, apparently HCL has launched version 12 of Domino, the groupware server it inherited from IBM, which in turn acquired it along with Lotus Software in 1995.…

Hybrid Instagram/Amazon app Xiaohongshu may just have been making mirthful TGIF post Popular Chinese shopping app Xiaohongshu has seen its software banished from app stores and its social media accounts crimped, a few hours after issuing a controversial post on June 4th that asked, “Tell me loudly, what is the date today?”…

For now you have to cope with 100Gb/s and 400Gb/s over single-mode fiber, and brace for 100Gb/s over 80kms The Ethernet Alliance has wrapped up its 2021 Technology Exploration Forum and revealed it’s heading off in pursuit of speeds beyond 400Gb/s.…

All thanks to FBI that somehow had wallet's private key The US Department of Justice on Monday said it has recovered 63.7 Bitcoins, right now worth $2.1m and falling, of the 75 or so BTC the Colonial Pipeline operators paid the ransomware miscreants who infected the fuel provider's computers.…

Hundreds of arrests already in Oz, details of European and US ops to be revealed soon The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has revealed it was able to decrypt messages sent on a supposedly secure messaging app that was seeded into the criminal underworld and promoted as providing snoop-proof comms.…

Feds, facing pushback over constitutional concerns, say they no longer need the data after all The FBI on Saturday withdrew a subpoena issued to USA Today's parent company Gannett in April to find out who read an online news story published in February about a shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and the wounding of three others.…

No new hardware though loads of bits and bytes for software makers WWDC Apple on Monday opened its 2021 Worldwide Developer Conference by promising a raft of operating system and privacy improvements – including a relay system to anonymize Safari connections, and randomized email addresses for online account signups.…

Plus: FBI boss says ransomware is terrorism 2.0, and more In brief Plans by the German government to allow the police to deploy malware on any target's devices, and force the tech world to help them, has run into some opposition, funnily enough.…

Gonna need a little Mo security over here US House Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) seemingly revealed his Gmail password and a PIN in a Sunday rage tweet about a lawsuit regarding the January 6 insurrection attempt.…

With his brother in tow, poor sod Jeff Bezos has confirmed he will buckle up with his brother, Mark, next month and head into space as part of the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.…

Not too difficult to get in, but component serialisation could still be a hurdle iFixit has published a preliminary teardown of the M1 iPad Pro, touted by Apple as a potential crossover, combining the portability of a tablet with the unbridled power of the same processor used in the MacBook Pro. But take a look at its innards and you'll find things largely appear the same.…

Breeding season takes a tern for the worse Two drone crashes at a nature reserve in Orange County, California, are being blamed for a colony of some 3,000 sea birds abandoning their nests.…

Which pours cold water over Cupertino's insistence that third-party fixes violate privacy Apple has paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to an unnamed Oregon college student after one of its outsourced repair facilities posted explicit pictures and videos of her to her Facebook page.…

The usual suspects are accused of anti-competitive behaviour, naughtiness with data South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has set up a new team dedicated to investigating abuse of dominance and competition concerns in online ads.…

Basically, it doesn't work Microsoft has closed a long-standing request to port Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to .NET Core, stating that it "will not be updating VSTO or the COM Add-in platform to use .NET Core."…

Plus: National watchdog says pseudonymisation is data processing The UK government's opposition Labour Party has backed calls for a delay to NHS Digital's controversial slurp of data held by family doctors as new guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office sheds light on the legality of the process.…

Has the hacktivist group had enough of Musk's manipulative crypto-Tweets, or has someone just donned the mask to protest their crashed Bitcoin balance? Entities using the name and iconography of hacktivist collective Anonymous have deemed Elon Musk's recent crypto-tweeting worthy of a re-emergence.…

Yep. The exec responsible for shambolic Test and Trace programme, and TalkTalk's 2015 mega-breach Baroness Dido "Queen of Carnage" Harding, former TalkTalk CEO and current head of NHS Test and Trace, is reportedly eyeing the top job at NHS England.…

At least it was more popular than Skype... just More judges prefer using Microsoft Teams for remote court hearings than a made-to-order video platform bought as part of a £1.2bn Ministry of Justice digitisation initiative, an internal survey has revealed.…

Plus: CyberUp campaign writes to Home Sec British infosec businessees mostly support beefing up the Computer Misuse Act to directly tackle the ransomware crisis – while reform campaign CyberUp has written to Home Secretary Priti Patel offering “support” for “a renewed, forward looking framework”.…

Can be viewed in any light. Bargain Readers of El Reg are nothing if not cultured and frequent dabblers of the avant-garde. Which is why it will come as no surprise that an artist has recently sold an "invisible" sculpture for a reported €15,000 (£13,000).…

Extra performance wrung out, but we wouldn't rush to eBay The benchmarks don't lie. Apple Silicon is fast. The M1 processor outperforms Intel’s competing i5 and i7 chips in virtually every metric you would care to mention, from CPU performance to graphics rendering. With that in mind, one may ask why anyone would want to buy an x86 Mac.…

Big Red wanted TXO Systems dragged to court for years, say legal papers Oracle has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a British reseller that — it claims — infringed Sun Microsystems’ intellectual property by engaging in grey market reselling.…

One can’t spell shit without IT, but for Pete's sake it doesn't need to be in your endpoints Column Fans of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy know how top military secrets are extracted from the enemy. Senior figures are turned in operations run by the most secret brains in the country, bluff and double-bluff mix with incredible feats of bravery, treachery and psychological manipulation.…

At least nobody said 'watch this!' Who, Me? Another tale involving buttons of the big and red variety arrives for today's deposit in the Who, Me? archives. There are some things that are best left unsaid. And unpressed.…