The Register

Wow, this PC is hot stuff... actually it might be a bit too hot On Call Can you smell burning? Is it the Friday morning bacon? Are you having a stroke? Or is it something more sinister? Find out in this week's episode of On Call.…

Singapore's holding a global mega-conf in August, will have 600 no-quarantine-required rooms ready Singapore has created a hotel that makes COVID-19-safe business meetings possible, in an attempt to give long-haul commercial travel a boost. But while the new facility will makes meetings possible, it also makes the fun parts of business travel impossible.…

Little love for a return to the five-days-on-campus week, Blind survey shows Poll It seems workers at big-name technology companies aren't that displeased at last year's pandemic-induced work-from-home rule – and, while popping into the office every so often still has its adherents, the majority of polled techies don't want to spend more than two days a week rubbing shoulders with coworkers.…

Rival atheists accused of not believing in privacy law The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has warned members their personal information appears to have been leaked.…

Reg writer on the spot reports that life without news links on The Social Network™ is just fine Facebook is being flayed in Australia after its ban on sharing of links to news publications caught plenty of websites that have nothing to do with news.…

We’ll be fine, says Redmond security crew. No word on whether you will be too once crims analyse their haul Microsoft has admitted that as a result of installing backdoored SolarWinds tools in some parts of its corporate network, portions of its source code was obtained and exfiltrated by parties unknown.…

Move follows ousting of ethics expert Timnit Gebru Google has reshuffled the management team overseeing its Ethical AI group months after it ousted one its star researchers, a controversial move that sparked public anger and internal revolt.…

Driver-level limitation to favor gamers, coin-crafting hardware to follow Nvidia announced a new line of GPUs solely for mining cryptocurrencies on Thursday – and that it's halving the cryptocurrency mining efficiency of forthcoming GeForce cards in an effort to keep the kit in the hands of gamers when the hardware goes on sale next week.…

Difficult entry, descent, landing process over, now for a search for ancient microbial life NASA just now successfully landed Perseverance, its largest and heaviest rover yet, on the surface of Mars in the Jezero Crater. The machine will conduct the ambitious mission to finding ancient microbial life on another planet.…

Updates for modern code editor hark back to 40-year-old tools Makefile projects, widely used in open source development, are getting an official Microsoft extension in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and a request for built-in VIM support is on the official backlog.…

Also lifts lid on allegations former workers paid staffers of 'state-owned enterprises' Cisco is investigating a “self-enrichment scheme” among several former employees in China, the firm told investors earlier this week. Switchzilla said it had also tipped off the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).…

So says Kenna Security in a refreshing piece of counter-FUD analysis While the infosec industry is used to reading (and pumping out) FUD about software vulnerabilities, eye-catching research suggests about 500 vulns were exploited in 2019 – despite 18,000 new CVEs being created.…

Mountain View sees your kids at home this year, with its devices in their laps The PC industry is expected to release 40 new Chromebook models this year, according to Google. This is almost certainly driven by sky-high demand for the basic computing devices, which are especially popular in classrooms home schooling.…

18 months of dispute over new grading structure and counting... The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is trying to crank up the pressure on Openreach top brass ahead of next week's planned strike action by adding three more days to the protest campaign.…

Spouse to receive $250k over 'loss of consortium' following Arizona incident Intel must pay nearly $1.2m after a ruling in a lawsuit alleging injury caused by a toxic gas emission at one of its facilities.…

Just as legal challenge launched at government for doing the same thing NHS Digital has awarded a £51m IT contract to global consultancy Deloitte without prior notice or competition – just as the UK government faces a legal challenge for doing the same thing with a hugely expensive "management" contract.…

Unified? Kind of, but now there are two .NET runtimes in the official SDK Microsoft has shipped the first preview of .NET 6.0, the first long-term support release of its newly unified application platform, promising native Apple Silicon support, desktop applications on ARM64, and a ton of updates to key frameworks like ASP.NET Core.…

Also: Windows 10 21H1 sent to the beta channel The two sides of Microsoft were on show this week as a major update to the Linux kernel turned up on Windows Update for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2) users and the next version of Windows finally found its way to the company's loyal Insiders.…

Company has a habit of reacting badly to vuln disclosures Updated A parental webcam targeted at nursery schools was so poorly designed that anyone who downloaded its mobile app gained access to admin credentials, bypassing intended authentication, according to security pros – with one dad saying its creators brushed off his complaints about insecurities six years ago.…

If you 'Build It', they will come In less than three decades, Amazon has taken a wrecking ball to dozens of industries from retail and groceries, to logistics and web hosting. And now it's settled on its next victim: the Swiss cuckoo clock industry.…

Better security and application management, but compatibility can be an issue Red Hat's Fedora project is to add a new variant called Kinoite, an immutable desktop operating system alongside the existing Silverblue, which runs GNOME desktop.…

Well, that's a new one Anyone familiar with contacting a tech support helpdesk has heard the groan-inducing line: "Have you turned it on and off again?" For that reason, we can't help but doff our cap to indie ISP Zen Internet, which instructed one customer beset by connectivity drops to contact his MP.…

And the COVID-19 precaution? A negative test 72 hours before In what is either going to be seen as hopeless optimism or a heavily telegraphed super-spreader event, the CEO of the Mobile World Congress has said he intends to run its annual mega tech conference in Barcelona as an in-person event.…

Tune in next week and discover how to tighten that gap in your remote worker security Webcast You’ve seen large parts of your workforce take to the hills over the past year with nothing but a laptop and a Microsoft 365 account for company.…

Masslogger evolution rears its ugly head, $30 gets you three month license to cause carnage Cisco Talos has uncovered a credential-stealing trojan that lifts your login details from the Chrome browser, Microsoft's Outlook and instant messengers.…

‘Technology Associate’ exams that taught general skills like Python, HTML and Java are on the way out. No refunds offered Microsoft has retired the exams for Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) certifications, its broad entry-level tech certifications, and replaced them with a heavily Microsoft-centric curriculum.…

Everything will be anonymised, promises vendor In a sign that interest in process mining is heating up, vendor FortressIQ is launching an analytics platform with a novel approach to understanding how users really work – it "videos" their on-screen activity for later analysis.…

De facto one-party state decrees censorship scheme that sounds a lot like China's Great Firewall Cambodia has formally announced a National Internet Gateway that will filter all traffic coming into the country, or traversing networks within its borders.…

Wants big players to build locally for locals, then build export capability India has created a new tech manufacturing investment attraction fund, this time for telecom equipment and enterprise networking kit.…

26 years after IBM paid Lotus $3.25bn, the Notes email client might be getting useful India’s HCL, the new owner of groupware combo Notes/Domino, continues to evolve the products for the faithful and maybe, just maybe, the occasional new buyer.…

Nothing says urgency like non-binding future reports The new acting head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Jessica Rosenworcel has emerged from her first meeting in charge of America's telecoms regulator stressing urgency and the need to act at a “critical time.”…

As News Corp and Google strike global news payments deal and bill passes lower house Analysis + Update Facebook has barred the sharing of news articles in Australia, effectively immediately, because it thinks Australia’s pay-for-news plan is unworkable.…

Oh yes, and hacking Hollywood, allegedly Three suspected North Korean military intelligence hackers have been charged with, among other things, conspiring to loot more than $1.3bn (£938m) from banks, ATMs, and cryptocurrency companies, according to an indictment unsealed by the US Department of Justice on Wednesday.…

State legal filing answers Amazon's preemptive federal lawsuit last week Five days after Amazon filed a federal lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James to preempt anticipated state legal action, James has answered with a complaint against the e-commerce giant alleging labor law violations.…

New views, card types, and branding as 10th anniversary nears Australian dev tools supplier Atlassian has unveiled a new look and new views for its Kanban-bothering application, Trello.…

API now stable, more on the way Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), aimed at providing building blocks to simplify application development for Kubernetes.…

So, Zoom again then? Updated Microsoft’s video conferencing service Teams has suffered a massive outage causing widespread disruption as people in the United States logged in to start work on Wednesday.…

Doesn't matter which court, Cupertino vociferously defends App Store terms Bismarck in North Dakota (population 128,949) and Brussels in Belgium (population 1.2 million) couldn't be more different. Except for one thing. Both cities are venues where Apple's App Store governance policies have faced, or are facing, intense scrutiny from lawmakers.…

Everyone wants to be the 'Snowflake of X' – in this case, the graph DB world Graph database purveyor TigerGraph has announced £105m in funding to add to the $65m stash already raised.…

Reassuring the regulators Microsoft has unveiled a preview of Azure Firewall Premium, aimed at highly sensitive and regulated environments.…

Next step in Redmond's 'complete virtualization stack with Linux' Patches submitted by Microsoft for the next version of the Linux kernel, 5.12, add the ability to boot the OS as the root partition on its Hyper-V hypervisor.…

Immutablity or vulnerability – it’s your choice Webcast If you think your backup strategy means you’re protected from the worst that cyber-criminals can throw at you, we’ve got some bad news. Ransomware creators know all about backups, too.…

Still Missing In Action for Windows Insiders Windows 10 21H1 is on its way, and seemingly without the major new features we've come to expect in a Microsoft spring rollout, if a post on Redmond's Windows Hardware Certification blog is anything to go by.…

Hold up, just a few more questions... The US Department of Justice has written to Salesforce and Slack to ask a few questions about December's $28bn merger announcement.…

James Bond? Inspector Gadget? Yup, all here A Soviet equivalent of Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher machine has sold for more than double its auction asking price – while a secret camera disguised as a pack of cigarettes went for nearly $20,000.…

Next up: Clinical trials to test the code's suggestions Machine-learning algorithms may help pharmaceutical companies identify old drugs that can be rehashed to treat the COVID-19 coronavirus in elderly patients, according to a study published in Nature Communications.…

Open-source stuff stays for now, company promises Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has described its $156m buy of cloudy DevSecOps biz Bridgecrew as a "key bet" at a time when the world has never been more reliant on off-premises computing.…

No penalties for contractor oopsies in first year, but you'll still have to pay what HMRC thinks you owe An IR35 snooper squad sniffing out contractors won't be coming to a town near you anytime soon unless there is a strong reason to suspect "criminal" behaviour.…

Going green or just plain mean? Exclusive Fujitsu wants to tighten the group's corporate belt by removing the benefit fuel card afforded to hundreds of UK staff, and anyone resisting could potentially be fired and rehired on new contractual terms.…

Do y'all think Samsung might rethink plans to spend $20bn down there? As winter storms cause power outages across the United States, a lack of juice in Texas has led Austin's fabs to shut down.…