The Register

Welcome to another edition of Just A Minute, live from Scunthorpe Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Right, let's start the meeting. Oh, could someone take the minutes?" And my heart sinks. They'll see me and ask me to do it. They always do.…

IT's Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood On Call What's the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Welcome to On Call and an account from nearly 40 years ago when one hard pressed engineer was dealing with a ham-fisted response to the policies of the UK's Thatcher government.…

None of that nuclear-magnetic-resonance garbage, ha Microsoft says it has made progress in its effort to develop CMOS-based chips for quantum computing.…

Posts look to have evaporated along with employee privileges Oracle has done something a little odd: exhuming ancient blog posts about Solaris and SPARC by former Sun luminaries that have moved on to other things.…

India gets special attention with new rules for apps that tie loyalty and prize draws to payments Google has added 15 more countries to its list of nations in which it will allow gambling apps that allow users to play with real money.…

Top telcos still designated as stooges, but they've perked up a bit The US Department of the Treasury has announced a revision to the ban on trading in companies suspected of having ties to China’s military.…

Job ads call for silicon designers, ASIC engineers, display wonks and folks to build data centre and home kit Google has picked Taiwan as the location of its first hardware engineering facility outside the USA.…

GPU giant says it'll play ball soon Nvidia has been accused of cheating in a big-data performance benchmark, and thus unfairly coming out on top, by the very umpires of the test.…

He steals from the rich, and gives to the... wait, which side is the poor side now? The populist online investor uprising to punish Wall Street traders by propping up shorted stocks hit a wall on Thursday when retail brokerage firm Robinhood announced that customers could, for now, sell but not buy eight turbulent securities.…

Got a few (thousand) dollars to spare? Unless the venerable language has finally breathed its last – which is more than a little unlikely – the Perl.com domain was hijacked yesterday.…

Macs sell like hot cakes too thanks to M1 chip, everything up by double digits Apple is making bank in a pandemic – as millennials might say. The company last night reported doubles all round as demand for its latest blower ballooned, and customers locked indoors due to coronavirus countermeasures lapped up Macs and iPads.…

'So far the jury is still out... are you willing to help with this?' Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.…

Canalys stats also show Samsung knocked to 2nd in a shrinking market It is official: Huawei is no longer a major smartphone maker after it fell out of the top five line-up of the biggest sellers in Q4. As for Apple? It is again at the summit, at least according to Canalys.…

'We decided to not use any UI frameworks ... we want to be fully in control of our own destiny' Visual Studio Code only succeeded because a failed online editor was pivoted to become a desktop product, according to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Erich Gamma.…

'It's all about people, empathy at mass scale,' says Big McD IT helpdesk vendor ServiceNow has beat its own forecasts for calendar Q4 revenue and posted 2020 growth of 31 per cent.…

Bork bork acka-lacka bork bork Bork!Bork!Bork! While New Zealand might have cut itself off from much of the outside world in a physical sense, we were surprised to find its isolation extends to the occasional internet connection.…

Freshest flagship delivers, and looks good doing it Review The Samsung Galaxy S21 is not a particularly ambitious phone. There’s nothing novel or provocative about it. It’s a flagship, yes. But it’s also a fairly conservative one, faithfully sticking to the paths trodden by its predecessors.…

My god, it's full of tabs Browser maker Vivaldi is tackling the issue of tab overload by adding a second row of the things via two-level tab stacks.…

SaaS pick 'n' mix might appeal more than standard processes for S/4HANA upgrade, though SAP has launched a lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud service for customers' on-premises ERP systems, taking accountability for performance and promising lower costs.…

Chocolate Factory insists it's working on its own info usage labels, too Google on Wednesday warned iOS developers who use Google ad technology that they may see less revenue as Apple implements its privacy clampdown.…

Fibre-to-the-desk is the driver because it allows longer connections and fewer physical frames Cisco reckons it has invented "a whole new category of switches" called "micro-switches".…

Devotes earnings announcement to trashing Cupertino over privacy as both post mega-profits Facebook has allowed misinformation to circulate, pandered to bigots, and generally turned a blind eye to all manner of horrible behaviour that has spilled out into real-world consequences including attempted genocide. But now The Social Network™ has found something so scary it has decided the world needs to know that Bad Things Are About To Happen.…

But China's Xiaomi again tops booming smartphone market which just hit record of 100m sales in six months India appears to have permanently banned the 59 Chinese apps it first barred from local use in June 2020.…

GameStop shares soaring to $350 from $5 last year?! WTF is going on? Analysis So it seems 2021 is going to be the year that internet culture finally reaches the deepest and most protected pockets of society.…

Censorship-busting tool updated, advice on how to use it to evade blockades published China's recent upgrades to its content-blocking Great Firewall can be circumvented, according to censorship fighters from the Great Firewall Report.…

Scientists will focus on modelling hurricanes, wildfires, solar storms with Milan Epycs and Nv A100s HPE will upgrade the US National Center for Atmospheric Research’s supercomputer using AMD and Nvidia’s latest CPUs and GPUs, creating a machine roughly three times as powerful as its current Intel-based beast.…

Seattle duo go back to court demanding promised royalties AT&T has been sued by two Seattle entrepreneurs who accused the telecoms giant of stealing their technology and launching a rip-off version to avoid paying massive royalty fees.…

Last year's slipstream technique revived to pierce vulnerable firewalls – browsers patched to thwart bypass attempts Video Ben Seri and Gregory Vishnepolsky, threat researchers at Armis, have found a way to expand upon the NAT Slipstream attack disclosed last year by Samy Kamkar, CSO of Openpath Security.…

Vulnerabilities in build systems, secrets in source code: developer environments are an attack target Developer site Stack Overflow has published details of a breach dating back to May 2019, finding evidence that an intruder in its systems made extensive use of Stack Overflow itself to determine how to make the next move.…

It was a first mover for graph DBs, but cloud is full of rivals Graph database swashbuckler Neo4j has joined a throng of NoSQL vendors in selling its technology core as a fully managed cloud database.…

Europol-led op knocks offline 700 servers used to infect 'millions of computers' EU police agency Europol has boasted of taking down the main botnet powering the Emotet trojan-cum-malware dropper, as part of a multinational police operation that included raids on the alleged operators’ homes in the Ukraine.…

What do we want? Better coverage! How do we want it? Without actual infrastructure The UK government is looking to reform the laws governing how communications equipment is deployed and managed, in an effort to speed up the rollout of gigabit-capable connections.…

Potentially 250,000 reasons UK nature conservation charity was targeted The Woodland Trust, a peaceful British charity that looks after trees, was struck by a “cyber attack” before Christmas.…

That's 20 pence a pop for the 2.4 million calls made, many to Telephone Preference Service users The UK’s data watchdog has issued £480,000 in financial penalties to four businesses that illegally made 2.4 million marketing calls to members of the public registered with the Telephone Preference Services (TPS).…

Canadian uni educator apparently was an excellent teacher Anyone with sufficient memory to recall their college days may remember suspecting some of the staff behind the lectern were barely breathing. One student in Canada however was rather surprised to learn a professor offering the gift of knowledge had, in fact, passed away two years earlier.…

Customer: 'It feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth' Cloudy DevOps company GitLab has removed its $4.00 user/month Bronze/Starter tier, giving users the choice between paying for Premium at $19.00 or downgrading to the free tier and losing some features.…

Also: First all-commercial crew named, Boeing readies Starliner again and NASA's ex-boss is off to private equity In Brief The UK will be making its first major industrial contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) with the Columbus Ka-band Terminal (ColKa), which will be fitted to the Columbus laboratory module during a spacewalk by flight engineers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover.…

EU puts 2.9bn euro ($3.5bn) behind European Battery Innovation project, expects companies to triple that The European Union has announced a €2.9bn ($3.5bn, £2.57bn) state aid program to build a full production chain for battery tech, from the extraction of raw materials to the design and manufacturing of battery cells, and their recycling and disposal.…

Spend more on resilence, get more resilience: who whould've thunk it? The 2021 State of Chaos Engineering report from Gremlin, based on a survey of 400 companies, has shown a correlation between high availability and frequent use of chaos engineering.…

Time to make some ch-ch-changes The University of Nottingham is on the lookout for a new HR and finance system in a deal which could be worth £35m, barely a year after updating its current provider's system.…

New security features in Chrome but can businesses do everything they need through the browser? Google has introduced BeyondCorp Enterprise, for secure access to browser-based applications, using new security features in the Chrome browser.…

I’d love to sort out that issue for you, Steve, but it’s Saturday and I'd rather not commit a crime Europe has had enough of the blurring between work and personal time – where your boss calls you in the evening or colleagues email at the weekend – and is mulling introducing legislation that would provide a “right to disconnect.”…

What a co-incidence this news has emerged in the same week as a five-yearly party congress! Intel has revealed that it pumped an extra US$475m into its facilities in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.…

Small-scale test involving biosensor and trained algorithms shows early promise Scientists say they have devised a way to screen for prostate cancer using a drop of urine, a sensor, and AI algorithms. And the test takes just twenty minutes, and is 99 per cent accurate, according to results from a small-scale test.…

Scorches Flash for the very last time, too The Mozilla Foundation has scorched a pair of monstrosities in the new version 85 of its Firefox browser.…

You probably remember it as Tucows.com, an essential source of shareware downloads for the early Web One of the web’s early software download bazaars, Tucows.com, has closed.…

Chip designer records bumper final quarter and full year, predicts more of the same to come, says supply flow will increase Sometimes, things just go right. AMD on Tuesday reported record full-year and fourth-quarter financial figures, all due to interest in its chips across the board, from microprocessors in PCs and servers to GPUs in games consoles, and all during a pandemic.…

Management masterclass as locked-up Lee Jae-Yong apologises for his absence Samsung’s vice chairman and de facto boss Lee Jae-Yong has reportedly sent staff motivational messages from inside prison.…

FY21 Q2 results buoyed by cloud demand, pandemic-driven IT focus Microsoft far exceeded expectations for its second-quarter fiscal 2021 financial results, posting $43.1bn in revenue, an increase of 17 per cent.…

How's your year going? A US Air Force intelligence officer who kidnapped her daughter to Mexico and attempted to defect to Russia with information labelled top secret has been jailed for 11 years.…