The Register

Hotshot snotbot shows grotty terror plot buzzbots what's what Until recently, the variously camouflaged, partially stealthed and fully invisibility-cloaked boffins at DARPA – Uncle Sam's most famous left-field military research institute – had a problem.…

Why does it always... That's why. That's why it's raining on you UK government proposals to create a workers' watchdog have been slammed by campaigners for not adequately covering umbrella companies, some of which have been accused of sharp practices as the IR35 off-payroll tax revamp expands their usage among contractors.…

Plans fintech infusion for local banking sector, plus data-sharing infrastructure Hong Kong has revealed a strategy to give its financial services sector a fintech infusion.…

Russia, Greenland, northern Canada will get the Full Monty Dust off your funky eclipse sunglasses and your homemade pinhole projector – a partial solar eclipse is set to cast a blurry shadow across parts of the UK on Thursday.…

Fines, fines, everywhere there's fines Microsoft and five other companies have received fines totaling US$75K from South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), for running afoul of local data protection laws.…

Company also says large and well-funded IT department sorted recovery swiftly JBS Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, has revealed it handed over “the equivalent of $11 million” to resolve a ransomware infection that disrupted operations in Australia, the USA, and Canada.…

None were illegal, but they did put civil servants in awkward ethical territory and execs knew it Japanese tech and telecoms giant NTT has temporarily slashed the pay of several top executives, to reprimand them for paying too much of the bill at $500-a-head lunches with government officials.…

Sure, you can apply to work from home in the middle of nowhere, just don't expect Silicon Valley pay Facebook, like other Silicon Valley mega-corps, is ready to get its workers back in the office, setting October as the time when business returns somewhat to normal.…

Also sent lovely flowers as US$22bn GoTo Group cut driver bonuses Drivers who work for Indonesia’s Uber equivalent, Gojek, have gone on strike for three days in response to some of the payments they receive being halved.…

FBI reveals undercover employee sold him fake explosives before arrest Seth Aaron Pendley, the 28-year-old Texas man accused of planning to blow up an Amazon Web Services data centre, admitted on Wednesday he planned to destroy a building with an explosive.…

But executive order expands on supply chain security initiative with call for evidence-based vetting of technology The White House on Tuesday revoked stalled Trump-era orders that sought to ban social media apps TikTok, WeChat, and others in the United States as national security threats.…

Boffins find flaw in web security that enables certificate confusion Academics from three German universities have found a vulnerability in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that under limited circumstances allows the theft of session cookies and enables cross-site scripting attacks.…

The first based in China Huawei has opened another cyber security centre and, despite facing a crisis of trust in the West, has chosen to do so for the first time in its Chinese heartland.…

Sierra Nevada Corporation eyes a landing site in the UK Sierra Nevada Corporation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Spaceport Cornwall aimed at landing its Dream Chaser spacecraft on a strip in the southwest county of England.…

Have you tried simply being more powerful and wealthy? The leak of US federal tax returns filed by the world's richest tycoons sent shock waves this week. To put it simply, the headlines stemming from the ProPublica report appear damning.…

Criminal operators emerged from woodwork just as COVID hit the West The Nefilim ransomware gang might not be the best known or most prolific online extortion crew but their penchant for attacking small numbers of $1bn+ turnover firms is paying off, according to latest research.…

From July you'll be able to swipe credit card for kit at 'Experience Centers' Microsoft is set to reopen some of its stores for sales to the general public.…

Impressive working computer from the corpse of a rarity Video Faced with dwindling sales to education customers in the late 1990s, Apple introduced the eMate 300.…

Raspberry Pi-powered prototype proves 95% accurate, 100% private, claim boffins Researchers at the University of Michigan have proposed a way to have your privacy cake and eat your home automation too. They've found a means of using a voice-activated smart speaker system without it having to listen to everything you say – and no, it's not "pressing a button."…

FPGA-driven prototypes yet to prove the company's bold performance and power-draw claims Tachyum, which has been promising a "universal processor" dubbed Prodigy for the past three years, said it was one step closer to delivering on that pledge with the development of a motherboard for its FPGA emulator that allows customers to test a complete Prodigy system.…

Mandiant investigation says crims gained access through legacy VPN The boss of Colonial Pipeline has appeared before a Senate Committee to explain the events which led to US East Coast fuel supplies running dry last month and some $5m being handed over in ransom.…

Malicious crew targets ME and Asia but also tries evading Chinese AV suites ESET has published details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) crew that appears to have deployed recent supply chain attack methods against targets including "electronics manufacturers," although it didn't specify which.…

OK, we see where this is going Google claims not only has it made an AI that's faster and as good as if not better than humans at designing chips, the web giant is using it to design chips for faster and better AI.…

Regulator airs country's muddy laundry - including fact it rarely unplugs The UK is a nation of online shoppers who – when not spending a whopping £113bn over the past 12 months – spent more time online than any other grown-ups across Europe last year.…

We want to give your property better internets for free, pls respond The UK's Department of Fun – aka Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – has opened a consultation on legislation designed to improve access to gigabit broadband in apartment blocks.…

Plus: UAVs that can smell your poop – both for benign purposes, mind Researchers at Fraunhofer FKIE have unveiled a system that teaches drones to hunt down humans by listening to their screams.…

Reports through Chipzilla's bug bounty scheme growing, but still in the minority Intel has pushed out a raft of security advisories for June, bringing its total discovered "potential vulnerabilities" for the year to date to 132, only a quarter of which were reported by external contributors and the company's bug bounty programme.…

The history of computing is all change, all the time. Yet silicon-slingers let the chips fail where they may Column Unless you've been hiding under a (non-silicate) rock, you know there's a massive global shortage of semiconductors. Automobile production lines have stalled. New computers are launched late. Gamers can't get their hands on the latest bits of kit. And we're told that this won't clear up until 2023. If we're lucky.…

Delayed Euro 2020 championship will be won by the Czech Republic, and England will drop out in semi-finals (sounds legit) The Czech Republic footie team is set to be crowned champions next month, beating fellow underdogs Denmark 3-2 in the Euros in what pundits claim will prove to be a "thrilling final".…

Unimpressed beak orders Transport for London to let them onto Southwark roof Transport for London tried to block engineers and surveyors from EE and Three carrying out a survey for a new mobile phone mast by telling a judge they “might insert a USB stick into a computer” or “upload some virus”.…

A day before THAT delay, Matt Hancock told MPs that 'citizens' own the data he'd instructed the health department to take by default Comment Against a strong field, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has come out as a winner in the prize for stomach-churning political double-speak while addressing NHS Digital's shameless grab for patient data held by GP surgeries in England.…

Never. Test. In. Production. Who, Me? A Who, Me? moment last week introduced a much-needed laugh into the lives of at least a few end users, after a bit of testing in production had all too familiar consequences.…

Supermarkets presumably working on a solution to this 'problem' right now There's no digital equivalent to the love-it-or-hate-it impulse aisle of the supermarket, with shoppers spending noticeably less on sweets, cookies, and other tasty treats online than in the real world.…

Promises it won't happen again, expresses remorse … all the usual stuff that clouds (and Zuck) say after they stumble around making messes Fastly has explained how it managed to black-hole big chunks of the internet yesterday: a customer triggered a bug.…

Nú með þýðingarmöguleika Vivaldi has released version 4.0 of its eponymous browser, adding translation capabilities and dragging the long-awaited mail and calendar functionality out of tech preview.…

Malware was too loose to have come from a Western nation, according to Sentinel Labs An advanced persistent threat that Russia found inside government systems was too crude to have been the work of a Western nation, says security researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade of Sentinel Labs, before suggesting the malware came from a Chinese entity.…

Minister moved from celebrating new facility to complaining about it in a handful of hours India’s new tax e-filing portal went live Monday night, and was down less than 24 hours later, leading union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to jump onto Twitter with some pointed questions for the site's developer, Indian services giant Infosys.…

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.…