The Register

New tax rules see a hike in use of umbrella companies - another can of worms Contractors able to continue working outside the IR35 regulations are gaining leverage in the market and succeeding in punting their scarce skills, according to a survey.…

'You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it' - but others disagree Analysis Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist Andressen Horowitz has posted a paper suggesting that "If you're operating at scale, the cost of cloud can at least double your infrastructure bill."…

ESA's veteran probe left for its mission 18 years ago today Space extenders Today marks the 18th anniversary since the European Space Agency' (ESA) launched the extraordinarily long-lived (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft from the Baikonur cosmodrome in 2003.…

Also tries to bust blades out of the box with new UCS-X series Cisco has advanced an alternative vision for running hybrid clouds – but you’ll need Cisco hardware to make it happen.…

We might have a solution Webcast The convergence of traditional CPU-powered HPC and GPU-fueled AI is one of the wonders of the age, whether it’s modelling vaccines or the climate, enabling automated trading, or speeding up fraud protection.…

Millions can’t use it, but it may be about to become a de facto travel permit India has updated its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app to record users’ COVID-19 vaccination status.…

Data center companies and chipmakers have signed an agreement as the government seeks to deglobalize their supply chain As semiconductor demand and supply chain insecurity both continue to grow, South Korea has decided it wants its own CPU production capability and has pushed its chip companies and hyperscale operators together to make it happen.…

Judge decides fondleslab giveaway was offered after permission to carry concealed weapons had been secured The strange case against Apple global security boss Thomas Moyer, who was accused of trying to bribe his way to permits to carry concealed guns, has ended with the judge dismissing the charges.…

Pair had access to financial results before release and slipped those details to traders, says watchdog India’s Securities and Exchange Board says staff at services giant Infosys committed insider trading.…

Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks Amazon warehouse workers sustain serious injuries more frequently than employees working in similar jobs across thousands of other companies, a report by unions concluded on Tuesday.…

Info-stealing scheme, attributed to Russia-affiliated crew, relied on spoof USAID marketing messages Uncle Sam on Tuesday said it had seized two web domains used to foist malware on victims using spoofed emails from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).…

New visuals, simplified menus, though Mozilla has yet to fully state its position on 'privacy preserving ads' Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.…

3070 Ti, 3080 Ti available this month ... well, in theory Nvidia announced two more GPUs this week: the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. These represent its latest “gaming flagship” hardware.…

Newsgroup restored after spam sinks entire board The Usenet group comp.lang.tcl vanished from Google Groups for several hours before being restored on Tuesday.…

Amazon's container service running on-premises: a turnaround for a company that once scorned hybrid cloud ECS Anywhere, which enables on-premises or Edge container applications to be managed by AWS, is now generally available.…

What’s the remedy? Read on… Promo The thought of ransomware gripping the corporate systems we manage is enough to give any of us sleepless nights. The thought of a ransomware attack crippling the healthcare infrastructure all of us rely on is terrifying.…

No more appeals as lawyer gravy train pulls into station Nokia and Daimler have resolved a long-running patent dispute, with both sides halting any pending litigation across the world and the German carmaker agreeing to pay licence fees.…

CDR and KKR the new owners of shape-shifting data platform biz Cloudera has been snapped up by private equity firms CDR and KKR in a cash deal worth around $5.3 billion, the California-based data biz confirmed today.…

Promises lower latencies, higher power thresholds BT has started trials of hollow-core fibre optical networks to test if they can raise fixed-line speeds and produce mobile networks with lower latencies.…

'Medieval mixed with athletic wear' chic from 1995 Fans of 'cyber' flick Hackers can amuse themselves by visiting an exhibition of the characters’ costumes in London – but time is running short if you want to catch a glimpse of Angelina Jolie’s bizarre getups.…

One of the few differentiators left in the smartphone arena Chinese mobile maker Xiaomi has demoed its latest charging tech, dubbed HyperCharge. Xiaomi claims its tech allows a 200W charger to fully replenish a 4,000mAh battery in eight minutes.…

Yep, UK.gov to build literal flagship - for about £200m Boatnotes Britain is to get a new ocean-going gin palace to schmooze VIPs, negotiate trade deals and fly the flag for UK Plc, the government confirmed at the weekend.…

We've kind of got a lot going on right now with vaccinating etc... maybe you could do the comms bit, huh? The UK's Royal College of GPs (RCGP) has written to NHS Digital to call for better communication with the public about their rights in opting out of what has been dubbed the "biggest data grab in NHS history."…

Fond memories of the before times and Windows Aero at a shuttered McDonald's order point Bork!Bork!Bork! Today marks a return of an old favourite as the DNS of bork, McDonald's, pops up again to show us how unattended kiosks should be run nowadays.…

So says the UK's Employment Tribunal in unfair dismissal case A “very highly qualified and experienced expert in artificial intelligence” who founded a misinformation-fighting startup has lost a legal case against Facebook in London for unfair dismissal.…

Will its vision for unified analytics fly? Databricks, the commercial company founded around the popular Apache Spark data lake, is making a strike for new class workloads and enterprise data management jobs in its make-or-break IPO year.…

Success, disagreement, forking, success... it's the c-IRC-le of liiiiiiiiiife Column IRC is the open secret of open software. IRC - internet Relay Chat - started in Finland in 1988 and quickly became the Internet’s first widespread real-time chat system.…

40k units now, but 'serious volume' to arrive after the summer Short of silicon? The Raspberry team has elected bring forward the availability of its RP2040 chippery to a wider audience, with an eye on potential customers who are struggling to secure supplies of microcontrollers.…

Cars are becoming computers on wheels, but car-makers aren't tuned into the silicon innovation cycle Feature In February 2021, giant automakers Nissan and Honda warned shareholders that revenue was set to fall. The cause of the imminent fall was not economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic but a boom in demand for semiconductors that left them unable to secure the components they needed to make their products.…

Space boffin tells Reg it's stupidly hard to clean up orbiting trash after Canadarm2 survives encounter with item too small to be tracked The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has revealed that a piece of space debris had punctured the Canadarm2 robotic on the International Space Station (ISS).…

They’ll be hosted by Equinix, owned by NVIDIA, and include NetApp storage Computex NVIDIA has decided to become an IaaS provider, at least for its own DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputers.…

CEO reveals new Teslas include AMD silicon and that Samsung has signed to pack RDNA 2 graphics into Exynos SoCs COMPUTEX AMD has revealed a new 3D chip stacking technology it claims delivers the equivalent performance boost to a new generation of chip architecture.…

TSMC is well on truly on top with 55 percent market share The world's top 10 semiconductor foundries set new records for combined revenue in 1Q21 by growing one percent quarter-on-quarter to reach US$22.75B, thanks to price hikes and full utilization of chip stocks, market research firm TrendForce said on Monday.…

Plus: More Rowhammer research, Feds warn of Fortinet attacks, etc In brief The creator of the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) website, which alerts you if it turns out your credentials have been swiped and leaked from an account database, has open sourced the project's internals.…

Appears to have taken first step by appointing grievance officer Twitter has been given three weeks to comply with India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 – which came into effect last week.…

Plus: Ex-OpenAI employees launch machine-learning research org In brief Nearly a hundred counties, towns and cities across the US have purchased surveillance cameras from Chinese companies blocked by the federal government over the human rights abuse of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.…

Sometimes honesty is the best policy Who, Me? Let's take a step back in time for today's Who, Me? with a trip to the dying days of manual credit card imprinting.…

Google spawned it, Cloudflare backed it, Microsoft made its own cut. Boffins worry it didn't improve privacy Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) have graduated to Internet Engineering Task Force’s standards track.…

Teases Alder Lake architecture – which mixes different types of CPU – in mobile PCs. Also reveals some 5G fun Computex Intel has found another pair of 11th-gen Core processors and announced them at Taiwan’s Computex conference, then revealed its 12th-gen “Alder Lake” architecture is “just on the horizon.”…

Double-mutant strain puts electronics factories at risk Vietnam’s government has asked Samsung to find COVID-19 vaccinations to protect workers in provinces that are home to industrial parks, a request that reflects the co-dependence between the Korean Chaebol and the rapidly developing nation.…

Cops weren’t total dopes: chronic electricity theft means they still smoked crims West Midlands Police in the UK has revealed that its officers raided a suspected cannabis growing operation and ended up smoking out a Bitcoin mine run on stolen electricity.…

Decent port of a PlayStation 4 'exclusive', but it's far from original The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. In May, the industry finally pushed some hot properties out the door including Resident Evil Village, Biomutant, and the Mass Effect remasters. But we opted to check out something just a little bit older.…

Theft spree repeatedly blamed on wrong guy – lawsuit Apple and its security contractor Security Industry Specialists (SIS) were sued on Friday in Massachusetts as part of a multijurisdictional defamation and malicious prosecution complaint brought on behalf of Ousmane Bah, a New York resident misidentified as a shoplifter multiple times in 2018 and 2019.…

Legal challenge now on behalf of more than 10,000 others A lawsuit spearheaded by four female Google ex-employees claiming the ad giant pays men higher wages for doing the same job was granted class-action status this week.…

Disney and Comcast get a pass from the Sunshine State, though Two technology grade groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter among others, on Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a new Florida law, SB 7072, that prohibits social media companies from deplatforming state political candidates and establishes a right for citizens to sue over platform moderation decisions.…

Leaked data proves very educational Details of some US nuclear missile bunkers in Europe, which contain live warheads, along with secret codewords used by guards to signal that they’re being threatened by enemies, were exposed for nearly a decade through online flashcards used for education, but which were left publicly available.…

Claims of ignoring NDA will be tried by High Court, rules judge London’s High Court has refused to hear parts of a software copyright case after a Spanish startup Trappit claimed American Express ignored an NDA and unlawfully copied its flight rebooking software.…

There are 'advantages', but you must submit to 'the Google way of doing things,' warns analyst Google is promising to capture data logs from Oracle and other on-prem SQL data systems for monitoring, data integration and ML pipelines.…

Not the first plane trip you wanted to do post-lockdown, but there you are Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual tech jamboree, is back, in person and it is multiplying.…

Amazing how being able to write off 130% of infrastructure deployment focuses minds BT-owned Openreach threw rural Britain a bone today, announcing it would double the number of country premises expected to receive FTTP access by the end of 2026.…