The Register

Yes that was a Betteridge headline (badoom, tish) Long-running US skit show Saturday Night Live has once again courted controversy by inviting Technoking Elon Musk on to host.…

You win some, then you lose some A Veritas salesman had £275,000 in "windfall" commission withheld after helping land "the largest ever deal in Veritas's history" – and a judge found a clause in his employment contract which made it lawful to do that.…

Never want to return to daily 9-5 regime? Use psychology to baffle higher-ups With some company bosses hellbent on forcing staff to return to the office once the pandemic is over, research has arrived that warns of the productivity pitfalls of expecting minions to re-embrace the daily commute.…

We are all human beings, we live in a community, and everything we do affects others Column The trouble with good ideas is that, taken together, they can be very bad. It's a good idea to worry about supply chain malware injection – ask SolarWinds – and a good idea to come up with ways to stop it. It's even a good idea to look at major open-source software projects, such as the Linux kernel, with their very open supply chain, and ask – is this particularly vulnerable? After all, a poisoned Linux kernel would be bad enough to make people forget SolarWinds.…

'Everything in this industry always goes to schedule and to plan,' he says Interview Rocket Lab is on a roll, notching up multiple launches and unveiling plans for something considerably grander than its workhorse Electron.…

Ingenuity's third flight goes further, faster, as Perseverance snaps pics 'n' vid of 'copter zipping past VIDEO NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has flown flying faster and further than ever before - even when it was on Earth - and we even have video of Sunday's 80-second flight because the Perseverance Rover’s Mastcam-Z had its eye on the drone's third flight.…

You don't get me, I'm part of the union Who, Me? Bid farewell to the weekend with a tale of surfing snoopage and automation rejected in another story from The Register's Who, Me? files.…

Brit spymaster calls for renewed attention to UK tech capabilities – and expanded role for his agency The director of the UK's signals intelligence agency has delivered a speech in which he contemplated power in the digital age, observing that "China's size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system," and hinting at an expanded role for the agency he leads as one way to fight back.…

Here’s a flight plan to map your journey Promo Whatever unit of measurement you use, it’s clear that more and more enterprise computing is happening in the cloud - which also means the cloud is an ever-growing target for cyber attackers.…

Many banned posts were made by opposition politicians and appear to be criticism of the government As India battles a surging second wave of COVID-19 cases and severe shortages of medical supplies to fight it, the nation's government has told Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to remove social media posts it says may panic its populace with misinformation.…

Uninstall code, distributed from backend servers seized in January, fired on Sunday Notorious Windows malware Emotet was automatically wiped from computers yesterday by European law enforcement using a customized DLL.…

Plus: America creates task force to tackle ransomware crims In Brief The Homebrew package manager for macOS and Linux has fixed an issue that could have been exploited by miscreants to run malicious code on people's computers.…

Proper customer protections now required, local authorities urged to make new rules stick China has issued a new code governing “livestreaming” – an emerging marketing practice that has gone big, fast, in China and will be familiar to The Register readers around the world as infomercials for the digital age.…

Dot-org has been offline for a month, says ‘people who have ill intentions’ behind crack A “scanlation” website for Manga has admitted that its members credentials have been stolen and are now being shared online.…

New version adds Hyper-V fun, more support for ACRN IoT hypervisor, support for PlayStation controllers and ‘novelty port’ to ancient Nintendo Linus Torvalds has emitted version 5.12 of the Linux kernel, and warned the next version looks like a whopper.…

Guidelines, privacy, security all a smokescreen for monopoly abuse, lawmakers told Special report Apple and Google were blasted by app developers this week during a US Senate hearing over the tech giant's software souks. Here we summarize that meeting – and take a closer look at why a proposed law in Arizona to tackle the duo's behavior failed to pass.…

DEF CON hails 'an icon in all the positive ways' Obit Celebrated information security researcher Dan Kaminsky, known not just for his technical ability but also for his compassion and support for those in his industry, has died. He was 42.…

Plus: Enormo AI chip gets an upgrade, and more In brief Banks in America are reportedly rolling out cameras with machine-learning software to surveil people, claiming it’ll help reduce fraud, provide a better service to reduce wait times, and monitor homeless people sleeping near ATMs.…

Oops, watchdog doesn't actually have the power to do so, panel unanimously point out The US government's consumer watchdog cannot force scammers to return the money they cheated out of their victims, the Supreme Court declared unanimously this week.…

Watchdog deemed Richard Glenn's conduct 'unacceptable' An IT teacher at an English private school has been banned from teaching for 36 months for "unacceptable professional conduct" that included getting drunk and visiting a strip club with one or more pupils.…

Our plan is better than President Biden's, they claim, with few details A cadre of Republican senators have proposed allocating $65bn to developing broadband infrastructure in America as part of a $568bn five-year spending plan.…

Killer IoT app finally arrives: Keg-tracking tech to tackle light-fingered miscreants Forget all those interminable IoT gadgets gathering dust in the drawers of the world. Brewers may soon be able to breathe easier after signing up to what we're going to call the Internet of Beer.…

US Copyright Office asked to add DMCA amendment Repairs specialist iFixit has urged the US Copyright Office to add exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would allow individuals to legally circumvent digital restrictions in the process of repairing hardware.…

Come for the 'ohana', stay for the massive piles of cash Salesforce has topped a survey of UK executive salaries with median earnings of around £100,000 per annum, beating investment bank Man Group and consultancy Kearney to the top spot.…

Japanese firm has a reckoning to face Post Office employees were wrongly prosecuted by the company as a direct result of it covering up software bugs in its Horizon IT system, the Court of Appeal in England has said as it quashed 39 convictions this morning.…

Also, Dell and HP miss out on expanded board positions Indian IT trade association and advocacy group National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has appointed Rehka Menon of Accenture as chairperson – the first woman to take the position in the organisation's history.…

Second jaunt to the International Space Station for Endeavour SpaceX has launched the second operational Crew Dragon mission, sending another four astronauts to the International Space Station.…

A treat for returning workers as meeting cancelled due to roomful of bork Updated Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft is famed for eating its own dogfood and this week chowed down on a bowl of fresh bork as its consulting boss encountered what we can only assume is the company's latest attempt to deal with Meeting Culture.…

Microsoft's own distro lurks under the covers and applications magically appear in the Start menu Hands on Microsoft has released the first public preview of Linux GUI applications on Windows 10 – so we wasted no time in taking it for a spin around the block.…

Get with the disruptive app design, granddad: meaningless errors are cool Something for the Weekend, Sir? An error has occurred… Of course it did – I'm in a hurry and the login is sensing my urgency. Big mistake. Let's try again, more casually. An error has occurred……

As long as the technical nous is there If you've ever worked in a commercial kitchen, you probably know what a "bump bar" is. These plank-like computerised boards are the organisational force behind every restaurant, enabling sweat-drenched chefs to see pending orders and ensure a steady flow of food to the front of house.…

Practical jokes: just don't On Call Welcome to another entry in The Register's On Call files, where we learn that the hilarious pranks of an IT joker can be enjoyed as much as millionaire actor George Clooney's "fun" leg-pulling.…

Early users get speed, so policy-makers may stop building, but more users means slower speeds ... Elon Musk's Starlink project has copped more criticism, this time from a researcher at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia-Pacific region.…

First, COVID vaccinations, now atmosphere generators for an alien world? We're really cooking on gas now Earthlings have succeeded in creating oxygen away from their lush home world and on the unforgiving dust planet Mars for the first time, using equipment on a robot they have lovingly dubbed Perseverance.…

Sad news: Cupertino seems to think you won’t be comfortable going out until at least the end of the year COVID-19 vaccinations have been administered to hundreds of millions of people, but Apple seems to think that you'll be safest if you don't go out until at least the end of year.…

Expects breakthroughs in design, materials and more. No pressure: Xi Jinping dropped in ahead of launch China's highest-ranked university has opened a new school dedicated to integrated circuits and given it the job of achieving breakthroughs and creating a generation of tech talent for the nation.…

#FOSS4GOV challenge will fund and mentor devs and startups to create govtech code India has challenged local developers to create open-source customer relationship management and enterprise resource management software worthy of use by its government agencies.…

'The system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn’t tell if there was a driver there at all' Tesla vehicles can be tricked into driving in Autopilot mode when no one is sitting on the driver seat nor controlling the steering wheel – as required by the software – according to Consumer Reports.…

Server chip business doldrums blamed on 'digestion' Intel on Thursday reported first-quarter 2021 revenue of $19.7bn, which was better than analysts expected though not enough to prevent Chipzilla's share price slipping, the stock closed down 1.77 per cent and slipped still further in after-hours trading.…

Storage box maker puts customers on red alert after outbreak in ransomware infections QNAP has urged its customers to install and run its latest firmware and malware removal tools on their NAS boxes amid a surge in ransomware infections.…

Tweets linking to source code were fair use, say digital-rights warriors The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Wednesday sued Proctorio, a maker of academic surveillance software, to obtain judgement that a Miami University student's tweets linking to portions of Proctorio source code on Pastebin do not violate copyright law.…

Software fixes available, says FAA American aviation regulators have ordered private jet operators to install software updates for Garmin collision avoidance units after multiple reports of false alarms – raising the risk of a mid-air crash.…

SQL Server optimisations on way too, but 'Hirsute Hippo' not an LTS release so take-up may be tepid Canonical's love-in with Microsoft has continued apace with the arrival of Ubuntu 21.04, replete with Active Directory integration. Optimisations for Microsoft's SQL Server are also inbound.…

Find out how OutSystems and AWS can help you clean up your legacy Promo Moving your applications and data to the cloud give you the opportunity to revamp your existing software and enable you to reach new customers, drive efficiencies and enhance productivity. If you do it right.…

Once again, the cloud makes it rain Adobe shareholders have approved an executive compensation package that handed CEO Shantanu Narayen a $7m pay bump during fiscal 2020, according to SEC documents.…

Noble aim to curb energy-hungry apps, but needs willing souls to trade performance for efficiency Microsoft is previewing a new Windows developer feature called EcoQoS for reducing power consumption, as well as adding Eco Mode to Task Manager.…

Plus: UiPath and Teradata give investors reason for cheer. Yes, plenty of the wrong people happy on a Thursday in lockdown Former SAP biz Qualtrics has beat expectations by posting a substantial revenue and subscriptions rise amongst three bits of upbeat tech-stock news that indicate fair winds for the market, putting smug smiles on the faces of investors.…

Space-saving structures could work well in 'space missions' An applied maths professor and her team have dreamed up inflatable origami structures they say could save time and energy in erecting emergency shelters, such as those vital to refugee camps.…

Lockdown's getting to everyone – even the social media monkeys British domestic spy agency MI5 wants to dispel the idea it is staffed by martini-quaffing layabouts who spend implausible amounts of time lounging around top-end bars and hotels. It has therefore opened an Instagram account.…

Stressing the ex in x86 Canadian AI chip startup Tenstorrent, which is headed by former top AMD engineers, has picked one of SiFive's latest RISC-V CPU designs for its unconventional machine-learning processors.…