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Other fun bits: An 'asteroid patrol', brain:computer fusion, DNA storage, enhanced privacy laws China has put quantum communications networks and a brain:machine interface on its to-do list in plans unveiled at its annual "Two Sessions" parliamentary sittings.…

Is Spain really ready for 50,000 people at one venue? Sounds like a super spreader event ready to happen Mobile World Congress appears determined to run its annual Barcelona super-conference as an in-person event this year, mid-pandemic, posting a safety plan online on Monday.…

Don’t panic: Fewer than 0.001% of sessions compromised through flaw that couldn’t be maliciously triggered If you visit GitHub today you’ll be asked to authenticate anew because the code collaboration locker has squished a bug that sometimes “misrouted a user’s session to the browser of another authenticated user, giving them the valid and authenticated session cookie for another user.”…

Take that, rootkits and other low-level nasties - if they take a crack at fresh VMs, on certain instance types under a handful of OSes Microsoft has revealed that its Azure IaaS platform now offers free a virtual trusted platform module.…

Service options decline starting next year... so there may be a Nexus 9K switch in your future Cisco has in recent days issued a blizzard of end-of-life and end-of-sale announcement for switches in its Nexus 3000 and Nexus 7000 ranges.…

Plus: Chrome also patched, Microsoft and Intel team up for homomorphic encryption, and more In brief Apple on Monday released security patches for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and Safari to fix up a vulnerability that can be exploited by malicious web pages to run malware on victims' computers and gadgets.…

'This is going to be a lot of work ... a reasonable set of mitigation primitives exists today, ready and waiting for use' After the disclosure of the 2018 Spectre family of vulnerabilities in modern microprocessor chips, hardware vendor and operating system makers scrambled to reduce the impact of data-leaking side-channel attacks designed to exploit the way chips try to predict future instructions.…

That's the people who own Bethesda, Doom, Fallout, etc The European Commission and the US Securities and Exchange Commission have approved Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax, a US video game holding biz behind top titles like Doom and Fallout, in a deal worth a whopping $7.5bn.…

While its namesake founder is indicted for fraud and money laundering McAfee will sell off its enterprise business to private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) for $4bn in cash, the venerable security biz announced on Monday.…

And here's us thinking 640KB was enough for anyone South Korea's SK Hynix has started mass production of its first 18GB LPDDR5 memory chip.…

High price and poor upgradability made this an unattractive alternative to the 2019 Mac Pro The iMac Pro is dead. Apple has stopped allowing prospective customers to create their own custom configurations of the premium all-in-one box.…

Buy one enterprise software division, get one sueball absolutely free Micro Focus International has told the London Stock Exchange it intends to appeal judgments resulting from a verdict of a patent infringement against it in the US.…

No obvious replacement yet either Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to customer feedback by, er, shutting down some of its UserVoice forums.…

Paging Mr Heath Robinson A Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 user has solved the premium hardware's heating issues with the aid of elastic bands, a USB fan, and $50 handed over to Amazon.…

Plus: AI Index 2021 report takeaways, Chocolate Factory banished from top ethics conference, and more In brief US government should avoid hastily banning AI-powered autonomous weapons and instead step up its efforts in developing such systems to keep up with foreign enemies, according to the National Security Commission on AI.…

Ten letters, starts with R, ends with E, three syllables The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland is fending off "an ongoing cyber incident" that has shut down its campuses.…

Metropolitan police hand keys to French outsourcer Capgemini has won a £600m IT infrastructure deal from the UK's Metropolitan Police to run a service desk, data centres, and services management including the integration of other suppliers.…

You're naming yourself wrong? An iCloud customer says she spent more than six hours on the phone to Apple after being locked out of the service because her name is apparently incompatible with the application code.…

Plus: McAfee's in serious trouble over claimed cryptocurrency scam In brief Another form of malware installed in servers backdoored in the SolarWinds' Orion fiasco has been spotted in the wild.…

IT pros from orgs large and small tell The Reg the tech delivered, mostly, but couriers and home Wi-Fi suddenly became your problem Covid Logfile Brianna Haley was given one day to be ready to roll out Zoom for 13,000 users at over 1,000 sites.…

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (as Windows crashes again) BORK!BORK!BORK! Getting astronauts to the Moon or Mars is the least of NASA's problems. Persuading Microsoft Windows not to fall over along the way is apparently a far greater challenge.…

Time to fix those legacy evils, though.... right? Column It is the monster which corrupts all it touches. It is an energy-sucking vampire that thrives on the pain it promotes. It cannot be killed, but grows afresh as each manifestation outdoes the last in awfulness and horror. It is Microsoft Exchange and its drooling minion, Outlook.…

Leads Works Ltd and Valca Vehicle and Life Cover Agency tried to exploit household finance fears in lockdown, says data watchdog Two businesses that dispatched more than 2.6 million nuisance text messages seeking to exploit lower household incomes during Britain’s first lockdown are nursing a combined financial penalty of £330,000 from the UK’s data watchdog.…

Let us tell you a tale of the Mailman's Apprentice Who, Me? The weekend is over and Monday is here. Celebrate your IT prowess with another there-but-for-the-grace confession from the Who, Me? archives.…

Perseverance takes first drive around landing spot named in honor of seminal sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler NASA’s Perseverance rover trekked across Mars for the first time last Thursday, March 4, 2021.…

Without Honor, or 5G silicon, there can be no victory Oppo has become China’s top smartphone brand for the first time, according to analyst house Counterpoint.…

Don't just patch, check for p0wnage, says top natsec team The Biden administration has urged users of Microsoft's Exchange mail and messaging server to ensure they have not fallen victim to the recently-detected "Hafnium" attack on Exchange Server that Microsoft says originated in China.…

Will go live in 2022 and ‘effectively double’ capacity in the Middle Kingdom Microsoft has revealed it plans to open a fifth Azure region in China.…

Side-channel ring race 'hard to mitigate with existing defenses' Chip-busting boffins in America have devised yet another way to filch sensitive data by exploiting Intel's processor design choices.…

‘Subtle and very nasty bug’ meant 5.12 rc1 could trash entire filesystems Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has rushed out a new release candidate of Linux 5.12 after the first in the new series was found to include a ‘subtle and very nasty bug’ that was so serious he marked rc1 as unsuitable for use.…

Proof-of-concept SEER taught over eight days using 512 GPUs Facebook has trained its most advanced semi-supervised computer vision system yet on a dataset of a billion public images taken from Instagram, its other social network.…

Trick future robot overlords by scribbling 'superuser' on your forehead OpenAI researchers believe they have discovered a shockingly easy way to hoodwink their object-recognition software, and it requires just pen and paper to carry out.…

'That is not the world we want, nor the one users deserve' With the arrival of Google Chrome v89 on Tuesday, Google is preparing to test a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that it hopes will replace increasingly shunned, privacy-denying third-party cookies.…

Why are cellular networks so worried about batt life during lockdown? US telco Verizon recently splashed $45bn on 5G spectrum and then advised its customers to use LTE to save device battery life. Not to be outdone, rival carrier T-Mobile is recommending battery-anxious punters use 2G instead of the latest-and-greatest in cellular connectivity.…

SaaS pusher says it has locked up social media account after 'unauthorised access' Near ubiquitous SaaS CRM pusher Salesforce got a rude awakening this week when its carefully curated image of a business addressing racial equality was shattered by its clearly hacked LinkedIn page.…

Deep sea submersible may help humans explore deepest oceans Researchers in China have developed flexible submersible robots that experts say might one day help humans reveal the secrets to unexplored depths of the Earth's vast oceans.…

Ninth anniversary celebrated with bug fixes for enthusiasts and power users A month after version 7.1 of LibreOffice hit the streets, the first update has landed replete with a swathe of bug fixes for the suite.…

Data from multiple aviation giants hit Not that many planes are taking off these days, but that didn’t stop the flight of passenger records from servers belonging to aviation tech supplier SITA after it was hit by a "cyberattack".…

'Bold play by Wipro, but one not without risk' - analyst Outsourcing provider Wipro has bid $1.45bn for banking consultant and digital transformation outfit Capco.…

Suit says he couldn't tell 'old' price from 'new', nor perceive pop-up window Updated A legally blind man who cannot see "faces or text" has claimed that Dell is violating federal accessibility laws by maintaining an improperly formatted website and online store.…

'You'll be surprised at how much you can do with a personal computer' It has been 40 years since the launch of Sinclair's ZX81, a device that welcomed countless Brits to the delights of home computing at the dawn of the 1980s.…

'No access to buildings' for striking Repayment Project engineers, confirms company Updated Openreach’s Project Repayment Engineers who are already on the picket line to protest over changes in the grading structure that they say devalues their role, are naming five more strike dates.…

One-fifth of all flights in a 3 hour period were affected GPS jamming of airliners not only causes navigational havoc but delays commercial airline flights too, EU airspace regulator Eurocontrol has complained in a new report.…

Our vulture Iain argues against this week's motion Reader debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: a motion was proposed this week, the argument for the motion was published on Wednesday, and the argument against is published today.…

Untangling privacy implications of using Google's productivity suite not easy A Dutch government report identifying "10 high data protection risks" for users of Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, has been revised after Google's response, and now says eight high risk issues still remain.…

Still waiting for neuroscientists to work out why Something for the Weekend, Sir? Never again. As Gods are my witnesses, you will never catch me [insert gerund here] in future. I have learnt my lesson.…

Friends and family tech support meets steam-powered computing On Call It's a friends and family episode of On Call today, dedicated to the moments when one's attempts to render IT assistance are met with bafflement or just plain hostility.…

The walls are closing in on the iGiant The UK's antitrust watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple’s app store after developers complained its strict rules are an unfair stranglehold and may break competition law.…

Netflix and drive is finally here Honda has started selling the first commercial passenger vehicle with level 3 autonomy - the ability to drive in many situations without human intervention, but with the expectation a human is always ready to take control.…

Faster, Sysadmin! Install! Install! The Chromium crew has revved its engines and decided it will soon emit a new stable release every four weeks and create a new type of release for those who are built for comfort rather than speed.…