The Register

What a useless tool, say folk in freelance community, with months to go before tax reforms introduced to private sector UK.gov's controversial tool used by contractors to determine their tax liability under IR35 legislation is still proving less than reliable just months before tax reforms are introduced to the private sector.…

American cable guy Liberty Global and Spanish multinational Telefónica ask CMA to hurry up and marry their kids The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will subject the proposed merger of Virgin Media and O2 to an investigation to decide whether the combined mega-entity will hurt the market for certain telecommunications-related products.…

We know 2020 has been hard on the standup circuit, but really? Comedian Katherine Ryan has found her eponymous website redirected to an Australian shipping company following a domain expiry.…

Massive planets at far out distances from their stars are possible after all The Hubble Space Telescope has spied a previously unknown exoplanet with similar properties as our Solar System's hypothetical object Planet Nine. This newly spotted body is living on the outskirts of another solar system 336 light-years away.…

Both are driving me up the wall Something for the Weekend, Sir? Do not park in front of my house.…

Company safe... telephone gear... Is this the cleaner's cupboard? On Call The weekend is almost within touching distance, so break out the beverages and enjoy another tale of On Call shenanigans from The Register's put-upon readership.…

VMware’s Rajiv Ramaswami gets Dheeraj Pandey’s job, and the task of fending off Microsoft’s new contender Over the last five years, hyperconverged infrastructure went from being a slightly outré software-defined concept to an infrastructure option that earned a place on almost every infrastructure shopping list.…

We're sure these websites will find some way to rebound from this incredible punishment Google and Amazon have been slapped with €100m and €35m fines respectively after France’s data privacy watchdog declared both companies had placed advertising cookies on people’s computers without their consent.…

Because the balance sheet showed only muted growth while subscription cash starts to flow Oracle has posted modest growth for its second quarter, with SaaS-y ERP a notable exception. But founder Larry Ellison says the numbers don’t reflect its bright new cloudy reality.…

Which is why it's built its own UPS, from the firmware up. And also why Graviton ignores Intel's and AMD's best tricks Amazon Web Services is tired of tech that wasn’t purpose built for clouds and hopes that the stuff it’s now building from scratch will be more appealing to you, too.…

Good luck with your digital transformation without us on board, says Asia Internet Coalition Big Tech’s Asian lobby group has warned Pakistan that the nation's recent content-blocking rules will hurt its economy.…

And repeats that there's no Huawei that Chinese manufacturer is getting its hardware in, either The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday began proceedings to determine whether to revoke China Telecom's ability to operate in America.…

Sophisticated campaign has been going on for months, we're told On Thursday Microsoft warned that there's an ongoing campaign to distribute malware that modifies web browsers to conduct credential theft and ad fraud.…

$500 a pop, $25k 'earned' and not much of a trace left, says Guardicore A “malwareless” ransomware campaign delivered from UK IP addresses targeting weak security controls around internet-facing SQL servers successfully pwned 83,000 victims, according to Israeli infosec biz Guardicore.…

Wormable nasty still doesn't need any user input to pwn target devices A previous patch for Cisco's Jabber chat product did not in fact fix four vulnerabilities – including one remote code execution (RCE) flaw that would allow malicious people to hijack targeted devices by sending a carefully crafted message.…

Open-source API framework aims to make Cassandra a bit easier DataStax, chief commercial cheerleader of Cassandra, has released an open-source API framework for data aimed at easing developer access to the NoSQL columnar database.…

Rocking the Red Hat boat with an alternative distro designed for production use Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project, has kicked off a new venture called Rocky Linux, the aim being to build "a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100 per cent bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)".…

Billing budget? Free plan? All useless when buggy code went into overdrive Sudeep Chauhan, founder of startup Milkie Way, suffered a bad case of bill shock when a test with a $7.00 billing budget and a free database plan on Google Cloud platform (GCP) generated a $72,000 invoice overnight.…

The Pandora's Box that won't stay closed UK trade union Prospect has chimed in with the chorus of disapproval at technologies such as Microsoft's Productivity Score being used on the nation's workers.…

Take those claimed performance gains with a pinch of salt, though Oracle has announced the general availability, at least in the cloud, of Database 21c.…

Blanket deletions will smother internet, EU tech chief told Twitter, Mozilla, Automattic, and Vimeo have signed an open letter aimed at EU tech chief Margrethe Vestager taking issue with new digital rules due to be announced later this month and asking for a more flexible approach when it comes to internet content.…

'Better late than never' opines industry bod The UK's Ministry of Defence has launched a bug bounty scheme, promising privateer pentesters they won't be prosecuted if they stick to the published script.…

New shiny has governance, mailing lists, public repository... but how will Google use it? Google has opened its forthcoming operating system, Fuchsia, to community contributions, but has not addressed the question hanging over it: how will it be used?…

Web advertising giant says it has been working with filter makers, others to 'evolve the platform' Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3.…

TripAdvisor caught in sweep of software deemed too nasty for local consumption China has banned 105 apps from reaching local users and says it’ll ban more in future.…

Dell and HPE in stasis as mid-range and high-end markets slide The world’s server market stalled in the year’s third quarter, says analyst firm IDC.…

IP arm of Finnish firm should have spoken up sooner... or so the lawsuit claims The American wing of Lenovo has sued Nokia in a California federal court in an attempt to stop the telecoms equipment biz from enforcing its 19 patents pertaining to video decoding.…

Test flight took candidate Mars trip rocket to new heights Videos SpaceX has conducted a test of the Starship it plans to use for flights to Mars, and while the experiment ended badly the flight was judged a success.…

Service was so unpopular, getting rid of it was an election policy South Korea on Thursday shuttered a government-run digital certificate service that required the use of Microsoft’s ancient ActiveX technology.…

Population of 64,000 needs better access to e-government services, and there's also four navy bases to consider India has announced a new submarine cable connecting its mainland to the Lakshadweep Islands.…

So what does that make it, a leg? A toe? Boston Dynamics, the Softbank-owned robotics biz, is reportedly being sold to South Korean automotive giant Hyundai for $921m in a deal expected to be announced shortly.…

Ready Player None Geeks hoping to grab AMD’s latest and most powerful gaming graphics card the RX 6900 XT were left in the dust after available stocks were sucked dry from online stores minutes after the gear was launched on Tuesday.…

Congressional hearing on Privacy Shield oddly productive affair Analysis Everyone is in agreement: the United States needs a new federal privacy law, and it needs to be put in place in 2021.…

Inference can be expensive but the cloud giant's working on that, we're told re:Invent Amazon Web Services is in the second week of its three-week re:Invent run, and the show's announcement deluge continues, now with an emphasis on AI-oriented services.…

Multi-AG, FTC antitrust lawsuits focus on 'the wrath of Mark', potential break-up of social media giant Facebook illegally crushed its competition and continues to do so to this day to maintain its monopoly, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the attorneys general of no fewer than 46 US states plus Guam and DC.…

Regulatory submissions for COVID-19 jab candidate 'unlawfully accessed' The EU Medicines Agency today revealed it was hacked, just a week after infosec eggheads said foreign state hackers have been targeting European institutions.…

Rival GitPod sees perfect opportunity to say: Pssst, we've got that stuff GitHub CEO Nat Friedman showed off Codespaces at the virtual Universe event, though the thing remains in limited preview and key features are still missing. Meanwhile, rival GitPod has added support for Visual Studio Code and the ability to run commands with root permissions in its similar workspace service.…

Typo? We've asked, but... well, y'know If you've got any money left over from your purchase of AirPods Max, you might want to save it. Battery replacements won't come cheap, with Apple charging £309 in the UK – or roughly 56 per cent of the original headphones.…

Spending watchdog report retells sad history of Home Office IT failings The UK Home Office has added £336m to the cost of running its border management IT systems as delays and uncertainty continue to dog the programme, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).…

Hardware infrastructure vendors' obsession with consumption-based tech continues Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is to send high-performance computing (HPC) into its everything-as-a-service portfolio, GreenLake.…

What if the cat in the box could come back to life? Boffins from America's standards-setting body NIST, the University of Maryland (UMD), and the California Institute of Technology believe there's a way to make quantum computers correct many of their own errors – which would help overcome one of the major design challenges for such devices.…

'Nothing' yet to speak of in terms of products, though OnePlus founder Carl Pei has raised $7m in seed funding for his new hardware startup based in London and focused on the audio sector.…

IT biz sued by US Dept of Justice on behalf of dev pays out fine, damages A Texas-based software contractor has settled a lawsuit that accused it of illegally discriminating against American programmers by favoring foreigner workers to keep wages low.…

Those daily Zoom calls just got worse One in ten employees forced to work from home like to do so in the buff while some 8 per cent say they are showering less during lockdown – meaning those sweaty office chairs are positively teeming with with microbial life.…

T minus 23 days and there will very likely be last minute export/import changes As-yet undefined rules regarding the cross-border transportation of goods between the UK and the EU mean IT professionals supporting SAP installations in the UK can expect to be working between Christmas and New Year as the Brexit deadline approaches with no deal yet agreed.…

Pervade Software's product isn't perfect but neither is the police response to security concerns A war of words has erupted between the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) and a British web security pro after a senior cop declared it would be "a waste of public money" to keep discussing security flaws in the body's Cyberalarm product.…

Founder talks of plans for independent distro 'rebuild' The CentOS project, a non-commercial Linux distribution that tracks Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is changing to become only CentOS Stream, based on a development branch of RHEL and therefore less suitable for production workloads.…

YouTube and Instagram exempted, Bill kicked into committee for a while Australia has revealed the legislation with which it plans to force Google and Facebook to pay local news publishers for linking to their content, a plan the nation hatched to funnel more revenue to news outlets whose business models didn't evolve fast enough to remain viable in the internet age.…

Offer does not apply in China Apple has fired a warning shot at Facebook and Google by insisting it will remove their apps from its App Store if they don’t comply with Cupertino's new privacy standard.…

Attempts tech fix to solve aging crisis The Japanese government is splashing ¥2bn ($19m, £14m) to fund digital dating services powered by AI technology in an attempt to boost the country’s flagging birth rate.…