The Register

Priti Patel doesn't say a word about encryption, though CyberUK 21 Priti Patel has promised a government review of the UK's 30-year-old Computer Misuse Act "this year" as well as condemning companies that buy off ransomware criminals.…

Big Brother Watch warns app contains too much sensitive medical information Folks in England can from next week use the NHS App to confer their vaccination status, in the face of warnings that the technology could lead to identifiable medical information being exposed.…

You can't buy this kind of service. No, literally BT-owned infrastructure provider Openreach has confirmed plans to stop sales of copper-based phone and broadband services in 77 exchange locations across the UK, affecting roughly 700,000 premises.…

The data is in: most users do not opt in to third-party tracking Mobile app analytics company Flurry is measuring how many users of iOS 14.5 are opting in to allow apps to request to track them - and so far only 15 per cent worldwide have done so.…

Spent money in the walled garden since October 2015? The day ends with "y" so Apple is facing fresh legal scrutiny of its App Store policies. This time the battleground is the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal, where a potential collective action is being launched on behalf of circa 20 million users over claims Apple's 30 per cent "tax" is excessive and unjustified.…

Probable cause of accident and fire still under investigation The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has published a preliminary report into last month's fatal crash involving a 2019 Tesla Model S in Texas.…

11th-gen Core H has nice new touches, but pitch is usual 'a new PC will be faster and smaller and lighter than an old PC' promise Intel is talking up a new generation of laptop and mobile workstation CPUs that it says will deliver modest performance gains and lighten laptops for power users.…

What is Geordie for bork? Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a blessed respite for Microsoft's wares today as it appears that it is Java's turn to disgrace itself on platform 1 of Newcastle upon Tyne's Central Station.…

Gazing into the void for at least a few more years yet Nearly nine years after leaving the solar system, and decades beyond its original mission, Voyager 1 is still gathering valuable data, providing plasma readings to continuously sample the density of the interstellar medium.…

Patch your devi... oh, hang on a sec A computer science professor from Sweden has discovered an arbitrary code execution vuln in the Universal Turing Machine, one of the earliest computer designs in history – though he admits it has "no real-world implications".…

Launches open tender for new £60m deal Northern Ireland Libraries is launching a formal procurement of a £60m IT contract to replace incumbent supplier Fujitsu following a two-year delay costing taxpayers some £12m.…

Someone at West Midlands Trains approved nasty cybersecurity drill UK rail operator West Midlands Trains sent an email to 2,500 employees to thank them for hard work during COVID and promised a one-time bonus as a reward, but that lovely news turned out to be phishing training. Needless to say, it did not go over well.…

This early-stage project is not a fork, Redmond insists Microsoft on Monday launched an open source project to make a Linux kernel tool known as eBPF, short for Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, work on Windows.…

Suggests terabyte-packing servers that move data at astounding speed aren’t far off Samsung has shown off a picture of what it says is the first DDR5 DRAM-based memory module that can talk the language of Compute Express Link (CXL).…

And just like that, the Digital Yuan has its route into the mainstream Alibaba’s controversial financial services arm, the Ant Group, has been welcomed into trials of China’s digital currency.…

No breakthroughs left to make in electronics, says CEO as company eyes off IPO-by-SPAC Vietnam's largest industry conglomerate, Vingroup, has announced it will no longer develop televisions and smartphones under its VinSmart brand and instead redirect resources toward its electric vehicle unit, VinFast.…

Another auto-exploit saw rPi push Telegram messages over CAN bus to brick a car Black Hat Asia Researchers have used the Black Hat Asia conference to demonstrate the awesome power of the Raspberry Pi as a car-p0wning platform.…

But won’t reveal who it wants banned from social media over less obvious disinformation As COVID-19 continues to ravage India, the nation’s government has told it populace that 5G signals have nothing to do with the spread of the virus – if only because no 5G networks operate in India.…

Blames spam filters for brownout, warns fix could be 'disruptive' Trend Micro’s hosted email security product is experiencing a global brownout.…

Internet souk said it only approved 6% of new sellers Amazon's latest brand protection report states it destroyed more than two million pieces of counterfeit goods last year and denied most would-be sellers from setting up shop in its online souk.…

Boffins will have to wait until September 2023 to get their hands on the goodies OSIRIS-REx, the spacecraft carrying NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample, has started its two-year journey back to Earth, the space agency confirmed on Monday.…

Freely available to use, from the hardware schematics to RISC-V cores on an FPGA, to the firmware on top The OpenPOWER Foundation, formed to promote IBM's open-source POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), on Monday said it is putting together a new working group to develop LibreBMC, claimed to be the first baseboard management controller (BMC) designed with open source software and hardware.…

But we heard the message loud and clear – it's pretty much the standard runtime platform now Kubecon A session on how to hack into a Kubernetes cluster was among the highlights of a Kubecon where the main events were generally bland and corporate affairs, perhaps indicative of the technology now being a de facto infrastructure standard among enterprises.…

Plus: Google boffin who resigned over AI ethics controversy, joins Apple In Brief What do you know? The US Postal Service uses AI technology and have GPU servers running computer vision algorithms to track items being delivered across the country.…

Really, three years should be the bare minimum at this point Analysis Almost seven months after the brand splashed down in the UK market, mobile maker Vivo is making some bold promises about the longevity of its upcoming phones.…

5.10 lifespan also extended to six years, up from two Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for Linux 5.13 with the first release candidate, which includes initial support for Apple's M1 processor along with "a fair amount of stuff, all over the place."…

Should cover the cost of the air leaking out of the Russian segment Fancy a stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS)? It is about to get a lot pricier for future private astronaut missions.…

Rust/WinRT moniker consigned to the garbage collection Microsoft has released an update for Rust for Windows (formerly Rust/WinRT) with completed support for Win32 and COM APIs.…

Securities advisor passes note setting potential date for snipping of Snapdragons to investors Nearly two years after Apple swallowed Chipzilla’s smartphone modem business for a cool $1bn, the company is reportedly set to start using its own home-grown baseband chips, starting with 2023’s iPhone.…

Rocket marks 10th successful launch and landing, though Dogecoin's descent was a little rougher Elon Musk has announced a SpaceX mission to the Moon paid for in Dogecoin, just a day after the cryptocurrency tumbled in response to the multibillionare calling it a "hustle" while he hosted Saturday Night Live.…

Will deal make goods, services less competitive? Regulator wants to hear from interested parties Britain’s competition regulator has belatedly stuck a probe in AMD’s $35bn all-stock proposal to purchase Xilinx, more than a month after investors in both businesses gave the transaction their seal of approval.…

Plus: Student cripples EU bio lab and IRS goes after cryptocurrency In brief The United States' Department of Defense has opened up all of its publicly facing systems and apps to investigation under a bug bounty program.…

Much of the OSS world is critically underfunded yet critically important It's been nearly five months since the SolarWinds hack came to light, causing lots of chin-scratching about vulnerabilities in the software supply chain.…

Top dog Neo4j just wouldn't scale, says car giant's data boss Car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover rejected leading graph database Neo4j over scalability concerns, according to its head of data and analytics.…

It'll do great things in the future, just don't impose timeframes on when Column It is said that the more you know about a subject, the less you trust newspapers about it. This is said because it is true.…

Also we fixed SS7 use by British telcos. How? Why? Not saying Domains'n'hosting outfit Namecheap harboured more than a quarter of all known phishing sites that falsely posed as UK government web presences during 2020, according to the National Cyber Security Centre today.…

It soothed this raging roomful of wannabe lawyers anyway Who, Me? The oversized rear of Monday is obstructing our view of the receding weekend. Never mind, pour yourself a beverage, select a pastry and settle in for a morning with the Regomiser and another edition of Who, Me?…

Azure icon gets the Fluid Design treatment Logowatch Microsoft has given Azure’s logo a tweak for the second time in four years.…

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Dev team doesn’t have necessary hardware, and even if they could afford it eBay is empty OpenSolaris ‘spork’ Illumos has decided to deprecate support for SPARC CPUs.…

At least you won’t have to check in with a QR Code China has revealed that it will enforce its border on the peak of Mount Everest, as a precaution against climbers transmitting the Coronavirus when they reach the summit.…

Long March 5B lands 45km from the Maldives Bits of China's Long March 5B rocket have returned to Earth without inconveniencing anyone, but did irritate NASA enough for the agency to issue a sternly-worded statement.…

Trump-era Executive Order gets China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile kicked off bourse China’s top three telcos – China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom – have warned investors they are about to be delisted by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).…

Oil transport by road allowed after Colonial Pipeline goes down, operator says recovery is under way but offers no recovery date One of the USA’s largest oil pipelines has been shut by ransomware, leading the nation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to issue an regional emergency declaration permitting the transport of fuel by road.…

NASA records, shares sound of Ingenuity drone on Mars, like we're in some kind of sci-fi flick Video One of the microphones on Perseverance, NASA’s latest and greatest Mars rover, has recorded the sounds of its autonomous helicopter Ingenuity flying on the Red Planet, providing scientists with the first ever audio samples of an aircraft operating on another planet.…

'Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality' states poorly redacted report Tesla CEO Elon Musk's public statements about the state of his automaker's Autopilot assistive driving technology overestimate the system's capabilities, according to documents released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).…

Antisocial giant insists 'Help keep FB free of charge' messaging is merely educational The number of Facebook and Instagram users on iOS agreeing to be tracked by the social networking behemoth for targeted ads has fallen drastically in the week since Apple's iOS 14.5 debuted – and Zuck & Co have hit back.…

But beware lock-in-as-a-service, analyst warns MariaDB has added proprietary bells and whistles, in the form of distributed SQL, for its DBaaS and supposedly developer-friendly front end.…

Plus: NCSC warns of how hostile powers may exploit smart city infrastructure Russian spies from APT29 responded to Western agencies outing their tactics by adopting a red-teaming tool to blend into targets' networks as a legitimate pentesting exercise.…

Biz expected 4,000 signups, got 60,000, system couldn't cope GitLab says a surge in demand and a technical shortcoming resulted in the DevOps outfit yanking a free certification offer barely two days after turning on the tap.…