The Register

Two ingredients that don't really go together. Like, er, AI and Ethics? RoTM Following Microsoft's 2019 foray into whisky-making, Google has got into the AI-infused consumables game with the frankly horrific-sounding Marmite and Maltesers® cake.…

The Harris Federation learns infosec lessons the hard way The Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity responsible for running 50 primary and secondary academies in London and Essex, has become the latest UK education body to fall victim to ransomware.…

C-suites need a kick up the proverbial, says Lindy Cameron in first speech So-called cyber-attack insurance "cannot be a substitute for better basic cybersecurity," the National Cyber Security Centre's chief exec has said in her first major speech since taking office.…

Developers liked WPF but Microsoft neglected it. Avalonia is a possible solution Interview Avalonia, a cross-platform framework for desktop applications, has built up a considerable user community but is it a viable alternative to Microsoft's official solutions?…

Microsoft's finest takes a break in the US retail space Bork!Bork!Bork! The column that will not die returns with a bork guaranteed to send shivers down even the most hardened IT pro's spine – not only a sad-looking Windows, but a dread sticky note stuck to the screen.…

No prior experience of working with the intelligence community? 'Knowledge of the technological landscape' will do The UK's Home Office is on the hunt for a supplier to help support applications running on its counter-terrorism data network to fulfil a contract that could be worth up to £32m.…

Tune in and find out more from F5 Networks Webcast A web application firewall (WAF) is your first line of defence when it comes to protecting your organization from an array of potential threats.…

Applicants sought from Afghanistan to Vietnam – even Moscow and Myanmar – with the rest of world allowed later this year Apple has announced an expansion of its Independent Repair Provider program, the scheme that provides authorised third-party companies to repair out-of-warranty iThings.…

Boston Dynamics: From Terminator to Amazon worker replacement Analysis Those fearing a takeover of the human race by robots may have failed to adequately account for the drudgery of modern capitalism.…

Simulated Bifurcation Machine burns algorithms onto FPGAs, pops 'em into a vanilla workstation, and offers 10x performance for some problems Toshiba has brought its kind-of-quantum computers out of the clouds and onto Japanese desktops.…

Zuck tired of US gov blocking his cables to Hong Kong, goes another route Facebook has announced that it will build two new subsea cables to connect North America with Indonesia and Singapore. The two cables, named Echo and Bifrost, will be the first transpacific cables through the Java Sea.…

Nice economy you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if growth slowed Big Tech’s Asian lobby group, The Asia Internet Coalition, has issued a statement calling for Vietnam to consult on the impact of its proposed tax laws and then rewrite them.…

Rules are tight, but also leave plenty to the imagination China has set new rules that spell out data that local app-makers can collect and store, but won't sanction apps that go beyond the permitted data collection regime.…

Session monitoring scripts prompt dozens of privacy lawsuits against Big Biz, mainly in California and Florida Intel is among the growing list of companies being sued for allegedly violating American wiretapping laws by running third-party code to track interactions, such as keystrokes, click events, and cursor movements, on its website.…

Another day, another data nightmare Royal Dutch Shell is the latest corporation to be infected by the Clop ransomware. The criminals behind the malware have siphoned internal documents from the oil giant, and publicly leaked some of the data – notably a selection of workers' passport and visa scans – to chivy the corporation along to pay the ransom.…

Goodbye darkness, my old friend Constellations of satellites and chunks of space debris orbiting Earth and reflecting sunlight may have lightened our night skies by more than 10 per cent, scientists say. We're also told the light pollution is increasing.…

'Uber of private investigators' failed to live up to its name A tech CEO who lied to investors to get funding and then blew millions of it on maintaining a luxury lifestyle, which included private jets and top seats at sporting events, has been sentenced to just over eight years in prison.…

If the license doesn't fit, you must commit The maintainers of Rails, a Ruby-based framework for making web apps, have released three new versions to resolve a software licensing conflict that surfaced last week.…

Are you local? Catastrophically local? The widely used npm library netmask has a networking vulnerability arising from how it parses IP addresses with a leading zero, leaving an estimated 278 million projects at risk.…

Gamma-ray burst technique could figure out how commonplace these tricksy customers are Scientists have shown that explosions from the early universe might help in solving black holes' middle sibling problem.…

Why, you ask? Why not? With enough love (and isopropyl alcohol), you can make even the oldest computer feel like it came straight from the factory. But when the restoration is done, vintage computing restorers are left with a difficult question: What next?…

Estimate of damaged fab equipment revised upwards by 54% Japanese automotive chipmaker Renesas has said the blaze at its factory in Japan earlier this month may be worse than expected, with 17 fabrication machines affected rather than the 11 originally indicated.…

Cops should be exempted from regulatory safeguards, says lawyer The UK's Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws is again advising the removal of legal safeguards around a controversial law that allows people to be jailed if they refuse police demands for forced decryption of their devices.…

Plus: Amazon delivery drivers forced to consent to being surveilled by AI In Brief The backlash Google faces over ousting two female co-lead researchers at its Ethical AI unit has continued as another of their peers turned away Mountain View's money.…

Freeeedommm! (for your data) Alex Salmond's Alba Party has got off to a rocky start after a coding error on its website appeared to expose the names of those signed up.…

Backdoor quickly spotted and reverted The main code repository for PHP, which powers nearly 80 per cent of the internet, was breached to add malicious code and is now being moved to GitHub as a precaution.…

So that's why they're not named alongside Lynch and Hussain Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise settled its potential lawsuit against Autonomy auditors Deloitte for $45m in 2016, The Register can reveal – shedding new light on how the $5bn lawsuit against former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and ex-CFO Sushovan Hussain came about.…

Plus: Did Google expose a Western hacking op? Who cares? You're safer In brief Apple has issued critical security patches for all supported phones, fondleslabs, and watches after being alerted to multiple possible intrusions by Google.…

It's still totally bananas, though Column One of the many joys of blockchain is that it generates even more heat online than a Chinese Bitcoin mine pumps into the atmosphere. This month's posterchild is the NFT, the Non-Fungible Token, which is seen by all the right-thinking fold as practically the fundamental particle of crypto-scam physics.…

Hmmm. Shared services... that always works out really well, right? The UK’s Ministry of Justice is ditching a £100m ERP procurement as it strives to get in step with a new Cabinet Office shared service strategy for enterprise applications.…

Quite a few have come back online, but it takes seven hours to restore each rack French cloud operator OVH has revealed how it is cleaning every server it thinks can be returned to service in its fire-affected Strasbourg data centres.…

The house always wins. Even in the Casino back office Who, Me? The weekend has waddled into the distance and Monday is with us once more. Join us for another episode in our Who, Me? series where a reader finds himself with a plum contract and no other bidders. What could go wrong? What indeed.…

Which is why you need to apply a little big data Webcast No matter what size your organisation is, when it comes to cybersecurity, your attack surface is bigger than ever.…

And not just the obvious ones about containers The ship that’s blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week has shifted.…

Led by proper CompSci boffin who wants to create a software development industry capable of earning billions Taiwanese officials have announced plans to create a new Ministry of Digital Development.…

Death of Flash means vAdmins still have work to do to stay alive even with relaxed new deadline VMware has extended support for vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.5 by a year, and says it needs to do so because customers are struggling to upgrade while their teams work from home/live in their offices.…

Driver and networking changes keep coming and io_uring is being noisy Linus Torvalds has expressed concern that work on 5.12 of the Linux kernel is moving at an uncomfortably slow pace.…

Astroboffins are so confident, this once dangerous near-Earth object has now been struck off official risk lists Humanity can breathe a sigh of relief. Asteroid 99942 Apophis, a 340-metre-wide space rock scientists initially believed to be one of the most hazardous near-Earth objects, will not hit our planet in 2068 as feared, after all.…

Lawyers hope to recover repair cost shelled out by insurer A defective iPad sparked a house fire this time last year, a lawsuit filed against Apple has claimed.…

Let's go round again, maybe we'll turn back the hands of time The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This edition we are once again sticking with the indie scene as it's genuinely churning out the most interesting stuff as 2021 coughs and splutters along. Two games this time, both based on a "genre" of sorts that is almost as old as gaming itself.…

Cloud giant manages to dismiss only part of lawsuit brought against it Salesforce should face trial after its software was allegedly used by Backpage.com to track sex traffickers, pimps, and their johns online, a judge has ruled.…

And Elon Musk must delete 2018 tweet threatening loss of benefits for unionizing Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.…

Will you visit me please, if I open my door... in cars? Autonomous driving sales are accelerating, claims analyst house Canalys, citing global shipments of 3.5 million vehicles with Level 2 self-driving capability during calendar Q4 2020.…

Yes, it's old, but the handset has been supported for much longer than the big dogs usually manage If it's not the battery, it's the software. Phones can have a brief shelf-life and the road from cutting edge to obsolete is short. Bucking that trend is Fairphone, which is about to start rolling out Android 9 to its Fairphone 2 model, first released more than five years ago.…

'Many contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF events, and we stand behind them' The chorus of disapproval over Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), rejoining the organisation has intensified as Linux giant Red Hat confirmed it was pulling funding.…

Wow, Redmond actually said soz! As Project Reunion - Microsoft's latest scheme to tempt developers back to Windows - lumbers closer to the finish line, the company has admitted it made a whoopsie in the deprecation of the Pivot control.…

A couple of execs have been let off the hook, though Oracle has failed to block a legal case that alleges it inflated cloud revenue with dubious sales practices, but has succeeded in reducing its scope.…

A little self-knowledge can take you a long way, says Nutanix Promo A year ago, tech teams, along with the rest of the world, had to react quickly to a new reality which few had done any meaningful preparation for.…

For organizations inclined to give, there's now some supporting infrastructure OpenCollective, an online funding and community platform founded in 2015, on Wednesday launched Funds for Open Source, a program to facilitate financial support for open source software projects.…

Ow. Thank you sir may I have another