The Register

James Bond? Inspector Gadget? Yup, all here A Soviet equivalent of Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher machine has sold for more than double its auction asking price – while a secret camera disguised as a pack of cigarettes went for nearly $20,000.…

Next up: Clinical trials to test the code's suggestions Machine-learning algorithms may help pharmaceutical companies identify old drugs that can be rehashed to treat the COVID-19 coronavirus in elderly patients, according to a study published in Nature Communications.…

Open-source stuff stays for now, company promises Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has described its $156m buy of cloudy DevSecOps biz Bridgecrew as a "key bet" at a time when the world has never been more reliant on off-premises computing.…

No penalties for contractor oopsies in first year, but you'll still have to pay what HMRC thinks you owe An IR35 snooper squad sniffing out contractors won't be coming to a town near you anytime soon unless there is a strong reason to suspect "criminal" behaviour.…

Going green or just plain mean? Exclusive Fujitsu wants to tighten the group's corporate belt by removing the benefit fuel card afforded to hundreds of UK staff, and anyone resisting could potentially be fired and rehired on new contractual terms.…

Do y'all think Samsung might rethink plans to spend $20bn down there? As winter storms cause power outages across the United States, a lack of juice in Texas has led Austin's fabs to shut down.…

Having apparently lost, UK registry operator tries desperate legal gambit The UK’s internet registry operator Nominet has claimed that an effort to remove members of its board and replace them with two caretaker directors is not legal and is refusing to put it to a member vote.…

‘Help Wanted … in Space’ signs go up for first time in over a decade The European Space Agency is about to advertise for astronauts for the first time since 2008 and is open to candidates with a physical disability under a new “Parastronaut feasibility project”.…

Ex-copper signed over copyright to bosses, judge rules A British developer has lost his fight to claim ownership over software he wrote while working for digital forensics firm MD5.…

New CEO pledges 'aggressive targets' to regain market share and leadership After completing nine years as CEO of VMware last week, Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday started work in the same job at Intel and prioritized delivering on promises and innovating quickly.…

Minister claims investment attraction regime is working, also asks for help getting products from villages into Marketplace Amazon.com will make some of its own-brand electronic in India.…

Azure and AWS already have same cloud deal, but hey - new friends! Google and Tata Communications have teamed to spread the G-Cloud further inside India.…

Serial entrepreneur regrets the error Attendees of the Abundance 360 Summit in January paid $15,000 or more to attend an in-person event that arguably shouldn't have happened under California's December 5, 2020, stay at home order. And for that price, 12 of the 30 who showed up left with a COVID-19 infection.…

Cough up if you want to use it with your laptop and phone Password manager LastPass has changed its terms and conditions to limit the free version of its code work on a single device type only per user, seemingly in an effort to force free folks into paying for its service.…

Trend Micro claims software is full of security flaws that allow data out and malware in Trend Micro has published a report claiming that data-sharing Android app SHAREit, which has over a billion downloads, contains multiple vulnerabilities after the app's maker ignored advice to fix the flaws.…

'Every country will need to change its ways' says Microsoft billionaire Review Bill Gates' book How to avoid a climate disaster is a sombre but informative read.…

But the growth can't last forever... The pandemic has been relatively kind to the UK arm of Virgin Media, which reported [PDF] growth in its broadband and contract mobile business units during 2020.…

Be honest, what's YOUR 'bus factor'? DevOps writer Gene Kim spoke at the Dynatrace Perform event last week, saying not a word about Dynatrace but focusing on technical debt and developer productivity.…

'Don't give out the location!!' Everyone has a quirky personal interest or two, but few have pursuits that would move us to drive to Exmouth amid a national lockdown that dishes out fines for non-essential travel.…

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage: Wearable Brick Apple Watch Series 5 or Apple Watch SE owners can now send their devices for a free service after multiple units of the fancy wristwear refused to charge once entering Power Reserve mode.…

Shipments up a whopping 90+% in Q4 despite industry-wide shortages The one-device-per-person trend caused by the pandemic fuelled a boom in notebook sales across Britain in Q4 that resulted in a near year-on-year doubling of shipment growth.…

All these use cases, not much action Wrinkles and bubbles in wonder substance graphene are showing electronic properties researchers say could one day help solve limits on current microprocessor designs.…

Second attempt to run entirely in the browser – but nothing works yet The LibreOffice team has been working on a port to browser-hosted WebAssembly, and hopes for a working demo by summer 2021. "It's the way the industry is heading," said Document Foundation board member Thorsten Behrens.…

Web hosts infiltrated for up to three years in attack that somewhat resembles SolarWinds mess France’s Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (ANSSI), the nation’s cyber-security agency, has identified a years-long campaign to infiltrate IT monitoring platform Centreon.…

LA hosting outfit SkySilk puts itself in the hot seat because it thinks other clouds wrongly act as judges Social network Parler is back online, five weeks after Amazon Web Services told the service company it had breached its terms of service, and therefore shut down its servers.…

Veteran Unix Admins offer new cut of systemd-free Debian derivative and get the name right this time Devuan, the Linux distribution that came into being after the 2014 disagreement over Debian’s adoption of the systemd as the operating system’s init daemon, has celebrated its sixth anniversary by adding a third init option.…

Maybe it can use the spatial data that India also liberalised yesterday to deliver promise of unplugging rogue operators India's government has become so tired of SMS scams that it's creating two new national bodies to deal with the problem.…

Want to shake off NDMP for good? Tune in this week Webcast Ensuring your organisation’s NAS data is protected is fraught with challenges. You need to ensure you’re capturing the right data, at the right time, and if the worst comes to the worst, you want to be certain you can restore it and get your company back in business as quickly as possible.…

Boss reckons half a dozen institutions will follow suit this year Barclays Bank is to join the Open Invention Network (OIN), as is Canada-based Toronto-Dominion (TD) Bank Group, in order to resist what Barclays told us are "overt or veiled threats of litigation from patent trolls."…

Ah, the old 'liquidate your company' trick. Classic Another month and two more British companies behind nuisance marketing calls are collectively facing a £270,000 penalty for breaking the law by calling people registered by the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

Decision would mean less complicated situation for Blighty's digital economy The EU is set to rule that the UK's laws are sufficient to ensure "adequacy" for the safe sharing of personal data, a move promising to end uncertainty over data protection rules post-Brexit.…

Plus: Dodgy-looking AI coding bootcamp and a murderous conversation with OpenAI's GPT-3? In Brief A Korean AI startup has come under fire after it scraped private messages from its users that contained private and sensitive information to train a chatbot.…

Maybe this is why we're single Happy ENIAC Day! Join us for a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.…

Plus: SentinelOne picks up Scalyr, fatal flaws in TCP, and a view on Supermicro In brief Internet Security Research Group nonprofit Let's Encrypt has massively upgraded its certification hardware and software so that it can delete and reissue all its certs in less than 24 hours.…

Fail fast, fail often The UK's Crown Commercial Services has awarded Accenture, Capita and IBM spots on an £800m framework created to help the NHS shift to a more agile and/or DevOps-like approach to development and support.…

IT can be measured to a high degree of accuracy – and what the world needs now is accurate data Column Bitcoin miners are using more energy than Argentina. Turning off your video camera during Zoom will save the planet. I am not a cat, I am a lawyer. Those who laud the transformational power of IT can't overlook that some of these transformations are very weird indeed.…

When imposter syndrome turns out to not be a syndrome at all Who, Me? You can't hurry Linux kernel upgrades, as The Supremes never sang and a Register reader discovers in today's episode of Who, Me?…

Key trends and strategies for digital CX and customer self-service in 2021 and beyond Promo The lockdown has changed our relationship with technology forever. Over a third of customers increased their use of online banking in 2020, and the majority will continue to do so once “normal service” resumes. So, the need to provide a seamless experience to these digital customers is paramount.…

As FireEye reveals how suspicious second phone signed up for 2FA gave the game away Microsoft president Brad Smith said the software giant’s analysis of the SolarWinds hack suggests the code behind the crack was the work of a thousand or more developers.…

Compulsory arbitration code clears committee without amendments, but cracks show as one major local signs big Google deal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai have again spoken to Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg about the nation’s plan to force the two tech giants into compulsory arbitration to pay local publishers for news content shared or indexed on their platforms. Frydenberg added he believed the two companies were close to doing deals to pay local publishers.…

Resets clock to avoid going into safe mode A signal from venerable space probe Voyager 2 reached Earth today, acknowledging that the spacecraft has received its first command since March 2020 and had reset internal clocks as instructed.…

AMD admirers get plenty to swoon over, Intel’s SGX also makes it unto the kernel, as did some head-scratching gaming kit Linus Torvalds has delivered version 5.11 of the Linux kernel to the faithful.…

One small step for man, one giant.... urgh...*clutches heart*... THUD Space is not for the faint of heart. Astronauts will eventually suffer cardiovascular damage if they stay in the void long enough unless we get better at mitigating the effects of radiation.…

CEOs say US needs to invest in home-fabbed tech President Joe Biden intends to sign an executive order to tackle the shortage of chips, as the semiconductor world's top brass urged the Democrat to fund efforts to build more fabrication plants in the United States.…

Subsidize public bus service and slow down production? No thanks, says Bezos Bunch Amazon on Friday sued New York Attorney General Letitia James to prevent her office from bringing legal action that would punish the behemoth computing biz for alleged worker health and safety violations.…

Server maker says latest article is 'a mishmash of disparate allegations' Following up on a disputed 2018 claim in its BusinessWeek publication that tiny spy chips were found on Supermicro server motherboards in 2015, Bloomberg on Friday doubled down by asserting that Supermicro's products were targeted by Chinese operatives for over a decade, that US intelligence officials have been aware of this, and that authorities kept this information quiet while crafting defenses in order to study the attack.…

Lawyers say they need HSBC UK Powerpoint slides to undo Uncle Sam's case against Meng Wanzhou Huawei today turned to the British courts in its fight to keep CFO Meng Wanzhou out of American prosecutors’ hands.…

Promised software may never work as specified, it is feared New Jersey's Microsoft-powered coronavirus vaccine-registration system has not worked properly for the past five weeks, according to officials, and may never work as specified.…

AppGyver disappears inside juggernaut's attempts to nurture more modern image SAP has dipped its hand into the corporate loose change to snap up no-code app development firm AppGyver.…

Accusations of grey hat infosec consultancy extortion ring drop away after El Reg intervenes A cautionary tale about the dangers posed by affordable Internet of Things devices turned into a much more sinister story after a company threatened an infosec bod with a police report (since retracted) unless he deleted a Twitter thread highlighting shortcomings in one of its products.…