The Register

Plus: Dead pop star brought back to life by ML, OECD develops effort to monitor AI power In brief Today's artificial intelligence can autocomplete a photo of someone's face, generating what the software predicts is the rest of their body.…

iGiant says case alleging state aid from Ireland was 'catgorically annulled' Last year Apple won a long-fought legal battle against the European Commission, which argued it had received unlawful state aid from Ireland that allowed it to swerve nearly €13bn in back taxes.…

Adding Serial API, Web NFC support, richer human interface device support Google has released a beta of Chrome 89, adding further hardware interaction APIs even though Mozilla and Apple consider many of these features harmful, as well as introducing a desktop-sharing API for Windows and Chrome OS.…

Learn how to escape your NAS backup pain – simply tune in this month Webcast If managing data is part of your world, some things never change. There’s always more information coming at you, automation trumps good intentions, and the network data management protocol (NDMP) seem to have been designed to make your life … difficult.…

'Sensitive' personal data not accessed – so what about names and contact deets? UK Research and Innovation, the British government's science and research organisation, has temporarily turned off a couple of its web-facing services after an apparent ransomware attack.…

VPP service TITSUP* at eu-central-1 While UK parents looked forward to weeks more of home education for their poppets, iDevice management service Jamf School has taken a tumble for some users.…

It started building M16 when 'overall semiconductor memory was amid downturn' Two years after breaking ground, Korean memory giant SK Hynix has finished work on its ₩3.5 trillion (£2.2bn) DRAM factory, known as M16, located in the northwestern city of Incheon.…

Chance of Moon landing in 2024 ever slimmer if test flight this year is delayed Hopes of a launch of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) in 2021 have been dealt a further blow by an admission that a second Green Run hot fire test is required for the SLS core stage.…

One-way traffic at the moment... and don't mention Access Microsoft has made the source code for its Extensible Storage Engine (aka JET Blue) available on GitHub.…

New network will have 600 fewer cash machines The UK Post Office has awarded two contracts worth a total of £30m for a banking network and ATMs system in a procurement expected to be worth £357m once all contracts are awarded.…

15 years in the making. Out of the labs and into the real world: The 100Gbps Internet connection Why on earth would Cisco want to push fibre to your desk?…

Itanic sinks further beneath the waves The Linux kernel will no longer support Intel Itanium processors following a decision by Linus Torvalds to merge a patch marking the architecture as orphaned.…

Platform to handle data from roadside sensors and in-vehicle systems Sopra Steria has won a £42m contract from Highways England to upgrade the National Traffic Information Service to help keep travellers on the move throughout the country's 4,300 miles (6,920km) of strategic road network.…

medConfidential spots tiny yet staggering web blunder Exclusive A single missing web link on GOV.UK has cost the taxpayer £51m over the last five years because civil servants are being forced to handle paper forms posted to the Home Office.…

Battle between members and management of .UK registry follows long history of tension Analysis An effort to oust the CEO and most of the board of .uk registry operator Nominet is building momentum within Britain’s internet industry, although success remains far from clear.…

At least the whiteboard could be wiped clean of evidence Who, Me? The Register readership knows no bounds when it comes to electrical snafus, as demonstrated by a Who, Me? entry featuring motorised mayhem and a certain South Korean semiconductor manufacturer.…

May be a decent AWS alternative - if sudden 106 percent cloudy DB2 price hike doesn’t scare you off IBM’s trying a new pricing plan to lure more folk to its cloud.…

Plus: Second ransomware operation in the sights of Uncle Sam – and the insurance industry under fire for fueling extortionware rise In brief Cisco's anti-spam service SpamCop failed to renew spamcop.net over weekend, causing it to lapse, which resulted in countless messages being falsely labeled and rejected as spam around the world.…

Smartphone-slinger wants off America's naughty list, now and forever Chinese consumer tech company Xiaomi has sued the United States for designating it a "Communist Chinese military company" and banning transactions with the firm.…

Chairs, desks, cup-holders, and a weird wearable cushion will reach the west in late 2021 If you’ve ever felt that IKEA lacks a sense of humour, here’s proof: the company’s new collection of gaming furniture and accessories produced in collaboration with ASUS is not called “FRÄG”.…

Seems to be full steam ahead on blockchain for uses other than funny money India has signalled it intends to create a digital version of its currency.…

And the day after news of those talks emerged, Google said it never threatened to pull search from Australia Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Australia’s leaders last week to discuss the nation’s News Media Bargaining Code, a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay when they link to news content.…

Ex-BBC chairman, former RIPE NCC boss lined up to run .UK registry as caretakers if campaign successful The UK internet industry has called for the ousting of the CEO and most of the board of Nominet – the organization that operates the .uk registry – accusing them of lining their own pockets at the expense of charitable causes and millions of ordinary Brits.…

Alas, it looks as though, for now, us humans are still alone in the pitch-black depths of space The notion of phosphine-producing microbes floating in Venus’s atmosphere is looking more and more shaky, as scientists believe the detection of the gas may have been skewed by the antenna of a telescope used to discover it.…

Promising protocol much easier to fingerprint than HTTPS Google's QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol, announced in 2013 as a way to make the web faster, waited seven years before being implemented in the ad giant's Chrome browser. But it still arrived before privacy could get there.…

Recently released cryptography code easily undone by trivial buffer overflow Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy on Thursday reported a severe flaw in Libgcrypt 1.9.0, an update to the widely used cryptographic library that was released ten days ago.…

Swedish comms giant cashes in where Huawei is on retreat Swedish telecoms equipment manufacturer Ericsson will be raising a glass of aquavit to this week's Q4 2020 figures. Network sales were up 11 per cent unadjusted, driven by the ongoing rollout of 5G connectivity, as well as the ongoing malaise of rival Huawei.…

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should Motorola and Lenovo are experimenting with wireless charging tech that works remotely, casting power to phones and wearables from across the room.…

Open that little box and bingo, clear text of the whole PDF Exclusive The European Commission's war of words against pharma company AstraZeneca over COVID-19 virus vaccines has descended into farce after Brussels accidentally published an unredacted version of a disputed supply contract.…

A fresh preview as the management cards receive a shuffle Microsoft has disappointed hair-shirted developers with the arrival of a settings screen preview for its Windows Terminal product, potentially – though not necessarily – heralding the end of JSON tinkering to make things just so.…

Yes, survival games can tell great stories too The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. It was tricky deciding what to look at for this edition, what with the doozy of Cyberpunk 2077 in our tail lights. As for the New Year, we've been left with the usual dearth of releases so it was time to check out something that's been in development for a while and is almost ready for 1.0.…

At the end of the day, biz customers will buy the product they want Analysis Christian Klein cut a lonely figure in front of mysteriously floating cameras in his computer-generated studio. Yet, presenting a vision of enterprise resource planning arguably as idealised as the CGI mountains looming over his shoulder, SAP's CEO pressed on.…

A sad-faced engineer leads it round the back of the barn. A single shot rings out With a certain inevitability, Microsoft has wielded the axe on the preview of Azure Service Fabric Mesh, before the technology even had a chance to trouble General Availability.…

Shuttered celebrations of computing heritage need your support The UK's halls of computing geekery continue to be shut thanks to the ongoing pandemic. However, virtual tours and talks are on offer for those seeking a diversion from streaming platform bingeing.…

World+dog continues to swallow this tablet, though Eleven years ago this week, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to a bemused world. We say bemused, because at the time, nobody really knew what it was.…

How do you license open-source hardware? Existing software licences will not do, says CERN The OSI (Open Source Intitiative) has approved version 2 of CERN's Open Hardware License (OHL), meaning it conforms to its Open Source Definition and respects the ideals and ethos of the movement.…

Windows puts on a surprise show at UK retailer Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows Mobile may be dead, but Microsoft's earlier attempt at a lightweight operating system lives on - albeit in unexpected form - thanks to the self-scanners so beloved by some of the UK's supermarkets.…

Welcome to another edition of Just A Minute, live from Scunthorpe Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Right, let's start the meeting. Oh, could someone take the minutes?" And my heart sinks. They'll see me and ask me to do it. They always do.…

IT's Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood On Call What's the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Welcome to On Call and an account from nearly 40 years ago when one hard pressed engineer was dealing with a ham-fisted response to the policies of the UK's Thatcher government.…

None of that nuclear-magnetic-resonance garbage, ha Microsoft says it has made progress in its effort to develop CMOS-based chips for quantum computing.…

Posts look to have evaporated along with employee privileges Oracle has done something a little odd: exhuming ancient blog posts about Solaris and SPARC by former Sun luminaries that have moved on to other things.…

India gets special attention with new rules for apps that tie loyalty and prize draws to payments Google has added 15 more countries to its list of nations in which it will allow gambling apps that allow users to play with real money.…

Top telcos still designated as stooges, but they've perked up a bit The US Department of the Treasury has announced a revision to the ban on trading in companies suspected of having ties to China’s military.…

Job ads call for silicon designers, ASIC engineers, display wonks and folks to build data centre and home kit Google has picked Taiwan as the location of its first hardware engineering facility outside the USA.…

GPU giant says it'll play ball soon Nvidia has been accused of cheating in a big-data performance benchmark, and thus unfairly coming out on top, by the very umpires of the test.…

He steals from the rich, and gives to the... wait, which side is the poor side now? The populist online investor uprising to punish Wall Street traders by propping up shorted stocks hit a wall on Thursday when retail brokerage firm Robinhood announced that customers could, for now, sell but not buy eight turbulent securities.…

Got a few (thousand) dollars to spare? Unless the venerable language has finally breathed its last – which is more than a little unlikely – the Perl.com domain was hijacked yesterday.…

Macs sell like hot cakes too thanks to M1 chip, everything up by double digits Apple is making bank in a pandemic – as millennials might say. The company last night reported doubles all round as demand for its latest blower ballooned, and customers locked indoors due to coronavirus countermeasures lapped up Macs and iPads.…

'So far the jury is still out... are you willing to help with this?' Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.…

Canalys stats also show Samsung knocked to 2nd in a shrinking market It is official: Huawei is no longer a major smartphone maker after it fell out of the top five line-up of the biggest sellers in Q4. As for Apple? It is again at the summit, at least according to Canalys.…