The Register

37 years later and fomer state-owned telco might be facing its own Black Monday For the first time since 1987, the Communication Workers Union is to run a national ballot of unionised workers at BT Group to test their appetite for strike action over job losses, office closures and more.…

The foulest stench is in the air, the funk of forty thousand... cigarettes? On Call A reader's brush with filth is retold in today's episode of On Call in which the dirtier side of IT is laid bare.…

Less pew, pew, pew and more click, click, click NASA released this week the first audio recordings captured by its six-wheeled nuclear-powered rover Perseverance in action, zapping rock samples as the Martian wind eerily whispers in the background..…

Works just fine on ancient low-end Androids, so now The Social Network™ can monopolise developing nations too! Facebook has unveiled a new weapon in its world domination plan: a two-megabyte version of its Instagram app.…

Cloud company offers slightly confused roadmap to restoration French cloud provider OVH has suggested a UPS could be the cause of the fire that destroyed one of its data centres and took another three offline.…

How can we put this? Imagine beanie babies were screenshots that needed their own power plant NFTs – or non-fungible tokens, a newfangled way to trade virtual assets – truly exploded into the mainstream on Thursday when Christie’s auctioned off its first-ever NFT digital artwork for $69,346,250. Not a typo.…

US industry groups still want Biden administration cash for local manufacturing The Semiconductor Industry Association of China (SIAC) and its United States counterpart the Semiconductor Industry Association have announced the establishment of a biannual chatfest to address technical and trade-related issues.…

Regulator keen to know how Android Choice works in the EU, what makes the Google/Apple relationship tick, and if Salesforce buying Slack is a problem Australia is going after Big Tech again, this time with research on “the impact of default settings and pre-installation of search services and web browsers on consumer choice and competition.”…

Cops probe vice chairman Samsung's appropriately ranked vice-chairman Lee Jae-Yong, right now behind bars for bribery, concealment of criminal proceeds, and embezzlement, is being investigated for illegal drug use.…

Funny how code that targets Redmond vanishes while tons of others menacing other vendors remain On Wednesday, shortly after security researcher Nguyen Jang posted a proof-of-concept exploit on GitHub that abuses a Microsoft Exchange vulnerability revealed earlier this month, GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, removed code, to the alarm of security researchers.…

Mozillians formulate 'prime' directive for browser's comeback following psychological study Mozilla has found a way to make its Firefox browser feel faster without any engineering effort: tell people that it's faster than the competition.…

But questions remain over its enterprise app credentials ServiceNow, the IT helpdesk vendor with a yearning for world domination, has launched its latest platform upgrade, Quebec, which features new AI, low-code app development tools and a bit of process mining thrown in for good measure.…

One of them is a critical RCE bug Netgear has released a swathe of security and firmware updates for its JGS516PE Ethernet switch after researchers from NCC Group discovered 15 vulnerabilities in the device – including an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw.…

'It's something that we, as an industry, invented' but all customers wanted were end-to-end business processes Middleweight enterprise application provider IFS is launching a cloud platform and rebuilding its applications. Just don't expect to find a standalone ERP product in there.…

Microsoft's rigorous testing at work Microsoft's near-legendary approach to quality in Windows has struck again, with customers complaining of blue screens rather than print-outs following a recent patch.…

But relies on integrated graphics, and what's the serial port for? Perhaps the only element of Huawei's consumer business that's emerged unscathed from US sanctions has been its PC line. With the Chinese tech giant's computer supply chain intact, it has been business as usual, and the company just introduced its first desktop PC beyond mainland China.…

Especially if you're routinely handling RAR files Malware-peddling spammers are using a curious variation on the old custom file-extension dodge to evade scanning tools, according to Trustwave.…

Only for new projects, but beware the hardcoded references One-stop DevOps shop GitLab has joined the movement to change the default name for an initial branch in a Git repository in favour of something less historically problematic.…

Plus: Ellison ramps up SAP trash-talking. At least some things are the same in 2021 Updated Oracle has underwhelmed the market with its Q3 results – shares took a minor tumble yesterday. But true to form its island-owning founder and CTO did his best to distract from matters at hand by talking up wins against its arch-rival and hyping technology it is yet to launch.…

'Predator' sent down for eight years after pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars A man who conned four women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by falsely claiming they were investing in a software biz was this week sentenced to eight years behind bars.…

But there's a lot more to worry about in new Bill, say campaigners A new UK law will explicitly authorise the "voluntary" slurping of data from mobile phones of crime suspects and witnesses.…

Also: NASA to send another astronaut up in a Soyuz, Mars Express has its head in the clouds In brief Fancy a career change? Be quick, and the chief exec's desk at the UK Space Agency could be yours. The permanent full-time position with a salary of £125,000 is likely to be challenging as the UK seeks to maintain its position as a space-based international leader in the wake of ructions such as the country's departure from the EU.…

'Data has been extracted' as Swiss-cheese servers are exploited Norway's Parliament has joined the growing list of organisations hit by vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Exchange Server.…

It's not just car-makers slowing down: Advantech supplies the likes of Cisco and IBM COVID-related silicon supply chain issues have impacted core information technology products, according to Taiwanese industrial tech specialist Advantech.…

Because that’s not where the threat is anymore Webcast If you’re currently running your company’s cyber security operation from home, ask yourself, where exactly is the “perimeter” you’re supposed to be protecting?…

Take it from us Earthlings, we know what a species can really do to a planet Astronomers have been offered a cheat sheet on the kinds of things to look out for – from air pollution to energy production – when hunting for signs of intelligent life on faraway exoplanets.…

... and a lot of wrist action Facebook has outlined what it believes will be the future of online interaction – and it’s a device that will sit on your wrist and act as a next-generation mouse.…

In seven flavours, accessible from Windows or macOS, with Active Directory support and USB passthrough Alibaba Cloud has quietly started a private beta of Elastic Desktop Service – a desktop-as-a-service offering.…

Says demand for space is booming and private enterprise loves its liberalisation plans India has decided to boost the budget of its space program by 46 percent.…

Remote code execution, denial of service, API abuse possible. Meanwhile, FBI pegs China for Exchange hacks Security and automation vendor F5 has warned of seven patch-ASAP-grade vulnerabilities in its Big-IP network security and traffic-grooming products, plus another 14 vulns worth fixing.…

Journalism Competition and Preservation Act has been proposed twice already. Will it survive this time? Both chambers of Congress reintroduced a bill on Wednesday that would give American publishers the power to negotiate with tech companies, like Facebook and Google, over the use of news content online.…

Multiple Object Versionless Architecture is as popular now as it was two decades ago Alan Holden, the inventor of the MOVA programming language, doesn't mention it on his resume, which isn't entirely surprising since it never really existed.…

See, regular expressions are hard Websites with domain names containing 't.co' were knackered in Russia today as a result of the Kremlin throttling Twitter.…

Moz urges ISPs told to commit to opt-in data usage – as if one more scolding might make a difference in decades of opt-out In the wake of a T-Mobile US privacy policy change that will automatically share US users' web and mobile app data with marketers, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Society, and others, have published an open letter asking internet service providers to do more to promote privacy, particularly as it applies to the DNS data that reflects online interaction.…

Claims campus will be home to 'Europe's largest mobile technologies engineering team' Apple today announced plans to invest €1bn in a new European Silicon Design Centre in Munich, Germany.…

Life in the 21st century is great A CCTV camera biz which left an admin account username and password exposed on the World Wide Web has, you guessed it, been targeted by hacktivists.…

Say goodbye to icon on Windows 10 Microsoft users are striding into a bright, new, legacy Edge-less future: unless they're using the Surface Hub, HoloLens or Xbox.…

Servers affected include those used by ESA, Villarreal football club, and some misused by malware miscreants Customers of European cloud hosting provider OVH have been told it plans to restart three data centres on its French campus in Strasbourg next week, following a massive fire on site this morning that destroyed one bit barn.…

Plus Brexity energy efficiency labelling standards thrown in The UK government has said it plans introduce rules later this year that would enshrine in law the "right to repair".…

Shades of the Encrochat bust all over again A series of police raids in Belgium have resulted in the apparent shutdown of the Sky ECC encrypted mobile phone network.…

Customers directed to howl into the wind of the Microsoft Store Microsoft has finally confirmed that it is indeed closing down its UserVoice forums, after The Register noted earlier this week that staffers had been merrily shutting some of the crowd-contributed pages.…

Alexa, am I having a heart attack? A smart-home speaker device and machine-learning software can be used to pick up a person's heartbeat, and report the results to doctors to analyze, folks at University of Washington reckon.…

'Most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time' The UK's eye-wateringly expensive Test and Trace system has failed to provide any data showing it is effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19, according to a damning report from MPs.…

French outsourcer will handle software, networking, and infrastructure Atos has been selected to run the UK's National Employment Savings Trust occupational pensions scheme in a contract award estimated to be worth £1.5bn over 18 years.…

'For many ... vendors, the BSD license is very important compared to the GPL' It's not as well known as Linux, but FreeBSD has plenty of hardcore fans. In a wide-ranging chat covering licensing, architectures including RISC-V, and a development model that's free of a "dictator", The Reg spoke to members of the project about new release features and more.…

Bare-faced cheek of Barewire using our trademarks, say Redmond legal eagles A multinational tech support scam was operated out of a rural Surrey cottage for years before its Indian call centre was rumbled and gave the game away to Microsoft, the High Court has heard.…

Plus: Where did their original logo come from? Updated Police have issued a tender to replace their CyberAlarm tool following reporting by The Register and infosec researchers revealing security flaws in the logging software.…

Suggestion to hand out shares in new registry dismissed as a non-starter With an extraordinary vote that will define the future of the UK’s internet registry operator just two weeks away, the battle lines between the company's management and those seeking an overhaul have been drawn.…

There’s always someone to blame for bad infosec, but never a willingness to make meaningful change Column Remember the Cold War? For me, growing up in America meant living under the permanent, intangible threat of sudden vaporisation by thermonuclear attack. It added a piquant pointlessness to everything. Ashes, ashes, all burn down.…

Waymo recreated 72 fatal crashes and it turns out its simulated AI driver isn't a careless, distracted jerk Keen to prove that automated cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, Waymo, the robotaxi biz spun out of Google in 2016, set out to simulate 72 fatal crashes that occurred from 2008 through 2017 in the vicinity of Chandler, Arizona.…