The Register

Doesn't matter if design was perfected at dawn of humankind, you still have to pay Cupertino tax Apple's $699 Mac Pro Wheel Kit provoked astonishment from the general public, swiftly followed by raucous laughter. Even by Apple's standards, these were a blatant piss-take. Fortunately, there's now an alternative for thrifty punters from Mac accessory biz OWC that costs "just" $199.…

You know this, guys: 7.14 linguine. Get with the programme! Reg Standards Bureau No less a character than John Cleese himself has mounted a challenge to the supremacy of the Register Standards Soviet after the funny walks man suggested that he himself was an appropriate measure of social distancing.…

Demirkapi shows how drivers can be misused for deep pwnage DEF CON Writing a successful Windows rootkit is easier than you would think. All you need is do is learn assembly and C/C++ programming, plus exploit development, reverse engineering, and Windows internals, and then find and abuse a buggy driver, and inject and install your rootkit, and bam. Happy days.…

And expands its Horizons VDI into new clouds VMware has decided revealed plans to become an application vendor of sorts, with make-your-office-safe-ware that complements its other end-user compute products.…

Stiffened sinews and floppy disks On Call Do you remember those halcyon days when we used to enjoy a city break every now again? Relive those times with a continental Friday On Call, courtesy of The Register.…

Boffins find atmospheric oddities that make the planet blink in Spring and Autumn Mars pulses with ultraviolet light three times a night during spring and autumn, according to boffins from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).…

The Middle Kingdom is thought to be a few months further down the road to economic recovery and smartmobes are discretionary purchases Sales of smartphones in China fell by 10.3 per cent year-on-year in the quarter ended 30 June, according to box-counters at analyst firm IDC.…

Not exactly the first time this has happened, by a very long chalk Google's Chrome Web Store is once again under fire for poor policing of harmful extensions.…

Last Dynabook shares shuffled off to new owner Sharp Toshiba has finally and formally exited the laptop business…

On grounds that they can track users, conduct corporate espionage and oppress Chinese-Americans United States president Donald Trump has issued two executive orders banning Chinese messaging service WeChat and made-in-China-but-only-operating-abroad social network TikTok, and labelling the two a “threat”.…

‘Everyone can see that the US goal is to keep its monopoly in science and technology’ says Chinese foreign minister China has ridiculed America's plan to build a "clean network" free from Chinese tech and businesses, particularly in its telecoms infrastructure.…

All that money must be wired to the US Treasury immediately Capital One must pay a trivial $80m fine for its shoddy public cloud security – yes, the US banking giant that was hacked last year by a miscreant who stole personal information on 106 million credit-card applicants in America and Canada.…

A misunderstanding about the vulnerability means defenses fall short Some of the boffins who in 2018 disclosed the data-leaking speculative-execution flaws known as Spectre and Meltdown today contend that attempts to extinguish the Foreshadow variant have missed the mark.…

Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…

China can't hold a candle to GRU's shenanigans, says expert Black Hat While China is the bête noire du jour of the US government, Russia is the master of spreading disinformation, fostering conflict, and derailing discourse online, the Black Hat security conference was told today.…

Leaker only 'a bit concerned' about getting sued Updated Switzerland-based IT consultant Tillie Kottmann on Thursday published a trove of confidential Intel technical material, code, and documents related to various processors and chipsets.…

Drop the heat gun, pal: minimal glue means there's hope for brave butterfingers among you The OnePlus Nord is one of the most heavily hyped phones of 2020. In addition to being OnePlus's first real stab at the mid-range in several years, it also has the distinction of being reasonably easy to repair, according to iFixit.…

Blizzard of litigation ahead of purported $20bn IPO Snowflake, the much-touted cloud-native data warehouse company, has been hit with a lawsuit over its name just as it is reportedly set to launch a stock market IPO.…

They didn't even make it a year Just days after unveiling its latest Pixel 5 flagship, Google has retired the last-gen Pixel 4 and 4 XL smartphones.…

Should your policy cover that? Well that's up to you The National Cyber Security Centre has urged British businesses to think carefully when picking a cyber insurance policy – but won’t say whether insurance that covers ransomware payoffs is a bad thing or not.…

How to survive a pandemic Western Digital ended the year on a relative high as the work-from-home trend across much of the world led to a buying frenzy from cloud builders expanding their data centres to feed demand.…

'Impact was increased when a redeploy was triggered in an attempt to mitigate' GitHub has reported on the reasons behind a severe four-and-a-half-hour outage on 13 July.…

Continuum reborn? Not quite, and some features are Sammy-only for now Microsoft and Samsung have previewed Android apps running on Windows – or appearing to, since the apps actually run on a connected smartphone, but are viewed and controlled from the PC, a technique called app streaming.…

Reminding Chipzilla of days gone by... Taiwanese fabless semiconductor biz Mediatek has made its first forray into the PC-based 5G connectivity market, bringing welcome competition to a an area dominated by Qualcomm.…

Global Service Delivery Centres in Poland, Argentina, India, China and the Philippines all impacted, as are staff in UK and US Exclusive The artist formerly known as Ernst & Young is preparing to transfer the majority of its in-house compute function to IBM, with 800 people in various corners of the world set to make the move from October onwards.…

But the competition is fierce Yellowbrick, purveyors of an analytical data warehouse built on flash memory, has launched feature updates aimed at real-time analysis and cloud-to-on-prem data movement.…

Lovely-to-hold blower sadly missing some features for the price Review The first thing you notice about the Oppo Find X2 Neo is how incredibly thin it is.…

Bognor Regis man still faces 20 years in clink, though The British teenager accused of being part of the gang that hacked Twitter and posted a cryptocurrency scam from various US celebrities' accounts has not yet been arrested.…

Case continues over failed Project Emerald Direct Line has dropped its claims that IBM negligently misrepresented its ability to develop an insurance platform – though the UK insurer is continuing its £36m legal battle against the US tech giant for allegedly having "seriously underestimated the complexity" of a 2014 contract.…

Telcos won't give up on the dream of becoming enterprise app stores instead of dumb data pipes Arm and Vodafone Group have flexed their muscles in a way designed to menace Cisco and other networking vendors, while keeping alive telcos’ dreams of offering enterprise app stores.…

Nothing but love for regulators, but nothing for hyperscalers despite previous Google Cloud entanglement Controversial made-in-China social network TikTok has announced it intends to “establish a new data centre in Ireland, and our first data centre in Europe” and will spend “approximately €420million” on the project.…

UK govt portal among those borked Mozilla on Wednesday warned that an ongoing change in the way Firefox handles browser cookies may interfere with websites – and urged web developers to test their code.…

The smaller the manufacturing process, the bigger the subsidies China has unveiled a slate of new and more focused initiatives aimed at helping local chipmakers boost production and accelerate product development.…

Or maybe a spleen? Stomach? Snot bubble? You decide Pic Not only does the good ol’ Sun provide us with light and warmth, its solar wind casts around the planetary system a protective magnetic bubble that’s probably shaped like a... deflated croissant.…

Handy service for India and Nigeria, or feature creep that constricts competition? Google has added a secure file locker to the “Files” app that it offers as a clean-up service for Android owners, and suggested it as ideal for users who share a smartphone.…

Hiragana love this new peripheral after it created all sorts of firmware fun The Raspberry Pi foundation has created its first made-for-Asia peripheral: a Japanese keyboard.…

‘Clean Network’ initiative bans use of Chinese clouds, names Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent as compromised US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has announced a “Clean Network plan” he says offers a “comprehensive approach to guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”…

'We are investigating the situation' Canon has had a double shot of bad luck lately. First, its brand-new photo-and-video-hosting cloud started losing files. Now it's reportedly fallen victim to ransomware.…

ES&S takes the bold step of not ignoring vulnerability reports Black Hat Just hours after Professor Matt Blaze today discussed the state of election system security in America, one of the largest US voting machine makers stepped forward to say it's trying to improve its vulnerability research program.…

Get. The. Terms. Of. The. Audit. In. Writing Black Hat The two penetration testers whose arrest and imprisonment made headlines last year are finally sharing their story, and it is a doozy.…

'We need to prepare for a number of scenarios that may not come to fruition' says Prof Blaze Black Hat Just as America was getting a grip on improving the security of its electronic ballot boxes, the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing a potential surge in remote voting unexpectedly into the mix, the Black Hat hacking conference was told today.…

'Customers are trying to use Istio and having a hard time, we see this from the support ticket volume' Interview Microsoft plans to donate a new open source project, the Open Service Mesh (OSM), described as a "lightweight and extensible service mesh that runs on Kubernetes," to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and has kicked off the process to do so.…

Autofill arrives for mobile forms, plus new viewer widget, performance and tooling updates Google has released version 1.20 of its Flutter cross-platform framework for mobile, web and desktop, and reports that the number of Flutter-built apps in the Play store has increased from 50,000 to 90,000 since April.…

CEO bemoans looming recession and 'trade wars', but hey, we're halfway through the week Elongated lead times for Arista's hottest networking gear won't likely improve until at least the final quarter of 2020 at the earliest as the supply chain continues to recover from COVID-19.…

Helpful as Huawei is increasingly swept aside for 5G infrastructure Intel has announced a new partnership with virtualization giant VMWare to collaborate on building a new software platform for 5G vRAN (virtualized radio access network) infrastructure.…

It's good at taking notes. Plus: Tablet-sized foldable, ear beans, and more Samsung has unveiled two new models of its Galaxy Note smartphone and made sure they're really good at helping you to take notes.…

Disruptions leapt 63% as lockdowns came into force after February Global internet disruptions went up 63 per cent after February and remained elevated throughout the first half of 2020 compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to net and cloud researcher ThousandEyes.…

'Not the most glorious of returns to public market' says analyst Twelve years after first going public, Rackspace Technology has returned to the NASDAQ with more of a whimper than a bang. It has raised $704m, the vast majority of which will be used to pay down debts owed to its private equity backer.…

Phased shutdown ends December, and subs will be shunted to other platform Google will begin the process of shutting down its Play Music streaming service later this month, concluding in December when the tech giant nukes all user-uploaded tracks.…

COVID-battered businesses win reprieve from Information Commissioner's Office Updated British Airways expects the fine for its 2018 credit card data leak to be just 10.8 per cent of the original £183m proposed by the UK data watchdog – while US hotel chain Marriott has both halved and kicked its own data protection fine into the long grass once again, The Register can reveal.…