The Register

Crypto-mining jerks at least partly to blame Engineers around the world have been given a few hours off today, assuming they are using Microsoft's Azure DevOps Hosted Pools, as the platform buckled under a second wave of attacks.…

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 steps up to boost the coffers of NoSQL database biz Redis Labs, a commercial backer of the open-source key-value store database Redis, has secured $110m in funding, with backers including Softbank Vision Fund 2.…

Digital Markets Unit takes aim at giants' conduct with users and advertisers The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today launched its Digital Markets Unit (DMU) watchdog, which aims to regulate large online platforms like Google and Facebook, and create rules governing their conduct with users and advertisers.…

Emulation could save you from a complete meltdown Webcast No-one likes to have a silo of specialized but aging kit that requires special care and attention embedded in the heart of their computing infrastructure.…

Possible culprit: Ancient code running in production. A vuln 'would not be terribly surprising' says maintainer PHP maintainer Nikita Popov has posted an update concerning how the source code was compromised and malicious code inserted – blaming a user database leak rather than a problem with the server itself.…

Aww, did the big bad criminals get a little lockdown burnout too? Compromising every web-connected server and service you can find gets tiring after a while – and by the end of 2021 internet criminals targeting British companies were as fatigued as the rest of us, according to Bitdefender.…

Swarm programming with audio, video, and everyone editing at once – what could go wrong? JetBrains today pushed out Code With Me, formerly in preview, a plugin to support remote collaborative coding, as well as updates to its Java and Ruby IDEs.…

Not rewriting the whole OS, of course, but using the language going forward Google has signalled support for the Rust programming language in low-level system code to limit the prevalence of memory-based security vulnerabilities.…

Tracking ID placed on mobile device without informed consent, says campaign group Privacy group noyb, founded by rights advocate Max Schrems, has instigated a new complaint about Google's use of the Android Advertising ID (AAID) to track users.…

Yes, that Horizon branch office management IT system The UK Post Office has awarded Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension to run the Horizon IT system, faults in which led to dozens of subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted.…

Windows whinging? Take your mind off it with a sausage roll Bork!Bork!Bork! The Easter Bunny has been and left us with a basket of bork in the form of Microsoft's Windows 7 End of Support (EOS) fairy.…

Ball gazers don't see devices flying off shelves in 2022. Do they know something we don't? Analysts are forecasting worldwide IT spending to top $4 trillion in 2021 with devices leading the charge as organisations adapt to changing workforce demands.…

Expresses fondness for Biden administration infrastructure plan that would help parcels be delivered faster and boost broadband speeds Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said he supports increasing corporate tax rates after receiving criticism, yet again, from US President Joe Biden.…

We might just be witnessing a final state of these incredible space rocks Not only did a telescope on Earth spot, for the first time in history, an extinct comet on a close fly-by of our home world but scientists now reckon the space rock is covered in a substance similar to talcum powder.…

Membership data row ascends to desk of California attorney-general The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has taken legal action it hopes will prove that members’ personal data does not remain in the possession of the rival International Association of Atheists.…

Looks like the Galaxy S21 did well, and Texas storm shutdown blew over Samsung has pre-announced its Q1 2021 earnings and predicted $58.1bn of consolidated sales and $8.3bn of operating profit.…

36 years for the first. Then it was like buses: none for ages, then 2 zettabytes came along almost at once Disk-maker Seagate claims to have become the first company to ship three zettabytes' worth of data storage devices.…

What’s this got to do with Big Blue's hybrid cloud obsession? Cloudifying COBOL ... until you repent and go back to z/OS IBM has announced a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86.…

Labs offered tech by Arm as well as its upstart rival and others Engineers and scientists working on American military research programs can now access RISC-V processor core designs and associated blueprints through DARPA's Toolbox, and use the technology in their prototypes and experiments.…

If you can’t guess why, how’s life under that rock? The organisers of COMPUTEX, Taiwan’s annual PC-tech-fest, have shelved plans to run a real-world event this June.…

WebNX facility falls offline in blaze, takes customers down with it A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild.…

So please don't delay in applying updates, says, well, everyone SAP and security analysts Onapsis say cyber-criminals are pretty quick to analyze the enterprise software outfit's patches and develop exploits to get into vulnerable systems.…

Forget smartphones – whaddabout motors? The US automotive industry has warned it faces a bleak six months of disruption caused by the global shortage of semiconductors, adding that the chaos will result in 1.28 million fewer cars made this year.…

'Improving the state of the world'... by not paying the government SaaSy CRM giant Salesforce.com is among the tech companies named in a think tank report for paying no corporate income tax in the US despite sizeable earnings.…

Join us with Red Hat and IBM – and learn how to apply a little data discipline in the cloud Webcast Security and governance are tough enough problems when it comes to conventional computing. When it comes to cloud native, they can be enough to stop a migration project before it’s even off the drawing board.…

Would-be Node.js successor gets $5m cash injection Deno, the JavaScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, is now a company with nearly $5m to fund development – though its developers say it will remain "permissively free."…

Timing is everything It may be chilly in the UK this week, but that is nothing compared to the state of Hell as Microsoft continued its support of OpenJDK.…

Stop, collaborate and listen, Chipzilla's back with its brand new invention Intel on Tuesday announced the availability of its "Ice Lake" 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, intended for applications running on servers, high-end workstations, and in data centers.…

Shouting cyber cyber cyber, mega mega fail thing The UK Cyber Security Council announced itself to the public realm last week by touting a domain it doesn't own. Helpfully, internet jokesters then bought up variations on the official address.…

Nothing to do with THAT court case or lack of Oracle certification on GCP. Nope. Definitely not Google owner Alphabet has switched from Oracle to SAP for its main financial software in a move that has dented Big Red's share price.…

Now to recreate re-entry with a short drop onto a hard floor We bring our Lego My Own Creation (MOC) odyssey to a close today with a bit of unabashed self-indulgence in the form of a Skylab model and Skylab modification for the enormous Lego Saturn V.…

If you can't measure it, you can't research it A team of European researchers have succeeded in slowing down antimatter in a study that could lead to more accurate measures of this strangely elusive substance and help confirm the fundamental symmetry of nature.…

Not to worry, zombies with a gambling addiction probably won't eat your enterprise brains Column It seemed like a classic April The First spoof. Indeed, some tech titles had it on their lists of best pranks of the day. But it's true: the software zombie court case to end all zombie software court cases has woken from its slumber. Nearly 29 years after it first lurched from the crypt, SCO v The World Of Linux is back, and it smells just as bad as ever.…

Starts year-long proof of concept for the basics, meanwhile China is already testing cross-border crypto-payments The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has announced it will study the feasibility of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).…

The ‘we think this is mostly for SmartNICs’ stance is looking a little thinner VMware has released an update of the mostly experimental cut of its flagship ESXi hypervisor for the Arm architecture, adding support for 80-core server processors and hinting that more server-makers have come aboard.…

Plus: Waymo CEO is standing down, Volvo is partnering with a self-driving startup to stay relevant In Brief Twitter has suspended multiple accounts purporting to be Amazon warehouse workers defending the mega-souk’s working conditions and speaking out against unionization.…

Yes, this could mean Zuck gets your passport and credit card. We’re sure he’ll take care of them properly … An Australian Parliamentary Committee has recommended that locals be compelled to hand over identification documents to sign up for and use social media.…

Workers to get earlier, longer, holiday, probably paid (fingers crossed) Japanese auto-maker Subaru announced Monday that it is making “production adjustments” - aka making fewer cars - due to semiconductor supply chain issues.…

As night-time internet cut-offs stretch beyond 50 consecutive days Myanmar’s military junta has ordered the suspension of wireless broadband services.…

Plus: Top universities hit by data-stealing extortionists in Brief It was a tsunami of DNS queries that ultimately took out a host of Microsoft services, from Xbox Live to Teams, for some netizens about an hour on April Fools' Day, Redmond has said.…

Lack of product enthusiasm in a stale market during a semiconductor drought finally killed it LG Electronics' board has tired of its loss-making smartphone business and ordered its closure.…

May the 4th not be with you Yahoo! Answers is shutting down in a month's time after nearly sixteen years online.…

Account info swiped in 2019 via security hole, sold online, now given away for free Reams of personal data – including phone numbers, email addresses, and birthdays – obtained from 533 million Facebook accounts was offered to all for free on a cyber-crime forum over the weekend.…

America's top judges decide copied code in Android is fair use The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-2 decision that Google's limited copying of Oracle's Java APIs in its Android operating system constitutes fair use under US law.…

Surely this back light problem would have come up in testing, court mulls A US court has rejected Apple's request to throw out a potential class-action lawsuit accusing the iGiant of knowingly selling MacBook Pro laptops with defective display cables.…

Halt and catch fire Who, Me? A blast from the past, and possibly the future, as a Register reader regales us with a tale of carnets in the pre-Maastrict Treaty era. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

Remote code execution hole, arbitrary file writing flaw could make a mess of stored files Updated Some QNAP network attached storage devices are vulnerable to attack because of two critical vulnerabilities, one that enables unauthenticated remote code execution and another that provides the ability to write to arbitrary files.…

Google comes in late too Apple has begun warning iOS developers that it will reject apps containing advertising SDKs that use data from the device to create unique identifiers, or fingerprints, in preparation for the upcoming release of iOS 14.5.…

Join us online for three days of DevOps, containers, CI/CD Event Theory is great, but you’re never going to put it into practice without having the right tools – and knowing how to use them.…

Semiconductor sovereignty, meet supply chain security Analysis Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also known as TSMC, plans to spend $100bn over the next three years in response to chip demand and has advised its customers to expect to pay more.…