The Register

In response to complaints about the time taken to scan, not concerns about privacy Hong Kong’s secretary for innovation and technology Alfred Sit has said the Territory is working on a technology that somehow passively scans QR codes.…

DNS oversight body accused again and again of chronic foot-dragging ICANN has finally acted against Net 4 India, terminating its accreditation and so preventing the rogue registrar from registering domain names for customers in most internet registries across the globe.…

14th five-year plan to be revealed, national digital currency also makes the agenda China will today open its annual “Two Sessions” parliamentary meetings, and has said the nation’s technology strategy will be among the top three items up for discussion.…

Far-right sanctuary sues cloud giant for breach of contract after plug pulled on its server hosting Parler this week dropped its case against Amazon Web Services – and filed a fresh lawsuit claiming the cloud giant breached its contract by pulling the antisocial network's hosting.…

Eight plucky applicants will be picked for journey of a lifetime Video Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa this week he opened an application process for eight people to accompany him to the Moon aboard SpaceX’s Starship.…

Dodgy doppelganger not the first, won’t be the last Logowatch Adolf Hitler killed himself in 1945 after being responsible for the death of millions as the leader of Germany's Nazi party. He had a small rectangular mustache.…

Notes an 'erosion of trust' – gee, wonder who could be responsible for that... Google says it will not come up with new ways to track individual netizens as they browse the web once Chrome phases out third-party cookies, commonly used for loosely observing people's online activities.…

Demand will increase, says CEO, as HPC chief heads for the exit Hewlett Packard Enterprise says it is now seeing signs that biz customers are planning to update their on-premises infrastructure as the world slowly recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic... not that this came in time to save its latest quarter.…

Time to go down to Memphis, er, Cupertino, to check for a decree Researchers have discovered language buried in the forthcoming release of MacOS Big Sur 11.3 that suggests Apple may withdraw the Rosetta 2 binary compatibility layer in some regions.…

Azure SQL Data Warehouse Ignite Microsoft has pushed out Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB to general availability in an effort to bring its transactional NoSQL database closer to the analytics workhorse data warehouse.…

The same tech inside Google Pay, Shopping, Analytics, Ads, etc Google on Wednesday announced the release of Flutter 2, an update to its popular cross-platform, open source app development framework.…

Ace infosec biz aware and investigating, we're told Infosec outfit Qualys, its cloud-based vuln detection tech, and its SSL server test webpage, have seemingly fallen victim to a ransomware attack.…

Any user could become root, warns Immersive Labs researcher Proof of concept code has been published for a vulnerability in popular data centre security management tool Saltstack, which was discovered after a developer at Immersive Labs found a privilege escalation bug allowing any old user to become root.…

Spend a little time with our Tim and Nutanix’s Kong Yang – and learn how to crack the conundrum Webcast Upheaval always creates opportunity, and it’s often cyber criminals who are the first to exploit it.…

Ready or not, here I come! The next version of Windows 10 is most definitely inbound after Microsoft began forcing the code onto its loyal band of unpaid testers last night as a "recommended update."…

'Their open licensing model is absolutely one of the greatest licensing models out there' Nvidia has no plans to dismantle Arm's licensing-based biz model, enterprise veep and CFO Colette Kress has said, touching on one of the key concerns voiced by industry as competition regulators probe the proposed $40bn buyout.…

Pitches pro-privacy platform with customizable results filter dubbed Goggles Brave, maker of the identically named privacy-focused web browser, has acquired its own search engine to offer as an alternative to Google Search and competing search engines that exist but aren't all that visible in Google's shadow.…

If he said it on Twitter it must be all above board, right? Cryptocurrency enthusiast Elon Musk has attracted scorn after floating the idea of changing the name of Boca Chica, Texas, to "Starbase."…

For now, you get Dell and Pure Storage-as-a-service and more metallic locations Equinix is weeks away from unleashing Ampere’s 128-core Altra server CPUs in its “Metal” not-quite cloud service.…

One warning email.... then three years of backup gone in a flash, says storage exec Cohesity exec Chris Colotti has said that Kaseya Spanning eradicated years of backup data belonging to him after he unwittingly breached a usage limit for an account that was supposed to have no pre-set limits, and then didn't upgrade his plan within a five-day period.…

Seeing as Google thinks no one cares about location records, we'll remove street addresses from all our sites, says compliance chief Sectigo’s chief compliance officer has hit out at Google for minimizing the visibility of Extended Validation HTTPS certificates in Chrome.…

Hackers are friends not foes, says Alyssa Miller in this opening argument for our latest debate Register debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, the argument for the motion is published today, and the argument against will be published on Friday.…

No broadband or bedroom though, so you'll have to sign up for sats or build your own Stuck in a flat in London, Tokyo, New York or another less lovely urban area for the pandemic?…

Terms of deal not disclosed as Big Blue insists it wasn't wrong, but merely didn't follow design standards British insurer Direct Line has settled a High Court case it brought against IBM for £36m after alleging Big Blue fatally bungled a far-reaching Agile methodology-based insurance platform IT project.…

Pitches 'shared fate' scheme as an upgrade to current convention of cloud sec being your problem Google and insurance colossi Allianz and Munich Re have teamed on a special insurance policy tailored to the G-Cloud.…

Product consolidation roadmap? Not yet. But all involved say the combo will work out just fine Private equity group TPG has acquired security vendor Thycotic and announced it will merge it with another recent acquisition, Centrify.…

When there are passphrases, there is inherent risk, says Redmond Ignite Microsoft has said it will add end-to-end encryption for some one-to-one Teams calls later this year – and urged folks to move away from using passwords with Azure AD.…

Not so fast, says infosec boffin, because crims know returning workers will be easy prey Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky has suggested that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic will bring a slowdown in cyber-crime.…

Mainframe operating system to get more AI, hybrid cloud cred, expanded coprocessor support IBM has teased a significant update to its z/OS mainframe operating system.…

Good tech policy vital as Asian states climb out of the COVID-19 crunch ASEAN, the trade and security bloc comprising ten Southeast Asia countries, has admitted its five-year ICT Masterplan could have been better-designed, didn't deliver on some goals, and lacked the policy underpinnings that would have improved its chances of success.…

Chipzilla vows to appeal verdict Intel was told on Tuesday to cough up $2.18bn in damages after losing a patent-infringement court battle against VLSI Technology, a Silicon Valley veteran rejuvenated by an intellectual property fight.…

Patch ASAP: Holes used to raid top-tier targets and stash info in Kim Dotcom's old cloud file locker Microsoft says Beijing-backed hackers are exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server to steal data from US-based defense contractors, law firms, and infectious disease researchers.…

Full stack means fully locked in – oh shoot, did we say that out loud? Ignite Microsoft on Tuesday launched Azure Percept – a full stack of technologies to run AI code at the network edge – during its annual Ignite conference.…

Lawmakers look to FCC to become a 'cop on the beat' The decade-long battle over net neutrality in America has returned. Again.…

Unauthorized versions of CuPy and other projects flood PyPI The Python Package Index, also known as PyPI, has removed 3,653 malicious packages uploaded days after a security weakness in the use of private and public registries was highlighted.…

Beachheads open up on both sides of the Atlantic Apple is facing a fresh round of battles on both sides of the Atlantic over its App Store and iPhone policies.…

Citizen development platform where everything looks like Excel Ignite Microsoft today introduced Power Fx, a low-code language for its Power Platform, but it is not altogether new, being extracted from the existing formula language for what the company calls canvas apps.…

You may be interested in tech, but backers want to know about revenue 'multipliers' SAP aims to convert €5bn in revenue from support and software licences into cloud subscriptions over the next five years, according to the German software giant's CFO.…

Ok, so you have 2.7 million developers.... one for every phone you might sell in 2025? Huawei's sales and shipments may be shrinking like a snowball in the Sahara, but armed with App Gallery platform stats, it is trying to put on a brave public showing.…

New Windows Server ahoy - but the company would rather talk about Azure Ignite Microsoft has released a preview of Windows Server 2022, with "secured core", improved Windows Containers, and MsQuic protocol support in the kernel.…

Neanderthal ear scans support idea they could hear us and had a 'type of human language' Computerised tomography scans and auditory bioengineering models of fossilised Neanderthals ears suggest our closest extinct cousins had a hearing range necessary to process human speech.…

Feeds growing market for edge kit with gear rated for temps below freezing Lenovo has updated its edge computing hardware portfolio, adding two rugged compact machines to its ThinkEdge line-up.…

Microsoft's OS might be time-expired, but the pastry is, well, far too edible Bork!Bork!Bork! While the French may project their borkage as art onto the wall of a Lyon tunnel, Brits seem to prefer theirs glaring down balefully from a screen in a sausage roll emporium in Yateley.…

It's your computer, not ours – but we may go ahead and update it for you, says team The Linux Mint team has introduced a fix for a memory leak it does not fully understand: restarting the Cinnamon desktop.…

And they're getting into the ransomware game too, warns Sophos Gootkit financial malware has been resurrected to fling ransomware payloads at unwitting marks, according to Sophos.…

Network Solutions hasn't confirmed what happened, though The short-lived theft of Perl.com in late January is believed to have been the result of a social engineering attack that convinced registrar Network Solutions to alter the domain's records without valid authorization.…

Special vote to sack UK internet registry's CEO and chairman coming later this month The board of .uk internet registry operator Nominet is again under pressure after support to fire the organisation’s CEO and chairman hit a critical milestone.…

Goes deep on Docker and adopts ‘strangler fig’ pattern to replace legacy platform Netflix has revealed it’s built a new media ingestion and distribution platform and expects to spend much of 2021 on a migration from what it describes as a “large and complicated legacy system”.…

Matter held not for long... but for long enough Video Physicists have trapped a sliver of the world’s coldest plasma in a magnetic "bottle" for the first time, taking the first tentative steps towards building increasingly realistic simulations of the interiors of stars.…

Japan doubles up for AWS, Indonesia warms up for Microsoft as Alibaba and Google lie in wait AWS and Microsoft have expanded their Asian cloud presences.…