The Register

Oh look, Cloudflare spots a sudden surge in use of other messaging apps The new self-appointed military government of Myanmar has temporarily banned Facebook.…

'From US to Europe to China to Asia-Pacific, our channel inventory has never been so low' In a blow to anyone fighting over the scraps in the laptop market, Lenovo says it is running at between one third to a half of normal stock levels because it can’t keep up with relentlessly high demand for PCs.…

Probably not used by last year's US government-busting attackers, though As if that supply chain attack wasn't bad enough, SolarWinds has had to patch its Orion software again after eagle-eyed researchers discovered fresh vulnerabilities – including one that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution.…

Turning smart homes into dumb ones Updated Ring is suffering a major outage with many of its video doorbells effectively dead, turning smart homes into very dumb ones.…

Liquid hot Facebook project tucked under penguin's wing The Linux Foundation has said it will join forces with Facebook’s Magma project, with the intent of building an open source mobile core network platform based on the software project.…

'We are using the word experimental right now' Microsoft's Project Bicep, first demoed at the Ignite event last year and still described as "experimental", lets users define a set of Azure resources in code by using a domain-specific language.…

It works – but the more 'exciting' stuff is in the Dev and Canary Channels Microsoft has added new features to Edge and released a stable channel version for Mac M1 users as it strives to make the browser more than a tool to download Chrome.…

Which are – you guessed it – behind schedule An independent review of the coalition-era Superfast Broadband programme published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today argues Britain received value for money, although some rural areas are still waiting for the cable guy.…

Not like every expert didn't warn it. Also: Queen of Carnage confirms consultants were paid average of £1.1k a day Baroness Harding, head of the UK's NHS Test and Trace programme, has defended the money spent on the app it scrapped in June last year, saying £14m was not wasted.…

Modernisation that happens to be an upsell to premium cloudy plans Analysis Microsoft has introduced a cloud configuration for Windows 10 with the claim of "easy to manage cloud endpoints," but complex manual steps and interaction with InTune management means it is unlikely to match Google's Chrome OS for ease of deployment.…

Advice is nice. But what it isn't is binding, says Akamai Britain's National Cyber Security Centre has urged internet service providers to adopt its Border Gateway Protocol best practice guide following a number of routing blunders over the past few years.…

Linux variant studied, dissected in detail in case you want to look out for it ESET researchers say they have found a lightweight strain of malware that targets multiple OSes and has hit supercomputers, an ISP, and other organisations.…

Bye bye Ubiquity, Subiquity: new unified installer will cover both desktop and server Canonical is building a new installer for Ubuntu using Google's cross-platform Flutter framework – but is facing questions about use of a non-native toolkit for such a key component.…

'Procedural content' might offer a way forward for projects queueing up to use a supercomputer Researchers at the UK's University of Sussex have developed a way to boost neural activity simulations without reaching for expensive and scarce supercomputing resources.…

450 Android apps track location, 1.7bn downloads, 44% use X-Mode code: only 10% pulled off Play Store A report on Android apps that do location tracking identified 450 apps that use tracker SDKs, many of which use an SDK called X-Mode, which Apple and Google have banned, but are still in Google's Play Store.…

Thunk: The reassuring sound of a rugged, comfy biz computer Review Lenovo's ThinkPad range is a bit like a pair of sensible shoes. It might not look flashy but there's something comfortable about its configuration, and the recently released ThinkPad T14s Gen 1 AMD is no different.…

Cloud supremo to become CEO of one of Earth's biggest super-corps Analysis Even though Amazon is one of the largest and most recognized companies in the world, such was the outsized stature of its CEO and founder Jeff Bezos that the ecommerce giant's actions have often been personally associated with him.…

Google wants researchers, vendors to stop making attacks easy Enigma To limit the impact of zero-day vulnerabilities, Google security researcher Maddie Stone would like those developing software fixes to stop delivering shoddy patches.…

Is there anywhere in the world TikTok isn’t in trouble? ByteDance, the Chinese company that makes TikTok, has sued local rival Tencent for alleged monopoly practices.…

Forget academic adversarial attacks and imagine if ML were the weakest link in the chain Enigma When Microsoft surveyed 28 organizations last year about how they viewed machine learning (ML) security, its researchers found that few firms gave the matter much thought.…

Sees businesses signing up for long deals, confident the black ink will come Google’s various cloud services bled $14.6bn in losses in the past three years while also growing revenue to new heights.…

Promises to grease the skids for small business advertisers who get off Google and bound towards Bing Analysis Microsoft has backed Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, a scheme the nation intends as a mechanism to make Google and Facebook pay local news publishers for the privilege of linking to their work to deliver a new funding mechanism for public interest journalism.…

Maybe we should start an online bookstore sometime The ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic helped Amazon record its first quarter to pass $100bn in revenue – and it grew profits 118 per cent.…

Signals analytics, not IaaS, is the opportunity it wants to chase Alibaba says its cloud has become profitable for the first time.…

Still hoping to lob a zillionaire and three commoners into space in a commercial flight later this year Video The latest prototype of SpaceX's Starship rocket, the SN9, burst into flames as the vehicle attempted to land on Earth on Tuesday.…

Multi-billionaire founder channels Bill Gates, will become exec chairman of cloud giant with gift shop on the side Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, will step down from his CEO role this summer, handing the job to the head of its AWS cloud computing division, Andy Jassy.…

What a lovely company Amazon will pay $61.7m to drivers it is said to have screwed over by stealing their tips for three years, only stopping when America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation.…

Director General injects some reality into the lunar landing schedule The European Space Agency has signed off on three more European Service Modules for NASA's Orion spacecraft, taking the total to be delivered to six.…

You'll have to go to one of Redmond's partners for something less simulated The hype-o-meter has gone up a notch with the arrival of Azure Quantum in Public Preview.…

But you can thwart it with MFA Researchers from Slovakian infosec firm ESET have uncovered a new strain of Linux malware that targets high-performance computing clusters – aka supercomputers – running OSes including Linux, Solaris, and IBM AIX.…

Elder server httpd to be revitalized with Google-funded memory-safe add-on At almost 26 years old, the Apache HTTP Server, known as httpd, has a memory problem: it is written in C, a language known among other things for its lack of memory safety.…

Oof, that's gotta hurt for Cloudera, which is sitting at a paltry $4.6bn Databricks, the company behind open-source big data tool Apache Spark, has sucked up a $1bn investment round courtesy of AWS, Microsoft, Google, and more.…

The axeman cometh The sound of a blade being sharpened in Redmond could be heard this week as Microsoft issued a six-month warning for Skype for Business Online.…

HPE cut off its own arm to escape infrastructure services Atos shares spiked this morning after it confirmed that negotiations to purchase DXC Technology are dead in the water.…

Company reckons setup is 'first of its kind in Europe' Scaleway is running a farm of Apple M1 Mac Minis in its repurposed fallout shelter beneath Paris, France.…

'We attempted to add 1,200 servers to our web tier' – but with a saturated network it did no good Slack says it has identified a scaling failure in its AWS Transit Gateways (TGWs) as the reason for the chat service's monumental outage on 4 January. As a result, Amazon's cloud computing arm said it is "reviewing the TGW scaling algorithms".…

Just a coincidence or a call-back to borks of Windows past? Bork!Bork!Bork! Even after a year of readers sending in photos taken of error screens they've seen out and about for The Reg's Bork column, the infamous Windows "Blue Screen of Death" has remained a mainstay. However, have you wondered why blue is the colour?…

Impeccable timing IT teams at Asos.com face absorbing massive stock and brand data in the company's £295m acquisition spree while at the same time finishing a global retail e-commerce system project.…

Group aims to represent 'the voice of the user' The Linkerd project, a lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes, has formed a steering committee as it competes for developer attention with Google-sponsored Istio as well as other projects.…

Fancy re-engineering code used to 'simulate weather and climate' for the next generations of supercomputers? UK weather forecasting agency the Met Office is tendering for delivery partners to help it build its data platform over the next four years in a framework deal that could be worth £30m.…

Mozilla meanwhile wants to continue compliance discussions with security certificate vendor When Google Chrome 90 arrives in April, visitors to websites that depend on TLS server authentication certificates from AC Camerfirma SA, a digital certificate authority based in Madrid, Spain, will find that those sites no longer present the secure lock icon.…

Advice to next vCEO: Execute the plan, faster Outgoing VMware CEO and incoming Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has revealed he was initially approached to take a seat on the chipmaker’s board.…

UK internet registry faces uphill battle to restore member trust Analysis The campaign to remove the CEO and non-elected board members of .uk internet registry operator Nominet may be over before the official petition is even filed.…

Lycra louts fiddled files to make them faster, but automation overtook their antics Virtual cycling company Zwift has banned two riders for fiddling with data they uploaded to the service, and which helped them to do better in races.…

NAS spinner writes custom firmware for Toshiba tin in enterprise gear Synology has introduced its first-ever list of validated disks and won’t allow other devices into its enterprise-class NAS devices. And in a colossal coincidence, half of the disks allowed into its devices – and the only ones larger than 4TB – are Synology’s very own HAT 5300 disks that it launched last week.…

And yes, that's what happened in Myanmar this week Something nasty happened to the internet in Myanmar at around 3am local time (2030 UTC Sunday). Traffic dipped markedly. And by sunup the reason for the situation became clear: the nation’s military had decided to reclaim power after a brief period of democracy, and presumably restricted internet access to make it harder to organize resistance.…

You, yes, thousands of you, take this $4m and get back to work Google will pay at least $3.8m to settle a dispute with Uncle Sam in which the ad giant was accused of paying woman engineers less than their male colleagues, and for discriminating against female and Asian candidates applying for technical positions.…

I am once again asking for your financial support, says Zuckerberg's empire Facebook has created a new screen in its iOS app that will urge people to allow it to continue stalking their online activities for targeted advertising.…

Lawyers required to hand in dead-tree copies. No, seriously The US court system has banned the electronic submission of legal documents in sensitive cases out of concern that Russian hackers have compromised the filing system.…

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.…