The Register

Plus: Second ransomware operation in the sights of Uncle Sam – and the insurance industry under fire for fueling extortionware rise In brief Cisco's anti-spam service SpamCop failed to renew spamcop.net over weekend, causing it to lapse, which resulted in countless messages being falsely labeled and rejected as spam around the world.…

Smartphone-slinger wants off America's naughty list, now and forever Chinese consumer tech company Xiaomi has sued the United States for designating it a "Communist Chinese military company" and banning transactions with the firm.…

Chairs, desks, cup-holders, and a weird wearable cushion will reach the west in late 2021 If you’ve ever felt that IKEA lacks a sense of humour, here’s proof: the company’s new collection of gaming furniture and accessories produced in collaboration with ASUS is not called “FRÄG”.…

Seems to be full steam ahead on blockchain for uses other than funny money India has signalled it intends to create a digital version of its currency.…

And the day after news of those talks emerged, Google said it never threatened to pull search from Australia Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Australia’s leaders last week to discuss the nation’s News Media Bargaining Code, a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay when they link to news content.…

Ex-BBC chairman, former RIPE NCC boss lined up to run .UK registry as caretakers if campaign successful The UK internet industry has called for the ousting of the CEO and most of the board of Nominet – the organization that operates the .uk registry – accusing them of lining their own pockets at the expense of charitable causes and millions of ordinary Brits.…

Alas, it looks as though, for now, us humans are still alone in the pitch-black depths of space The notion of phosphine-producing microbes floating in Venus’s atmosphere is looking more and more shaky, as scientists believe the detection of the gas may have been skewed by the antenna of a telescope used to discover it.…

Promising protocol much easier to fingerprint than HTTPS Google's QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol, announced in 2013 as a way to make the web faster, waited seven years before being implemented in the ad giant's Chrome browser. But it still arrived before privacy could get there.…

Recently released cryptography code easily undone by trivial buffer overflow Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy on Thursday reported a severe flaw in Libgcrypt 1.9.0, an update to the widely used cryptographic library that was released ten days ago.…

Swedish comms giant cashes in where Huawei is on retreat Swedish telecoms equipment manufacturer Ericsson will be raising a glass of aquavit to this week's Q4 2020 figures. Network sales were up 11 per cent unadjusted, driven by the ongoing rollout of 5G connectivity, as well as the ongoing malaise of rival Huawei.…

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should Motorola and Lenovo are experimenting with wireless charging tech that works remotely, casting power to phones and wearables from across the room.…

Open that little box and bingo, clear text of the whole PDF Exclusive The European Commission's war of words against pharma company AstraZeneca over COVID-19 virus vaccines has descended into farce after Brussels accidentally published an unredacted version of a disputed supply contract.…

A fresh preview as the management cards receive a shuffle Microsoft has disappointed hair-shirted developers with the arrival of a settings screen preview for its Windows Terminal product, potentially – though not necessarily – heralding the end of JSON tinkering to make things just so.…

Yes, survival games can tell great stories too The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. It was tricky deciding what to look at for this edition, what with the doozy of Cyberpunk 2077 in our tail lights. As for the New Year, we've been left with the usual dearth of releases so it was time to check out something that's been in development for a while and is almost ready for 1.0.…

At the end of the day, biz customers will buy the product they want Analysis Christian Klein cut a lonely figure in front of mysteriously floating cameras in his computer-generated studio. Yet, presenting a vision of enterprise resource planning arguably as idealised as the CGI mountains looming over his shoulder, SAP's CEO pressed on.…

A sad-faced engineer leads it round the back of the barn. A single shot rings out With a certain inevitability, Microsoft has wielded the axe on the preview of Azure Service Fabric Mesh, before the technology even had a chance to trouble General Availability.…

Shuttered celebrations of computing heritage need your support The UK's halls of computing geekery continue to be shut thanks to the ongoing pandemic. However, virtual tours and talks are on offer for those seeking a diversion from streaming platform bingeing.…

World+dog continues to swallow this tablet, though Eleven years ago this week, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to a bemused world. We say bemused, because at the time, nobody really knew what it was.…

How do you license open-source hardware? Existing software licences will not do, says CERN The OSI (Open Source Intitiative) has approved version 2 of CERN's Open Hardware License (OHL), meaning it conforms to its Open Source Definition and respects the ideals and ethos of the movement.…

Windows puts on a surprise show at UK retailer Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows Mobile may be dead, but Microsoft's earlier attempt at a lightweight operating system lives on - albeit in unexpected form - thanks to the self-scanners so beloved by some of the UK's supermarkets.…

Welcome to another edition of Just A Minute, live from Scunthorpe Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Right, let's start the meeting. Oh, could someone take the minutes?" And my heart sinks. They'll see me and ask me to do it. They always do.…

IT's Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood, Robin Hoooooood On Call What's the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Welcome to On Call and an account from nearly 40 years ago when one hard pressed engineer was dealing with a ham-fisted response to the policies of the UK's Thatcher government.…

None of that nuclear-magnetic-resonance garbage, ha Microsoft says it has made progress in its effort to develop CMOS-based chips for quantum computing.…

Posts look to have evaporated along with employee privileges Oracle has done something a little odd: exhuming ancient blog posts about Solaris and SPARC by former Sun luminaries that have moved on to other things.…

India gets special attention with new rules for apps that tie loyalty and prize draws to payments Google has added 15 more countries to its list of nations in which it will allow gambling apps that allow users to play with real money.…

Top telcos still designated as stooges, but they've perked up a bit The US Department of the Treasury has announced a revision to the ban on trading in companies suspected of having ties to China’s military.…

Job ads call for silicon designers, ASIC engineers, display wonks and folks to build data centre and home kit Google has picked Taiwan as the location of its first hardware engineering facility outside the USA.…

GPU giant says it'll play ball soon Nvidia has been accused of cheating in a big-data performance benchmark, and thus unfairly coming out on top, by the very umpires of the test.…

He steals from the rich, and gives to the... wait, which side is the poor side now? The populist online investor uprising to punish Wall Street traders by propping up shorted stocks hit a wall on Thursday when retail brokerage firm Robinhood announced that customers could, for now, sell but not buy eight turbulent securities.…

Got a few (thousand) dollars to spare? Unless the venerable language has finally breathed its last – which is more than a little unlikely – the Perl.com domain was hijacked yesterday.…

Macs sell like hot cakes too thanks to M1 chip, everything up by double digits Apple is making bank in a pandemic – as millennials might say. The company last night reported doubles all round as demand for its latest blower ballooned, and customers locked indoors due to coronavirus countermeasures lapped up Macs and iPads.…

'So far the jury is still out... are you willing to help with this?' Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.…

Canalys stats also show Samsung knocked to 2nd in a shrinking market It is official: Huawei is no longer a major smartphone maker after it fell out of the top five line-up of the biggest sellers in Q4. As for Apple? It is again at the summit, at least according to Canalys.…

'We decided to not use any UI frameworks ... we want to be fully in control of our own destiny' Visual Studio Code only succeeded because a failed online editor was pivoted to become a desktop product, according to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Erich Gamma.…

'It's all about people, empathy at mass scale,' says Big McD IT helpdesk vendor ServiceNow has beat its own forecasts for calendar Q4 revenue and posted 2020 growth of 31 per cent.…

Bork bork acka-lacka bork bork Bork!Bork!Bork! While New Zealand might have cut itself off from much of the outside world in a physical sense, we were surprised to find its isolation extends to the occasional internet connection.…

Freshest flagship delivers, and looks good doing it Review The Samsung Galaxy S21 is not a particularly ambitious phone. There’s nothing novel or provocative about it. It’s a flagship, yes. But it’s also a fairly conservative one, faithfully sticking to the paths trodden by its predecessors.…

My god, it's full of tabs Browser maker Vivaldi is tackling the issue of tab overload by adding a second row of the things via two-level tab stacks.…

SaaS pick 'n' mix might appeal more than standard processes for S/4HANA upgrade, though SAP has launched a lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud service for customers' on-premises ERP systems, taking accountability for performance and promising lower costs.…

Chocolate Factory insists it's working on its own info usage labels, too Google on Wednesday warned iOS developers who use Google ad technology that they may see less revenue as Apple implements its privacy clampdown.…

Fibre-to-the-desk is the driver because it allows longer connections and fewer physical frames Cisco reckons it has invented "a whole new category of switches" called "micro-switches".…

Devotes earnings announcement to trashing Cupertino over privacy as both post mega-profits Facebook has allowed misinformation to circulate, pandered to bigots, and generally turned a blind eye to all manner of horrible behaviour that has spilled out into real-world consequences including attempted genocide. But now The Social Network™ has found something so scary it has decided the world needs to know that Bad Things Are About To Happen.…

But China's Xiaomi again tops booming smartphone market which just hit record of 100m sales in six months India appears to have permanently banned the 59 Chinese apps it first barred from local use in June 2020.…

GameStop shares soaring to $350 from $5 last year?! WTF is going on? Analysis So it seems 2021 is going to be the year that internet culture finally reaches the deepest and most protected pockets of society.…

Censorship-busting tool updated, advice on how to use it to evade blockades published China's recent upgrades to its content-blocking Great Firewall can be circumvented, according to censorship fighters from the Great Firewall Report.…

Scientists will focus on modelling hurricanes, wildfires, solar storms with Milan Epycs and Nv A100s HPE will upgrade the US National Center for Atmospheric Research’s supercomputer using AMD and Nvidia’s latest CPUs and GPUs, creating a machine roughly three times as powerful as its current Intel-based beast.…

Seattle duo go back to court demanding promised royalties AT&T has been sued by two Seattle entrepreneurs who accused the telecoms giant of stealing their technology and launching a rip-off version to avoid paying massive royalty fees.…

Last year's slipstream technique revived to pierce vulnerable firewalls – browsers patched to thwart bypass attempts Video Ben Seri and Gregory Vishnepolsky, threat researchers at Armis, have found a way to expand upon the NAT Slipstream attack disclosed last year by Samy Kamkar, CSO of Openpath Security.…

Vulnerabilities in build systems, secrets in source code: developer environments are an attack target Developer site Stack Overflow has published details of a breach dating back to May 2019, finding evidence that an intruder in its systems made extensive use of Stack Overflow itself to determine how to make the next move.…

It was a first mover for graph DBs, but cloud is full of rivals Graph database swashbuckler Neo4j has joined a throng of NoSQL vendors in selling its technology core as a fully managed cloud database.…