The Register

Potentially 250,000 reasons UK nature conservation charity was targeted The Woodland Trust, a peaceful British charity that looks after trees, was struck by a “cyber attack” before Christmas.…

That's 20 pence a pop for the 2.4 million calls made, many to Telephone Preference Service users The UK’s data watchdog has issued £480,000 in financial penalties to four businesses that illegally made 2.4 million marketing calls to members of the public registered with the Telephone Preference Services (TPS).…

Canadian uni educator apparently was an excellent teacher Anyone with sufficient memory to recall their college days may remember suspecting some of the staff behind the lectern were barely breathing. One student in Canada however was rather surprised to learn a professor offering the gift of knowledge had, in fact, passed away two years earlier.…

Customer: 'It feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth' Cloudy DevOps company GitLab has removed its $4.00 user/month Bronze/Starter tier, giving users the choice between paying for Premium at $19.00 or downgrading to the free tier and losing some features.…

Also: First all-commercial crew named, Boeing readies Starliner again and NASA's ex-boss is off to private equity In Brief The UK will be making its first major industrial contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) with the Columbus Ka-band Terminal (ColKa), which will be fitted to the Columbus laboratory module during a spacewalk by flight engineers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover.…

EU puts 2.9bn euro ($3.5bn) behind European Battery Innovation project, expects companies to triple that The European Union has announced a €2.9bn ($3.5bn, £2.57bn) state aid program to build a full production chain for battery tech, from the extraction of raw materials to the design and manufacturing of battery cells, and their recycling and disposal.…

Spend more on resilence, get more resilience: who whould've thunk it? The 2021 State of Chaos Engineering report from Gremlin, based on a survey of 400 companies, has shown a correlation between high availability and frequent use of chaos engineering.…

Time to make some ch-ch-changes The University of Nottingham is on the lookout for a new HR and finance system in a deal which could be worth £35m, barely a year after updating its current provider's system.…

New security features in Chrome but can businesses do everything they need through the browser? Google has introduced BeyondCorp Enterprise, for secure access to browser-based applications, using new security features in the Chrome browser.…

I’d love to sort out that issue for you, Steve, but it’s Saturday and I'd rather not commit a crime Europe has had enough of the blurring between work and personal time – where your boss calls you in the evening or colleagues email at the weekend – and is mulling introducing legislation that would provide a “right to disconnect.”…

What a co-incidence this news has emerged in the same week as a five-yearly party congress! Intel has revealed that it pumped an extra US$475m into its facilities in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.…

Small-scale test involving biosensor and trained algorithms shows early promise Scientists say they have devised a way to screen for prostate cancer using a drop of urine, a sensor, and AI algorithms. And the test takes just twenty minutes, and is 99 per cent accurate, according to results from a small-scale test.…

Scorches Flash for the very last time, too The Mozilla Foundation has scorched a pair of monstrosities in the new version 85 of its Firefox browser.…

You probably remember it as Tucows.com, an essential source of shareware downloads for the early Web One of the web’s early software download bazaars, Tucows.com, has closed.…

Chip designer records bumper final quarter and full year, predicts more of the same to come, says supply flow will increase Sometimes, things just go right. AMD on Tuesday reported record full-year and fourth-quarter financial figures, all due to interest in its chips across the board, from microprocessors in PCs and servers to GPUs in games consoles, and all during a pandemic.…

Management masterclass as locked-up Lee Jae-Yong apologises for his absence Samsung’s vice chairman and de facto boss Lee Jae-Yong has reportedly sent staff motivational messages from inside prison.…

FY21 Q2 results buoyed by cloud demand, pandemic-driven IT focus Microsoft far exceeded expectations for its second-quarter fiscal 2021 financial results, posting $43.1bn in revenue, an increase of 17 per cent.…

How's your year going? A US Air Force intelligence officer who kidnapped her daughter to Mexico and attempted to defect to Russia with information labelled top secret has been jailed for 11 years.…

Messaging wunderkind said to be haven for extremists – and Silicon Valley gave it a pass, ex-ambassador complains Marc Ginsberg, a former US ambassador who oversees a non-profit called Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW), sued Alphabet's Google subsidiary on Monday for failing to remove the Telegram Messenger app from its Google Play store.…

Sudo, make me a heap overflow! Done, this system is now yours Security researchers from Qualys have identified a critical heap buffer overflow vulnerability in sudo that can be exploited by rogue users to take over the host system.…

Plus fixes for iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, XCode, iCloud for Windows – and a day after Google disclosed Nork op Apple today released software updates to patch vulnerabilities in iPhones and iPads that may have been exploited by miscreants to silently snoop on victims from afar.…

Shenanigans called on ASP.NET scaffolding tech A New York judge has denied Microsoft a new trial after the software giant attempted to overturn a 2020 judgement over its infringement of a database interface patent.…

Academics can apply for free access to historic Twitter data, so there is a use for the well of human misery after all Twitter is making public tweet data freely available to academic researchers in the hope the boffins can use it to make the world a better place.…

Meet MicroDroid, a base image for on-device VMs that might never see light of day Google is working on a stripped-down version of Android for virtualized environments, judging by source code commits made to the AOSP repository.…

Windows 10 Team Creators Update due for support axe in March - yes, two months from now Microsoft is set to resume rolling out the Windows 10 Team 2020 Update, although some administrators will have only a few short weeks before the previous version drops out of support.…

Two feet sideways and it could have been the pilot: report A drone crashed into the windscreen of a helicopter being flown at low altitude and injured a passenger aboard the aircraft.…

Press secretary won't say nay or yea on Entity List, but prez says 'we need to play a better defense' It has been six days since Joe Biden became president of the United States. Since then, he has wasted no time in reversing policy decisions made by his predecessor with a series of executive actions on LGBT rights, the environment, and race relations.…

O'Reilly's opinionated survey says low-code on the up and modern web dev is 'chilling' A report from an online learning platform presents a different take on programming language and devops trends, showing Python and Java ahead of the usual survey winner JavaScript.…

Money talks in Morrisons and Co-Op Shoppers keen to avoid that personal touch have been faced with multi-day card payment problems at UK grocery giants Morrisons and the Co-Op.…

Hyperion Gray founder relates 'holy f**k' moment when he realised A zero-day hunter has told The Register of the “holy f**k” moment when he realised he'd been targeted by a North Korean campaign aimed at stealing Western researchers' vulns.…

Multi-millionaire granted unconditional bail, case moving to Manchester Crown Court The multi-millionaire former boss of Britain’s largest privately owned hosting provider has appeared in court to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.…

From one of the world's largest software suppliers to... who? The clock is ticking for Barking and Dagenham Council as the East London authority plans to ditch Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 and go live with cloud-based software from MHR and Advanced by the end of the year.…

Price negotiable, but if you've got £8m to spare then the land speed record is up for grabs The Bloodhound Land Speed Record project is looking for a new owner after its chief exec, Ian Warhurst, confirmed the vehicle is up for sale.…

Brian Exelbierd, Red Hat Liaison and CentOS board member, gives the company perspective Interview Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.…

Lib Dem blows raspberry at Sir Humphrey-style non-answer The British government has denied being "complacent" over the Solarwinds hack as a fed-up peer of the realm urged a minister to "answer the question".…

Tune in next month to learn a raft of cloud-native storage knowledge Webcast Containers and Kubernetes are the future, giving you a way to move away from monolithic applications and their assorted drudgery, and make a break for the sunlit uplands of microservices, composability and continuous delivery. All in the cloud or clouds of your choice.…

Third time's a charm? Suebell number three filed by Euroconsumers members Apple may have to cough up €60m ($73m, £53m) after Altroconsumo, an Italian consumers rights group, filed a class-action lawsuit railing against Cupertino's practice of throttling the performance of its older smartphones.…

The cosmic ballet goes on Astronomers have discovered the first-known “sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system,” after a neural network flagged it up in data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).…

Security eggheads discover their PCs chatting with Kim Jong Un's hackers North Korea's hackers homed in on specific infosec researchers and infected their systems with a backdoor after luring them to a suspicious website, Google revealed on Monday.…

Turns out having coherent API documentation is useful for, well, everyone Google, Microsoft, and friends have pitched in about half a million bucks to create a project seemingly designed to prop up the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Web Docs.…

Meanwhile, staff get unexpected backing from football players Amazon has taken a leaf out of a certain former president's playbook, insisting that mail-in voting will result in a false result. This time, however, it’s a vote by Amazon’s Alabama warehouse staff on whether to unionize.…

The third-party advertising cookie: Barely tolerated anymore. We can rebuild it, internet titan insists, we have the technology. Analysis Google on Monday said it will make some of its Privacy Sandbox proposals available for testing with the release of Chrome 89 in March as part of its effort to rewire the technical infrastructure of online advertising.…

With a little $10bn package proposed to help them on their way President Biden is preparing to assemble a crack US government cybersecurity team, and has pledged $10bn in funding to shore up the defenses of Uncle Sam's computer networks.…

Miscreant fingered server that held docs related to credit applications down under The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has admitted one of its servers was accessed without sanction and may have been digitally pawed by miscreants.…

Upgrades? It's a bit of a Hotpoint The smartphone trade is beginning to resemble the market for white goods with punters increasingly likely to wait until their device is broken before seeking a replacement.…

Some things can wait, even if it is central to the 'economy's recovery' The UK's telecoms regulator has said it will delay the upcoming auction of the 700MHz and 3.6-3.8GHz radio bands as result of difficulties caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

Tune in here to find out how to smooth those tricky tenant-to-tenant migrations Webcast Setting yourself up on Microsoft 365 with a tenancy makes perfect business sense – until other business decisions mean you have to move that tenancy to another domain.…

Going low-level with C# and more The Win32 API is being opened up to more languages by Microsoft via the win32metadata project.…

Ain't nobody got time for that Twelve resellers have been awarded places on an NHS hardware contract for northern England in deals worth a total of £504m.…

Police pull out classic 'sophisticated cyber attack' line A 28-year-old has been arrested after allegedly carrying out what police have labelled a "sophisticated cyber attack" on a school.…