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Criminal operators emerged from woodwork just as COVID hit the West The Nefilim ransomware gang might not be the best known or most prolific online extortion crew but their penchant for attacking small numbers of $1bn+ turnover firms is paying off, according to latest research.…

From July you'll be able to swipe credit card for kit at 'Experience Centers' Microsoft is set to reopen some of its stores for sales to the general public.…

Impressive working computer from the corpse of a rarity Video Faced with dwindling sales to education customers in the late 1990s, Apple introduced the eMate 300.…

Raspberry Pi-powered prototype proves 95% accurate, 100% private, claim boffins Researchers at the University of Michigan have proposed a way to have your privacy cake and eat your home automation too. They've found a means of using a voice-activated smart speaker system without it having to listen to everything you say – and no, it's not "pressing a button."…

FPGA-driven prototypes yet to prove the company's bold performance and power-draw claims Tachyum, which has been promising a "universal processor" dubbed Prodigy for the past three years, said it was one step closer to delivering on that pledge with the development of a motherboard for its FPGA emulator that allows customers to test a complete Prodigy system.…

Mandiant investigation says crims gained access through legacy VPN The boss of Colonial Pipeline has appeared before a Senate Committee to explain the events which led to US East Coast fuel supplies running dry last month and some $5m being handed over in ransom.…

Malicious crew targets ME and Asia but also tries evading Chinese AV suites ESET has published details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) crew that appears to have deployed recent supply chain attack methods against targets including "electronics manufacturers," although it didn't specify which.…

OK, we see where this is going Google claims not only has it made an AI that's faster and as good as if not better than humans at designing chips, the web giant is using it to design chips for faster and better AI.…

Regulator airs country's muddy laundry - including fact it rarely unplugs The UK is a nation of online shoppers who – when not spending a whopping £113bn over the past 12 months – spent more time online than any other grown-ups across Europe last year.…

We want to give your property better internets for free, pls respond The UK's Department of Fun – aka Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – has opened a consultation on legislation designed to improve access to gigabit broadband in apartment blocks.…

Plus: UAVs that can smell your poop – both for benign purposes, mind Researchers at Fraunhofer FKIE have unveiled a system that teaches drones to hunt down humans by listening to their screams.…

Reports through Chipzilla's bug bounty scheme growing, but still in the minority Intel has pushed out a raft of security advisories for June, bringing its total discovered "potential vulnerabilities" for the year to date to 132, only a quarter of which were reported by external contributors and the company's bug bounty programme.…

The history of computing is all change, all the time. Yet silicon-slingers let the chips fail where they may Column Unless you've been hiding under a (non-silicate) rock, you know there's a massive global shortage of semiconductors. Automobile production lines have stalled. New computers are launched late. Gamers can't get their hands on the latest bits of kit. And we're told that this won't clear up until 2023. If we're lucky.…

Delayed Euro 2020 championship will be won by the Czech Republic, and England will drop out in semi-finals (sounds legit) The Czech Republic footie team is set to be crowned champions next month, beating fellow underdogs Denmark 3-2 in the Euros in what pundits claim will prove to be a "thrilling final".…

Unimpressed beak orders Transport for London to let them onto Southwark roof Transport for London tried to block engineers and surveyors from EE and Three carrying out a survey for a new mobile phone mast by telling a judge they “might insert a USB stick into a computer” or “upload some virus”.…

A day before THAT delay, Matt Hancock told MPs that 'citizens' own the data he'd instructed the health department to take by default Comment Against a strong field, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has come out as a winner in the prize for stomach-churning political double-speak while addressing NHS Digital's shameless grab for patient data held by GP surgeries in England.…

Never. Test. In. Production. Who, Me? A Who, Me? moment last week introduced a much-needed laugh into the lives of at least a few end users, after a bit of testing in production had all too familiar consequences.…

Supermarkets presumably working on a solution to this 'problem' right now There's no digital equivalent to the love-it-or-hate-it impulse aisle of the supermarket, with shoppers spending noticeably less on sweets, cookies, and other tasty treats online than in the real world.…

Promises it won't happen again, expresses remorse … all the usual stuff that clouds (and Zuck) say after they stumble around making messes Fastly has explained how it managed to black-hole big chunks of the internet yesterday: a customer triggered a bug.…

Nú með þýðingarmöguleika Vivaldi has released version 4.0 of its eponymous browser, adding translation capabilities and dragging the long-awaited mail and calendar functionality out of tech preview.…

Malware was too loose to have come from a Western nation, according to Sentinel Labs An advanced persistent threat that Russia found inside government systems was too crude to have been the work of a Western nation, says security researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade of Sentinel Labs, before suggesting the malware came from a Chinese entity.…

Minister moved from celebrating new facility to complaining about it in a handful of hours India’s new tax e-filing portal went live Monday night, and was down less than 24 hours later, leading union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to jump onto Twitter with some pointed questions for the site's developer, Indian services giant Infosys.…

Innovation and Competition Act aims to keep America ahead of China and passes with unusual bipartisan support The United States Senate has passed the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, a sweeping stimulus program that seeks to secure supply chains and stimulate industry — especially high-technology industries — to ensure America remains ahead of China.…

Yup, just a Republican wanting a private business to be subjected to more government regulation Dave Yost, Ohio's top government legal eagle, has filed a lawsuit that asks the courts to declare Google Search a public utility and the company as a whole a common carrier — ie: more subject to government regulation.…

Admits 'potential losses' may result, says they won’t be significant South Korean chip maker SK Hynix has admitted some of its DRAM components included defects, though it says accounts of the issue are overblown.…

Adobe, Intel, SAP, Android emit vulnerability fixes, too Patch Tuesday Microsoft's traditional Patch Tuesday saw the software giant release fixes for 50 flaws, and a reminder to apply updates as soon as possible because six of them are being exploited in the wild by miscreants.…

From hidden master keys to pineapples stuffed with Bolivian marching powder — this story has it all The FBI has revealed how it managed to hoodwink the criminal underworld with its secretly backdoored AN0M encrypted chat app, leading to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of 32 tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, more than $148M, and even cocaine-filled pineapples.…

The problem started when those ridiculous users ... oh, hang on. It started in the IT department Feature The concept of "shadow IT" is a familiar one. One of my favourite descriptions of it comes from security vendor Forcepoint, which says shadow IT is "the use of information technology systems, devices, software, applications, and services without explicit IT department approval."…

Departure from Apple's usual iron-fist approach to iPhone software With the launch of iOS 15, Apple will give users the option to upgrade to the latest software or stick with iOS 14 while continuing to receive crucial security updates.…

Software porting efforts aim to make sure Android, Linux, Firefox, and Chrome work well ahead of time The Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is working to build 2,000 laptops using the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture by the end of next year, as the nation looks to reduce its reliance on foreign technology giants like Arm and Intel.…

We're gonna need a bigger rolled-up newspaper Threats to humanity's dominance on Earth are oft-featured here at The Register, with aspiring usurpers ranging from dancing robots to peckish rats.…

Also announces buttload of new products at Cloud Summit event Alibaba proclaimed at its Cloud Summit 2021 that it is ploughing $1bn into "Project AsiaForward", an initiative focused on expansion and development in Southeast Asia.…

The highs, the lows, the acquisitions, the resignations, and more Encryption and verification package Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has celebrated a troubled 30 years of securing secrets and giving cypherpunks an excuse to meet in person, with original developer and security specialist Phil Zimmermann toasting a world where encryption is common but, he warns, still under threat.…

But it seems the iPhone 6 and SE will be looked after until the end of time With the launch of MacOS Monterey, Apple plans to ditch support for a slew of machines, including all MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops released prior to 2015.…

Using techniques Microsoft had previously considered 'not a vulnerability' A reverse engineer has discovered what is claimed to be "the first known malware targeting Windows containers to compromise cloud environments," a sentence to put any system administrator on edge.…

Don't call it growth Global smartphone shipments recovered in the first quarter of this year following a dismal 2020 for the mobile hardware industry.…

What's that? Letting people know just weeks before was a bad idea? The UK government has conducted an embarrassing climbdown by agreeing to delay the implementation of NHS Digital's controversial grab of GP patient data by two months.…

Cloud data outfit realises SQL-centric approach won’t attract the developers it needs to grow Snowflake Summit Cloudy data-wrangling outfit Snowflake has opened itself up to Java and Scala developers.…

If your IoT kit employs RabbitMQ, EMQ X or VerneMQ, it's time to get patching Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Centre (CyRC) has warned of easily triggered denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities in three popular open-source Internet of Things message brokers: RabbitMQ, EMQ X, and VerneMQ.…

Chocolate Factory competition-squashing tactics receive a firm 'Non' from Paris Google is to change the way it operates its advertising business, after the internet giant was slapped with a €220m (£189m) fine by French competition regulators for abusing its dominant position.…

Residents near Western Digital, Seagate HQs deafened by popping of Champagne corks The launch of the cryptocurrency Chia has caused demand for hard disk drives in the European market to blow up, according to research firm Context.…

'Potential impact to performance' drops some of the world's biggest websites offline Updated A not-inconsiderable chunk of the World Wide Web, including news sites, social networks, developer sites, and even the UK government's primary portal, has been knocked offline by an apparent outage at edge cloud specialist Fastly – though your indefatigable The Register remains aloft.…

From pictures of shattered glass to patterns on doors and much more A US designer has sued for damages of around $12m amid allegations that Japanese games developer Capcom breached copyright by using her photos in titles including the massively popular Resident Evil.…

'When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, it's not reliable anymore' Version 8.0 of the popular Windows editor Notepad++ has arrived with new features including Dark Mode, a native build for ARM64, and optional new toolbar icons using the Fluent UI.…

When I grow up, I want to be an Identity and Access Management specialist – said no one ever Feature A search on LinkedIn's UK job site just now (1 June 2021) returned 5,265 roles for a network manager; 2,204 for a system administrator; 4,964 for a web developer; and 10,776 for a business analyst. None of these are a particular surprise – they're popular, sought-after careers.…

Linux and macOS guests will be doable, and iGiant even appears to have added an XKCD Easter Egg Desktop virtualization is not the kind of thing that gets a mention in Apple’s big product announcements, and today's effort that revealed macOS 12 — code-named Monterey — was no exception. But sharp-eyed observers have spotted some changes that will make Macs, including those powered by Apple’s own Arm-compatible silicon, more adept at running guest operating systems.…

Tell us what’s holding you back from the cloud or pushing you forward Reader survey It’s one thing being born in the cloud. It can be quite another contemplating moving an established infrastructure and suite of applications off premises.…

It’s now a cloud-native, low-code product that’s growing and offers a viable Exchange alternative, apparently HCL has launched version 12 of Domino, the groupware server it inherited from IBM, which in turn acquired it along with Lotus Software in 1995.…

Hybrid Instagram/Amazon app Xiaohongshu may just have been making mirthful TGIF post Popular Chinese shopping app Xiaohongshu has seen its software banished from app stores and its social media accounts crimped, a few hours after issuing a controversial post on June 4th that asked, “Tell me loudly, what is the date today?”…

For now you have to cope with 100Gb/s and 400Gb/s over single-mode fiber, and brace for 100Gb/s over 80kms The Ethernet Alliance has wrapped up its 2021 Technology Exploration Forum and revealed it’s heading off in pursuit of speeds beyond 400Gb/s.…