The Register

A confession from ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer. Also: WPA fun in the Registry The product activation inflicted on Windows by Microsoft has few fans, but one of its creators stepped up over the weekend to explain and defend the maligned technology.…

Azure wins on Ultra Disk storage but it's expensive, says Cockroach Labs Distributed SQL database biz Cockroach Labs has analysed public cloud performance and concluded that Google Cloud Platform wins on throughput, although AWS is ahead on CPU performance and network latency.…

Surprisingly fixable... with a bulging toolbox AirPods are as close as you can get to a swearword in the repair world, known for being almost impossible to service thanks to their densely packed circuitry and closed design. Mercifully, that isn't the case when it comes to Apple's hugely expensive AirPods Max headphones.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

These things could be more common than first thought Astronomers have discovered the two largest-known radio galaxies to date. At a whopping 62 times the size of our own Milky Way, they are believed to be the largest single objects yet found in the universe.…

Expect it in handsets from Motorola, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 870, a 5G-capable system-on-chip designed for high-ish-end Android smartphones coming out at the end by March.…

Get your updates when you can for gear from scores of manufacturers Seven vulnerabilities have been found in a popular DNS caching proxy and DHCP server known as dnsmasq, raising the possibility of widespread online attacks on networking devices.…

Nation's IT ministry wants what Brussels is having The Indian government has sent a fierce letter to Facebook over its decision to update the privacy rules around its WhatsApp chat service, and asked the antisocial media giant to put a halt to the plans.…

Microsoft-owned code silo admits 'significant errors of judgment and procedure' GitHub has apologized for what it called “significant errors of judgment and procedure” in the firing of a Jewish employee for warning colleagues of neo-Nazis at the Capitol during its ransacking by pro-Trump rioters this month.…

Manifest v3 plus JavaScript timer throttling, vuln fixes, FTP killed off, etc Google on Tuesday announced the stable channel release of Chrome 88, which includes support for an extension platform revision known as Manifest v3.…

Instructions for spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems Any organizations that used the backdoored SolarWinds network-monitoring software should take another look at their logs for signs of intrusion in light of new guidance and tooling.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

'If this scenario occurred during a flight, the rocket would have continued to fly' After the weekend's shorter-than-hoped-for test firing of the core stage of NASA's monstrous Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, engineers have confirmed the hardware remains in "excellent condition" and blamed "test parameters that were intentionally conservative."…

No longer a corpo behemoth holdout Citrix has confirmed plans to buy Wrike, a project management and team-based collaboration tool, for $2.25bn.…

Peer-to-peer protocol promises availability and resilience, but awaits proof of speed and resource thrift Brave Software on Tuesday plans to release an update of its Brave browser that implements support for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol for storing and sharing data over a distributed network.…

Stop sniggering at the back! Today's lesson: Actually getting Teams working – aye, Scotland? How many poor underlings are trapped in Redmond's locker? Over 200 million, apparently. With BettFest 2021 firing up the virtual halls, Microsoft is trumpeting the number of devices it has in the world of education along with the penetration of its Teams platform.…

Redmond wants to improve key database library, but then why not just use Dapper? Microsoft's next major version of its Entity Framework (EF) database library for .NET will have long-term support and attempt to match rival Dapper for performance – an attempt, said senior program manager Jeremy Likness, that "will likely not be fully achieved."…

Key doc hasn't been updated since 2018, warn politicos and trade union The UK's Information Commissioner's Office needs to update its Code of Employment Practices to tackle workplace spying by bosses, the Prospect trade union and the Labour Party have said.…

Glue you! Well not anymore. Early signs are positive ahead of launch, but it's not without issues Preliminary teardowns suggest the Samsung Galaxy S21 is easier to fix than its predecessors, sidestepping some of the more dubious design decisions that previously frustrated third-party repair shops.…

BT-owned infrastructure firm workers in dispute over pay and terms It’s hard to pull solidarity out of the bag when everyone’s having a tough January but that’s what the General Secretary for the Communication Workers Union has asked the wider org to do for a small band of Openreach project engineers poised to vote on strike action.…

DMs at dawn Porting a workable Linux to Apple's new silicon is a modern-day Holy Grail for some. Sadly, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for those undertaking the quest.…

Back when AI meant William Daniels behind the dashboard Fans of 1980s memorabilia, rejoice! You too can wow your neighbours with your very own KITT, as owned by Knight Rider actor David Hasselhoff.…

Another unfortunate UAV episode for Sussex cops Updated A police drone operator managed to switch his craft off mid-flight, dropping it squarely into a pond while attempting to search for a missing person.…

Nice work if you can get it BT has been awarded a £20m contract extension, without competition, on a project that has already ballooned in value by 138 per cent.…

Burglary took place 3 months before biz discovered unauthorised entry Updated Anyvan, the European online marketplace that lets users buy delivery, transport or removal services from a network of providers, has confirmed it was the victim of a digital burglary that involved the theft of customers' personal data.…

Open source users warn adoption of copyleft licence could make use of Elasticsearch, Kibana a business risk Elastic, whose products include Elasticsearch and Kibana, has adopted a new licence called SSPL (Server Side Public License), as used by MongoDB. The aim is "to restrict cloud service providers from offering our software as a service," but others warn this could make the products risky to use unless a paid-for licence is adopted.…

Which is exactly what you should do Scotland's environmental watchdog has confirmed it is dealing with an "ongoing ransomware attack" likely masterminded by international "serious and organised" criminals during the last week of 2020.…

This is why we test The Moon moved a little further from NASA over the weekend as the first firing of the Space Launch System's core stage came to an abrupt halt after only 67.2 seconds.…

And them good ol' boys revokin' sanction to buy, singin', 'Soon will come the day that we fly' As parting gifts go, this one ranks pretty low. With less than three days until the inauguration of Joe Biden, the Trump Administration has reportedly revoked several licences that would allow Huawei to buy US-made tech, and plans to deny over 150 pending requests.…

Tune in and we'll take you from benchmarking to insight Webcast You keep hearing that DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery are the key to overhauling your software development organisation.…

Just 16% of cloud spending in Q3 went to local tech services shops, says analyst European cloud giants are finding themselves teetering on the brink of relevancy in their own backyards as they fail to ward off encroachment by US rivals, or so data from Synergy Research Group (SRG) has indicated.…

No documentation yet, but big ambitions for UI components tailored for AWS services Amazon Web Services has released AWS UI, which the cloud services biz describes as "the first step in a larger process of creating a new open source design system."…

Only been out 2 years Seoul's High Court has sentenced Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-Yong to 30 months behind bars for bribery, concealment of criminal proceeds, and embezzlement.…

That technical issue the department said it had fixed? It didn't exist Estimates detailing the loss of criminal evidence records by the UK Home Office and the police show the figure leaping from 150,000 to 400,000.…

Also: Departures from Redmond, going big with Surface Hub, and celebrating third place In brief Build 21292 of Windows 10 arrived for Dev Channel Windows Insiders last week and while there was little of interest, the team was delighted to note that it had continued to work on the x64 emulation in the Arm edition of the operating system.…

Zoom is great for status update meetings, says big cheese, but as for inspiring a workforce... To some of us, the work-from-home revolution provides a welcome opportunity to spend time with family members, even though working and studying shoulder-to-shoulder might not be a frictionless process.…

Plus: Google trains 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model, popular software used for job screenings scraps facial-recognition feature In brief Just days before President Trump is due to leave office, the White House created its National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which will sit under the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

Pat Gelsinger returning to Chipzilla as CEO is another extraordinary stroke of luck for the company Column Intel has been many things. It has been a struggling startup, surfing the sudden successes and near-death experiences of 1970s Silicon Valley. It's been a relentless powerhouse, ruthlessly exploiting its dominance as personal computing rode Moore's Law to commercial and social revolution. Now it's in danger of seeing its supremacy crumble as rivals grab markets and mindshare with better manufacturing and marketing as Moore's Law itself turns to sand.…

Oh good, you fixed it. Now, if you could just put your head on that plate... Who, Me? Beware the perils of being too helpful as we kick the working week off with a Who, Me? starring both DNS and the need of management to put someone's – anyone's – head on a spike.…

Plus: Watch out for NTFS-corrupting folder, Mimecast hack, and more In brief Last week ended with news that the venerable infosec mailing list Bugtraq was being shutdown at the end of the month.…

Not a machine-generated headline, we swear Facebook and its Irish subsidiary on Thursday announced the filing of a lawsuit in Portugal against two people for allegedly scraping Facebook profile data and other browser info using malicious Chrome extensions.…

Idiot faces up to a year in the cooler after FBI tracks him down from SD card found in prang wreckage A man in California faces up to a year behind bars and a fine for crashing his drone into a police helicopter, forcing an emergency landing.…

While the Touch Bar is to be banished Renowned Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo reckons the iGiant is bringing back its beloved MagSafe charging standard with the next generation of MacBook Pro machines.…

We'll drink to that The compatibility layer for Windows applications, Wine, has celebrated the start of 2021 in the traditional manner – with a substantial update.…

Parting shot by Trump – but 'bi-partisan' push against China will continue, says analyst With five days left before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, the Trump administration has delivered a parting blow to China's tech industry by designating Xiaomi as a "Communist Chinese military company" and placing it on a financial ban list.…

A blue day on the Red Planet Hot on the heels of a mission extension comes news that scientists have now given up on attempts to persuade the NASA InSight lander's "mole" to burrow more than a few centimetres beneath the Martian surface.…

Install base explodes following WhatsApp 'privacy' update, Musk endorsement Updated Signal is experiencing a partial outage as tens of millions of netizens flood the free secure messaging service.…

Commercial involvement in open source is essential, says CMS boss Interview Content management system Drupal is 20 years old, prompting its founder to talk to about its evolving role, why it shifted from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release, and concerns about JavaScript bloat causing issues for those with poor connectivity.…

Epic by name, epic (lawsuit) by nature Epic Games intends to file a competition lawsuit against Google in the UK as part of the ongoing Fortnite-kicked-off-platforms saga, according to documents lodged with the Competition Appeal Tribunal.…

Uphill battle shifting business applications to the cloud laid bare SAP today reported preliminary results for 2020, showing the German enterprise software vendor serving up flat revenue and slightly improving profits, along with a worryingly notable drop in licence sales.…