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Moscow. 1978. It always feels like... somebody's watching me Who, Me? We return to the Cold War in today's Who, Me? Start your week with suspected sabotage, computer sleuthery, and a satisfying slug of Grand Marnier deep in the heart of 1970s Москва.…

Alibaba takes it on the chin, apologises, promises to do better (and maybe feels it got off lightly with fine representing four percent of revenue) Alibaba has humbly accepted that it broke China's antitrust laws and will pay a colossal fine.…

Object to ‘undue burden of compliance on volunteer communities’ India’s Software Freedom Law Center has assisted an open-source developer and advocate to challenge the nation’s new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code on grounds it imposes unfair burdens on developers.…

'Strategic Competition Act' calls for appointment of a new ambassador-at-large for tech America's plan to compete with China includes a call for the land of the free to dominate tech standards bodies, especially for 5G, and to appoint an ambassador level official to lead a new “Technology Partnership Office” that Washington will use to drive tech collaboration among like-minded nations.…

Internet rubberneckers and crisis-starved media left to ponder non-event Two days ago, the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) initiative warned of a possible collision on Friday between two orbiting objects, but it now appears they passed each other without incident.…

App's developers believe they can manage potential abuse Earlier this month, a startup called Socket, Inc., launched Wormhole, a web app for encrypting files and making them available to those who receive the URL-embedded encryption key, without exposing the files to the cloud-based intermediary handling the transfer.…

Someone hasn't heard of redundancy The US Justice Department on Friday announced the arrest of Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, for allegedly planning to blow up a single Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, which he thought would knock out around 70 per cent of the internet.…

Mammoth as a mobe, but serious as a game device Lenovo's latest tech features top-shelf components and new cooling technologies.…

Retail union accuses the tech giant of illegally swaying votes, files complaint Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, voted against unionization, according to results announced on Friday.…

Questions raised about procurement process but, gosh, they badly need a replacement HR system The US State of Iowa has approved $17m in its 2022 budget to replace an HR system dating back to the 1980s with Workday software.…

As the constellation stands anyway SpaceX's Starlink has been described as the solution to dismal rural broadband. Like any project linked to Elon Musk, the satellite internet constellation is surrounded by a thick cloud of hype. But is it justified?…

Things to look forward to on Monday morn: Our Who, Me? column and 1st flight of Ingenuity Updated The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is set to take its first flight after engineers spun its blades up to 50rpm in preparation.…

Who says everything below the line is a cesspit of useless filth? Nearly a third of Britons use the name of their pet or a family member as a password, the National Cyber Security Centre has said as it advised folk to adopt what looks very much like a Register forum user's suggestion for secure password generation.…

From org design to developing operations, consulting-outsourcing giant carries the can Consultancy and outsourcing firm KPMG has been awarded an £18m contract to, for all intents and purposes, create the entire back-end operations, processes and technology system for the recently formed Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council.…

Up to 18.4 million petabytes... which should be useful to someone Microsoft has released a 64-bit preview of its OneDrive sync client for Windows, citing "large files" and "a lot of files" as a driver for the update.…

Queen's hubby left more than a passing impression on the UK tech world Obit Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has died at the age of 99. The Queen's husband died at Windsor Castle this morning.…

Gender bias found in employment adverts despite antisocial network giant's past promises Two years after Facebook settled five lawsuits claiming that its employment, housing, and credit ads illegally discriminate, researchers with the University of Southern California have found that the company still serves job ads unfairly, based on gender.…

Very 2021 to have AI bots fight in simulated networks for our entertainment (and science) Microsoft has open-sourced software that pits machine-learning-powered network intruders against automated defenders inside virtual networks.…

New laws needed to cut off incentive to crooks, argues Marcus Willett Increasing numbers of senior ex-GCHQ people have called for laws preventing businesses using cyber insurance to buy off ransomware attackers – with the money merely perpetuating the criminals' business model.…

All inventions should be demonstrated by a puppet doing a Tommy Cooper impression Something for the Weekend, Sir? If the future was a song, it would be a mashup.…

Duplo exercise provides vital insight into flawed human heuristic Scientists working on the psychology of problem solving may have hit upon why things always seem to get more complicated.…

Slated for inclusion in version 5.13, due about three months from now The Asahi Linux project, an effort to bring the Linux kernel to Apple’s M1 silicon, has merged its work and is on track to have it accepted in version 5.13 of the kernel.…

Before smartphones and LCD displays there were... green lights and red lights On Call There was a time before phones went wireless (and before Apple made sure we all carried a spare charge cable.) Take a trip back to those halcyon days with another entry in the pages of On Call.…

For compute and SD-WAN only, with plenty of details not yet in place Cisco has taken steps towards IT-as-a-service with a new “Plus” offering launched last week at Cisco Live.…

Safer than eyeballs or fingerprints, apparently India’s National Health Authority has commenced a pilot of facial recognition software as a means of identifying people as they queue in the nation's COVID-19 vaccine centres.…

It’s not The Register asking. The question comes from the official Australian government vaccine advice service (and the answer is ‘No’) Australia’s Department of Health has included the question “Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?” on its vaccine advice page.…

Government hopes to cash in on free trade agreement with B2B e-commerce Vietnam has launched its own e-commerce platform to help in-country businesses access European Union markets.…

Public Suffix List halts submissions from those seeking reprieve from iGiant's rules Marketers frantic to preserve their ad tracking capabilities in advance of Apple's iOS 14.5 privacy restrictions have overwhelmed a volunteer-maintained database used to oversee domain names and improve web security.…

Organizations added to Entity list The US government's Department of Commerce has added seven Chinese supercomputing companies to its Entity list, meaning American businesses need a special licence to work with them.…

'It’s an exciting prospect, but too early to say so definitively' professor tells us Physicists are this week giddy with excitement after a decade-long experiment looking at the inner-workings of a muon, a type of particle similar to the electron, hints that there may be another fundamental particle or force waiting to be discovered.…

Weight blunder led to wrong thrust used on takeoff, says UK watchdog A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.…

First Party Sets 'harmful to the web in its current form' A Google proposal which enables a web browser to treat a group of domains as one for privacy and security reasons has been opposed by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).…

Eskom disputes results of Big Red audit South African electric utility Eskom is set to appeal against a court decision that refused to force Oracle to support software used by the firm while a licensing and payment dispute is settled.…

Teases new ‘Hyperlaunch’ tech that will allow booting of whole VM fleets The Xen project has released another upgrade to its open source hypervisor.…

'Creepy' videos liken CMS giant to 'absent, drunken father' – but its market share is only rising Hosting company Wix is apparently running a bizarre campaign in an attempt to win over WordPress customers, causing WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to accuse Wix of "dirty tricks."…

You cannot kill what does not die Microsoft Paint has followed its long-lived chum Notepad into the howling wilderness of the Microsoft Store.…

'Allowing everyone to use their favourite IDE just makes a lot of sense' Gitpod, which provides remote environments for testing and debugging code, has shifted to Visual Studio Code from Eclipse Theia and is sponsoring a new event called DevX Conf, focused on the developer experience.…

Expensive bike, earpods can now be tracked from inside the walled garden An upgrade to Apple's Find My app has added support for devices from third-party manufacturers including gadget-tracking startup Chipolo, Belkin, and niche Dutch bike maker VanMoof.…

ValueLicensing also calls for action to 'restore and maintain competition and choice in the market' Updated Microsoft is being sued by UK reseller ValueLicensing for £270m in damages over claims of restrictive contractual practices and abuse of dominance.…

Euro cops take $1.65bn of blow off the streets after poring over messages The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn (£1.2bn, $1.65bn) from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers' messages.…

Company acted fairly and reasonably, rules judge Two men who quit software development firm Geeks Ltd failed to prove the company unlawfully withheld more than £2,000 from each of them to claw back its training costs, a tribunal has ruled.…

Though framework agreement 'cannot guarantee any business' The UK government has awarded 25 suppliers places on a framework deal for software design and implementation which could be worth up to £1.5bn.…

Reports of Cloud team's demise may be premature Chinese giant Huawei has conducted an internal re-organisation and The Register understands one result is its cloud and business computing groups have come together under new leadership.…

Take the heat out of your firewall deployment Webcast If you’ve got an application which faces the web, no one would dispute that you should probably have a web application firewall sitting in front of it.…

Terms and conditions 'not transparent or fair', High Court judge says The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that bookmaker Betfred must pay a Lincolnshire blackjack player £1.7m ($2.3m) in winnings that the betting site withheld because of a supposed software glitch.…

Wait... what? Strap in for the story of an Australian rare earth miner, partly owned by China, and worries about uranium dust The future of a China-backed rare-earth mining operation in southern Greenland has become uncertain following an election in which one of the winning party's key policies was opposition to an Australian mining company.…

Working to improve 'cyberwalls', but for now swift recovery is main strategy Video The highest-ranked officer in India’s armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation’s defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor.…

And ponders whether to let itself be bought by private equiteer CVC for $20bn Toshiba has received an offer to go private.…

Let's see what the regulators say Shareholders in AMD and Xilinx on Wednesday approved their massive proposed merger.…

The trick is to get buddies to decline low-paying jobs and check old code DoorDash drivers are encouraging one another to turn down food delivery jobs below a minimum threshold of $7 in an attempt to game the company’s in-app payment algorithm.…