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Gamma-ray burst technique could figure out how commonplace these tricksy customers are Scientists have shown that explosions from the early universe might help in solving black holes' middle sibling problem.…

Why, you ask? Why not? With enough love (and isopropyl alcohol), you can make even the oldest computer feel like it came straight from the factory. But when the restoration is done, vintage computing restorers are left with a difficult question: What next?…

Estimate of damaged fab equipment revised upwards by 54% Japanese automotive chipmaker Renesas has said the blaze at its factory in Japan earlier this month may be worse than expected, with 17 fabrication machines affected rather than the 11 originally indicated.…

Cops should be exempted from regulatory safeguards, says lawyer The UK's Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws is again advising the removal of legal safeguards around a controversial law that allows people to be jailed if they refuse police demands for forced decryption of their devices.…

Plus: Amazon delivery drivers forced to consent to being surveilled by AI In Brief The backlash Google faces over ousting two female co-lead researchers at its Ethical AI unit has continued as another of their peers turned away Mountain View's money.…

Freeeedommm! (for your data) Alex Salmond's Alba Party has got off to a rocky start after a coding error on its website appeared to expose the names of those signed up.…

Backdoor quickly spotted and reverted The main code repository for PHP, which powers nearly 80 per cent of the internet, was breached to add malicious code and is now being moved to GitHub as a precaution.…

So that's why they're not named alongside Lynch and Hussain Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise settled its potential lawsuit against Autonomy auditors Deloitte for $45m in 2016, The Register can reveal – shedding new light on how the $5bn lawsuit against former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and ex-CFO Sushovan Hussain came about.…

Plus: Did Google expose a Western hacking op? Who cares? You're safer In brief Apple has issued critical security patches for all supported phones, fondleslabs, and watches after being alerted to multiple possible intrusions by Google.…

It's still totally bananas, though Column One of the many joys of blockchain is that it generates even more heat online than a Chinese Bitcoin mine pumps into the atmosphere. This month's posterchild is the NFT, the Non-Fungible Token, which is seen by all the right-thinking fold as practically the fundamental particle of crypto-scam physics.…

Hmmm. Shared services... that always works out really well, right? The UK’s Ministry of Justice is ditching a £100m ERP procurement as it strives to get in step with a new Cabinet Office shared service strategy for enterprise applications.…

Quite a few have come back online, but it takes seven hours to restore each rack French cloud operator OVH has revealed how it is cleaning every server it thinks can be returned to service in its fire-affected Strasbourg data centres.…

The house always wins. Even in the Casino back office Who, Me? The weekend has waddled into the distance and Monday is with us once more. Join us for another episode in our Who, Me? series where a reader finds himself with a plum contract and no other bidders. What could go wrong? What indeed.…

Which is why you need to apply a little big data Webcast No matter what size your organisation is, when it comes to cybersecurity, your attack surface is bigger than ever.…

And not just the obvious ones about containers The ship that’s blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week has shifted.…

Led by proper CompSci boffin who wants to create a software development industry capable of earning billions Taiwanese officials have announced plans to create a new Ministry of Digital Development.…

Death of Flash means vAdmins still have work to do to stay alive even with relaxed new deadline VMware has extended support for vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.5 by a year, and says it needs to do so because customers are struggling to upgrade while their teams work from home/live in their offices.…

Driver and networking changes keep coming and io_uring is being noisy Linus Torvalds has expressed concern that work on 5.12 of the Linux kernel is moving at an uncomfortably slow pace.…

Astroboffins are so confident, this once dangerous near-Earth object has now been struck off official risk lists Humanity can breathe a sigh of relief. Asteroid 99942 Apophis, a 340-metre-wide space rock scientists initially believed to be one of the most hazardous near-Earth objects, will not hit our planet in 2068 as feared, after all.…

Lawyers hope to recover repair cost shelled out by insurer A defective iPad sparked a house fire this time last year, a lawsuit filed against Apple has claimed.…

Let's go round again, maybe we'll turn back the hands of time The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This edition we are once again sticking with the indie scene as it's genuinely churning out the most interesting stuff as 2021 coughs and splutters along. Two games this time, both based on a "genre" of sorts that is almost as old as gaming itself.…

Cloud giant manages to dismiss only part of lawsuit brought against it Salesforce should face trial after its software was allegedly used by Backpage.com to track sex traffickers, pimps, and their johns online, a judge has ruled.…

And Elon Musk must delete 2018 tweet threatening loss of benefits for unionizing Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.…

Will you visit me please, if I open my door... in cars? Autonomous driving sales are accelerating, claims analyst house Canalys, citing global shipments of 3.5 million vehicles with Level 2 self-driving capability during calendar Q4 2020.…

Yes, it's old, but the handset has been supported for much longer than the big dogs usually manage If it's not the battery, it's the software. Phones can have a brief shelf-life and the road from cutting edge to obsolete is short. Bucking that trend is Fairphone, which is about to start rolling out Android 9 to its Fairphone 2 model, first released more than five years ago.…

'Many contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF events, and we stand behind them' The chorus of disapproval over Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), rejoining the organisation has intensified as Linux giant Red Hat confirmed it was pulling funding.…

Wow, Redmond actually said soz! As Project Reunion - Microsoft's latest scheme to tempt developers back to Windows - lumbers closer to the finish line, the company has admitted it made a whoopsie in the deprecation of the Pivot control.…

A couple of execs have been let off the hook, though Oracle has failed to block a legal case that alleges it inflated cloud revenue with dubious sales practices, but has succeeded in reducing its scope.…

A little self-knowledge can take you a long way, says Nutanix Promo A year ago, tech teams, along with the rest of the world, had to react quickly to a new reality which few had done any meaningful preparation for.…

For organizations inclined to give, there's now some supporting infrastructure OpenCollective, an online funding and community platform founded in 2015, on Wednesday launched Funds for Open Source, a program to facilitate financial support for open source software projects.…

Ow. Thank you sir may I have another

For pity's sake, don't thank Jobs Two decades ago this week, the first version of Mac OS X hit shelves. We're not talking figuratively. The software was sold direct to consumers on disk, with a suggested retail price of $129 (roughly $190 today, adjusted for inflation).…

We've taken your comments on board but... In another sign that SAP is hellbent on migrating its customers to the cloud, the German ERP monster has scrapped community-based suggestions for updates to its on-prem in-memory database, HANA.…

The Register goes a-building once more – no glue required this time NASA's Perseverance is currently trundling around Mars. In the absence of an official Lego version, your hardworking vultures had a crack at a pair of recent designs for the nuclear-powered rover.…

I can indeed make things magically disappear if I shout loudly enough On Call A classic case of a user punching themselves in the face via the medium of technology awaits in this week's column dedicated to those brave professionals at the other end of the phone. Welcome to On Call.…

'Drug delivery would certainly be an intriguing application,' prof tells us Tiny so-called microswimmers coated with gold can be moved around in a liquid using a laser system controlled by a machine-learning system – and scientists hope the technique will be used in some way in the future to transport drugs inside humans.…

Crew Dragon briefly thought its power supply had problems. Also on the ISS: an Ethernet upgrade and missing wastewater NASA has suggested that radiation caused a computer malfunction on the International Space Station.…

Meanwhile, Outlook on Windows gets magical email completion powers Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and once again emitted tools to detect and filter out swearing and abuse on its Microsoft 365 cloud.…

Takes number one smartphone sales slot across swathes of Europe Xiaomi has warned semiconductor shortages will shape its product release plans for 2021.…

Law bill to give developers a choice to opt out vanishes this week A law bill proposed in Arizona that would allow app developers to avoid Apple and Google's mandatory in-app payment systems and associated commission fees has stalled – after state senators mysteriously skipped a vote on it.…

Three big telcos also boast 1.3 billion 4G subscriptions, and 400m broadband connections heading to gigabit speeds China’s big three telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom – have said they added more than 300 million 5G subscriptions in 2020, an expansion supported by the construction of more than million new 5G-enabled base transceiver stations (BTS).…

Dive into Huawei’s Industrial Digital Transformation Conference right here to find out Promo If you think digital transformation is just a buzzword, just consider how technology has both enabled and changed the way we work together and collaborate over the last year. As the world teeters on the brink of opening up again, now is a good time to take stock of where we’ve been and to think about what about happens next, whether it’s how we power AI and build it into our decision making, make the cloud more intelligent, or reduce the environmental impact of technology.…

WISPA it softly - seven million people rely on wireless connections America is big. Really big. And for those living in the most rural parts, finding solid broadband can be an uphill struggle, with many opting to ditch fixed-line connections for wireless equivalents.…

Ahead of Fedora 34 release, we talk to project leader Matthew Miller Interview Fedora, the community Linux distro used by Red Hat for early implementation of new technology, is not just for experimentation, project leader Matthew Miller tells us.…

Debian, Ubuntu ahead of the curve in patching at least – don't be late yourself Two high-severity vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL software library were disclosed on Thursday alongside the release of a patched version of the software, OpenSSL 1.1.1k.…

Seeks jury trial and share of profits from IBM's Hybrid Cloud platform Updated IBM's cloud business is the subject of a lawsuit brought by a former employee in the US, who alleges Big Blue lifted his technology and then fired him.…

Revamped desktop and shell based on GTK 4.0 The GNOME project has released version 40 of its Linux desktop, with a new design for finding and launching applications and updated core apps.…

Join our Regcast to learn the power of APIs Webcast The pace of digital evolution can appear overwhelming, all the more so when you still feel weighed down by legacy applications and data stores.…

Watchdog bites Uncle Sam and Lockheed Martin over $14bn-and-counting efforts Agile methodology has not succeeded in speeding up deliveries of onboard software for the F-35 fighter jet, a US government watchdog has warned in a new report.…

Double the bandwidth of DDR4, with 13% less power consumption Samsung has unveiled its first DDR5 DRAM based on a High-K/Metal Gate (HKMG) process, debuting with a 512GB module aimed at the high-performance computing and AI markets.…