The Register

Over-promised, under-delivered, and plays like an alpha – try again later The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Merry Christmas? Maybe not if you found Cyberpunk 2077 in your stocking.…

A ghost-ship story for Christmas Something for the Weekend, Sir? Account suspended. Er, wot? [F5, spin spin] … Account suspended.…

Just a little jiggle 12BoC On the first day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.…

SpaceX man rubbishes rumoured tech in future Apple car Elon Musk says he once tried to sell Tesla to Apple, but Cupertino wouldn’t even agree to a meeting with CEO Tim Cook.…

Even fitness trackers ruled a big risk due to potential for record-matching identifying your family The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published a guide to the terrifying risks that businesses will expose themselves to if they use tech created in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) or engage in any business activity with the Middle Kingdom.…

Trump administration is behind the times: used old name for Chinese company Hutchison sold ages ago The CK Hutchison Group, the Hong-Kong-based conglomerate that operates the “3” mobile brand and maintains plenty of other telecoms investments, wants to clear its name after it appeared on a new list of companies the USA designates as military end users to which US companies cannot export.…

Those 35,000 connections that aren’t built? Celebrate the 11.86 million that were, says Minister Australia has declared its national broadband network (NBN) is “built and fully operational”, ending a saga that stretches back to the mid-2000s.…

Rule number one of sausage club: never ask what goes into the sausage Bork!Bork!Bork! ATMs are like sausages. Everyone likes them, but nobody wants to know what lurks inside. Come take a peak with another edition of The Register's look at computers behaving badly.…

Hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of consultancy work farmed out Deloitte, Atos, and Phoenix Software are among the 29 organisations who've been picked to provide a whopping £200m worth of IT consultancy services to the National Health Service in the north of England.…

Improving Windows' quality by making it not boot? A Windows 10 update rolled out by Microsoft contained a buggy version of chkdsk that damaged the file system on some PCs and made Windows fail to boot.…

Also: Rocket Lab rounds out a busy year, OneWeb returns to constellation work, NASA ploughs ahead with Orion In brief Dr Josef Aschbacher will succeed Jan Wörner as director general of the European Space Agency once Wörner's term ends on 30 June 2021.…

Compromised info include names, email addresses, DoBs, and National Insurance numbers Updated Workplace pension provider NOW: Pensions has emailed a number of UK customers to warn about a data leakage caused by contractor error.…

Plus: Govt has no targets at all for 5G deployment, claims telco insider The UK's cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has warned that the government risks missing its target to deliver gigabit-capable broadband to 85 per cent of the country by 2025, citing "considerable challenges" to the infrastructure rollout.…

Also: Santa drops a final Windows Insider release, new PowerShell, Skype Together Mode In brief As some Surface Hub 2 users continue to wait for Microsoft to deal with whatever has befallen the Windows update for their shiny wall decorations, the original Surface Hub can now pick up the new code via the Surface Hub Recovery Tool (SHRT).…

OK sunshine, but put it on-prem Few things are certain in computing, but the shift to the white and fluffy seems irrepressible. One prediction the European Centre for Midrange Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) seems confident in making, then, is that it needs to up its game in cloud computing.…

Doing both CentOS Stream and CentOS Linux would mean doing both poorly claims CentOS board member Red Hat's Karsten Wade, a Senior Community Architect and member of the CentOS board, has defended the decision to kill off CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, saying the two projects were "antithetical" and Stream is a satisfactory replacement in most cases.…

You can’t make this stuff up Google has proclaimed itself the “cleanest cloud in the industry” due to its exclusive use of renewable energy and announced a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia that will be resold by an arm of state-owned oil and gas company Saudi Aramco.…

Better capital returns than cash and all allowed under company rules Business intelligence software vendor MicroStrategy has revealed it’s sitting on a billion bucks worth of bitcoin.…

Ad giant’s promise to play nice with other exercise gadgets accepted in Brussels, deferred down under Australia’s picked a third fight with Google, this time telling it to jump higher if it wants to buy Fitbit.…

Dodges reports alleging Apple has put it on probation Taiwanese tech manufacturing concern Wistron has issued a stock market announcement in which it tries to hose down reports that Apple has put it on the naughty corner and shrug off the riot at its Indian iPhone factory.…

Come on in and enjoy our unprotected FTP server and unsigned configuration files Dell, which pitches its Wyse ThinOS as "the most secure thin client operating system," plans to publish an advisory on Monday for two security vulnerabilities that are as bad as they could possibly be.…

Legal challenges? Scrutiny? Ah, never mind those The NHS has signed a £23m two-year contract with Palantir without scrutiny, even though the controversial AI firm's engagement with UK the health service was originally supposed to be a temporary, emergency measure to help address the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Not sure how the last bit relates to COVID-19 but there ya go Over the weekend, Republican and Democrat lawmakers in the US reached consensus on a new $900bn coronavirus stimulus bill.…

Also: Would have been great if they'd chatted to an epidemiologist about Eat Out to Help Out project The UK government's insistence that it was simply "following the science" during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic was a big factor in the costly delay to the nation's first lockdown and postponed the introduction of face masks rules, according to an independent report.…

And SS7 telco hack rears its ugly head yet again In brief In an 8-K filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SolarWinds has given more details on exactly how it learned its servers were spewing out malware.…

Meanwhile, Apple-1 in original box signed by Woz goes for $736,862 Steve Jobs may no longer be with us but the cult of Apple persists as fanbois haemorrhage money to own pieces from the company's past.…

And Sparta Global then didn't bother turning up to the Employment Tribunal A company hailed as the UK's top tech employer tried to diddle a former trainee out of £2,000 in unlawfully withheld back pay – and a judge was startled when he discovered how Sparta Global treats its new hires.…

Chester healthcare provider needs some tech to help wrangle its temps The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is launching a £60m procurement in the hope that it can better manage staffing with the magic of software.…

We have to be smarter than the baddies and expect the unexpected Column One of the great threats to our civilization is space weather. Specifically, the Sun's proven ability to target the planet with a tremendous cosmic belch of radiation, knocking out satellites, power grids, and networks worldwide.…

Not quite what we meant by Halt and Catch Fire Who, Me? The weather outside might be frightful, but the fire is... unexpected. Kick off your week with a tale of fan-tastic idiocy courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have enough technical debt that it’s blown a Euro-privacy deadline Google has revealed the cause of its very unwelcome Gmail outage and on The Register’s reading of the situation it boils down to forgetting to take an obsolete version of software out of production.…

Improved cloud-hopping capability started as a mere Fling, make AWS an easier target VMware has added a new and simpler way to move virtual machines between private clouds, or private clouds and the public cloud.…

As India shouts out to world+dog: Anyone fancy building a fab here? China’s largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has told investors that new US sanctions announced late last week will be a long-term hassle but won’t impact its current operations.…

Microsoft’s analysis of hack suggests someone else had a crack at SolarWinds in 2019 when next-level 'DLL hell' followed likely developer pipeline compromise United States secretary of state Mike Pompeo has laid the blame for the SolarWinds hack on Russia, but his boss begs to differ.…

Plus: Video of drone swarm formation flying through a forest The US Air Force has successfully tested an autonomous AI system on one of its aging Lockheed U-2 (aka "Dragon Lady") reconnaissance aircraft.…

No one's AMPing up the love Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.…

WinTel alliance weakens further Microsoft is reportedly designing its own homegrown server and desktop-grade processors using CPU blueprints licensed from Arm.…

At the SMIC of a flitch, biggest China semi foundry's on the entity list The US government has added SMIC — China's largest domestic semiconductor foundry — to a Treasury Department entity list.…

Join Basware’s webinar to find out how you can start small and deploy best-of-breed modules for a quick ROI Promo Basware, with research and advisory firm Gartner, has looked at how businesses are rethinking their investment plans in light of the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic. They produced a report earlier this year that suggests businesses look to start small and deploy best-of-breed modules that deliver a speedy ROI.…

Who remembers that Army recruitment calamity? Not the salty sea dogs running the naval forces Weeks after the British Army renewed a contract that retained Capita at the heart of its recruitment services, the oft-criticised outsourcing biz has snaffled a £1bn deal to provide training services for the Royal Navy and Marines.…

Medical records, insurance claim docs, promotion process feedback... you name it, Probase bared it Exclusive A business app developer's unsecured Microsoft Azure blob left more than half a million confidential and sensitive documents belonging to its customers freely exposed to the public internet, The Register can reveal.…

DBMS for dummies Rockset, the company behind the indexing-obsessed database of the same name, has confirmed integration with Retool, a low-code platform with the aim of helping businesses build data-hungry internal applications.…

Can we do Trump Tower next? Off he went with a Trumpety-Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. It's all we've heard for the past four years, and if the pandemic has done an iota of good, it's to have wrested some of the news agenda off the United States' lunatic ex-president.…

Misleading processes and inadequate testing caused an inversion of steering, officer ESA has published its report into the loss of the Vega VV17 mission and said the screwup was due to an "inversion of electrical connections" during integration.…

It's all in Chinese if you fancy a gander Huawei has launched the first developer preview of its in-house smartphone operating system, HarmonyOS 2.0.…

Plus: EU agrees that security could be better and calls for bigger role for itself Some 5G networks are at risk of attack thanks to "long-standing vulnerabilities" in core protocols, according to infosec researchers at Positive Technologies.…

How to always be on the wrong side of tech fashion Something for the Weekend, Sir? "It will never catch on." The next thing you know, you’re staring at a badly drawn zob scrawled over Shakespeare's shimoneta*.…

Fur the love of god! On Call Welcome to the last On Call before Christmas, and a reminder that furry friends and technology do not always make good bed, or even floor, fellows.…

Now to build over 130,000 little 'scopes in nasty hot places. Also in data centers Amidst the paroxysms of coronavirus and Brexit, the United Kingdom on Wednesday found time to ratify the Convention that formally establishes the SKA Observatory (SKAO), paving the way for the giant radio telescope to be built.…

And that’s not entirely terrifying, because plenty of people have good credit but struggle to prove it Your web search history plus records of the browser and device you use to make those searches could enable financial institutions to calculate you a more accurate credit rating than traditional methods, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the global finance organisation says the ability to use those records might be a good thing rather than a privacy nightmare.…