The Register

Thou shalt not devise thine own cursed metrics, we decree Reg Standards Bureau A bizarre American website has come up with a new way of measuring pressure by referring to the weight of elephants delivered through the area of a ballet shoe. Frankly we're baffled.…

Legal saga that began with dodgy prosecution ends in vindication Updated The Home Office cannot order Ofcom to ignore its legal duties even when a government minister wants to shut something down because of unspecified "national security" concerns, the Court of Appeal has said, ruling that ministers acted outside their legal powers when banning GSM gateways.…

Plus: Lots of dead space in the new Mac Mini The first teardowns of the MacBook Pro and Air reveal few surprises. iFixit got its hands on the inaugural Apple Silicon machines and tenderly disassembled them, with the results largely affirming what we learned during this month's keynote.…

Electron celebrates a parachute party and is successfully recovered Rocket Lab has joined SpaceX in a very exclusive club of orbital booster recovery-capable companies after it parachuted an Electron first stage back to Earth.…

COVID-19 could slow customer wins, warns analyst Cloud HR and finance application biz Workday is bouncing along happily amid a global pandemic as it outstripped market expectations and posted an 18 per cent annual increase in revenue for Q3 of its fiscal 2021.…

The last time we saw one of these was in February. Things haven't gone well since then Bork!Bork!Bork! Software licensing is the bane of IT pros. Some spend hours poring over byzantine rules and regulations while others throw in the towel and roll things themselves. Then there are those that simply ignore the pleas for a production licence.…

Tech hipsters? On our doorstep? The Silicon what? The National Cyber Security Centre picked its London HQ building not because it was the best or most cost-efficient location – but because the agency "prioritised image over cost", a Parliamentary committee has said.…

Doesn't mean it's terrible, you just have to manage your expectations Review With a price tag of £329, OnePlus's latest 5G phone is also its cheapest. From the polished design to the solid day-to-day performance, there's some things to rave about with the Nord N10. And yet we're not going to do that. Not yet.…

The system's playing up again. Infamy! Infamy! Something for the Weekend, Sir? No, I didn't get it wrong. I had a… er, computer glitch. There, everyone will believe that.…

In steps our hero: Have you tried turning it off and on again? On Call It's Friday! Come board the On Call bus to a time when Program Manager was king and Windows was a mere teenager.…

Combined Ministry of Defence and GCHQ team has worked since April to 'transform cyber capabilities' The United Kingdom has announced £16.5 billion ($22bn) of new defence spending, some of which has gone towards a newly revealed National Cyber Force and some earmarked to create a Space Command and agency dedicated to AI.…

Spear-phishers love the executive suite. Here’s how to stop them getting in Webcast If you’ve ever wondered what the CEO does all day, you’re not the only one. Cyber-attackers give the matter a lot of thought, which is why a well-crafted spear-phishing attack can be so hard to defend against.…

Driver and security guard tied up and 48 pallets stacked with Cupertino kit stolen Northamptonshire Police in the UK have warned locals to be on the lookout for suspiciously well-priced Apple products after a literal highway robbery saw 48 pallets loaded with Cupertino kit stolen.…

WebAssembly-powered sandbox promised to be safer than the notorious plugin The Internet Archive says it's found a way to preserve content created with Adobe's notoriously insecure Flash tool without risking user safety.…

And hints at new local data governance push Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on the nation's technology industry to start designing products for the world, and for youth to create new digital defences.…

ESXi, Cloud Foundation, and desktop hypervisor users should get patching VMware has revealed and repaired the flaws in its hypervisor discovered at China’s Tianfu Cup white hat hacking competition.…

Devs can make unauthorised changes, data integrity is a work in progress, security is not there yet ... and there's just nine months to go In 2016 Australia’s online census crashed and burned after legitimate attempts to complete the survey were mistaken for a DDOS attack, the routers funneling traffic failed and disaster recovery plans did likewise.…

Developer in Turkey accused of using 30,000 accounts to nab Instagram files Facebook on Thursday sued Ensar Sahinturk, a software developer based in Istanbul, Turkey, who is alleged to have built a network of sites that scrape data from Instagram to create Insta-clones.…

Also bans devs from scraping the site for facial recognition fodder YouTube has started rolling out adverts on all videos uploaded on its content-sharing platform, and won’t give creators any ad revenue until they get popular enough.…

The aging structure is too hazardous to repair, engineers say The Arecibo Observatory, America’s largest radio telescope, is to be blown up after the National Science Foundation decided recent damage has left it too dangerous to repair.…

Proposed legislation calls for research to detect synthetic shams online On Wednesday, proposed US legislation to fund defenses against realistic computer-generated media known as deepfakes was approved by the US Senate and the bill now awaits consideration in the US House of Representatives.…

Enhanced network security for AWS virtual private cloud – while Microsoft previews Azure Firewall Premium AWS has announced Network Firewall, a new service drawing on the open-source Suricata project.…

Also: Skyrora aims for 2023 for its XL, ISS gets ready for Nauka, and HALO moves forward In Brief British rocketeer Skyrora has been testing the third-stage engine for its Skyrora XL rocket with launch planned for 2023.…

What time is it? It’s Hammerspace live demo time Promo Using Kubernetes across on-prem and the cloud is a tantalizing idea, but it’s sometimes difficult to put your finger on exactly where data is supposed to live while you’re doing this, and how you should serve it up wherever it is needed.…

Trying to get that one weird app working on new Mac silicon? Anyone pondering how to get Intel-based Windows apps onto shiny new Apple M1 devices have been thrown a lifebelt by CodeWeavers.…

'There are no American vendors for the network equipment that fuels our wireless economy' The US House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Utilizing Strategic Allied Telecommunications Act of 2020, which earmarks $750m in grants to support the domestic development of OpenRAN.…

Creaky old law holds back global competitiveness, says group A majority of British infosec professionals worry about accidentally breaking the UK's antiquated Computer Misuse Act, according to an industry campaign group that hopes to reform the law.…

Time Lord tapped to introduce youngsters to hardware and coding The BBC has created a Doctor Who-themed miniature computer, powered by a SiFive RISC-V system-on-chip, to help teach children how to program.…

These things cost over $3m new Ah, kids. Who'd have them, right? Well, for many the biological imperative proves strong and this is why we can't have nice things. However, some people – like Dallas TX-based real estate billionaire Tim Gillean – can afford to have both nice things and children.…

Expandability traded for performance Apple last week set the cat among Intel's pigeons with the launch of its first PCs incorporating silicon designed in-house.…

Amnesty period ends, time to control those 'runaway processes' or pay up Container crew Docker has completed rolling out new pull limits for non-paying users, but claimed that only 1.5 per cent of users are affected.…

Ad biz is serious about making others disclose information collection Hot on the heels of Apple slapping privacy "nutrition labels" on app listing pages in its App Store, Google says it plans to require similar privacy disclosures from those offering Chrome extensions in its Chrome Web Store.…

One framework to rule them all? Or yet another one to add to the confusion? Microsoft has released Preview 3 of WinUI 3, its next-generation framework for Windows desktop applications.…

Yes, our current girth would welcome some age-appropriate Pokémon GO Updated UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey has awarded a contract to develop an augmented-reality game it hopes will bring some 21st-century tech to the great British outdoors.…

'Like any good family, you're going to have fights,' says dev relations bloke The team behind the NoSQL database DataStax, which is built on Apache Cassandra, has emitted a distribution designed specifically for Kubernetes and supports stateful workloads – and it's called K8ssandra.…

Posts sharp Q3 data centre growth and nice gaming numbers but has nothing to say about Arm Nvidia believes another wave of growth lies ahead of it as microservices create demand for faster data centre networks and therefore a need to offload security and networking chores from hard-pressed CPUs.…

DKIM 'makes us all more vulnerable to extortion, blackmail,' argues Green Matthew Green, associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US, wants Google and other email providers to make it possible for people to deny they've written old email messages.…

Second failure in last three missions doesn't inspire confidence The European Space Agency (ESA) and Arianspace have commissioned an inquiry into the failure of a Vega rocket that crashed on Tuesday, destroying a pair of Earth monitoring satellites built by French and Spanish researchers.…

Gather ‘round, Blockheads, so we can explain this thing called a ‘virtual machine’ and why it matters Blockheads are about to get a new appreciation of private clouds and application packaging, after VMware launched a Blockchain product.…

But Red Hat points out its code-base is so big that mastery of inclusivity will take time A new group called the “Inclusive Naming Initiative” has revealed its existence and mission “to help companies and projects remove all harmful and unclear language of any kind and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms.”…

Campaign even targeted branch offices inside China and sought secrets of automotive and engineering companies Broadcom’s security subsidiary Symantec has named a China-linked hacking gang known as “APT 10” and “Cicada” as the probable source of a year-long attack on Japanese interests around the world.…

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do when they run an algorithm for you? The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has banned commercial facial recognition software and launched a review after 25 officers were accused of using it unofficially to try to identify people.…

Great timing because we're all in a rush to travel these days Boeing 737 Max passenger jets are today closer to returning to service in the United States after America's aviation watchdog lifted a 20-month ban albeit with caveats attached.…

Arizona-led fight over battery-gate ends in settlement Apple has agreed to pay $113m to settle a lawsuit with multiple US states that said the tech giant unfairly hobbled the performance of millions of iPhones.…

Secure coding, identity management, patching, configuration controls, what madness is this? Every now and again the US Congress manages to do its job and yesterday was one of those days: the Senate passed a new IoT cybersecurity piece of legislation that the House also approved, and it will now move to the President’s desk.…

You'll have to run x64 version through the Rosetta emulation layer, or give it access to the Mac Bluetooth radio Updated Google's attempt to launch its Arm port of Chrome for Apple Silicon Macs got off to a rocky start after it was forced to pull the browser over stability concerns.…

Magecart variant has changed and you should be alert, warns RiskIQ A new offshoot of the Grelos card-skimming malware - a common Magecart variant - is doing the rounds, according to infosec biz RiskIQ.…

Cupertino's cut will shrink to 15% for small coding shacks from 1 January Apple has overhauled commissions charged to small developers that turn over up to $1m on paid apps and in-app purchases sold via the App Store as the spotlight shines on its policies amid ongoing litigation.…

What could go wrong with NASA's SLS rocket? The Aitken system is finding out Amid NASA's plans to put boots on the Moon by 2024, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is blowing its own trumpet that simulations in preparation for the Artemis mission have been carried out on its Aitken supercomputer.…

We got Brexit, they also got broadband The Northern Ireland Executive has awarded a £165m contract to local infrastructure provider Fibrus Networks to expand gigabit-capable, full-fibre broadband to more than 78,500 rural homes and businesses.…