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We'll never know but he was spared the whiteboard of shame Who, Me? It's March again and we're still (mostly) indoors. Let us take your mind off the long, dark teatime of the soul (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) with another reader confession in The Register's Who, Me? column.…

Merged Potevio and CETC do drones, 5G, satnav, lots of military software, and have been told to accelerate R&D Late last Wednesday evening a regulatory announcement appeared on the Shanghai Stock Exchange that may well have signaled a major change in China’s approach to developing key technologies.…

If you want the lowdown on managed detection and response, clock this Promo One thing you can say about cyber-attackers. They don’t keep office hours. They – or their code – will chip away at your systems, all day, every day, looking for a way in before quietly exploiting it for as long as possible.…

Plus: Critical Cisco flaw, NSA advice, and someone hacked Gab? In Brief The murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which is said to be have been aided by digital surveillance, was ordered by the head of the Saudi Arabian government, US intelligence has publicly asserted.…

Tech already used to verify university degrees, will soon be compulsory at the border Singapore has proposed a blockchain-based document verification system developed by its GovTech agency to provide proof of recent negative COVID-19 tests, and hopes it becomes used to offer proof of vaccination status around the world.…

Biased words can't be ‘Grandfathered’ in – that’s also a term on vendor's new list of words best avoided Analytics vendor Splunk has followed up on its 2020 decision to stop using the terms “master” and “slave” with a new guide to writing “unbiased documentation”.…

Devs told if they really, really, need more time for merges they can have it Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel.…

CARBON SPIDER and SPRITE SPIDER give you extra reasons to patch last week’s critical vCenter bug Two strains of ransomware have recently been updated to target VMware’s ESXi hypervisor and encrypt virtual machine files, says security vendor CrowdStrike.…

Never mind the glue and soldered RAM Apple, on its French website, is now publishing repairability scores for its notoriously difficult to repair products, in accordance with a Gallic environmental law enacted a year ago.…

Keeping family members out of the country deemed harmful President Biden has issued a proclamation revoking a series of Trump administration proclamations that halted the issuance of green cards for immigrants. The rule change, however, left in place limitations on temporary work visas for skilled foreign workers.…

Or about five days of annual operating profit ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has offered to pay less than $100m to settle multiple privacy class-action lawsuits in the US.…

Not literally and all in the name of education Ever idly wonder if a marmot could bring down an ant-eater? Would a fox be foxed by a badger? Could a badger out-badger a fox?…

Uh huh... it's a good time to be in enterprise security analytics Tired of keeping up with security alerts from your system? Worried that your Security Operations Centre (SOC) is getting deluged in low-level reporting? Fear not: Imperva has produced an aggregator aggregation product that sits over the top of all your other alert-generating security software.…

Still, it's probably best to stick with eye-wateringly expensive official peripherals In addition to various minor bug fixes, Apple's 11.2.2 update to macOS Big Sur addresses an issue where newer MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models could be damaged by dodgy third-party USB-C accessories.…

Also: Old age a bigger risk for Branson's passengers as Virgin Galactic slips again What do you buy the richest man in the world? A ticket to ride on Elon Musk's rocket, judging by the latest delay announced by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.…

Though company insists it is 'not a car manufacturer' With its carrier and mobile businesses in turmoil, and no sign of a reprieve from crushing US sanctions, China's Huawei is reportedly lurching into the growing electric vehicle market.…

Yes, we will never mention the death of the PC again, at least until next time Dell Technologies spent tens billions of dollars to diversify its kit bag beyond computers, yet it was the humble notebook that broke its sales records in 2020.…

Now, this might shock you, but it's something we like to call 'fun' (if you have friends) The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Loath as I am to feature another early access survival-exploration-crafting adventure for the second month in a row, February's sleeper smash-hit, Valheim, has forced my hand. So onwards, now, to the 10th realm of Norse mythology. Yeah, there was an extra one, didn't you hear?…

Yeah, you did great, but you should have done better Salesforce shares slid yesterday despite posting revenues of $5.82bn for Q4 of its fiscal '21, up 20 per cent on the same period last year.…

Worldwide vacancies if you're looking for work – and free ads if you want workers Job Alert We're running free job ads to try and keep techies in gainful employment during these testing times.…

Specialist databases will still be necessary, analyst says EDB, a prominant backer of the PostgreSQL open-source database, expects to focus on graph, JSON, and time-series data in the upcoming autumn release. Analysts, however, are sceptical about its ability to optimise for different data models ahead of built for purpose databases.…

Plus: Full ruling in $5bn High Court case expected by end of Q1 Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants a High Court judge to formally consider a damning report which found that Deloitte auditors committed misconduct when they signed off British software firm Autonomy's annual accounts.…

Lidar-equipped spherical probes or solar panel-powered cranes, perhaps? The European Space Agency is investigating sending an army of autonomous rovers into underground caves and lava tubes on the Moon.…

Engineers write off GC abuse because Spectre broke everything anyway In early November, a developer contributing to Google's open-source Chromium project reported a problem with Oilpan, the garbage collector for the browser's Blink rendering engine: it can be used to break a memory defense known as address space layout randomization (ASLR).…

Well, Brexit meant Brexit One of the consequences of Brexit came back to bite a Seagate customer in the UK who was forced to pay import VAT and brokerage fees on a replacement drive still under warranty that was this month shipped from the Netherlands.…

A bitter pill best swallowed with eight gallons of swimming pool water Something for the Weekend, Sir? Those files I promised you? Oh, I'm sorry, they accidentally got taken out with the recycling. A gull swooped down and snatched them out of my hands. They were lost in a tsunami. No, a forest fire. An earthquake. Actually, to tell the truth, my mum put them in the washing machine.…

A matte-black terminal? Neat! Where can I get one? On Call Dark Mode is all the rage nowadays, but screens of the blackest black go back further than you might think, as we'll discover in another episode of On Call.…

And this machine will be used to *check notes* study climate change. Study it or cause it? Computer scientists attempting to build computational replicas of Earth to tackle climate change and environmental disasters reckon they will need a 20MW supercomputer with 20,000 GPUs to run a full-scale simulation.…

Is The Social Network™ finally declaring a stance in democracy and politics In the latest instalment of Myanmar vs. the internet, Myanmar's military junta has been banned from both Facebook and Instagram. Businesses affiliated with military personnel were also banned.…

Containerised Tanzu portfolio starts to make serious sales progress VMware has closed its 2021 financial year with $11.8bn of annual revenue, $3.3bn of it earned in Q4.…

And reckons subscription acceleration means flat revenue is nothing to worry about Nutanix’s new CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has teased new bundles that make it easier to buy and implement more of the company’s products at once.…

That's what's on offer in new 'supervised' YouTube mode for tweens and teens YouTube has introduced features that allow for "supervision" of tweens and teenagers, but it only works if kids use their parent or guardian’s Google account and only offers pre-programmed filters.…

Announced rules also require fast takedowns of content, online profile verification, and more After a three-year review process, India has announced strict regulations for instant chat services, social network operators, and video-streaming companies.…

Approved open-source projects to get no-cost subscriptions (if they haven't already got one) Red Hat today further extended its olive branch to open-source groups with another freebie of sorts: this time, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Open Source Infrastructure.…

Remedies to gatekeepers range from nothing to an antitrust breakup US antitrust legislators held a hearing on Thursday to consider how to limit the power of technology gatekeepers like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook in order to promote competition.…

Redmond taking a leaf out of the enterprise app makers' book Microsoft has followed enterprise application vendors' lead and put together a bunched of pre-packaged software to be hosted in the cloud for specific vertical industries.…

Third-party code in security-critical apps is obviously suboptimal, but company says you can opt out A security researcher has recommended against using the LastPass password manager Android app after noting seven embedded trackers. The software's maker says users can opt out if they want.…

More expensive, less flexible, but easier and safer to use Google has recognised that users struggle to configure Kubernetes correctly and introduced a new Autopilot service in an attempt to simplify deployment and management.…

It seems people are OK with paying more for faster internet, though Comparison site Compare Fibre reckons consumer choice will halve and prices will "as much as double" in areas where Openreach is to stop selling copper services.…

You again! That uninvited guest that just keeps turning up... Microsoft has updated TypeScript to version 4.2 and a flag has been added to answer the age-old question: "just why is that file there?"…

Deposits $1bn+ real world greenbacks into digital dosh, may borrow to buy more MicroStrategy, a company once well known for making enterprise software, has extended its investment in Bitcoin, buying 19,452 units of the cryptocurrency for around $1.026bn in cash at an average price of about $52,765 per coin, including fees and expenses.…

AT&T and T-Mobile also have to write enormous cheques before March 24 Radio spectrum doesn’t come cheap. Just ask America's communications regulator, the FCC, which just announced the winning bidders in its long-awaited auction of C-band spectrum, which hauled in a cool $81bn*.…

Plus: User passwords were stored in plain text after all The UK's National Cyber Security Centre is now helping IoT gadget firm FootfallCam Ltd secure product lines following the recent digital burglary of its nursery webcam operation.…

Experimental blocking of sites that load resources from four big companies makes the web unusable A new extension for Google Chrome has made explicit how most popular sites on the internet load resources from one or more of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.…

EFF bod slams effort 'to silence a critic' as $50k+ raised to challenge lawsuit Analysis A copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against a university staffer by Proctorio – a maker of software that monitors students during online exams – was this week dubbed "meritless" by an EFF analyst.…

Which? rides to the rescue of consumers and... er... Apple and Samsung? The UK Consumer's Association has kicked off a claim against chipmaker Qualcomm, alleging that its licensing activities have resulted in UK 4G smartphone owners being overcharged.…

Public outcry over access – all because £450m agency doesn't have school-grade web skills The Government Digital Service (GDS) has mounted its assault on the last standalone UK.gov department website – triggering two ministerial interventions to halt the damage amid a public outcry over access to justice.…

What it’s like managing code running at 200 KPH? Find out here Promo Managing corporate software is a significant challenge in today’s marketplace. Consider what it’s like keeping 250,000 lines of code up-to-speed when the system it’s running on literally races at 200 KPH and generates a stream of data spanning 700 different parameters.…

Contract was clear and trying to backdate changes was naughty, rules Australian court HP’s Australia tentacle has lost an appeal in which it sought to deny a top salesperson a colossal commission.…

Boffins find those developing apps for the chatty AI assistant can bypass security measures Computer security bods based in Germany and the US have analyzed the security measures protecting Amazon's Alexa voice assistant ecosystem and found them wanting.…