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It's time to crack open the public sector pork barrel.... like it was ever closes It's pork barrel cracking time again, like it was ever really closed - the UK government has waved in a 30-strong gang of vendors to compete for slices of a potential £1.2bn framework for back office software.…

The Reg once again shoves its talons into bags of spiky bricks for latest website-breaking set Despite scratched silver blocks and a woeful VIP programme, The Register has built Lego's new Space Shuttle Discovery - and we never want to see another silver sticker again.…

Threatens to release designs and data if not paid. But dangles 2005-vintage ThinkPad as proof it's serious An entity claiming to represent ransomware gang REvil says it has accessed "large quantities of confidential drawings and gigabytes of personal data" from Quanta Computer Incorporated, a Taiwanese manufacturer that builds laptops and other gadgets for the likes of Apple, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco, and plenty of other top-tier tech companies.…

Make your move before the cyber-crims make theirs, says Sysdig Promo The cloud has transformed how you manage your infrastructure and software development, enabling continuous integration and deployment, while allowing you to keep your operations running, well, continuously.…

Tells CVC and other would-be buyers to get serious and read Japanese regulations, or go home Japanese megacorp Toshiba has rebuffed an acquisition attempt by private equity outfit CVC.…

CompSci trio describe theoretical Denial-of-Wallet attack If you want to stick it to a startup that relies on serverless infrastructure, you may be able to inflict $40,000 in financial damage every month with a modest 1,000-node botnet.…

Send more money to help us protect our space toys, military tells Congress US military leaders have claimed China has a satellite with a grappling arm, and said its existence highlights the needs for increased funding to match the Middle Kingdom and Russia's expanding orbital arsenals.…

Programme members were asked to make noise ahead of Amazon Web Services conference Microsoft has revoked the Most Valuable Professional status of an Australian developer who publicly complained that the programme was effectively asking members to spread marketing material.…

200 other companies also targeted, but no data lost Japan has accused a member of the Chinese Communist Party of conducting cyber-attacks on its space agency and 200 other local entities.…

Great Leap Forward sees broadband speeds surge, 99 per cent of villages hooked up, all for $6/month China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had a busy Monday as it declared the country's intention to be both a manufacturing and a network superpower, and claimed progress towards the latter goal is illustrated with some seemingly odd statistics.…

Judge, JUDI, and executioner? The US Army is experimenting with machine-learning software that could be used to give tanks, trucks, and robots the ability to follow verbal orders from soldiers and communicate in natural language on the battlefield.…

Is there a back button for reality? Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a bunch of colorful iThings on Tuesday, including iMac desktop computers in rainbow shades, its most powerful iPad yet, and – gasp – a purple iPhone.…

Crucial flaw won't be fixed until next month Dozens of defense companies, government agencies, and financial organizations in America and abroad appear to have been compromised by China via vulnerabilities in their Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances – including a zero-day flaw that won't be patched until next month.…

All supported releases will now support ECMAScript modules - but progress on moving away from CommonJS is slow Node.js 16 has been released with prebuilt Apple Silicon binaries and version 9.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine.…

Blundering mouthpiece sent arrogant line to journalist by accident Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people’s personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be “normalised.”…

Where's the PowerShell command to ban all meetings forever? Straight from Microsoft's Department of Stating the Bleeding Obvious come tweaks to its online productivity software based on research that found back-to-back meeting cause stress.…

Sulphorous stench was self-immolating Apple product An Apple iPhone XR caught fire aboard a British Airways Boeing 787 mid-flight after a clumsy passenger dropped it down the side of her seat.…

Campaign launched to alert public sector staff that not everyone on the internet is nice Ten thousand Britons have been targeted on LinkedIn by recruiters for the Chinese and Russian intelligence services, according to an awareness campaign launched by domestic spy agency MI5 this morning.…

Here we go again - you don't want them in your backyard, amirite? The UK government has submitted major reforms to the legislation surrounding how mobile masts are deployed in the English countryside, with the aim of improving overall coverage and expediting the transition to 5G.…

A brief nap can do wonders when you're under the weather Microsoft engineers scrambled to improve the health of Azure on Tuesday after the cloud service started looking a bit green around the gills.…

Redmond is in a pickle with loyal Windows devs on one side and cloud-based Linuxy future on the other Microsoft has announced 64-bit Visual Studio, but in its rush towards modern development some developers using older Windows or Azure technology are feeling left behind.…

Strategic imperative Cloud & Cognitive Solutions grows 0.8%, good old hardware spares execs' blushes As a metaphor for its current financial plight, IBM's cloud platform was wobbling this moring for customers in cities across the world.…

Cisco Talos discovers flaws in air fryer, connected chip cooker firm fails to fix Bad news for lockdown slimmers who've ignored advice about not needing to connect every friggin' appliance in their home to the internet: Talos researchers have sniffed out security flaws allowing attackers to hijack your air fryer.…

Why can't business users just stick to the script? The received wisdom in ERP is that businesses design their processes in the system for everyone to follow. Except they don't.…

Church of England first left the European bloc in the 16th century If you need something else to direct your Brexit-induced rage towards, look no further than the big guy upstairs and a subset of people who believe in Him.…

Countless people signed away the right to have their trauma acknowledged, and that can’t stand Column A few years back, I sat in astonishment as a young and very promising scientist explained that her colleagues kept lists of the people she’d want to avoid working for, because they had been identified - privately - as sexual harassers.…

History in the making for the tiny open-source-powered whizzing chopper Video Ingenuity has successfully performed a solar-powered autonomous flight on Mars, NASA confirmed on Monday.…

Taskforce and two forums to consider Central Bank Digital Currency The Bank of England and HM Treasury have formed a Taskforce to "coordinate the exploration of a potential UK Central Bank Digital Currency" (CBDC).…

Speculation of shift to EVs swirls as governor who once said $3bn subsidy plan was a con now thinks it 'works for taxpayers' Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Foxconn board member Dr Jay Lee have announced a new agreement to revive and remodel the notorious high-tech plant that attracted billions in incentives but appears not to have delivered promised economic benefits.…

It's always BGP (when it’s not DNS). Absent route filtering didn't help either Vodafone Idea, the Indian limb of the mega-carrier, has been fingered as the source of what's been described as a "major BGP hijack" by Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS), an organisation that "provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats."…

Complete with availability zones, coming real soon now after it turns local kids onto the cloud Microsoft has announced a new Azure region in Malaysia.…

Social network for web outcasts can be downloaded again from next week for iThings, we're told Parler is set to return to Apple's App Store next week after the social network agreed to moderate hate speech on its platform.…

Trendy exercise gear 'poses serious risks to children', says CPSC America's Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has urged owners of the hi-tech Peloton Tread+ treadmill to use caution after a child was killed by one of the machines last month.…

Lessons learned and mission accomplished, apparently The US government's response groups for dealing with recent SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities have reached the end of the road.…

Model S took corner at high speed, left road, and smashed into a tree Updated Authorities are investigating a Tesla crash in Texas in which two men were killed this weekend. The authorities are probing whether the vehicle was operating in its Autopilot mode with neither occupant in control.…

Let's opt every WordPress site out of FLoC. Nice idea, but security update? Really? A proposal by a WordPress core contributor to treat Google's FLoC ad tech as a security vulnerability, and therefore backport an automatic opt-out to previous WordPress versions, shows the depth of community opposition to the technology.…

Ex-BT boss is familiar with the football lifestyle – being paid millions for doing very little Gavin Patterson, former boss of BT, is in the frame to lead a proposed European football league at the centre of a storm of criticism.…

Change the record, nobody's fooled by this now UK Home Secretary Priti Patel will badmouth Facebook's use of end-to-end encryption on Monday evening as she links the security technology with paedophilia, terrorism, organised crime, and so on.…

Looking for the way ahead? Follow the Yellowbrick Summit Promo The cloud is changing, and how you think about data needs to change too.…

Share price immediately dips for GPU-maker The proposed sale of Arm to Nvidia looks a bit more tenuous today after UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden issued a Public Interest Intervention Notice (PIIN) indicating he may intervene in the sale on national security grounds.…

When 4GB is just not quite enough Microsoft is to drag veteran code wrangler Visual Studio kicking and screaming into the modern world with a 64-bit version.…

Environment variables full of secrets uploaded to attacker server Codecov, makers of a code coverage tool used by over 29,000 customers, has warned that a compromised script may have stolen credentials over a period of two months, before it was discovered a few weeks ago.…

Rounded corners are nice, but what you really want is Linux 5.10, right? Windows Insiders have been given a bit of Linux love with the arrival of a freshly updated kernel and an all-important clock fix.…

Plus Pwn2Own faces fire and update Chrome immediately In Brief The former systems administrator for the FIN7 card-slurping gang has been sentenced to 10 years in a US prison.…

Glimmer of hope on the semiconductor front – for the car industry anyway Japanese chipmaker Renesas has said it will restore full production capacity at its N3 Naka plant by the middle of next month following a blaze in March that destroyed equipment and contaminated the clean room.…

Nobody caught – er, held us responsible, says Chinese firm Huawei was able to snoop on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls and track down Chinese dissidents because it was included in the core of the Netherlands' mobile networks, an explosive news report has claimed.…

NASA’s JPL lab speaks to The Reg The first human-made helicopter to take flight on another planet, Ingenuity, has hovered in Martian skies after NASA at last launched the device into the air.…

'Eskom should pay the pending dues for the Oracle software that they use' Oracle has pulled the plug on support for software described as "quite essential" to "crucial operations" at South African energy firm Eskom as part of an ongoing licensing dispute.…

Modified Keemi disinfects, takes temperatures, tells you off for not socially distancing South Korea Telecom (SKT) has linked up with Yongin Severance Hospital to commercialise and deploy facility-roaming robots that minimise the need for face-to-face contact, thus supporting reduced COVID transmission.…

Procurement raises questions over supplier creating its own sales pipeline within govt The UK's Home Office is tendering to recruit a supplier to help manage the selection of its IT projects, leading to concerns over conflict of interest.…