The Register

Billing budget? Free plan? All useless when buggy code went into overdrive Sudeep Chauhan, founder of startup Milkie Way, suffered a bad case of bill shock when a test with a $7.00 billing budget and a free database plan on Google Cloud platform (GCP) generated a $72,000 invoice overnight.…

The Pandora's Box that won't stay closed UK trade union Prospect has chimed in with the chorus of disapproval at technologies such as Microsoft's Productivity Score being used on the nation's workers.…

Take those claimed performance gains with a pinch of salt, though Oracle has announced the general availability, at least in the cloud, of Database 21c.…

Blanket deletions will smother internet, EU tech chief told Twitter, Mozilla, Automattic, and Vimeo have signed an open letter aimed at EU tech chief Margrethe Vestager taking issue with new digital rules due to be announced later this month and asking for a more flexible approach when it comes to internet content.…

'Better late than never' opines industry bod The UK's Ministry of Defence has launched a bug bounty scheme, promising privateer pentesters they won't be prosecuted if they stick to the published script.…

New shiny has governance, mailing lists, public repository... but how will Google use it? Google has opened its forthcoming operating system, Fuchsia, to community contributions, but has not addressed the question hanging over it: how will it be used?…

Web advertising giant says it has been working with filter makers, others to 'evolve the platform' Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3.…

TripAdvisor caught in sweep of software deemed too nasty for local consumption China has banned 105 apps from reaching local users and says it’ll ban more in future.…

Dell and HPE in stasis as mid-range and high-end markets slide The world’s server market stalled in the year’s third quarter, says analyst firm IDC.…

IP arm of Finnish firm should have spoken up sooner... or so the lawsuit claims The American wing of Lenovo has sued Nokia in a California federal court in an attempt to stop the telecoms equipment biz from enforcing its 19 patents pertaining to video decoding.…

Test flight took candidate Mars trip rocket to new heights Videos SpaceX has conducted a test of the Starship it plans to use for flights to Mars, and while the experiment ended badly the flight was judged a success.…

Service was so unpopular, getting rid of it was an election policy South Korea on Thursday shuttered a government-run digital certificate service that required the use of Microsoft’s ancient ActiveX technology.…

Population of 64,000 needs better access to e-government services, and there's also four navy bases to consider India has announced a new submarine cable connecting its mainland to the Lakshadweep Islands.…

So what does that make it, a leg? A toe? Boston Dynamics, the Softbank-owned robotics biz, is reportedly being sold to South Korean automotive giant Hyundai for $921m in a deal expected to be announced shortly.…

Ready Player None Geeks hoping to grab AMD’s latest and most powerful gaming graphics card the RX 6900 XT were left in the dust after available stocks were sucked dry from online stores minutes after the gear was launched on Tuesday.…

Congressional hearing on Privacy Shield oddly productive affair Analysis Everyone is in agreement: the United States needs a new federal privacy law, and it needs to be put in place in 2021.…

Inference can be expensive but the cloud giant's working on that, we're told re:Invent Amazon Web Services is in the second week of its three-week re:Invent run, and the show's announcement deluge continues, now with an emphasis on AI-oriented services.…

Multi-AG, FTC antitrust lawsuits focus on 'the wrath of Mark', potential break-up of social media giant Facebook illegally crushed its competition and continues to do so to this day to maintain its monopoly, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the attorneys general of no fewer than 46 US states plus Guam and DC.…

Regulatory submissions for COVID-19 jab candidate 'unlawfully accessed' The EU Medicines Agency today revealed it was hacked, just a week after infosec eggheads said foreign state hackers have been targeting European institutions.…

Rival GitPod sees perfect opportunity to say: Pssst, we've got that stuff GitHub CEO Nat Friedman showed off Codespaces at the virtual Universe event, though the thing remains in limited preview and key features are still missing. Meanwhile, rival GitPod has added support for Visual Studio Code and the ability to run commands with root permissions in its similar workspace service.…

Typo? We've asked, but... well, y'know If you've got any money left over from your purchase of AirPods Max, you might want to save it. Battery replacements won't come cheap, with Apple charging £309 in the UK – or roughly 56 per cent of the original headphones.…

Spending watchdog report retells sad history of Home Office IT failings The UK Home Office has added £336m to the cost of running its border management IT systems as delays and uncertainty continue to dog the programme, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).…

Hardware infrastructure vendors' obsession with consumption-based tech continues Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is to send high-performance computing (HPC) into its everything-as-a-service portfolio, GreenLake.…

What if the cat in the box could come back to life? Boffins from America's standards-setting body NIST, the University of Maryland (UMD), and the California Institute of Technology believe there's a way to make quantum computers correct many of their own errors – which would help overcome one of the major design challenges for such devices.…

'Nothing' yet to speak of in terms of products, though OnePlus founder Carl Pei has raised $7m in seed funding for his new hardware startup based in London and focused on the audio sector.…

IT biz sued by US Dept of Justice on behalf of dev pays out fine, damages A Texas-based software contractor has settled a lawsuit that accused it of illegally discriminating against American programmers by favoring foreigner workers to keep wages low.…

Those daily Zoom calls just got worse One in ten employees forced to work from home like to do so in the buff while some 8 per cent say they are showering less during lockdown – meaning those sweaty office chairs are positively teeming with with microbial life.…

T minus 23 days and there will very likely be last minute export/import changes As-yet undefined rules regarding the cross-border transportation of goods between the UK and the EU mean IT professionals supporting SAP installations in the UK can expect to be working between Christmas and New Year as the Brexit deadline approaches with no deal yet agreed.…

Pervade Software's product isn't perfect but neither is the police response to security concerns A war of words has erupted between the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) and a British web security pro after a senior cop declared it would be "a waste of public money" to keep discussing security flaws in the body's Cyberalarm product.…

Founder talks of plans for independent distro 'rebuild' The CentOS project, a non-commercial Linux distribution that tracks Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is changing to become only CentOS Stream, based on a development branch of RHEL and therefore less suitable for production workloads.…

YouTube and Instagram exempted, Bill kicked into committee for a while Australia has revealed the legislation with which it plans to force Google and Facebook to pay local news publishers for linking to their content, a plan the nation hatched to funnel more revenue to news outlets whose business models didn't evolve fast enough to remain viable in the internet age.…

Offer does not apply in China Apple has fired a warning shot at Facebook and Google by insisting it will remove their apps from its App Store if they don’t comply with Cupertino's new privacy standard.…

Attempts tech fix to solve aging crisis The Japanese government is splashing ¥2bn ($19m, £14m) to fund digital dating services powered by AI technology in an attempt to boost the country’s flagging birth rate.…

Upgraded collab environment offers worthy post-COVID tweaks, also relies on oldies like Presence Cisco has upgraded its Webex collaboration suite in ways it hopes will both boost productivity in the post-COVID age and meet the 2020 moment by "giving everybody a voice" and making online meetings "10x better" than the real world.…

Because freedom, maybe also because it would make blocking their stuff easier Analysis The world’s top tech companies have taken Cambodia to task over its plan to introduce a government-controlled internet bottleneck that would be the sole point of entry to the nation.…

Suggests industry form a task force to do something eventually Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on his nation’s industries to get better at recycling electronics.…

Not a great look Cybersecurity corp FireEye has confessed its most secure servers have been compromised, almost certainly by state-backed hackers who then made away with its proprietary hacking tools.…

Donald-appointed jurist says Uncle Sam 'likely overstepped' authority, 'acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner' The Trump administration has lost yet another legal decision in its efforts to force Chinese video app TikTok to sell off its US interests purportedly for national security reasons.…

For those who want to turn the price tag up to 11, or $549 Apple today embarked upon another skirmish into the world of over-ear headphones with the launch of the AirPods Max.…

Light load from Redmond as everyone else seeks to bury bad news, sorry, align in update cadence Patch Tuesday For December's Patch Tuesday bug bonanza, Microsoft handed out fixes for a mere 58 vulnerabilities while various other orgs addressed shortcomings in their own software in separate, parallel announcements.…

Plus: Yet another UK.gov bod demands end-to-end encryption is broken Tutanota has been served with a court order to backdoor its encrypted email service – a situation founder Matthias Pfau described to The Register as "absurd."…

Don't drop this one It's what's inside that counts. That was the conclusion when we reviewed Huawei's Mate 40 Pro earlier this year, which was spectacular from a hardware perspective, but hamstrung by the absence of the Google Play Store.…

Wenn Sie sie nicht schlagen können, schließen Sie sich ihnen an SAP is trying to take on the upstarts slurping customer spending with sales pitches for workflow, low-code and robotic process automation tech.…

'Adopting these may have legal and policy implications' Web infrastructure company Cloudflare is pushing for the adoption of new internet protocols it says will enable a "privacy-respecting internet".…

Processors are 'critical to future products', set to perform tasks for host systems Seagate says it has, after several years of effort, designed two custom RISC-V processor cores for what seems a range of functions including computational storage.…

Welcome to the GitHub Universe Microsoft's GitHub has revised its financial plumbing to allow corporate customers to contribute cash to favored open-source projects via GitHub's existing billing setup.…

Emotions post-migration among the IT team included 'shock, refusal, rational understanding, and acceptance' A German IT services outfit specialising in the insurance market has migrated 500 IBM Db2 databases to the EnterpriseDB (EDB) iteration of Postgres in a sign of life after proprietary wares.…

Certain ZBook Studio G7 and Book Create G7 models ready to get number crunching out of the box Christmas might have come early for data scientists and analysts as HP is to start selling a selection of its laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything you need to crunch numbers and build AI models.…

Also: Teams Calling, PowerToys and a Windows 95 sweater for the patient In Brief Sadly not an oblique reference to the Val Kilmer 1984 cinematic vehicle, Azure has launched the altogether more serious Azure Government Top Secret: a new cloud to serve customers dealing with Top Secret classified data.…

Developer: 'I find security an insufferably boring procedural hindrance.' Oh dear. Maybe Rust can help? A new survey of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) contributors, conducted by the Linux Foundation and academic researchers, reported that 91 per cent of respondents are male, the great majority has full-time paid employment, and that they spend on average under 3 per cent of their time on security issues, with little inclination to increase it.…