The Register

Astroturfing, political posturing, invective. Exactly what internet policy needs Comment A flawed consultation into Section 230 – America's safety blanket that shields online platforms like Google and Facebook – has already devolved into a mess dangerously reminiscent of the net neutrality debate.…

11th-gen Core processor family for portable computers announced Having celebrated the arrival of its 11th-generation Core technology last month, Intel on Wednesday held a virtual event to announce the official launch of what it has already discussed, its latest line of processors for laptops.…

South Carolina crook jailed for 2 years after flogging $340k of purloined Cisco kit A former IT security director was yesterday given a two-year prison sentence after he admitted to stealing and reselling dozens of networking switches from a county government.…

Five years after arrest at LAX, Broadcom secret snatcher sent down A Chinese professor who stole trade secrets from a Silicon Valley semiconductor company was yesterday sentenced to 18 months in jail and fined $476,835.…

El Reg speaks to those battling the dog-eat-dog regime in internet giant's warehouses Special report Palettes stacked 10 high when the old rules said a maximum of five; policies to thwart the spread of the COVID-19 virus not followed and co-workers only informed about positive tests a month later; punishing work rates that are constantly changed and used as a weapon; write-ups as retaliation for complaining about racist behavior; and serious injuries dismissed with a Tylenol and an ice-pack.…

Seems the only things being generated by Pentagon deal are legal arguments The ongoing JEDI pantomime took another turn today [PDF] as Oracle's challenges to the handling of the winner-takes-all $10bn cloud contract were rejected by a US appeals court.…

All the gamers NVMe Microsoft plans to bring the DirectStorage API developed for the forthcoming Xbox Series X to Windows PCs, and a development preview will be available next year.…

'Vision' platform to be 'cornerstone of our emerging asset intelligence strategy and programme' UK utility Severn Trent Water has offered £4.8m for a replacement of its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.…

Enterprise, Pro versions of OS coming to Microsoft's jumped-up whiteboard Microsoft is bringing Windows 10 Enterprise and Pro to the most sizeable of Surface devices, the Surface Hub 2S.…

Duelling devices out soon – but no such promise for requisite next-gen networks It only took a year for 5G devices to begin their downward trajectory into "affordable" territory. Samsung and Xiaomi both look set to continue that southwards march, with both brands unveiling bargain-basement 5G blowers set for a release in the coming months.…

Void forged in merger event also the first of its kind spotted Video The latest gravitational wave event, announced by astrophysicists today, is a particularly good 'un. Not only is it the largest signal detected yet, it's the first time an intermediate-sized black hole has ever been spotted.…

APT phishing crew had COVID-themed fling with the west during height of pandemic, claim researchers Malware pathologists have noted a return to "business as usual" as groups associated with Chinese state interests turned their attentions back to Tibetan matters after a European dalliance earlier this year.…

ERP outfit picks its battles in darkening enterprise software cloud Interview The ERP market is in for a few surprises later in the year, according to Mike Ettling, CEO of ERP vendor Unit4.…

'It's so under-appreciated as a planet compared to Mars' Interview As Rocket Lab sought to get its Electron booster back into action, The Register spoke to CEO Peter Beck about finding faults, recovering rockets, and missions to Venus.…

The next train is headed to... oh dear Bork!Bork!Bork! We live in a global village and Microsoft is often at pains to remind us that Windows is a worldwide operating system. So here's some borkage in Bucharest.…

Which means you get to pay, because cost of ads, sellers' fee hikes are built into prices, so once the tech titans charge more ... you get the drift Google and Amazon will increase the prices they charge advertisers and sellers to reflect new digital services taxes being levied in the UK, Austria and Turkey.…

Whaddaya mean we’re all doomed? With a US presidential election nearly upon us, the past week has seen a worrying jump in the number of lies, misinformation and state-sponsored efforts to sow discontent.…

Google and Apple's new 'Exposure Notifications Express' gives health authorities a shortcut Google and Apple have updated their COVID-19 contact-tracing tool to make it possible to notify users of potential exposures to the novel coronavirus without an app.…

Kitchen table chat tries to sell you on the latest kit, AI devs might like it, too Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 30 series last night, its latest family of real-time ray-tracing graphics processors aimed primarily at PC gamers.…

Telecoms Authority says it could learn to love Tinder and Grindr if they open hearts and minds Pakistan has continued its crusade against lewd online content by banning a bunch of dating apps.…

Vodafone's Indian outpost has a $10bn bill all by itself and may struggle to pay India's supreme court has given the nation's telcos a decade to pay billions of dollars in back taxes.…

No degree? No H-1B? No worries! Indian giant tickles Trump’s tummy Indian IT services giant Infosys has pledged to hire 12,000 more American workers in the next two years and will prioritise graduate hires because they let the company grow while keeping costs down.…

Silicon Valley heavyweights demand access to review boards that can shoot down trolls just ahead of trial Intel is leading an effort to force the US Patent and Trademark Office to axe a new rule said to favor litigious patent trolls.…

Never mind GitHub Packages or Azure Container Registry, we've reinvented the wheel... er, box Microsoft's GitHub on Tuesday launched a public beta of its Container Registry, a service that both overlaps with and complements GitHub Packages, which debuted last year, but evidently has nothing to do with Microsoft's Azure Container Registry.…

So brave... but not so Brave Google Chrome is making good on its promise to block so-called "heavy ads" – web adverts that hog the network, drain batteries, or slow down your device by chewing up too much processor time.…

Some kind of protest against drones taking away people's jobs of pestering aircraft mid-flight? The pilots of a passenger jet landing at LA International reckon they were approached by a mysterious flyer equipped with what was described as a "jetpack," passing within a few hundred yards of their aircraft.…

Also: Scotland edges closer to launch, and ad astra Gerald 'Jerry' Carr In brief An impressive sequence of launches at the end of August was marred first by ULA's Delta IV Heavy preferring life on the ground just three seconds before lift-off and then SpaceX deciding the weekend weather looked a bit iffy for its next batch of Starlink satellites.…

For when precision isn't so important Microsoft shone light today on a new type, Half, lurking within the depths of .NET 5 Preview 7, aimed at adding another IEEE 754 format as well as saving a bit of storage space.…

Do people even know alternative videoconferencing software exists? The coronavirus pandemic has been kind to videoconferencing service Zoom, which has seen Q2 2021 revenues soar by 355 per cent year-on-year on the back of widespread adoption by business and personal users alike.…

Possibly the first of the 'dumb' phones that didn't suck It has been two decades since Nokia formally launched the iconic 3310 mobile phone, a device that instantly conjures nostalgia.…

HWND? AppWindow? Current situation 'not making anyone happy' as company seeks one true way Microsoft has revealed its plans for the future of the windowing API in Windows, a fundamental piece in desktop development, as part of the Project Reunion effort to untangle the mess caused by UWP (Universal Windows Platform).…

If your iPhone doesn't impress any more, Sammy thinks you'll flip for luxury Changed banks lately? Samsung thinks you're more likely to have done that than to have changed from iOS to Android.…

Also: A hat-trick of Windows previews, new Azure emissions, and researching HoloLens 2 In brief While Microsoft has yet to release official figures, the latest incarnation of Windows 10 has picked up steam. The May 2020 update is now on 24.1 per cent of PCs, going by the 150,000 systems surveyed by AdDuplex.…

Transaction 'disturbed the order of the capital market', claim Seoul prosecutors South Korea has indicted Samsung Group vice chairman Lee Jae-yong over his role in a 2015 merger that made him heir apparent to the multinational's empire.…

Outsourcer's employees 'would like to work in a more flexible way' In what could be seen as a traditionally British two fingers towards the government's plea for employees to return to their places of work, UK outsourcing firm Capita appears set to close a third of its office space permanently.…

I didn't get rich by signing checks Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of surveillance and stress, according to a study by the Open Markets Institute.…

You may have one or two, dare we say Epic, thoughts to share Apple on Monday said changes to its App Store review process, outlined at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, have now been implemented.…

Felled by an upside-down student card, apparently Bork!Bork!Bork! Summer time, and the borking is easy. Particularly if you're a Windows 10 IoT-powered ticket machine in Dublin.…

Contain your enthusiasm, because ‘Bottlerocket’ is for containers and containers only Amazon Web Services has created a second Linux distribution.…

At registry operator, money talks and everyone else is ignored Analysis Nominet has backtracked on a plan to give itself control of .uk's multi-million-pound domain-name-expiration market following an outcry by its members.…

TikTok TikTok … the sound of a sale slipping away? ByteDance, the Chinese owner of controversial social network TikTok, has signalled it will comply with China's new technology export control laws.…

That's certainly one way to get around COVID-19 travel restrictions A British citizen has been extradited to the US to face charges he oversaw a series of business email compromise attacks to steal over $2m from unwary accounts departments and individuals.…

Calls for more moderation to stop video nasties reaching local eyeballs Pakistan has asked YouTube and TikTok to impose tighter censorship on content it deems "vulgar, indecent and immoral", including nudity and hate speech.…

The toys are maintaining a constant horizontal velocity from the pram +Comment Facebook has announced it will "reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram" if Australia's pay-for-news plan becomes reality.…

Innocuous images deemed a threat, netizens silenced until twitterings terminated Netizens are being locked out of their Twitter accounts for tweeting innocuous posts and images, such as math equations, that trigger the social network's system that prevents the sharing of private personal information.…

NASA's OGO-1 dies a natural death after reentering Earth's atmosphere NASA’s first Orbiting Geophysical Observatory satellite, launched in 1964, plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated into pieces over the Pacific Ocean over the weekend.…

Imagine everyone placing 30-minute orders for stuff all day. In fact, let's turn to those who have lived under it Amazon has won approval to deliver packages by drone across the United States, meaning that customers could soon receive lightweight orders within 30 minutes but at a cost: drone delivery bots soaring overhead.…

Uni bod accused of destroying evidence by agents investigating possible visa fraud, transfer of 'sensitive' data to Beijing A Chinese academic working as a university researcher in America has been charged with destroying evidence while under investigation for possible visa fraud and potentially leaking "sensitive" software and data to Beijing.…

Chat app chaps, Electron security, Microsoft Teams under fire A critical remote-code-execution vulnerability affecting past versions of the Slack desktop app was disclosed on Friday after the software maker fixed its app.…

Plus: Time to dump that old backdoored ZTE mobile hotspot In brief Cisco has warned hackers are crashing or crippling its networking kit out in the field by black-holing all available memory via specially crafted IGMP packets.…