The Register

Ten letters, starts with R, ends with E, three syllables

The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland is fending off "an ongoing cyber incident" that has shut down its campuses.…

Metropolitan police hand keys to French outsourcer

Capgemini has won a £600m IT infrastructure deal from the UK's Metropolitan Police to run a service desk, data centres, and services management including the integration of other suppliers.…

You're naming yourself wrong?

An iCloud customer says she spent more than six hours on the phone to Apple after being locked out of the service because her name is apparently incompatible with the application code.…

Plus: McAfee's in serious trouble over claimed cryptocurrency scam

In brief  Another form of malware installed in servers made vulnerable by flaws in SolarWinds' Orion management software has been spotted in the wild.…

IT pros from orgs large and small tell The Reg the tech delivered, mostly, but couriers and home Wi-Fi suddenly became your problem

Covid Logfile  Brianna Haley was given one day to be ready to roll out Zoom for 13,000 users at over 1,000 sites.…

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (as Windows crashes again)

BORK!BORK!BORK!  Getting astronauts to the Moon or Mars is the least of NASA's problems. Persuading Microsoft Windows not to fall over along the way is apparently a far greater challenge.…

Time to fix those legacy evils, though.... right?

Column  It is the monster which corrupts all it touches. It is an energy-sucking vampire that thrives on the pain it promotes. It cannot be killed, but grows afresh as each manifestation outdoes the last in awfulness and horror. It is Microsoft Exchange and its drooling minion, Outlook.…

Leads Works Ltd and Valca Vehicle and Life Cover Agency tried to exploit household finance fears in lockdown, says data watchdog

Two businesses that dispatched more than 2.6 million nuisance text messages seeking to exploit lower household incomes during Britain’s first lockdown are nursing a combined financial penalty of £330,000 from the UK’s data watchdog.…

Let us tell you a tale of the Mailman's Apprentice

Who, Me?  The weekend is over and Monday is here. Celebrate your IT prowess with another there-but-for-the-grace confession from the Who, Me? archives.…

Perseverance takes first drive around landing spot named in honor of seminal sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler

NASA’s Perseverance rover trekked across Mars for the first time last Thursday, March 4, 2021.…

Without Honor, or 5G silicon, there can be no victory

Oppo has become China’s top smartphone brand for the first time, according to analyst house Counterpoint.…

Don't just patch, check for p0wnage, says top natsec team

The Biden administration has urged users of Microsoft's Exchange mail and messaging server to ensure they have not fallen victim to the recently-detected "Hafnium" attack on Exchange Server that Microsoft says originated in China.…

Will go live in 2022 and ‘effectively double’ capacity in the Middle Kingdom

Microsoft has revealed it plans to open a fifth Azure region in China.…

Side-channel ring race 'hard to mitigate with existing defenses'

Chip-busting boffins in America have devised yet another way to filch sensitive data by exploiting Intel's processor design choices.…

‘Subtle and very nasty bug’ meant 5.12 rc1 could trash entire filesystems

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has rushed out a new release candidate of Linux 5.12 after the first in the new series was found to include a ‘subtle and very nasty bug’ that was so serious he marked rc1 as unsuitable for use.…

Proof-of-concept SEER taught over eight days using 512 GPUs

Facebook has trained its most advanced semi-supervised computer vision system yet on a dataset of a billion public images taken from Instagram, its other social network.…

Trick future robot overlords by scribbling 'superuser' on your forehead

OpenAI researchers believe they have discovered a shockingly easy way to hoodwink their object-recognition software, and it requires just pen and paper to carry out.…

'That is not the world we want, nor the one users deserve'

With the arrival of Google Chrome v89 on Tuesday, Google is preparing to test a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that it hopes will replace increasingly shunned, privacy-denying third-party cookies.…

Why are carriers so worried about people's battery life during lockdown?

US telco Verizon recently splashed $45bn on 5G spectrum and then advised its customers to use LTE to save device battery life. Not to be outdone, rival carrier T-Mobile is recommending battery-anxious punters use 2G instead of the latest-and-greatest in cellular connectivity.…

SaaS pusher says it has locked up social media account after 'unauthorised access'

Near ubiquitous SaaS CRM pusher Salesforce got a rude awakening this week when its carefully curated image of a business addressing racial equality was shattered by its clearly hacked LinkedIn page.…