The Register

Despite Chinese labor laws, 72-hour work weeks are still common

Chinese software developers have crowdsourced a spreadsheet that dishes the dirt on working conditions at hundreds of employers.…

Names and bars crypto exchange SUEX, warns paying ransoms could spell trouble

Ransomware extracted at least $590 million for the miscreants who create and distribute it in the first half of 2021 alone – more than the $416 million tracked in all of 2020, according to the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Total ransomware-related financial activity may have reached $5.2 billion.…

Crew successfully de-orbited on Sunday carrying vital payload: footage for a movie shot in space

The International Space Station has again had to compensate for unexpected thrusting by a Russian spacecraft.…

Plus rifle-toting robot dogs, but makers insist they're really dumb

In brief Whether or not non-fungible tokens are a flash in the pan or forever, malware operators have been keen to weaponise the technology.…

Plus: Microsoft Translator machine learning software now supports over 100 languages

In brief Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice's help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice.…

Michigan man arrested for borrowing costly textbooks and selling them

A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them.…

Academics advised to consider excluding certain terminology for the sake of inclusivity

A working group in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has proposed a series of steps to "decolonize" the Informatics curriculum, which includes trying "to avoid using predominantly Western names such as Alice/Bob (as is common in the computer security literature)."…

Car makes facing increasingly tough times until supply catches up

Toyota said it would cut car production by up to 150,000 vehicles due to ongoing semiconductor shortages and restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.…

Salus populi suprema lex esto ... or perhaps not

A Missouri politician has been relentlessly mocked on Twitter after demanding the prosecution of a journalist who found and responsibly reported a vulnerability in a state website.…

Global handset market slips in Q3 on sliding chipset availability, says Canalys

Crippling component shortages caused smartphone shipments to dip in calendar Q3, though it was the also-rans, vendors outside of the top five biggest brands with the lowest economies of scale, that suffered most.…

This webcast will help you comply

WEBCAST So, it can be a bit of a shock for Microsoft 365 customers to find out that the platform’s native security and data protection tools can be somewhat … lacking. Oh, and inconsistent, with different apps having different retention periods.…

Washington Metro admin has taken an early lunch

Bork!Bork!Bork! It's a whole new world for bork today as a Washington Metro platform indicator suggests an alternative to the usual train for weary commuters. How about getting a bit more out of Windows?…

He hasn't got $2.5bn to hand to the DoJ, unlike his bosses

A Boeing 737 Max test pilot has been charged with obstructing US aviation safety regulators, according to the US Department of Justice, and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.…

French cloud provider puts outage and fire behind it to focus on beating the big players

French cloud and colocation service provider OVH has edged a 6 per cent increase in its nominal market valuation following its initial public offering on the Euronext Paris stock exchange.…

Hope extended to gas giants across the universe... well, it is Friday

Those of us fatalistically counting down the minutes until the Earth is engulfed by the dying embers of the Sun in approximately 5 billion years might be offered a glimmer of hope by the news that planets – or at least gas giants – can survive the collapse of their host star.…

Meanwhile, Yugabyte says PostgreSQL compatibility for its distributed database dates back to 2019

Google has clarified details of the interface between its popular distributed SQL database-management-cum-storage-service Spanner and the open-source RDBMS PostgreSQL.…

ICANN also dislikes it but web infrastructure firms don't really mind

The European Union has drawn the ire of privacy activists for proposals to put real names and contact details back into Whois lookups, as part of its Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive.…

Things not likely to improve until 2023

Canalys Forum 2021 Technology price rises are about as welcome Windows 11's needy hardware specs but one part of the industry is quietly happy about the inflationary conditions caused by industry-wide component shortages – the channel.…

Debate exhibits chronic distrust of policy makers, Big Pharma, and insurance companies

Register debate This week's Register Debate tussled over the motion Assumed consent is the right approach for sharing healthcare patients' data, beyond their direct care. The results are in, and as you can see, we have a clear winner.…

Send me an SMS and I’ll tell you everything

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Below the note is scrawled an ominous threat: "We know where you live."…