The Register

Bid to build the most stable iteration of the columnar database has its price

Cassandra 4.0 – the open-source distributed NoSQL database used by Apple, Netflix, and Spotify – has been delayed at the 11th hour after a developer spotted a bug in the code.…

Gamify all the things!

UK map maker Ordnance Survey is bringing a new concept to the mobile gaming market: not looking at your phone.…

These are a few of our favourite things

Bork!Bork!Bork! Beer and bork: two of our favourite things here at Vulture Central. And also, it seems, at the Co-Op.…

RTFM: Read the [fine] manual

Review Traditionally the Darktable project only releases one update a year, with a new version arriving on Christmas day. But the developers behind Darktable have been adding new features and improving existing ones so quickly that one a year is no longer enough.…

That's the way uh-huh uh-huh, I hype it

Column Gartner is an odd fish. A very big odd fish, making some $4bn a year out of its 16,000 souls beavering away in its shiny belly. It acts as soothsayer to the troubled monarchs of industry and whichever of their courtiers can afford a subscription to its reports.…

Salesmen suffer after suspicious surfing

Who, Me? Start your week with a trip back to the early days of the World Wide Web with a tale of imaging peril and malware malarky from the files of Who, Me?…

Three-way crash harms no humans but shutters fulfilment centre and sees orders galore cancelled

The Ocado Group, an operator and purveyor of automated warehouse tech for e-tailers, has admitted that three of its robots collided and caused a fire last Friday at its Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC) in Erith, south-east London.…

The Social Network fires back after President Biden accuses it of 'killing people'

US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy publicly doubled down on criticism of Facebook for spreading vaccine misinformation, after The Social Network™ rejected his previous criticism and President Joe Biden's assertion it is "killing people".…

Hong Kong authorities 'alarmed by unsubstantiated remarks'

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam has slammed a US government advisory that warns business of warrantless surveillance and the potential for forced surrender of corporate and customer data in the Special Administrative Region (SAR).…

Heads of State, academics, diplomats, journalists, and others targeted, iPhones vulnerable

Amnesty International and French journalism advocacy organisation Forbidden Stories say they've acquired a leaked list of individuals targeted by users of Israeli spyware-for-law-enforcement operator NSO Group, and that Heads of State, academics, diplomats, human rights advocates, and media figures are among those targeted.…

Because that’s how they deal with electricity thieves in Miri District

Police in the Malaysian district of Miri have used a steamroller to crush 1,069 computers allegedly used to mine Bitcoin.…

Plus: People creeped out that TV chef Bourdain's voice has been faked

In brief OpenAI has disbanded its AI robotics team and is no longer trying to apply machine learning to physical machines.…

Hardware gremlins plagued orbiting observatory for over a month

NASA’s beloved Hubble Space Telescope is able to snap the heavens again after overcoming a hardware issue that had plagued it for more than a month.…

Lots of time for legacy users

Reminding the world that there's more to life than Windows 11, Microsoft has promised a feature update for Windows 10 in the form of 21H2.…

Microsoft reins in some of its excesses with a visual tidy-up

Microsoft's much-trumpeted "visual refresh" for its suite of Office applications has begun making its way out to users enrolled in the Insider programme, last night slithering onto both the Windows 11 Intel and ARM test setups at Vulture Central.…

Have we been smoking something?

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands enlisted the help of a small robot to open a 12m (40ft) 3D-printed steel bridge across a canal in Amsterdam's red-light district earlier this week.…

PrintNightmare? More like Groundhog Day for admins

Microsoft has shared guidance revealing yet another vulnerability connected to its Windows Print Spooler service, saying it is "developing a security update."…

Cops and dobbers: Uncle Sam dangles cash incentive for tattletales

The US is offering a $10m reward to anyone who dobs in digital outlaws responsible for foreign government-backed cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure such as pipelines, power grids, and communication networks.…

Back to an era when 'cloud' meant 'it's probably going to rain'

Microsoft got back to its roots this week with another go – this time cloud-enabled – at an Altair 8800 running on Azure Sphere hardware.…

British competition watchdog publishes details of why it approved AMD/Xilinx merger

The UK’s competition regulator has finally published its reasons why it has decided not to stand in the way of the $35bn merger between AMD and Xilinx.…