IBM US staff must be fully vaccinated by December – or go back to bed without pay

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has finalized a plan on global tax laws that could lead to Big Tech paying more in taxes no matter where they operate.

The deal involves 136 countries and jurisdictions that constitute about 90 per cent of Earth’s gross domestic product. The plan imposes a minimum 15 per cent tax rate on corporate profit starting in 2023 on large multinational companies, the OECD said.

The goal being to discourage Big Biz from moving profits out of certain countries to low-tax havens and avoid levies. How effective this measure will be, we’ll have to see: we’re told it could raise $150bn in additional annual tax globally. There is a caveat: this minimum tax rate will apply to companies with yearly sales above €750m.

The Facebook empire on Friday experienced some aftershocks after its massive Monday outage, leaving some netizens unable to use its apps and websites as expected.

Unlucky, or perhaps lucky, folks found themselves hitting errors when accessing parts of the social network as well as its Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger units. Attempts to view notifications, for instance, brought up the message: “Error performing query.”

The services appear to be recovering, if they are not already recovered, after about an hour or two of disruption. Another configuration change was reportedly blamed.

A US nuclear submarine has “struck an object” while submerged in the South China Sea – and the US Navy is insisting that it wasn’t a Chinese submarine.

Almost a dozen sailors were reportedly injured in the underwater collision, according to the US Naval Institute’s news offshoot. The submarine was operating in the South China Sea, but was in international waters at the time of the incident, the US Navy said.

The nuclear-powered attack boat is said to be returning to port in Guam, while a statement from the USN said none of the injuries were life-threatening. The sub’s nuclear propulsion plant is said to be undamaged.

Venture capital firms are pouring billions into quantum computing companies, hedging bets that the technology will pay off big time some day.

Rigetti, which makes quantum hardware, announced a $1.5bn merger with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, a finance house focusing on strategic acquisitions. Rigetti, which was valued at $1.04bn before the deal, will now be publicly traded.

Before Rigetti’s deal, quantum computer hardware and software companies raked in close to $1.02bn from venture capital investments this year, according to numbers provided to The Register by financial research firm PitchBook. That was a significant increase from $684m invested by VC firms in 2020, and $188m in 2019.

Sponsored Deciding that running your database in the cloud make sense, is easy enough.

Afterall, who would balk at the prospect of virtually unlimited scale, high availability, performance at internet scale, and the ability to tap multiple database management systems. And that’s before the prospect of never having to worry about falling foul the licensing police ever again.

But it’s the not the nature of the destination that usually prevents people heading to the cloud. It’s worrying about how they get there.

Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork – our column of reader-submitted unhappy displays – is celebrating 30 years of Microsoft Money this month with an example of why Windows, .NET and ATMs do not make good bedfellows.

Spotted by Register reader Sam Thompson in the delightful UK city of York (home of the Jorvik Viking Centre and the excellent National Railway Museum), the only thing being dispensed by this cash dispenser is the finest Microsoft-infused bork.

Dell revealed its latest refresh for its Dell EMC Poweredge servers yesterday, emphasizing their small size and reduced latency for uses in places like hospitals, retail space or offices.

Designed for small and medium-sized businesses, the new range, which includes the T150, T550, T350, R250 and R350, is marketed for use either in edge environments, or in a data center. IT manager, take your pick.

Surprising nobody, the new entry-level servers use Intel Xeon processors, E-2300 processors to be exact. They are also equipped with what Dell calls “office-friendly acoustics and thermals”, but the thing Dell seems proudest of is its shrinking of T350, which is 37 per cent smaller than its predecessor.

Iran, Turkey and both North and South Korea are bases for nation-state cyber attacks, Microsoft has claimed – as well as old favourite Russia.

While more than half of cyberattacks spotted by Redmond came from Russia, of more interest to the wider world is information from the US megacorp’s annual Digital Defence Report about lesser-known nation state cyber-attackers.

“After Russia, the largest volume of attacks we observed came from North Korea, Iran and China; South Korea, Turkey (a new entrant to our reporting) and Vietnam were also active but represent much less volume,” said MS in a post announcing its findings.

The developers behind popular language education app Duolingo are setting their sights on maths education.

According to an interview with the BBC, founder and chief executive Luis von Ahn sees his company’s approach to gamifying education as a way of getting children off distracting social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram.

“But the problem with smartphones is they are a double-edged sword – they also come with interruptive things, like TikTok,” he told the licence fee-funded broadcaster.

A British VoIP firm has staggered back to its feet after being smacked with a series of apparent DDoSes a month after suffering a series of sustained attacks it said were delivered by the REvil ransomware gang.

In an update at 11:56 UK time, it said it was “continuing to suffer from large scale DDoS attacks. VoIP Unlimited engineers are continuing to mitigate the impact on services.”

Voip Unlimited’s services went down in September at the time of the initial attack, with managing director Mark Pillow saying at the time he was “extremely sorry for all inconvenience caused”.

Citizens in Wales are set to be required to comply with COVID-19 passport rules to attend mass events, partly because of an apparent technical glitch in the UK nation’s Parliament or Senedd Cymru, in Welsh.

A member by the name of Gareth Davies issued a furious statement on Twitter, appearing to blame the institution’s IT department for stripping him of his suffrage on an issue of national importance.

In Davies’ absence, the controversial vote was carried 28-27 in favour of the Health Protection (Coronavirus Restrictions) Regulations. Under the rules, all over-18s would need a COVID Pass to enter nightclubs, indoor, non-seated events for more than 500 people, such as concerts or conventions, outdoor non-seated events for more than 4,000 people and any setting or event with more than 10,000 people in attendance. A negative lateral flow test (aka rapid antigen test) result within the last 48 hours would also count.