The Register

Zuck pauses plan to roll out topic moderation tools for its FB-for-biz Facebook this week temporarily halted plans to roll out tools that would have allowed its Workplace customers to censor touchy topics, following a reported internal staff revolt.…

ODMs in Far East make bank as public cloud slingers buy yet more infrastructure Spending on data centre hardware and software dipped in Q1 as enterprises tightened their belts - the reasons for which are clear. As for the purveyors of public cloud, no such concerns existed.…

♫ Now don't go wasting my precious time! Pay the ransom quickly and we'll be just fine ♫ (no, don't) The Maze ransomware gang has struck again – this time targeting an American M&A practice which counts former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham as one of its clients.…

We're gonna need it if we ever live up there – and it looks like a tempting option right now Pittsburgh-based space robot specialist Astrobotic has been picked by NASA to drop a rover onto the surface of the Moon.…

Ex-TalkTalk CEO fails to convince public everything's going swimmingly Comment When something as serious as the UK government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic is being openly mocked on social media, it's clear all is not well.…

Carrier to use Swedish giant's RAN kit to upgrade 3G/4G sites Swedish infrastructure giant Ericsson today confirmed a new deal with O2 UK for its RAN equipment, which will be used to upgrade existing 3G/4G sites across the West of England and Wales.…

UK outfit gets a Streisand effect 101 Comment UK-based infosec outfit Keepnet Labs left an 867GB database of previously compromised website login details accessible to world+dog earlier this year – then sent lawyers' letters to bloggers in a bid to erase their reports of its blunder.…

Tells us more so we can better understand the problems you face Reader survey Everyone says that data is the lifeblood of the organization, yet very few actually take that idea to its logical conclusion, namely that storage is at the heart of the enterprise.…

Chocolate Factory surpasses OnePlus sales for first time, thanks to Pixel 3a 2019 was a good year for Google's mobile hardware division, according to figures from analyst house IDC, which reports record Pixel sales of 7.2 million units – up 52 per cent on the previous year.…

Despite everything going on in the world, you can rely on hyped tech stock to be a bit bonkers Cloud data warehouse specialist Snowflake looks set to file for an IPO valuing the company at $20bn – more than 13 times its valuation of $1.5bn back in January 2018.…

Wake me up before you Go, Code Microsoft has handed over the Go extension for its popular Visual Studio Code editor to the Go community, switching the extension's publisher to "Go Team at Google."…

Positive Technologies analysts less than positive about GTP Long-standing vulnerabilities in older wireless broadband standards will continue to dog new 5G networks, despite efforts to improve network security, a new report has claimed.…

Funny? Only until you read what really happened here A Frenchman who complained that he didn't have enough to do at work has been handed €50,000 (£44,470) after suffering from "bore-out".…

One's 'best served cold with ranch and carrots', the other turns to 'Yoda Speak' An open-source project for automating the installation of free Let's Encrypt certificates for websites built with Microsoft's ASP.NET Core framework was forced to change its name after a trademark complaint from the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).…

And other tidbits from the realm of rocketry Roundup NASA's Gateway edged a little closer to reality last week as the agency took another look at the James Webb Space Telescope's launch date and prepared for the arrival of the solid rocket motors for the SLS.…

You've just splashed the cash on a new Surface. Haven't you suffered enough? Lurking within the epic patch dump offloaded on Windows 10 2004 users last night came the news that Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 owners have been waiting for: fixes for glitches.…

So that's an 'F' for University Technical Colleges then? UK.gov's spending watchdog has found the University Technical College (UTC) scheme introduced by David Cameron's coalition government in 2010 lacks student numbers, is deep in deficit and provides a poor education.…

'This is going to be a problem; we are not on top of this' Interview Expiring root certificates will cause devices like smart TVs and refrigerators to fail in the next few years, security researcher Scott Helme has warned.…

Improved metadata management and easier compliance also required The Scottish Police Authority is on the hunt for virtual data warehouse and data lake providers as part of a £6m tender intended to help the public body derive some value from the huge volumes of data it is sat on.…

Destination 'Preinst aborted' Bork!Bork!Bork! Come join your friends at The Register on a train journey to Bork. Or at least one to destination Aborted.…

€400m for starters, after recent ban on 'untrustworthy' suppliers that sounded a lot like it was directed at Huawei The German government has begun a fund to support locally brewed electronics as the country tries to reduce its reliance on imported kit.…

IBM's server revenue grew rather nicely, but Lenovo's in a more-shipments-less-revenue trap Analyst firm IDC has published its assessment of the server and storage markets for 2020’s first quarter and the numbers are nasty.…

Maybe it's time to get it gone GnuTLS, a widely used open source library implementing Transport Layer Security, last week fixed a bug that had been hiding in the code for almost two years that made resumed TLS 1.3 sessions vulnerable to attack.…

$8bn for all things innovative and economically restorative Malaysia has decided to splash cash on tech as part of its post-pandemic economic stimulus plan.…

Are company naming consultants paid by the word? Logowatch Rackspace has changed its name to “Rackspace Technology”.…

The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma A novel adversarial attack that can jam machine-learning systems with dodgy inputs to increase processing time and cause mischief or even physical harm has been mooted.…

Hyperscalers spar in non-compete, NDA spat Amazon has kicked off a legal challenge to prevent a former AWS product marketing veep from taking a senior role at rival Google Cloud.…

Widespread outage rolled for two-plus hours, incident report mentions 'broad network incident that is impacting many cloud services' Updated IBM’s cloud has gone down hard across the world.…

Blame Reg Bot 9000 for any blunders in this story, by the way Microsoft's online news service mixed up a singer from the British girl group Little Mix for another mixed-race member of the pop band in an article about racism – after the Windows giant dumped dozens of human editors for AI software.…

Microsoft, Intel, Adobe, SAP emit fixes in security synchronicity Patch Tuesday Microsoft has given IT admins and folks another busy Patch Tuesday with 129 security vulnerabilities to address.…

Google engineer flags bugs in speculative-execution exploit defenses Linux kernel developers are fixing up a trio of weaknesses in the open-source project – after a Google engineer reported that defenses implemented to stop speculative-execution snooping do not work as intended.…

There'll be 'unintended negative consequences' if we continue like this The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) has delivered a light slapping to the US administration as it urged lawmakers to think a little harder about policies aimed at improving national security.…

'People familiar' have been running their mouths, it seems Apple is reportedly inching closer towards unveiling its first Arm-based Macs, with official confirmation expected to take place at this month's WWDC conference.…

And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that meddling Citizen Lab Canada's Citizen Lab laboratory has uncovered a hacks-for-hire phishing operation targeting anyone from political activists and oligarchs to lawyers and CEOs that hit more than 10,000 email inboxes over seven years.…

Critics worry mass return to House of Commons is unsafe UK Parliament select committees will continue in a "virtual" format until mid-September, House of Commons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has confirmed.…

New features for core product as well as enhancements to Atlas DBaaS Against a backdrop of mounting losses, NoSQL document store database MongoDB has pushed out its 4.4 iteration with a slew of new features that it expects to improve analytics, ease scaling and smooth performance.…

Snake / Ekans nasty fingered Updated Japanese car maker Honda has been hit by ransomware that disrupted its production of vehicles and also affected internal communications, according to reports.…

Sustainable revenue is hard for privacy-focused browser Privacy-focused browser maker Brave has responded to complaints about affiliate links by apologising for a coding error but also stating that adding affiliate links to search queries is standard practice.…

Find the savings and security you need when working remotely Webcast Working remotely using cloud apps – it’s the new normal, and it’s time to revisit data protection. You need to protect your business data when your users aren’t on-prem, and you need confidence you’ve got continuity if the worst happens.…

Plus: When Microsoft found breaking up hard to do, and much more Roundup Welcome to another look at recent happenings in Redmond, starring Visual Studio, Windows 10, Azure bots and that 20 year anniversary of the anti-trust case when Microsoft realised that breaking up was hard to do.…

18- and 9-month terms dished out for contempt of court A group of Lebanese IT distributors have been handed prison sentences for contempt of court after running afoul of Dell and breaching an anti-lawsuit order.…

Vodafone confirms to The Reg: Misled Merseyside chap missed his target A Merseyside man has been sentenced to three years in jail by a beak in Liverpool Crown Court after torching a Vodafone-owned phone mast.…

DARPA seeks a few good hackers Two years ago, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency introduced a hardware security program called System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware, or SSITH.…

Yes, clicks. You can feel it, says Vulture who got his claws on one Review Regular readers will know this correspondent is rather partial to mechanical keyboards. The latest to join my collection is Logitech's G915 TKL, launched by the Swiss peripherals makers just last month.…

How many speeding Brit drivers does contract value equate to? 250,000 based on minmum fine possible IT services outfit Civica has bagged a £25m contract to provide a managed service to support bespoke software and data integration for the UK National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme (NDORS).…

Escaping telemetry might seem attractive, but there are downsides too Open-source Chromium web browser and Visual Studio Code editor not free enough for you? Some developers, wary of the big corporate sponsors behind these projects, have taken the code and removed any branding, tracking and links to services to create independent alternatives.…

Because not everyone has a smartphone and Apple devices remain problematic Singapore will introduce a wearable device to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and the minister responsible won't rule out making it compulsory.…

Atmospheric moon taking a wander Titan, the only known moon in the Solar System with an atmosphere, is drifting away from Saturn at a rate a hundred times faster than previous estimates, according to the latest research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.…

CEO Arvind Krishna tells Congress it’s time to debate law enforcement reform, including access to AI IBM has discontinued its facial recognition or analysis software.…

Now that launches and cubesats are cheap, ‘post-mission disposal’ has become more important Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to test a self-destructing satellite in the hope of commercialising the technology so the proliferating fleet of low-orbit kit doesn’t become junk.…