The Register

Only the beast of Redmond could meet 'data sovereignty and reliability' needs, says UK.gov department The UK's Ministry of Defence has handed Microsoft a £17.75m contract to run hosted services in the Azure Cloud – and rivals won't even get a chance to compete due to requisite "data sovereignty and reliability".…

Even the bus shelters of the windy city cannot escape the borkage Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another entry in the digital signage corridor of despair, where cock-ups that would normally only trouble a user's screen are on public display for all to marvel at.…

Fondleslab feels like a real laptop, though transition is far from seamless Apple has long toiled to position the iPad Pro as a legitimate computing device like the iMac and MacBook Pro. Earlier this year it tried to take a step closer to achieving that goal with the release of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.…

Moenie die hoender ruk nie Word has reached Vulture Central that Microsoft is to retire support for 27 languages in iOS Outlook from the end of June 2020.…

More 5G. More e-commerce. More IoT. But no growth target for the first time in ages China will move to cut the cost of internet connections for local companies as part of its post-pandemic push to restore its economy.…

German efficiency was no match for user stupidity On Call Welcome to Friday the 82nd of March. Or is it only us for whom the days are blurring? Luckily The Register is here to bookend your week with our regular On Call feature.…

Tune in next month for tips on better use of licenses, and how you can save $$$,$$$ Webcast The problem with Microsoft Office 365 licenses is that while most businesses never quite seem to know how many they’ve got, paying for more of them, or more expensive tiers with existing ones, seems like the easiest thing in the world.…

By the time you get the status check the app needs, and get through the new check-in process, you'll wish you stayed home The Indian government has made its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app mandatory for all air passengers on domestic flights.…

We know this sounds like a tall tail but... Pic Astronomers scanning the sky for potentially hazardous space rocks have discovered a first – a presumed trojan asteroid around Jupiter that is looking increasingly like a comet.…

Oops, spoiler! Suffice to say data-crunching demand remains robust as buyers seek plague-time insight Splunk has reported mixed results for its first quarter, while suggesting that the novel coronavirus won’t kill its ambitions for the full FY 2020.…

Grandchild Digital Picture Removal A court in the Netherlands ruled this month that a grandmother must remove pictures of her grandchildren from her social media accounts after her daughter filed a privacy complaint.…

Services groups bear the brunt as thousands of workers given, in US at least, 30 days' notice, 90 days' pay IBM is swinging the axe on its staff, with significant numbers of employees not attached to the cloud being told their time at Big Blue is up.…

Biz says it'll be a proper as-a-service outfit by 2022, which means changes to support, supplies, locations HPE has vowed to slash its spending by at least $1bn after it suffered a disastrous financial quarter, primarily blaming its downfall on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on its supply chain and customers.…

Welp, at least that's better than industry averages, says code-hosting biz Code hosting biz GitLab recently concluded a security exercise to test the susceptibility of its all-remote workforce to phishing – and a fifth of the participants submitted their credentials to the fake login page.…

Slimming down SQL and living on the Edge Build There was SQL Edge and Azure Synapse news at Microsoft's reimagined Build gathering this week, so The Register had a chat with corporate vice president Rohan Kumar about the company's database ambitions.…

We 'cannot afford a construction site in top management while in crisis mode' moans savings bank rep A boardroom saga that has involved two rapid changes in the leadership at SAP in the last year is beginning to unsettle shareholders.…

Shotwell case ends with Rothschild Patent Imaging backing off for good Updated The GNOME Foundation has settled a US lawsuit brought against it by Rothschild Patent Imaging, complete with an undertaking by the patent assertion entity that it will not sue GNOME for IP infringment again.…

Yes, it's the Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition Samsung is aiming a new version of the Galaxy S20 flagship phone at military customers. Dubbed the "Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition", the chaebol describes its latest blower as "mission ready". And it certainly looks the part.…

48 hours of conversations to get you thinking more intelligently about intelligent software Promo Artificial intelligence is still one of those areas of IT that feels like everyone’s talking it, but not many people are actually doing it.…

Yes, the app that's not quite working yet Campaign groups have written to the UK Prime Minister warning GCHQ and its digital arm, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will have the capacity to re-identify the phones of people who have installed the nation's coronavirus contact-tracing app.…

International Tea. The world isn't about to suddenly start appreciating you "It's International Tea Day!" I joyously proclaimed as I bounded into the kitchen, trying my best to sound like I had been counting the days rather than learning of it a couple of hours ago.…

British border search law strikes again The leader of far-right political group Britain First has been handed a judicial slap on the wrist after refusing to give his phone PIN to police at Heathrow Airport.…

Paper released on proof-of-concept of 100 pixels, each with three nanowires Scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology claim to have developed a robotic eye they say mimics the equivalent human organism and even out-performs it on some measures.…

And guess which department bought 10,000 O365 licences? Key British government departments have bought thousands of new devices to cope with the COVID-19-fuelled homeworking boom – as well as signing up for unprecedented numbers of accounts with videoconferencing services.…

Real-time collaboration in Office 365 but .NET developers sidelined in favour of JavaScript Build An intriguing technology preview at Microsoft's just-finished Build event is Fluid Framework – but the company has not done a great job of communicating what exactly it is.…

Microsoft, BIND, Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, others fix up software A new vulnerability has been found in the design of the world's domain-name system that potentially can be exploited to flood websites off the internet.…

25kV + lots of wiggly amps = big local magnetic field A commercial drone fell from the sky after a flight across a railway line threw its internal compass into confusion.…

Dupa ton va rugam sa lasati un mesaj Efforts to rectify Xiaomi Mi 9 users losing the ability to connect to the cellular network after a Vodafone-issued patch have had mixed results, with some punters able to use their phones as normal but others suffering weird side effects.…

Lots of previews and coming-soons, but is it too little, too late? Build Microsoft's scattergun approach to IoT continued at the company's virtual Build shindig with Azure IoT Central gaining new toys, updates for Digital Twins, and Azure RTOS reaching General Availability.…

Don’t stand so close to me as-a-service, with added blockchain COVID-19 is spurring new types of wearable hardware.…

A simpler alternative to site slurping Boffins at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a tool called ScrAPIr to help simplify access to online data available through application programming interfaces, or APIs.…

Public health agencies get green light to emit software using joint-developed tech Analysis Apple and Google have officially released their Exposure Notification API, a joint technology project to allows public health organizations to build mobile apps capable of efficient and anonymous coronavirus contact tracing via Bluetooth.…

Sigh. How many users did it have before it started this stuff? Zoom has outlined more about its efforts to improve its security.…

Boffin immortalized, praised for her 'leadership and vision' Video NASA has renamed its forthcoming Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) after the agency’s first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman, who drove the Hubble project and pushed for a computing-based approach to sky scanning.…

Hey Tmall Genie, spike my cholesterol, then coalesce my web empire with voice commands Alibaba will invest $1.4bn into its smart speaker line, including a model capable of ordering KFC for breakfast.…

Japanese mission also carrying rolling remote-control robot atop last of a famous rocket family The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency today (JAXA) said it successfully launched the last of its H-II transfer vehicles and a to the International Space Station, carrying the unusual cargo of a remote-controllable rolling robot and a Wi-Fi-in-space experiment.…

Pah, fine, OK, we’ll do what you say... in marketing, pouts telco to NARB AT&T has been officially slapped down by America's National Advertising Review Board (NARB) for its 5G Evolution campaign in which it branded its phone and network 5G E, despite not deploying full 5G technology.…

It was a software bug, insists telco, as attorneys walk with most of the money Literal locked-down market biz Securus Technologies has settled a class-action lawsuit over illegally recorded prison phone calls, promising to improve its systems while avoiding a massive damages bill stretching to tens of millions of dollars.…

I’m sorry, I will continue ignoring that question Apple may still be recording and transcribing conversations captured by Siri on its phones, despite promising to put an end to the practice nine months ago, claims a former Apple contractor who was hired to listen into customer conversations.…

'Serious questions' over security and how it would help supply chain The construction of a $12bn semiconductor factory in Arizona owned and operated by TSMC has prompted a group of Democrat senators to probe whether the Taiwanese giant was lured with the promise of financial incentives.…

Now about that ageing software estate and those lucrative licences... Microsoft has acquired UK robotic process automation (RPA) specialist Softomotive for an undisclosed sum, snatching a bigger foothold in a market attracting interest from investors and other large software vendors.…

When you go will you send back a rocket from Edinburgh? Blighty is preparing for take-off as Edinburgh-based rocket-botherer Skyrora test-fired its Skylark-L rocket from a location in the heart of the Scottish Highlands.…

More than you could ever want to NOA about Google Cloud Platform Next on Air As the tech industry ponders how to hold virtual events in place of the usual big barn jamborees, Google has come up with its own take on death by G Suite Slides: a nine-week digital event called Next on Air.…

Meanwhile, PowerToys gets the Run Build Microsoft celebrated Build by emitting the first stable release of its new Windows Terminal and a getting-there incarnation of its handy set of PowerToys utilities.…

Plus: Serco plays email fail game by mass-mailing human contact tracers; NCSC gives feedback on feedback about beta app Analysis Worried about identifiable personal data from your coronavirus contact-tracing app making it into a British government database? Fear not! The Ministry of Defence is sanitising it all first.…

How to defend your organization from attack Webcast We’ve been hearing about ransomware for years now. You may even personally know a company that has been a victim and quietly paid up, and you may even know someone who’s told you not to worry. “It’s OK if you have a good backup,” they say.…

Linux envy? And why not use existing ones like Chocolatey? Build Microsoft has said it will push out a new package manager - now in preview - that sounds useful but raises some awkward questions and issues.…

Subdomain takeover possible, says infosec bod At the end of March, video chat app Houseparty, owned by Epic Games, responded to unsubstantiated reports that user accounts had been hacked – by offering a $1m bounty to anyone able to prove the rumors were part of a coordinated campaign to smear the company.…

iGiant would have to show it has learned from Google's failures Comment The word on the street is that Apple is developing new augmented-reality glasses, with the work at an advanced stage. Prototypes, we're told, have been made and Cupertino is aiming for a 2021/2022 release. There's also a name: Apple Glass.…

Driver code open-sourced Build Microsoft has followed up the crowd-pleasing announcement of GUI and GPU-enablement for Linux apps running on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 with details of the tweaks needed to make the magic happen.…