The Register

In unusual turn of events, Ajit Pai warns he’ll do his job unless stopped The head of America's communications regulator has asked Congress to intervene to stop him from auctioning off radio spectrum for billions of dollars, warning that if they don’t change the law, he’ll be obliged to do his job.…

What did happen to the $125 everyone was promised? Equifax has finally agreed to pay compensation for the massive security breach it suffered in 2017 that led to the theft of at least 146 million people's personal info.…

Feds gain access to military base shooter's mobes using outside tools The US Department of Justice is once again taking Apple to task for not cooperating with device decryption requests, even after it announced that it had retrieved information from a pair of iPhones without Cupertino's help.…

Known and yet still unfixed flaws lurk in proprietary device-linking tech Apple's proprietary approach to securing Bluetooth peripherals, known as MagicPairing, has some benefits, but not magical enough to make vulnerabilities vanish.…

That's 6,700 employees let go this month – so far – with doubt hanging over AI projects Uber has let another 3,000 people go after axing 3,700 earlier this month amid the coronavirus pandemic. That's about 30 per cent of its 22,000-strong workforce slashed in a month.…

Only in 'extremely rare circumstances.' So that's OK Microsoft had to warn a subset of Office 365 administrators over the weekend that their organisation might have inadvertently featured in an outsider's internal search results.…

Meanwhile, Pushbullet pushes back after Chrome extension pulled Popular Android app Podcast Addict has been suspended from the Google Play Store, apparently for mentioning COVID-19.…

Wide-ranging powers come into force in June The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will soon acquire new EU-derived powers allowing it to seize control of rogue traders' eBay and Amazon accounts, and even their entire websites, if it thinks "consumer interests" might be being harmed.…

Spending watchdog says UK health service lacks oversight, can't trace responsibilities The UK government is failing to learn lessons from previous NHS IT disasters, including the £9.8bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT) fiasco, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found.…

Is French policy the controversial company's Achilles' heel, though? Huawei's rotating chairman has admitted to the world's media that his organisation has been "impacted" by a year of US sanctions against it – and he's quite unhappy with France, too.…

Less glue, but the silicon remains firmly soldered in place No sooner had Microsoft pushed the Surface Go 2 out the door, torque screw terror iFixit tore it apart to see how it measured up to the appalling repairability of its predecessor.…

Who would have thought the G in G Cloud stood for Gangster? Exclusive The Cabinet Office has confirmed that scammers and/or jokers broke into the UK government's Digital Marketplace to promote a round-the-clock "bespoke" fraudulent email service that preys on "gullible consumers".…

Plus: Zuck wants machines to spot bad memes on Facebook Roundup The world of artificial intelligence keeps on turning: here's a summary of what's been going down.…

What lots are in the public sector pork barrel? Hardware, software, cloud services, security... plus chatbots and blockchain A group of London NHS trusts has awarded a gaggle of IT resellers, integrators, and service companies a place on a framework contract worth up to a total of £3bn.…

Japanese Uber-investor refreshing board as Ma heads off to do good works Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma will step down from the board of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank after a 13-year stint.…

This hack owes it all to a dalliance with a TMS9900 40 years ago. How about you? Times are tough for the custodians of Blighty's computing history as both the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and Cambridge's Centre for Computing History have found themselves bereft of visitors, events and income, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown. Can you help?…

Reg man samples the Google-free life Review For over a month, I've immersed myself in Huawei's latest flagship blower: the P40 Pro. Not only does it represent the pinnacle in Huawei's R&D efforts, but it's also indicative of another thing: a schism in how Android works.…

Plus: Pop's Lady Gaga popped in hack, and more Roundup Let's catch you up on infosec news beyond the bits and bytes we've already reported.…

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the... BOOM Who, Me? The weekend is receding, and Monday lumbers into view. Delay the inevitable with a tale of nautical nonsense from The Register's regular Who, Me? column.…

Old treaties don't mention space mining and a new one could take forever the sign off. Enter the new 'Artemis Accords' NASA has laid out a new set of principles that it hopes will inform how states and private companies will interact on the Moon.…

Snyk offers a new approach for a new reality Webcast Digital transformation is a major change to your organisation and business. It means more software, and that means more software risk. The cloud means your infrastructure is now part of your application, blurring the lines on who is responsible for security. And DevOps has accelerated the deployment of software.…

Five Eyes-style Euro intel alliance Maximator tipped UK off about Crypto AG machines Dutch spies operating as a part of a European equivalent of the Five Eyes espionage alliance helped GCHQ break Argentinian codes during the Falklands War, it has been revealed.…

The Register presents White House transcript obtained by Stealth Anti-Tracing Intelligence Remote Exfiltration The Register has obtained the following transcript of a recent White House conversation between US President Donald Trump and advisors regarding the ban on American technology reaching Huawei.…

Seeing as India has launch sites nicely close to the equator, they should be interested India has decided to open its space industry to private companies.…

To boost the post-pandemic tax base Indonesia has released details of its tax on digital services, revealing it will kick in on July 1st at a rate of ten percent.…

To facilitate global payments, which is surely of interest to an investor in Alibaba Singapore’s state-owned investment firm Temasek holdings has joined the Facebook-led Libra not-a-cryptocurrency project.…

55 million users of $10 Bluetooth-enabled phones come into embrace of closed-source app India has delivered on its promise to adapt its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app for feature phones.…

Jeez, talk about bitter Setting aside the serious consequences of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic – loss of life, economic hardship, rising authoritarianism, and blissfully clear roads – there is a lesser but still troubling development.…

Export of semiconductors built using US tools to Chinese giant banned without a license The Trump administration on Friday officially clamped down on the use of US technology worldwide to manufacture chips for Huawei, cutting off the mega-corp from vital semiconductor supply chains.…

Lawsuit filed by shareholders who thought chip biz was onto something long-term rather than serving a fad Nvidia has been accused of under-reporting sales of graphics processors for cryptomining in an effort to distance itself from the volatile market.…

Programming language ready to leave the wilderness for mass adulation The Rust programming language celebrated its fifth birthday on Friday and says the future looks bright.…

Google's next, warns chief product officer Software AG is shunting its webMethods.io Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) at Microsoft's Azure cloud environment to snuggle up closer to the beast of Redmond.…

Don't worry, you can still microwave your dinner – even if this smells of ransomware An important middleman in the UK's electrical power grid has suffered a cyber attack, though the lights are still on across good old Blighty.…

Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came open to open source.…

Metropolitan Police's China-style surveillance runs up against reality Counter-coronavirus masks may thwart London police plans to deploy creepy facial-recognition cameras across the capital, senior managers have admitted.…

KCOM owner Macquarie was said to be among suitors Openreach boss Clive Selley has roundly dismissed a report out last night that BT was "in talks" with buyers to flog a multibillion-pound stake in its pipe-laying arm to investors.…

Advertise with us here, or browse the listings to see if a role would suit you Job Alert We've got more jobs for you to sift through this week as we continue our efforts to keep techies in work during these testing times.…

Hey, he's not causing any harm, unlike Norfolk's plague doctor creep While England may be awkwardly stumbling towards easing lockdown restrictions, the message to invading Anglo-Saxons is clear: one does not simply drive into Wales.…

We asked, you answered. Goodness, you answered The Register needed a Regism for our favourite blue screen merchant and we were heartened by the response. But as Connor MacLeod might say: "There can be only one."…

'People are going to lose a lot of time this year' The UK & Ireland SAP User Group has called on SAP to further extend its indirect software access licensing programme to give users time to respond to project timetables delayed by COVID-19.…

Back to the time when tape was king 2020 marks 60 years since ALGOL 60 laid the groundwork for a multitude of computer languages.…

Is that Jam on your XML? Or is it... oh no... Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a tube-sized edition of The Register's column of reader-spotted signage silage, with a Transport for London (TfL) screen displaying its undergarments for all to see.…

Plans new sub cable running from the UK to Spain on just-about the longest route possible Facebook has backed a new submarine cable that it says will circumnavigate Africa and deliver three times more capacity than is currently connected to the continent.…

Tender loving care UK housing association People for Places, which runs a property portfolio worth around £3bn, has awarded Salesforce a software licensing contract for CRM and job scheduling worth £21m.…

Essay on role of internet during plague times also suggests online schooling may not be the finished article TCP-IP-co-developer Vint Cerf, revered as a critical contributor to the foundations of the internet, has floated the notion that privacy legislation might hinder the development of a vaccination for the COVID-19 coronavirus.…

Fault finding fail via the friends and family helpline On Call For those gradually losing track of days, today is Friday. The weekend is upon us, and rather than the communal trip to the pub we might have enjoyed in months past, instead enjoy another refreshing On Call yarn from those poor devils on the frontline.…

And reckons it can crack 100kw per rack with help from Yorkshire company Iceotope Dielectric fluids conduct heat but don’t conduct electricity, which is why they’re a fine way to cool electronics.…

Satellite data shows two huge iron blobs tussling under the surface Boffins think they have figured out why the magnetic North Pole is heading to Russia at such a relatively speedy rate. It's all down to two gigantic magnetic blobs of liquid iron hidden underneath the Earth’s surface, apparently.…

Ticks plenty of diplomatic and supply chain security boxes with build in State tipped to be less MAGA-happy in 2020 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's biggest chip maker, will build a $12bn chip factory in Arizona in what the company is calling a "strong partnership" with the US government.…

Outsourcer Interserve holds a number of UK defense contracts, among others Britain's Ministry of Defence contractor Interserve has been hacked, reportedly leaking the details of up to 100,000 of past and current employees, including payment information and details of their next of kin.…