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In tech and everything else needed in a post-COVID-19 economy Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modhi has signalled that the nation intends to become self-reliant in as many industries as possible and other officials have already started saying that includes tech.…

Oh OK, so now we know who to blame for all this mess on Earth Potentially helping to answer the question of how did we all get here, scientists have found evidence of ideal conditions for the formation of microbial life on Earth – sodium-rich, alkaline fluids present in the early Solar System.…

CEO says it’s to stop fraud and the public seems to be on his side Gaming hardware vendor Razer has offered up to five million free face masks to Singaporeans – if they sign up for its payment system.…

Nothing too scary. Plus updates from SAP, Adobe, VMware The May edition of Patch Tuesday landed this week. And there are scores of security fixes to install.…

‘This workload will self-destruct in 30 seconds’ - now with variable pricing Microsoft’s Azure cloud has started to offer Spot VMs, the pay-what-you’re-willing-to cloudy servers that hyperscalers use to sell off their unused capacity.…

Sure, they should have got more, but let’s not get greedy here The lawyers who successfully sued Facebook for breaking Illinois’s biometric privacy law on behalf of citizens in the US state have hailed the “superb result” that will see them receive a quarter of the settlement.…

As opposition MP criticises slow and incomplete source code release, saying 'Public health messaging shouldn't require citizens to follow GitHub forks' The legislation underpinning Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app makes it possible to demand that visitors to private homes install the app before entry.…

Experienced ‘degraded performance’ earlier in the day, now seems to just be TITSUP Updated Slack is down – in the middle of a pandemic during which millions are working from home and reliant on collaboration tools.…

Social isolation, meet real estate, hardware, HR savings Twitter on Tuesday said employees who are able to work from home can "continue to do so forever," a policy change that suggests the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, and resulting stay-at-home orders, may have a lasting impact on corporate work practices.…

What was really behind Tesla CEO's reopening of factory while daring cops to arrest him? On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dared the authorities in Alameda, where his factory is based, to arrest him for breaking coronavirus lockdown edicts by restarting production in the California county. We're still waiting for the cuffs to come out.…

Free-as-in-speech software is wildly popular – keeping libraries, components up to date is not Ninety-one per cent of commercial applications include outdated or abandoned open source components, underscoring the potential vulnerability of organizations using untended code, according to a software review.…

Here's how you might go about building an infrastructure for modern workloads Comment Data storage is one of the most complex areas of IT infrastructure, as it needs to fit in with a range of conflicting requirements. Storage architectures have to be fast enough to meet the demands of users and applications, but without breaking the budget. They must deliver enough capacity to meet ever growing volumes of data while being reliable.…

Take care what data you enter into apps, it may be stored insecurely Security researchers at Comparitech have reported that an estimated 24,000 Android apps are leaking user data because of misconfigured Firebase databases.…

Flagship killer at a lower cost, though €500+ isn't exactly budget Xiaomi has lifted the lid on the much-anticipated successor to 2018's Pocophone F1 flagship killer: the Poco F2 Pro. The handset, which starts at €500, packs Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragon 865 platform and a 64MP quad-camera setup.…

Now out of preview and optimised for 8 more domains The concept behind Kendra, the enterprise search service that Amazon Web Services made generally available today, is pretty simple.…

That discussion you were dreading has to happen sometime As part of the rebranding exercise that saw Office 365 morph into Microsoft 365, the Windows giant has unveiled its new Family Safety app. Kind of.…

Too lazy to type out Python? But not too tight to pay $20 a month? Kite will today launch a subscription-based coding assistant that tries to help programmers craft stuff quickly and efficiently.…

Didn't a soft drinks company try a similar stunt a few years ago? Microsoft has flung open the doors on its latest crack at Facebook-for-suits with a "New" Yammer.…

Also: China trumpets the return of its new capsule and Cygnus has left the station Roundup Welcome to your weekly reminder that space is both expensive and difficult in The Register's roundup of all things rockety.…

'An entire database can be in one rack' DataStax, the lead vendor behind open-source DBMS Apache Cassandra, is rolling out a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) version of its wares, while the Cassandra-emulating ScyllaDB has pushed out its own upgrade to compete with DynamoDB, the AWS-native version of the same database.…

'The pandemic hasn't changed these trends: it has accelerated them' Webcams – like toilet paper and disinfectant wipes – have become an increasingly scarce commodity since the start of the pandemic, with analysts at the NPD Group reporting an almost-threefold increase in sales for the first three weeks of March.…

Coronavirus focused minds on desktop kit, networking, security, cloud, Register reader survey finds Seven in ten IT pros and executives surveyed by The Register told us they, on average, maintained or increased their technology spending amid the coronavirus pandemic. Those polled also, overall, named Microsoft as their most valued vendor, followed by Zoom, Google, and Amazon Web Services.…

Bye-bye US, bonjour Brussels The Eclipse Foundation today unveiled plans to make itself a little more European with a jump into Brussels.…

And smiles as its tech services industries do swimmingly in Q1 Taiwan has let it be known it’s attracted a big new investment from Apple.…

We like finding non-Remond alternatives, but the free options make it tough for commercial operations SoftMaker's Office 2021 – a cross-platform office suite that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux – has hit public beta.…

Virtzilla prepares to re-open some offices next week for staff who are willing to leave home VMware has emerged as a player in coronavirus contact-tracing.…

Good luck fishing all that out of the sky Russian rocket tanks used to launch a radio telescope have broken up into 65 chunks, littering Earth’s orbit with debris.…

Infraspace Cloud encrypts, stores and protects to mitigate high-end risk for high-end apps Promo It feels like every article starts with something along the lines of "now we’re all working remotely" but, honestly, when the shoe fits...…

Eight weeks to turn ‘helping you enable remote work with Office 365 at this difficult time’ into cash Organisations that took up Microsoft’s offer of a free six-month Office 365 trial to help them enable remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic are about to see the other side of that offer.…

Cart, meet horse, and you can both worry about 180-day data retention India's government has released the protocol for using data gathered by its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app, weeks after its April 2nd release and after it was downloaded almost 100 million times.…

Xeon, shmeon: Netflix loves ‘em and AWS has more instance types using it coming soon Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch for a new instance type powered by the second generation of its custom Arm CPUs – the Graviton2.…

Miscreants threaten to leak 756GB of allegedly stolen paperwork Hackers are threatening to release 756GB of A-list celebs' contracts, recording deals, and other personal info allegedly stolen from a New York law firm.…

Damien Patton 'deeply ashamed' of drive-by synagogue shooting The CEO of surveillance AI upstart Banjo, Damien Patton, has quit the company he founded following revelations he was involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1990s and participated in the shooting of a synagogue.…

Full mitigation is buy a newer computer – or don't use suspend-to-RAM It's possible to extract data from a computer via its Thunderbolt port – once you've got the case off, plugged in a flash programmer, and reprogrammed the controller's firmware to grant access.…

Elementary, my dear Holmes Federal prosecutors have filed a superseding indictment against the CEO and COO of now-defunct blood-testing company Theranos, piling on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and forfeiture.…

If push comes to shove, PC giant could get 0.2% on the dollar in recompense Quanta Storage has blamed the coronavirus pandemic for failing to hand over the $439m it owes HP.…

Revenue shortfall fears have led a third of polled businesses to shed workers More than a third of businesses in France, Germany, the UK, and the US have laid off or furloughed IT staff based on coronavirus cost concerns, says private equity biz, and Scottish satellite slingers, Leonne International.…

Jeez, no need to be so salty Liquid Martian brines may be more common than once thought, but they are unlikely to play host to anything that looks like life as we know it, a paper in Nature Astronomy has found.…

Aims to head off supply chain issues from dependence on Asian plants Analysis The US is reportedly in talks with Intel and TSMC to develop new chip factories on home soil due to supply chain concerns as well as the geopolitical threat posed by China.…

768G SoC supports upgradeable drivers, claims 15% performance boost Gaming phones are an increasingly lucrative niche within the smartphone market, particularly in Asia, where vendors like Xiaomi's Black Shark, ZTE's Nubia, and Asus all vie for dominance. Catering to this segment is Qualcomm, which today rolled out the Snapdragon 768G platform.…

But you wanted floating windows? Sorry, too hard The Visual Studio Code team has released version 1.45 and is beginning to implement new features including binary custom editors for content such as images or audio files, as well as Notebook functionality, along the lines of Jupyter notebooks.…

Plus: Waymo to resume self-driving car tests amid pandemic, and more Roundup Let's get stuck into another roundup of AI news beyond what we've already reported.…

Plus: From the creator of axed Wunderlist, presenting... Superlist Roundup It's farewell to an old friend and hello to a fresh build of Windows 10 in this week's rundown of news from Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington.…

Yet again, science reality is better than science fiction The giant hexagon-shaped storm raging atop Saturn’s North Pole is made out of frozen hydrocarbon ice suspended in seven hazy layers stacked on top of one another, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Friday.…

And the banker never wears a mac / In the pouring rain / Very strange Perhaps with an eye on its own well-documented Reply-All woes, Microsoft has slipped a little mail storm protection into Office 365.…

Don't phunk with my smart home Rapper Will.i.am's IoT startup Wink will be pivoting to a subscription model this week after the shocking realisation that servers cost money to run.…

Plus: Cognizant cognisant of whopping $70m in damage, malware creeps hit hospital firm, phishing campaigns, and much more Roundup It has been a full week in infosec news. Here are a few things you should know about, beyond what we've already covered.…

So no one told you life was gonna be this way Google's Go programming language, all but disallowed by the web giant's own Fuchsia team for its excessive memory consumption, tops developers' to-do lists. That's according to a survey by tech talent platform HackerEarth.…

Hundreds to be forced out of the door into COVID-19-ravaged jobs market IBM has slammed shut the window of opportunity for Global Technology Services (GTS) staff to put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, meaning a requisite number will now be forcibly ejected.…

Knowing me Big Red, knowing you, Norwich authorities: Aha? Aha. Norfolk County Council, the UK local government authority based in Norwich, has awarded contracts for an organisation-wide ERP upgrade to Oracle and "service partner" Insight Direct.…