The Register

So future-proofing your handset might not have to break the bank The prices of 5G handsets are plummeting as demonstrated by the Realme X50m 5G, announced earlier today. This blower, from the sister company of industry giants OPPO and OnePlus, retails at ¥1,999 — about £230 — and comes with a surprisingly decent array of specs.…

WireGuard VPN, more Snap, and hints about a GUI for WSL Canonical has unleashed Ubuntu 20.04, the first LTS (Long term support) release since 18.04, Bionic Beaver, two years ago, and its CEO and Ubuntu desktop chief have spoken a bit about what's under the lid.…

Pressure after surrounding porous rock sopped up water was at a 50-year high before 2018 Kīlauea eruption For those of us who spent no small part of our childhoods avoiding certain bits of carpet because they were lava, boffins reckon they might have an idea why volcanoes erupt in the first place.…

Static analyzer proves its worth with discovery of null-pointer error A static analysis feature set to appear in GCC 10, which will catch common programming errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, has scored an early win – it snared an exploitable flaw in OpenSSL.…

Meanwhile, Chocolate Factory to donate its Istio toolkit to vendor-neutral open-source foundation Google's cloud-sitting service Anthos now officially interoperates with AWS, and Azure support is almost there.…

CEO, CFO take a 70% cut in light of performance, COVID-19 situation Capita has told investors that its CEO and CFO will see a 70 per cent reduction in the number of shares they were due to be awarded as part of their annual package in 2020.…

Extraordinary surveillance powers set to be injected into govt orgs It has been called the “most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy.” It has not once but twice been found to be illegal. It sparked the largest ever protest of senior lawyers who called it “not fit for purpose.”…

Focus, train and engage your remote teams to stay safe, gratis Promo As toilet paper stocks begin to recover, we all figure out the sweet spot for our government-mandated daily walk or trot, and fence off sections of our homes from our significant others for "me time," it’s time to begin the next phase of social isolation: adjusting sensibly to our environment with an actual plan.…

Named AF-SOUTH-1 and near some handy routes to Europe and West Africa AWS has opened its first region in Africa and named it AF-SOUTH-1.…

Still no definitive word on open sourcing or how it will solve Singapore's Apple problem Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said that the government he leads will never see the data on the nation’s imminent coronavirus-busting-and-contact-tracing app.…

'We’re proposing an entirely different approach' lead prof tells The Reg Light-propelled nanocardboard robots laden with sensors, flitting in the Martian atmosphere, could one day help us better understand the Red Planet.…

Users have migration work to do in the next month. Good thing nobody's busy right now, eh? IBM Cloud will lift and shift its GPU cluster from London to Frankfurt to avoid falling foul of GDPR post-Brexit.…

First-of-its-kind blueprint of materials and structures shared online Video The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has published the first-ever comprehensive geological map of the Moon’s surface.…

Apparently everyone's cyber-spooks are mad for this right now Hackers working on behalf of the Vietnamese government attempted to break into Chinese organisations heading up the country's coronavirus response, according to infosec outfit FireEye.…

Already time-shifting inside some bit barns with electricity-source-predict-ometer Google has revealed that it will try to shift work around its cloud to follow the availability of electricity generated by renewable resources.…

Senior execs, journos, managed security service providers among those targeted, we're told Apple has reportedly patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in iOS that are being exploited by what appears to be government-backed hackers to spy on high-value targets. Think senior executives, journalists, managed security service providers, and similar.…

Upstart will make 'targeted changes to how we operate' ... like, oh, say, making something that actually lives up to the hype? Analysis The bubble appears to have finally burst on augmented-reality darling Magic Leap, with its CEO announcing on Wednesday he was slashing its workforce in half.…

Online transaction biz intends to clarify its analytics harvesting habit Stripe CEO Patrick Collison insists his company's collection of e-commerce customers' site interactions, mouse metrics, and identifiers is solely for fighting fraud – though he allows that the payment platform's disclosure could be better.…

No dog-eared National Geographic for those left in the virtual waiting room Zoom's ongoing game of whack-a-mole with security bugs in its code continued today with the imminent emission of version 5, replete with support for 256-bit AES-GCM encryption.…

Need $10k off CRM giant? Read on, though it's not a silver bullet Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff must be in a giving mood. His company has just announced an application process and deadlines for $5m in grants to small businesses throughout the USA and globally to help firms with cashflow during the COVID-19 economic fallout.…

Unsatisfying AMA ends up mainly being about Teams Opinion A Microsoft 365 AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread yesterday failed to reveal much of substance about plans for the future or how to fix the platform's many issues.…

ESA chap on astronomy and demagoguery as SpaceX readies the next batch of satellites Interview SpaceX is due to fling another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit tonight. The Register spoke to ESA's Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration, Mark McCaughrean, about the night sky and interstellar specks on the windscreen.…

No plans to lay off staff or freeze recruitment, apparently Analysis On a call with financial analysts yesterday, the leadership team of Germany's enterprise software giant SAP was measured and rational - and quite possibly at odds with the rest of the world's response to the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Buttons hewn from battleship-grey stone the way they should be, right? From the department of Just Because You Could Doesn't Mean You Should comes the arrival of a CSS library to transport your HTML pages back to the world of Windows 98.…

Two-year deal penned by University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust A single-supplier tech framework with the University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust that is worth up to £1bn over a maximum of four years has gone to Dell Technologies.…

Formal attire, no 'BBC Dad' episodes, and absolutely no funky backgrounds Britain's House of Commons' embrace of "hybrid scrutiny" sessions represents the biggest change in its Parliamentary protocol in generations. But guidelines released shortly after the measure was approved show no signs of standards slipping, with members expected to dress smartly and behave with the, er, usual decorum.…

Payment page malware infection live for most of March, snares 20k punters British hardware chain Robert Dyas' website has been hit by credit-card stealing malware that siphoned off customers' payment details including the long card number, expiry date and security (CVV) code.…

'Many customer workloads perform better on Amazon Linux 2' firm claims, but where is the source? Amazon Web Services has pushed out a "Service Ready" software certification program for its homegrown Linux 2 distribution, working with over 20 firms including Chef, Datadog, DataStax, Hashicop, Kong, New Relic, Snyk, Tableau and Trend Micro.…

Bring the eye bleach – humans are weird Before "The Event", aesthetes occasionally visited museums as a low-cost way to ingest some culture. Those vaults of bygone curios still exist, and their staff have had an ingenious idea in this age of isolation – public Twitter throwdowns over which establishment has the best exhibit on various themes.…

Yeah, about that contract you signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement... Microsoft-owned code shack, GitHub, wrung its hands at last night's news that US President Trump intends to temporarily halt immigration, unfortunately forgetting that the internet never ever forgets.…

Decrypted configuration bitstream can be siphoned from chips via side-channel flaw A newly disclosed vulnerability in older Xilinx FPGAs can be exploited to simplify the process of extracting and decrypting the encrypted bitstreams used to configure the chips.…

Pandemc lockdowns forces new measures on crucial crypto process than underpins world's DNS IANA – the body that oversees the internet's IP addresses and domain names – must think it's under a curse in its quest to protect the 'net. Last time it was a malfunctioning safe that blocked its important work to keep the global network glued together.…

A shift in badness doesn't mean more badness overall, says Secureworks Though the number of COVID-19-themed scams has exploded since the start of this year, infosec outfit Secureworks reckons that overall online criminality has remained fairly steady.…

Oslo outfit also unveils first stable release for Android Chromium-based browser maker Vivaldi might have stirred a hornets' nest thanks to inbuilt ad blocking for both its desktop and mobile incarnations of version 3.0.…

What? Why? This one’s all about an eleven-month window of client complications VMware has pointed out that even if you don’t want to move to a newer version of vCenter, Adobe may have already effectively made the decision for you.…

Rebrand Field Book reveals it's versatile as well as 'accelerate' and 'excel' Logowatch Next.js sponsor Zeit has daringly stroked itself with the rebrando-brush and emerged as Vercel following the receipt of $21m in venture capital funding.…

Borg SD-WANS can now drive Chocolate Factory virty cloud networks and the workloads therein Cisco will extend its SD-WAN service into Google's Cloud.…

Get ahead of the trend: Home is the new office Promo The era of the daily commute and the nine-to-five workday at the office is coming to an end. More organisations than ever before have been forced to adopt part- or full-time remote working – and the ongoing global health crisis is swiftly completing the transformation.…

Liverpool followers were Kryptonite for Must Always Walk Alone Man, Dr Disinfector and the rest of the Virus Vanguard Singapore has grounded a superhero squad intended to educate its population about staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because the Lycra-clad creations offended fans of Liverpool Football Club.…

WhatsApp gets a leg-up into m-commerce Facebook has announced a US$5.7bn investment in Jio, India's biggest mobile telco.…

Fine, fine, we'll ban whatever the government says is illegal, just give us back access, says US giant Facebook has given in to Vietnamese government demands, and agreed to remove any content considered “anti-state” after telcos in the nation reportedly cut off access to the social network's systems.…

And starts deploying TLS1.3 to make streams faster and more secure Netflix has released its Q1 FY20 results and revealed some unusual coronavirus impacts.…

Workers complain to The Register of unnecessary COVID-19 risk US telco Charter Communications is facing an investigation from the New York State Attorney General for potentially putting employees at unnecessary risk during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.…

Version 2.7.18 is the last official Python 2 release, but it'll live on The final official release of Python 2 arrived on Tuesday, marking the end of two decades of work.…

When science fact is better than science fiction Gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes with different masses – the heftier one being 30 solar masses and its companion being just eight – have been observed for the first time.…

It's all about the content. And where you can – and can't – get it Nvidia’s GeForce game-streaming service has lost four big-name game publishers, with Xbox Games Studios, Warner Bros, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment pulling their titles by the end of the week.…

IT giant admits it made 'a process error, improper response' to flaw finder IBM has acknowledged that it mishandled a bug report that identified four vulnerabilities in its enterprise security software, and plans to issue an advisory.…

How long till this gets hacked? The House of Commons today approved so-called "hybrid sessions" – MPs participating in Parliament in person and via video conferencing – marking arguably the biggest change in British parliamentary procedure in centuries.…

It’s time to strengthen your enterprise apps with the help of Nutanix Webcast You are still trying to decide whether public cloud computing is right or wrong for you. Maybe the snag is regulation, maybe it's GDPR, maybe you fear the loss of control and ballooning management costs, or maybe your applications just work better on your IT infrastructure.…

Cash-flingers see dollars through a Blue Prism Purveyor of software robots, Blue Prism, has hired a new CEO and bagged £100m in funding, proof of market confidence in the technology concept in the face of strong economic headwinds.…