The Register

Seeing as finance is Hong Kong's thing and that industry needs lots of security kit, this could be scary US President Trump has signed an order to end Hong Kong's special status, meaning that restrictions on high-tech exports to mainland China now apply to the Special Administrative Region as well.…

Spoiler alert: Cable companies are ripping Americans off Proposed changes to the way the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) measures broadband availability across America can’t come soon enough – as the state of Georgia has made plain.…

You'll want to patch that – and all these other bugs fixed by Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, VMware, SAP, Google Mega Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday patched a wormable hole in its Windows Server software that can be exploited remotely to completely commandeer the machine without any authorization. It was one of hundreds of security bugs squashed today by Redmond along with Oracle, Adobe, VMware, SAP and Google.…

When two don't become one A rogue white dwarf star hurtling through the Milky Way may have freed itself from a binary system after it partially exploded as a supernova more than 40 million years ago.…

EU antitrust folks give themselves two weeks to think about it Google has pinky-promised not to pull user health data from Fitbit devices into its monster ad empire if the European Union approves its planned $2.1bn acquisition.…

Funnily enough, triggering a brain drain and denting the economy isn't such a great vote winner The Trump administration today scrapped its new rule that would have forced up to a million foreign students to leave the United States if their universities didn’t offer at least some in-person tuition mid-pandemic.…

10 out of 10: Great in a test score, less good when it's for the severity of a flaw SAP customers should update their installations to close a security vulnerability that can be exploited to commandeer the software by anyone who can reach it.…

Redmond's Azure-based system pals up with virty dinosaur Microsoft has agreed to make Citrix a "a preferred digital workspace solution" for its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), part of its Microsoft 365 suite.…

Brit firm inks deal with Best Buy in US as it eyes government tenders abroad UK modular PC flinger Kano has cast its ambitions overseas as well as at home for its updated edutech-flavoured Kano Windows 10 PC, out today along with a pile of new buildable accessories.…

Finnish comms biz says it's ready to go on a million radios already, despite what outgoing CEO said previously Nokia will allow telcos to repurpose existing 4G/LTE radios to support 5G, via an easily-deployed software update. Should we get our hopes up for near-ubiquitous fast mobile internet? Not if previous comments by the company's outgoing CEO are to be believed.…

Query data in one cloud and export the results to another Google's virtual Cloud Next event has kicked off with the introduction of BigQuery Omni, letting customers extend the tentacles of the analytics service to probe data across Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure.…

Country to be hit with £2bn cost, massive tech delay after firm 'materially compromised' by US's latest sanctions D-day has finally arrived for Huawei in Britain: UK.gov will outlaw the purchase of Huawei gear to build 5G networks by the end of this year, and from 2027 the country's mobile networks must eradicate the Chinese vendor's kit from their 5G infrastructure.…

Insider suggests company doesn't charge enough in royalties to satisfy Japanese giant Troubled Japanese conglomerate SoftBank is reportedly exploring the possibility of offloading Arm Holdings, the iconic British chip designer acquired in 2016 for £23.4bn (or $32bn at historic exchange rates).…

Chartered Institute of Information Security finds many overworked, under-resourced, stressed Almost one in five infosec pros have quit a job due to overwork or burnout caused by the constant pressure of keeping things safe and doing so without the resources to counter ever-evolving threats.…

A little something to keep determined snoopers out, in theory Updated Google Cloud will today announce the availability, as a beta, so-called Confidential Virtual Machines that feature on-the-fly RAM encryption using per-VM keys.…

What’s that smell? It could be Oh So Orange, Clearly White or Almost Black Google has revealed it employs people to invent colours and give them silly names, too.…

Also: Hope Probe hopes for lift-off, Virgin teases SpaceShipTwo interior, Ariane 6 slips In brief SpaceX's 10th Starlink mission remained resolutely welded to the launchpad over the weekend as the company decided to stand down from a 11 July launch attempt in order to "allow more time for checkouts".…

Counterfeit and repurposed semiconductors still a problem If you're looking for cheap electronic sensors, the internet has lots of possibilities, but buyer beware: they aren't always exactly legit.…

From happy hour to zappy power As if a few volts were enough to get between a steaming Cornishman and his pint, a pub near the UK pirate haven of Penzance has run an electric fence along the bar to enforce social distancing. And yes, it can be turned on.…

'Project Ubin' might be faster and cheaper than current tools, even for central banks Singapore’s experimental digital-ledger-powered payments service has proven itself ready to handle actual transactions in multiple currencies, according to the organisations involved in its final tests.…

You wanted an android butler? Well, first it's gotta learn to hold a wire, then we can talk about folding sheets Video An MIT team has built a robot that can plug cables into jacks.…

Interested in Helm, service meshes and what’s next for DevOps? Grab your ticket now – there's still time Event Mid-July is almost here, and with it the first online edition of our excellent Continuous Lifecycle London conference.…

13 percent growth ain’t bad, but the Chinese giant has previously done better Huawei has posted its results for the first half of 2020 and the news is mixed.…

Bags, soap, cosmetics covered, Trump admin backs away from President’s threatened wine levy America is moving ahead with massive 25 per cent tariffs on French products in retaliation for the Euro nation approving a new digital tax aimed squarely at tech giants like Google and Facebook.…

Your order [Ref #RYUGU_REGOLITH | Picked up by probe #HAYABYUSA2] has shipped! The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that its attempt to bring a chunk of asteroid back to Earth will touch down in December.…

Minister declares special economic zones are open to even China and Russian money so long as they do something digital or medical Pakistan has become the latest Asian nation to declare it will roll out the welcome mat for foreign investors who want to do something to do with technology on its soil.…

Localisation and transformation plan wins prime ministerial approval, but as usual has as much upside for Google as for its generous hosts Google has unveiled a plan to invest $10bn in India over the next five to seven years.…

Crooks made off with everything needed for ID theft Exclusive Hackers infiltrated Collabera, siphoned off at least some employees' personal information, and infected the US-based IT consultancy giant's systems with ransomware.…

Microsoft, Google, Facebook and pals weigh in on F-1, M-1 visa lawsuit Big Tech has thrown its support behind a legal challenge to a Trump administration rule that will force foreign students to leave the US if their university courses are online-only amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

Yevgeniy Nikulin faces up to 10 years in a US cooler The Russian hacker accused of raiding LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring, and obtaining data on 213 million user accounts, has been found guilty.…

Trio quits immediately, workers under investigation Three senior Ubisoft execs quit over the weekend amid claims of widespread sexual harassment within the video-game giant's Canadian wing.…

The only winning move is... not to play? Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations.…

More native applications we smoke, yo, our rep gets bigger Microsoft and Google have been working together to help make Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) easier to publish, in the hope that web apps will one day compete with native apps on mobile devices.…

Plus: Teams goes Nationwide and gains new hardware, VS Code updates In brief While many fleshbags won't trouble the inside of an aircraft this summer, Microsoft has thrown those on unplanned staycations a bone with the confirmed release date for its latest Flight Simulator: 18 August.…

CHIEF concerns for customs tech haven't gone away.... The UK government says it has earmarked £115m in spending for new IT systems to help with the management of customs arrangements and border data after the Brexit transition period comes to a close at year end.…

Still won't be as big as Texas Instruments Analog Devices has confirmed an intent to buy rival Maxim Integrated, saying it'll fork out a whopping $20.9bn in an all-stock deal.…

Torvalds worries about compiler bugs: 'Very rare, but incredibly hard to debug' Rust language team lead Josh Triplett has promised to support its use in the Linux kernel, saying: "I'd be happy to have the Linux kernel feeding into Rust language development priorities. If building Rustic interfaces within the kernel requires some additional language features, we should see what enhancements to the language would best serve those requirements."…

Plus: IB students kick up a stink over algorithm grading, and more In brief A man was charged after he was mistakenly identified as a thief by facial-recognition software used by the Detroit Police Department.…

To SD or not SD-WAN is the question? Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is to wolf down Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) outfit Silver Peak for $925m.…

Company 'aware and reviewing' the lawsuit, not your clipboard. Honest Microsoft's social-media-for-suits tentacle, LinkedIn, has attracted legal fire for allegedly peering at the clipboard of iOS devices.…

Hope is to ease procurement while saving cash University of Manchester has dished out a contract worth up to £50m to a handful of integrators to provision cloud services from the big three providers and build a tool for "consolidated and managed billing".…

There's a 0.1mm tolerance and OS has built-in tools for managing peep hole If you've ever been to a tech trade show, chances are you willingly exchanged personal details for a webcam cover. The plastic strips are loved by cheapskate vendors everywhere, but a new advisory from Apple warns against leaving them attached while closing your MacBook lest it utterly bugger your display.…

Plus: Kazakh man charged with corporate mega-hack, and more In brief With world+dog on Zoom these days, news of a zero-day attack against the videoconferencing app would cause a stir, but relax – it's only if you're on Windows 7 or older.…

Redmond will retain stake in popular chatbot service Microsoft has kicked a five-year-old out onto the cold, hard Chinese streets by spinning off its Xiaobing (or Xiaoice) business.…

Plus: New availability report highlights database issues GitHub marked the start of the week with more than four hours of downtime, as GitHub Issues, Actions, Pages, Packages and API requests all reported "degraded performance."…

(No don't. Don't do that. - Ed) Technology might be transient, but paint on bricks is forever Bork!Bork!Bork! In the battle of new versus old in today's example of signage silage, the only winner appears to be Bork.…

'Higher fidelity local debugging experience' than debugging on Windows and deploying to Linux Hands On Microsoft has pushed out an extension for Visual Studio 2019 that lets developers run and debug a .NET Core application on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2).…

Don't even get started on 2021.... please In a world full of surprises where everything subject to change based on humanity’s ability to combat an invisible killer, Gartner has calculated IT spending will crash this year and experience a “swoop” recovery next.…

Maybe Donald isn’t in love with Vlad after all – but he did just give Russia attribution and maybe a peek at tradecraft US president Donald Trump has revealed that in 2018 he authorized an attack on suspected-to-be-state-sponsored Russian internet trolls intent on disrupting the electoral process during Congressional elections.…

Confessions of a student Who, Me? Bid a fond farewell to the weekend and buckle up for the new week with a slightly NSFW example of the breed we like to call Who, Me?…