The Register

Nice to see Jeff Bezos catching a break Sure, the planet may be in the sort of crisis not seen in over a century, but it is a great time to be Amazon.…

San Francisco Airport websites hacked, VMware patches emitted, etc Roundup We're one week further along, and we hope everyone is well out there. Time for another security roundup amid the coronavirus lockdown.…

Including: Yes, that nightmare smart toilet that photographs you mid... er, process Roundup Here's your latest summary of recent machine-learning developments.…

Just in case any one else decides to do a Burr or Feinstein Well, if Congress won't do it, we, the geek people, will have to instead, it seems.…

Giving students network messaging in the '90s. What could possibly go wrong? MY EYES! Who, Me? Wipe that chocolate off your face and settle in for another story from the archives of The Register's Who, Me? collection of reader confessions.…

To offer social distancing advice when people head out to play on a looming long weekend Taiwan has floated the idea of adapting its traffic-monitoring app into a “don’t-go-there-you-won’t-be-able-to-social-distance-app.”…

As Linus Torvalds relieves the USA of his favorite Finnish Easter dessert Linus Torvalds’ has announced version 5.7rc1 of the Linux kernel, and a shout-out from the Linux kernel technical advisory board in case any maintainers have hit coronavirus-related complications.…

Check out this plucky Euro-Japanese spacecraft and its seven-year trip to innermost planet BepiColombo, the first European-Japanese spacecraft to hopefully orbit Mercury, has swung by Earth for its first gravitational assist maneuver in its seven-year journey to the innermost planet of our Solar System.…

A liquid-oxygen tank, 65 volts across a 28-volt thermostat, and a two-inch tumble all led to this 'successful failure' Part one Apollo 13 was launched 50 years ago today. Now regarded as a "successful failure," the story of the aborted Moon landing began years earlier, with the design of mankind's then most advanced spacecraft.…

Paradoxical contract that isn't a contract fails to satisfy judge Updated IBM's practice of promising its sales reps commission rates it can lower at any time, particularly after a sale is finally inked, may soon face a jury.…

US govt-funded outfit hopes to kill off web quackery that puts us all at risk Machine-learning software to snare scammers hawking fake COVID-19 test kits on social media is being built by a tiny startup funded by the US National Institutes of Health.…

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying we all need it Reader survey Network security: love it or hate it, there’s no denying we all need it.…

In which case, it'll do The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. What a time to be childless, huh? You young, care-free things have stacks of box sets and video games to plough through while we're all stuck indoors fearing for our lives and those of our loved ones. Unfortunately, my lockdown has been busier than usual as childcare is closed too, which is why we're weeks late. But hey! A long weekend! Maybe it's the perfect time to check out Doom Eternal.…

Only when the big hand reaches the little hand will the Amiga copy those files On Call Welcome to an unusual entry in The Register's On Call, where an Amiga mystery is never fully explained after the call for help is issued. Can you solve the mystery?…

Copying article snippets could get costly, if web giant doesn't ditch them altogether The French Competition Authority (FCA) has told Google to negotiate with French news companies to determine fees due for the re-use their content.…

Anti-mortar system specs, legal paperwork, payment forms, and more, dumped online from infected PCs Internal confidential documents belonging to some of the largest aerospace companies in the world have been stolen from an industrial contractor and leaked online.…

Has anyone told the Chinese? Quantum computers pose an "urgent but manageable" threat to the security of modern communications systems, according to a report published Thursday by influential US RAND Corporation.…

Secure messaging app says it could not continue operations in America under proposed law Secure messaging app developer Signal says its US operation hangs in the balance due to a proposed law in America.…

First quarter started off so well... ERP giant SAP has cut its annual revenue estimates by as much as €1.9bn in the face of COVID-19 disruption which saw a "significant amount of new business" postponed in the first quarter.…

Chocolate Factory's AI call assistant will soon be getting confused by Brit idioms at the worst time possible Almost one year after its flashy launch at Google I/O, the Chocolate Factory's AI call assistant, Google Duplex, is coming to the UK.…

Bezos cloud crew chops 'bells and whistles' in favour of native support, adds shared storage Amazon Web Services has launched Fargate 1.4, an update to its serverless container platform that adds support for shared Elastic File System storage and removes use of Docker Engine.…

Find out how to widen your cloud options while keeping control Webcast While it’s trendy to go entirely off-premises and hybridize your cloud, many will nod and smile at the suggestion while having no intention of actually doing it.…

And 'difficult to understand, hard to debug' PipelineResources have been deprecated Tekton Pipelines, the major component in an open-source project for CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) on Kubernetes, has reached the milestone of beta status.…

That's a retirement day present he won't forget An elderly and reluctant Frenchman was ejected from a French Air Force fighter during a retirement day jolly – and narrowly missed taking the pilot with him, an investigation report littered with unintentional howlers has revealed.…

Spoiler: It found a tyre pressure sensor and a Wi-Fi password Modern connected cars contain security threats, consumer org Which? has said after commissioning analyses of two models, a Ford and a Volkswagen.…

Graph graph graph egg and graph; graph graph graph graph graph graph baked beans graph graph graph Graph database slinger Neo4j is putting out a suite of tools aimed at helping data scientists be more productive using graph analytics techniques.…

Employees allege offshoring was reason behind next-day sacking of 140 staff A key maker of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors for self-driving cars unlawfully terminated more than 140 of its employees to shift jobs offshore, a lawsuit claims.…

No Neo in 2020? Never mind, The Matrix 4 is out in 2021 Microsoft emitted a fresh version of Windows 10 last night, featuring fun for Linux fans, as mutterings intensified over hardware delays.…

Plus, what’s big tech doing to help? Not much it seems, Bill Gates excepted Comment With the rate of deaths from COVID-19 beginning to decline in Europe, the focus has turned to how to manage virus spread once lockdown orders are lifted. The proposed solutions say a lot about the planet's cultures.…

Gartner predicts 2020 slump, but it'd be worse were it not for NAND flash Gartner, tech's equivalent of Mystic Meg, has predicted that the semiconductor sector will struggle in 2020, thanks to everyone's least-favourite pathogen: the novel coronavirus discovered late last year. Worldwide revenue will decline 0.9 per cent year-on-year to $415.4bn. That's a revision on previous forecasts, which expected 12.5 per cent growth.…

A cunning cut won't save this bit of borkery Bork!Bork!Bork! While computers falling over in public may once have been a thing to be mocked, now they are reminders of days gone by and sometimes, just sometimes, have a message for the future.…

Thou shalt respect the Osman and keep your distance, rebels An American local council has dared to challenge the almighty Vulture Central Standards Soviet by proposing alligators as a standard unit of measure for social distancing during the coronavirus lockdown.…

This is what comes of mixing the International Space Station, a relationship breakdown, and banking records A case of alleged low-orbit internet banking fraud has taken another twist, with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas filing an indictment in which it claimed the complainant in the case had lied.…

Brit cops turn to drones, now mobile tools to make everyone’s lives a misery There's a reason why the UK doesn't have a mandatory national ID card despite numerous efforts by the authorities to impose one: it's because Brits can't stand the use of petty power.…

Western Australia is enforcing internal borders now The Australian State of Western Australia has detailed the surveillance technology it will use to track residents during the coronavirus crisis.…

You want this service at Cloudflare's scale? Then maybe you might want to pay for it Cloudflare on Wednesday said it is ditching Google's reCAPTCHA bot detector for a similar service called hCaptcha out of concerns about privacy and availability, but mostly cost.…

Alternative headline: Here's a bug report for cosmology The universe may not be expanding at the same rate in all directions according to a study backed by the European Space Agency – a possibility that has left cosmologists asking themselves some serious questions.…

Employee cuffed after forged contracts and dodgy documents discovered China's biggest e-learning company has admitted inflating its sales figures.…

Only in one AZ of one region, but it's been working to add more hosts for two weeks and counting VMware’s cloudy “capacity constraint” incident has stretched into a third week.…

Except you in Europe and UK, you still get to control over analytics fuel On Wednesday, Twitter users, except those in Europe and the UK, lost the ability to prevent the micro-blogging biz from sharing mobile ad measurement data with its analytics and advertising partners.…

Problems pile up for grounded craft Boeing is working on software patches for two bugs in its infamous 737 Max's flight controller – one that causes the autopilot to drop out during final approach, the other a loss of control and subsequent nosedive mid-flight.…

Aims to limit recessionary impacts, help global pandemic response First data was the new oil, then Google said data is more like sunlight. A flood of organisations proposing big data insight into the COVID-19 response would have anyone believe it is the new medicine.…

Now focused on developers, firm wants its tools to be more universally useful. Keep it light(weight), though Docker has published the Compose specification, used for defining its own multi-container applications, and is asking contributors to help with its maintenance and evolution.…

Former Facebook, Yahoo! CSO to advise CEO after weeks of soaring popularity and scrutiny Video-conferencing company du jour Zoom is desperately trying to head off a mass exodus of users by announcing a new advisory board – and hiring former Facebook and Yahoo! CSO Alex Stamos as a troubleshooter.…

Big words from co-CEO after Larry Ellison ribs vendor during earnings call Death, taxes and vendor feuds seem the only certainties to which the disheartened technology careerist can cling in these troubled times.…

'They have not reported an objective analysis' – now that's a zinger A newly published study into the start date for the Earth's magnetic field has provoked claims of foul play among rival academics.…

New leasing and rental options rolled out to tempt buyers stuck in a rut The bank of Hewlett Packard Enterprise - aka its Financial Services arm - is creating a Payment Relief Programme (PRP) to tempt tech buyers to refresh their infrastructure amid a global pandemic and pay later.…

Also: Interim CEO Mitchell Baker drops the 'interim' part Mozilla has squeezed out version 75 of the Firefox browser, crediting "empathy" in its systems for an ability to continue emissions even as Microsoft and Google hit the pause button on their Chromium-based apps.…

We'll have to wait until the US wakes up before we can answer that one In an impressively frank postmortem, Microsoft has admitted that at least part of its organisation was asleep at the wheel in a very real sense while its European DevOps tooling tottered.…

We've got just a few Qs about automation, storage, AI Reader survey Like other parts of your business, the IT team is beginning to suffer as key people fall sick or need to self-isolate. At the same time, they have the added pressure of supporting many more users working from home, which has dramatically changed some established internal service dynamics.…