The Register

Also: Money for Excel hits US, Teams readies new toys for next academic year, and more Roundup As Microsoft continues to fling fixes at the world and its dog, the firm has also expanded Teams grid to allow teachers to gaze upon 49 little faces and despair as well as tweaking Edge to provide, er, heaps better memory munching.…

Somebody else will have to provide the rocket, though Virgin Galactic, the company that has yet to send a paying passenger on a sub-orbital lob, let alone trouble anything more challenging, has opened the door to "Private Orbital Spaceflight".…

We'll find out as WWDC rolls on WWDC Apple will confirm its transition to Arm this week at the virtual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says Ming-Chi Kuo – the analyst widely regarded to be the most accurate when it comes to Cupertino's movements.…

Plus: Nigeria-based entrepreneur accused of fraud, and more Roundup It was another week of furious firefighting in the security space, including the curious tale of a Forbes "most promising" entrepreneur indicted over alleged phishing attacks, new privacy laws in the US, software flaws and more.…

10% of the world's pagers are in use by Britain's health service The digital arm of England's health service, NHSX, is tendering for a replacement to ageing pager technologies in an effort to modernise hospital communications systems.…

Plus: AI for the benefit of humankind group loses a member and more Roundup Windows fans can finally train and run their own machine learning models off Radeon and Ryzen GPUs in their boxes, computer vision gets better at filling in the blanks and more in this week's look at movements in AI and machine learning.…

And there's £6m British pounds for the biz that can do it University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in the UK is desperately seeking to replace a mishmash of finance and warehouse management software with an integrated ERP system in a tender worth up to £6m.…

Shipments soared 86% in Q1, 200 million expected to be shifted this year Despite the economic effects of the pandemic, true wireless stereo (TWS) devices like earbuds, headphones and speakers have proved robust, with Q1 global shipments up 86 per cent year-on-year to 43.8 million.…

VxRail gets rugged version, dalliances with AMD, Optane and NVIDIA Qaudro GPUs Dell’s updated its VxRail hyperconverged boxen.…

Not even Brexit is going to slap our as-a-Service biz Microsoft's board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.51 per share this week as its UK tentacle reported another bonzer year of revenue growth.…

Pollution, sprawling cities of megastructures, any sign aliens are screwing up just like us... Astronomers are on the hunt for signs of alien civilizations in space by searching for things like extraterrestrial solar panels or planetary atmospheres spewing pollutants.…

Needs about €21bn it doesn’t have and a whole lot of new science to make it feasible The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has signed off on an update to its particle physics strategy that calls for the construction of two new very, very, large pieces of atom-smashing hardware.…

Brrrrr... dunngadunng... braaaaarp: that's the sound of da police Who, Me? Bid farewell to the weekend with a story from the Who, Me? mailbag that struck a little close to home for one Register hack.…

Tune in online next month to hear all about the advantages of legacy server emulation Webcast It’s a familiar story to many: you’re a business that’s run quite happily on an incredibly robust backend IT infrastructure for literally decades.…

Country total of $3.9bn is about 40 percent of AWS revenue, but Amazon sells to the world China’s spend on cloud infrastructure services in Q1 2020 jumped 67 percent year-year, says analyst firm Canalys.…

As India’s slowdown to 2G in Kashmir is extended to July The internet blackout in towns in two states of Myanmar (Burma) has entered a second year.…

A win for Vlad the Decryptor Russia has lifted restrictions on secure messaging app Telegram after its developers agreed to block some content.…

'Far more formidable gates to access to other applications than anything that existed in the industry 20 years ago' Analysis Microsoft president Brad Smith on Thursday called on antitrust regulators in the US and Europe to scrutinize whether smartphone app store business practices are consistent with antitrust law.…

City council demands snoop gear kit reports, mayor OK with that New York City Council has overwhelmingly voted to require cops to report their use of surveillance technology.…

An AI engineer recounts his previous woes to The Register Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a brilliant idea: get two neural networks and pit them against each other to get a machine to generate completely new, realistic looking images. But in practice they are notoriously difficult to train and deploy, as one engineer told El Reg.…

Wait and see before pointing the finger, warns threat intel boffin As Australia reels under sustained cyber attacks following increased Chinese diplomatic hostility, the country's Lion brewery and dairy conglomerate has been hit for the second time.…

Yeah, about that whole JSON thing... The Windows Terminal gang has got back into its preview groove with an update for the open-source command-line front-end.…

'We don't know what he stands for' Huawei is uncertain whether a change in leadership in Washington DC will resolve its ongoing woes with the US government, company representatives have told The Register.…

Doors remain closed at that other hub of nerdery, the Centre for Computing History Raspberry Pi fans rejoice! The foundation's Cambridge outlet has tentatively opened its doors once more, although is sadly shorn of its trademark interactive displays.…

'Revenge' attack cost biz £100k, say police A woman who deleted 5,000 files from her former company's Dropbox has been punished with community service – even though the business allegedly collapsed after her file-shredding spree.…

£499 nabs early birds 5G, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage Xiaomi's latest flagship, the Poco F2 Pro, hits UK shelves today with an early-bird price of £499.…

*Cough* But are they freelancers? *cough* – HMRC IR35 tax reforms remain set to come into force on 6 April 2021 as the 2019-20 Finance Bill passed through its committee stage.…

Vodafone responsible for maintaining system infrastructure The UK's 101 and 111 non-emergency telephone numbers are currently inaccessible by the public following a behind-the-scenes failure.…

I always feel like / somebody's dropping eaves / and I have no privacy Google has introduced "continuous match mode" for apps on its voice-powered Assistant platform, where it will listen to everything without pausing. At the same time it has debuted related developer tools, new features, and the ability to display web content on its Smart Display hardware using the AMP component framework.…

Because nobody wants to be the new Yahoo! apparently Date: June 1, 2022.

If you're looking around - there's a lot on offer Job Alert It's Friday and The Reg's Job Alert column is back with another list of work opportunities.…

'If that is true, that is a horrendous admission' – analyst ServiceNow, the company that sees itself dominating enterprise software via workflow tools, has told customers contractual arrangements will not be altered as it wrestles with economic stresses accompanying a pandemic.…

A week of wobbles ends in a good, old fashioned TITSUP* Code shack GitHub has rounded out the week with "elevated error rates" as developers learned that Friday is a day for bacon sandwiches rather than pull requests.…

But it does have a name. 'Firefox Private Network' is out, ‘Mozilla VPN’ is in. The Mozilla Foundation has announced it will soon launch its VPN.…

And look, confirmed hacker sitting up front Bork!Bork!Bork! Those wondering if perhaps there were nefarious actors at work back in 2016, influencing the electorate, need look no further than some software on a London bus tidying up after itself.…

eROSITA telescope shows a busy, energetic universe Pic Astronomers have mapped the hot gas floating in our Milky Way for the first time – and identified more than a million X-ray-emitting objects in the universe – by piecing together images snapped by the eROSITA telescope.…

Time for the Windows pantomime: 'Oh yes it does...' 'Oh no it doesn't' On Call Hey, it's the 111th of March, or thereabouts. How will you celebrate this milestone? May we suggest a biscuit, a beverage of your choice and the schadenfreude that comes from a dip into The Register's On Call mailbag.…

Threesome now plan to march East and conquer Europe Chinese consumer tech enfant terrible Xiaomi has bunged a special NFC chip into its fitness wearable, giving it the power to serve as a Mastercard in Russia.…

It's The Reg wot warned it The UK government last night confirmed it has aborted its ill-conceived coronavirus contact-tracing phone app – blaming protections and battery-saving restrictions in Apple’s iOS for its failure.…

Two models get hot-fixes, er, looks like 77 more to go? Netgear has issued patches to squash security vulnerabilities in two router models that can be exploited to, for instance, open a superuser-level telnet backdoor.…

Freeform Dynamics took a look at survey submissions, now shares its report for you to pore over Analysis Every organisation realizes and understands storage is important – or should do. Users, customers, and executives all want instant access to information, using whatever tools they wish to use. And then there are the demands of auditors and regulators. Storage is anything but invisible.…

Analyst predicts seven-football-fields-per-minute printing plunge Analyst firm IDC says the printer industry has been kicked right in the COVIDs.…

Although Huawei’s details are rather thin on this one Despite looming US government bans preventing access to American technology, Huawei has announced a new server based on the third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors launched just this week.…

Won't say who the attackers are working for – just don't mention 中国 Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called a snap press conference to reveal that the nation is under cyber-attack by a state-based actor, but the nation’s infosec advice agency says that while the attacker has gained access to some systems it has not conducted “any disruptive or destructive activities within victim environments.”…

Data pilfered from PeopleSoft HR database sold to tax fraudsters, it is claimed US federal authorities said they had arrested Justin Sean Johnson in Detroit, Michigan, on charges associated with the 2014 hacking of a human resources database at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and thrown the book at him.…

Employees bag commiseration prize of free ID protection Staff records – from social-security and corporate credit card numbers, to passport and bank account details – were siphoned from Cognizant by hackers who then doused the IT contractor in ransomware.…

New York architects hit instead of Canadian standards agency after crooks get names mixed up The Maze ransomware gang has screwed up by targeting a New York design and construction firm instead of the Canadian Standards Association it was intending to hit.…

We wanted flying cars and space travel for 2020 but instead we got re-runs of fascist propaganda Facebook has removed online ads and posts by President Trump's reelection campaign for violating its rules prohibiting "organized hate," a step the ad biz has been reluctant to take.…

By which it means people who can’t afford a Macbook, right? Given the continuous turmoil in Huawei’s telecoms and mobile businesses, it’s easy to forget that the company’s laptop business remains relatively unscathed, with the Chinese tech giant regularly introducing new models. The latest is the Ryzen-powered Huawei MateBook 13 AMD Edition ultrabook.…

Google, Facebook cable link to China problematic, says oversight body The White House's Team Telecom advisory committee wants the FCC to put the kibosh on a proposed capacious fiber-optic cable linking America and Hong Kong.…