The Register

Including effort to land first woman on the lunar surface NASA has temporarily suspended operations for its James Webb Space Telescope – and halted testing of its Space Launch System, a rocket due to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 – amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

We're guessing May's virtual Dell World conference is no mere webinar In an interesting IP rights grab, Dell has filed to trademark the word "Podference".…

What a pair of asswipes – they even pulled a knife at a supermarket Police in the Australian State of New South Wales have published an image of two men they say conducted a series of brazen toilet paper robberies and called for community assistance to flush them out.…

Just don't let your battery die or you'll have to explain it to the police Taiwan, in an effort to limit the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, has implemented a geo-fence using people's mobile phones.…

Use delivery services, PM urges, electronics shops shuttered amid coronavirus pandemic UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tonight told Brits to stay at home for the next three weeks, at least, to thwart the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.…

Clouds, silver linings etc. The long-awaited IPv6 train may finally be pulling into the station as Google reported a spike in usage.…

But will it be any better than the up-and-running WhatsApp effort? The World Health Organization is working on an open-source app for Android, iOS and the web "to help contain and mitigate COVID-19". Anyone interested is invited to pitch in.…

Spreading in the wild, no vaccine, people told to distance themselves from dodgy sources... sounds familiar Hackers are commandeering victims' Windows PCs by exploiting at least one remote-code-execution flaw in the Adobe Type Manager Library included with the Microsoft operating system. No patches are available right now.…

'We expect to see the supply side change dramatically over the next year or so' February 2020 saw "the biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market" as sales tumbled 38 per cent year-on-year, according to researchers at Strategy Analytics.…

We talk to the guy who spent 20 years trying to make it happen The island of Sark, a United Kingdom royal fiefdom located in the Channel Islands and measuring just two square miles (517 hectares), has succeeded in its 20-year quest to be officially recognized by the International Standards Organization (ISO).…

Everybody chill, Big Tech's got this Roundup Welcome to the first in what we at The Register fervently hope will be a short-lived series: it's time for a tech COVID-19 roundup.…

Who wants 999 iPhones? As Apple stores outside of Mainland China remain stubbornly closed, the firm has dropped the two-iPhone limit on its website, allowing customers to (theoretically) spend millions on shiny new mobes.…

Coronavirus forces judges to join the 21st century more or less overnight Britain's courts have declared they will start holding trials and hearings through video calling – although they appear rather ill-equipped for doing so.…

Developers advised to check blogs and forums for product news Google has announced that its I/O 2020 event, normally used for announcements relating to Android and other products, has been cancelled completely.…

No connection-checking while society crumbles, but corporate customers will have to keep paying Remote control and support outfit TeamViewer is turning off connection checking for its freebie product as more and more of its customers find themselves suddenly working from home.…

Starsky Robotics shuts down, plus more news from world of neural networks Roundup Let's get cracking with some machine-learning news.…

Top court says UPC was not properly approved but only on a technicality Germany’s constitutional court has ruled that the nation's ratification of a long-planned Unified Patent Court (UPC), which would create a single legislature for the whole of Europe to decide on patents, was unconstitutional.…

Public’s the new private – tell your friends Webcast While early adopters jumped right into the first generation of cloud services, you may have held off – and perhaps for good reason. Now the second generation is upon us, you may be wondering if this is the right time to join the revolution.…

Mark Summerfield didn't hold back in written evidence A £175m IT platform for Co-Op Insurance that was subcontracted out by IBM to a third party was a "disaster" despite assurances it was an "out of the box" product, the insurer's CEO told London's High Court.…

Remember the three rules: social distancing, hand washing, giving Windows enough storage Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment of The Register's occasional series reminding IT professionals to check their public facing orifices.…

HR and finance cloud vendor focuses on its own apps Workday, the cloud-based Human Capital Management (HMC) and financial application company, is soft-peddling on the prospect of opening up its platform to third-party vendors.…

Overseas travelers and others need to stay home – and we should use their phones to monitor them, we're told Tracking and limiting the movements of overseas travelers, and others suspected to be COVID-19 coronavirus carriers, has proved an essential tool in controlling the pandemic.…

Almost 30 years of VBA and the mayhem miscreants wrought with it Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, The Register's weekly reminder, thanks to the recollections of our readers, of a time when it was only viruses of the computer variety that were all the rage.…

On the other hand, these Pwn2Own results are legit Roundup It is time for another Reg security summary.…

Goes appointment-only elsewhere, pledges to have enough staff on-site to keep running Equinix has all but closed its data centres in France, Germany, Italy and Spain as of Monday, March 23, at 0800 Central European Time.…

'The world around us may be going through strange times, but so far kernel development looks normal,' says penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has released a new release candidate of the Linux kernel – version 5.6 rc7 – and added a little COVID-19 commentary.…

To protect and grow its own industries. But first, call your mother and enjoy this five-minute national round of applause for medicos and transport workers India has announced new incentives to lure electronics manufacturers to its shores.…

Flew Apollo 15 Command Module to an inhuman apogee, made first deep space EVA Al Worden, an Apollo astronaut who earned the title of the most isolated human, has died aged 88, of a stroke.…

Totally not running out of cloud. But may ditch free offers to serve current customers during the Pandemic Microsoft prioritise health care and government users are it adds Azure capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

It will be carbon-neutral by 2025, whatever that eventually means To coincide with *checks press release* the 11th anniversary of SAP's decision to make sustainability a "long-term strategic goal," the German ERP juggernaut has announced a partnership with consulting and accountancy titan Accenture to develop solutions for upstream oil and gas companies based on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud.…

Tips from El Reg hack with two decades of WFH experience If you aren’t already, chances are that your home will soon become a prison of sorts as efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus force, or at least encourage, us to “shelter in place” with only very occasional trips out for food, medicine, and fresh air.…

When science reality is more interesting than science fiction Astronomers have discovered the universe’s most powerful winds: driven by supermassive black holes, they ripple across interstellar space bulldozing through material in galaxies, and are known as quasar tsunamis, we're told.…

You may want to check what you're actually teaching your neural networks in future Boffins in Germany have devised a technique to subvert neural network frameworks so they misidentify images without any telltale signs of tampering.…

It's not like you can snoop on anyone right now anyway, right? Proof-of-concept exploit code has emerged for last month's data-leaking KrØØk vulnerability present in a billion-plus Wi-Fi-connected devices and computers.…

Pair join Netflix to turn it down for what? Connectivity stability Amazon Prime Video and Google's YouTube have joined Netflix in dialing down their video stream quality in the European Union, Switzerland, and the UK for 30 days to preserve internet stability during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Criminal scum use pandemic as golden business opportunity British police are saying coronavirus-related fraud reports have spiked by 400 per cent over the past six weeks as the COVID-19 illness continues its inexorable march through humanity.…

Implements 'touchless deliveries' for 'leccy car-buyers Electric car maker Tesla has been forced to suspend production at two of its main production sites, as state authorities in the US impose restrictions on economic activity in a bid to stem the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Caution - Windows Insider builds may bork your PCs (just like ours) Microsoft celebrated its Teams success with a fresh build of Windows 10 that was so light on features that chief product officer Panos Panay felt the urge to tease on other upcoming toys.…

Though hopefully the rush for kit will have subsided by then The people of Great Britain will soon be able to get their hands on Huawei sub-brand Honor's latest ultrabook – the Magicbook 14.…

Scary idea, but can work if IT bods are there to hold their hands It has been the subject of hype and overblown expectations, but that is not set to dampen investment in robotic process automation – the idea that simple software “robot” can carry out annoying admin tasks. But as organisations begin to understand how best to exploit RPA, IT departments will be finding a new role.…

Eventually, 'customers will stop buying and start preserving capital' Notebooks are flying off the shelves like hot cakes, or perhaps more appropriately bog paper, as Brits barricade themselves at home to rest, work and play in an effort to avoid catching COVID-19.…

Where's the Wichita Lineman when you need him? Bork!Bork!Bork! The Reg skips lightly across the Atlantic to bring you premium Bork, fresh from the US of A in The Register's mercifully occasional series of computers behaving badly.…

Customers on-premises with perpetual licences 'don't have a good story' for remote working Working from home and want to access your PC at work? The best solution may cost thousands in additional Microsoft licensing costs.…

Already sin-binned it in 2018, will keep it around in extended support until 2021, and is way behind Chrome Firefox has decided it’s time to burn the browser’s FTP connections.…

Facebook's popular frontend framework can't escape its heritage After several months of debate, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has decided to modernize the front-end interface used by Wikipedia and other projects by adopting the Vue.js JavaScript framework, a choice that remains controversial.…

But did our hero break 'Circle rules? On Call Well, that was quite the week wasn't it? Perhaps Friday should start (rather than end) with a stiff drink. The Register's On Call feature is on hand to kick things off.…

Looks like you'll have to stream Derry Girls in lower resolution for a bit Netflix will reduce the quality of its streaming videos in Europe in response to the European Commission's request on Thursday that streaming services and telecom operators throttle their data streams to avoid overloading the internet.…

False positive rates, we've heard of them The AI community is attempting to tackle the coronavirus pandemic using all sorts of algorithms in its toolbox. As such, it's coming up with ways to predict the virus’ protein structure, crunch through thousands of science papers, and now, er, detecting coughs.…

Microsoft extends support because right now we have better things to do with our lives than upgrade Windows Microsoft will extend the support life of Windows 10 1709’s Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise editions, because right now we’ve all got better things to do than upgrade Windows.…

Urges ‘extreme caution’ if you DIY and reminds you ‘Never spray any liquids directly onto or into any product’ Dell has developed guidance for cleaning its data centre products, on the off-chance you feel like giving them a once-over during these complicated times.…