The Register

Two countries divided by a common... approach to dealing with COVID-19 The Trump Administration wants to give cash payments to every American adult within the next two weeks to help those who have lost their jobs or otherwise hit hard times during the global coronavirus pandemic.…

Not totally eradicated yet, ads make more dosh Cryptojacking, the theft of computing power to mine digital currency, has been around at least since 2013 – and has shrunk in use dramatically with the death of Monero-mining service Coinhive.…

Dark day for Big Blue Updated A mystery outage hit IBM Cloud today, partially knocking out services for much of the day stateside. At time of writing, parts of the platform remain down even after several hours.…

Where there's a hit, there's a writ Broadcom is suing Netflix for being so successful that people have cut their cable subscriptions and ditched the set-top boxes that make the chip designer a huge profit.…

We peek inside the latest official release of Microsoft's IDE While the limelight may have been snatched by the arrival of the first preview of .NET 5, its great (and occasionally not so great) grandparent, Visual Studio 2019 16.5 has shuffled out of the shadows.…

Looking for a burner blower? Motorola Mobility has lifted the lid on its latest budget blower – the pocket-friendly Moto e6s, which offers the most compelling, er, screen-to-price ratios on the market. Just £99 gets you a phone with a 6.1-inch HD screen.…

You know the one, that pothole ridden journey from on-prem to the fluffy white stuff Databricks, the company behind analytics tool Spark, is introducing new features to ease the management of security, governance and administration of its machine learning platform.…

Preview 1 hints at great things, but right now has just enough to make ARM64 users smile Microsoft has dropped the first preview of its latest attempt to unify its development platform: .NET 5.…

Warnings and advice from team that has already hauled itself across the line QCon London Andrzej Grzesik, principal engineer at UK neobank Revolut, spoke at the recent QCon London, - back in the days when in-person tech conferences were a thing - about the company's shift to Java 11, which it has now been running for over a year.…

And his boss monitored him with a RAT A most entertaining piece of threat research from Check Point gives a unique insight into the "working" life of a Nigerian email spammer who made thousands of dollars from stolen credit cards alone in recent years.…

CW to live on as a counter in a Curry's, as CEO says: Mobile is 'currently holding back the whole business' It's (yet another) sad day for the UK high street, after Dixons Carphone confirmed it will close all 531 standalone Carphone Warehouse stores, with an expected 2,900 roles made redundant.…

Plus insurer kept firing defect reports at us during acceptance testing, said Steve Allen Co-Op Insurance's £155m Agile contract with IBM for a new IT platform collapsed not only because the insurer kept raising spurious defects but also because Sopra Steria bungled a critical data migration, the Big Blue veep overseeing the project told London's High Court.…

When we said 'shut everything down,' we only meant the retail stores What's the difference between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Stores? When Teams closes down, people seem to notice.…

Also: China has a launch failure but hey, things on Mars might be looking up Roundup It has been a frustrating few days for space fans, with automatic safeties and virus fears stopping rocket-based play. Still, there was at least a glimmer of hope from the red planet.…

Kickstarter caveats apply Oh, how we'd love to be a fly on the wall at the offices of Chinese phone maker Unihertz. The company has a reputation for producing incredibly niche phones that cater to demographics that are otherwise ignored by most others. Take the Unihertz Titan, for example, which was a rugged homage to the Blackberry Passport.…

Advice for devops? Don't do 'wagile', says Dun & Bradstreet The market of graph databases, which structures data according to a network of relationships, is tiny. Strong growth might see it hit $2.4bn in 2023.…

Come on, builders - who doesn't like subsidies? The UK government has promised to introduce new laws to force developers to ensure new-build properties are capable of gigabit-speed broadband.…

Normal precautions should suffice, ultraviolet hand cream can light the way Data centres are warm places full of fans designed to efficiently circulate air. Commercial data centres are visited by many people every day. Some of those people could be COVID-19 carriers. The virus doesn’t mind warmth and can be spread by airborne droplets that may well have a better chance of floating free in a well-ventilated bit barn.…

Please develop machine-learning algos to analyse this text for a vaccine A dataset of more than 29,000 scientific papers focused on COVID-19, and the coronavirus family as a whole, has been publicly shared to ultimately help the medical world thwart the bio-nasties.…

Temperatures can soar over 400C on the rocky world, and yet... Video Mercury, the innermost planet in the Solar System, reaches searing temperatures. Yet ice still manages to exist on its rocky surface. How?…

What took you so long, eh? Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube have issued a joint statement in which they promise to disinfect their platforms of contagiously incorrect COVID-19 content.…

Online hackfest designed to help government response, provided entries arrive in 12-point Arial India has turned to its national crowdsourcing platform to find ideas that might crimp COVID-19.…

Including: COVID-19-hit cruise giant admits it was hacked Roundup We hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. It's time for another Reg roundup of security news you may have missed.…

Finally, something that isn't coronavirus related [delete this – ed.] VMware has released security patches for a trio of bugs in its desktop-class virtualization products.…

Loss of Face time Apple has finally coughed up the $454m it owes VirnetX for infringing its video-conferencing patents, nearly a decade after Cupertino first lost the lawsuit.…

Just the San Francisco Bay Area goes to 3-week near-lockdown The coronavirus website built by Google-stablemate Verily and vaunted by President Trump on Friday, is up and running – and is proving to be not nearly as useful as the Command-in-Chief suggested.…

Tesla Delaware lawsuit also delayed The ten-year monster battle between Google and Oracle over the use of Java APIs will be delayed until further notice – after the US Supreme Court announced it was suspending oral arguments over coronavirus fears.…

Miscreants also hammer Euro websites as well, because why not? In an impeccable instance of horrible timing, the US government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says it fended off a cyberattack by online scumbags.…

Developers! Developers! Developers! And all their infrastructure! On Monday GitHub announced it plans to buy NPM Inc, which operates the npm repository relied upon by 12 million JavaScript developers.…

And that’s before you even get to microphone and video settings They knew it was coming and have been desperately building capacity – yet the flood of workers to video conferencing software has proved too much for companies like Zoom and Microsoft.…

We'll be OK, says former incumbent telco Brit telco BT is talking tough, saying it is confident its broadband network will not buckle under the increased strain of extra people using broadband as they work from home to avoid catching the coronairus.…

Also: Python 3.8 comes to Azure Functions, .NET Core uninstallation made easy and happy Brazilian chatbots in Azure Roundup While Azure wobbled and Windows was updated, the Microsoft gang continued toiling away with Python, Portuguese and Private Link for its cloud and an altogether more down to earth way uninstalling .NET.…

Claims 'don't stand up to serious scrutiny' retorts Google Browser-flinger Brave's chief privacy and industrial relations officer, Dr Johnny Ryan, has written to five European data protection commissions to complain of claimed breaches of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by Google.…

And HR folks aren't far behind, says Proofpoint strategist Interview Nurses are among the groups most heavily targeted by email scammers because of the value of the data they can access, according to email security biz Proofpoint's Adenike Cosgrove.…

Sadly, no room for a ZX Spectrum on the way to the Moon Flinger of small satellites Rocket Lab has made a move to tighten up its supply chain with the acquisition of Toronto-based Sinclair Interplanetary.…

Respect mah Autorité. You too, Tech Data, and Ingram Micro The French competition watchdog, Autorité de la Concurrence, has slapped Apple with a stonking €1.1bn fine over claims the Californian fruit farm had artificially limited supply of its kit to wholesalers.…

Windows Update for the Linux kernel? No wonder Gates stepped down Microsoft has crept closer to the next version of Windows 10, 2004, and revealed the thankful news that the dev-friendly Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will not require a full-on OS update for those all important kernel tweaks.…

A lack of liquidity is going to cause complicated problems, analysts warn Analysis If The Register's readers are anything like its writers, Monday is not the most cheerful morning of the week. We might console ourselves with the thought that if the weekend was a blur, perhaps last week was a dream. Sadly, it was not.…

Hello? Is this thing on? (message failed to send) As those able to do so begin a seemingly indefinite period of working from home, Microsoft's Slack for Suits platform, Teams, began tottering.…

Graph database vendor gets graphical and promises slick extraction from relational data stores Graph database upgrades are like buses. First Neo4j updated its wares, and now TigerGraph has pushed out new features it hopes will appeal to a broader range of enterprise folk.…

Spintronics is/was cool Columnist The four horsemen of disaster in IT decision-making are fear, uncertainty, doubt – and hype. FUD famously first pranced forth when IBM ran the world and its salespeople ladled them out over any upstart which had a chance of taking market share. But hype – ah, hype. The salesman-on-uppers to FUD's downer street preacher, it wants your investment of hope so it can bolster those of others. It's a pyramid scheme of promises.…

Pop quiz: you're hosting your first tech conference and a pandemic is declared. What do you do? Microsoft celebrated the conclusion of a successful - and suddenly virtual - Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) conference by switching the forthcoming Build event to a digital affair as well. The Register spoke to those behind the first WSLConf about hitting the big red button with mere days to go.…

Stop that van! Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, The Register's timid delve into the dark past and dastardly deeds of our readers.…

Plus: Machine-learning software scans ancient texts Roundup Here's a handy little roundup of all the bits of AI news that you may have missed.…

No virus-fragging fun unless you’re actually fragging viruses – and no universal developer fee waiver either Apple has proclaimed it won’t let COVID-19-related games into its app store, because it’s the responsible thing to do.…

Crushed rollers sent rack into the red until castor thousands solved wheely obscure problem Google has revealed that the wheels almost literally fell off some of its servers.…

VMs went down but the lights are back on, and someone's home to fix it all As if the world doesn't have enough to worry about right now, Azure users with resources running in the Microsoft cloud's Central West USA region have just enjoyed an outage.…

Infosys closed office on suspicion, swabbed it out, but open for business again today The Indian city of Bengaluru has advised the IT industry to let its people work from home as part of its response to COVID-19, as at least two cases strike the city.…

There'll be a website, at some point, that will work in some way, maybe In a Friday press conference, US President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus... with the help of Google, which was news to Google.…

You look like you have coronavirus, can I help you with that? Nearly 45 years to the day after founding Microsoft, Bill Gates today finally stepped down from the board to devote his time to dealing with global health issues and climate change.…