The Register

Microsoft Build also pulls plug on physical conference Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June will become a World Wide Web-only event due to health concerns raised by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Just call us Florida man cos we're going to Orlando As is the way with the 21st century, IT companies are apt to get meta and ServiceNow is no exception.…

Too bad they are likely uninhabitable Astronomers have discovered 139 minor planets lurking at the edge of the Solar System after examining a dataset collected to study dark energy in the universe.…

And nothing to do with stock-market crash, nope, no way Citing concerns for the safety of its employees amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Xerox announced on Friday it is putting its hostile takeover of HP Inc on ice for now.…

Bezos' juggernaut still not happy Updated The US government has filed a motion [PDF] to the Court of Federal Claims asking for 120 days to "reconsider certain aspects" of the Pentagon's decision to hand Microsoft the JEDI super-cloud contract – yet Amazon Web Services will oppose the motion.…

Well that's one way of putting it Hackers have slurped biz comms customers' data from a database run by one of O2's largest UK partners.…

Deadline for multi-factor authentication in UK banking looms Saturday is the delayed deadline for UK banks and financial institutions to have implemented two-factor authentication for payment transactions.…

Not headphones. Earbuds Hands on The past few years have borne witness to a new category of audio tech: the totally wireless earphones. Initially popularised by Apple's AirPods, we've since seen a wide range of alternatives crop up, ranging from bargain basement to unapologetically aspirational. Sennheiser's Momentum True Wireless 2 earbuds fall into the latter category.…

Protecting innocent drivers from nasty old cash tips... and your sneezes Food delivery service Deliveroo will create an option for no-contact deliveries in the UK in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak.…

Microsoft's convoluted Power Apps freebie shows shortcomings of platform As millions of businesses adopt hasty remote-working policies, Microsoft has posted a "Crisis communications" solution for its Power Apps platform – the idea being that with just a few (hundred) steps, users will be able to show their whereabouts, request help and more.…

Uneasy Broadcom withdraws annual guidance Adobe and Slack reported quarterly revenues last night, but the former's earnings suffered at the sticky hands of COVID-19 while the latter pondered the impact of the virus.…

Time to get your eyeballs rolling, you've been staring at the screen long enough While its employees adjusted to life complaining about working from home rather than working in open-plan offices, Microsoft emitted a fresh build of Windows 10 for Fast Ring Insiders and tweaked Your Phone for Samsung owners.…

Yes, shame about the rest of the world In a rare bit of positive COVID-19 news, Apple has reopened all of its 42 retail outlets in Mainland China.…

It's environmentally friendlier, you see Something for the Weekend, Sir? If there's something I can't stand, it's those stupid columns people write for IT news websites.…

Yes, here's another one Bork!Bork!Bork! Barclays, the McDonald's of banking bork, has put its hands up. Yes, there was a problem with some ATMs. A problem that The Register has been more than happy to share.…

'Up 50%' looks good, less so when it's 520,000 out of 15.3 million Electric and fuel-cell vehicle sales in Europe jumped by over 50 per cent in the last quarter of 2019, but still make up only 4.4 per cent of total sales.…

A Hoover-dunnit for your Friday morning On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's reminder of happier times, when the only panic was the one coming out of the easily ignored telephone.…

Can't fix flaws if you don't look for them The number of vulnerabilities in open source projects surged almost 50 per cent in 2019, according to security biz WhiteSource, which can be seen as good news in the sense that you don't find what you're not looking for.…

We can't even go to the pub and wait for this to all blow over BT Group has confirmed its CEO has been diagnosed with COVID-19 just days after meeting fellow telco top brass at a gathering organised by the UK government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).…

Code interpreter ran with admin-level access, not sand-boxed, potentially open to remote-code execution Avast has disabled a component in its Windows anti-malware suite that posed, ironically enough, a significant security risk.…

Oracle grows cloud, beats Wall St expectations, slams SAP, Workday Oracle on Thursday reported $9.8bn in revenue for Q3 of its 2020 fiscal year, a two per cent year-over-year gain and enough to lift the database giant's stock in after-hours trading despite a dismal day on Wall Street.…

Not like anyone is looking for medical advice right now As the world tackles the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, ransomware creeps have knocked offline a public health agency's website that served nearly a quarter of a million people in the US.…

All your face are belong to US The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing Uncle Sam's Homeland Security, and multiple government agencies, claiming the g-men stonewalled on what they are doing with people's faces scanned at US airports. The civil-rights warriors hope to extract information from the organizations via the courts.…

Bloke takes auto-vac firm to court in wrongful termination gripe A former iRobot employee is suing the manufacturer for firing him after he highlighted alleged failures to comply with regulations.…

The mystery of manipulating nuclear spins with electric fields could make it easier to build quantum computers in the future A group of scientists have accidentally proven a near 60-year old theory correct, thanks to a botched lab experiment.…

Anyone able to reach a vulnerable machine can get system-level access, no login needed Microsoft has released an out-of-band emergency patch for a wormable remote-code execution hole in SMBv3, the Windows network file system protocol.…

Xen, KVM muscling in, meanwhile Despite earlier assertions, VMware has no immediate plans to turn ESXi on Arm into a supported product – and may never do it – because it’s yet to figure out why.…

But you should really be looking at migrating to C# Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away as the Windows giant announced support for Visual Basic in its upcoming .NET 5.0…

Yep, it's NSA Groundhog Day again Despite recent revelations that the process by which the FBI and NSA gain approval for spying on US citizens is open to abuse, the US Congress is again planning to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act that gives those measures their legal foundation.…

Hated keyboard to be replaced with ye olde scissor switch in new models We're in the twilight of the lifecycle of the loathed butterfly keyboard, according to famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In a recent investment note, Kuo said Apple would release new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with conventional scissor keyboards by Q2 2020.…

Prompt to install enhanced extension is the first thing you'll see The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on.…

Emulated OS for Microsoft's upcoming Surface Neo has lots of rough edges The new Windows 10X build, 19578, has been pushed to Microsoft's emulator with many updates – including a beta of a new File Manager and the ability to run on released (as opposed to Insider) builds of Windows 10, provided you have at least version 10.0.17763.0 (October 2018 update).…

Absolute mad lads The European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos Space Corporation (RSC) have blinked and postponed the planned 2020 launch of the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin.…

Helpful announcement in Bologna station Bork!Bork!Bork! We're going topical in today's instalment of computers behaving badly because here's an Italian display that developed the blues just before the country sent everyone home.…

Tech companies are loving the attention while keeping schtum on outages With more and more companies across the world telling employees to work from home in an effort to limit, or slow, the spread of COVID-19 – which was last night declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization – outages on common remote-working tools have started to increase.…

No, really, don't try to get the real-deal $1,980 version for $350 The latest flashy gold smartphone touted by Escobar Inc, the company set up by Roberto Escobar, brother of infamous Colombian drug baron Pablo, appears to be a Samsung Galaxy Fold in disguise.…

Ireland's Taoiseach closes country's schools and colleges from tomorrow until 29 March Updated Last night, Donald Trump made the second presidential address of his premiership to announce drastic steps to combat COVID-19 — including a ban on travel to the US from all 26 Schengen-area countries.…

Previously unseen nasty spotted lurking in Armenian government websites Russia's infamous Turla hacking crew looks to be gearing up for a new offensive, according to researchers with ESET.…

SSDs, laptops, servers all hit in the struggle for stock The virus that causes COVID-19 continues to hit technology supply chains as vendors struggle to produce and ship stock following a slowdown in China, where the illness was first detected.…

What about my iPhone? The European Commission has introduced ambitious reforms to back the "right to repair" by forcing electronics manufacturers to improve the design, durability and recycling and reuse possibilities of devices they sell.…

What are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al supposed to do? We have some ideas Faced with a growing barrage of criticism over how it has handled the outbreak of the coronavirus, the White House has turned to tech giants to help it tackle the pandemic.…

... a bigger severance package to Lores, that is HP Inc's chief exec will be paid 50 per cent more if he is fired in a hostile takeover, according to the company's SEC filings last week.…

Takedown should (in theory) see spam volumes shrink rapidly Microsoft has bragged of downing a nine million-strong Russian botnet responsible for vast quantities of email spam.…

Handy for capturing multi-disk VMs but limited restoration capabilities Google Cloud Platform already has the ability to store custom images, which you can configure with pre-installed applications. A custom image is just a disk image, though, whereas its new Machine Images - a feature now in beta - also include all the configuration metadata including permissions.…

Testimony claims search engine giant favours own products and services, even when they're rubbish For years, Yelp's senior VP of public policy, Luther Lowe, has been complaining on Twitter about how every minute of every day Google screws his company by inserting its own listings instead of Yelp's when people use its search engine – even when Google's version is minimal.…

Raining irooooon, from a lacerated sky The weather is very strange on WASP-76b. Liquid iron rains down on one side of the exoplanet, every night.…

But a 2% digital services tax may rankle giants across the pond The UK government has announced a multibillion-pound package of measures designed to boost investment in computing, digital services and science.…

Draw together disparate systems and spread your infosec skills wider with Open Systems Webcast While a prevention layer around your network is important, don't forget you need detection and response practices to deal with threats once they’re in your systems – and to mitigate their effects quickly and thoroughly.…

What could go wrong? Capita has won a contract to ensure existing Airwave emergency radios can work with the UK's Emergency Services Network (ESN), should the 4G pipe dream ever get switched on.…

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do... British IT services provider Allvotec will cut "up to 300" jobs from the UK, offshoring some to Bulgaria in a push to reduce costs.…