The Register

Also: Stable Edge for all (staffers) and setting a good example with regard to coronavirus Roundup Cosmos DB has rolled out a free tier, staffers get their mitts on stable Edge, and Azure DevOps Services steps back from axing TLS 1.0. For now. Yes, it's the weekly roundup of all things Microsoft we haven't already covered.…

BBK brand plays it safe Hands on OPPO's latest flagship smartphone, the Find X2, comes to the UK in early May.…

Yes, you read that right Australia's privacy watchdog is suing Facebook for exposing the personal data of more than 300,000 Australians as part of the Cambridge Analytica data-slurp scandal.…

£1bn boon to improve coverage across the home nations UK ministers are meeting the heads of O2, Three, EE and Vodafone later today to formalise plans for a Shared Rural Network (SRN), which would improve coverage in rural black spots.…

Oh, and beware of the leopard The weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the hugely influential BBC radio show.…

Meanwhile, Broadcom and Symantec have merger woes Roundup It's that time again – the week's security news in digestible chunks beyond what we've already covered. Let's get into it.…

Ministry of Fun under pressure to admit it's going to happen Who'd be a head of data policy for the British government? You spend all your time talking about data transparency, but it is so hard to be transparent.…

A decade on, expanding open ecosystem highlights limits of monolithic approach to CPU design How well does Intel sleep? It's just rounded off a record year with a record quarter, turning silicon into greenbacks more efficiently than ever, redeeming recent wobbles in the data centre market and missteps in fabrication with double-digit growth.…

One vendor's security controls aren't enough, says Dan Wiley Interview "I don't want to have a job any more," said Check Point's Dan Wiley, sitting in a fashionably nondescript London coffee shop. "I don't want to have to do my job. It means that we failed."…

Well-known software development principles count for more than technology choices QCon London Software engineers from digital bank Monzo told developers at the QCon event in London how and why it runs its banking systems on 1,600 microservices.…

Disk-wiping utility was meant to be a force for good, not evil Who, Me? Welcome to another leap back to the shooters of the '90s, and how to deal with them, in The Register's regular Who, Me? feature.…

And why do such a thing? Well, how else will you push your artificially intelligent software into production? Achieving production-level governance with machine-learning projects currently presents unique challenges. A new space of tools and practices is emerging under the name MLOps. The space is analogous to DevOps but tailored to the practices and workflows of machine learning.…

That's one way to pad your pension pot, allegedly A former acting Inspector General at the US Department of Homeland Security was today indicted for allegedly stealing internal software and data and attempting to sell it all back to his then-employer.…

Wait, a proposed law tackling the sexual abuse of kids and they name it... the EARN IT Act? Seriously? On Thursday, a bipartisan group of US senators introduced legislation with the ostensible purpose of combating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online – at the apparent cost of encryption.…

Infosec biz that found the database spill raises eyebrow at UK ISP's advisory to subscribers A Virgin Media server left facing the public internet contained more than just 900,000 people's "limited contact information" as the Brit cable giant's CEO put it yesterday.…

Domestic intel agency's cloud server continues to get them into hot water The UK's spy agency auditor has given public sector snoopers a clean bill of health – except for domestic surveillance specialists MI5, whose cloud data storage blunder is still under investigation.…

With eSIM tech for the Dick Tracy in your life OPPO has whipped the sheets off its first watch – imaginatively titled the OPPO Watch. The news coincided with the unveiling of the OPPO Find X2 smartphone, which the Chinese tech brand introduced at a London event earlier today.…

Three 'nauts, one commander to ride Musk's missile for an eight-day stay Axiom Space has signed a contract with SpaceX to fly three private astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) "as soon as the second half of 2021".…

It's like Christmas all over again, source tells us Exclusive Morrisons has slowed its conveyor belt of tech changes to avoid any IT crashes as British shoppers continue a coronavirus-inspired panic-buying spree.…

Historic tech real estate has a guide price of $300k Deep-pocketed fans of historical computing gear, take note: a fully functional Apple-1 computer is going under the hammer, with a guide price of $300,000.…

David Goeckeler finally gets keys to his own kingdom, says he's stoked to ride 'massive wave of new opportunity' Storage giant Western Digital has hired David Goeckeler, boss of Cisco's $34bn networking and security biz, as its new chief exec.…

Fiddle with some numbers and voila A vulnerability in NordVPN's payments platform allowed anyone to view users' payment information and email addresses, a startling HackerOne entry has revealed.…

Engine and afterburner 'for static display only'. But they said that about that Vulcan too... News has reached Vulture Central of an opportunity to purchase an actual, honest-to-goodness Concorde engine, replete with afterburner.…

That won't cause any confusion Having fixed the mystery blocking bug of last week, Microsoft dropped a fresh Fast Ring build of Windows 10 and announced plans to clear the waters of the privacy pond by fiddling with the names given to diagnostic data slurpage.…

Consumer mag Which? calls for manufacturers to be open about how long they will support devices File this one under "well, duh." Consumer mag Which? today published research estimating that over a billion Android devices are vulnerable to hackers and malware as they are not receiving security updates.…

You might have free coffee pods but I've got pen and paper Something for the Weekend, Sir? Paper jam. Yum, my favourite flavour.…

It's the triple! Internet Explorer, McAfee and... is that Windows 8.1 flashing its privates? Bork!Bork!Bork! It's been a few days and there have been a few borks. Today's entry in the hall of infamy takes us far from London's Vulture Central all the way to Amman, Jordan.…

Droopy, Sticky and Non-booty. The three forgotten dwarves. On Call Welcome to an art-infused instalment of On Call, where Spanish surrealism runs headlong into the grim reality of a 1990s UK travel agency, and it is up to a Register reader to save the day.…

Same old story from PwC but more optimistic than other research Women are still struggling to get a foothold in the IT industry, according to research from PwC.…

Plucky droid will look for signs of microbial life, study climate to help prepare future visitors NASA’s latest Martian rover, due to launch in July and being assembled right now, finally has a name: Perseverance.…

It's not quite DeepMind's 'Come with me if you want to live' moment, but it's close, maybe DeepMind has shared its AI software's homework detailing the structure of six proteins linked to the Wuhan coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2, aka the thing that causes COVID-19.…

Audio gear maker drops 'recycle mode' aka 'e-waste mountain candidate' Sonos will no longer force customers to permanently brick their smart speakers when trading them in for newer models.…

'We don’t want people to be deceived'... unless it's by paying politicians Facebook, still reluctant to ban deceptive political ads, has filed a lawsuit against domain registrar Namecheap and its identity-protecting proxy service WhoisGuard, for allowing people to register seemingly dodgy web addresses.…

Contact info and more, perfect for phishing Virgin Media, one of the UK's biggest ISPs, on Thursday admitted it accidentally spilled 900,000 of its subscribers' personal information onto the internet via a poorly secured database.…

MediaTek chipset flaw already exploited in the wild Google has emitted its latest monthly batch of Android security fixes, addressing a total of 70 CVE-listed vulnerabilities.…

Online security initiative halts hurried purge to accommodate reality Let's Encrypt has halted its plans to cancel all three million flawed web security certificates – after fearing the super-revocation may effectively break a chunk of the internet for netizens.…

Discovery in this case could get very interesting indeed Huawei has pleaded not guilty on Wednesday a New York court to Uncle Sam's charges it robbed, racketeered, and wire frauded itself to technology success.…

And there it is – exactly what telco was fretting over in FY'19 results T-Mobile US was hacked by miscreants who may have stolen some customer information.…

2019 was year two of the magic turnaround and restructuring deepens In year two of its supposed three-year turnaround plan, Capita shares took a dive today after it posted a larger than expected losses for calendar '19.…

No auto-driving cars or or indeed any cars in this TITSUP* pile-up Updated Ride sharing service, Uber, and its culinary tentacle Uber Eats, have fallen down and there does not appear to be a helpful driver to pick them up.…

The buy price, the debts... won't someone think of the HP shareholders? It's all getting a bit boring but HP Inc's board has again unanimously rejected Xerox's $36.5bn buyout bid, saying it low-balls their valuation of the company and "disproportionately benefits" Xerox shareholders.…

Tribunal rules that Robert Lee was 'part and parcel' of bank's ops for 7 years UK tax collector HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has won a case against a contractor who contested almost £75,000 in taxes and national insurance contributions under off-payroll rules.…

The return of the cashpoint bork as support dries up Bork!Bork!Bork! ATM customers have been treated to that most special of sights, a refusal to dispense cash unless Windows 7 gets the update goodness it craves.…

Hole-punch-packing slimline Android that you can buy with pocket change Motorola has confirmed its latest budget blower, the Moto G8, following last year's well-received G7 and it brings faster silicon, a larger screen, and ditches the dreaded notch for a more discrete hole-punch camera.…

Someone must have bumped the go button in rush to work from home As a "work from home if you can and for God's sake stop touching each other" policy arrived in Redmond, it appears one worker managed to trigger a premature emission of good news on the way out.…

Although exploitation is like shooting a lone fish in a tiny barrel 1,000 miles away A slit in Intel's security – a tiny window of opportunity – has been discovered, and it's claimed the momentary weakness could be one day exploited to wreak "utter chaos."…

Was it something I said? NASA is celebrating the return to full science operations of its ageing Voyager 2 spacecraft by not speaking to the thing for 11 months.…

Samsung sticks firm to policy of glueing the hell out its phones iFixit has published the long-awaited results of its Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G teardown. And what did the amateur gadget surgeons find?…

Fresh start for 'FIFA of UN agencies'? The current head of Singapore's intellectual property authority, Daren Tang, has won the race to become Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).…

It's the comeback nobody wanted or asked for Google has told customers using its Kubernetes engine (GKE) that a new management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour (around $73.00 per month) will apply from 6 June 2020.…