The Register

Blur tool brings privacy protection to images, in these troubled times Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, secure comms biz Signal has deployed a blur tool in its messaging and calling app to allow users to obscure faces in app-captured snapshots.…

Mein OS tut weh Bork!Bork!Bork! Willkommen to today's edition of Bork, The Register's glimpse at what digital signage does when it thinks nobody is looking.…

Google's free IDE is high quality but doesn't remove all the annoyances of Android development Google has released Android Studio 4.0, a massive update to its IDE for mobile app development, with features like an upgraded Layout Inspector, and the brand new Build Analyzer and motion editor.…

Utility creator claims OTT security hoops are harmful to indie devs A developer of a Windows utility has protested that "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is hurting independent developers" because of the number of warnings and obstacles placed in front of users who download installers that are not signed or sufficiently well known.…

That escalated quickly Elon Musk has called for Amazon.com to be broken up because it declined to sell a book.…

There's Samsung to be said for having an in-house 5G vendor, right, Korea? A new report has put the UK sixth globally for 5G adoption – behind the usual heavyweights of South Korea and Switzerland, as well as the US, Kuwait, and Qatar.…

All Amazon staff are slackers now as AWS chat backend Chime's in Slack has posted strong growth for the first quarter of FY 2021 and declined to measure its performance by comparing adoption rates with Microsoft Teams.…

The perils of 'bring your child to work' day On Call We have stepped into Friday, and the weekend is only a few short hours away. Take a break from wondering what a trip to the park might do to the "R" number and join us for another adventure of those Register readers cursed with the On Call phone.…

And teases pay-by-credit-card options for its AWS service VMware has extended the supported life of vSphere 6.7 for 11 months.…

Admins told ‘It will not be possible to opt out’ but also promised transition should be painless Google has advised G Suite administrators that its replacement for Google+, “Currents”, will debut on July 6th.…

Fraud allegations regarding health company transaction mean more strife for Lee Jae-yong South Korean prosecutors have requested an arrest warrant for Samsung Group heir, Lee Jae-yong, as part of a investigation into an alleged $3.9bn accounting fraud.…

Leaving more room for false ads bought by local politicians, which it still allows Facebook will hide ads bought by state-owned media outlets from its US-based users, as part of its plan “to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate ahead of the November 2020 election in the US.”…

And we’d do it anywhere else, anytime, says veep Google India has explained why it yanked an app called Remove China Apps from its “Play” digital souk.…

The beloved mole hasn't been able to dig into the Red Planet's regolith for ages NASA’s Insight lander is back in business after the agency reported that its "mole," a digging probe designed to burrow into the martian soil, is now back in action after suffering months of mishaps.…

One employee went on to infect her cousin, who later died Amazon.com employees have sued the e-commerce giant for failing to protect them against the coronavirus, after they contracted COVID-19 and infected their relatives or partners.…

Security firm's swallowing may leave many staff out in the cold VMware is acquiring antimalware company Lastline to boost its network security offerings.…

Chinese telecom companies and authorities want more network control to keep everyone...uh, safe online Chinese telecom companies and the Middle Kingdom government contend that the TCP/IP protocol stack is ill-suited for future networking needs and have proposed reworking the internet's technical architecture with new, more secure internet protocols.…

That's one way of making people check for updates A hapless IT bod found the Have I Been Pwned service (HIBP) answering its own question in a way he really didn’t want – after a breach report including a SQL string KO’d his company’s helpdesk ticket system.…

Fill out our questionnaire, and we’ll share the report once we’ve collated the data Reader survey Some company directors respond well when you wave a pie chart in their face to get what you want, and we’re offering you an opportunity – if you work in database storage and workloads – to help create that kind of budget-relocating study yourself.…

Biz committee chairman asks whether firm accepts software had issues A senior Brit MP has written to Fujitsu demanding answers from the company over its role in the Horizon IT system scandal that has rocked the nation's Post Office.…

We need to look further to glimpse Population III fireballs – where's that James Webb Telescope? European astronomers, using data from the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, have suggested the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe happened earlier than thought.…

'Government is moving too fast, and breaking things as a result' Open Rights Group has instructed lawyers to lodge a complaint with the UK's data watchdog over the rollout of the Test and Trace system because it says the system breaches the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Firm denies shutdown of marketing organ but heads may well roll Exclusive Sophos has placed 100 staff at risk of redundancy and is said to be shutting down its Naked Security blog, sources have told The Register - although the private equity-owned biz denied this.…

Be the hero who carries a thermometer around in their mobe Niche, China-exclusive smartphones seldom get a nod in The Reg's pages, but allow us to make an exception for Honor's latest flagship, the Play4 Pro.…

Aussie homeowner moves press conference off freshly seeded grass In these dark times, at least we still have the no-nonsense attitude of Australians to lift the mood – though the country's prime minister found himself at the pointy end of it this morning.…

Let's play 'That's Not My Subdomain' There was another twist in the long-running Demon subdomain saga yesterday as Namesco accidentally mixed up some customers due to a "scripting error."…

Exploding sun's shock wave may have sparked light from interstellar gas More than 20 years ago a huge wave of energized interstellar gas was detected passing through the Big Dipper – or The Plough as it's known in the UK. Now astrophysicists think they've figured out the cause of the cosmic commotion: a ripple from a massive supernova explosion passing through the Milky Way.…

Forget Industry 4.0 – we're on Data 4.0 now, if Informatica is to believed Web 2.0, Analytics 3.0, Industry 4.0. A world-weary tech worker would be minded to add TotalBull 5.0 to the list. Tech industry vendors are prone to promote grand visions that on close examination turn out to be a mishmash of concepts and technologies congregating only to shift more units.…

A little more short-term revenue never hurt any.. er, well.. You know how it is: the economy is in meltdown; half the company is working from home and the other half is furloughed. What is there to look forward to? Software audits, that's what.…

Top court rules iGiant's trademark infringed by components In a setback for the right-to-repair movement, Norway's Supreme Court has upheld a decision that a repair shop's use of unauthorized iPhone screens violated Apple's trademark.…

'Serious threats' and references to family violence as payment descriptors turned into virtual messaging service Creeps in Australia have given away money in order to harass people with abusive transaction descriptions that appear in online banking records.…

Working group already probing Bluetooth performance on myriad devices to help developers The GSM Association, the body that represents mobile carriers and influences the development of standards, has suggested its members bake virus contact-tracing functionality into their own bundled software.…

If you're not registered somewhere in the union, you can't use the TLD Any Brit based in the UK, and not in the EU, will have their .eu domain taken away from them on January 1, 2021, according to the latest iteration of rules published by the TLD's operator EURid.…

Complete with nagware and wash-tracking features Users of Samsung’s wearable devices can now get their hands on a hand-washing app that runs on their wrists.…

Something something pushing us over the Edge Microsoft warned late last year that it was making plans to distribute the Chromium-based version of its Edge browser in Windows 10 updates. It began doing so earlier this year, although manual installation was required, but now Redmond has taken the distribution of Edge via Windows Update a step further by initiating installation.…

Customers given 80 days before instance deletion and the suggested replacement doesn't yet support Linux IBM has given users of its IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on Power 80 days to find a new home.…

Plus: Zoom fixes code-execution security bugs Mozilla has emitted security updates for Firefox to address eight CVE-listed security flaws, five of them considered to be high-risk vulnerabilities.…

Star light, star bright, you're being blocked out by these satellites Updated After complaints from astroboffins, a SpaceX Starlink internet satellite is set to launch tonight with a deployable visor designed to stop sunlight reflecting off its metallic body.…

Electrolux, construction biz fooled into handing over money funneled out of the US to South Africa A fraudster has admitted he tricked two suppliers into paying him more than $500,000 by impersonating staff at a subcontractor and a retail outlet via email.…

Sure, companies will probably just ignore its most important component, but what you gonna do? The final rules for California’s digital privacy law have been published and they are… full of holes.…

12,000 people waiting for hardware, 500 might get it this month. Might Atari is on track to lose by default in a lawsuit brought by the architect of its much-delayed VCS games console over unpaid wages.…

Hyperscalers snap up GPUs for AI inference Sales to hyperscalers now account for half of all Nvidia’s data-center revenues, the graphics giant’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said during a speech at the Bank of America Securities 2020 Global Technology Conference.…

17% growth pre-pandemic now a measly 5% Sales of wearable tech are estimated to slow in 2020 as consumers slam the brakes on non-essential spending. ABI Research is expecting 27 million fewer units sold against earlier forecasts, for a total of 254 million.…

You've not heard this one before but it does sound familiar Google has been sued for billions of dollars in a proposed class action alleging the adtech company identified and tracked users who adopted its browser's incognito mode to avoid such tracking.…

Who's in China and not involved in the deployment of 5G, eh? We are! Xiaomi has formally launched its latest phones for the UK market, the Redmi Note 9 Series, with an interesting dig at fellow corporate citizen Huawei as it bids to become the successor to that company in the West.…

Microsoft already at the trough, IBM and AWS said to be en route Google has joined Microsoft in signing a framework agreement, or Memorandum of Understanding, with the UK government's centralised procurement agency to set discounts on a range of cloud services.…

Closest example yet of substellar object Disk Detective-using researchers have spotted a brown dwarf, plus protoplanetary disk, 332 light years from home.…

All the old lines are getting pretty darn blurred, say security experts at Euro online confab Infosec Europe Does your IT security model take into account things like pacemakers? According to Dr Victoria Baines, speaking at Infosec Europe, "we also perhaps neglect the idea that critical infrastructure might be inside people" as well as merely carried in their pockets.…

Factory closures, surge in remote working and weakened economy all fed into forecasting formula Seven is lucky for some, but maybe not PC and tab makers in 2020 if research house Canalys has got its forecasts right: manufacturers will ship 367.8 million of those boxes, 27.8 million fewer than the prior 12 months, and down - you guessed it - 7 per cent.…

Minimalist distro aims to be the go-to for systemd-free Linux installations The Devuan team has released Beowulf 3.0.0, based on Debian Buster, but with the systemd init system - now standard in Debian - removed.…