The Register

Buying all the buzzwords: AI, 5G and Blockchain implementations promised China's Tencent, the owner of billion-member messaging app WeChat, has announced it will spend 500 billion yuan ($70bn) into new infrastructure over the next five years.…

Early May attack hit 600-plus hosting and cloud customers Global system integrator NTT has said someone hacked their way into its hosting and cloud services and may have accessed 600-odd customers’ data.…

Amid political theater, Section 230 protection loss dangled Analysis Following a fit of indignation at Twitter's decision to apply a fact check notice to some of his recent Twitter messages, US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that purports to limit the liability protection afforded to internet platforms when they take action on user posts.…

Startup says it's covered by the First Ammendment, ta very much The American Civil Liberties Union has sued Clearview AI for scraping billions of photos from public social media profiles, without people's explicit consent, to train its facial-recognition system.…

Chocolate Factory insists its practices have been mischaracterized Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the ad biz employs unfair and deceptive trade practices to collect location data from mobile phones.…

The price will only go down The maintainers of OpenSSH, widely used for connecting securely to servers and devices over networks, have warned that the SHA-1 algorithm will be disabled in a "near-future release".…

Colour us shocked A £339 "anti-5G" product billed as the "first to market full-spectrum protection" appears to be nothing more than a bog-standard £5 USB stick with an LED on the end, according to Pen Test Partners.…

Scampering through spring fields, or a cautious dribble seeping under the bathroom door? After a lengthy gestation in the Insider Program, the Windows 10 May 2020 Update (aka 2004, aka 20H1) has arrived, replete with a Linux kernel in the form of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL).…

So says Barracuda Networks, anyway Digital rogues are shunning Microsoft in favour of Google when it comes to launching branded spear-phishing attacks, according to threat intel firm Barracuda Networks.…

Have your say – we want to hear your insights and experiences Reader survey It’s a truism that not only does business rely on the information it holds, for many it is that information that pushes the organisation’s growth and prosperity. This puts the storage infrastructure and its performance firmly in management’s sights, especially as the range of demanding workloads ramps up every quarter.…

Sorry, fraud is a crime in both our countries Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou has suffered a fresh setback in her fight to avoid extradition to the US after a Canadian judge ruled her case could continue.…

Double the RAM but not double the price Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has confirmed a doubling of the diminutive computer's RAM to 8GB for £74.…

Patch Thursday is for you, Patch Tuesday is for everyone else Apple has alerted users about a bunch of security fixes for its software on supported versions of macOS that you ought to install as soon as you can.…

Thows arms around Salesforce and Microsoft in cloudy cuddle Workday, purveyor of in-memory cloud-native HR and finance tools, has lowered its subscription revenue estimates by up to $85m for fiscal 2021 in response to the COVID-19 crisis.…

Hilarious Launched with website glitches and no associated phone app, England's Test and Trace programme - expected to help lift the nation safely out of its COVID-19 lockdown - went live this morning.…

'We appreciated your input and insights' Updated Keivan Beigi, developer of AppGet, has described how Microsoft nearly hired him to work on the open-source Windows package manager as an official feature, then went quiet for six months before announcing WinGet, which Beigi says is "very inspired by AppGet".…

The vulnerability allegedly leaked his location, making him a target for hitmen The older brother of dead Colombian cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar is suing Apple for a whopping $2.6bn over a security vulnerability that allegedly allowed miscreants to access his location via his iPhone X handset.…

Oh wait You can file this one under: "Better late than never." The General Court of the European Union has annulled an earlier European Commission ruling blocking a merger between O2 and Three on competition grounds, following an appeal from the latter.…

Trendy systems programming lingo tops poll fifth year on the trot Rust for the fifth year in a row has held its position as the most-loved programming language in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, even if it's not the primary language for most programmers and not many jobs require it.…

Not just a bunch of complete bankers Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another entry in the pantheon of borkage. This time from an Android app demonstrating that the path to success is to first find failure.…

'Split-shift model' to safely help 'critical infrastructure workforce' do its thing Broadcom has sent staff back into corporate offices in England – though workers elsewhere in the UK can continue working remotely, a letter seen by The Register reveals.…

A dozen daring firms will duke it out for the right to get India talking and take on the world! HCL and Zoho are among the companies shortlisted in the Indian government's competition to develop a locally-made video conferencing platform for its own use.…

Dev sticks with elderly GTK+2 GUI toolkit because 'we would gain nothing' by upgrading The sound-tinkerers among you will be pleased to learn that Ardour 6.0 is out, representing a major upgrade of the open-source digital audio workstation for Linux, macOS and Windows.…

And still no sign of safe software or approval to fly Boeing has resumed production of the 737 Max, its passenger plane with software so flawed that its certification was yanked after being found to have caused two fatal accidents.…

Losses deepened, optimism increased Nutanix has beaten the interim guidance it offered investors as the COVID-19-induced economic slowdown impacted its operations.…

Unethical developers drum up bogus user counts to gain trust Efforts to manipulate installation counts in Chrome Web Store extension listings appear to be alive and well, despite a developer's personal crusade to call attention to the problem.…

Launch comes ahead of UK rolling out its controversial version Switzerland says it is the first country to roll out a contact-tracing app for the COVID-19 coronavirus using technology and a set of APIs produced jointly by Apple and Google.…

Prime Minister gives e-cash and e-government a hurry-up as Apple tunes in to its manufacturing smarts Vietnam has accelerated its adoption of all things digital.…

Trump's throwing everything at the social wall to see what will stick Opinion “In their natural habitat, when chimpanzees become angry, they often stand up, wave their arms, and throw branches or rocks – anything nearby that they can get their hands on. When chimps are removed from the wild and kept in captivity, they experience stress and agitation, which can cause them to react in the same way – by throwing things,” explains the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada.…

Workers told to take five days of compulsory leave ‘so we can better care for each other’ In the halcyon days of April, before IBM initiated its latest round of mass redundancies, the IT giant told staff in its Australian and New Zealand operations to take a break – and brace for a deluge of post-lockdown work in the third quarter of 2020.…

Demand high, components MIA The three months to April 30 were "complicated," HP Inc said on Wednesday while trying to explain why its sales dropped by double digits in its fiscal second quarter of 2020.…

Lightning strike threat postpones lift-off to Saturday NASA's attempt to launch American astronauts to the International Space Station aboard an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade was aborted today due to bad weather.…

Just don't expect a full battery Apple has released the fifth version of macOS Catalina, and fixed yet another stability issue that saw machines crash during large file transfers; the latest in a long series of problems with version 10.15 of the operating system.…

'Something malfunctioned' as timer was about to hit double digits Wannabe satellite flinger Virgin Orbit has shared more detail on what went wrong and right in the very brief maiden flight of LauncherOne.…

Best change any recycled credentials from your blogging days Russian-owned blogging service LiveJournal has reportedly suffered a hack affecting 26 million user accounts.…

You’ve come to the right place: We’re running a webcast to show you how Webcast “The journey to cloud” echoes through all organisations. It’s a Bildungsroman – a story of empowerment and betterment. A shiny, towering cityscape of gleaming edifices and elegant spires. It’s like an ascension into the actual clouds. Like dying and waking up in heaven.…

Same specs, but now it's a Pro Almost four months after it was first unveiled, Motorola has finally announced a European release for its Moto G Stylus phablet.…

More than dozen services down, customers left unable to work Adobe technicians scrambled on Wednesday to restore multiple cloud services after a severe outage left customers stranded.…

You know sick people call ambulances using mobile phones, right? Another 5G mast has gone up in flames in Liverpool in the UK, in this case mere days after it was erected.…

Still on Java 8? You'll need to upgrade to 11 to use it Updated Google Cloud Platform has added Java 11 support to its serverless Cloud Functions service.…

Reality intrudes into politics and tech once again Updated Cleansing Britain's phone networks of Huawei equipment by 2023 might not be possible, ministers are said to have realised after UK policy changes on the Chinese company in the last few weeks.…

If you're anything like us, you dream of reorganising your country's highways. This is a new system they want to tighten up data streams, but still Highways England is shopping for a new £62m National Traffic Information Service to help collect, process and disseminate real-time data and information about traffic on 4,300 miles (6,920km) of road.…

How may I secure thee, let me count the ways... There was good news for enterprises keen to inflict Microsoft's Edge browser on their users with the arrival of a new security baseline and a way to turn off the Surf game that arrived in version 83.0.478.37.…

Although perhaps your lockdown digs are tidier than ours Audio kit flinger Skullcandy has embedded Tile's gadget-tracking tech to help you skin your knuckles fishing out its latest all-wireless earbuds from under the well beneath your handbrake.…

'It should not be used for interactive shell work' – Windows Terminal chief Microsoft senior program manager Rich Turner took to Twitter in recent days to remind everyone that it really is time to move on from Windows' ancient command processor, cmd.exe.…

Supply and demand in action Crime has never been cheaper to pull off, so long as you're not particular about quality.…

A viable alternative to the platforms with billions of active users between them? There's still work to be done Analysis Rich Communication Services (RCS) was initially pitched as the inevitable successor to SMS, offering enhanced multimedia functionality and other fun stuff, like read receipts.…

Surprise! IBM has brought Netezza back from the dead in a move likely to sow further confusion among customers of Big Blue's enterprise data products.…

Tweeter-in-chief responds by alleging bias and electoral skulduggery Twitter has for the first time acted on inaccurate tweets made by US president Donald Trump.…

Behold, the three error dialogs of the borkpocalypse Bork!Bork!Bork! As the UK tentatively returns to work and those who must venture back onto public transport, we were happy to learn that even in these changed times, Windows remains as wobbly as ever.…