The Register

Chocolate Factory's as-a-service stuff grows as advertising, profit takes a tumble Google-parent Alphabet saw its bottom line take a tumble this past quarter as the coronavirus pandemic cut into its lucrative advertising business.…

And stuff that Cupertino just banked billions from Apple is weathering the COVID-19 storm well so far: on Thursday, it reported a surge in sales from its online souks, and maintained iPhone revenues despite temporarily shuttering stores during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.…

When the economy's tanking, who ya gonna call? Jeff Bezos! Amazon on Thursday reported $88.9bn in revenue for its second quarter of 2020, a 40 per cent increase year-on-year that exceeded expectations and lifted the web goliath's already buoyant stock in after-hours trading.…

Proof-of-concept algorithm-matching system paves way for more complex recommendation engine Intel engineers, and academics from MIT and Georgia Tech, have built a neural network that predicts whether two snippets of code intend to achieve the same aim even if they're written differently.…

Brush up on your RESTful, gRPC, container development skills with us online Webcast Building an application from the ground up for your business has never been quicker or easier. With REST for web services leading to the RESTful architectural style, and containers proving the perfect delivery model, the combination of DevOps, microservices, and automation means an organization can create almost anything, instantly.…

Warnings either not new or need more study, reckons open-source dev team Neal Krawetz, a computer forensics expert, has published details on how to detect Tor bridge network traffic that he characterizes as "zero-day exploits"... which the Tor Project insists are nothing of the sort.…

Some argument over exact numbers affected Dell is laying off staff though there is some dispute over the numbers involved.…

'The concept of paying for monitoring per host has not aged well' Application Performance monitoring (APM) biz New Relic has trimmed its offerings to three core products and is moving away from host-based pricing to a per-user-per-month subscription and pay-as-you-go for data ingested and events processed.…

Larry, stop giving Bill ideas Bill McDermott – the former SAP CEO right now plying his trade at the top of workflow whizkid ServiceNow – has competed hard against Oracle for so long that he seems to have borrowed more than a few lines from Larry Ellison’s playbook.…

Reverse tabnapping is no more Mozilla's Firefox 79 is here, but general users shouldn't get too excited – almost all the new features are aimed at developers.…

Or maybe you want a List. Or a Task. Or a Planner. Just bung it into Teams Microsoft has shared more details about Dataflex, its low-code/no-code app platform that will be embedded into Teams - something it should have done much earlier to help demystify things.…

Folk outside London cry: Why doesn't Alexa understand me? To those of us born here, Britain is a wondrous cornucopia of accents and dialects. To visitors, like US-bred AI assistants, people outside of London may as well not speak English.…

And its lightweight virtualized RAM and CPU project, Napoca, too Security vendor Bitdefender has open-sourced its hypervisor introspection technology, which the Xen Project will adopt as a sub-project.…

Despite America but because of China, vendor came out on top It almost seemed like a mission impossible but Huawei has defied all expectations – including its own – by outshipping rival handset maker Samsung to become the world's biggest shifter of smartphones.…

23 cameras, microphones and a helicopter on the rover to see and hear the Red Planet in living technicolor Perseverance, the heaviest and most complex Martian rover yet, is on its way to the Red Planet aboard an Atlas V rocket that blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday.…

Now just AWS waiting in the wings under One Government Cloud policy As predicted by El Reg, IBM has joined the growing band of mostly American vendors to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK government that defines discounts for public cloud sales to public sector buyers.…

That's one way of speeding up the tech refresh cycle Netgear has quietly decided not to patch more than 40 home routers to plug a remote code execution vulnerability – despite security researchers having published proof-of-concept exploit code.…

Full-fibre connections coming to (some of) the UK's 'final third' by 2026 Openreach has confirmed an intent to bring FTTP "full-fibre" connectivity to part of the so-called "final third" of the UK – representing rural and isolated areas typically underserved by network providers.…

Prospects of cursed ESN project still murky for customers-to-be As if the UK's emergency services didn't have enough on their plate, the troubled plan to replace their communication network appears to be hitting choppy waters once more.…

Between football, new gaming consoles, Indian low-end-handsets and cloud computing, life is complex for Korean giant right now Samsung Electronics has reported droopy results for its second quarter and has been beaten out by Huawei in the global handset shipments stakes for the first time.…

No data loss or evidence of extended intrusions, but standalone limb Xchanging did suffer DXC has recovered from a ransomware attack that hit its independent services-for-insurers operation Xchanging.…

A neural net takes to heart the old, silly saying: 'On the internet, men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents' The creators of a controversial tool that attempted to use AI to predict people's gender from their internet handle or email address have shut down their service after a huge backlash.…

10Gbps upgrade from challenger ISP backed by private equity London-based ISP Community Fibre has said it will invest £400m to extend its 10Gbps FTTP connections to more premises in the English capital, aiming to reach one million households and businesses by 2023.…

Commercial business slumps but troubled 737 MAX could be back in the skies late this year Boeing has announced it will stop making 747s, probably in the year 2022.…

The cash will come in handy after COVID kicked a colossal hole in Q3 revenue Huawei has agreed to pay US chipmaker Qualcomm $1.8bn to settle a long-standing dispute over infringement of the American firm’s patents.…

Also adds Windows Virtual Desktop support and two-factor authentication Microsoft’s upgraded its Remote Desktop app for Android with features that mean sysadmins can now control desktops that run just about anywhere from just about anything.…

We watched six hours of congressional hearings so you didn’t have to Analysis For six hours on Wednesday, the Western world’s most powerful tech CEOs – whose businesses have become household names and touch every part of our daily digital lives – were grilled by US lawmakers regarding their market dominance.…

Current and former bods fear cloud work is doomed, IT titan disagrees Over the past two weeks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has axed roughly 150 positions in the US, including Azure Stack Hub engineering roles and at least part of its SimpliVity team.…

Ancient ball of suns smeared across space by our galaxy two billion years ago The Milky Way galaxy ripped apart an ancient star cluster born in the early universe and stole its suns two billion years ago, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday.…

Because no one likes to install spoof system files Microsoft is preparing to once and for all drop support for the SHA-1 hash algorithm.…

Chipzilla faces potential class-action headache after stock price plunge On Tuesday this week, five days after Intel acknowledged that its plan to produce 7nm processors had gone off the rails, a shareholder lawsuit was filed against the chip maker.…

We're gonna keeping punning this until someone pays us $5m An annoying vulnerability in the widely used GRUB2 bootloader can be potentially exploited by malware or a rogue insider already on a machine to thoroughly compromise the operating system or hypervisor while evading detection by users and security tools.…

System Roles another key ingredient in six-monthly update Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 has hit beta, with security and production stability pointed to as key goals for the update.…

What do we all need? Next-gen masts. When do we need them? Sooner than they'll be ready Most UK cities now have some degree of 5G coverage, promising those with capable devices faster internet connections. But how much of a game change is it really? New data from RootMetrics highlight consistently nimble connections, albeit with some major differences between networks.…

Surprise pledge catches company on the hop: 'We have announced no change to our strategy' China's ambassador to Britain has threatened to withdraw Huawei and several billions in investment following the government's decision to ban the manufacturer's products from 5G mobile networks.…

Just be careful it's not 'out of scope' Microsoft has created a new landing page for developers, along with a dedicated feedback repository for reporting issues with Windows.…

Could it be? Something approaching, dare we say, viability? Huawei has highlighted growing adoption figures for its Android software ecosystem - Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and the Huawei AppGallery - following the imposition of US government sanctions.…

Carol and Kevin banned from outback establishment for 'bad behaviour' Heads up, folks. Australia's at it again. From the country that brought you "mortal wombat" comes news that two emus have been barred from an outback pub for "bad behaviour".…

Most of the things Microsoft said would be great were not Windows 10 was made generally available on 29 July 2015, introducing the concept of Windows-as-a-Service, a digital assistant called Cortana, a Universal Windows Platform for developers, Continuum to enable "a Windows Phone to become like a PC", and not forgetting the revival of the Start menu.…

You'll wanna tune into this chat about SD-WAN, then Webcast Research from Vanson Bourne found that more than half of surveyed businesses wished their SD-WAN – their software-defined wide area networking – was provided straight from their cloud vendor as opposed to a third party.…

Vodafone not happy either as telcos complain to defence sub-committee about Huawei removal woes Stripping Huawei from the UK's telecommunications network presents a daunting challenge, executives from Vodafone and BT told the House of Commons Defence Sub-Committee yesterday afternoon.…

Almost 25 years and counting, here's to the luckiest spacecraft off Earth Space Extenders Welcome to the final episode in The Register's series on engineering longevity in space. We conclude with the joint ESA and NASA project, more than 24 years into a two-year mission: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).…

Plus: Don't worry, students. The attackers told us they destroyed your data Nearly half of British university staff say they have received no cybersecurity training, according to a recent survey.…

Passengers will be able to watch themselves float while bathed in Earthlight and surrounded by tasteful colours Passengers that go into space aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo won't just experience weightlessness: they'll also get to watch themselves float in a giant mirror and enjoy decor designed to remind them of Earth's oceans and deserts.…

Toshiba leads effort that aspires to run 100 quantum cryptographic devices for 10,000 users by 2024 Japan is poised to start work on global quantum key distribution service and associated infrastructure.…

Who can you trust these days? The voice applications people use with their Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant smart speaker devices have privacy policies, but most users don't read them and neither device maker has shown much concern about policy problems or inconsistencies.…

Microsoft’s trashing the place, clearly. Or is it? Poll GitHub has announced it will henceforth publish a public roadmap of current features.…

Newsletter-as-a-service outfit Substack does the usual apologising Some advice from The Register: when announcing a new privacy policy don’t do so with emails that reveal 500 addresses in the “To” field of the message.…

'We just wanna design chips without distractions', say staff in open letter British chip designer Arm’s Chinese outpost has called in the Chinese government to “protect” it in an ongoing boardroom dispute with its parent company.…

Calls for e-commerce surge and keeps schools closed due to certain virus that's made news lately Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has threatened a pair of local telcos with expropriation if they don’t improve services.…