The Register

Uncle Sam's crackdown sparks 'force majeure event that cannot be overcome' One of Huawei’s flagship projects in Australia has been called off because, as the state government put it, “trade restrictions imposed by the US government create a force majeure event that cannot be overcome.”…

Should boffins keep it old-school space-race era – or embrace the, er, future of the 1970s? NASA has brought back its sleek iconic logo, lovingly named the worm for its curvy red font, in time for its first crewed spaceflight using American rockets in almost a decade.…

HTTP header ends in own goal Twitter on Thursday warned of an esoteric bug that, in limited circumstances, allowed users' non-public profile information to potentially fall into the hands of other users.…

American young adults are easiest marks for criminals, study reckons Want to know why ransomware is still rampant? One in three surveyed folks in North Americans said they would be willing to pay up to unscramble their files once their personal systems were infected.…

Developers rejoice, there may be (eventually) a store-agnostic way to sell in-application items Google has decided to try to openly standardize one of its own APIs for handling in-app purchases in web apps rather than pursuing a previously proposed proprietary plan.…

Non-military tech rule exception plus other tweaks mulled The US government is reportedly close to introducing stringent new rules that would stop Chinese companies from buying certain high-technology components, including semiconductors and optical materials.…

Alleges anticompetitive behaviour in the walled garden. There's no party like a third party, eh? Channeling their inner Kevin Patterson, Tile this week bemoaned Apple's unfairness to a US congressional panel in Colorado investigating the iPhone maker's stewardship of its app ecosystem.…

Get the latest advice and insight on scale, resiliency and intelligence Promo Business continuity is another of those aspects of IT that, before, was always pitched on a rather "what if" basis. What if your global cloud comms provider goes down? What if a squirrel chews through one of your server room’s insulation cables?…

£899 and no social media? That's going to be a big ask There are few surprises around UK pricing and availability for Huawei's latest P40 handsets, which are more or less consistent with previous P-series models – but they are missing a few things punters may not be too, er, appy about.…

US air safety bods call it 'potentially catastrophic' if reboot directive not implemented The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios" – including the crashing of onboard network switches.…

'A whole bunch of tunnels': Mesh networking with per-node permissions and OAuth security Interview WireGuard, a new VPN protocol with both strong performance and easy setup, has been adopted by startup Tailscale as the basis of a peer-to-peer remote networking system that is both secure and quick to configure.…

Lose yourself in a relic of simpler times Got some unexpected time on your hands and a yearning for simpler times? May we present an original prototype ROM of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, courtesy of The Centre for Computing History, for your tinkering pleasure.…

But first, you get a taste of it with host lifecycle management, and more waiting for K8s integration VMware plans to give its flagship vSphere product the power to patch all the software inside a virtual machine.…

That's a pretty expensive gap in S4/HANA When Precision Drilling, a global company that serves the oil and gas industry, upgraded its asset management application to SAP S/4HANA two years ago, it was expecting the software to handle data going into its supply chain systems. But it soon discovered that was not the case.…

Cramped conditions? Not being able to see friends and family? Sounds familiar If the current coronavirus pandemic has got you wanting to leave Planet Earth, you’re not alone. More than 12,000 people answered NASA’s latest call for astronauts to explore the Moon and Mars.…

Chinese giant plays nice with open source Huawei has become a licensee member of the Open Invention Network (OIN), which agrees to cross-license Linux patents to one another royalty free and to any organisation that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux.…

Track your jogs around the block – while those are still allowed The gyms are shut. The government wants you to stay indoors. You can only leave your home once per day. And nobody, it seems, told Fitbit, which this week announced its latest calorie-counting, timber-trimming wearable – the Fitbit Charge 4.…

Clue: Home working might have played a bit part, even in return of the desktop The rush to work from home as COVID-19 grips Europe has led to bumper sales of related tech for distributors, official stats confirm.…

Ad giant added memory to servers, restarted, watched things get worse ... is on top of things again now A 14-hour Google cloud platform outage that we missed in the shadow of last week's G Suite outage was caused by a failure to scale, an internal investigation has shown.…

Maybe the world needs the Pidgin of voice and video right now? Slack has added integrations with Microsoft Teams calls and Zoom.…

Could this candidate be a missing link between small and bonkers-massive? Astronomers have discovered what they believe could be a black hole of intermediate-mass nestled on the outskirts of a large galaxy more than 700 million light years away.…

Following the moon to find capacity and sticking to safe sites as Chuck Robbins leads new weekly briefings Cisco was surprised by how quickly it needed to adopt a global working-from-home policy, amid the coronavirus pandemic, and is now rationing VPN use to safeguard its security.…

How to combat the threat and comply with GDPR Webcast Here’s something that you may not know, something the cloud companies are not keen to shout about too loudly.…

Oh, oh no... oh God Intel and Broadcom were the lone beacons of success in an otherwise dismal semiconductor market last year, according to industry analysts at Omdia (formerly IHS Markit).…

About coronavirus or anything else Vietnam will fine people posting fake news on social media in an effort to crack down on the spread of both general misinformation and falsehoods about the novel coronavirus.…

Scores new gig promoting software-defined data centres VMware is hunting for a new vice-president and managing director for Australia and New Zealand.…

Imagine an iPad running FaceTime clamped to a post stuck into a Roomba and you'll get the idea Japanese airline ANA has spun out a startup to develop and sell “avatars” - robots that comprise a remote-controllable stand with iPad-like device running a Facetime-like app, to bring your face into a room.…

Wow, how convenient On Monday, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a worker at its Staten Island, New York, warehouse, who had organized a protest demanding more protection for workers amid the coronavirus outbreak.…

A few more months to get those servers upgraded 'in light of current global circumstances' Microsoft has blinked once again and delayed disabling TLS 1.0 and 1.1 by default in its browsers until the latter part of 2020.…

Feeling secure? Sucker Analysis The FBI has not followed internal rules when applying to spy on US citizens for at least five years, according to an extraordinary report [PDF] by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.…

What have you got for us, Detective? Amazon's Detective has hit general availability, adding to a range of AWS security services, which at this point has become a little confusing.…

Today's Window Walk is brought to you by the letters 'R' 'E' and 'G' Microsoft has persevered with the quickfire release cadence of the toolbox of stuff that should really be built into Windows 10 in the form of PowerToys 0.16.…

For a biz that prides itself on not censoring the internet, it sure likes censoring the internet Cloudflare, known for free speech advocacy, rolled out a self-styled family-friendly variation of its DNS service to block adult content – and ended up denying access to LGBTQ websites and sex education resources.…

Two-year campaign observed by Guardicore A malware gang is targeting Microsoft SQL servers with such precision that they're disabling rival gangs' software nasties in their quest to steal control of servers from their rightful owners.…

Playing catch-up with AWS and not that smart, but some advantages over DNS Google Cloud Platform's Service Directory, which aims to enhance microservice discovery, has hit beta.…

2021 looking ever more virtual and distant. Did March feel like a year for you too? Microsoft has switched its September Ignite event to a digital affair even as other organisers hope for a return to some semblance of "normal" by August.…

Enterprise cloud rains bonus down on software supremo... that's this year's holiday sorted then Salesforce.com has had a rummage down the back of the sofa and awarded CEO Marc Benioff $2.3m in small change.…

You lot can keep the blinkenlights flashing but you'll have to be TUPEd from BT... Exclusive - updated BT is outsourcing management of its mainframe estate to IBM in a five-year agreement that kicks off today. And while it may be April Fools' Day, some incumbent staff being TUPEd across to Big Blue aren't laughing.…

Web calculator should give you an idea of bog roll, pasta, booze stocks The UK is in its second week of official coronavirus lockdown, though society has been collectively shitting the bed for much longer – so surely by now we've all suffered the indignity of venturing out to the supermarket only to be faced with barren shelves.…

AIM-listed biz says THAT virus meant it has little choice, will seek a buyer AIM-listed software and managed services outfit K3 is to put its loss-making Microsoft Dynamics reseller division into the hands of administrators amid commercial unpredictability caused by COVID-19.…

Vicarious liability now applies to intentional leaks, top court says Morrisons supermarket is not liable for the actions of a disgruntled employee who deliberately leaked nearly 100,000 employees' payroll data online, Britain's Supreme Court has ruled.…

With licence fee under threat, where can corporation get the money from? The BBC has floated the idea of replacing its licence fee with a broadband levy in its submission to a government consultation.…

Authors, publishers unimpressed The Internet Archive has defended its decision to make its collection of 1.4 million books readily available online, despite most of them still being in copyright, by arguing that public libraries are currently closed.…

Space scientist reveals drive behind solar instrument experiment now approved by NASA NASA has formally green lit a mission to explore how the Sun whips up solar particle storms – those giant frenzies of charged particles that can frazzle orbiting satellites and destroy electronic systems on Earth.…

Connecting to a port greater than 8192 using a hostname now stalls, possibly Apple's latest update to macOS Catalina appears to have broken SSH for some users.…

Also: Satellite comms outfit OneWeb files for Chapter 11 Roundup Welcome to another roundup of the week's rocket-based tomfoolery for space nerds. Let's jump straight into it.…

It's actually another Huawei down the 5G antennas Stob Your attention please. I bring a message to you, Britain's IT community, from High Command.…

Steady now A survey of more than 800 organisations has found that 53 per cent are looking to upgrade enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.…

Three secrets of success you need to know, according to Quadrotech Webcast You merged. You sold a company. You’re migrating to a sovereign data centre. Whatever the reason for your Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration, it can be one of the most important and stressful projects you will ever take on.…

Flying a 50-year-old rocket to mark the anniversary of Apollo 13? What could go wrong? Exclusive Faced with spiralling costs for its Space Launch System (SLS) and pressure to put American boots on the Moon by 2024, NASA is to return the Saturn V to flight.…