The Register

$25k from you and $75k from the government buys improved productivity and economic diversity The Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong has increased the subsidies offered to local business’ technology investments by 50 percent.…

Super-crypto actually normal TLS, lawsuit launched over Facebook API usage, privacy policy rewritten UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sparked security concerns on Tuesday when he shared a screenshot of “the first ever digital Cabinet” on his Twitter feed. It revealed the country’s most senior officials and ministers were using bog-standard Zoom to discuss critical issues facing Blighty.…

Could be a wearable, could be wired. Backed by big fines and jail The State of Western Australia has given itself the power to install surveillance devices in homes, or compel people to wear them, to ensure that those required to isolate during the coronavirus crisis don’t interact with the community.…

There's an app for that. Or text, if you dare. Or even retail outlets Singapore will bin the physical tokens used to provide two-factor authentication (2FA) for some digital government services.…

Australia starts crustacean migration Australia will arrange rescue flights for lobsters, shellfish, and other seafood, to ease the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy. No, it's not that kind of rescue: they're going to be eaten, hopefully.…

Techies, non-techies respond to COVID-19 by self-medicating at home With the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, on its third week of self-quarantine, and facing at least another month of being stuck in near-lockdown at home, habits have changed.…

Oh no, we've been rumbled With workers opting to telecommute and dial into video conferencing amid the coronavirus lockdowns, where possible, sales of formalwear are up... partially.…

Turmoil in the financial markets fells ambitious acquisition plan Xerox said on Tuesday that it is ending its hostile bid to acquire printer-and-PC maker HP due to financial complications arising from the ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

K8s 'kind of a universal key' for going multi-cloud MariaDB has updated its cloud-native SkySQL database, promising a slew of features addressing deployment, management and analytics.…

Low demand, supply glut. Why bother? Samsung Display will discontinue production of LCD panels by the end of the year due to falling demand for the increasingly marginalised tech and a supply glut in the market.…

Although you need to hop in the Management API sidecar for the really good stuff NoSQL slinger DataStax has released an open source Kubernetes operator for Apache Cassandra as it seeks to cosy back up to the community.…

For now. (Having mattresses and smartbogs to fall back on doesn't sound so nuts anymore) Over half of Chinese electronics, scooters and underwear corp Xiaomi's revenue came from smartphone sales, according to audited figures published today [PDF].…

Plus note to admins: sending content to Microsoft is on by default and users cannot disable it Hands On Microsoft made a number of Office 365 Microsoft 365 announcements yesterday, including touting an expanded set of AI capabilities in its core applications.…

Lots of non-savvy users may be recycling previously hacked creds Group video chat app Houseparty has offered a $1m bounty to identify what it claims is an organised campaign to falsely depict it as a hackers' backdoor.…

If you ignore the T&Cs to probe a site's algorithms, don't expect the Feds to swoop in using the dreaded CFAA Netizens probing websites' algorithms for bias and discrimination, against the sites' terms and conditions, can breathe a small sigh of relief. A US federal court has ruled it's not a criminal offense to flout a consumer-grade website's fine-print.…

Bloody poms are full of great ideas Australian prime minister Scott Morrison may have to eat his words on how to limit the spread of coronavirus after the country's westernmost state announced "extreme and draconian" measures all of its own.…

How many customers' deets? It's not saying just yet Marriott Hotels has suffered its second data spillage in as many years after an "unexpected amount" of guests' data was accessed through two compromised employee logins, the under-fire chain has confirmed.…

Gotta find Huawei to handle 2020: Despite rosy 2019 figures, Chinese comms giant sees trouble ahead Huawei's rotating CEO reckons the Chinese government will retaliate against the US tech industry rather than allow the giant of the Middle Kingdom to be "slaughtered on the chopping board"* of US sanctions.…

DIY IDE Theia hits 1.0, and it's still compatible with all those extensions The Eclipse Foundation has pulled back the curtains on version 1.0 of Theia, an alternative to Microsoft's developer darling of the hour, Visual Studio Code.…

Proved for all sites, proved for all sites, there is nothing else we can do Two years ago, network infrastructure biz Cloudflare launched the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver, with the promise that internet users could use the service to surf the internet without being tracked - by Cloudflare at least.…

Filtering, anti-spoofing, coordination, validation to prevent crooks, spies hijacking victims' connections An internet community effort to improve routing security has got a boost from some of the internet’s biggest names.…

And few worried about security – are they right? Two-thirds of polled Register readers, on average worldwide, said it was business as usual in their IT departments amid the ongoing global coronavirus crisis. And fewer than one in ten said they were paralyzed by the pandemic.…

Employers, would-be employees, we're here to help during these trying times Job alert We've received a couple of solid responses to our offer last week, in which we invited organizations seeking tech staff to tackle the coronovirus pandemic to send in their recruitment ads and we would run them for free online. No catch, no snark, nor strings attached.…

MEX I can: A tale of ingenuity and innovation Space extenders As the European Space Agency flicked the standby switch on some of its long-lived spacecraft in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, The Register figured it was time for a look at how the agency has kept its fleet flying far beyond expectations. Today, the veteran Mars Express orbiter.…

Forget the Lambeth Walk, instead enjoy the Camden Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in our uplifting series of incidents where someone else's IT misdemeanours are flashed at an unsuspecting world. Behold the bork.…

We've asked top tech companies if India's lockdown changes the service you receive. Most say no India is the dominant source of offshored IT workers, and home to big facilities for plenty of global IT companies. India is also in lockdown and workers there cannot leave their homes except under limited cirumstances.…

Is this the end of the DNS? No, but it is curious to see where this is going Opera has updated its lightweight browser for Android so that it can access unofficial .crypto domains, primarily to exchange cryptocurrency.…

Mum? Dad? What was lockdown like? It went by in a flash, junior, because we studied for a database certification Oracle will offer free training and learning material during the coronavirus lockdown.…

New digital payment standards are changing the rules – don’t be caught out Promo You’ll probably be more than familiar with open banking standards by now. Launched in the UK by the Competition and Markets Authority in January 2018 and increasingly adopted in the wider world, 202 (and counting) regulated providers are now on board.…

Just use a wee bit of your imagination Future astronauts will need to be prepared to shed blood, sweat, tears, and, erm, possibly urine, too, if they want to build a home base on the Moon.…

Good luck if you're a user of Cloud SQL, Cloud Data Fusion, or Cloud Composer Google’s cloud is experiencing trouble.…

Now that's a caveat Microsoft has corrected its own claim that it had “seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.”…

Citizens advised to put away their papers and use the national data locker instead India is advising its citizens that cloud storage can help to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.…

This being America, they weren't too hard on most of them The US government is cracking down on Voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers accused of giving safe harbor to robocall spammers.…

Plus: Edge sharpened, Teams upgrades promised Microsoft on Monday teased a few future features of its Edge web browser and Teams slack-killer. It also announced the rebranding of its cloud productivity suite Office 365 as Microsoft 365 – a subscription offering that already included Office 365, alongside Windows 10 Enterprise services and security features.…

You thought thousands of complaints would make a difference? Analysis The price of dot-coms will steadily increase over the next four years following DNS overseer ICANN's controversial renewal of Verisign's contract to run the top-level domain.…

Bad case of the Mondays European cloud giant OVH is suffering a substantial outage today: if there's a website you can't reach right now, it's perhaps hosted by OVH..…

1903 still rules roost, Azure Fabric 6.5 support extended, and more Roundup Cross out the expiry date on your rapidly ageing role-based certification - you've got an extra six months. But that wasn't the only thing to break from Redmond in the past week, here are the best bits.…

Set to replace John Manzoni on 14 April, but no word on the new chief digi officer John Manzoni – permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office and CEO of the UK civil service who had an agenda to introduce more digital services – has been replaced with Alex Chisholm.…

We need to get people's nans on WhatsApp BT has begun asking contact centre employees to return to work as it grapples with an increasing number of customer calls resulting from the UK-wide lockdown.…

Still using PhoneGap? Don't Developers using Adobe's PhoneGap framework for building mobile apps for iOS and Android may soon be unable to submit to Apple's App Store, thanks to Adobe's use of an old iOS SDK.…

Couldn't have come at a better time with COVID-19 economic shutdown BT has won a legal application to restart a decade-old court case in the hope of clawing back more than £90m in VAT the telco claims it overpaid to HMRC from 1978 onwards.…

Don't worry, though. Any 'systematic' data extraction would be 'time-consuming' The digital burglary at 118 118 Money exposed recordings of customer service calls that included a raft of personal information although thankfully not payment data.…

Encounters the ridge phenomenon: As in, there is one 'at the bottom of my nose you can't get past' We're all told from a tender age not to shove things up our noses – Lego, chickpeas, pencils, fingers – but it seems even grown-up astrophysicists can have difficulty grasping these most basic recommendations when it's in the name of science.…

Swift on more platforms – provided you do not need a GUI The team working on the Swift programming language has said its goals for the upcoming version 5.3 will include "adding support for Windows and additional Linux distributions".…

Plus, Google warns of fake journo phishing attacks Roundup It's once again time for the El Reg security roundup.…

Your quick summary of neural network news Roundup Hello Reg readers. Here's a quick roundup of bits and pieces from the worlds of machine learning and AI.…

O'Reilly has quit the events game, and it might not be the only one Comment You've been there, done that and you quite literally have the T-shirt. Love them or loathe them, IT conferences are a feature of industry life. My first was CA World in New Orleans in 1998. In front of an audience of thousands, then Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang wandered across the stage pontificating as a chorus of children danced about him (no, really) and I knew I had indeed entered a whole new world of weird.…

Folds up just like a smartphone – if you ignore the size and weight Planet Computers has announced the Astro Slide, a 5G smartphone with a slide-out physical keyboard. It will run Android 10 but with the ability to support Linux in future.…

Amazon promised. Google trialled. UPS got a licence. But only 1% of retailers are interested because they're still mostly rubbish More than a billion people are in coronavirus-inspired lockdown and even going out to shop for essentials increases the risk of the virus spreading.…