The Register

Plus: Big Blue wanted to 'turn the screw in a controlled manner' on client An IBM exec was accused of contradicting himself at the High Court in London as he testified over the failure of a £175m Agile platform contract with Co-Operative Insurance.…

Staff found out after seeing their own jobs advertised in India Exclusive Maersk is preparing to make 150 job cuts at its UK command-and-control centre (CCC) in Maidenhead – the one that rebuilt the global shipping company's IT infrastructure after the infamous 2017 NotPetya ransomware attack.…

Also, a new data centre region beneath Spain's Azure skies Roundup Chromium Edge has been tweaked to prevent users installing PUA, Microsoft's going to Spain, plus there are a few more things about the gnomes at Redmond we didn't get around to revealing last week.…

Open-source chap Boris Renski chats to El Reg about the near future Interview The co-founder of Kubernetes cloud outfit Mirantis, Boris Renski, has left the business to start a new venture focused on 5G-based "private LTE" campus networks.…

Deep Space Climate Observatory ticking again after gyroscope mishap The Deep Space Climate Observatory – a satellite that warns of incoming space storms that could knacker telecommunications on Earth – is up and running again after being shut down for eight months by a technical glitch.…

‘We'll just buff it out’ says SpaceX biz baron Video Video footage has emerged of SpaceX's Starship prototype dramatically blowing up on the pad.…

Google's TensorFlow Dev Summit may be next, too Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, due to take place on March 22 to 26 in Silicon Valley's San Jose McEnery Convention Center, has been cancelled following the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in Northern California.…

'Does it have its own satellite dish, sir?' 'You can tell your son it has its own satellite' Drone enthusiasts are up in arms over rules proposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that would require their flying gizmos to provide real-time location data to the government via an internet connection.…

Proposed settlement to end 66 class-action cases awaits judicial approval Apple – which banked $55bn profit in its 2019 fiscal year – is willing to pay up to $500m to settle US claims that the company secretly slowed certain iPhone models to preserve battery life, according to a proposed class action settlement.…

British biz's foray 'has not fared well as it exits the market nursing substantial losses' Brit accountancy software maker Sage is offloading its Brazilian operation to local management.…

PC-and-printers biz will 'carefully review and evaluate the offer' before, presumably, deciding: No Xerox is going for it: this morning it officially inched forward in its effort to forcibly acquire troubled PC-and-printers slinger HP amid repeated attempts by HP's board to strangle the plan.…

Let's hear it for tumbling memory prices It has been eight years since order books opened for the diminutive Raspberry Pi and the foundation has celebrated by knocking $10 off the price of the 2GB incarnation, reducing the thing to $35.…

Pandemic-dodging Sammy continues tradition of investment in Vietnam Samsung has started work on a $220m R&D centre in Vietnam to contribute to it's research in AI, IoT, big data and 5G.…

Meanwhile, Sophos finds nasty rootkit, OnlyFans says massive archive not a hack Roundup Here's El Reg's fresh slice of all the infosec news – beyond what we've already covered – that you'll need to know as you start your week. Ready? Here we go.…

Do you own your data – or does your data own you? Webcast You listened when they told you data was the new oil. Now you spend your working lives buying, tending, and managing storage.…

Global Prestige or Global Positioning? Squabbles ensue as politicos realise space is hard Hopes of an on-time delivery of a report into how the UK's Galileo replacement might work have been dealt a blow as, yup, it's running late.…

Man who steered firm away from burning platform steps away: 'I want to do something different' Nokia Oyj will say jäähyvästi to current CEO Rajeev Suri in September, replacing him with Pekka Lundmark – who currently heads energy firm Fortum.…

'Company affected lives of millions of people, causing disruption, annoyance and distress,' thunders ICO A Scottish business that fired 193.6 million automated nuisance calls at Brits has itself become the recipient of some unwanted comms – a letter containing a £500,000 fine from the UK's data watchdog.…

'We are truly sorry' Fintech startup Loqbox has fessed up to suffering an "attack" which potentially revealed its customers' names, postal addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and phone numbers.…

Still a monopoly in Western Euro channel, but it's smaller: shortages and AMD ROME burning Intel market share It isn't just in PCs that Intel's vice-like grip is weakening – its share of server CPU sales for standalone build-to-order (BTO) options and upgrades has also crashed in Western Europe due to protracted production issues, exploited by a resurgent AMD.…

Anything but this Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another edition of signage behaving badly, The Register's look at borkage of all shapes, sizes and flavours from around the world.…

High Court hears from delivery lead in high-stakes trial IBM's delivery lead on the collapsed £175m Co-Op Insurance IT platform project told a colleague the project was "hurting" Big Blue, the High Court has been told.…

Unloved assistant to smarten up its act in Microsoft 365. US only, naturally Microsoft has jammed yet another knife into the consumer incarnation of its unloved electronic assistant, Cortana.…

Hydro-Québec to take tech to market A Canadian utility company says it will try to commercialise 2019 Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough's controversial fast-charging, non-flammable glass battery.…

And when you're too tired, you can lower it again. QUITTER! Back in my day, a Pro Plus was a tiny sugar-coated pill that dragged me through the ennui of a Computer Science degree. If I took enough of them, I thought, the dancing C++ syntax on my screen would start to make sense and I might – just might – scrape through my dissertation clutching a 2:1.…

'Member the Apple II? Hobbyists' kit is where business IT begins Column The twin planets of business and consumer technologies have been locked in a game of Pong for decades. The Apple II was aimed at hobbyists, but catalysed the revolution that put a PC on every office desk.…

We want to share your hard-won advice and knowledge with the rest of world Podcast On the ball as ever, we here at The Register have decided a podcast is in order.…

We're all Doomed Who, Me? Welcome to Monday. As the weekend recedes and workstations are fired up, pause a moment to travel with us to a time when an ill-judged bit of gaming took down an entire network and a Reg reader uttered "Who, Me?"…

Do not pass Go, do not collect garbage The Python programming language continues to find more fans, having tied Java as the second most popular programming language, according to analysis conducted by IT consultancy Redmonk.…

Science's civil rebel dies aged 96 Video Freeman Dyson, the eminent British-American physicist and mathematician best known for his theoretical work in quantum electrodynamics, died today. He was 96.…

Git outta here – has it been that long? The Apache Software Foundation has decreed this week to be the 20th anniversary of the source code management system, Subversion. So, happy birthday SVN!…

How much you make, Randy? Wanna cough up, I dunno, twice that or something? America's communications watchdog on Friday suggested it may fine the nation's four major wireless carriers for selling subscribers location data without adequate safeguards to prevent misuse.…

Now one Donald-shaped signature away from dishing out $1bn to fund the big switch President Trump is expected to sign a bill that would allocate $1bn to US carriers to replace existing Huawei-built infrastructure after it was unanimously passed by the Senate yesterday.…

Or it would, if it were ever released Vivo has introduced the third generation of its APEX concept phones – the APEX 2020. This handset packs a bunch of new experimental features, largely centred around its display and camera technology, which might eventually make their way to production phones from Vivo and others.…

How many expansive ERP projects would that buy? One? Two? Answers on a postcard He may have left SAP in November last year but former CEO Bill McDermott still managed to net €15,176,900 for his work with the firm in 2019, making the American Germany’s highest earner, according to some calculations.…

Client solutions to the rescue as infrastructure shrinks 7% After all those costly company takeovers, Dell has reported that yet again good old-fashioned PCs came to its rescue to offset the continued slump in its server and storage business.…

Make things that work well, look good, and talk back, with help from interactive online training Promo Why code from scratch when you can assemble apps quickly and visually from a collection of parts? That’s perhaps an oversimplification of low-code, but building and deploying applications and services with this automated approach has a variety of benefits.…

Fun not required The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. For the first time we feature a multiplayer title, and not a particularly forgiving one at that. I don't know why, I'm not even good at video games despite dedicating a chunk of my scant free time to playing them. Want to squad up? Someone send help, please, because I'm still trying to Escape From Tarkov.…

UK utility biz suspends internet services British utility biz Southern Water was the victim of a phishing attack on Wednesday, resulting in a hurried shutdown of some of the company's systems.…

Edge Goes Surfing? How about Horace Goes Skiing? Having given admins the nod that the pre-release Windows 10 2004 was good to go for the Windows Server Update Service, Microsoft did what Microsoft does and changed it.…

Hardware is hard Cisco has begun a new round of job cuts as the networking giant's traditional hardware business faces slowing sales.…

Microsoft Surface Duo in mind? Hands On Google has updated Android studio with support for multiple virtual displays, a new split view for the layout designer, and view binding to make it easier to interact with GUI components.…

May we present the BSOD on Wheels Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment in The Register's irregular look at tech behaving badly in public. Today we present Bork on Wheels.…

Interim managers ready to go. £93m budget locked and loaded. No lets not talk about the size of the US National Quantum Initiative Program An interim management team for the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQQC) has been named with responsibility to get the centre built and sketch out its priorities.…

Where do I see myself in five years' time? On parole with a bit of luck Something for the Weekend, Sir? We all have something to hide. But as I hinted last week, probably the worst way to keep it hidden is by uploading a video of it to social media.…

The heat was on, risin' to the top / Everybody's goin' strong, and that's when the SPARC got hot On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's weekly dip into the big bag of woe unleashed by users on those responsible for picking up the telephone.…

Germans didn't think goofball film title was 'morally unacceptable', judges rule The phrase "fack ju" can be registered as a trademark, according to an EU court which overruled a group of offended trademark lawyers.…

They got it back – after reneging any claim against Uncle Sam for damages A Brighton-based ad agency is scratching its collective head after its website was effectively seized by US Homeland Security.…

Sueball lobbed at OneAudience Data-driven ad biz Facebook filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday against another info-snarfing company for allegedly breaking the social network's rules for gathering personal details.…