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Low-profile Chinese firm decides mobile marketing, brand stuff can't be that hard Review Smartphone vendors are almost all universally weird. TCL (not to be confused with 1990’s R&B group TLC, best known for their hit song about the downfalls of wearing medical apparel) is no exception.…

Yes, especially for consumer-facing workloads. But don't expect a comfortable ride The cloud is dominated by American companies. AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle all win more revenue than Alibaba, China's current leader.…

Breaking free from the office – without breaking the office Comment By now you’ve got this working-at-home business covered. Even if you find you’re occasionally eating your own weight in biscuits, you’ve bought a lighting kit to look professional on video calls, and you’ve won the fight for bandwidth by bribing the kids to stay off Houseparty.…

Plus: A peek inside Nvidia's Ampere architecture, and more Roundup Here's your summary of recent artificial intelligence bits and bytes, and related hardware and software.…

Hangzhou wants a 'health and immunity firewall' One of China's major tech hubs is planning to make a health and movement tracking system developed to fight the COVID-19 epidemic a permanent fixture in daily life.…

Seven hosts might have been asking a bit much for early footling VMware has shrunk the hardware requirements for its shiny new native Kubernetes on vSphere product, making it rather more affordable.…

First Virgin Orbit test launch glitches out at rocket’s first stage Virgin Orbit, the Richard-Branson-founded effort to launch satellites into space from a rocket that drops beneath the wing of a Boeing 747, has suffered a failure of its first test launch.…

Assuming we ever get into the office again and into the merch cupboard Contest We wanted paperless offices, and instead we got people-less – with in-person chats replaced with the warmth and nuance of video meetings featuring people wearing big ugly headphones while trying to get their children to stop building forts out of pizza boxes.…

This and more bits and bytes from infosec world Roundup It's once again time to catch up on the latest happenings from the world of infosec.…

In the wonderful world of the US military, anything is plausible Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and while the UK is basking in a bank holiday that seems much the same as any other day, your hardworking vultures have another story to tell via our regular Who, Me? column.…

Rocket taxi to fly on Wednesday in first all-American launch since 2011 SpaceX has been given final approval to get into the space taxi business after NASA signed off on “Launch America”, a launch that will see the company’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule used to transport a pair of American astronauts into space.…

But company reckons things are just getting started in China Alibaba has revealed that its cloudy revenue grew 62 percent in the year to March 30th, 2020, for an annual run rate of US$5.6 billion.…

‘My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be’ says Linux overlord Linux overseer Linus Torvalds has binned Intel on his personal PC and hinted that he hopes to one day run an ARM-powered desktop.…

Whoa, no Huawei?! UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reportedly agreed to a plan that will entirely cut Huawei equipment from the nation's 5G networks within the next three years.…

IBM isn't the only IT giant said to be unfairly binning elders HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have been sued for age discrimination by former employee Daniel Cochran, who spent 26 years at HP, and at HPE after 2015 when the biz split in two.…

Tech is perhaps five years away from actual deployment, we're told Australian scientists say they have broken data communications speed records by shifting 44.2 terabits per second over 75km of glass fiber from a single optical chip.…

Hang on, didn't analyst just pooh-pooh demand? Yep It could wishful thinking or bravado on a conference call with analysts but Lenovo is betting the current home working trend and consumers' reliance on online services will run on past the crisis and be a boon for PC makers.…

Zuck has been so good at looking after your data, why not give him more? Born too late to play the role of Star Trek's Commander Data, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg took to the streams last night as the company confirmed a jump in users of its Workplace platform.…

Unsurpisingly budget airline goes cheap: No payout or credit monitoring Victims of the Easyjet hack are now being told their entire travel itineraries were accessed by hackers who helped themselves to nine million people’s personal details stored by the budget airline.…

Take a trip down memory lane back to when every byte mattered Build Microsoft delighted retro fans by closing its Build conference with an open-sourcing of 1983's GW-BASIC.…

Like Inception, but expensive and disappointing. So... just like Inception With antivirus tools increasingly wise to common infection tricks, one group of extortionists has taken the unusual step of stashing their ransomware inside its own virtual machine.…

Automotive driven down, though As many in the broader IT sector walk around with a fire extinguisher, Nvidia is oiling its fiddle, reporting that revenue hit $3.08bn [PDF] for Q1 2021 ended 26 April, up 39 per cent from last year.…

If all goes to plan, firm plans to begin commercial operations within months Virgin Orbit is set to fling a first payload to orbit with its Boeing 747-mounted LauncherOne.…

We're trying, says senior dev evangelist GitLab version 13.0, the company's major release of 2020, is out today.…

And that means Windows 3.0 is too It's a double anniversary today as we take a moment to ponder 30 years since Windows 3.0 set Microsoft on the road to desktop GUI dominance and celebrate three decades of Microsoft Solitaire.…

It crashed the same day it went missing despite 3-day closedown and hunt The runaway experimental drone that closed Latvia's skies to international flights after it went missing has been found lodged in a tree.…

Only the beast of Redmond could meet 'data sovereignty and reliability' needs, says UK.gov department The UK's Ministry of Defence has handed Microsoft a £17.75m contract to run hosted services in the Azure Cloud – and rivals won't even get a chance to compete due to requisite "data sovereignty and reliability".…

Even the bus shelters of the windy city cannot escape the borkage Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another entry in the digital signage corridor of despair, where cock-ups that would normally only trouble a user's screen are on public display for all to marvel at.…

Fondleslab feels like a real laptop, though transition is far from seamless Apple has long toiled to position the iPad Pro as a legitimate computing device like the iMac and MacBook Pro. Earlier this year it tried to take a step closer to achieving that goal with the release of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.…

Moenie die hoender ruk nie Word has reached Vulture Central that Microsoft is to retire support for 27 languages in iOS Outlook from the end of June 2020.…

More 5G. More e-commerce. More IoT. But no growth target for the first time in ages China will move to cut the cost of internet connections for local companies as part of its post-pandemic push to restore its economy.…

German efficiency was no match for user stupidity On Call Welcome to Friday the 82nd of March. Or is it only us for whom the days are blurring? Luckily The Register is here to bookend your week with our regular On Call feature.…

Tune in next month for tips on better use of licenses, and how you can save $$$,$$$ Webcast The problem with Microsoft Office 365 licenses is that while most businesses never quite seem to know how many they’ve got, paying for more of them, or more expensive tiers with existing ones, seems like the easiest thing in the world.…

By the time you get the status check the app needs, and get through the new check-in process, you'll wish you stayed home The Indian government has made its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app mandatory for all air passengers on domestic flights.…

We know this sounds like a tall tail but... Pic Astronomers scanning the sky for potentially hazardous space rocks have discovered a first – a presumed trojan asteroid around Jupiter that is looking increasingly like a comet.…

Oops, spoiler! Suffice to say data-crunching demand remains robust as buyers seek plague-time insight Splunk has reported mixed results for its first quarter, while suggesting that the novel coronavirus won’t kill its ambitions for the full FY 2020.…

Grandchild Digital Picture Removal A court in the Netherlands ruled this month that a grandmother must remove pictures of her grandchildren from her social media accounts after her daughter filed a privacy complaint.…

Services groups bear the brunt as thousands of workers given, in US at least, 30 days' notice, 90 days' pay IBM is swinging the axe on its staff, with significant numbers of employees not attached to the cloud being told their time at Big Blue is up.…

Biz says it'll be a proper as-a-service outfit by 2022, which means changes to support, supplies, locations HPE has vowed to slash its spending by at least $1bn after it suffered a disastrous financial quarter, primarily blaming its downfall on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on its supply chain and customers.…

Welp, at least that's better than industry averages, says code-hosting biz Code hosting biz GitLab recently concluded a security exercise to test the susceptibility of its all-remote workforce to phishing – and a fifth of the participants submitted their credentials to the fake login page.…

Slimming down SQL and living on the Edge Build There was SQL Edge and Azure Synapse news at Microsoft's reimagined Build gathering this week, so The Register had a chat with corporate vice president Rohan Kumar about the company's database ambitions.…

We 'cannot afford a construction site in top management while in crisis mode' moans savings bank rep A boardroom saga that has involved two rapid changes in the leadership at SAP in the last year is beginning to unsettle shareholders.…

Shotwell case ends with Rothschild Patent Imaging backing off for good Updated The GNOME Foundation has settled a US lawsuit brought against it by Rothschild Patent Imaging, complete with an undertaking by the patent assertion entity that it will not sue GNOME for IP infringment again.…

Yes, it's the Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition Samsung is aiming a new version of the Galaxy S20 flagship phone at military customers. Dubbed the "Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition", the chaebol describes its latest blower as "mission ready". And it certainly looks the part.…

48 hours of conversations to get you thinking more intelligently about intelligent software Promo Artificial intelligence is still one of those areas of IT that feels like everyone’s talking it, but not many people are actually doing it.…

Yes, the app that's not quite working yet Campaign groups have written to the UK Prime Minister warning GCHQ and its digital arm, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will have the capacity to re-identify the phones of people who have installed the nation's coronavirus contact-tracing app.…

International Tea. The world isn't about to suddenly start appreciating you "It's International Tea Day!" I joyously proclaimed as I bounded into the kitchen, trying my best to sound like I had been counting the days rather than learning of it a couple of hours ago.…

British border search law strikes again The leader of far-right political group Britain First has been handed a judicial slap on the wrist after refusing to give his phone PIN to police at Heathrow Airport.…

Paper released on proof-of-concept of 100 pixels, each with three nanowires Scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology claim to have developed a robotic eye they say mimics the equivalent human organism and even out-performs it on some measures.…

And guess which department bought 10,000 O365 licences? Key British government departments have bought thousands of new devices to cope with the COVID-19-fuelled homeworking boom – as well as signing up for unprecedented numbers of accounts with videoconferencing services.…