The Register

Platform admits failover cluster fell over but they're really sorry and, here, have a credit note Biz automation platform ConnectWise has issued a credit note to disgruntled customers caught up in last week's day-long outage that the firm blamed on a wobble in its "highly resilient" cloud infrastructure.…

Plus: Privacy options abound and Collections attempts to fill Sets' boots Build There were nods to the past and future at Microsoft's Seattle Build event as the company teased upcoming features for its latest crack at a browser that people might want to use.…

Is that a laser projector in your pocket or are you, er, just going camping? Those seeking a bit of portable projector fun will shortly have a tiny option in the form of the Nebra AnyBeam, a pocket-sized laser for flinging images onto a handy surface.…

It's been fun Bill Clinton was president of the United States when I first started at The Register, mobile phones (and anything else "mobile") were low-rez monochrome chunks of plastic, and politicians were slack-jawed children when it came to technology.…

Add new skills to your security arsenal to stay one step ahead Promo Organisations can no longer ignore the growing problem of cybercrime, with ransomware affecting enterprises of all sizes while state-sponsored adversaries and others attempt to obtain access to their most critical data.…

Get your modular bargains Smartphone makers are touting cameras with 5x and even 10x lossless zoom on some very expensive new gadgets. Huawei's lossless 5x costs around £900. However, on a recent weekend family escape, I grabbed a smartphone and took some wonderful, truly lossless 10x photos on a rig that set up that will cost you, dear reader, less than £300. It's a proper LTE flagship phone, and has a (real) Xenon flash too.…

Bundled software not just an annoyance, it's also a risk The apps bundled with many Android phones are presenting threats to security and privacy greater than most users think.…

Try saying that a few times before any morning coffee NetApp has made life a bit harder for its all-flash competitors, claiming to offer the industry's best price/performance on a new mid-range end-to-end NVMe array and updating its ONTAP OS and services.…

Microsoft answers whinges that there was not enough Windows at Build with fresh borkage Build The Windows Insider team celebrated the end of Microsoft's annual Seattle developer shindig, Build, this week by dropping a fresh Windows 10 update for testers and, er, breaking stuff.…

Ad giant pushes Kotlin language, Q beta 3, Flutter, ChromeOS, and more Google I/O Google released Android Q beta 3 to developers this week, though more significant was word that the company wants developers to write their Android apps in Kotlin rather than Java or C++.…

Maybe Wednesday's strike helped a bit Ride-hailing apps like Uber or Lyft are the biggest contributor to traffic congestion in San Francisco, according to a study published in Science Advances today.…

Big Red sets phasers to kill in space-opera-esque battle Amazon offered lucrative jobs to not one but two Pentagon officials deciding which tech giant will land the military's mega JEDI cloud contract, Oracle now claims.…

See that girl, watch that scene, digging that 'Ponzi' scheme Another cryptocurrency caper has been hit with a fraud lawsuit – this time OneCoin, set up and run by the self-titled "CryptoQueen" Ruja Ignatova.…

Big Apple residents weren't too appy with apartment block's high-tech security system The owners of a Manhattan apartment block have agreed to give their tenants mechanical keys to end a court battle over a keyless smart-lock system.…

Parliament also wants a word with Sheryl Sandberg The Canadian parliament says it plans to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg as part of a probe into Cambridge Analytica's shenanigans.…

But it's for privacy! You know us. We're Google, privacy champions. Always championing privacy, us Google I/O Google, the largest handler of web cookies, plans to change the way its Chrome browser deals with the tokens, ostensibly to promote greater privacy, following similar steps taken by rival browser makers Apple, Brave, and Mozilla.…

Um, are we supposed to feel proud about this? Wow. Pat yourself on the back, Blighty. The average download speed for fixed-line broadband in the UK almost surpassed the global average of 57.9Mbps, comms regulator Ofcom revealed today.…

French telco's cyber arm consumes second infosec specialist of 2019 Orange has snaffled Belgium-based security services outfit SecureLink for a whopping enterprise buy price of €515m.…

Who will rid us of this costly mess? Um, the private sector, mumbles Cabinet Office UK.gov still has "no meaningful" blueprint on how the disastrous Verify programme will be propped up when the public sector pulls funding in 2020, according to an influential Parliamentary Committee.…

Buddies up with Microsoft to stir a bit of Azure into the mix The Red Hatters continued flinging out new products today with the announcement of OpenShift 4, ushering in automation, autoscaling and, er, Azure Functions.…

This gov idiocy is making the UK a less safe place to go online Opinion A startup is claiming to have signed age verification contracts with a host of smut site operators – and is hoping 40 per cent of Britons will display their privates to it in July.…

'Into a club-worthy Ibiza anthem,' apparently Clearly not sated by his weird collab with Icelandic muso goblin Björk a few years back, renowned telly zoologist and Britain's dad Sir David Attenborough is showing the world that, at the age of 93, it's never too late to drop some sick clubland beats.…

And after that he's having tea with an archbishop. No, really America’s foreign secretary is to deliver a telling-off to the UK over the British government’s decision to maintain the Huawei status quo for 5G networks, according to reports.…

Microsoft software-targeting malware gets commands from code hidden in attachments A recently uncovered malware infection uses the basic functions of Microsoft's Exchange Server to remotely monitor and control computer systems.…

US case's star witness takes stand in London Autonomy Trial Autonomy's former US head of sales testified to London's High Court how he took part in a secret US grand jury legal hearing against British software firm Autonomy's chief financial officer.…

Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice... aka York Mild exaggeration is a time-honoured tradition for disgusted Brits whingeing to their local newspapers about everything under the Sun.…

Perv messed with the wrong woman – an IT security bod An Airbnb "superhost" has been arrested and jailed after a guest discovered a camera hidden inside an internet router placed in the bedroom.…

Accountancy SaaS CCH falls over, thanks to nasty infection A global software-as-a-service platform catering to accountants is in damage control mode after a malware infection knocked its services offline.…

Pair cuffed in Israel The administrators of a news website dedicated to the dark web have been arrested by the FBI and cops in Israel on suspicion of receiving commission for directing readers to a Tor-hidden souk that sold drugs and weapons.…

AI. Privacy. AI. Privacy. AI. Privacy. AI. Priva... Google I/O Google on Tuesday gathered developers to the open air Shoreline Amphitheater beside its Mountain View, California, headquarters to witness and applaud its latest technological marvels amid natural splendor.…

Foot dragging causing real harm to Americans caught up in scams No less than 42 US state attorneys general have warned that the epidemic of robocalls sweeping the nation is causing serious harm to ordinary Americans.…

Self-driving cars are gonna need a decent amount of internal networking Chip designer Marvell is hoping to boost its multi-gig Ethernet business by acquiring American competitor Aquantia, primarily known for high-speed transceivers.…

Or so claims Symantec Months before top-tier hacking tools, likely built by the NSA, were leaked to the public by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, the exploit code was apparently being used by Chinese state hackers to infiltrate systems.…

Not all documents are created, er, stored equal Cloudy storage provider Dropbox has enhanced its bit barns with a tiered storage architecture that divides the contents of the platform into frequently accessed "warm" data and "cold" data, with the latter less likely to be disturbed.…

But revenues for Q1 2019 flat as a pancake Virgin Media has so far managed just 1.7 million Lightning connections, nearly halfway to its original stated aim of connecting 4 million premises by the end of 2019 to speeds of 300Mbps.…

Tech salaries up almost 2 per cent in 2018 Average salaries for tech jobs advertised in the UK are up 1.7 per cent compared to last year, according to jobs-board botherers at Reed Technology.…

Alibaba, Azure and more used for badness, warns infosec biz Spammers are increasingly turning to common file-sharing and object storage services such as Google Drive and Microsoft Azure, in an attempt to evade ever-better corporate filters.…

All subsequent updates will have a Big Blue tint Red Hat pushed out a minty-fresh update to its Enterprise Linux platform in the form of version 8 at its Boston shindig today.…

Bankrupt competitor can't pay $845m for trade secrets theft After a long and bloody struggle, Dutch chip-making kit vendor ASML surveys the battlefield: its enemies are dead, and all that's left are their assets.…

Still a solution looking for a problem? Seems that way Blockchain remains a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and of the supply chain projects that got past sign-off, most remain in the pilot phase.…

Engineers knew of problem in 2017. Management didn't until after fatal crash As the 737 MAX scandal rolls on, "software delivered to Boeing" has been blamed by the company for the malfunctioning of a safety display.…

Splashing out on software-defined file and object storage plus ... some extras Privately owned HPC powerhouse DDN is buying software-defined storage business Nexenta and becoming a full-scale enterprise storage supplier.…

Competition commissioner finds grounds to investigate The European Commission is to investigate Apple over charges to music streaming services, according to the Financial Times.…

Head to Westminster for the best in DevOps, containers, and more... Events Continuous Lifecycle London kicks off in just one week, but there’s still time to grab a spot at our three-day exploration of modern software development and deployment.…

Wear a helmet, hipsters The scourge of cities around the world, app-rented e-scooters aren't just a thorn in the side for urban curmudgeons – they're also behind a rash of head injuries.…

Also: NASA's 2024 Moon dreams get another soaking from the big bucket of reality Roundup SpaceX moved on from the exploding Crew Dragon and Rocket Lab celebrated a fifth launch last week while NASA's five-year Moon plan looked in ever more danger of unravelling.…

Joss sticks lit at the Open Infrastructure Summit OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce took to the stage of the open source outfit's shindig in Denver, Colorado this week with a message of collaboration, openness and... clowns.…

£500k social network scotched less than two weeks after launch Who, Me? Are you hoping to make it through the week without a major balls-up? El Reg's fingers are crossed for you – but remember, not everyone is that lucky.…

Quick-fire summary of the past few days of news Roundup Welcome back, Brits, from your three-day Bank Holiday week. Allow us to catch you up on recent infosec comings and goings.…

Meet South America's Stoned Henge Pic Humans have been tripping off hallucinogens for at least a millennium, according to a crew of archaeologists who discovered a 1,000-year-old pouch of mind-bending drugs in a Bolivian cave.…