The Register

Indian outsourcer bags another utility National Grid has signed up to spend up to $44.5m (approx. £32.2m) with Wipro, which will take on the energy infrastructure company's data centres and mainframes with a view to introducing a hybrid cloud infrastructure.…

Plus: Smart software ugrade means Roomba can recognise dog poo In Brief Microsoft and AWS reportedly [PDF] scored subcontracts totalling $50m with the US Department of Defense to develop algorithms capable of recognizing objects from military drone footage after Google pulled out from the controversial Project Maven.…

A potentially iffy component in the flight actuation system this time Virgin Galactic's schedule woes worsened last last week as the company pushed its next flight to mid-October thanks to a potentially defective flight control component.…

Teaching online is like talking to a brick wall Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

(And, also worryingly, its increasing financial cost) Feature The next time you ask Alexa to turn off your bedroom lights or make a computer write dodgy code, spare a thought for the planet. The back-end mechanics that make it all possible take up a lot of power, and these systems are getting hungrier.…

Tells committee: I know I said Facebook was 'morally bankrupt' but... The incoming head of the UK's data watchdog has "gone on the record" to say he will be fair and impartial in his dealings with tech companies despite once describing Facebook as "morally bankrupt pathological liars."…

Who wants to live forever? It could be the offer you can't refuse Opinion Tech rarely touches the soul. It enrages when social media pours petrol on hotheads. It inspires when Hubble comes back to life and delivers more cosmic awe. It pays our bills when we work in it, and it empties our pockets when we drunk-eBay that vintage console game collection. But when it brings back a dead lover?…

How does $100k per character sound? And that's just for labour Who, Me? Wave a cheery goodbye to the weekend, and start the week with a hot beverage, a pastry or two and a freshly unearthed tale from the Who, Me? catacombs.…

Claims they're 'designed for durability' but users report kit dies in months – even on mountain bikes Apple has advised motorcycle-riding iPhone owners that their metal steeds might damage their smartphones after prolonged exposure to engine vibration – but users report total dysfunction after even less frenetic vibrations.…

Alleges IBM China staff had access to confidential info and took it with them to new Inspur operation IBM has been sued for trade secret misappropriation by a Chinese company called Beijing Neu Cloud Oriental System Technology Co., Ltd, over "fraudulent and unfair business practices" that allegedly saw Big Blue encourage use of Neu Cloud's customer information by staffers at server-maker Inspur.…

NZ, Singapore, and Chile are other - and smaller - current signatories to pact that's hoped to set regional agendas, so this is a fillip South Korea has initiated the process of joining the Digital Economic Partnership Agreement (DEPA), an expanding regional bloc of nations that seek to establish key rules and strengthen cooperation for digital trade.…

'One of the messier merge windows' means the new stuff might sneak in next week Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.15 of the Linux kernel, with but isn't sure if it's a big 'un or nothing to get excited about.…

Another weekly digest of strangeness from around the world that you may have missed Roundup Welcome to our weekly conclave of chaos and confusion as we collate another bunch of odd and unusual tales from the past seven days and present them to you in the manner of a small and grubby child handing a bunch of crumpled, hand-picked flowers to a slightly intoxicated aunt.…

Funny how 'privacy-focused' Apple and Google haven't managed that Facebook's WhatsApp on Friday said users will soon be able to store end-to-end (E2E) encrypted backups of their chat history on Google Drive in Android or Apple iCloud in iOS, with an option to self-manage the encryption key.…

We'll just hike the prices for customers, otherwise. Happy now? Three of biggest US food delivery outfits – DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub – have sued New York City to stop it enforcing a limit on the fees they can extract from restaurants.…

Games maker weakens iGiant's control over iOS, loses its antitrust claims Analysis Epic Games on Friday won a Pyrrhic victory against Apple in its antitrust lawsuit, with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruling that Apple must allow developers to tell customers about third-party payments systems.…

Org releases its top ten list of bad things software vendors do The Open Web App Security Project has released its Top Ten list of vulnerabilities in web software, as part of the general movement to make software less painfully insecure at the design stage.…

Old proverb: If Windows crashes on a Surface Pro X, will anyone see the bugcheck? Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 on Apple's M1 is not "a supported scenario" for the OS that stands to bring so much joy to OEMs.…

There's no council tax infringement a Brimstone missile can't punish The Royal Air Force is set to start testing its rebranded Reaper drones in UK skies over the next few weeks – and senior officers are planning to make them available to local councils.…

Home assistant little more than an expensive plastic brick for some owners Lenovo says it is still waiting on Google to fix a “firmware issue” that has left some owners of its Lenovo Smart Displays and Smart Clocks with blank screens, almost five months after the problem was first reported.…

Right not to be subjected to solely automated decisions might not be keeping pace with 'data-driven economy' says document The UK government has launched a consultation that suggests it could water down individuals' rights to challenge decisions made about them by artificial intelligence.…

Employment judge points finger at Northgate – trial to follow A pair of Unix sysadmins have claimed a botched TUPE job transfer left them stuck between three organisations which all denied responsibility for employing them.…

Sovereign according to Google's definition, that is Google Cloud and T-Systems are to create what the companies call a "sovereign cloud offering" for Germany, though details are sketchy and it may not be digital sovereignty as the term is normally understood.…

Stage fright? Or the knowledge that Windows is lurking behind you Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork goes backstage today as the revival of music festivals in the UK heralds the return of background borkage.…

Plans to send remote devices to work at 70-year-old decommissioned nuclear power station may not be so barking Tired of doing parkour on the internet, robots from Boston Dynamics have been deployed at UK nuclear facilities to carry out routine tasks in dangerous environments.…

No, not the title of an undiscovered Douglas Adams book, it's medical history in the UK Geek's Guide to Britain It looks like a bejewelled crown, spinning and sparkling as its surfaces catch the light. But what this glass sculpture in the entrance hall of Oxford's History of Science museum portrays is much more valuable. It is a model of the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 coronavirus vaccine, developed by Oxford University researchers in 2020, one million times its actual size.…

Please hold me back from the discount aisle in case I buy a USB desk fan Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am standing in the middle of a supermarket, holding my tool. It's important that the security cameras see that I am waving my tool around. This is to avoid any embarrassment.…

Those knobs can be sensitive On Call Friday has arrived, and the promise of the weekend stretches out before us. Spare a thought, then, for those cursed to keep users happy, whatever the time of day. Welcome to On Call.…

IDC says AsiaPac market growing, rest of world isn't, Dell wins on volume, and IBM on sale price The global market for servers was mostly steady in the second quarter of 2021, according to analyst firm IDC, as the market recovers from 2020's unusual demands.…

Promises to offer App Store as an option, but needs its developer account to be reinstated to do that Epic Games has decided to put South Korea's new law requiring Apple and Google to offer third-party payment options in their app stores to the test.…

German-Australian outfit Quantum Brilliance thinks it can deliver product that runs on your desk in five years, for DBAs and boffins alike IBM's Quantum Ambassador for EMEA and Asia-Pacific – a business development role – has jumped to a little-known startup called Quantum Brilliance that believes it can bring diamond-powered quantum accelerators into conventional computers within five years.…

Meet Amazon OpenSearch Service, more or less the same code, without the trademark infringement Amazon Web Services on Thursday fulfilled its commitment to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Service with its expected new identity, Amazon OpenSearch Service.…

Devices were supposed to arrive Friday, November is new target Google and giant Indian telco Jio have announced the jointly developed budget 4G smartphone, and the accompanying made-for-India cut of Android, have been delayed.…

Plus: President Biden wants businesses with 100+ staff to get vaccinated or test weekly Microsoft will let its employees in the US continue working from home until further notice as the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread through the country. The Windows giant had planned to recall staff to their offices next month.…

* Terms and conditions apply. See in store for caveats. No purchase necessary Amazon on Thursday said more than 750,000 of its US-based operations employees will be eligible to receive at least some funding to cover college tuition costs though only at schools that partner with the internet giant.…

Time to hit the road Orolia – the Resilient Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) outfit with its European HQ in France – has won two contracts worth €70m to provide atomic clocks for the first 12 satellites of the Galileo Second Generation System (G2S).…

There’s room for you and your cowboy boots, we’ll even get you a rhinestone suit The State of Tennessee has agreed to pay Oracle $65m in incentives in order to relocate its headquarters from California to the state capital of Nashville.…

Maybe they were using, you know, Microsoft's collaboration service As the majority of the desk-based workers lurched to working from home during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, communication between teams fell and working hours increased.…

Air purified, everyone back to bed, says Roscosmos, studiously ignoring smoke, burning smell Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) had their preparations for an important spacewalk rudely interrupted early this morning when an emergency alarm woke them all up just before 2am UTC.…

Companion mode? We've got that too says Google Microsoft is adding features to Teams meetings to support hybrid office/remote meetings, including an AI-powered "speaker coach" that will notify users who interrupt others.…

Another way to run Kubernetes - though connector to AWS console still in preview, as are plenty of the AWS controllers Amazon Web Services has emitted EKS Anywhere, enabling users to create on-premises Kubernetes clusters with tooling consistent with that in the public cloud service – though currently only VMware is supported for production.…

'Fundamental errors' in CMA's findings, claims The Social Network Facebook has hit back at the UK's regulatory challenge to its decision to buy gif slinger Giphy, claiming the provisional findings by the competition watchdog are based on "fundamental errors."…

Finder tells El Reg of struggle to report snafu McDonald's customers who won a prize draw competition got more than they hoped for after the burger chain emailed them login credentials for development and production databases used to power the campaign.…

Customers pulling forward orders to mitigate mounting supply worries The mood music in tech land isn't so much about workspace projects - that's so 2020 - it's more about biz customers again investing in data centre hardware, when they can get hold of it.…

Ideally, will speed up biz's answer to the question: How much should we charge for that? Workday has paid an undisclosed price for pricing engine and guided selling firm Zimit, a software company specialising in helping companies quote for their services.…

Chuck that on top of £63m firm already has from related projects The UK Home Office has handed Fujitsu a £5m contract to support a border system beset with delays.…

For when it's time to kick that shadow IT habit Element, the commercial face of the Matrix messaging system, may have added to the woes of WhatsApp with the introduction of a bridge from the Facebook tentacle into the federated messaging world of Matrix.…

Yes, that Amazon. The one that's been fined for breaches of privacy and labor laws and accused of price-fixing, making life hell for unions … Amazon.com has written a very-colorfully-worded letter to the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), urging it to take a strong stance when considering SpaceX's satellite broadband business because Elon Musk is a cheat who messes things up – for those who need better internet connections, and totally not for Amazon itself.…

And names a new CTO VMware has kind-of announced a hypervisor for Arm processors, or at least one of them: Apple's M1 system-on-a-chip.…

This thing better not explode on the pad The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to launch – surprise, surprise – a little later than expected. Space agencies in America, Europe, and Canada said on Wednesday they're now aiming for December 18, 2021 rather than October.…