The Register

FY21 Q2 results buoyed by cloud demand, pandemic-driven IT focus Microsoft far exceeded expectations for its second-quarter fiscal 2021 financial results, posting $43.1bn in revenue, an increase of 17 per cent.…

How's your year going? A US Air Force intelligence officer who kidnapped her daughter to Mexico and attempted to defect to Russia with information labelled top secret has been jailed for 11 years.…

Messaging wunderkind said to be haven for extremists – and Silicon Valley gave it a pass, ex-ambassador complains Marc Ginsberg, a former US ambassador who oversees a non-profit called Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW), sued Alphabet's Google subsidiary on Monday for failing to remove the Telegram Messenger app from its Google Play store.…

Sudo, make me a heap overflow! Done, this system is now yours Security researchers from Qualys have identified a critical heap buffer overflow vulnerability in sudo that can be exploited by rogue users to take over the host system.…

Plus fixes for iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, XCode, iCloud for Windows – and a day after Google disclosed Nork op Apple today released software updates to patch vulnerabilities in iPhones and iPads that may have been exploited by miscreants to silently snoop on victims from afar.…

Shenanigans called on ASP.NET scaffolding tech A New York judge has denied Microsoft a new trial after the software giant attempted to overturn a 2020 judgement over its infringement of a database interface patent.…

Academics can apply for free access to historic Twitter data, so there is a use for the well of human misery after all Twitter is making public tweet data freely available to academic researchers in the hope the boffins can use it to make the world a better place.…

Meet MicroDroid, a base image for on-device VMs that might never see light of day Google is working on a stripped-down version of Android for virtualized environments, judging by source code commits made to the AOSP repository.…

Windows 10 Team Creators Update due for support axe in March - yes, two months from now Microsoft is set to resume rolling out the Windows 10 Team 2020 Update, although some administrators will have only a few short weeks before the previous version drops out of support.…

Two feet sideways and it could have been the pilot: report A drone crashed into the windscreen of a helicopter being flown at low altitude and injured a passenger aboard the aircraft.…

Press secretary won't say nay or yea on Entity List, but prez says 'we need to play a better defense' It has been six days since Joe Biden became president of the United States. Since then, he has wasted no time in reversing policy decisions made by his predecessor with a series of executive actions on LGBT rights, the environment, and race relations.…

O'Reilly's opinionated survey says low-code on the up and modern web dev is 'chilling' A report from an online learning platform presents a different take on programming language and devops trends, showing Python and Java ahead of the usual survey winner JavaScript.…

Money talks in Morrisons and Co-Op Shoppers keen to avoid that personal touch have been faced with multi-day card payment problems at UK grocery giants Morrisons and the Co-Op.…

Hyperion Gray founder relates 'holy f**k' moment when he realised A zero-day hunter has told The Register of the “holy f**k” moment when he realised he'd been targeted by a North Korean campaign aimed at stealing Western researchers' vulns.…

Multi-millionaire granted unconditional bail, case moving to Manchester Crown Court The multi-millionaire former boss of Britain’s largest privately owned hosting provider has appeared in court to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.…

From one of the world's largest software suppliers to... who? The clock is ticking for Barking and Dagenham Council as the East London authority plans to ditch Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 and go live with cloud-based software from MHR and Advanced by the end of the year.…

Price negotiable, but if you've got £8m to spare then the land speed record is up for grabs The Bloodhound Land Speed Record project is looking for a new owner after its chief exec, Ian Warhurst, confirmed the vehicle is up for sale.…

Brian Exelbierd, Red Hat Liaison and CentOS board member, gives the company perspective Interview Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.…

Lib Dem blows raspberry at Sir Humphrey-style non-answer The British government has denied being "complacent" over the Solarwinds hack as a fed-up peer of the realm urged a minister to "answer the question".…

Tune in next month to learn a raft of cloud-native storage knowledge Webcast Containers and Kubernetes are the future, giving you a way to move away from monolithic applications and their assorted drudgery, and make a break for the sunlit uplands of microservices, composability and continuous delivery. All in the cloud or clouds of your choice.…

Third time's a charm? Suebell number three filed by Euroconsumers members Apple may have to cough up €60m ($73m, £53m) after Altroconsumo, an Italian consumers rights group, filed a class-action lawsuit railing against Cupertino's practice of throttling the performance of its older smartphones.…

The cosmic ballet goes on Astronomers have discovered the first-known “sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system,” after a neural network flagged it up in data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).…

Security eggheads discover their PCs chatting with Kim Jong Un's hackers North Korea's hackers homed in on specific infosec researchers and infected their systems with a backdoor after luring them to a suspicious website, Google revealed on Monday.…

Turns out having coherent API documentation is useful for, well, everyone Google, Microsoft, and friends have pitched in about half a million bucks to create a project seemingly designed to prop up the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Web Docs.…

Meanwhile, staff get unexpected backing from football players Amazon has taken a leaf out of a certain former president's playbook, insisting that mail-in voting will result in a false result. This time, however, it’s a vote by Amazon’s Alabama warehouse staff on whether to unionize.…

The third-party advertising cookie: Barely tolerated anymore. We can rebuild it, internet titan insists, we have the technology. Analysis Google on Monday said it will make some of its Privacy Sandbox proposals available for testing with the release of Chrome 89 in March as part of its effort to rewire the technical infrastructure of online advertising.…

With a little $10bn package proposed to help them on their way President Biden is preparing to assemble a crack US government cybersecurity team, and has pledged $10bn in funding to shore up the defenses of Uncle Sam's computer networks.…

Miscreant fingered server that held docs related to credit applications down under The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has admitted one of its servers was accessed without sanction and may have been digitally pawed by miscreants.…

Upgrades? It's a bit of a Hotpoint The smartphone trade is beginning to resemble the market for white goods with punters increasingly likely to wait until their device is broken before seeking a replacement.…

Some things can wait, even if it is central to the 'economy's recovery' The UK's telecoms regulator has said it will delay the upcoming auction of the 700MHz and 3.6-3.8GHz radio bands as result of difficulties caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

Tune in here to find out how to smooth those tricky tenant-to-tenant migrations Webcast Setting yourself up on Microsoft 365 with a tenancy makes perfect business sense – until other business decisions mean you have to move that tenancy to another domain.…

Going low-level with C# and more The Win32 API is being opened up to more languages by Microsoft via the win32metadata project.…

Ain't nobody got time for that Twelve resellers have been awarded places on an NHS hardware contract for northern England in deals worth a total of £504m.…

Police pull out classic 'sophisticated cyber attack' line A 28-year-old has been arrested after allegedly carrying out what police have labelled a "sophisticated cyber attack" on a school.…

No, no, this shocker isn't related to the price of the hardware Apple fanboys will readily admit the iPhone sits close to their heart, such is the level of affection they hold. That said, if they've got a pacemaker or implanted defibrillator, you'd best hope they're speaking figuratively.…

'They're not closing a security hole, they're just requiring that everyone use Chrome' Fedora's maintainer for the open-source Chromium browser package is recommending users consider switching to Firefox following Google's decision to remove functionality and make it exclusive to its proprietary Chrome browser.…

Or maybe it's that no one wants to touch this complex SaaS migration The UK government has delayed the award of contracts worth £115m to power the migration from an on-premises platform for ERP to a cloud-based software-as-a-service model.…

The Department for Education needs to learn its lesson too Column It is not good form to ruin people's online privacy. It is especially bad form if you're in a position of authority when you do this. It goes beyond bad form altogether if you're the Department for Education and you are potentially exposing schoolchildren to online attacks. That is criminal neglect.…

The Natwest ATM of woe says no, bleats a plaintive: Børk! Bork!Bork!Bork! A chill wind from the North greets today's entry in The Register's pantheon of Bork. A hidden (and frozen) cashpoint awaits visitors to Newcastle station.…

What could be wrong when two UPSes commit seppuku? Who, Me? Welcome to an electrifying edition of The Register's regular Who, Me? feature in which a reader rues the day he decided to trust the electrician.…

Plus: GPT-3 seems especially hostile toward Muslims. And Cruise, Microsoft work together on self-driving cars In Brief Google last week locked the work account of the co-lead of its AI ethics unit, Margaret Mitchell, as she investigated the controversial ousting of her colleague Timnit Gebru.…

WARP Drive process automation code said to be 'extremely valuable' Tesla has fired and sued software engineer Alex Khatilov for alleged trade secret theft and breach of contract. The electric automaker claims its former employee copied thousands of files to his personal Dropbox account just days after being hired.…

Plus: SonicWall hacked, Qualcomm security wobble, warrantless cellphone monitoring by US snoops revealed In brief One-time ADT security engineer Telesforo Aviles, 35, pleaded guilty to computer fraud in the US after spying on women through their home surveillance cameras.…

Microscope needed to find tiny punctures in the hull Russian cosmonauts have detected another leak in the International Space Station – and suspect there may be a second – months after they just patched a hole.…

Meanwhile, web giant agrees to cough up euros to French publishers Google threatened to shut down its search service in Australia if the government passes legislation that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers Down Under for reusing their news content.…

Miscreants hit with $31m fines tho only pay what they can afford: $3.7m Three ticket resellers have agreed to settle US government charges that they unlawfully used software bots to obtain music, theater, and sporting event tickets for markup and resale.…

Awa' an bile yer heid, SEPA tells ransomware scum About 4,000 stolen files from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) have been dumped online by frustrated ransomware criminals after the public sector body refused to pay out.…

Medium-sized firm, big revenues, big target Updated A London ad agency that counts Atlantic Records, Suzuki, and Penguin Random House among its clients has had its files dumped online by a ransomware gang, The Register can reveal.…

Proud parent Huawei probably sobbing in the car Honor, the smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, today announced its first handset as an independent company. The Honor View40 is a sub-flagship blower, priced at ¥3,599 (about £400) and aimed initially at the Chinese market.…

Has your password been pwned? MS browser will tell you Microsoft has detailed how the Password Monitor feature in Edge works after it pushed version 88 of the browser into the Stable channel.…