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Redmond rips out usernames, says it will focus on customer orgs, not staffers If you heard a strange noise coming from Redmond today, it was the sound of some rapid back-pedaling regarding the Productivity Score feature in its Microsoft 365 cloud platform.…

Mission aims to bring home 2kg of stones and soil from up to 2m down China's Chang'e-5 probe has successfully landed on the Moon following its separation and descent from a spacecraft in lunar orbit.…

Flagships are falling out of favour while demand for cheap devices swells Samsung is reportedly planning to discontinue its Galaxy Note line of phablets next year as hard-pressed smartphone buyers continue to switch from high-end flagship devices to more affordable products.…

Star of science and celluloid is no more That's that then. The Arecibo Observatory appears to have been destroyed with the collapse of the platform previously suspended above the giant dish.…

Though COVID-19 vaccine coming, video chat is here to stay, claims chief bean counter Lockdown luvvie Zoom has reported a bumper set of Q3 financials – although a rise in the number of free users dampened gross profit margins.…

Various enhancements but merging still a big no-no The OpenZFS project, formerly called ZFS on Linux, has released version 2.0.0 with major new features. The previous release was version 0.86 in October. Both Linux and FreeBSD are supported.…

Speech patterns consistent with boredom?! Minus 10 points! The slightly creepy "Productivity Score" may not be all that's in store for Microsoft 365 users, judging by a trawl of Redmond's patents.…

Meanwhile, landlord reckons he's found a loophole in coronavirus restrictions by naming beer 'Substantial Meal' Ideally, government regulations should not be open to interpretation, but the UK's wishy-washy response to the coronavirus pandemic has only left people scratching their heads – or, worse, thinking of ways they can bend the rules.…

Windows Feature Experience Pack attempts to make beast more modular The modularisation of Windows 10 continued this week as Microsoft popped a batch of potentially standalone components into a seperate Windows Feature Experience Pack.…

America's outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act gets a roasting Analysis There’s a growing problem with computer laws written in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were produced just as PCs began entering widespread personal usage but they failed to account for what electronic devices would soon be used for most of the time: accessing information over the internet.…

Blank share certificates, passport scans, you name it Exclusive A Cayman Islands-based investment fund has exposed its entire backups to the internet after failing to properly configure a secure Microsoft Azure blob.…

Or is it time to get SASE? Webcast After more than six months, the shine is wearing off working from home – not just for the workers, but for the security teams who need to rethink pretty much everything about how to protect them and their companies.…

Volunteers sought to join the COVID-ravaged jobs market IBM has revealed that hundreds of UK staff working in the Global Technology Services division will be in line for the chop under the latest wave of redundancy action.…

The Reg talks to Software Engineering veep Sha Ma Interview GitHub has described efforts to break down its monolithic application architecture into microservices – and revealed that it still runs some services on AWS, even after the 2018 acquisition by Microsoft.…

Though these days it's the darling of the tech shopping cart British chip designer Arm turned 30 last Friday. This is an auspicious occasion. The microprocessor technology drafted by this Cambridge-headquartered outfit forms the basis of nearly all smartphones and tablets in circulation, dominates the Internet-of-Things and embedded electronics space, and is appearing in an increasing number of computers, in the shape of laptops and server gear.…

Big Red said it was picked for its 'superior' cloud, but marketing minutiae and conference-eve thunder stealing have intruded Amazon Web Services has announced it is now videoconferencing darling Zoom’s “preferred” cloud.…

Boffins see more interference with domain-name look-up system, wonder why DNSSEC is taking so long Boffins from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute have crunched six years and four months of data, and found that DNS spoofing, while uncommon, has doubled during that time.…

The satellites are up there, Qualcomm has silicon on the ground, government wants more India’s tech self-sufficiency drive has extended into satellite navigation, as the nation seeks manufacturers to help drive adoption of its own system.…

Mac Minis in the cloud, still with the SmartNIC-powered Nitro isolation subsystem AWS has announced that it is now offering bare-metal Macs in its cloud.…

Wobbly NAS tended by Fujitsu crashed trading – and automatic failover failed Miyahara Koichiro, the CEO of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), has resigned in the wake of its October outage. The exchange’s operator, Japan Exchange Group, accepted his request to stand down.…

We don't need no education... IT department may need some Students in Baltimore, Maryland, were on Sunday warned against connecting their Windows PCs to the county’s public school IT system after it was hit by ransomware.…

Lab hopes improved tool will be used to craft new medicines faster DeepMind says its AlphaFold machine-learning software can now rapidly predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy, and could one day help us develop drugs faster.…

Someone needs to make a 'Best viewed with anything but IE' badge for websites As of today, the Microsoft Teams web app no longer supports Internet Explorer 11, as the Windows giant foretold in August.…

FCC boss tells telco industry he's available for lobbying work in January Analysis FCC head Ajit Pai has announced he will step down on Inauguration Day in January, bringing an end to a tumultuous four-year reign in charge of the US telecoms regulator.…

New API has same name but little integration with existing service AWS has added a messaging service to its Chime SDK, used by developers to build real-time conferencing features into applications.…

Chang'e-5 set for a lunar touchdown, Japan aims for Australia An exciting week is in the offing for space fans as China's Chang'e 5 prepares for a lunar landing and Japan's Hayabusa2 is set to return its precious cargo to Earth.…

Join us to learn how to save execs from themselves Webcast You have to hand it to the cyber-criminals. They really know how to mix a perfectly balanced cocktail of software engineering and human insight when it comes to crafting the perfect spear-phishing attack.…

Plus: Insider fixes and support extensions for old versions of Win 10 In Brief An odd thing has happened in the Windows 10 market-share figures published by ad slinger Ad Duplex. While the most recent release, the October 2020 Update (aka 20H2), crept closer to double digits, an older version also registered a gain.…

We said they were water-resistant, counters iGiant, as unhappy customers return from the beach The Italian competition authority (AGCM, or Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato) has fined Apple €10m (£8.97m/ $12m) over allegations it misled customers about the waterproofing qualities of its iMobes.…

Healthy block work paves the way IBM says it has managed to coax TLC-class endurance and performance from cheaper QLC flash chips, with customers of the company's FlashSystem 9200 all-flash arrays getting the benefits.…

Nothing from Chinese bogeyman allowed in core network by early 2023 The UK's Ministry of Fun* has published its roadmap for the removal of so-called high-risk vendors from UK telecoms networks as part of the second parliamentary reading of the Telecoms Security Bill.…

Legacy Business accounts to be axed from 4 January 2021 There is an early Christmas present for customers of TalkTalk Business as the company prepares to swing the axe on a legacy email service.…

What a spoon Infamous spoon-wrecking genius Uri Geller has lifted a 20-year ban on Nintendo from publishing Pokémon trading cards he claimed appropriated his likeness.…

Around 30% of premium notebooks sent by plane during pandemic, expect price rises on devices that are available to buy in January PC makers will be forced to compete for air freight space toward the end of this year as vaccines for COVID-19 are distributed around the world, both Dell and HP have warned.…

You didn't want fries with that, did you? Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in our series of digital signage behaving poorly. Today, the revelation through the medium of Windows that "chips" is, of course, the correct word for delicious bits of fried potato.…

A digital dial tone might have helped to keep the lights on for many Column Serverless is the new hotness. Like so much corporate IT, it's a complete misnomer. There are just as many servers as before, but your tasks – or microservices, if you need four more syllables – have no idea which ones they're using. Same meat, different stew.…

Modestly updating old phones won't work beyond Q4, says analyst Although shipments of smartphones to the channel recovered somewhat in the third quarter of 2020, that hasn't necessarily translated into sales.…

The Cassandra of 1980s tech: Doomed to warn, but never be heeded Who, Me? This Monday's Who, Me? is a reminder that for every ludicrous bit of company branding, there is always somebody behind the scenes yelling "No!"…

‘Removed by an unknown party’ says Bureau of Land Management POLL The mysterious monolith found in a remote corner of Utah last week has mysteriously disappeared.…

Hailed as visionary pioneer who changed both India and the software industry Mr Faqir Chand Kohl, the founder of India’s largest IT services company Tata Consulting Services and a pioneer of the nation’s IT industry, passed away last week aged 96.…

First solution: run on bigger servers to reduce chatter in the Kinesis fleet Amazon Web Services has revealed that adding capacity to an already complex system was the reason its US-EAST-1 region took an unplanned and rather inconvenient break last week.…

Also: New Zealand owl watching with Rocket Lab and ExoMars 'chute test In Brief Elon Musk's SpaceX demonstrated that a long-dormant pad could be reactivated with seemingly little effort after it launched the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite from Space Launch Complex 4 at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.…

UK data watchdog has been told and 'forensic' probe is ongoing Players' managers looking to lift salaries by a couple of million pounds or so better check their email read receipts: a full week after Manchester United was hit by hackers, many of its systems remain offline, with at least one report claiming the club is being shaken down for ransom.…

Budget sub-brand selloff will save jobs of workers, says founder, and avoid 'dragging innocent people' down Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has bid farewell to the company's budget sub-brand Honor, saying that selling the business will safeguard it from forces in America he believes are seeking to destroy Huawei.…

Here’s some information that will really help Promo You know you’ve got lots of data resting in your systems. But how much of it is usable information, that your colleagues can actually put to work?…

Sign up and make your voice heard A UK infosec bod has launched a petition asking the government if it would please drop its plans to install backdoors in end-to-end encryption.…

Must have lowered the asking price to one that isn't higher than entire group's market cap Capita has opened talks with a new suitor for its Education Software Solutions business, the one it tried to offload earlier in the year at a price reported to be higher than the entire group's market capitalisation on the London Stock Exchange.…

But Parliament seems a bit busy at the moment to legislate The UK government has announced plans to set up a Digital Markets Unit (DMU) to level the advertising playing field currently dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook.…

When I dreamt of a sci-fi future, I'm pretty sure this wasn't it Something for the Weekend, Sir? Help me up, would you, luvvie?…

Can we start a petition to abandon the whole 'lol jk ur in a simulation' arc too? The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. We've continued to put the Xbox Series S through its paces [read: played it a lot] with one of the titles available on the console from launch on 10 November, Assassin's Creed Valhalla.…