The Register

'Progress' report shows nobody's really paying attention any more How is Britain's £1.3bn National Cyber Security Strategy going? Nobody really cares any more – even the Cabinet Office, judging by its latest progress report.…

A grand uddertaking Irish computer vision and AI agriculture specialist Cainthus hopes to raise $50m after launching a facial recognition tool for cows.…

Another fine mess On Call Friday is upon us so take a moment from glumly hitting refresh on your government website of choice and join us for a story of abbreviations and adult filters in today's edition of On Call.…

Cloud giant has a lust for Rust so needs top minds and wants them to advance the language Amazon Web Services has quietly revealed that it has hired Rust compiler co-lead Felix Klock.…

No, really. It has signed a contract to make this happen in 2025 The European Space Agency has formalised its plan to dispose of space junk by using an orbiting claw to grab an old bit of rocket before dragging both the claw and the junk to a fiery doom.…

Alibaba in front with Huawei and Tencent on a second tier China's clouds grew by 65 per cent in 2020's third quarter, collectively hauling in $5bn of revenue in the period.…

New ways to evade sticking points apparently under discussion TikTok has another week to sort out its sale to Oracle, Walmart, and their investor pals.…

Hallucinate, Desegregate, Mediate, Try not to hate: INXS of 25 years on, PHP liberates the number eight Version 8.0 of the PHP scripting language is scheduled for release on 26 November, which coincides with the US Thanksgiving holiday.…

When we expect heavy traffic spikes we provision enough capacity to handle it... right? The gov.uk postcode-searching tool for Britons to find out what level of coronavirus lockdown they'll be in until Christmas has crashed on launch and been withdrawn.…

And on the B-side: Linux? Looking for something to do in quarantine? How about booting DOS from a 10-inch vinyl record?…

Maybe next time Brooker can choose to write a proper Black Mirror episode Streaming giant Netflix has agreed to settle a lawsuit over the trademark rights to the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books.…

'These actions will help us to optimize the business by reducing the number of unprofitable customers' HP might have dropped the Ink Inc from its corporate banner but CEO Enrique Lores is still mining for the black gold: with the firm clawing back cash by slapping away the grubby hands of its pesky "unprofitable customers" from its printing rig.…

UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee report slams manufacturers as Euro Parliament votes to back tinkerers A new report from the UK's House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) argues the country should enshrine the "right to repair" in law and reduce VAT on tech repair services, while Europe's Parliamentarians also voted to further the cause.…

Direct observation published for first time As we near the northern winter solstice, the Sun continues to produce a steady power output of 384.6 yottawatts resulting from the fusion of hydrogen into helium in two distinct nuclear reactions. Direct observation of the secondary cycle was published in the journal Nature for the first time yesterday.…

Plus: Broadband ambitions meet cold water Among the economic doom and gloom of the UK's Autumn Spending Review, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak inadvertently revealed the sop UK.gov plans to throw to telcos after sacking Huawei from the UK's 5G rollout at the behest of an orange one-term president of the US.…

Watching, always watching Microsoft's Productivity Score has put in a public appearance in Microsoft 365 and attracted the ire of privacy campaigners and activists.…

Cheap and cheerful clearly appealed during pandemic It has been a difficult year for the mobile industry as economic uncertainty and widespread national lockdowns further depressed the public's appetite for handset upgrades. Some vendors are faring better than others, however, with Xiaomi proving especially resilient.…

Containers, serverless, CI/CD, tooling – we’d love to hear all about it Event If there’s anything that hasn’t come to a halt this year, it surely is software development and service infrastructure work. We know you’ve all been busy so here’s another chance to get in your presentation proposal for our Continuous Lifecycle Online 2021 conference.…

53 nations and 180 telcos have adopted Clean Network plan – and Huawei fell for it The United States' Clean Network plan has won support from 53 nations and 180 telcos, and Huawei has unwittingly legitimised it.…

Which rather kicks a hole in the planned debut of Slack-like Salesforce Anywhere Salesforce is reportedly deep in talks to buy Slack, according to The Wall Street Journal, which says a deal could happen "in days".…

Left last couple of bans alone but now says national security argument is bogus and calls for mutual co-operation China has responded to India's new round of bans on mobile apps by attacking the reasons for the banishments.…

It flew OK without MCAS – but not well enough to be certified as safe The Boeing 737 Max was safe enough to fly without the controversial MCAS system but would not have met safety certification rules, the EU Aviation Safety Agency has said after confirming the airliner will return to European skies in January 2021.…

French IT outsourcer says its overall losses will deepen as direct result Sopra Steria has said a previously announced Ryuk ransomware infection will not only cost it "between €40m and €50m" but will also deepen expected financial losses by several percentage points.…

Multiple services sickly after Kinesis catches a cold: CloudWatch, DynamoDB, Lambda, Managed Blockchain AWS has delivered the one message that will strike fear into the hearts of techies working out their day before Thanksgiving Holidays: US-EAST-1 region is suffering a "severely impaired" service.…

$2.5m worth – 1,000 pairs of Nike Air Mag sneakers or a second-hand Pagani? Decisions, decisions Is it a vote of confidence when the CFO sells $2.5m in shares as the CEO is about to make his big pitch of the year and the quarterly results are due?…

SMEs are spending again, claims tech giant It is now seven straight quarters since Dell's infrastructure unit last grew but COO Jeff Clarke reckons he's spotted some green shoots of recovery that might bode well for server and storage spending next year.…

Take the M3 exit to offline mail and calendar shenanigans It's been a while coming, but browser maker Vivaldi has finally released a public preview of its long awaited email client.…

Local US carriers to remain unable to buy its kit with federal funding The US Federal Communications Commission has rejected a petition [PDF] from controversial Chinese teleco kit maker ZTE asking the agency to reconsider whether it should be deemed a national security threat.…

'It's like being in my own bubble back here' Though taxis can do a lot of things, like getting one from A to B, emptying out bank accounts, and even transporting BSODs, we suspect that preventing the spread of COVID-19 is not one of them.…

'While Bob never got to play on the big stage, he always followed the band around and got to ride on the bus' One anniversary unlikely to be marked within the bowels of Redmond is that of Microsoft Bob. However, a retired engineer has taken to YouTube to confirm that the unloved interface did indeed enjoy a second life as digital ballast for Windows XP.…

Lawyers for fined firm make eyebrow-raising claim to irate ex-customer Ticketmaster is claiming that the ICO's £1.25m data breach fine clears it of any responsibility for its network being infected by card-skimming malware, according to correspondence seen by The Register.…

Quis custodiet ipsos bork-es? Bork!Bork!Bork! Join us on a jaunt to an Australian shopping centre, where Windows 7 rules the roost and the digital signage, it seems, might be watching your every move.…

Famed director dispenses a reality check for wannabe Martians Film-maker Werner Herzog has upended the scorn bucket over billionaire electric car and space firm mogul Elon Musk's plans to create a city on Mars.…

This must have cost a packet... MongoDB has just found out what it can spend the marketing budget on, if not the usual fodder of canapés and international flights.…

Needed for probe testing how X-59 can break sound barrier without breaking eardrums NASA has revealed it’s building network cables capable of surviving supersonic flight.…

SaaS revenue tops licences for the first time in solid Q3 VMware has reported Q3 growth that beat guidance offered earlier in its financial year but said results would have been better but for a slowdown in “transformational projects”.…

Authorities warn aliens to get a permit before they do this sort of thing Poll The Utah Department of Public Safety has found a mysterious metal monolith in a remote corner of the state.…

Palo Alto Networks spotted subscriber IDs and MAC addresses on the move UPDATED Infosec researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence unit spotted a pair of prominent Chinese apps leaking personal data, and after it informed Google the ad giant dumped the apps from its Play store.…

43 apps axed, including those helping buyers and sellers of digital tat bazaar India has banned another 43 apps from operating in its territory.…

Plus or minus some caveats Comcast has vowed to enforce its 1.2TB-a-month download limit in more US states, expanding the policy to cover the nation's northeast and mid-Atlantic corners.…

Ring, Echo owners get emails explaining how to switch off incoming functionality Amazon is close to launching Sidewalk – its ad-hoc wireless network for smart-home devices that taps into people's Wi-Fi – and it is pretty much an opt-out affair.…

If you've been pwned in the past, pay special attention to this one VMware has published a series of workarounds for critical command injection vulnerabilities in its Workspace One Access, Access Connector, Identity Manager and Identity Manager Connector products.…

Any opportunity to nudge customers cloudwards, but no word on whether generosity will extend to Europeans Microsoft is slicing a chunk off the cost of its subscription productivity suite, but interested businesses must be both small and US-based.…

Hopefully no dogfood was eaten ahead of this incident UK electronic retailer Currys PC World found its website in need of urgent maintenance this afternoon and pulled its online orifice offline.…

What untold treasures could these primitive technologies hold? Carriers are eagerly eyeing industrial IoT as a way to fatten slender margins, and diversify from their traditional bread and butter of handset sales and subscriptions. The latest foray into this space comes from Vodafone, which plans to sell an end-to-end system to UK biz customers.…

Yes, even Amazon got a piece of 'multi-billion' dollar meal AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM can celebrate Thanksgiving safe in the knowledge they have won a place on the US Central Intelligence Agency’s lucrative Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract.…

Stuff that helps with Chipzilla's bottom line, basically Intel CEO Bob Swan has penned an open letter to President-elect Joe Biden congratulating him on his win, and urging his incoming administration to continue investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing.…

Software dinosaur will run alongside new CDS platform, says HMRC A top civil servant has said UK tax collector HMRC has not set a date to end use of a vital 26-year-old customs system, even though plans to migrate began seven years ago.…

What do 20 pizzas and five hours of face time with your most boring mate have in common? Cravings for social interactions affect the same area of the brain hit by hunger pangs after a long absence of nosh, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found.…

2027 ban prelude will be new Ofcom micromanagement powers Not content with its planned ban on Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G phone networks, the British government now wants to threaten Huawei-using telcos with fines of £100,000 a day unless they follow binding new rules on how existing kit can be used.…