The Register

Not a steak, but if you're going midrange there's enough to chew on Review You get a lot of phone for less than £300 these days. Just look at the Realme 7 and 7 Pro, which recently splashed down in Europe. These devices are the OPPO sister brand's latest bid for the middle-tier mobile market. They don't push any envelopes, but they are excellent value for money.…

Response to pandemic elevates simple laptop to centre of universe... Dell only vendor to shrink, says Canalys Canalys Forum 2020 Fuelled by the pandemic, demand for notebooks continued to go through the roof in Q3 as the PC industry grew at its fastest pace in almost nine years - Dell was the only major top five player to report declines.…

Innocent survey UAS brutally smashed into roof by Stranraer seabird An innocent drone has crashed after being attacked by an aggressive Scottish black-headed gull.…

Plus: Bunch of Cisco fixes for Patch Tuesday week, Fitbit kit hit, RAT malware written in Golang, and more In brief NordVPN has hit the go-live button for the first of its colocated server setups.…

The signage may be borked, but the Swedish meatballs are steaming Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows 10 likes an update. Goodness me it likes an update, as any user who has found a workday cruelly interrupted while the operating system treats itself to a jolly good patching can confirm.…

Rhetoric for the post-Brexit era but will actions follow words? Comment A UK government minister has called for the country to "shape the standards of new technology" in a speech aimed at drumming up Commonwealth support for a cyber "leadership" role for post-Brexit Britain.…

Boss has to agree, home time not to exceed 50 percent and let’s talk about salary if you leave town Microsoft has decided its 150,000-plus staff can work from anywhere, anytime, most of the time.…

Beware the wrong tool in the wrong hands Who, Me? If there is one Microsoft product guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of an IT pro more than Excel shoehorned into the wrong place, it's Access inserted into any place. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Bills home-brewed silicon as the upgrade path to better Redis or memcached Amazon Web Services has made its home-brewed Arm-powered Graviton2 CPUs the default for its ElastiCache service.…

Top advice and info from an extraordinary lineup of speakers Event Learn from industry practitioners about model deployment pipelines, testing & monitoring for machine learning, and how to bake explainability into your process…

Bank of England and US Reserve among those pondering own digital dollars China has announced a significant new trial of its digital currency, co-incidentally on the same day influential central banks laid out their plans for a similar effort.…

Warnings to clean up its act went unheeded, but door remains open for a return Pakistan has banned TikTok, citing the service’s slew of salaciousness as insupportable.…

Or as they put it: ‘Embed the safety of the public in system designs … facilitating the investigation and prosecution of offences’ The nations of the Five Eyes security alliance – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK – plus Japan and India, have called on technology companies to design their products so they offer access to encrypted messages and content.…

US military sticks techno-specs on crack canines in command experiment The US Army will give military dogs augmented-reality goggles and walkie-talkies to work out whether the technology can help them better assist soldiers on the battlefield.…

It's Do Not Track II: The Wrath of Ashkan and Sebastian... Caaaaaaaan't you stop stalking us around the internet A coalition of technology companies, publishers, academics and advocacy groups this week proposed a web specification to allow internet users to declare whether they agree to have their personal data shared or sold.…

Unpatched Cisco VPN servers, access to the iOS source code, AWS secret keys – this is weapons grade 'oof' A team of vulnerability spotters have netted themselves a six-figure payout from Apple after discovering dozens security holes in the Cupertino giant's computer systems, some of which could have been exploited to steal iOS source code, and more.…

Pittsburgh workforce erosion, punitive policies cited in labor complaint The US National Labor Relations Board has bundled a series of complaints alleging labor law violations against IT services firm HCL America (HCL Technologies), which supplies contract workers like data analysts to a Google office in Pittsburgh, into a case to be heard in February.…

But as ever, users, you don't need to yell into the phone... it's not the 1970s In a much-anticipated move for Android phone users, Google has tweaked its Assistant to let users interact with third-party apps – including Spotify and Twitter – using their voice.…

Someone's got to wrangle all the automation now Microsoft and pals have joined the act Open source bot orchestration vendor Camunda has rolled out its latest platform update, which includes features designed to centrally wrangle bots from the multitude of vendors currently muscling in on the lucrative market.…

There's only one way to stop this, says counter-ransomware bod Software AG has seemingly been hit by ransomware, with the German IT giant itself telling the Euro nation's stock market it had been “affected by a malware attack.”…

Stay home, log into Druva’s DxP virtual summit – and still get the t-shirt Promo A lot has changed over the past six months, but one thing hasn’t: your company’s data is still its most important asset, and protecting it is crucial.…

Private equity funding stalls amid COVID-19 Canalys Forum 2020 Some Internet of Things projects are stalling, trapped in what analyst Canalys terms as a "proof-of-concept hell," though it believes the limiting factors are cultural rather than technological.…

Computer Misuse Act charges stack up against vengeful former hubby A Crown Prosecution Service lawyer is on trial accused of unlawfully accessing information about his judge wife's new lover after their marriage broke down.…

Xbox fans, move along. These principles don't apply to console-jockeys In a vague swipe at the likes of Apple, Microsoft has declared its 10 app store principles. Surprisingly "please, please use our store" isn't one of them.…

Not going anywhere, just not going to space. A bit like the calamity capsule Former NASA 'naut Christopher Ferguson has withdrawn as commander from the first crewed mission of Boeing's calamity capsule, the CST-100 Starliner.…

Bulk of deal focuses on secure, high-performance connectivity to China IT services nonprofit Jisc, which runs the UK's academic network Janet, has awarded framework contracts worth up to £35m to provide remote access to British research and courses, including from China.…

Don't worry, says the internet giant, this doesn't happen too often An unsealed warrant in a case involving alleged pedophile R&B star R. Kelly has shown how the Feds can get Google to hand over the details of people who make specific web search queries.…

Netizens have been obliviously chatting with software for the past 10 days Someone used OpenAI's GPT-3 text-generating software to write a spree of posts on Reddit, convincing people the missives were penned by a real person, and banking thousands of internet points in the process, The Register can confirm.…

Capex to opex, capex to opex, capex to opex... Stop. 'It's just not what people really want' Canalys Forum 2020 Selling tech based on consumption is predicated on a "lie" and a "fallacy" created by the powerful marketing machines at some of the largest hardware vendors.…

Did we mention where it goes? Plus: LinkedIn trolling and other lockdown fun Something for the Weekend, Sir? My private parts are private, for sure, but I never thought about giving them a passcode.…

Fined £40k after probe. Plus: ICO wants your views on its future powers A company that fired out more than 9,000 spam emails promoting face masks has been fined £40,000 by the UK Information Commissioner's Office and ordered to stop doing it.…

Google has a word with digital rights warriors The EFF has disabled by default an anti-tracking feature in its Privacy Badger browser extension – after Googlers warned it could be abused to track people.…

Powerful computers need powerful fans, after all On Call Everybody knows a tidy desk equates to a drawer below rammed full of dusty detritus. Welcome to an On Call in which a Register reader channels his inner Kondo.…

And we're about to extract a sample from it Scientists have compared asteroid Bennu to a chocolate creme egg – and say it may explode as it continues to spin at an ever-increasing rate.…

Let the chips fall where they may AMD is said to be in advanced talks to buy Xilinx in a deal set to top $30bn.…

What are the chances? Facebook has claimed that the Real Facebook Oversight Board (RFOB), a critical advocacy group set up as a riposte to the social network's inaction on that front, is a phishing operation and has had its website taken down.…

Plus: Experts talk voting machine security, 'warming' of relations with infosec community If you're designing a security bug bounty for your organization's products, by all means get the lawyers to take a look, but keep their hands off the keyboard. If it's one thing flaw-finders find too tedious to deal with, which will put them off finding holes in your defenses, it's legalese – and these are people who otherwise spend all day combing reverse-engineered code for typos.…

Cache me if you can, Intel On Thursday, AMD CEO Lisa Su presided over a webcast to introduce the chip designer's latest line of Ryzen processors based on its Zen 3 microarchitecture.…

Zero trust, zero touch, crypto-jacking – bung all the usual buzzwords in "BlackBerry has always been known for our strong strategy," chief exec John Chen told the BlackBerry Security Summit earlier this week – just as a well-read investment blog concluded that "without a meaningful shift, this company (and stock) will probably keep on struggling".…

Gosh, that's a lot of Gits. But a viable alternative to Microsoft's stable Developers were given another option for code wrangling today with the arrival of native GitLab integration for Gitpod.…

Chinese bogeyman continues to seek stand-ins for Google's Android services Huawei's homegrown mobile software store has scored Intel-owned mobility app Moovit.…

We'll show you how to access persistent data across any hybrid environment Webcast Everybody may be ‘doing’ Kubernetes on some level these days, but it’s arguable whether everybody’s doing it properly.…

Support and knowledge base articles consolidated into a single and search engine-friendly location Microsoft has celebrated yet another tumble of its "365" services by consolidating its support sites into one location.…

And the name of this fresh public entity? World, say hello to... NewCo IBM has confirmed a "tax-free" spin-off of its Managed Infrastructure Services unit into a separately traded public company, expunging a part of Big Blue that has been shrinking and subject to years of cost-cutting.…

And if that's not Skynet enough for ya, Britten-Norman is working to make the BN-2 Islander fly autonomously The US Air Force (USAF) is deploying Kubernetes containerisation tech aboard some of its spyplanes – as UK-based Britten-Norman teams up to make one of its flagship aircraft semi-autonomous.…

Nobody expects the Telco Consolidation UK ISP TalkTalk has confirmed it is considering a takeover offer from Toscafund Asset Management that values the broadband and TV provider at £1.1bn.…

Raising inevitable concerns over protection of patient data NHS England is tendering for AI technologies in deals worth up to £15m to help guide the treatment of stroke victims while the health service groans under the strain of coronavirus.…

Which means your new Mac is vulnerable to 'evil maid' attacks, if that's something you worry about Apple's T2 security chip is insecure and cannot be fixed, a group of security researchers report.…

No, not the TV show, as great as it is. You, silly! Canalys Forum 2020 There are lies, damn lies, and tech vendor surveys, but the latest from hyperconverged specialist Nutanix might raise a wry smile. It turns out IT is important after all.…

Plus: MPs call for more OpenRAN-based work in UK The British government should rip out Huawei's 5G mobile network equipment regardless of the facts because doing so would curry favour with Donald Trump's US, Parliament's Defence Committee has said in an extraordinary new report.…