The Register

£150k up for grabs if you can help create the dystopian future of warfare The UK's Ministry of Defence has £900,000 for any companies willing to supply it with weaponised drones capable of flitting around “urban environments” and even poking their electronic noses inside shopping centres and private houses.…

The arrival of .NET 5.0 brings yet another twist Microsoft .NET program manager Immo Landwerth has set out the latest summary of how to write code that targets more than one version of the platform.…

Blighty didn't miss out on ESA award like with Copernicus, it's just more worried about space junk than Hera The European Space Agency (ESA) has let people know where €129.4m of work for its Hera mission will go. The UK is, unsurprisingly, not on the list.…

After wrangling the small print over countless Skype for Business meetings (yes really) The High Court of England and Wales has said insurers should pay up on a raft of key "test" clauses in a ruling affecting hundreds of thousands of UK businesses forced to close during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown.…

Customers clearly looking to simplify buying into supply chains – but the market is tougher than it looks Workday's boss got a chance to flex his jaw muscles this week at Deutsche Bank's 2020 Global Technology Conference, using that platform to talk up his interest in the market for procurement software.…

Inspectors tried to let them off the hook, council managers held firm The local council overseeing the core of the Australian city of Melbourne has been told to refund around 1,200 fines that resulted from drivers making a minor typo.…

ML, analytics connector reduces memory demand, says database firm In-memory NoSQL database Aerospike is launching connectors for Apache Spark and mainframes to bring the two environments closer together.…

Don't mind us just trying to enlighten the mood From the department of what can't Microsoft Teams do comes news of tuition for Buddhist monks and AI slithering into medical workflows.…

National health promotion will pump instructions onto wrists and - if you behave - cover up to 90% of device cost Singapore and Apple have cooked up a scheme that will see the city-state’s citizens rewarded with gift vouchers if they wear the Apple Watch as part of a national health promotion programme.…

It only took five years Europe’s top court has decided that the continent’s network neutrality rules will stand, rejecting challenges from the telecoms industry.…

Erm ... guys ... have you looked at recent patch counts? (We have: you issued 372 this quarter, 54 critical) Microsoft has open-sourced the fuzzing tool it uses to scour its own code for potential security vulnerabilities.…

Radars, aeroplanes, radio: Don't forget the boffins on this 80th anniversary Comment Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, where Britain saw off Nazi Germany's air force and briefly stood alone against Hitler's military might. Yet while the occasion is marked by flypasts and parades, it's important to remember that tech also played a part in Britain's victory.…

Alibaba and Tencent left to offer mediated wallets rather than potentially become private currencies A deputy governor of the People's Bank of China has revealed more about the nation’s plan for a digital currency, and the news isn’t good for alternative payment systems run by the likes of Alibaba and Tencent because it appears they won’t get the chance to go head-to-head with Banks.…

Dot over an X instead of an I ‘illustrates our commitment to empowering every individual’ Logowatch Citrix has “unveiled fresh thinking about what employee experience means” and launched a new logo to prove it.…

And have you tried simply asking hackers to not hack? The NSA has published online a guide for IT admins to keep systems free of bootkits and rootkits.…

Programmers put decade-old package out to pasture, advise devs to find alternatives The maintainers of Moment.js, a JavaScript time-and-date handling library downloaded 12 million times a week, put the project into maintenance mode on Tuesday, and advised developers to consider alternatives.…

We polled you IT pros out there on your info silo plans – and here are the results Reader survey Once upon a time, not so very long ago, relational databases were pretty much the only game in town – for mainstream organizations, at least. As a result, they underpin huge numbers of business applications of all kinds, and when we surveyed readers of The Register recently, it was clear many organisations expect their relational database usage to increase.…

No way to sugarcoat this: New York AG eclairs the 2015 data theft matter settled Dunkin' Donuts today settled a lawsuit in which it was accused of hushing up the fact hackers siphoned its customers' personal information from its systems in 2015.…

OK, fine. Blood-oxygen level monitoring, hexa-core 5nm Arm processors, TV packages... The tagline for today’s Apple product launch event was “time flies.” How ironic given 2020 feels like it's been a decade long.…

'51 billion' active JVMs can't be wrong Oracle on Tuesday marked the arrival of Java 15, known as Oracle JDK 15 among those concerned about formalities and trademarks, in the 25th year of the programming language's existence.…

Also: GitHub and Teams action while Universal Print presses on In brief Windows Insiders, us included, were left a tad bemused last week after a Dev Channel update purported to "not include anything new" was abruptly pulled.…

Video platform is not for under-13s, insists spokesman A campaign group is suing Google for up to £2.5bn over claims that YouTube breaks EU data protection laws by harvesting information about children under 13 – and is hoping to turn it into a UK class-action-style case.…

Bid to banish camera bumps from smartphones, but smaller doesn't always mean better The latest crop of ISOCELL sensors from Samsung continue the trend of chasing ever smaller pixels, resulting in a dramatically reduced footprint and height.…

Plus: Updates rolled to ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, and more Microsoft has shipped the first "go live" version of .NET 5.0, intended to be a "unified platform" targeting Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more.…

iGiant needs to take accountability for society's throwaway culture, claims select committee The UK's Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) says Apple is still not answering questions relating to its record on the environmental sustainability and repairability of its iStuff.…

Optional extra pack a bit like Microsoft Plus! but with CMake instead of Pinball Microsoft has shunted the C++ extension for Visual Studio Code to general availability.…

Nearly 2,000 e-commerce shops pwned over weekend so it's time to migrate Thousands of e-commerce stores built using Magento 1 have been poisoned with malicious code that steals customers' bank card information as they enter their details to order stuff online.…

Linux on Azure might no longer need Windows Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to the Linux kernel with its aim being "to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor."…

Update to vSphere 7 brings container fun without VSAN, NSX or vRealize, but still needs some SDN nous VMware has pushed out the first update to vSphere 7, and it offers the chance to run containers and Kubernetes alongside VMs on modest collections of servers.…

Shift to Arm processors will maroon some users – and Hackintoshes are problematic Comment Apple will today announce shiny new things. Supposedly it'll be the sixth Watch series, and a mid-tier iPad Air. I want it to announce something entirely more useful, though: a macOS x86 virtual appliance for all capable systems.…

A year's delay costs £550m... so, er, no rush, eh? A "mindset reset" in the UK's Emergency Services Network (ESN) project is behind £1bn in additional costs and a further delay of two years, according to Home Office boss Matthew Rycroft.…

Tune in online this month and learn how to keep them at bay Webcast Working from home may have turned your life upside down, but for hackers, cyber-criminals and other bad actors, it’s all been business as usual.…

Android hackers prove it can be done, but it was no mean feat A group of Android tinkerers have found a way of sideloading an unrestricted OS onto the LeapFrog Epic, a kid-friendly tablet.…

Is that... XP? Can't be – venerable OS expired last year Bork!Bork!Bork! An old favourite returns this week as a Tesco self-service terminal gets a bit forgetful in its operating system's dotage.…

Wearable tracker now being distributed for those who don’t fancy smartphone surveillance Singapore test compulsory use of COVID-tracking tech as a condition of entry to some venues.…

‘Wing’ has one big screen and one little screen, no price or release date LG has given the world another twist on the dual-screen phone.…

Site accessed on 10/11/2016... is that November 10 or October 11? A family in Spain was erroneously accused of uploading child sex abuse material to Facebook because Spanish investigators read a date in a US report as if it used the European date format.…

Compiling using open source intel and hailed as showing extent of China’s surveillance activities A US academic has revealed the existence of 2.4-million-person database he says is compiled by a Chinese company known to supply intelligence, military, and security agencies. The academic alleges the purpose of the database is enabling overseas influence operations to be conducted against prominent or influential people outside China.…

'Everybody wants to build video into their apps now' Twilio reckons COVID-19 and lockdown has driven an uptick in its business, thanks to an increased demand for cloud-hosted communications.…

If Nvidia wants a proof-of-concept of A64 in a compute cloud, here's one Amazon Web Services has found another use for its home-brewed Graviton2 Arm processors: powering an instance type designed for burstable performance.…

Warns that plan could lead to 'dangerous inferences' about user identity, suggests GDPR is a better model Mozilla has strongly criticised India’s draft plan to allow companies to harvest non-personal data.…

‘Good booking momentum’ across all sectors and geographies says outsourcer If you’re looking for a sign that the global economy may not be in dire post-pandemic peril, Indian services giant HCL may just have delivered.…

Probing systems during a live election 'to be treated as hostile unless authorization granted,' Voatz insists About 70 members of the computer security community on Monday challenged US voting app maker Voatz's effort to dictate the terms under which bug hunters can look for code flaws.…

Beijing's snoops don't even need zero-days to break into valuable networks The US government says the Chinese government's hackers are preying on a host of high-profile security holes in enterprise IT equipment to infiltrate Uncle Sam's agencies and American businesses.…

Aliens may not be so different from us here on Earth – unintelligent and gassy Video Alien life may exist in the thick clouds in Venus’ atmosphere, scientists speculated in research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.…

Atlanta to upgrade software license with more protection, clerk tells us A court hearing on election security in America failed in its own security efforts – when it was zoombombed with porn, swastikas and images of the World Trade Center attacks.…

You can do it the easy way or the easier way A "hack-proof" smart padlock with security based on blockchain technology could be defeated by a simple Bluetooth replay attack – or a 1kg lump hammer.…

Microsoft went to sea, sea, sea to see what it could see, see, see... Microsoft has hauled its data centre in a box, Natick, up from the seabed and concluded that data is indeed better, down where it's wetter, under the sea.…

Meanwhile, co-founder petitions UK.gov to keep HQ and jobs at home Nvidia expects its $40bn buy of chip designer Arm to take over a year to close and to involve plenty of discussions with regulators – ones that will be interested in how the "Switzerland" of semiconductors can remain independent and still appeal to its new owner's rivals.…

Equipment failure shuts down servers, networking, storage Microsoft is said to be eyeing up linking people to Azure via satellite – just as its cloud platform partially tripped over in the UK, derailing the country's coronavirus statistics page.…