The Register

Hard luck, BT The UK's competition watchdog has provisionally cleared the proposed merger of Virgin Media and O2 after concluding it would not materially impact competition (and thus the price and availability of services) in the telecoms wholesale market.…

Private preview for now, Windows and macOS users sought for testing System76, a US company which markets laptops, PCs and servers running Linux, is developing a new GNOME-based desktop GUI called COSMIC for its Pop!_OS distribution.…

Potential surveillance nightmare could be unfolding in secret, civil-rights warriors fear The US Department of Homeland Security and its law enforcement agencies – Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection – have been sued for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests about their use of Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology.…

For a small fee, of course – and no video or voice yet Exclusive Element Matrix Services (EMS) is asking users tied into Microsoft's Teams platform but who "actually want [end-to-end] encrypted secure comms" to take a stroll over a newly built bridge to its own message network.…

It takes two to tango, says SaaS vendor Maine has accused Workday of showing "no accountability" for its part in a flawed process to replace the US state's HR system.…

Colourful PowerBook 170 was a one-off for Japanese women's golf tournament Another piece of Apple history has been put on the block, this time it's the turn of a weird - and in some eyes, possibly wonderful - limited edition of the PowerBook 170.…

Keep using the provided tools, NCSC says Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat has publicly claimed GCHQ sources told him Gmail was more secure than Parliament’s own Microsoft Office 365 deployment – but both Parliament and a GCHQ offshoot have told him to stop being silly.…

Filling the void left by Huawei Smaller telco kit makers should provide 25 per cent of the equipment used in Britain's 5G networks following the removal of Huawei, according to the recently formed UK.gov-backed Telecoms Diversification Task Force.…

'A huge Tetris' as biz struggles prepping kit for relocation under renewed COVID lockdown OVH is yet to bring all customers affected by its Strasbourg data center fire back online – and the French cloud operator's CFO has described ongoing restoration efforts as a "real nightmare."…

AI algorithms in large-scale astronomy are mandatory, study says A neural network has helped astronomers catalog a whopping 27 million galaxies collected from one of the largest astronomical surveys probing the mysterious nature of dark energy.…

Ride-sharing, food-delivering, payment-processing, home-insuring and money-lending org thanks COVID for pumping up its financials Singaporean superapp Grab announced yesterday that it plans to go public in the United States – through a $39.6bn merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).…

Alibaba was just the beginning, says regulator, as it forbids western web titans' favourite bullying behaviours China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has warned 34 local web “platforms” to make sure they comply with local laws, and take care not to adopt western startups' aggressive tactics, or they may suffer the same kind of smackdowns recently inflicted on Alibaba.…

IT giant is learning to live with repeated sprints rather than mega-deals Tata Consultancy Services won just seven new customers in its fiscal 2021, and went backwards on revenue and profit.…

Many European customers flee, Asia signs up in big numbers Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, operator of the "3" mobile brand across several geographies, has told investors that COVID-19 cut its revenues by 8 per cent and profits by 21 per cent, but it also found bright spots of business around the world.…

Remote-control malware wiped, deployments must still be patched The FBI deleted web shells installed by criminals on hundreds of Microsoft Exchange servers across the United States, it was revealed on Tuesday.…

eSentire warns of remote-access trojans masquerading as PDFs More than 100,000 web pages hosted by Google Sites are being used to trick netizens into opening business documents booby-trapped with a remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes over victims' PCs and hands control to miscreants.…

Want to write for El Reg or help us polish our output? Apply within Job alert The Register has a couple of vacancies open on our editorial team that we would like to fill immediately. Without further ado, here are the details:…

New law implementation, cease-and-desist letters, and mobile companies asked to detail free blocking tools The FCC is finally taking concrete action on the scourge of robocalls after years of dithering on the issue.…

This one seems as well thought-out as his Capitol rally salute US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed his latest anti-Big Tech legislation: a complete ban on mergers and acquisitions for companies valued at over $100bn if it may harm competition in any way possible.…

Existing users covered until 2022 Password specialist 1Password has acquired SecretHub, a secrets management platform aimed at IT engineers, and made a new service called Secrets Automation, previously in beta, generally available.…

100+ fixes for the Windows world – plus holes in SAP, Adobe, FreeBSD, etc Patch Tuesday April showers bring hours of patches as Microsoft delivers its Patch Tuesday fun-fest consisting of over a hundred CVEs, including four Exchange Server vulnerabilities reported to the company by the US National Security Agency (NSA).…

Living on the Edge as SA networks roll out The move to 5G has allowed vendors and carriers to fundamentally rethink how their networks are structured. Once the norm, tightly integrated vendor-specific hardware is gradually being supplanted by virtualized alternatives that run happily on standards-agnostic kit. Jumping on the bandwagon is Japanese provider NEC, which today said it would use RedHat's OpenShift Kubernetes platform for its upcoming 5G hardware.…

It's like the 2000s all over again, sighs Bitdefender Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are stealing browser session cookies and Monero cryptocurrency wallets from tightwads who install the pirated software, Bitdefender has warned.…

Surface Headphones 2+ also available and a range of 'Modern' kit coming in the next few months Microsoft has opened the order books on the fourth generation of its Surface Laptop, replete with Intel-baiting AMD chippery in the line-up.…

Beta expected in a matter of weeks, production release planned for summer AWS has introduced the OpenSearch project, the new name for its open-source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.…

After 17 years into a 13-year mission, that's not bad Northrop Grumman's second Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) has docked with Intelsat's IS-10-02 satellite, potentially extending the life of the latter by five years.…

Support has fallen behind and fixing it is a challenge Unity software developer Josh Peterson has spoken about the future of .NET support in the widely used game development engine.…

Sounds kind of like a vaccination passport for California offices Salesforce has waded into the heated debate over vaccine passports, suggesting they may be a means of getting employees back into the office. Just don't call them vaccine passports.…

'After saying this, I immediately received hostile messages' says pumpking of version 5.x On Monday, the Perl Core developer known as Sawyer X announced his intention to leave the three-person Perl Steering Committee, or Council, and the Perl Core group because of what he described as community hostility.…

Looks like classic case of failing to scale to meet inevitable demand The UK's National Health Service is now offering COVID-19 vaccines to those aged 45 and above however the volume of interest has made the appointment-booking website prone to wobbles.…

A hot £22m for a bit of CAZ-ual software support The UK government is on the hunt for a supplier to support and maintain the software behind its controversial Clean Air Zone (CAZ) policy in a tender that could result in a £22m contract.…

Analysis of Computer Misuse Act cases also draws heavily on El Reg archives An academic researcher has analysed more than 100 Computer Misuse Act cases to paint a picture of the sort of computer-enabled criminals who plague Great Britain’s digital doings in the 21st Century.…

BlazorWebView arrives on desktop applications. Too convoluted? Microsoft has shipped preview 3 of its forthcoming .NET 6 framework with a bunch of updates including the addition of Windows desktop to its Multi-platform App UI (MAUI).…

Remaining .uk registry board members ignore demands of campaign that has already removed CEO Nominet has chosen civil war over compromise, formally rejecting members' calls to install former BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons as chair of the .uk registry operator.…

NICE DCV also gets support for Apple's M1 silicon If you’re looking for another reason to fear webcam complications during a video chat, Amazon Web Services has two things for you.…

New version for England dead on arrival just as UK eases lockdown rules An update for the NHS's COVID-19 test-and-trace app for England has been blocked by both Apple and Google because it added the ability for users to store and share location data.…

Requires Alipay to open to competition but stops short of ordering company break up China has again cracked down on Alibaba, this time by ordering its fintech arm Ant Group to become a financial holding company that is subject to tighter regulations.…

Won’t say when flight tests will resume, because uploads and testing are hard when your machine is 15 light minutes away NASA will upload a "minor modification" of flight control software to the Ingenuity helicopter ahead of its first attempt at powered flight on Mars, and says the process of doing so means it can’t say when attempts to send craft into Red skies will take place.…

Jakarta bit barn offers subset of services - CLI, GPU, some storage services, advanced security services and serverless aren't on offer Chinese web giant Tencent has opened its first cloud data center in Indonesia.…

That’s Self-Paced Online Training, says SANS Institute Promo Working in cybersecurity means always keeping your skills bang up to date. But what are your options when the challenges of blocking out time for traditional in person training are compounded by pandemic-related restrictions?…

Also, President Biden hosts meeting to mull over silicon shortage Intel has offered to fabricate chips for cars within the next six to nine months to help automakers brought to their knees by the ongoing global semiconductor shortage.…

And we're so sorry for not warning staff or anyone else about his board reelection, adds foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Monday apologized for mishandling the announcement last month that founder Richard Stallman, or RMS, had been reelected to its board of directors – and published a statement from RMS both justifying his behavior and apologizing for it.…

Effort to get accurate info gets more serious under new chairwoman The FCC is encouraging netizens to use its internet speed mobile app in an effort to finally get accurate broadband data across the United States.…

Highest Q1 figures since 2012 It’s still boom time for makers of personal computers. The buying frenzy that started in the pandemic has spilled into the first quarter of 2021 with global shipments into the channel swelling by more than half to a staggering 82 million boxes.…

Also another data processing unit, system-on-a-chip for self-driving cars GTC Nvidia says it has designed an Arm-based general-purpose processor named Grace for training massive neural networks and powering supercomputers, and plans to ship it in 2023.…

Double anniversary means doubles all round, are we right? Join us in raising a toast in celebration of both the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the Earth and 40 years since the first Space Shuttle left the pad.…

Hello? Is this thing on? Microsoft is to buy Nuance Communications for $19.7bn in a bid to bolster its healthcare product line with AI conversational smarts.…

To complement his $300m Bond villain base in Hawaii After Oracle announced plans to relocate its headquarters from California to Texas, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said he would not be coming along as he's happy in Hawaii.…

Creates two new mini models because it’s assumed you won’t build silos to host huge hot monsters GTC Nvidia has created a pair of small data-center-friendly GPUs because it doesn’t think customers will get into AI acceleration unless they can use the servers they already operate.…

LSE document confirms AI infosec company's plans British AI-powered infosec biz Darktrace is to go public in England's capital city, the company told the London Stock Exchange this morning.…