The Register

Plus astroboffins confirm 'masked' asteroid heading Earthwards Astronomers have discovered a new population of foreign asteroids that have been quietly orbiting the Sun on the outskirts of our Solar System.…

We've got your back while you hunt for work during lockdown Job Alert Welcome to week four of our mini pandemic response – free job ads for techies. We're trying to keep our readers, their sisters, brothers, friends and relatives in work by providing the industry with free job listings.…

Comma, comma, comma, comma, comma coloring ban. You come and go, you come and go... The web is being reworked to display a rainbow of previously unavailable colors, but part of the transition demands abandoning commas for spaces when coding CSS color-space parameters.…

'Standard C integer types are incredibly wasteful' for certain types of programming Erich Keane, a compiler frontend engineer at Intel, has committed a patch to the LLVM Clang project that enables custom width integers - such as 31 bit, 3 bit or 512 bit.…

Platform is 'tightly' integrated with AWS S3, but now an alternative is needed Few CEOs are upstaged by their own kitchens but, watching Infor supremo Kevin Samuelson drone on about industry disruption, the spotless gleam of his chrome and white backdrop spoke more to viewers of this week's Infor Inspire virtual conference than he did.…

2012: The London Olympics, Baumgartner jumping from a balloon, and TeamViewer revealing someone wasn't using the right licence Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a special edition of The Register's occasional look at sickly screens with some historical hijinks in today's Bork to the Future.…

The curse of RS-232 strikes again in part two of our serial series On Call While the days may seem to be blurring a little at the moment, we can assure you that it is Friday, which means it is time for another in The Register's series of reader experiences at the hands of the On Call telephone.…

We were made for these times, says remote app-slinger, but we’re staying off planes The coronavirus plague has seen plenty of vendors tell investors they just can’t predict what’s going to happen this year, but Citrix has not just issued new guidance but increased the ceiling of its revenue expectations.…

Tune to find out from IONOS exactly how safe your information is from Uncle Sam's prying eyes Webcast When Microsoft loudly and publicly challenges the US government on remote data access, you can bet the Feds and lawmakers won't just sit still and take it.…

As Firepower kit hit by rare and ridiculous ‘silkscreen ID flaw’ A Friday challenge for netadmins: solve a silkscreen ID bug in a Cisco Firepower appliance.…

Possibly picking up China's slack. Fingers crossed for more than that! Taiwan’s posted its monthly Industrial Production Indexes for March 2020 and they contain some nice-looking numbers.…

FCC emits rules to tackle danger of orbital debris Satellite communications companies beaming signals to and from America will need to convince the nation's comms watchdog that any new sats put into orbit won't collide with others and spam space with debris.…

Warehoused servers were ready, but then the world discovered Teams Microsoft has admitted that some Azure regions have experienced coronavirus-triggered capacity constraints, and customers haven’t been able to get all the cloud they want.…

Sales, profit soar in first three months of 2020 as coronavirus helps Chipzilla print money Intel today reported a bumper first quarter of the year, with a big shift to homeworking worldwide partially fueling double-digit growth of its PC processor sales.…

L’ACEI lance le Bouclier canadien dans le but de protéger gratuitement la vie privée et la sécurité des Canadiens en ligne The organization that oversees .CA domains, among other important internet functions, is rolling out a free Canada-wide DNS-over-HTTPS service to protect people's privacy.…

Um, it wasn't doing this already? That explains a lot On Thursday Google said it will require all advertisers on its platforms to verify their identities, an initiative that aims to make online advertising more transparent by allowing people to see who paid for internet pitches.…

Homegrown chip to shift away from Chipzilla? Hey, it could work Apple will reportedly release its own Arm-powered Mac computers next year, marking the biggest component change since Cupertino ditched IBM's PowerPC chips in 2005 for Intel's x86 line.…

Users advised to move file out of folder, let a new one be generated, then copy it back over – if you want to keep them The last major update for Windows Terminal prior to version 1.0 dropped last night but be warned: there are some breaking settings changes.…

World slows down its smartphone buying for a bit LG Display has reported its fifth consecutive loss-making quarter.…

All fixed now so get back to work Big sack o' source GitHub is having a hellish week as the Microsoft tentacle suffered wobbles aplenty even as it tipped the scorn bucket over the emissions of the US administration.…

When? Which foundation? What about Knative? Analysis Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has stated that Istio, a key component in the Kubernetes platform, will be donated to a foundation, despite previous strong hints that the firm would never do so.…

Also: Remember that whole 'final build' thing? Here's a patch Microsoft began the run up to the weekend with a pair of new Insider builds for Windows 10 and the return of an old friend.…

Engineers, consultants can't visit client sites so home they go Computacenter has suspended dividend payments to shareholders after furloughing one in ten workers, the lion's share of which include engineers, project managers and consultants unable to visit customers on site.…

Research ponders whether lockdown may lead folk to update dusty networking kit for sitting room setups The COVID-19 pandemic looks set to have both short and long-term implications for the tech industry, themselves a reflection of changes in the established working culture. A new white paper from ABI Research highlights the growing need for modern home Wi-Fi kit to cope with an increasingly remote workforce.…

So future-proofing your handset might not have to break the bank The prices of 5G handsets are plummeting as demonstrated by the Realme X50m 5G, announced earlier today. This blower, from the sister company of industry giants OPPO and OnePlus, retails at ¥1,999 — about £230 — and comes with a surprisingly decent array of specs.…

WireGuard VPN, more Snap, and hints about a GUI for WSL Canonical has unleashed Ubuntu 20.04, the first LTS (Long term support) release since 18.04, Bionic Beaver, two years ago, and its CEO and Ubuntu desktop chief have spoken a bit about what's under the lid.…

Pressure after surrounding porous rock sopped up water was at a 50-year high before 2018 Kīlauea eruption For those of us who spent no small part of our childhoods avoiding certain bits of carpet because they were lava, boffins reckon they might have an idea why volcanoes erupt in the first place.…

Static analyzer proves its worth with discovery of null-pointer error A static analysis feature set to appear in GCC 10, which will catch common programming errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, has scored an early win – it snared an exploitable flaw in OpenSSL.…

Meanwhile, Chocolate Factory to donate its Istio toolkit to vendor-neutral open-source foundation Google's cloud-sitting service Anthos now officially interoperates with AWS, and Azure support is almost there.…

CEO, CFO take a 70% cut in light of performance, COVID-19 situation Capita has told investors that its CEO and CFO will see a 70 per cent reduction in the number of shares they were due to be awarded as part of their annual package in 2020.…

Extraordinary surveillance powers set to be injected into govt orgs It has been called the “most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy.” It has not once but twice been found to be illegal. It sparked the largest ever protest of senior lawyers who called it “not fit for purpose.”…

Focus, train and engage your remote teams to stay safe, gratis Promo As toilet paper stocks begin to recover, we all figure out the sweet spot for our government-mandated daily walk or trot, and fence off sections of our homes from our significant others for "me time," it’s time to begin the next phase of social isolation: adjusting sensibly to our environment with an actual plan.…

Named AF-SOUTH-1 and near some handy routes to Europe and West Africa AWS has opened its first region in Africa and named it AF-SOUTH-1.…

Still no definitive word on open sourcing or how it will solve Singapore's Apple problem Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said that the government he leads will never see the data on the nation’s imminent coronavirus-busting-and-contact-tracing app.…

'We’re proposing an entirely different approach' lead prof tells The Reg Light-propelled nanocardboard robots laden with sensors, flitting in the Martian atmosphere, could one day help us better understand the Red Planet.…

Users have migration work to do in the next month. Good thing nobody's busy right now, eh? IBM Cloud will lift and shift its GPU cluster from London to Frankfurt to avoid falling foul of GDPR post-Brexit.…

First-of-its-kind blueprint of materials and structures shared online Video The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has published the first-ever comprehensive geological map of the Moon’s surface.…

Apparently everyone's cyber-spooks are mad for this right now Hackers working on behalf of the Vietnamese government attempted to break into Chinese organisations heading up the country's coronavirus response, according to infosec outfit FireEye.…

Already time-shifting inside some bit barns with electricity-source-predict-ometer Google has revealed that it will try to shift work around its cloud to follow the availability of electricity generated by renewable resources.…

Senior execs, journos, managed security service providers among those targeted, we're told Apple has reportedly patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in iOS that are being exploited by what appears to be government-backed hackers to spy on high-value targets. Think senior executives, journalists, managed security service providers, and similar.…

Upstart will make 'targeted changes to how we operate' ... like, oh, say, making something that actually lives up to the hype? Analysis The bubble appears to have finally burst on augmented-reality darling Magic Leap, with its CEO announcing on Wednesday he was slashing its workforce in half.…

Online transaction biz intends to clarify its analytics harvesting habit Stripe CEO Patrick Collison insists his company's collection of e-commerce customers' site interactions, mouse metrics, and identifiers is solely for fighting fraud – though he allows that the payment platform's disclosure could be better.…

No dog-eared National Geographic for those left in the virtual waiting room Zoom's ongoing game of whack-a-mole with security bugs in its code continued today with the imminent emission of version 5, replete with support for 256-bit AES-GCM encryption.…

Need $10k off CRM giant? Read on, though it's not a silver bullet Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff must be in a giving mood. His company has just announced an application process and deadlines for $5m in grants to small businesses throughout the USA and globally to help firms with cashflow during the COVID-19 economic fallout.…

Unsatisfying AMA ends up mainly being about Teams Opinion A Microsoft 365 AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread yesterday failed to reveal much of substance about plans for the future or how to fix the platform's many issues.…

ESA chap on astronomy and demagoguery as SpaceX readies the next batch of satellites Interview SpaceX is due to fling another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit tonight. The Register spoke to ESA's Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration, Mark McCaughrean, about the night sky and interstellar specks on the windscreen.…

No plans to lay off staff or freeze recruitment, apparently Analysis On a call with financial analysts yesterday, the leadership team of Germany's enterprise software giant SAP was measured and rational - and quite possibly at odds with the rest of the world's response to the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Buttons hewn from battleship-grey stone the way they should be, right? From the department of Just Because You Could Doesn't Mean You Should comes the arrival of a CSS library to transport your HTML pages back to the world of Windows 98.…

Two-year deal penned by University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust A single-supplier tech framework with the University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust that is worth up to £1bn over a maximum of four years has gone to Dell Technologies.…

Formal attire, no 'BBC Dad' episodes, and absolutely no funky backgrounds Britain's House of Commons' embrace of "hybrid scrutiny" sessions represents the biggest change in its Parliamentary protocol in generations. But guidelines released shortly after the measure was approved show no signs of standards slipping, with members expected to dress smartly and behave with the, er, usual decorum.…