The Register

Chinese retail-'n'-cloud giant to splash $28bn as coronavirus pushes the online markets up In a world so disrupted by COVID-19 that many are wondering where their next pay packet will come from, the biggest sellers of cloud tech are trying to prove who has the deepest pockets.…

The Civil Aviation Authority giveth the CAA and taketh away British police drone pilots have had their wings slightly clipped – after the Civil Aviation Authority issued new rules tweaking previously reduced safety limits for the airborne surveillance gadgets.…

Also: naming the next PowerToys toy and a look at the latest Visual Studio preview Roundup As Microsoft finally named the date for the next version of its flagship operating system, the person in charge of its Windows Insider programme took a peep above the parapet in this week's roundup of the Microsoft stories you might have missed.…

Decentralise over Bluetooth, say 300 scholars Hundreds of academics have warned governments around the world not to commission coronavirus contact-tracing apps that collect and store personal data on entire countries' populations.…

Official survey reveals barriers to adoption: Challenging learning curve and limited IDE support "The overriding problem hindering use of Rust is adoption," according to the language's official survey, with some developers struggling to be productive and hampered by limited IDE support.…

Giving military time to look at aspects of decision US federal judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has slapped a hold [PDF] on Amazon's legal challenge to the $10bn Pentagon Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to give the military time to "reconsider... aspects of the procurement" in the mega-contract.…

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yes! TalkTalk broadband users are complaining they can't opt out of its Error Replacement Service, which swaps NXDomain DNS results with an IP address. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Users of the budget ISP complained about the very same issue back in 2014.…

At a cost of £14.5bn and counting Analytics house GlobalData has calculated that British retailers have shut 382 million sq ft of floor space since the UK's coronavirus lockdown on 23 March, causing a £14.5bn drop in sales – though it claims that equates to roughly £200 of delayed or cancelled spending per each local.…

Also, Zoom assembles security dream team to fix its ongoing woes Roundup This week in The Reg's security roundup of the notable bits beyond what we've already covered, the Tor Project has cut back to its core team, Zoom has called in the big security guns, US tech firms are taking on its Congress – and more.…

Find out how to build a WFH security policy without resorting to wielding an iron fist Webcast You’ve finally worked out how to make a latte at least almost on par with the coffee shop opposite the office. However, no matter how in control you’re starting to feel during this pandemic lockdown, your 9am is still a mess of access rights conflicts, broken connections, and emails fired into the void of an overworked, remote IT help desk.…

No competitive tenders for northern pipeline company, and here's why In a classic tale of vendor lock-in, Northern Gas Networks (NGN) has invested so heavily in SAP that it make little sense to purchasing heads to do anything other than sign off on a new £6m software license.…

Growing extra instruments, reducing fuel spend and those clever, clever hacks Space Extenders ESA's Cluster mission is heading into its third decade of operations. The Register spoke to some of the people behind the four spacecraft about how the team turned a five-year nominal lifetime into 20 years and beyond.…

Can't get assessors on-site to check SMEs' antivirus updates Security standards for defence contractors have been lowered thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, the Ministry of Defence has told its suppliers.…

Debate seems to centre over where data needs to reside to get the job done European efforts to define a contact-tracing protocol aimed at making it easier for authorities to detect cases of COVID-19 appear to be having a rather vivid disagreement.…

It looks like you need some pepperoni and cheese. Do you want some help with that? Who, Me? Monday has shuffled into view once more and brought with it another Register reader confession in the form of our regular Who, Me? column.…

Now incubated as part of Xen project and has plenty of plans for hyperconverged and storage fun XCP-ng, the crowdfunded effort to deliver an open-source version of XenServer, has passed the 100,000-download mark.…

And Zoox setlles with Elon's Musketeers over purloined IP Roundup OpenAI Microscope: Neural networks, often described as “black boxes”, are complicated; it’s difficult to understand how all the neurons in the different layers interact with one another. As a result, machine learning engineers have a hard time trying to interpret their models.…

Borrowers can score between £500k and £5m if they have a track record, co-investors, and can afford eight percent interest The UK government will throw £1.25bn at startups and R&D firms that are struggling to survive in the coronavirus lockdown and are willing to pay well-above-market interest rates and give away equity in exchange for a fiscal lifeline.…

CEO says ‘pandemic completely reversed the positive momentum’ but at least its healthcare biz is strong Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has posted slow growth and warned that it will be doing well to match that performance in its new financial year.…

Months of negotiation on voluntary code of conduct didn’t make progress Australia will force social media companies to pay for content shared on their networks and disclose details of the algorithms that determine what their users see.…

Bet you thought the rural internet gap wouldn't cause this kind of disruption Former darts world champion Gary Anderson says he cannot compete in upcoming remote tournaments due to his slow home internet connection.…

Plus some interesting new side-channel attack possibilities for crims to play with With Silicon Valley under lockdown Chrome 82 has been abandoned by Google, but the Chocolate Factory boffins haven't been slacking and on Thursday released the beta build of Chrome 83 ahead of schedule.…

No fuel, no problem! Older space kit to gets new lease of life with extentions The first mission that flew a spacecraft out to save an old telecoms satellite running low on fuel has been successful.…

Amazon, the government, economics? Startup schtum on sudden closure Pulse.io is advising its customers to withdraw all digital funds from the site "as soon as possible," after announcing it'll shut down completely on June 26.…

Thanks to a South African immigrant NASA has set a launch date for the first mission by US astronauts to the International Space Station, using a locally-made rocket taking off from an American launch site, since July 8, 2011.…

Reason behind murky CVSS 10 score revealed by Guardicore A critical vulnerability in VMware's vCenter management product allowed any old bod on the same network to remotely create an admin-level user, research by Guardicore Labs has revealed.…

It's baaaaaack: Devs polishing off Quartz Once upon a time, Paranoid Android was a towering force in the custom ROM world. Then it just… disappeared, allowing rivals like LineageOS to take its place. But, like Lt Commander Data in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard (sorry, spoiler alert), it's back, bringing with it a custom Android 10 image for nine phones.…

Nothing says serious engineering like a collapsible radio aerial Video Spare a thought for Iran's long-suffering scientists today, who had to read the news along with the rest of us that the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have "developed" a gizmo capable of detecting coronavirus... in five seconds. At distances of up to 100 metres.…

A mini revolution against Switchzilla takes form in a corner of industry group There is growing unrest at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) due to the power that some accuse Cisco of wielding over the global community of network designers, operators, vendors and academics.…

G Suite boss promises gallery view on the way for cyber-meeting platform Google is plugging its Meet service into Gmail as the Chocolate Factory rolls out the G Suite tanks in response to the threat posed by rival services.…

Backing for use of L-Band spectrum for 5G Ligado Networks, which is currently seeking approval for a terrestrial low-power 5G network, has won a powerful friend: Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chief Ajit Pai.…

New version of Microsoft's OS shuffles into the Release Preview spotlight Microsoft has finally nudged the next version of Windows 10 into Release Preview and given it a name: The Windows 10 May 2020 Update.…

Employers seek devs, support, and engineers all over the world Job Alert Welcome to the third edition of our barn-storming, ever-growing jobs list. We're publishing jobs every week for free to help keep techies in work during these tough times.…

240 million daily virus themed spams as 'bad actors' feed on people's fear In the past week, some 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails were sent via Gmail to unsuspecting marks, according to Google.…

IBM and Google join the Rolls-Royce programme A cross-industry group started by Rolls-Royce – now including Google and IBM – is in talks with the UK government to use data and analytics to guide policy makers and biz leaders towards the green shoots of economic recovery in the face of the devastating impact of COVID-19.…

Online editing support for Chocolate Factory's open-source dev framework "Social development environment" CodePen has unfurled support for Flutter, Google's open-source cross-platform framework for mobile and web.…

Jeff Bezos imagines the negatives can go out to work and spend, the infected can watch more Amazon Prime Video at home Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has called for a coronavirus testing blitz to help the global economy reopen and has assembled a team to try to make it happen.…

Part 1: No one expects the construction crew On Call Come with us to the 1980s, when computers cost proper money and RS-232 ruled the roost in another edition of Register reader recollections courtesy of On Call.…

No phone numbers needed – but you’ll need Notifications and Bluetooth on all the time The European Commission (EC) has published a document describing how it thinks member nations can best built a contact-tracing smartphone app to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.…

27 years of watching the Milky Way's core – that's how proper science is done Astronomers have observed a star tracing a rosette shape in its orbit around a supermassive black hole for the first time, an effect that provides further proof of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.…

On track to do the deed towards the end of the month Nvidia's $6.9bn deal to networking kit maker Mellanox has been approved by China's competition watchdog.…

Turnaround mission accomplished? Looks like it Citrix has announced the departure of a director and in so doing signified the business has probably turned a corner.…

Holey vid chat service reveals ‘re-architect’ of bug bounty program to ‘get overall security house in order’ India has effectively banned videoconferencing service Zoom for government users and repeated warnings that consumers need to be careful when using the tool.…

DNS overseer accused of ignoring the very people it is supposed to represent ICANN has again delayed a decision on the sale of the .org registry, pushing the issue off for another month multiple sources with knowledge of Thursday's meeting, have told The Register.…

Dust off your COBOL code and give it new life in WebAssembly Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare has implemented a way to run COBOL code on its serverless platform Cloudflare Workers.…

Not boldly seaking out new worlds, mostly checking out the ones we know The European Space Agency’s latest telescope, known as Cheops, has passed its preliminary in-flight tests and will embark on its mission to study exoplanets at the end of April.…

Two-step attack seen on core systems Researchers are warning owners of fiber routers to keep a close eye on their gear and check for firmware updates following the discovery an in-the-wild zero-day attack.…

Zuck's bucks have no luck, for now The Facebook-founded Libra Association has revised its planned digital currency after regulatory concerns and public backlash made the project's initial vision untenable.…

Video chat for the work-at-home world It's as good a time as any to buy a video conferencing and cloud comms firm. Just ask the business arm of US comms behemoth Verizon, which today confirmed it is acquiring BlueJeans Network for an undisclosed (but presumably substantial) sum.…

That's the Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform btw US FPGA manufacturer Xilinx has inked a deal allowing electronics giant Samsung to use its Versal ACAP (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) in 5G infrastructure products.…