The Register

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.…

Job role was scaled back after 2015 hack, rules employment judge A former Talktalk infosec exec has lost her unfair dismissal and equal pay claims against the UK telco after an employment tribunal rejected her case.…

DRAM and NAND struggle with swollen inventories and low demand – Gartner Famed entrails poker Gartner has pegged revenue decline in the 2019 semiconductor market at 12 per cent to $419.14bn (£335.2bn), thanks to a supply glut of DRAM chips and turmoil in the NAND flash sector.…

Mobile industry cats at GSMA extend congress deal with Spanish city There's some good news for Barcelona's tech-hungry pickpockets: the GSMA has extended its contract to hold annual industry shindig Mobile World Congress in the city until 2024.…

CTO Ahmad Nassri announces intention to bow out GitHub has completed its acquisition of JavaScript package registry NPM Inc, leading CTO Ahmad Nassri to announce his departure "in the near future".…

Cyber-crims bone up on methods for fun and profit, but mainly profit With more people looking to get into the online crime racket and huge caches of personal information cheap and easy to come by, documents describing the process of committing (and getting away with) online fraud are becoming hot commodities.…

Have a pair of Insider builds instead and an exciting Your Phone innovation: file transfer Microsoft treated Windows Insiders to a pair of emissions this week but sadly not the one that many were hoping for as Patch Tuesday came and went.…

Boffins claim to have found path to 'real-world applications' by running hot Scientists in Australia are claiming to have made a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing which could ease the technology's progress to affordability and mass production.…

Atlassian awards personal account to bloke's former employer An issue where Trello user Shashank Tomar was locked out of his personal account because of a secondary email belonging to a company he left five years ago has drawn criticism from users.…

Too many choices? Microsoft's ASP.NET Core, a web application framework (or more accurately, a family of frameworks), has made strides in performance and innovation, but its rapid development has resulted in a bewildering range of choices facing developers.…

Which is a great look in this age of cyber-meetings Hands On Over the past couple of years, teen-tastic mobile brand Honor has diverged from its usual fare, branching into TVs, laptops and the like. These have mostly been Mainland China exclusives, but the latest MagicBook is a notable exception. Vulture Central got its mucky talons on a unit of this shiny groin warmer, and found a surprisingly well-built machine, albeit with a few design quirks.…

Industry lobby says thanks, but we'll take it a bit slower than that The Indian government will allow IT operations to bring half their workforce back to the office as of Sunday April 20th.…

'Adds improved mobility' to pricey workstations without any obviously significant reinvention of the roller In case you needed more proof that the world is in a very strange moment, Apple now sells a US$699 (£560) wheel kit for the Mac Pro.…

Ex-CEO warns that new Chinese owners are exporting away from UK British chip designer biz, Imagination Technologies, is being investigated by the UK government for national security concerns after its former CEO revealed that the company is being increasingly controlled by China.…

FY19/20 results hit the mark as outsourcer says client SLAs being met even with 90 percent of staff at home Wipro has posted strong Q4 and full FY19/20 results, but also declined to offer guidance for the future.…

300 light years away but hey, why not? Astronomers have uncovered a new exoplanet that's roughly the same size as Earth and lies within its star's habitable zone 300 light years away after checking for software errors.…

Single point of failure, imprecise instructions and not enough labels are a bad, bad, mix Cloudflare has admitted that a four-and-a-bit-hour outage today was caused by someone pulling out cables that should have been left in place, but which were yanked because techies were given unhelpfully imprecise instructions.…

Deal announced two weeks ago would have seen shiny new VooV vid chat tool used around the world The United Nations has reportedly dissolved a deal that would have seen its 75th birthday celebrations conducted using video chat tech from Chinese web giant Tencent.…

US-Cert issues new report on misdeeds of North Korean groups The US government's Computer Emergency Response Team (US-Cert) has posted a new report on the latest exploits of North Korea's Hidden Cobra hacking crews.…

Daming letter sent to California attorney general asks for six-month delay Exclusive ICANN has been accused by its founding CEO and original chair of abandoning the organization’s core principles and accepting commitments it knows it cannot enforce in order to push through the sale of the .org registry later this week.…

Dismissal by both parties almost certainly means a settlement The judge overseeing Jonathan Langley's age discrimination lawsuit against IBM has dismissed the case, which was scheduled to go to trial later this year.…

And why causing a Ruckus is a good thing Sponsored Pervasive virtualisation and cloud adoption have moved more apps to the cloud and made edge connectivity more prominent and wireless. The advent of new and more efficient Wi-Fi such as 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 is expected to prompt a new wave of refresh cycles for enterprises.…

Collective amnesia over claimed 'screw Amazon' comment There is no evidence of wrongdoing or undue influence in the Pentagon’s controversial $10bn JEDI cloud contract award to Microsoft, the Defense Department’s internal watchdog has concluded.…

Times are hard...for you at least On Tuesday, Amazon told members of its affiliate marketing program that it will reduce the commissions it pays them to promote products on their websites.…

Firm blames successful cred-stuffing attack for customer pwnage Router biz Linksys has reset all its customers' Smart Wi-Fi account passwords after cybercrims accessed a bunch and redirected hapless users to COVID-19 themed malware.…

Stay of execution granted after customer 'feedback' Microsoft has indefinitely postponed the deprecation of Transport Level Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 in its IoT Hub.…

iPhone's 'budget' midget gem revival is out You have to give Apple credit for timing. It just announced the iPhone SE 2020. Priced at £419, it's the company's cheapest phone in years and lands at a time when nobody has any money, thanks to everyone's least favourite pathogen: Coronavirus.…

Another impressive (and iterative) update to smartphone lineup More of the same isn't always a bad thing, as demonstrated by the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro. These devices follow the same path as their older siblings, offering an iterative improvement at a reasonable price.…

Email ruse preying on COVID-19 fears sends data to crims, warns Mimecast Email security biz Mimecast has warned of a flight refund scam doing the rounds amid a general uptick in coronavirus-related online crime.…

Options being explored for Digital Interconnect division Enterprise software vendor SAP may jettison its SMS platform to focus on core application business.…

Deprecation of venerable protocol postponed 'in light of the current crisis' Google has switched File Transfer Protocol (FTP) back on in Chrome 81 in response to the COVID-19 situation. The change was made "via server-side configuration."…

Will someone rid us of these mast-er idiots? Vodafone CEO Nick Jeffrey has spoken out after arsonists targeted a phone mast serving the NHS Nightingale Hospital in Birmingham.…

No coincidence that new offer closely matches that from smaller rival GitHub is giving away its core services for free and has slashed the price of its paid Team plan by more than half – from $9 per user to $4.…

Starlink slips, Soyuz arrives and StriX-α sat heads to New Zealand Roundup Catching rockets by helicopter, three more 'nauts arriving at the ISS and COVID-19 causing schedule shuffles - it's been busy in the realm of rockets during this past week.…

Also: 2010 server products to survive into 2021 as overstretched admins given more breathing space Reports of the death of The Update Of The Damned (aka Windows 10 1809) appear to have been premature as Microsoft flung a lifeline to those with a little too much on their plate.…

Sub-domain on the move – you have until 29 May to pick a new one Pondering how to fill your days? Fear not – if you're still using the Demon sub-domain for your email address, you'd best start telling your contact book that changes are afoot.…

That might sound like good news, but it's not. Size isn't everything Prolonged periods in space increases brain mass by as much as 6 per cent, according to a new study, but that's not good news.…

And tosses in a new cloudy manager for good measure VMware has finally delivered on its vision to integrate Kubernetes and vSphere, by making Cloud Foundation 4.0 generally available.…

Overheating HP hardware disrupts festive ad flinging Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of computers getting hot under the collar and flinging bundles of bork at passersby.…

Can: Send rover to Mars and operate it from home. Can't: Remote in to mission PCs or replicate them in the cloud NASA has reverted to using old-school red and blue 3D glasses to direct the Curiosity rover around Mars.…

Welcome to the world of China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier China Mobile today published its 2019 annual report, revealing the extraordinary scale of the business and its ambition to do better beyond China’s borders and in the cloud.…

Ongoing Chrome Web Store security saga deftly straddles tragedy and farce Google has ousted 49 Chrome extensions from its Chrome Web Store because they contained malicious code, a ritual that should be familiar after a decade of purges.…

But we've only done it to help governments understand that virus thing you may have heard about lately Apple has released a set of "Mobility Trends Reports" – a trove of anonymised and aggregated data that describes how people have moved around the world in the three months from 13 January to 13 April.…

Shall we call it the Termin-Acer? Or maybe the ASUS-inator? BenQ for coming – we're here all week Taiwan's going to take a shot at developing military exoskeletons.…

As Prime Minister calls on citizens to inspire adoption of contact-tracing app The Indian city of Vadodara has taken a novel technological approach to coronavirus quarantine surveillance by floating a balloon equipped with cameras and a public address system.…

The Philippine government has demanded the nation's telcos submit continuity plans by the end of this week to ensure that the country maintains uninterrupted internet service during the coronavirus lockdown.…

And help to take small business digital because of y’know that virus thing we keep hearing about The Association of South-East Asian Nations ASEAN has made a regional fake news crackdown and e-commerce enablement a part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

FTC tallies the cost of pandemic rip-offs Fraud related to the coronavirus has cost Americans $13m and so far counting, according to the US government.…

As online grocery shopping gets harder as Amazon moves to invite-only The big four food delivery apps - GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats - are abusing their market power to force restaurants to charge the same for online and in-person order, according to a new lawsuit.…