The Register

'The mean police, they live inside of my head, the mean police, they come to me in my bed...' Online Q&A site Stack Overflow aspires to be "a welcoming and friendly place," and to make that so, the biz has deployed sentiment-sniffing code to catch unkind commentary lest it drive members of its online community away.…

Adobe and Intel add their woes Microsoft has delivered another epic Patch Tuesday, dropping fixes for more than 100 security bugs, and Adobe and Intel have added their dose of misery and security too.…

“Repeatedly violated internal policies” means go to the door Updated Amazon has fired another three employees who have been critical of the biz, including two tech workers in Seattle and a warehouse worker in Minnesota. All three have raised concerns about the working conditions at the online giant’s warehouses during the coronavirus outbreak.…

ERP, warehousing, sales, accounts, supply chain all working together Canada's OpenText has claimed its data-integration platform can bring together information from applications both inside and outside company boundaries.…

Oh it can't be that baaa.... $16.7 BEEELLION?! One of Softbank's slogans is that it "invests in human progress." If its latest forecasts are anything to go by, the returns are disappointing, to say the least.…

'It was really a long process because it's just volunteer work' Interview Inkscape, a popular open-source vector graphics application, is heading for its 1.0 release more than 16 years after its first appearance in November 2003.…

Amazingly, contractor for massive UK TV channels differentiates himself from 'mainstream media' Sleepy ITV daytime show This Morning isn't typically the venue for conspiratorial chatter. It's more Loose Women than Loose Change. Still, that didn't prevent Eamonn Holmes* from espousing the belief that the "mainstream media" is participating in a cover-up about the dangers of 5G.…

Plus: New Edge build, more Office 365 branding snuffed Roundup Though there may be no Neo this year, a new Windows is almost upon us as The Register rounds up the emissions from Redmond that you might have missed.…

Conservative politicos including IDS voice anger over 'untimely special pleading' An open letter from Huawei about the UK's 5G strategy in light of COVID-19 has provoked outrage among several key politicians in the country's ruling Conservative Party, who have denounced it as "hubristic" and "arrogant".…

All 'the working from home and virtual desktops' might make you think about data center rebuilds, hmm? AMD is once again hoping to muscle in on Intel's bread and butter with a new line of second-generation Epyc processors aimed squarely at the HPC, cloud, and enterprise markets.…

Distributed computing project sails past anticipated raw power of El Capitan – and you folks are at the forefront Give yourselves a pat on the back, ladies and gents – two teams made up of Register readers are in the top 1,000 out of more than 250,000 in the Folding@home distributed computing project for disease research.…

Enclave-bound service aims to be another nail in the password coffin Hoping to actually make the long foretold end of passwords happen, a startup called Beyond Identity believes it can hasten the demise of the memory-taxing access ritual by embedding a personal certificate authority into mobile devices.…

It’s open source. It will be abused. So we need to design a way out before we dive in Comment The world seems set to adopt smartphone-driven contact tracing to help detect COVID-19 carriers but regulators need to plot an exit strategy from this new form of deeply personal and intensive surveillance.…

Time to break ties with historic corporate inertia Column The suddenness and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic took many CTOs and CIOs by surprise as worries over the impact on a supply chain in China flipped, seemingly overnight, into a fight for corporate survival.…

Revealed: Oracle founder's plan for global wellness Comment Larry Ellison is not one to let anything get him down, least of all gravity. Grave though the global COVID-19 pandemic may be, the Oracle founder, CTO and chairman is a man who produces. And, as intrepid Forbes reporter Angel Au-Yeung found out, the product is "wellness".…

Google Pay is about to get really useful in India's biggest cities Google's India operation has launched a new feature that enables users to find and transact with essential stores during the novel coronavirus lockdown.…

Dell only vendor to increase shipments as debate turns to impact of pent-up demand vs shifting spending priorities Global PC sales fell markedly in Q1 2020, but that may not be an entirely bad thing.…

A rogue pulsational pair-instability nova from a heavy star measuring over 100 times the mass of the Sun Astronomers have spotted the biggest and brightest supernova explosion yet spotted and theorize it may have been sparked by two huge stars smashing together.…

Developers face three-month sprint to the finish line, with big government contract the prize India's government has kicked off a competition to develop a locally-developed video conferencing platform it hopes will put the country on the product development map.…

As Microsoft gives Teams a Brady Bunch upgrade Zoom’s security catch-up sprint has seen it announce its users will soon be able to choose where their traffic goes.…

As LINE named nation's preferred telemedicine tool Yahoo!’s Japanese offshoot has signed a deal to share analysis of its users’ locations, to help the nation’s effort to detect coronavirus clusters.…

It's instrumentation. It must be instrumentation. It wasn't instrumentation. Final part of The Register's look at Apollo 13 Part two 55 hours, 52 minutes and 58 seconds into Apollo 13's mission, capsule communicator Charlie Duke asked the crew to stir the spacecraft's cryo tanks. Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert did so, and the "boring" mission became suddenly all too interesting.…

Bluetooth, GPS, cell towers, code scanning: what’s the best way? In an effort to fend off the coronavirus while getting economies restarted, the world has hit on the same idea: a smartphone app that alerts people if they have been close to someone who has the virus.…

British mathematician checks out Mathematician John Conway has died after suffering from COVID-19.…

Data center snafu borks site because of...something The Unicode Consortium's technical documentation website went belly up on Friday, two days after the organization said the planned March 2021 release of Unicode 14.0 will be delayed six months due to COVID-19.…

Staff trying to strike a deal; Board worried about corporate shell structure With just seven days left until it has to make a decision on the $1.13bn sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm, DNS overseer ICANN appears in chaos.…

Nice to see Jeff Bezos catching a break Sure, the planet may be in the sort of crisis not seen in over a century, but it is a great time to be Amazon.…

San Francisco Airport websites hacked, VMware patches emitted, etc Roundup We're one week further along, and we hope everyone is well out there. Time for another security roundup amid the coronavirus lockdown.…

Including: Yes, that nightmare smart toilet that photographs you mid... er, process Roundup Here's your latest summary of recent machine-learning developments.…

Just in case any one else decides to do a Burr or Feinstein Well, if Congress won't do it, we, the geek people, will have to instead, it seems.…

Giving students network messaging in the '90s. What could possibly go wrong? MY EYES! Who, Me? Wipe that chocolate off your face and settle in for another story from the archives of The Register's Who, Me? collection of reader confessions.…

To offer social distancing advice when people head out to play on a looming long weekend Taiwan has floated the idea of adapting its traffic-monitoring app into a “don’t-go-there-you-won’t-be-able-to-social-distance-app.”…

As Linus Torvalds relieves the USA of his favorite Finnish Easter dessert Linus Torvalds’ has announced version 5.7rc1 of the Linux kernel, and a shout-out from the Linux kernel technical advisory board in case any maintainers have hit coronavirus-related complications.…

Check out this plucky Euro-Japanese spacecraft and its seven-year trip to innermost planet BepiColombo, the first European-Japanese spacecraft to hopefully orbit Mercury, has swung by Earth for its first gravitational assist maneuver in its seven-year journey to the innermost planet of our Solar System.…

A liquid-oxygen tank, 65 volts across a 28-volt thermostat, and a two-inch tumble all led to this 'successful failure' Part one Apollo 13 was launched 50 years ago today. Now regarded as a "successful failure," the story of the aborted Moon landing began years earlier, with the design of mankind's then most advanced spacecraft.…

Paradoxical contract that isn't a contract fails to satisfy judge Updated IBM's practice of promising its sales reps commission rates it can lower at any time, particularly after a sale is finally inked, may soon face a jury.…

US govt-funded outfit hopes to kill off web quackery that puts us all at risk Machine-learning software to snare scammers hawking fake COVID-19 test kits on social media is being built by a tiny startup funded by the US National Institutes of Health.…

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying we all need it Reader survey Network security: love it or hate it, there’s no denying we all need it.…

In which case, it'll do The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. What a time to be childless, huh? You young, care-free things have stacks of box sets and video games to plough through while we're all stuck indoors fearing for our lives and those of our loved ones. Unfortunately, my lockdown has been busier than usual as childcare is closed too, which is why we're weeks late. But hey! A long weekend! Maybe it's the perfect time to check out Doom Eternal.…

Only when the big hand reaches the little hand will the Amiga copy those files On Call Welcome to an unusual entry in The Register's On Call, where an Amiga mystery is never fully explained after the call for help is issued. Can you solve the mystery?…

Copying article snippets could get costly, if web giant doesn't ditch them altogether The French Competition Authority (FCA) has told Google to negotiate with French news companies to determine fees due for the re-use their content.…

Anti-mortar system specs, legal paperwork, payment forms, and more, dumped online from infected PCs Internal confidential documents belonging to some of the largest aerospace companies in the world have been stolen from an industrial contractor and leaked online.…

Has anyone told the Chinese? Quantum computers pose an "urgent but manageable" threat to the security of modern communications systems, according to a report published Thursday by influential US RAND Corporation.…

Secure messaging app says it could not continue operations in America under proposed law Secure messaging app developer Signal says its US operation hangs in the balance due to a proposed law in America.…

First quarter started off so well... ERP giant SAP has cut its annual revenue estimates by as much as €1.9bn in the face of COVID-19 disruption which saw a "significant amount of new business" postponed in the first quarter.…

Chocolate Factory's AI call assistant will soon be getting confused by Brit idioms at the worst time possible Almost one year after its flashy launch at Google I/O, the Chocolate Factory's AI call assistant, Google Duplex, is coming to the UK.…

Bezos cloud crew chops 'bells and whistles' in favour of native support, adds shared storage Amazon Web Services has launched Fargate 1.4, an update to its serverless container platform that adds support for shared Elastic File System storage and removes use of Docker Engine.…

Find out how to widen your cloud options while keeping control Webcast While it’s trendy to go entirely off-premises and hybridize your cloud, many will nod and smile at the suggestion while having no intention of actually doing it.…

And 'difficult to understand, hard to debug' PipelineResources have been deprecated Tekton Pipelines, the major component in an open-source project for CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) on Kubernetes, has reached the milestone of beta status.…

That's a retirement day present he won't forget An elderly and reluctant Frenchman was ejected from a French Air Force fighter during a retirement day jolly – and narrowly missed taking the pilot with him, an investigation report littered with unintentional howlers has revealed.…