The Register

Project 'SOP2SaaS'... it just rolls off the tongue The Cabinet Office is offering a £15m contract for a consultancy to help it shift central government enterprise applications to an as software-as-a-service delivery model, part of an ambitious refresh programme.…

Tough choice for adtech monolith in Foundem case Google must either show its "crown jewels" to a man it described to the High Court as a search engine optimisation expert or give up parts of its defence in a long-running competition lawsuit, the UK High Court has ruled.…

Our free job ad offer continues and vacancies keep rolling in Job Alert Welcome to this week's jobs list, a rundown of vacancies El Reg is advertising for free to keep tech people in work amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

CEO talks of measures to combat expected sales slide due to pandemic Allvotec – the rebranded Daisy Partner Services business – is responding to the coronavirus crisis by furloughing a number of staff and asking all that remain to take a pay cut to avoid potential redundancies.…

This season's colours are blue, white and bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Chicago! A town famed for what some might regard as a jumped-up quiche masquerading as pizza and home of the first skyscraper. Could there be a better venue for today's bork?…

Passwords-by-default feature may be faulty. But hey, who else just went from 10 to 200 million daily users? Video-conferencing app maker Zoom has promised to do better at security after a bruising week in which it was found to be unpleasantly leaky in several ways.…

Saving Sales from a self-inflicted dirty deed On Call Phew, March is over. Everything will be OK now, right? Right? Oh well... join us in nervously welcoming April with another tale from that special breed tasked with answering the phone, even when the subject matter is perhaps less than savoury.…

University lecturer and half of Duckworth-Lewis passes, aged 78 Eminent British mathematician Tony Lewis has died, aged 78.…

EFF raises alarm over increasing reliance on shoddy automation Analysis The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday warned that the consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic – staff cuts, budget cuts, and lack of access to on-site content review systems, among others – have led tech companies to focus even more resources on barely functional moderation systems.…

New line-up includes first i9 part in this latest generation Intel has announced its tenth-generation Core i5, i7, and i9 H-series microprocessors for laptops, which max out at 5.3GHz.…

A new use for App Exchange, with that slightly greasy Ronald McDonald vibe Salesforce has decided to offer some help to parents who are trying to balance working from home with keeping kids entertained.…

Privacy perspective: President has also threatened quarantine-breaking troublemakers may be shot The Philippines has started planning an app to help the government track the movements and contacts of people who carry the novel coronavirus.…

Uncle Sam's crackdown sparks 'force majeure event that cannot be overcome' One of Huawei’s flagship projects in Australia has been called off because, as the state government put it, “trade restrictions imposed by the US government create a force majeure event that cannot be overcome.”…

Should boffins keep it old-school space-race era – or embrace the, er, future of the 1970s? NASA has brought back its sleek iconic logo, lovingly named the worm for its curvy red font, in time for its first crewed spaceflight using American rockets in almost a decade.…

HTTP header ends in own goal Twitter on Thursday warned of an esoteric bug that, in limited circumstances, allowed users' non-public profile information to potentially fall into the hands of other users.…

American young adults are easiest marks for criminals, study reckons Want to know why ransomware is still rampant? One in three surveyed folks in North Americans said they would be willing to pay up to unscramble their files once their personal systems were infected.…

Developers rejoice, there may be (eventually) a store-agnostic way to sell in-application items Google has decided to try to openly standardize one of its own APIs for handling in-app purchases in web apps rather than pursuing a previously proposed proprietary plan.…

Non-military tech rule exception plus other tweaks mulled The US government is reportedly close to introducing stringent new rules that would stop Chinese companies from buying certain high-technology components, including semiconductors and optical materials.…

Alleges anticompetitive behaviour in the walled garden. There's no party like a third party, eh? Channeling their inner Kevin Patterson, Tile this week bemoaned Apple's unfairness to a US congressional panel in Colorado investigating the iPhone maker's stewardship of its app ecosystem.…

Get the latest advice and insight on scale, resiliency and intelligence Promo Business continuity is another of those aspects of IT that, before, was always pitched on a rather "what if" basis. What if your global cloud comms provider goes down? What if a squirrel chews through one of your server room’s insulation cables?…

£899 and no social media? That's going to be a big ask There are few surprises around UK pricing and availability for Huawei's latest P40 handsets, which are more or less consistent with previous P-series models – but they are missing a few things punters may not be too, er, appy about.…

US air safety bods call it 'potentially catastrophic' if reboot directive not implemented The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios" – including the crashing of onboard network switches.…

'A whole bunch of tunnels': Mesh networking with per-node permissions and OAuth security Interview WireGuard, a new VPN protocol with both strong performance and easy setup, has been adopted by startup Tailscale as the basis of a peer-to-peer remote networking system that is both secure and quick to configure.…

Lose yourself in a relic of simpler times Got some unexpected time on your hands and a yearning for simpler times? May we present an original prototype ROM of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, courtesy of The Centre for Computing History, for your tinkering pleasure.…

But first, you get a taste of it with host lifecycle management, and more waiting for K8s integration VMware plans to give its flagship vSphere product the power to patch all the software inside a virtual machine.…

That's a pretty expensive gap in S4/HANA When Precision Drilling, a global company that serves the oil and gas industry, upgraded its asset management application to SAP S/4HANA two years ago, it was expecting the software to handle data going into its supply chain systems. But it soon discovered that was not the case.…

Cramped conditions? Not being able to see friends and family? Sounds familiar If the current coronavirus pandemic has got you wanting to leave Planet Earth, you’re not alone. More than 12,000 people answered NASA’s latest call for astronauts to explore the Moon and Mars.…

Chinese giant plays nice with open source Huawei has become a licensee member of the Open Invention Network (OIN), which agrees to cross-license Linux patents to one another royalty free and to any organisation that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux.…

Track your jogs around the block – while those are still allowed The gyms are shut. The government wants you to stay indoors. You can only leave your home once per day. And nobody, it seems, told Fitbit, which this week announced its latest calorie-counting, timber-trimming wearable – the Fitbit Charge 4.…

Clue: Home working might have played a bit part, even in return of the desktop The rush to work from home as COVID-19 grips Europe has led to bumper sales of related tech for distributors, official stats confirm.…

Ad giant added memory to servers, restarted, watched things get worse ... is on top of things again now A 14-hour Google cloud platform outage that we missed in the shadow of last week's G Suite outage was caused by a failure to scale, an internal investigation has shown.…

Maybe the world needs the Pidgin of voice and video right now? Slack has added integrations with Microsoft Teams calls and Zoom.…

Could this candidate be a missing link between small and bonkers-massive? Astronomers have discovered what they believe could be a black hole of intermediate-mass nestled on the outskirts of a large galaxy more than 700 million light years away.…

Following the moon to find capacity and sticking to safe sites as Chuck Robbins leads new weekly briefings Cisco was surprised by how quickly it needed to adopt a global working-from-home policy, amid the coronavirus pandemic, and is now rationing VPN use to safeguard its security.…

How to combat the threat and comply with GDPR Webcast Here’s something that you may not know, something the cloud companies are not keen to shout about too loudly.…

Oh, oh no... oh God Intel and Broadcom were the lone beacons of success in an otherwise dismal semiconductor market last year, according to industry analysts at Omdia (formerly IHS Markit).…

About coronavirus or anything else Vietnam will fine people posting fake news on social media in an effort to crack down on the spread of both general misinformation and falsehoods about the novel coronavirus.…

Scores new gig promoting software-defined data centres VMware is hunting for a new vice-president and managing director for Australia and New Zealand.…

Imagine an iPad running FaceTime clamped to a post stuck into a Roomba and you'll get the idea Japanese airline ANA has spun out a startup to develop and sell “avatars” - robots that comprise a remote-controllable stand with iPad-like device running a Facetime-like app, to bring your face into a room.…

Wow, how convenient On Monday, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a worker at its Staten Island, New York, warehouse, who had organized a protest demanding more protection for workers amid the coronavirus outbreak.…

A few more months to get those servers upgraded 'in light of current global circumstances' Microsoft has blinked once again and delayed disabling TLS 1.0 and 1.1 by default in its browsers until the latter part of 2020.…

Feeling secure? Sucker Analysis The FBI has not followed internal rules when applying to spy on US citizens for at least five years, according to an extraordinary report [PDF] by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.…

What have you got for us, Detective? Amazon's Detective has hit general availability, adding to a range of AWS security services, which at this point has become a little confusing.…

Today's Window Walk is brought to you by the letters 'R' 'E' and 'G' Microsoft has persevered with the quickfire release cadence of the toolbox of stuff that should really be built into Windows 10 in the form of PowerToys 0.16.…

For a biz that prides itself on not censoring the internet, it sure likes censoring the internet Cloudflare, known for free speech advocacy, rolled out a self-styled family-friendly variation of its DNS service to block adult content – and ended up denying access to LGBTQ websites and sex education resources.…

Two-year campaign observed by Guardicore A malware gang is targeting Microsoft SQL servers with such precision that they're disabling rival gangs' software nasties in their quest to steal control of servers from their rightful owners.…

Playing catch-up with AWS and not that smart, but some advantages over DNS Google Cloud Platform's Service Directory, which aims to enhance microservice discovery, has hit beta.…

2021 looking ever more virtual and distant. Did March feel like a year for you too? Microsoft has switched its September Ignite event to a digital affair even as other organisers hope for a return to some semblance of "normal" by August.…

Enterprise cloud rains bonus down on software supremo... that's this year's holiday sorted then Salesforce.com has had a rummage down the back of the sofa and awarded CEO Marc Benioff $2.3m in small change.…

You lot can keep the blinkenlights flashing but you'll have to be TUPEd from BT... Exclusive - updated BT is outsourcing management of its mainframe estate to IBM in a five-year agreement that kicks off today. And while it may be April Fools' Day, some incumbent staff being TUPEd across to Big Blue aren't laughing.…