The Register

Bad case of the Mondays European cloud giant OVH is suffering a substantial outage today: if there's a website you can't reach right now, it's perhaps hosted by OVH..…

1903 still rules roost, Azure Fabric 6.5 support extended, and more Roundup Cross out the expiry date on your rapidly ageing role-based certification - you've got an extra six months. But that wasn't the only thing to break from Redmond in the past week, here are the best bits.…

Set to replace John Manzoni on 14 April, but no word on the new chief digi officer John Manzoni – permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office and CEO of the UK civil service who had an agenda to introduce more digital services – has been replaced with Alex Chisholm.…

We need to get people's nans on WhatsApp BT has begun asking contact centre employees to return to work as it grapples with an increasing number of customer calls resulting from the UK-wide lockdown.…

Still using PhoneGap? Don't Developers using Adobe's PhoneGap framework for building mobile apps for iOS and Android may soon be unable to submit to Apple's App Store, thanks to Adobe's use of an old iOS SDK.…

Couldn't have come at a better time with COVID-19 economic shutdown BT has won a legal application to restart a decade-old court case in the hope of clawing back more than £90m in VAT the telco claims it overpaid to HMRC from 1978 onwards.…

Don't worry, though. Any 'systematic' data extraction would be 'time-consuming' The digital burglary at 118 118 Money exposed recordings of customer service calls that included a raft of personal information although thankfully not payment data.…

Encounters the ridge phenomenon: As in, there is one 'at the bottom of my nose you can't get past' We're all told from a tender age not to shove things up our noses – Lego, chickpeas, pencils, fingers – but it seems even grown-up astrophysicists can have difficulty grasping these most basic recommendations when it's in the name of science.…

Swift on more platforms – provided you do not need a GUI The team working on the Swift programming language has said its goals for the upcoming version 5.3 will include "adding support for Windows and additional Linux distributions".…

Plus, Google warns of fake journo phishing attacks Roundup It's once again time for the El Reg security roundup.…

Your quick summary of neural network news Roundup Hello Reg readers. Here's a quick roundup of bits and pieces from the worlds of machine learning and AI.…

O'Reilly has quit the events game, and it might not be the only one Comment You've been there, done that and you quite literally have the T-shirt. Love them or loathe them, IT conferences are a feature of industry life. My first was CA World in New Orleans in 1998. In front of an audience of thousands, then Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang wandered across the stage pontificating as a chorus of children danced about him (no, really) and I knew I had indeed entered a whole new world of weird.…

Folds up just like a smartphone – if you ignore the size and weight Planet Computers has announced the Astro Slide, a 5G smartphone with a slide-out physical keyboard. It will run Android 10 but with the ability to support Linux in future.…

Amazon promised. Google trialled. UPS got a licence. But only 1% of retailers are interested because they're still mostly rubbish More than a billion people are in coronavirus-inspired lockdown and even going out to shop for essentials increases the risk of the virus spreading.…

I like to move it, move it / You like to move it, move it Who, Me? Welcome to a cautionary Who, Me?, a warning to all those lured by the promises of the cloud storage giants and a language lesson for all.…

Keep Calm And Stream Video, on generous new discount plans and payment terms The UK's big five telecoms companies have lifted data caps on all current fixed broadband services to ensure residents get the internet they need while locked down to prevent the spread of coronavirus.…

'The future of cybersecurity is the responsibility of everyone' Promo As women take more senior positions in the field of cybersecurity, there's a shortage of women available to mentor others.…

Warnings to investors from Dell, DocuSign, Cloudera and MongoDB reveal not all are completely terrified Coronavirus has started to become a staple of the Form 10-K corporate risk disclosure documents filed by public technology companies.…

Doesn’t anticipate slowdown because ‘I suspect a lot of us work from home even normally’ Linux overseer Linus Torvalds given the world version 5.6 of the Linux kernel, and been given the title “social distancing champ”.…

Remember landlines? Cisco service wants you to remember them too, to make dial-in part of your isolation arsenal Cisco's Webex collaboration service has urged users to turn off video and avoid starting meetings on the hour, to help ease pressure on public networks during the coronavirus-avoidance crisis.…

But Australia’s PM declares it doesn’t align with national values The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of the United Kingdom has provided advice to the government that it can use anonymised mobile phone data in the fight against coronavirus.…

Admits to ongoing provisioning problems but insists no capacity crunch even as it drops freebies Microsoft has revealed “a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders” and is “expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead”, but has already imposed some quotas to cope with huge demand for its cloud.…

This is clearly not the time to test your company's social media policy, because that's what was used to let him go Infosys has fired an employee who reportedly used his Facebook account to suggest wilfully spreading coronavirus.…

Big Brother refitted for Big Hover Authorities in the UK have begun using drones to direct the public to comply with public health measures announced on Monday to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.…

Scientists pull coronavirus treatment study apart after rushed publication A research paper, championed by President Donald Trump, that suggested hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin could effectively treat COVID-19 coronavirus victims is flawed, scientists fear.…

Failed defamation claim proves pricey After three years of legal wrangling, the defamation lawsuit brought by Brad Spengler and his company Open Source Security (OSS) against open-source pioneer Bruce Perens has finally concluded.…

Doc Frown: Searls decries video-conferencing software's 'creepy' closeness with ad tracking As the global coronavirus pandemic pushes the popularity of videoconferencing app Zoom to new heights, one web veteran has sounded the alarm over its "creepily chummy" relationship with tracking-based advertisers.…

UK volumes quieter than mix of Call of Duty and Merseyside derby streamers, says Openreach Britain has plenty of internet traffic "headroom" despite the explosion in remote working during the coronavirus shutdown, telcos and mobe networks have told The Register.…

Outsourcer vows to help efforts in healthcare call centres Outsourcing firm Capita has slashed £25m from planned capital spending in response to the "unprecedented situation" caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak.…

Things go sideways in Sainsbury's Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's occasional series on computers flashing their undercrackers to all and sundry.…

Cross-platform tool aims high while IDE gets stuck into Git Microsoft has slung out a pair of previews, giving admins a look at PowerShell 7.1 and developers another chance to play with Visual Studio 2019 16.6…

Watch the Atlas V 551 rocket blast off Vid The US Space Force embarked on its first official mission on Thursday, launching a military communications satellite aboard an Atlas V 551 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.…

Now wash your hands Updated UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for the novel coronavirus.…

Big Blue reopens window of opportunity, no end date mentioned IBM has extended the window of opportunity for its Global Technology Services workforce in the UK to nominate themselves for voluntary redundancy after too few people put their hand up in the allotted time.…

Less fashionable than React Native, but a mature solution for .NET developers Microsoft continues to evolve its Xamarin technology for cross-platform coding with .NET, even though alternatives like React Native and Blazor are getting plenty of attention within the company.…

Look on my beanpoleness, ye Blighty, and mea-sure! Far away enough? Check our converter and find out! As you nervously shuffle away from your close-talking neighbour who always stood too near at the best of times, tutting and muttering "social distancing", you may wonder to yourself just what two metres or six feet should really look like. Luckily, El Reg's Standards Soviet is here to help.…

Your search ranking will suffer less if you just make it a bit rubbish instead As companies shut their doors against the coronavirus outbreak, Google has released a set of guidelines to website owners on how to minimise the long-terms effects on their business's search ranking.…

How to Excel (sorry) on the helldesk On Call Well done! You've made it to Friday! As a reward, treat yourself to another cup of tea and an extra slice of toast, and enjoy a morning story of panicking users and level-headed IT pros in today's On Call.…

Folks at one Antarctic base have noisy, stinky, neighbors right now. And they're isolated until November Reg readers confined to quarters for the duration of the global coronavirus pandemic are probably not enjoying being at home all day, every day.…

We talk to CF's CTO as missing piece added to open-source application platform Cloud Foundry, an open-source foundation dedicated to a cloud-oriented application platform, is now incubating the KubeCF project, and has also welcomed Google upgrading its membership to platinum – the highest level.…

Symantec, Cisco, Uber and the loathsome Juul shed most staff in the tech sector The State of California has released its newest report on job losses, and it's not pretty.…

Terahertz nanoplasma kit makes traditional transistors look slow in comparison Scientists have crafted a tiny flexible electrical device capable of generating terahertz waves that can penetrate walls and microscopic cells, potentially paving the way for new imaging techniques – and fast switching in chips.…

The nation is already well and truly routed, and telcos have new taxes to pay India’s networking equipment market collapsed before the Coronavirus could stab it in the back, thanks in part to a new tax on telcos.…

Vodafone, Orange, AT&T, and Softbank are already users, will soon have Azure option Microsoft has become the latest company to have a crack at helping telcos prepare for 5G by acquiring network specialist Affirmed Networks.…

You can’t seriously be asking why. Do you live under a rock? The reason is coronavirus Dell today slipped out a regulatory filing in which it withdrew the financial guidance it offered in late February.…

Videos claiming to have magic savior pills racked up millions of views amid allegedly fraudulent investment scheme A social-media marketer is understood to be the first person to be hit with a federal fraud charge in the US for allegedly trying to trick people into investing in a bogus COVID-19 cure.…

Presumed pandemic profiteering may be just confused staff Analysis Earlier this week, Monkeybrains, a San-Francisco-based internet service provider, asked ZayoGroup, a communication infrastructure biz based in Boulder, Colorado, to temporarily upgrade a network circuit from 2Gbps to 10Gbps.…

Team Redmond stokes the flames as an exercise in black humor Microsoft is right now groaning under the weight of a 52,000-person internal Reply-All email storm.…

Oh Ce-Celia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to phone home For much of its life, Huawei didn't have to think too much about its software ecosystem, at least with regard to its once-growing Western market. But then Donald Trump pulled the rug out from underneath the Middle Kingdom mobe maker with a Google embargo.…

'We believe the stolen graphics IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of our graphics products' On Wednesday, AMD confirmed intellectual property related to its graphics processors was stolen last year, though insisted the leaked files will not damage its business nor compromise product security.…