The Register

East Coast looks to be hardest hit. C'mon, Chocolate Factory, we're relying on you to pull us through A bunch of Google services, from Gmail and Google Drive to Hangouts and Classroom, fell offline for unlucky netizens in North America today.…

Chocolate Factory's software souk still Trumped, so you'll have to make do with AppGallery Undeterred by US boycotts, Huawei has pushed out a new range of Android smartphones without the Google software that usually comes with them.…

Was 0.5mm of laptop really worth five years of pain, Tim? Teardown terrors iFixit have opened up the innards of the new MacBook Air to reveal not only the departure of the hated butterfly keyboard, but also tweaks that might make things a bit more repairable. Kind of.…

Online sales up 72%, but retailer warns of impact of store closures Online sales at Dixons Carphone shot up as Brits began preparing en masse to work from home by shelling out on notebooks, printers and – to keep the kids happy – games consoles, in response to the spread of COVID-19.…

Flagship's snappers would be great if we weren't under lockdown Hands on Huawei, when translated from the original Chinese, means "terrible timing"*. Case in point: the Huawei P40 Pro packs one of the best smartphone cameras yet, but comes at a time when most people are (or should be) self-isolating.…

Citrix, Cisco and Zoho-pwning APT41 attack wave seems in awfully bad taste Proving that no good crisis ever goes to waste, Chinese government hacking crew APT41 launched a campaign that abuses vulns in Citrix Netscaler and Zoho ManageEngine, according to threat intel outfit FireEye.…

Try the Tablet Experience and pretend the Windows 8 Tablet Mode never happened Microsoft celebrated the arrival of a new boss for the Windows Insider Program with a fresh build and another crack at dealing with Windows 10's often maddening approach to tablets.…

Erm, guys, this is lovely. But isn't selling new kit pretty important? Samsung has announced an update for the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10 that will imbue them with powers previously only available on the newer Galaxy S20 range.…

Microsoft makes sandwiches and Intel empties its factories of protective gear Roundup Welcome to another round-up of bandwagon-hopping and genuine altruism from big tech as the industry continues its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Pyjama party for NAND and DRAM flinger Chipmaker Micron forecast quarterly revenues above analysts' estimates as the novel coronavirus outbreak fuels demand for notebooks and data centre services.…

What will be the fate of an open-source project relied upon by so many? In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.…

Java Database Connectivity built in to hook up easily with analytics tools Graph database spinner Neo4j has built Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) into its tech as standard with the promise of making life easier for users of popular analytics and visualisation tools who want to work on graph data.…

No snark, just something to help an IT industry in need It won't have escaped anyone in the tech community and the wider world that we are in for some challenging times.…

Zoomarine: Oceans of fail Bork!Bork!Bork! Worried about The Rise Of The Machines in these troubled times? Cheer yourself up with another example of what computers get up to when humans aren't watching, courtesy of your self-isolated vultures at The Register.…

Sure, the bullet couldn't shift a big boulder, but it may have learned Ryugu's composition and birthday Astroboffins have analysed what happened when the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 shot a 2kg Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) at asteroid Ryugu in 2019.…

Sure, we'll delete local data after seven days but there's a way to avoid that After three years of escalating restrictions on third-party cookies to protect user privacy, Apple on Tuesday went all-in with full third-party cookie blocking.…

And ready to build the stuff that the rest of the world needs to stay online during the CoronaCrisis The vast majority of Huawei's employees are back to work following nationwide shutdowns implemented in response to the coronavirus outbreak in China.…

Isolation is the perfect time to learn new skills Promo Amid this planet's ongoing pandemic and stay-at-home measures, if you’re keen to repurpose all that time previously spent commuting, attending conferences, and so on, why not take a look at the SANS Institute’s Online Cybersecurity Training.…

Spacecraft instruments switched off after COVID-19 outbreak forces mission control to send workers home ESA will pause on-board operations of its spacecraft exploring our Solar System – after sending its mission control center staff home to help contain the coronavirus pandemic.…

Terms not revealed, but hopes are high that consolidation will be a good thing Japanese display giant Sharp will gobble NEC's display business in a push to expand into North America and Europe.…

And that's perhaps not the worst of viral idiocy in Australia: One minister made up a cyber-attack to cover for inadequate web provisioning Police have charged an Australian moron who coughed on a copper in Coffs Harbour and claimed he was suffering from COVID-19.…

Team explains privacy preservation plan and how smartphones' wireless prowess is wildly variable Singapore plans to open source a smartphone app its digital government team has developed to track citizens' encounters with Coronavirus carriers.…

Execs make new plea to shareholders in hostile takeover battle Executives at HP Inc have made yet another pitch to shareholders in their effort to ward off a hostile takeover by Xerox.…

Alternative headline: Jun Murai remembers he has a /8 under the fridge Special report IPv6 advocate Jun Murai today announced he will effectively sell more than 14 million IPv4 addresses and put all the proceeds – expected to top US$300m – into a trust co-owned with APNIC, Asia-Pacific's internet overseer.…

Majority of academic studies into hospital image processing aren't subjected to clinical testing Don’t fall for overblown claims that AI algorithms are just as good as, or even better, than human doctors at diagnosing diseases from medical images. That's according to a study published in The British Medical Journal on Wednesday.…

And now back on their feet after global two-hour wobble Symantec customers, or rather Broadcom customers these days, were taken offline for a while on Wednesday when the security service's data centers around the planet went down.…

Having trouble wrangling your data? It can probably automate that Informatica is boasting a total of 25 new features across its suite of data management technologies which could all be grouped under the phrase "we can automate that!"…

Get your patch in place to avoid future data loss HPE has told customers that four kinds of solid-state drives (SSDs) in its servers and storage systems may experience failure and data loss at 40,000 hours, or 4.5 years, of operation.…

Flight risk remains, says judge as she refuses bail attempt Julian Assange has failed to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to get out of prison – after a judge ruled that his previous antics made him a flight risk.…

Staying upright as more restrictions slapped on its clouds Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put a brave face on things yesterday as the Windows giant's infrastructure creaks under "unprecedented" load.…

We've already made that 'Royole with cheese' joke, right? In late 2018, Shenzhen startup Royole released the world's first commercially available foldable phone – the Royole Flexpai. Reviews weren't great, with one journo describing it as "charmingly awful". It only really entered the public consciousness due to the antics of Escobar Inc, which rebadged the Flexpai and sold it for £300. None were actually delivered.…

Branded lunchbox biz didn't answer for 5 days, alleges infosec firm Tupperware, maker of the plastic food containers beloved of the Western middle classes, has an active and ongoing malware infection on its website that steals credit card data and passes it to criminals.…

Microsoft expands preview of T4 Tensor Core-flavoured Azure Stack Edge It isn't only workers being sent home as Microsoft announced an expansion of its warmed-over Azure Stack Edge preview, replete with Nvidia GPU goodness, at the GPU Technology Conference this week.…

Prices undisclosed but you can bet it was cheaper Xerox might not have been able to prise HP Inc stock from the hands of shareholders yet but it has snaffled British print services specialists Altodigital and ITEC Connect for an undisclosed sum.…

Slips out door with 620,000 shares to enjoy a life less ordinary British reseller giant Softcat's managing director, Colin Brown, is standing down at the end of July, just months after he offloaded 125,000 shares for £12 each – totalling £1.5m – giving him a cash pillow to see out the coronavirus lockdown and beyond.…

*Not a new backcronym, but 'Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control' Updated BT is to halt all home visits by its Openreach broadband engineers except for essential ones needed to keep critical businesses and vulnerable people connected to the outside world.…

OpenCL and OpenGL wrappers in development for Microsoft's platform Microsoft and Collabora are developing OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers for DirectX so that software developed for these open standards will run correctly on all DirectX 12-enabled devices.…

Social network reportedly looking to buy a slice of country's biggest mobile provider Facebook is reportedly in talks to buy a multibillion-dollar stake in India's largest mobile network, Reliance Jio.…

Attention! Stand up straight you 'orrible lot! The UK's Ministry of Defence is on the hunt for an infrastructure and platform service provider to host servers supporting its Primavera project management software.…

Please update your contact details in this handy spreadsheet ... oh A UK housing association blurted 3,500 people's sensitive personal data as part of a bungled "please update your contact details" email exercise, The Register has been told.…

Impact will be 'deep, immediate, and long-lasting' Analysts are painting a particularly bleak picture for IT services companies and application software vendors as they struggle to pick up business in the face of the global coronavirus lockdown.…

Online marketplaces descend into wretched hives of scum and villainy Consumer watchdog Which? has unveiled an investigation demonstrating that the laws of supply and demand are in fine fettle at Amazon and eBay, despite protestations to the contrary.…

Security updates immune to freeze, we note Microsoft on Tuesday said it has decided to halt Windows preview releases in May due to health concerns arising from the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.…

Already shipped a million units to good reviews, now says DDR5 will launch in 2021 Samsung is confident it has the future of DRAM in the bag after successfully producing memory using a cutting edge ultraviolet lithography technology (EUV) process.…

Dozens of bugs swatted in latest Cupertino updates Apple has emitted a bundle of security fixes ranging across its product lines.…

Magic potion finally runs out for famed artist and author Asterix comics co-creator Albert Uderzo has died of a heart attack. He was 92.…

Orange light has been on in Sydney for over 36 hours A VMware warning on cloud capacity shortages does not mean users have issues to worry about, but the company is adding new hosts to increase capacity anyway.…

DO: Keep essential services humming. DON'T: Sneak in client work and claim it's critical India's technology services industry has been granted a limited exemption from the nation's 21-day lockdown aimed at preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus, but also been warned not to abuse its privileges by sneaking in work to avoid contractual complications.…

Public also urged to report stay-at-home scofflaws Hong Kong says it used a "government electronic monitoring system" to nab potential novel coronavirus carriers who flouted quarantine regulations. By monitoring system, it most likely means its wristband-based smartphone-tracking technology.…

You can still watch in HD, but, please, maybe not? If you start noticing a slightly blurrier quality to YouTube videos, no, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you.…