The Register

Global crisis necessitates extreme copyright flexibility, educators insist The Internet Archive on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Emergency Library to make it easier to borrow from its collection of ebooks during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.…

Lack of varied training data to blame, say researchers Speech-recognition software developed by top tech firms struggle to understand black people compared to white people, according to research published this week.…

Patch this flaw, unless you want random docs to wipe out your work Adobe has issued a patch for a critical flaw that can be exploited to delete files from Windows computers running the Creative Cloud client.…

Duff release, not extra traffic, behind remote desktop software falling over Having lifted connection checking on its freebie remote-access product, TeamViewer celebrated with a good, old-fashioned falling over.…

UK lacks formal emergency messaging system, so Big 4 carriers helped out Throughout the day (24th March), the British government is set to text UK mobiles to reinforce the prevailing advice amid the COVID-19 outbreak: stay home.…

Integrate your disconnected products and management if you want to survive Webcast In a recent survey, nine out of 10 organisations that suffered a significant security attack were running up-to-date cybersecurity software. They did what everyone told them to do, and it wasn’t enough.…

Brit telco and reseller giant in talks... presumably over a very long desk London-listed tech reseller Computacenter has confirmed it's in talks to hoover up the lion share of BT's French domestic operations.…

Bad time to request new resources, and existing ones have problems too Customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues.…

In space, no one can hear you scream 'Who used the last sheet of toilet roll!' Roundup In a week that marked the 55th anniversary of the first space walk and the first corned beef sandwich in orbit, rocket fans had plenty to keep them occupied.…

Azure security dashboard now covers Kubernetes service - at a price Microsoft's integration of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Security Center is now out of preview. In addition, the company has added Flatcar Linux to the Azure marketplace to replace CoreOS Container Linux, which goes end of life in May.…

Move over, Summit. Distributed computing project hits 470 PFLOPS A distributed computing project for disease research now has more data-crunching chops than the world's current most powerful supercomputer – IBM's Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.…

Also: Edge hits the pause button and F# 5 Preview 1 is here Roundup In a week that saw ups and downs for collaboration platform Teams, Windows 10 cross the magic billion mark and Apple admit that maybe Microsoft was right about the whole Surface thing, the Redmond gang continues its remote toiling.…

No word on what digi burglars lifted The parent firm of directory enquiry service 118 118 has yanked offline its finance division's website after detecting unauthorised access by a person or persons unknown, The Register can reveal.…

Free for 90 days as more and more people told to go into lockdown Enterprise software outfit SAP has made certain previously paid-for courses free for 90 days as governments enforce mass home working.…

Yes, you may have detected some sarcasm An annoying security flaw been disclosed and promptly fixed in the fairly popular memcached distributed data-caching software.…

Exec raises spectre of other cost-cutting activities but doesn't yet mention redundancies Capita's CEO, Jon Lewis, and his chief bean counter are taking a "voluntary" pay cut of 25 per cent for six months from 1 April in and among other "difficult decisions" the business says it will be forced to make during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Walmart Canada takes a break from slinging ads Bork!Bork!Bork! In today's edition of sickly signage, we have a prime example of transatlantic bork from one of Canada's finest retailers.…

Step one: Check if you really need new tools. If yes, prioritise and take small steps. And don't assume users are in great shape to learn new tricks IT projects with vast resources and years of planning all too often result in horrendous messes or failures. So what to do if you need to stand something up in a hurry to give your business extra capability or resilience during the coronavirus pandemic? Or if the boss likes the idea of the many free offers for collaborationware that have recently hit the market?…

In case force majeure means they can't deliver. And right now some haven't delivered detailed continuity plans NASSCOM – India's peak body for the IT and business process outsourcing industries – has advised its members to read the fine print in their services contracts so they understand the implications of a long lockdown that leaves them unable to deliver.…

Including effort to land first woman on the lunar surface NASA has temporarily suspended operations for its James Webb Space Telescope – and halted testing of its Space Launch System, a rocket due to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 – amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

We're guessing May's virtual Dell World conference is no mere webinar In an interesting IP rights grab, Dell has filed to trademark the word "Podference".…

What a pair of asswipes – they even pulled a knife at a supermarket Police in the Australian State of New South Wales have published an image of two men they say conducted a series of brazen toilet paper robberies and called for community assistance to flush them out.…

Just don't let your battery die or you'll have to explain it to the police Taiwan, in an effort to limit the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, has implemented a geo-fence using people's mobile phones.…

Use delivery services, PM urges, electronics shops shuttered amid coronavirus pandemic UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tonight told Brits to stay at home for the next three weeks, at least, to thwart the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.…

Clouds, silver linings etc. The long-awaited IPv6 train may finally be pulling into the station as Google reported a spike in usage.…

But will it be any better than the up-and-running WhatsApp effort? The World Health Organization is working on an open-source app for Android, iOS and the web "to help contain and mitigate COVID-19". Anyone interested is invited to pitch in.…

Spreading in the wild, no vaccine, people told to distance themselves from dodgy sources... sounds familiar Hackers are commandeering victims' Windows PCs by exploiting at least one remote-code-execution flaw in the Adobe Type Manager Library included with the Microsoft operating system. No patches are available right now.…

'We expect to see the supply side change dramatically over the next year or so' February 2020 saw "the biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market" as sales tumbled 38 per cent year-on-year, according to researchers at Strategy Analytics.…

We talk to the guy who spent 20 years trying to make it happen The island of Sark, a United Kingdom royal fiefdom located in the Channel Islands and measuring just two square miles (517 hectares), has succeeded in its 20-year quest to be officially recognized by the International Standards Organization (ISO).…

Everybody chill, Big Tech's got this Roundup Welcome to the first in what we at The Register fervently hope will be a short-lived series: it's time for a tech COVID-19 roundup.…

Who wants 999 iPhones? As Apple stores outside of Mainland China remain stubbornly closed, the firm has dropped the two-iPhone limit on its website, allowing customers to (theoretically) spend millions on shiny new mobes.…

Coronavirus forces judges to join the 21st century more or less overnight Britain's courts have declared they will start holding trials and hearings through video calling – although they appear rather ill-equipped for doing so.…

Developers advised to check blogs and forums for product news Google has announced that its I/O 2020 event, normally used for announcements relating to Android and other products, has been cancelled completely.…

No connection-checking while society crumbles, but corporate customers will have to keep paying Remote control and support outfit TeamViewer is turning off connection checking for its freebie product as more and more of its customers find themselves suddenly working from home.…

Starsky Robotics shuts down, plus more news from world of neural networks Roundup Let's get cracking with some machine-learning news.…

Top court says UPC was not properly approved but only on a technicality Germany’s constitutional court has ruled that the nation's ratification of a long-planned Unified Patent Court (UPC), which would create a single legislature for the whole of Europe to decide on patents, was unconstitutional.…

Public’s the new private – tell your friends Webcast While early adopters jumped right into the first generation of cloud services, you may have held off – and perhaps for good reason. Now the second generation is upon us, you may be wondering if this is the right time to join the revolution.…

Mark Summerfield didn't hold back in written evidence A £175m IT platform for Co-Op Insurance that was subcontracted out by IBM to a third party was a "disaster" despite assurances it was an "out of the box" product, the insurer's CEO told London's High Court.…

Remember the three rules: social distancing, hand washing, giving Windows enough storage Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment of The Register's occasional series reminding IT professionals to check their public facing orifices.…

HR and finance cloud vendor focuses on its own apps Workday, the cloud-based Human Capital Management (HMC) and financial application company, is soft-peddling on the prospect of opening up its platform to third-party vendors.…

Overseas travelers and others need to stay home – and we should use their phones to monitor them, we're told Tracking and limiting the movements of overseas travelers, and others suspected to be COVID-19 coronavirus carriers, has proved an essential tool in controlling the pandemic.…

Almost 30 years of VBA and the mayhem miscreants wrought with it Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, The Register's weekly reminder, thanks to the recollections of our readers, of a time when it was only viruses of the computer variety that were all the rage.…

On the other hand, these Pwn2Own results are legit Roundup It is time for another Reg security summary.…

Goes appointment-only elsewhere, pledges to have enough staff on-site to keep running Equinix has all but closed its data centres in France, Germany, Italy and Spain as of Monday, March 23, at 0800 Central European Time.…

'The world around us may be going through strange times, but so far kernel development looks normal,' says penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has released a new release candidate of the Linux kernel – version 5.6 rc7 – and added a little COVID-19 commentary.…

To protect and grow its own industries. But first, call your mother and enjoy this five-minute national round of applause for medicos and transport workers India has announced new incentives to lure electronics manufacturers to its shores.…

Flew Apollo 15 Command Module to an inhuman apogee, made first deep space EVA Al Worden, an Apollo astronaut who earned the title of the most isolated human, has died aged 88, of a stroke.…

Totally not running out of cloud. But may ditch free offers to serve current customers during the Pandemic Microsoft prioritise health care and government users are it adds Azure capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

It will be carbon-neutral by 2025, whatever that eventually means To coincide with *checks press release* the 11th anniversary of SAP's decision to make sustainability a "long-term strategic goal," the German ERP juggernaut has announced a partnership with consulting and accountancy titan Accenture to develop solutions for upstream oil and gas companies based on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud.…

Tips from El Reg hack with two decades of WFH experience If you aren’t already, chances are that your home will soon become a prison of sorts as efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus force, or at least encourage, us to “shelter in place” with only very occasional trips out for food, medicine, and fresh air.…