The Register

Falcon 9? Falcon 8 more like, as booster takes an unplanned bath SpaceX has lofted another set of Starlink satellites despite an in-flight engine failure, although those hoping to watch a booster landing were disappointed as the veteran Falcon 9 first stage took a dunking.…

Ooh, check us out rivals, we've got a 'keyboard'.. well, not a real one. It's Magic, OK? A common refrain in Apple’s hymnbook is that the iPad Pro is a legitimate computer, much like a MacBook Pro. Marketing aside, most professionals are yet to be convinced, noting that Cupertino’s increasingly pricey fondleslabs lack the essential features of a computer – like, for example, a pointing device.…

Yh capten 🎖 bruv, charlie fireteam brups  dat tr33line 🌳 at 9 🕘 The British Army has made a coronavirus-related tech U-turn after telling soldiers that commands issued over WhatsApp are now legally binding.…

Vows to be one of 'key beneficiaries' of 'platform shift towards the cloud' NoSQL database bigwig MongoDB is warning the Covid-19 pandemic will hit turnover by between $15m and $25m for fiscal 2021.…

ICO notches up first successful FoI prosecution A town clerk in the English county of Shropshire has been the subject of the first ever successful Freedom of Information prosecution after lying to a member of the public who made an FoI request.…

No, this is not business as usual as the C-virus continues to wreak havoc A couple of weeks ago Google cancelled its in-person Cloud Next event, saying it would become "Google Cloud Next '20: Digital Connect." Now even the virtual version has been postponed, with no rescheduled date given.…

Updates with pics from actual event... held on 8 March Hewlett Packard Enterprise celebrated the work of its female staff on International Women’s Day with stock photos of suited models rather than, you know, its actual employees.…

Bank info, driver's license copies and more found, report researchers A now-defunct mobile app for loaning money to small business owners has been pinned down as the source of an exposed archive containing roughly 500,000 personal and business financial records.…

Swedish Scandi-BSOD, anyone? Börk!Börk!Börk! In these trying times it is good to see Windows occasionally matching the global mood with a sad face in The Register's series of BSODdery. Welcome to Scandi-Bork.…

The axe prepares to fall on Global Tech Services staffers, including former Lloyds and Vodafone peeps that TUPED across Exclusive IBM has put 1,248 heads in its UK Global Technology Services (GTS) division at risk of redundancy with a little over one fifth of those ultimately facing the long walk down the company corridors to collect their P45s.…

Ad watchdog puts telco on the naughty step over range extender promotion Updated BT has been told to stop claiming its Wi-Fi discs work in “every room” of the home after complaints from rivals and the public alike.…

Plus: Intel ditches forthcoming Cooper Lake single, dual-socket 14nm Xeons from its roadmap Marvell this week teased its forthcoming server-grade ThunderX3 processor, which can, we're told, sport up to 96 Arm CPU cores and 384 hardware threads per socket.…

Israel is up for it. America, Iran, Thailand may be, too. China is there already, natch Pervasive surveillance through digital technologies is the business model of Facebook and Google. And now governments are considering the web giants' tools to track COVID-19 carriers for the public good.…

Googler publishes plans for Arduino-based equipment to help hospitals As more and more people are hospitalized due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, there may not be enough ventilators to sustain critical patients who need breathing assistance. That has prompted various individuals and groups, for better or worse, to look at MacGyvering their own airway support equipment.…

Microsoft drops some more detail of fourth-gen console: The Series X Microsoft has revealed some more specs for its forthcoming Xbox Series X, the fourth generation of its gaming console.…

We get the lowdown on the lockdown from a BPO operator in the heart of Manila The government of the Philippines has introduced “enhanced community quarantine” rules that restrict movement and have therefore depleted the ranks of workers in the nation’s flotilla of contact centres. One result is customer service degradation in other countries.…

AI flagged good content as bad content – and it took the founder of Godwin's Law to point it out One whole day after telling the world it was going to do its very best to ensure that only high-quality COVID-19 content from proper sources would spread on Facebook, The Social Network has mistakenly identified just such content as violating its community standards.…

And 3D-printed valve for breathing machine sparks legal threat Remember Theranos? The blood-testing company worth billions whose CEO Elizabeth Holmes became a celebrity right up until the point when it became clear its revolutionary testing machines didn’t actually work as described?…

Everyone else makes money but you get targeted ads: a win-win Comcast has signed a deal with advertising analytics company Comscore to sell its subscribers' viewing habits.…

'This is a deferral, not a cancellation' official insists Heads up, IT contractors: the implementation of Britain's IR35 controversial tax reforms will be delayed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UK government has confirmed.…

Two countries divided by a common... approach to dealing with COVID-19 The Trump Administration wants to give cash payments to every American adult within the next two weeks to help those who have lost their jobs or otherwise hit hard times during the global coronavirus pandemic.…

Not totally eradicated yet, ads make more dosh Cryptojacking, the theft of computing power to mine digital currency, has been around at least since 2013 – and has shrunk in use dramatically with the death of Monero-mining service Coinhive.…

Dark day for Big Blue Updated A mystery outage hit IBM Cloud today, partially knocking out services for much of the day stateside. At time of writing, parts of the platform remain down even after several hours.…

Where there's a hit, there's a writ Broadcom is suing Netflix for being so successful that people have cut their cable subscriptions and ditched the set-top boxes that make the chip designer a huge profit.…

We peek inside the latest official release of Microsoft's IDE While the limelight may have been snatched by the arrival of the first preview of .NET 5, its great (and occasionally not so great) grandparent, Visual Studio 2019 16.5 has shuffled out of the shadows.…

Looking for a burner blower? Motorola Mobility has lifted the lid on its latest budget blower – the pocket-friendly Moto e6s, which offers the most compelling, er, screen-to-price ratios on the market. Just £99 gets you a phone with a 6.1-inch HD screen.…

You know the one, that pothole ridden journey from on-prem to the fluffy white stuff Databricks, the company behind analytics tool Spark, is introducing new features to ease the management of security, governance and administration of its machine learning platform.…

Preview 1 hints at great things, but right now has just enough to make ARM64 users smile Microsoft has dropped the first preview of its latest attempt to unify its development platform: .NET 5.…

Warnings and advice from team that has already hauled itself across the line QCon London Andrzej Grzesik, principal engineer at UK neobank Revolut, spoke at the recent QCon London, - back in the days when in-person tech conferences were a thing - about the company's shift to Java 11, which it has now been running for over a year.…

And his boss monitored him with a RAT A most entertaining piece of threat research from Check Point gives a unique insight into the "working" life of a Nigerian email spammer who made thousands of dollars from stolen credit cards alone in recent years.…

CW to live on as a counter in a Curry's, as CEO says: Mobile is 'currently holding back the whole business' It's (yet another) sad day for the UK high street, after Dixons Carphone confirmed it will close all 531 standalone Carphone Warehouse stores, with an expected 2,900 roles made redundant.…

Plus insurer kept firing defect reports at us during acceptance testing, said Steve Allen Co-Op Insurance's £155m Agile contract with IBM for a new IT platform collapsed not only because the insurer kept raising spurious defects but also because Sopra Steria bungled a critical data migration, the Big Blue veep overseeing the project told London's High Court.…

When we said 'shut everything down,' we only meant the retail stores What's the difference between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Stores? When Teams closes down, people seem to notice.…

Also: China has a launch failure but hey, things on Mars might be looking up Roundup It has been a frustrating few days for space fans, with automatic safeties and virus fears stopping rocket-based play. Still, there was at least a glimmer of hope from the red planet.…

Kickstarter caveats apply Oh, how we'd love to be a fly on the wall at the offices of Chinese phone maker Unihertz. The company has a reputation for producing incredibly niche phones that cater to demographics that are otherwise ignored by most others. Take the Unihertz Titan, for example, which was a rugged homage to the Blackberry Passport.…

Advice for devops? Don't do 'wagile', says Dun & Bradstreet The market of graph databases, which structures data according to a network of relationships, is tiny. Strong growth might see it hit $2.4bn in 2023.…

Come on, builders - who doesn't like subsidies? The UK government has promised to introduce new laws to force developers to ensure new-build properties are capable of gigabit-speed broadband.…

Normal precautions should suffice, ultraviolet hand cream can light the way Data centres are warm places full of fans designed to efficiently circulate air. Commercial data centres are visited by many people every day. Some of those people could be COVID-19 carriers. The virus doesn’t mind warmth and can be spread by airborne droplets that may well have a better chance of floating free in a well-ventilated bit barn.…

Please develop machine-learning algos to analyse this text for a vaccine A dataset of more than 29,000 scientific papers focused on COVID-19, and the coronavirus family as a whole, has been publicly shared to ultimately help the medical world thwart the bio-nasties.…

Temperatures can soar over 400C on the rocky world, and yet... Video Mercury, the innermost planet in the Solar System, reaches searing temperatures. Yet ice still manages to exist on its rocky surface. How?…

What took you so long, eh? Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube have issued a joint statement in which they promise to disinfect their platforms of contagiously incorrect COVID-19 content.…

Online hackfest designed to help government response, provided entries arrive in 12-point Arial India has turned to its national crowdsourcing platform to find ideas that might crimp COVID-19.…

Including: COVID-19-hit cruise giant admits it was hacked Roundup We hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. It's time for another Reg roundup of security news you may have missed.…

Finally, something that isn't coronavirus related [delete this – ed.] VMware has released security patches for a trio of bugs in its desktop-class virtualization products.…

Loss of Face time Apple has finally coughed up the $454m it owes VirnetX for infringing its video-conferencing patents, nearly a decade after Cupertino first lost the lawsuit.…

Just the San Francisco Bay Area goes to 3-week near-lockdown The coronavirus website built by Google-stablemate Verily and vaunted by President Trump on Friday, is up and running – and is proving to be not nearly as useful as the Command-in-Chief suggested.…

Tesla Delaware lawsuit also delayed The ten-year monster battle between Google and Oracle over the use of Java APIs will be delayed until further notice – after the US Supreme Court announced it was suspending oral arguments over coronavirus fears.…

Miscreants also hammer Euro websites as well, because why not? In an impeccable instance of horrible timing, the US government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says it fended off a cyberattack by online scumbags.…

Developers! Developers! Developers! And all their infrastructure! On Monday GitHub announced it plans to buy NPM Inc, which operates the npm repository relied upon by 12 million JavaScript developers.…

And that’s before you even get to microphone and video settings They knew it was coming and have been desperately building capacity – yet the flood of workers to video conferencing software has proved too much for companies like Zoom and Microsoft.…