The Register

Swindon man walks away with two-year suspended sentence A man who spied on unsuspecting victims through their webcams has escaped a prison sentence after buying off-the-shelf LuminosityLink malware and using CCTV software to spy on them.…

Tops Ubuntu for catchy release names Jolla has refreshed Sailfish, the Linux-based mobile operating system designed for those seeking to escape the clutches of Android and iOS.…

But is remote working less productive? Cloudy storage company Dropbox has declared itself a "virtual first" company, meaning that for all of its employees "remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience".…

Zuckerberg and UK government throw code-breaking site funding lifeline From the Department of Definitely Not Evil comes news that Facebook is donating £1m to Britain's Bletchley Park computing landmark.…

Good news for Big Blue's market cap, not so much for its workers Analysis IBM will push through a major restructure at the IT outsourcing business it's spinning off, with 20,000 or more staffers facing the chop, an analyst estimated.…

The internet was supposed to get rid of intermediaries. How'd that work out? Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare this week launched a service called Cloudflare One that combines various identity, access, and security offerings in an effort to make the unruly internet more like a tame corporate network.…

Did we say £11m? Contract value now ranges from £19m to, er, £190m! Updated The police force for England's northern county of Cheshire is seeking a new ERP system in a deal worth up to £190m after a troubled launch of Oracle Fusion.…

Appears to cook a new way to shift containerised wares and get you onto OpenShift IBM has quietly announced a plan to turn one of its security software bundles into a software-as-a-service.…

'We’ve got the initial plumbing working' Linux distro bod tells our vulture Red Hat is integrating its Ansible automation platform and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.…

'Discovering a new type of celestial source is very exciting' lead astroboffin tells us After a thousand days of observations, the continuing X-ray radiation from two neutron stars smashing into one another has left astronomers puzzled.…

Asks if somebody will think of the startups in the wake of new digital services taxes in Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines The Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association with members including Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, SAP, Amazon and Airbnb, has opined that nations should not devise their own taxation regimes and instead follow global standards.…

955 million mobile phones used on single day in July India connected its 700 millionth broadband connection during July 2020, according to new data from the nation’s Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRAI).…

Outsourcing giant hires 13,000 and says it's doing well because customers are hustling to cut tech costs India’s services giant Wipro has posted a strong quarter of growth, ironically because many of its customers have accelerated projects designed to cut their technology costs.…

Exec blames mobile LTE, which he was definitely using as Comcast’s president of technology while being interviewed by cable body at a cableco event In a moment of sweet irony, Comcast’s president of technology disappeared mid-interview this week after his internet connection cut out – just moments after he boasted about how superior cable Wi-Fi connections were to cellular data.…

Cable damaged during sewer installation? Now that's a sh** storm Virginia's voter registration website fell offline close to the sign-up deadline this week – after fiber-optic cabling was damaged.…

Small and large models with 5nm system-on-chip touted Apple on Tuesday wheeled out its iPhone 12 range featuring a more powerful system-on-chip, harder glass, sharper displays, and 5G.…

Basically nobody trusts Facebook Analysis Global banking body the Financial Stability Board (FSB) has given a tentative green light to cross-border digital payments systems, producing a roadmap for making it a reality.…

Redmond urges folks to apply update ASAP – plus more fixes for Outlook and software from Adobe, Intel, SAP, Red Hat Patch Tuesday Microsoft's Update Tuesday patch dump for October 2020 has delivered security patches that attempt to address 87 CVEs for a dozen Redmond products.…

Chaebol's e-commerce efforts surged compared to 2019 Preliminary Q3 forecasts for Samsung's smartphone division show operating profit up 52 per cent to ₩4.45 trillion (£3bn) thanks in part to a renewed focus on leaner online sales channels.…

US CIST points spotlight at PDF reader 'n' creator suite Windows and Mac users running Foxit's popular PhantomPDF reader should update their installations to the latest version after the US CISA cybersecurity agency warned of a handful of high-severity product vulnerabilities.…

End of the WordPress era? No, we're aiming for 50% of web, says founder WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has engaged in a war of words with the Jamstack community on the merits of the latter's emerging new architecture for web applications.…

Tune in and learn how to reinvigorate your digital transformation Webcast It’s easy to say you want to kick off a digital transformation. It’s often harder to say what this should look like in practice, or what the benefits for your organisation will be. Just junking the printer and saying “we’re paperless now” isn’t a strategy, and certainly isn’t a plan. But moving to secure paperless communications is certainly a start.…

AOSP 10 also popped into patent non-aggression pact The Open Invention Network (OIN) has expanded the scope of its Linux System Definition to include the likes of exFAT and Android AOSP 10.…

Banking giant rapped over management of two US bit barns Banking giant Morgan Stanley has been ordered to pay a $60m civil penalty over allegations it failed to properly decommission hardware from two of its US data centres in 2016.…

HP is top dog stateside Research org Gartner has chimed in with earlier reports from Canalys that, yup, the PC industry is enjoying a bonzer pandemic, even if Dell is a bit in the doldrums.…

Plus: Waymo risks driverless car trial, ML papers now include code, and AI will write your dev CV for you In brief Facebook's computer-vision algorithm flagged an innocuous advert for onions posted on its social media platform for being "overtly sexual."…

Check bank accounts, don't open council emails, you know how this goes Hackney Council in East London has declared that it was hit by a "cyberattack" – but both the authority and officials from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) remain tight-lipped about what actually happened.…

Scratchier touchscreen, less impressive snapper Samsung hasn't made many "Fan Edition" phones. When it has, the rationale was always borne out of necessity. The first (and, until recently, only) device to carry the "FE" name was a Korea-only version of the Note 7, minus the exploding batteries that made an otherwise excellent phone an unmitigated commercial disaster.…

'Train has left the station' for more than half, while 43% delayed indefinitely SAP users from German-speaking countries are seeing sharp declines in corporate revenue as a result of COVID-19 – but half are still pushing forward with projects to roll out S/4HANA, the ERP vendor's core platform upgrade.…

Nothing like servicing an engine mid-flight, huh? Boffins from North Carolina State University and IBM Research have devised a software framework that can automatically repair a majority of the common code patterns that cause Java programs to hang.…

What's another three years amid project delays and Brexit uncertainty? UK tax collector HMRC has awarded Fujitsu a £168.8m contract without competition to ensure critical applications keep running as projects to replace them are delayed and Brexit pressures mount.…

Also new: WebView sidebars, rich JavaScript debugging, accessible settings Microsoft has released version 1.50 of the word's most popular code editor, Visual Studio Code, with enhancements to core features, richer extension support, accessibility improvements, and not forgetting a build that runs on Raspberry Pi.…

16KB RAM becomes 128KB as the Beeb gets down with the kids again As the nights draw in, Auntie Beeb has given schoolkids and hobbyists a much-needed something to look forward to in the next few weeks – an updated BBC Micro:bit.…

If no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The B-Team Imagination will today launch its latest line of graphics processor cores, including one we're told is destined for cloud hardware.…

Minister disowns 'crass' spot that shows American woman as Brit ballerina and seemingly belittles beleaguered arts sector Slightly NSFW The UK government has pulled an ad campaign that encouraged retraining for a job in cyber-security.…

AWS shows you how to fit a week of cloud security learning into just four hours Promo How does the cloud threat landscape look to you? As if security teams weren’t hard pushed already, chances are you’ve heard how bad actors have been taking advantage of 2020’s headlong rush to remote working.…

Adds 100 percent cashback tier if availability dips below 95 percent, removes reference to POWER8 servers IBM has issued a new Cloud Service Description, the formal document that explains what Big Blue considers to be a cloud and how it’s effort will behave.…

Five-year deal to oversee 3.6 million web addresses ... but does anyone actually want it? The European Union has opened up the .eu internet registry for a new owner, offering a five-year contract to oversee its 3.6 million domain names from October 2022.…

Database recording legit handsets appears to have exceeded capacity Indonesia’s cellphone registration scheme – an effort to protect local manufacturers, boost the tax base, and ensure consumers don’t end up with dodgy products – appears to have run aground.…

Pasta la vista, baby Astronomers have watched a star be destroyed by the process of spaghettification, a rare event triggered when a sun strays too close to a black hole.…

Pauses News Showcase rollout while it awaits government capitulation Google has paused the rollout of its News Showcase product in Australia, because it says it could be unworkable under the nation’s proposed pay-for-news plan.…

Minister says more supers will advance society. So why wait to develop silicon, networks, storage and more? India’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” program – a national drive for self sufficiency in just about everything – has added building a supercomputing hardware stack to its to-do list.…

After nearly 20 years, it's time to say goodbye to venerable messageboard Yahoo! is finally killing off Groups at the end of this year, after having launched it almost two decades ago.…

Sorry not sorry, Facebook California’s Attorney General has updated the state's data privacy regulations to outlaw shady semantics designed to confuse folks into handing over their data.…

'Unauthorized access to elections support systems' detected tho 'no evidence to date that integrity of elections data has been compromised' If you're wondering which bugs in particular miscreants are exploiting to break into, or attempt to break into, US government networks, wonder no more. And then make sure you've patched them.…

It was just code left over from a prototype, says hardware maker The Xplora 4 smartwatch, made by Chinese outfit Qihoo 360 Technology Co, and marketed to children under the Xplora brand in the US and Europe, can covertly take photos and record audio when activated by an encrypted SMS message, says Norwegian security firm Mnemonic.…

And so Facebook takes belated principled stance on, um, Nazi genocide Facebook will block posts that deny the Holocaust after CEO Mark Zuckerberg, aged 36, announced on Monday that his “thinking has evolved.”…

Time to get cracking on 5.10 Linux 5.9 has been declared stable, with Linus Torvalds observing "there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here" despite the number of tweaks in the last week.…

Multinational operation is part of election protection effort Microsoft and other global infosec companies have mounted a joint operation to sabotage command-and-control (C2) infrastructure used by the Trickbot malware to inject, among other things, ransomware into victims' PCs.…

Certain business models work better than others when most people avoid human contact Shifts in consumer behaviour could see a handful of companies come to dominate the online food, education and leisure industries, as Amazon has in e-commerce, according to research.…