The Register

Prompt to install enhanced extension is the first thing you'll see The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on.…

Emulated OS for Microsoft's upcoming Surface Neo has lots of rough edges The new Windows 10X build, 19578, has been pushed to Microsoft's emulator with many updates – including a beta of a new File Manager and the ability to run on released (as opposed to Insider) builds of Windows 10, provided you have at least version 10.0.17763.0 (October 2018 update).…

Absolute mad lads The European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos Space Corporation (RSC) have blinked and postponed the planned 2020 launch of the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin.…

Helpful announcement in Bologna station Bork!Bork!Bork! We're going topical in today's instalment of computers behaving badly because here's an Italian display that developed the blues just before the country sent everyone home.…

Tech companies are loving the attention while keeping schtum on outages With more and more companies across the world telling employees to work from home in an effort to limit, or slow, the spread of COVID-19 – which was last night declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization – outages on common remote-working tools have started to increase.…

No, really, don't try to get the real-deal $1,980 version for $350 The latest flashy gold smartphone touted by Escobar Inc, the company set up by Roberto Escobar, brother of infamous Colombian drug baron Pablo, appears to be a Samsung Galaxy Fold in disguise.…

Ireland's Taoiseach closes country's schools and colleges from tomorrow until 29 March Updated Last night, Donald Trump made the second presidential address of his premiership to announce drastic steps to combat COVID-19 — including a ban on travel to the US from all 26 Schengen-area countries.…

Previously unseen nasty spotted lurking in Armenian government websites Russia's infamous Turla hacking crew looks to be gearing up for a new offensive, according to researchers with ESET.…

SSDs, laptops, servers all hit in the struggle for stock The virus that causes COVID-19 continues to hit technology supply chains as vendors struggle to produce and ship stock following a slowdown in China, where the illness was first detected.…

What about my iPhone? The European Commission has introduced ambitious reforms to back the "right to repair" by forcing electronics manufacturers to improve the design, durability and recycling and reuse possibilities of devices they sell.…

What are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al supposed to do? We have some ideas Faced with a growing barrage of criticism over how it has handled the outbreak of the coronavirus, the White House has turned to tech giants to help it tackle the pandemic.…

... a bigger severance package to Lores, that is HP Inc's chief exec will be paid 50 per cent more if he is fired in a hostile takeover, according to the company's SEC filings last week.…

Takedown should (in theory) see spam volumes shrink rapidly Microsoft has bragged of downing a nine million-strong Russian botnet responsible for vast quantities of email spam.…

Handy for capturing multi-disk VMs but limited restoration capabilities Google Cloud Platform already has the ability to store custom images, which you can configure with pre-installed applications. A custom image is just a disk image, though, whereas its new Machine Images - a feature now in beta - also include all the configuration metadata including permissions.…

Testimony claims search engine giant favours own products and services, even when they're rubbish For years, Yelp's senior VP of public policy, Luther Lowe, has been complaining on Twitter about how every minute of every day Google screws his company by inserting its own listings instead of Yelp's when people use its search engine – even when Google's version is minimal.…

Raining irooooon, from a lacerated sky The weather is very strange on WASP-76b. Liquid iron rains down on one side of the exoplanet, every night.…

But a 2% digital services tax may rankle giants across the pond The UK government has announced a multibillion-pound package of measures designed to boost investment in computing, digital services and science.…

Draw together disparate systems and spread your infosec skills wider with Open Systems Webcast While a prevention layer around your network is important, don't forget you need detection and response practices to deal with threats once they’re in your systems – and to mitigate their effects quickly and thoroughly.…

What could go wrong? Capita has won a contract to ensure existing Airwave emergency radios can work with the UK's Emergency Services Network (ESN), should the 4G pipe dream ever get switched on.…

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do... British IT services provider Allvotec will cut "up to 300" jobs from the UK, offshoring some to Bulgaria in a push to reduce costs.…

Here's some advice that should come naturally to gamers: Stop going outside The organisers of video gaming expo E3 are expected to cancel this year's edition later today over coronavirus concerns.…

Stop us if you'd heard this one before The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has pulled on the hobnailed boots to deliver an almighty kicking to the US space agency over its Space Launch System (SLS).…

900 million records detailing country, interests and more left in full view Whisper, a mobile app for sharing those thoughts you'd rather not make public, turns out to be better at sharing secrets than keeping them, spilling a whopping 90 metadata fields associated with users in an exposed database.…

Right to be forgotten? We forgot... Google is to appeal against a €7m fine from Sweden for failing to follow Europe's General Data Protection Regulation.…

Microsoft and others take steps to handle remote staffer crunch With the COVID-19 outbreak pushing many companies to keep workers at home, admins are finding themselves having to deal with a crunch of traffic on VPNs and network appliances suddenly overwhelmed with remote connections.…

Rust and dual-partition sets for security, efficiency, and automated updates Amazon Web Services has begun previewing Bottlerocket, a new open-source Linux distribution designed for running containers.…

It's clearly not a pressing issue – this is the fourth time now The United States Department of Commerce has granted yet another extension – the fourth – to telcos using Huawei kit to run their networks.…

Neural Magic claims algos in social network's open-source compiler on GitHub look awfully familiar An AI startup is suing Facebook and one of its employees for allegedly stealing proprietary software that allows machine learning workloads to run faster on standard processors, eliminating the need for more expensive custom hardware.…

Plus thousands of laptops on unloved Windows OS used by Ministry of Justice, it admits Exclusive A critical crown court IT system and thousands of laptops used by the UK's Ministry of Justice run on Microsoft's obsolete and unsupported Windows XP operating system, The Register can reveal.…

Chocolate Factory clarifies its header for monitoring browser field trials following The Register report Google has stopped claiming that an identifier it uses internally to track experimental features and variations in its Chrome browser contains no personally identifiable information.…

But those early bird tickets will be gone on Monday night... Event Whether you need a grounding in DevOps basics, or need to dive deep into Kubernetes, MLOps or serverless, you should join us at Continuous Lifecycle London 2020 this May.…

Hefty Patch Tuesday covers critical Word, Dynamics bugs, and more Microsoft has emitted more than 100 fixes in its March batch of security updates.…

Monthly batch of updates covers FPGAs, graphics drivers, and more Intel has posted a fresh crop of firmware updates for security flaws in its chipsets.…

No need to be an also-RAN HPE is entering the 5G game with a new 5G core network software stack that aims at wooing telcos away from the large network equipment providers, such as Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson.…

Recovery might be easier than fixing the UK's retail sector Bork!Bork!Bork! We take a break from crashed cashpoints in today's instalment of The Register's occasional series of unhappy computers to bring you the latest from fashion sensation Superdry.…

Hopefully more memorable than the Men In Black gizmo Japanese imaging specialist Ricoh has spun off its 360° camera team into a new company called Vecnos.…

NASA also struck, more conferences cancelled, WISPA is moving ahead Updated The deadly novel coronavirus has reached California’s tech sector with the news that an engineer who attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco last month has now tested positive for COVID-19 – and is in a serious condition.…

Don't cry for me, Catalina! Don't scream when firing up the open-source editor ♬ Microsoft's open-source code editor is now notarised by Apple so the nagging of macOS Catalina should be a thing of the past with the February release of Visual Studio Code.…

Spirited equine gambols from vendor to vendor UK finance giant Lloyds Banking Group is to slice off a portion of its £3bn digital transformation investment and feed it to Google as part of a five-year agreement.…

Sub-postmasters testified about impact of scandal on their lives The "disgusting" Post Office acted as "judge, jury and executioner" before blowing more than £100m of taxpayers' money on legal bills, former sub-postmasters told Parliament today.…

Chipzilla's silicon will surrender secrets if properly probed Computer security researchers involved in the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting many modern processors have developed a related attack technique called Load Value Injection (LVI).…

Narrow House of Commons victory sees fresh wave of counter-Chinese comms pledges MPs have narrowly voted down a Parliamentary amendment that would have banned Huawei altogether from the UK's 5G networks.…

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and subscribe! On Tuesday, Docker will reveal how it hopes to make some serious money, which has been something of a mystery ever since the VC-fueled biz took shape in 2010 under the name dotCloud.…

We have to Just Walk Out of that shop, right? Oh... with products You know how it is: you start by selling books online, then take over the world of ecommerce, and almost by accident end up dominating the multibillion-dollar cloud computing market. After that, you just can't help yourself.…

The K8s on-ramp you didn't realise you need, or so Virtzilla hopes VMware has followed through on its promise to make vSphere capable of managing both virtual machines and Kubernetes (K8s) clusters by announcing version 7 of vSphere and a plethora of other container-related tech it hopes will give developers a consistent layer of services to let them go crazy with containers.…

Premium chip is 7nm, 4 Arm CPU cores, up to 7.4 million logic cells, multi-Tbps networking and crypto Xilinx will today announce an FPGA that is a little bananas: the Versal Premium, aimed at cloud builders and telcos.…

I love the smell of plasma in the morning. It smells like ...victory Astronomers have discovered for the first time a bizarre star floating in space some 1,500 light years from Earth that seems to only pulsate on one side.…

Plus: Last hurrah for v1 Dragon and Boeing is in trouble Roundup SpaceX hit the big five-oh as Boeing continued shuffling its feet and staring at the ground in this week's Queen-infused rundown of rocketry.…

Oh, she also took 'industry-leading role in AI' and found someone to replace her Ginni Rometty was awarded $20.16m for her final full year as CEO, president and chairman at IBM as the organisation reported a gargantuan revenue rise of 0.1 per cent.…