The Register

In today's episode of Absolutely Never Happening, Amazon wants the President to testify whether or not he personally ordered AWS JEDI snub Amazon has taken the extraordinary step of moving to depose the President of the United States as part of its appeal against the Pentagon's decision to award the $10bn JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft.…

* In Simplified Chinese NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has released a free, uncensored version of his autobiography for Chinese readers – after Beijing's censors scribbled out all the parts mentioning the Great Firewall in the official version.…

Mozilla's browser will, from March, require manual override Mozilla Firefox will require user intervention to connect to websites using the TLS 1.0 or 1.1 protocol from March 2020 – and plans to eventually block those weak HTTPS connections entirely.…

It was a state-sponsored attack, declares US Attorney General The United States today announced criminal charges against four Chinese Army soldiers who, it is claimed, are the hackers who stole 145 million Americans’ personal data from credit scorer Equifax.…

Komprise wants to help you kick your storage habit Webcast If the task of storing ever higher piles of unstructured data is overwhelming your data center, you are not alone. Like many other organisations, your company may be devoting much more of its time and resources to buying and managing storage than to the actual data it holds.…

Sun, science and, er, more science The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter launched on time at 04:03 UTC this morning on the back of an Atlas V.…

Rifles down back of sofa, finds extra $3bn for shareholders The mini saga that is Xerox's effort to financially charm the pants off HP Inc shareholders has taken a new twist – the copier biz is upping its bid to more than $36.5bn.…

Meet the Ethos-U55 and the Cortex-M55 for edge devices Arm is aiming two new processing unit designs at slimline AI workloads in smart speakers and other Internet-of-Things devices.…

Can GSMA really assure the event will be safe? It's been a brutal few days for Mobile World Congress, with several of its biggest participants withdrawing from the trade show over fears surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. The latest pack includes household names like Sony, Amazon, NTT Docomo and Nvidia, as well as 5G infrastructure stalwart VIAVI Solutions.…

Locking out network biz 'goes against the principles of a market economy and free trade', says diplomat The Chinese state has gone on a diplomatic offensive over Huawei and 5G, with ambassadors to the UK and France both accusing their host countries of discriminating against the company.…

Users rage, rage against the dying of the light (and support) It's not only end of support that Windows 7 diehards have to contend with. Late last week a new problem emerged – systems that refuse to shut down.…

NASA: Defects risked 'loss of vehicle' Troubled aerospace giant Boeing will "re-verify" the flight software code for its calamity capsule, the CST-100 Starliner, after it was revealed that December's anomaly could have been a lot, lot worse.…

Good news for Windows on ARM64 users in this week's round up Roundup The Microsoft gang managed to find time away from breaking Bing and trashing Teams last week to emit new Windows and update Visual Studio Code.…

Maybe sustainability's not just for hipsters? Column Last November, as I sat in a cafe penning my book Augmented Reality*, my MacBook Pro suddenly turned off in that very final way that lets you know something has gone very wrong. The Genius Bar confirmed a dead mainboard – and an estimated $1,000 repair.…

Even then he said there was no need to break out hardware sales Autonomy trial HPE instructed its accounting expert to assume that Autonomy was knowingly engaged in transactions to falsely inflate its accounts, according to court documents seen by The Register.…

When two become one in the server room Who, Me? Welcome back to Who, Me?, The Register's regular feature covering confessions from readers who just wanted to get the job done.…

Including: Google Maps turns 15 Roundup Here's your latest roundup of AI news beyond what we've already covered on El Reg. And totally written by a human. Honest, $reader_salutation_alt4.…

Including: Why was #RootGoat2020 trending on Twitter? It is as silly as you think Roundup It's time yet again to recap the latest security happenings.…

Prenez-vous les cartes de crédit? asks Tim Cook as he prepares to personally expense this trifling €25m On Friday, the French government fined Apple €25m for slowing down certain iPhone models to preserve battery life, a practice the Cupertino idiot-tax operation acknowledged back in 2017 following complaints about undocumented processor throttling.…

Nor any requests to remove the works of Rob Schneider, Kevin James, or Ashton Kutcher, sadly Netflix has posted its first-ever report into what sort of content governments have asked the streaming giant to pull from its service.…

'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't fetch that document' Continuing to drop flame retardant on the dumpster fire that is web security, Google on Thursday said it will soon prevent Chrome users from downloading files over insecure, plain old, unencrypted HTTP.…

Leaks, damn leaks and £219 phones Motorola will put the lengthy battery-life Power version of its upcoming Moto G8 range on British shelves later this month, after the specs for the latest handsets in its £200-ish budget 'droid "G" line were leaked earlier this week after a rogue Amazon listing went live.…

Security biz says it was a long time ago and he didn't technically work for them anyway Former Autonomy chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain was alleged to be involved in two #MeToo-style incidents while he was working for Mike Lynch's Darktrace infosec biz.…

Plus: Move to Agile is 'high risk' and infosec snafus still not fixed British F-35Bs deploying to the South China Sea next year may not meet key reliability metrics set by an American government watchdog, its annual report has revealed.…

It may or not involve office stationery Greater Manchester Police is struggling with a partial outage of a Capita-built computer system used by frontline officers to input information.…

Bell me to chat about it, eh? US attorney-general William Barr has urged the United States to buy a controlling stake in Nokia and Ericsson to build a competitor to Huawei.…

If you tolerate this then your children will be next Choosing a name for one's offspring can be incredibly difficult. You don't want them to be the ninth Jaxon in class, but you also don't want them to be bullied mercilessly for the rest of their lives.…

Joins LG under the duvet The list of vendors pulling out of Mobile World Congress (MWC) over coronavirus continues to grow. The latest to fall out is Swedish comms kit provider Ericsson, a big player in 5G hardware.…

French terminal flashes sous-vêtements at Paris patty punters Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment in our occasional series of software being poorly where it really shouldn't. Today it is Five Guys, where the burgers are fresh, but the software less so……

Listen to me, Palmer, I said listen to me Something for the Weekend, Sir? Speak up. (La la la la la.) Say what? (La la la la la.) No, sorry, can't hear a thing.…

Virtue is its own reward There's at least one browser out there unwilling to accept Microsoft's attempts to fiddle with search settings, and it's made by... Microsoft.…

A hairy moment with a Dell and a hairier one with a flying mouse On Call Welcome back to On Call, The Register's regular reminder of just how icky things can get at the sharp, pointy end of computer support.…

The plucky star-trekker also part of the first all-female spacewalk, too Christina Koch, NASA astronaut and engineer, has set a record after orbiting Earth in the International Space Station for 328 days – the longest amount of time spent in space on a single flight by a woman.…

'Pwned with a broadcast' bug among 25 to be patched by Google Google has posted the February security updates for Android, including for a potentially serious remote code execution flaw in Bluetooth.…

Ninth Circuit affirms decision that Bruce Perens was entitled to voice opinion about GPL compliance Open Source Security – the maker of the grsecurity patches that harden Linux kernels against attack – must cough up $260,000 to foot the legal bills of software industry grandee Bruce Perens.…

So hard to pick a side when it's the Hannibal Lecter and Charles Manson of technology going toe to toe Huawei and Verizon are squaring off in America over allegations of patent infringement and failed licensing deals.…

Bad: The other 20 per cent are still wide open. Also bad: Some of those patched machines may have been hacked Roughly a fifth of the public-facing Citrix devices vulnerable to the CVE-2019-19781 remote-hijacking flaw, aka Shitrix, remain unpatched and open to remote attack.…

Diversity, inclusion and transparency? Just as soon as we're done hiding forum posts Exclusive Hot on the heels of insisting "diversity and inclusion is a core GitLab value," the code-hosting biz asked its saleswomen to wear "short but somewhat formal dress and heels" to an awards night during its sales kickoff in Vancouver next week – because the company is "trying to step it up."…

How to suppliment falling handset margins and rising tensions with the Trump government? Let me see.... A consortium of Chinese phone makers are to create alternatives to Google's dominant Play Store, reducing their reliance on America tech and building another potential source of income.…

Trademark Big Red annoyances revealed by JVM software writers Just 9 per cent of Java devs pay for a supported version of the Java Development Kit (JDK), according to a new survey – despite Oracle introducing a licence fee for the official Oracle JDK from April 2019.…

City of Oakland, Forrester, Humana, thinkmoney and Deloitte trace their transformative low-code journey Promo If you feel it’s time to simplify your digital operations and streamline the services you offer to your customers, tune in to a three-day online summit to hear from companies in various industry sectors who have done just that.…

If you can open the damn thing, that is The spudger-wielding folks at iFixit have completed a teardown of the new Xiaomi Mi Watch – the Chinese vendor's first stab at a "real" smartwatch – and, shockingly, it's relatively repairable.…

Seeing as rules roll out in April and freelancer confidence is at a 6-year low The House of Lords has opened an inquiry into the UK.gov's controversial off-payroll working rules set to come into effect later this year, as confidence in freelance business drops to its lowest recorded levels.…

Regulator sends Request for Information to processor producer over abuse of position Qualcomm is being probed once again by the European Commission, this time to ascertain if it abused market dominance in 5G modem chips to stifle competition in radio frequency front ends (RFFE).…

That 'free' Adobe or Microsoft software isn't all it's cracked up to be, eh? We don't know who needs to hear this, but don't download cracked commercial software. Researchers claim more than 500,000 PCs have been left wriggling with malware after a cracked app went on to retrieve further nasties from Bitbucket repos.…

Pair allegedly gambled away investor cash and blew the rest on private jet and cars, mansion, fashion The heads of a cryptocurrency "investment" firm have been arrested and charged with running a Ponzi scheme that allegedly defrauded victims out of millions.…

Spillages on electronic panels made engines shut down mid-flight The mighty EU Aviation Safety Agency has issued a formal safety directive banning A350 airliner pilots from putting cups of coffee anywhere near sensitive cockpit electronics.…

Hardware and software under one roof: is Redmond embracing Apple's model? An organisational reshuffle at Microsoft is to create a new Windows and Devices team under Panos Panay, currently chief product officer in charge of hardware including the Surface range.…

Leap in space tech is about to democratise the cosmos Column Industrial revolutions bring three things – social upheaval, economic explosions and massive pollution. We haven't sorted that out since the first one and we're already well into our information-based second. Now we're promised a third as space technology moves from cottage industry into mass production.…

Trial of Joshua Schulte gets off to an unusual start amid claims of hidden backdoors, backups, and more Typically, your lawyer is on your side. Which is why it was a little unusual that on the first day of the trial of ex-CIA sysadmin Joshua Schulte – accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks – that his attorney, Sabrina Shroff, went out of her way to explain what an asshole he is.…