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How many hundred thousand customers? Who, Me? Welcome to a Who, Me? story in which the moral might be: "Be careful what you kick off before lunch if you want a mealtime free of phone calls."…

Former SpaceX, Tesla, and Google site reliability leader steps into newly-created role Boeing has created a new role for a vice president of software engineering and filled it with a veteran of similar gigs at SpaceX, Tesla, and Google.…

VMware warns of incoming security fix after attackers get root on host VMware has taken the unusual step of warning about an imminent security advisory after a Chinese team successfully popped its flagship product.…

If you own the model 6300 and 6400, upgrade now to ‘prolong life’ Aruba has quietly admitted that recent firmware for some of its switches uses storage at “an unintended and accelerated pace” that “will meet or exceed the deployment lifetime of the switch” once installed.…

We'll help you legitimize your decision with top technical and organisational tips Webcast PostgreSQL is a fine choice of RDBMS to help you manage your database. Free and open-source, it’s been a tried and true option for nearly 25 years, handling any size and shape of workload you can throw at it, while opening up your organisation’s options into open source working. Letting you migrate way from costly, slow or inflexible legacy databases, shift into the cloud, and build new applications in quicker and more agile ways, PostgreSQL is versatile across any kind of cloud configuration, and all sorts of containers.…

Delivery is even profitable in some places, whole company be kind-of in the black by 2021 Uber last week revealed that it currently derives most of its revenue from delivery services.…

Huawei appears to be rationing product, say analysts China’s smartphone market slumped in the year’s third quarter; analysts say.…

Makes work-from-home legal and lowers barriers to entry for smaller players and multinationals' use of Indian workers India has done away with regulations that govern outsourcers, making it easier for existing players to let their staff keep working from home and for overseas companies to use Indian labour.…

It’s SANS training time in Tokyo, Singapore, and India Promo We might all be living under various degrees of lockdown, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sharpen up your security skills with some of the best instructors around – and all at early bird prices, if you’re quick.…

Orange is the new sacked American media, including Fox News, and the international press this morning called the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden, signalling President Donald Trump's impending defeat.…

Plus: Waymo stops in SF and vegan milk designed by machine-learning In brief Denizens of Portland, Maine, have voted to give themselves the power to extract penalties from police and local government for the unlawful use of facial-recognition software.…

Expiration of cross-signed root certificates spells trouble for pre-7.1.1 kit... unless they're using Firefox Let's Encrypt, a Certificate Authority (CA) that puts the "S" in "HTTPS" for about 220m domains, has issued a warning to users of older Android devices that their web surfing may get choppy next year.…

How many grams of carbo-spy-drates are in your favorite applications? Apple on Thursday advised developers they need to clarify the privacy practices of apps distributed through its App Store, a requirement previewed earlier this year.…

Also: Another delay for SpaceX, Artemis I gets its fairings and Kelly twin prepares for a lengthy mission in politics In Brief Those anxiously anticipating the moment Richard Branson gets strapped into his space-jalopy and sent on a sub-orbital lob may not have much longer to wait, if the latest emission from Virgin Galactic is anything to go by.…

You're probably reading this on your work laptop when you should have been down the pub An Atlassian data scientist has published research gleaned from the company's analytics, that points to work-life balance being skewed thanks to the surge in remote working.…

Meet the Razer Book 13 Razer's newest laptop line, the Razer Book 13, ditches the FPS chic and beefy discrete GPUs in favour of something more befitting a business environment.…

But we rebuilt the entire institution in 5 days, says principal as he looks back on February attack The criminals who took out Scotland's Dundee and Angus College made a ransom demand that precisely added up to the contents of its bank account – and that was no accident, its principal has said.…

Which could be useful for AI assistants as they'll know whether you're barking orders at them or the kids or the TV Video To improve how people talk to machines in environments with multiple network-connected devices, boffins at Carnegie Mellon University in the US have devised an acoustic measurement technique for determining the direction a person is facing while speaking.…

Same people who killed Travelex and revenge-published personal data when ignored. Nice folk A social housing provider in Norwich, England, has said it was hit with the Sodinokibi ransomware following what it assumes was a successful phishing attack.…

Fills you with confidence, doesn't it? The United Kingdom is set to base its post-Brexit management of goods crossing the EU border on software that is still yet to be introduced, leaving little or no time for stakeholder testing.…

Smaller handset £699 going up to £1,099 for top-tier flavour Apple released its iPhone 12 lineup in drips and drabs this year. The latest volley of phones to become available are both the cheapest and most expensive models of the lot: the £699 iPhone 12 Mini, and the top-tier iPhone 12 Pro Max, which starts at £1,099.…

Perhaps mentoring wet behind the ears devs is your cup of tea? Job Alert We're doing our bit to keep techies teching with free job listings for anyone looking to hire such skills in the midst of the pandemic. If you have a problem (hiring) and if you we can find them, maybe you can hire some of our wonderful readers.…

A sliver of functions coming back in house, most being offshored to India and 380 UK roles put 'at risk' of redundo by Capita Exclusive Well colour us shocked! Three UK is ending its business process outsourcing contract with Capita years ahead of the expiry date amid insider allegations of poor performance.…

Company famed for iffy patches demonstrates its email prowess Microsoft's cloudy email service, Exchange Online, decided to have an early night last night, and then enjoyed a lie-in this morning.…

Please make sure you're obeying the law, outgoing commissioner pleads "There are over 6,000 systems and 80,000 cameras in operation across 183 LAs!" So exclaimed the UK's outgoing Surveillance Camera Commissioner as he detailed just how many council CCTV cameras there are across the nation.…

'Two to three times faster' in .NET 5.0 - but is running .NET in the browser a good idea? Microsoft is pitching its Blazor framework, the newest addition to the ASP.NET Core platform, as a suitable upgrade for C# developers still wedded to Web Forms, the programming model dating back to the first release of the .NET Framework in 2002.…

'What are you buying, Dave? We should talk about this' Something for the Weekend, Sir? It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you have clicked on Add to Basket.…

Don’t mention the postponed Ant Group float. Do mention the 881 million monthly mobile users and how they're spending more, more often Alibaba’s cloud made another loss in the company’s second quarter for 2021, but it was just $23m and the company says it will turn a profit before the financial year is done.…

Easiest call-out ever (after a pinch of sleuthing) On Call Friday is here, and with it a tale of extraordinary sleuthing courtesy of The Register's On Call.…

At $250 for 750ml the joke’s on the buyers who bought the whole batch in hours On April 1st, 2018, Elon Musk took to Twitter to reveal that his electric car company Tesla had gone broke.…

Tempted by telephony in Teams? Start right here Promo Like it or not, we’re living in the biggest experiment in work practices in decades. The Covid pandemic prompted a hurried retreat from offices, and a sudden rush onto cloud-based collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams.…

'u ok m8?' A fast radio burst, a mysterious type of powerful electromagnetic energy poorly understood by scientists, has been spotted in our own galaxy for the first time. It's been traced to a magnetar, an exotic form of neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field.…

Promises mid-2022 opening of full three-AZ region in central Indian city AWS has announced a new region in India, its second in the nation.…

Six-day outage predicted as rebuild commences from untouched backups Brazil’s Superior Tribunal de Justiça has temporarily shut down after a suspected ransomware attack.…

Cops used the opportunity to figure out remote access traps A tech support scammer making random phone calls in the hope of finding a victim called the cybercrime squad of an Australian police force, which used the happy accident to document the scam and inform the public what to watch out for.…

Plus or minus a load of caveats San Francisco will tax businesses slightly more if a chief executive earns orders of magnitude more than their rank-and-file employees after residents voted in favor of the rule.…

Trio of bugs reported by Google Project Zero, plenty of other flaws addressed Apple on Thursday issued security updates for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS that address three holes reported by Google's Project Zero bug hunters among exploitable flaws found by others. Installing the latest software for your iPhone, iPad and so on will address these programming blunders.…

'Individual X' said to have surrendered the digital dosh The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a legal request to formally take control of more than $1bn in Bitcoin (BTC) generated from the sales of illicit goods at Silk Road.…

Still, it'll make using the platform from home marginally less excruciating There was great excitement followed by great disappointment in the collaboration world this week as Microsoft appeared to confirm multiple account support for Teams before slapping on the inevitable gotcha.…

DevOps tool's maintainer says he's 'very happy with the results' The core maintainer of popular DevOps tool Jenkins has said GitHub's new code-scanning tool helped identify seven previously unknown vulnerabilities in plugins on the platform.…

Successful recovery would make it the first and only reusable orbital-class small launch system Rocket Lab's next mission has been named "Return to Sender" as the company confirmed plans to arrest the descent of its Electron booster via parachutes.…

Convert a jumble of documents into neatly structured data - if you are lucky Google Cloud Platform is previewing Document AI, a new service for automatic extraction of data from documents, such as key/value pairs in forms, with a choice of parsers and an option to use a custom model.…

Aerial ammo deliveries – always handy when you're storming a beach Rise of the Machines The British military's push towards autonomous war machines continued as the Royal Marines tested various items of robot battlefield equipment during a recent exercise in Cyprus.…

ISP reckons it can hit national coverage by end of next year Virgin Media added 125,000 premises to its network during the third quarter of 2020, a period for which the Liberty Global-owned telecoms giant posted weaker profits and marginal revenue growth.…

That was still dwarfed by clods using 'password' itself, though Britons began using the word "vision" in their passwords after prime ministerial advisor Dominic Cummings was caught travelling across the country from his parents' farm in Durham to Barnard Castle "to test" his eyesight, according to research from Pen Test Partners (PTP).…

Cloudy CRM monster's veep merry-go-round keeps spinning SaaS-y CRM vendor Salesforce has hired Accenture high-flyer Zahra Bahrololoumi as exec veep and CEO of its UK and Ireland biz.…

Not sure if we should be honoured or offended, but the Series S is a huge step up from its predecessor Review With Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo hitting the UK this week, global coronavirus cases assuring us the only way is up, and Christmas cancelled, there's never been a better time to sit your bum down, swot up on that "hygge" thing, and learn what it means to stay at home. For real this time. But there's another reason to take on the mantle of social distancing champ 2020 this month – the arrival of Sony and Microsoft's new games consoles.…

Third of customers stalling upgrades, says UK and Ireland user group data A third of SAP users have hit the brakes on migrations to S/4HANA, the German vendor's in-memory database-powered ERP system, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and related economic disruption.…

Pretty standard stuff, says analyst UK telco TalkTalk has asked regulators for an extension on its takeover negotations as it mulls a £1.1bn offer from Toscafund Asset Management.…

We're trying, insists beleaguered Information Commissioner's Office Scofflaws have failed to pay nearly £2m in fines handed out by the UK Information Commissioner's Office over the past 18 months, according to new research.…