The Register

250 'true Mozillians' laid off, Taiwan office completely shuttered Firefox maker Mozilla has axed 250 employees, or a quarter of its workforce, claiming the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is to blame after hitting it in the wallet. The organization also vowed to "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams."…

Phone maker to plough cash into 5G, cracking US market, and diversification Nokia licensor HMD Global is quids in after securing $230m in funding from a bevy of biz "partners" including Google, Qualcomm, and Nokia Technologies.…

It’s the best way to lead your cloud migration. Watch our next RegCast to learn more Webcast As your staff continue to work from home, likely well into 2021, there’s never been a more pressing moment to consider the different ways you can make your business work better with a remote workforce.…

Also: Scottish rocketeers to launch from Iceland, and SpaceX lobs more Starlinks In brief California-based Rocket Lab is to resume launches within the month after an Electron payload failed to reach orbit in July.…

'Obviously a critical brand' says CEO Benioff as he calls off online occasion Salesforce's 170,000-attendee annual uber-conference that the world knows as Dreamforce looks set to be no more - not even in digital form - at least as far as the 2020 version is concerned.…

Another chapter in the sorry Emergency Services Network saga Capita's contract to hook up emergency services control rooms under the UK's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) is being renewed for £6.5m without competition.…

'Inhouse crt rigs to solve... book before ur exam' as firm claims 'some' of the content wasn't theirs Exclusive British infosec biz NCC Group has admitted to The Register that its internal training materials were leaked on GitHub – after folders purporting to help people pass the CREST pentest certification exams appeared in a couple of repositories.…

Spudger-flingers rate it 4 out of 10, note an 'artificially short lifespan' The 2020 27-inch iMac is almost certainly Cupertino’s final Intel swan song before it departs into the uncharted waters of Apple Silicon.…

Also: TypeScript 4.0 goes RC, Azure Functions support for PowerShell goes GA and DoH gets easier for Insiders In brief Behold, Microsoft has dropped the black veil on a new Windows 10 build and some Android fun for Insiders.…

While remote-working adults adhere to 'business in the front, party in the back' As the mercury hits tropical levels in the UK, Vulture Central continues to deliver enterprise tech news in various states of undress.…

Judges went out of their way not to set a nationwide precedent, though In a shock ruling today, the UK Court of Appeal has declared that South Wales Police broke the law with an indiscriminate deployment of automated facial-recognition technology in Cardiff city centre.…

Eat out to BSOD?* Bork!Bork!Bork! A return to form for burger-botherers McDonald's with a summertime BSOD in today's entry in The Register's diary of distressed digital signage.…

Dawn probe's last data shows surprising results from asteroid belt Data from NASA's now-defunct Dawn spacecraft orbiting Ceres has shown that the largest object in the Solar System's asteroid belt has sub-surface oceans and recent volcanic activity, according to a group of papers published in Nature journals.…

Just how 'digital' does an HO supplier have to be? Thames Water has turned on the project taps, awarding contracts that could be worth up to £100m to a group of 13 IT consultancies in the UK.…

Which might help convince your stingy purchase manager Review The 2020 Huawei Matebook X Pro faithfully follows its predecessors in form and function. At its heart, it's a well-rounded but pricey ultrabook. No new ground is broken, but the Matebook X Pro gets the fundamentals right.…

Catching up on elastic and hybrid options, but not for cloudy first-timers Nutanix has struck a deal with Amazon Web Services to have its hyperconverged stack run in the Amazonian cloud, as revealed by our sister publication Blocks and Files yesterday.…

Deep-learning model pinpoints the pain in your AES DEF CON Convolutional neural networks can reveal which parts of an AES implementation are vulnerable to snooping, according to research by Googlers.…

And needs a very blunt instrument to do the job, because the protocol works as planned China is now blocking encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 with ESNI enabled, according to observers at the Great Firewall Report (GFR).…

Traffic among tenants in financial capital looks to be as tasty as renting racks Equinix has entered the Indian market by acquiring two data centres operated by GPX.…

And so will TikTok and Disney, with more to come Indonesia has found more tech companies willing to become collectors of the nation’s 10 percent digital services tax.…

But others live on colossal military bases that extend the range of India’s armed forces India has inaugurated a submarine cable between the mainland and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an archipelago 1350km from the nation’s east coast.…

Don't panic... still in the testing phase The US Army Research Laboratory says it is experimenting with reinforcement learning algorithms to control swarms of drones and autonomous vehicles to overwhelm and dominate America's enemies.…

Computer glitch followed by senior public health resignation in Golden State A system crash and subsequent bungling of a digital certificate caused California to fall behind in reporting the results of around 300,000 COVID-19 coronavirus tests last week.…

Safari links redirected by default into Cupertino's walled garden If you click on a link to an article in Safari, you may find Apple's News app pops up and opens the page rather than the browser.…

In-depth dive into protocols exposing countless gadgets to miscreants DEF CON More than 3.7 million. That's the latest number of surveillance cameras, baby monitors, doorbells with webcams, and other internet-connected devices found left open to hijackers via two insecure communications protocols globally, we're told.…

Gutted Sears, JC Penney locations could become 'fulfillment centers' Amazon is reportedly in talks with realtors to buy and remake the US locations of bankrupt Sears and JC Penney into Amazon fulfillment centers.…

Now that's a stretch: 'Work Yoga' memo tells folks to ignore calls, emails to 'stay in the zone' The British offices of Barclays Bank are under investigation over allegations that managers spied upon their own staff as part of a workplace productivity improvement drive.…

Add a little hyperconverged infrastructure, and you’re on to a winner. We'll explain all this month Webcast Guess what? Ransomware’s not going away any time soon. Infections are still happening all the time, sparking reputation-ending headlines, and derailing business plans.…

4G connectivity in bonny Glencoe, but clock on project deadline is ticking Britain's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) hit a major milestone today with the completion of its 500th base station.…

Industry binning old aircraft is an opportunity for aviation infosec DEF CON Boeing 747-400s still use floppy disks for loading critical navigation databases, Pen Test Partners has revealed to the infosec community after poking about one of the recently abandoned aircraft.…

For that and other work, hard-pressed integrator cops 5-year £355m contract. What the worst that could happen? Capita has scored a hefty contract with Transport for London that includes sending the body's on-prem IT systems for the Congestion Charge, and the Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ), into the cloud.…

It's all in the 'right-angled leaf', people As well as being Cockney rhyming slang for stairs, "apples and pears" is a phrase in many European countries meaning to compare two items that have little to no practical relation. The trillion-dollar tech corporation Apple, however, would appear to disagree.…

Plus: Sec wizard shows another way to pwn Mac users In brief A city in Colorado, USA, has swallowed its pride and paid off a malware gang after deciding the cost of a network nuke-and-pave was too high.…

The. Defining. Enterprise. Software. Company. Of. The. 21st. Century For those who can't operate a taxi app on their phone, ServiceNow has linked arms with Uber to bring the world a "Book Uber" feature via its Workplace Safety Management app to solve the "biggest problem businesses face".…

Now's not the time for competition, says Public Health England Public Health England (PHE), one of the agencies responsible for managing the nation's COVID-19 outbreak, is extending a contract with one of its main IT providers without competition to avoid disruption to a vital disease monitoring system.…

First woman to win the Turing Award and be made an IBM Fellow Frances Allen, one of the leading computer scientists of her generation and a pioneer of women in tech, died last Tuesday, her 88th birthday.…

You're so BASIC Who, Me? How's August working out for you? Why not take a moment out of your private staycation for another tale of cockuppery from the depths of The Register's Who, Me? vault.…

If this fine-grained thread control tech can run The Chocolate Factory, imagine it unleashed in Android Google has confirmed that it plans to contribute some of its in-house scheduling code to the Linux kernel, but hasn’t disclosed whether it has motivations beyond a desire to share.…

‘Horsehead Nebula’ is okay, ‘Siamese Twins Galaxy’ is not NASA has decided to "re-examine" how it refers to cosmic objects.…

Chinese company suggests current Kirin SoC could be last of its kind Huawei will halt production of its flagship Kirin chipsets later this year, due to US sanctions on Chinese companies.…

No new orders, limited support options and a very sketchy roadmap VMware has killed off the hardware products offered by recently-acquired Datrium.…

And bans future imports of much military tech India has named apps that it thinks citizens could do worse that adopt in the spirt of the nation’s self-reliance push , and the list includes competitors to software from global giants like Microsoft and Google.…

Plus: Microsoft to dump support for Cortana on iOS, Android phones In brief Your Google Home speaker may have been quietly recording sounds around your house without your permission or authorization, it was revealed this week.…

Start the clock on those patches – they'll be coming any day, week, month soon DEF CON In July, the makers of millions of smartphones powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon system-on-chips received mitigation recommendations to address a bevy of security flaws in their products, all introduced by Qualcomm's technology.…

Bug-hunter details how his team slurped data… IN SPAAAAACE DEF CON FYI, if you didn't already know: readily available satellite TV electronics can be used to sniff and inspect satellite internet traffic.…

Zuck, Google, Microsoft platforms barred from Apple's iOS software souk Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – suspected or convicted monopolists – are being thwarted from offering their respective game services by another tech giant facing scrutiny for anti-competitive behavior: Apple.…

Heavy burden for one valiant man to carry, and it needs sharing Credential breach website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) will be going open source, site creator and maintainer Troy Hunt has told the world.…

This is not a matter for the San Diego court, says digital family history service Springer of unwelcome family tree surprises and favorite of investigative genealogy hunting uncles everywhere, Ancestry.com has tried to invoke an arbitration clause to fight off a 77-page false advertising lawsuit accusing it of violating California auto-renewal laws.…

Taiwanese optics suppliers in the frame, reportedly Apple forecaster Ming-Chi Kuo has reported some supply chain issues for the firm's upcoming entry-level iPhone 12, with camera lenses from one supplier seemingly raising quality concerns.…

Don't worry, your job's safe... we think The UK government hopes to set up a dynamic purchasing system to help Blighty's public sector buy artificial intelligence services, with an estimated £200m on the table over four years.…