The Register

One more to go until Satya Claus delivers the first RC, children! Slipping under the (un)Inspire radar this week was an update to .NET 5 and a peek at where Microsoft plans to take Azure DevOps.…

Taxpayers shelled out £1.3bn for this 'abysmal' flop Capita's 2017 decision to implement bespoke IT systems on a £1.3bn British Army recruiting contract led to nearly 25,000 fewer applications to join the military in the following year, new figures have revealed.…

Move your legacy apps to the cloud in just a matter of days Webcast As your business-critical systems get old, operating costs explode and the risk of breakdowns increases dramatically.…

Brit registry is the cash cow that keeps on giving. Whether it wants to or not Analysis UK internet registry operator Nominet has decided to reform the way in which expired .uk domains are released and, to no one's surprise, has decided that the best solution is one that will result in it receiving millions of pounds in profit.…

Still cheap to run. Now also running the code you prefer, wherever you need it, and with cloudy sandboxes for tests Interview Arm thinks its architecture is primed to win enterprise workloads thanks to a combination of AWS, cloud-native development and open-source software.…

Heavily leaked Nord is a smartphone, not an incontinent Scandinavian Apple's foray into the smartphone market middle ground presents a major threat to phone makers like OnePlus, which yesterday countered with its own sub-€400 effort: the OnePlus Nord.…

Gives itself a job to ‘protect the public conversation’ Twitter has decided to crack down on QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory that suggests US president Donald Trump is working to expose a cabal of deep-state Satanist paedophiles that secretly runs the world.…

Sadly, missing all of us by 800 million years A massive asteroid broke apart within the inner Solar System and showered the Earth and Moon with up to fifty quadrillion kilograms of meteoroids, say a trio of Japanese scientists. That's approximately 30 to 60 times more cosmic material than the Chicxulub prang that thoroughly ruined the dinosaurs' day.…

But only for one HPC-oriented instance type, with steeper exit charges and deeper discounts Microsoft has quietly added a five-year term to Azure reserved instances, the commit-for-years-and-score-deep-discounts option in its cloud.…

Ability to debate frankly in private versus right of netizens to know what exactly is discussed Since October 2019, people participating in discussions about the way the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) builds web standards have been unable to decide whether meetings held by the standard's body's various groups should be recorded or not.…

Except for IBM’s non-x86 boxes which have posted modest growth India’s server market is shriveling, says analyst firm IDC.…

Objects to obscene content, not data leakage Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority has banned one Chinese-owned social video-streaming app Bigo and given TikTok a final warning that it needs to get its house in order or also face expulsion.…

No, surely not, no way, we're utterly shocked America's financial watchdog has taken a Silicon Valley AI startup and its CEO to court for allegedly swindling $11m from investors by forging fake bank statements to lie about its revenues.…

API dev kit remained modified for hours, says source Exclusive Twilio today confirmed one or more miscreants sneaked into its unsecured cloud storage systems and modified a copy of the JavaScript SDK used by its customers.…

Here, have a link to something vaguely related +Comment Faced with an obvious falsehood pushed on its platform by a politician seeking re-election, Facebook has finally taken action... in the most grudging, useless way imaginable.…

Chehade paved the way for domain price cap removal, now shows up at Ethos Capital Analysis The former head of DNS regulator ICANN has been named as co-CEO of a company that launched a controversial attempt to purchase the .org internet registry earlier this year. The news has again raised concerns over the revolving doors between regulators and those who need regulation.…

Major fixes for Bridge and Prelude, too, plus Reader Android updated A week after July's Patch Tuesday, Adobe has released out-of-band security updates for vulnerabilities in four of its products – and most of them are considered to be critical in severity.…

Including COVID-19 research, it is claimed. And they'll almost certainly never face an American court On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals with allegedly hacking hundreds of organizations and individuals in America and elsewhere to steal confidential corporate secrets on behalf of Beijing for more than a decade.…

Plus: Security tweaks for Microsoft 365 Inspire Because its customers apparently can't get enough of meetings, Microsoft has added some new Teams capabilities in the form of Standard and Premium Microsoft Teams Rooms.…

Two tech suppliers on list, just a week after America 'restricted' visas for Huawei and pals' foreign staffers The US Department of Commerce has sanctioned an additional 11 Chinese firms, including a major Apple supplier, over allegations that the companies are complicit in human rights violations in China's Xinjiang province.…

Patch out for Pen Test Partners-spotted vuln – you know what to do Research outfit Pen Test Partners has uncovered a vulnerability in Citrix Workspace potentially allowing a privilege escalation to lead to full remote compromise of the host machine.…

Use your old-school skills while having native Azure integration Inspire Microsoft has announced an update to Azure Stack HCI as it continues to aim at customers who do not fancy a wholesale jump to the public cloud.…

Also (yikes): A 'complicated wiring diagram of responsibilities amongst ministers' in the event of cyber attack An influential UK Parliamentary committee has called on social media companies to remove covert hostile state material and said the government must "name and shame" those that fail to act. It also said that there was a "complicated wiring diagram of responsibilities amongst ministers" who might have to act in the event of a major state cyber attack.…

Samsung suffered least as pandemic battered US market The US smartphone market took a battering in the second quarter of 2020 as the coronavirus disrupted all facets of American life and prompted states to shut down their economies.…

It looks like your CV needs updating. Would you like help? Microsoft's social-media-for-suits platform, LinkedIn, is to axe 960 roles as it makes "strategic changes" to "accelerate the vision of the company".…

Could paywall-dodging browser aid fall foul of DMCA rules? We ask the experts Code dive Over the weekend, I created my first Chrome extension and prepared to publish the project to GitHub until I realized it was possibly illegal under America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act.…

Nugget nestled in report on how outbreak will change the tech biz Apple was alone among corporate giants in foreseeing the pandemic risk in the run-up to the global COVID-19 outbreak, according to analysis by research firm Forrester.…

One-time retailer has a problem: Key evidence is on a lost fondleslab Administrators of UK mobile retailer Phones 4u claim that the company was deliberately collapsed by a cartel of British telcos – although an iPad with key evidence "cannot now be found", according to the High Court.…

Ramen, katsu curry and a side of finest BSOD Bork!Bork!Bork! Amid the table football, beanbags and overpriced coffee, London's silicon roundabout also plays host to that most modern of afflictions: the BSOD bork.…

Conservative, competent entry-level blower for the next-gen networks Review The Motorola Moto G 5G Plus sits among the inaugural sub-£300 5G handsets. While the Lenovo-owned phonemaker is happy to tread that unfamiliar ground, the handset doggedly sticks to the tried-and-tested Motorola playbook, with decent performance and photography alongside a pristine stock Android experience.…

Decentralised contact-tracing apps from Ireland and Canada are first off the rank The Linux Foundation has announced a new Public Health initiative (LFPH) that “builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.”…

Fancy integrating next-gen tech into your IoT, cameras, sensors, and robots? Well do you? Telecoms giant Nokia has lifted the lid on a fast, low-latency cellular connection for industrial kit – its private 5G SA (standalone) product, with some of it to be plumbed into a test mine near the Finnish city of Tampere.…

Suggests poorly-regulated address-marts are favorites of folks who want ‘clean’ addresses that give botnets a break Malicious actors are abusing the secondary market for IPv4 addresses, according to Lancaster University lecturer Vasileios Giotsas, University College London research and teaching assistant and postdoctoral fellow Ioana Livadariu from Norway's Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering.…

But will the UPC will be legal – or even worthwhile – without Britain? Analysis The UK has formally ditched the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a project to create a single pan-European patent system that would fix the confusing mess of contradictory laws currently in place.…

Big Blue may have an in on new healthcare plans IBM’s new CEO Shri Arvind Krishna has chatted over a video conference with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and pledged further investment in the nation.…

We may not know the answer until the 2030s, though The volcanoes on Venus, thought to have been long extinct, are actually still alive, at least in some cases, and are just having a quiet spell before reshaping the planet's surface once again. That's according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience on Monday.…

Payments giant could be worth $200 billion Alibaba's financial services arm, Ant Group, will seek an initial public offering in both Shanghai and Hong Kong as it looks to expands its operations into the European and American markets.…

Inform people in case they go Chinese and ignore self-sufficiency drive India’s Department of Consumer Affairs has detailed new rules for e-commerce operators, including a requirement to reveal a product’s place of origin.…

Funny that! The World Health Organisation’s Facebook Messenger chatbot refuses to break out the latest numbers of COVID-19 cornavirus cases and deaths for Taiwan and Hong Kong.…

Execs peg Big Blue's big blues to global pandemic recovery IBM's net income felt the full brunt of the economic downturn last quarter, falling 46 per cent on the year-ago period, though impressing Wall Street.…

May 2020 build warns of no internet connection when, er, there is Microsoft is probing a bug in Windows 10 version 2004 that wrongly warns folks that their machines have no internet connection.…

Because that always ends well Updated Microsoft is being sued for allegedly sharing its Office 365 customers' business data with Facebook app developers, partners, and subcontractors in violation of its data privacy promises.…

Plus: Minotaurs are from MARS, ANASIS-II awaits, and a cool half billion for Skynet In brief NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed last week that the intrepid SpaceX duo, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, would be departing the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 August, with a splashdown of the Crew Dragon capsule targeted for 2 August.…

But take that with a pinch of salt Computer misuse crimes across England and Wales have declined over the past year – with credential theft attacks remaining more or less flat in the pre-COVID reporting period.…

Payments provider cops to 'processing issues' caused by 'equipment change' Global online payment provider Worldpay is experiencing an ongoing outage affecting businesses and organisations in the UK.…

Plus: Skype plays catch-up, Barracuda goes Azure, and WinUI slings another preview In brief Having issued an all-too-brief stay of execution on the decidedly whiffy Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 protocols in Microsoft 365, the Windows giant has announced that deprecation enforcement will kick off again from 15 October.…

Also: Create the killer AI Doom player on a workstation In brief A judge in Munich has ruled in favor of banning Tesla Germany from repeating misleading descriptions of its Autopilot software in adverts.…

The little guys could get caught out with costly consequences Comment On 16 July, the European Court of Justice struck down Privacy Shield, an EU-US agreement that required American companies to sign up to a higher standard of privacy to be considered, perhaps somewhat condescendingly, "adequate*" for compliance with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).…

No evidence of data being used unlawfully, says health department The UK government has admitted it deployed the COVID-19 Test and Trace programme without a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) required by law, according to privacy campaigners the Open Rights Group (ORG).…

I am not a .... {NASA nightmare brought to life by AI} On the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, MIT boffins have given an insight into an alternative history, one where US president Richard Nixon paid tribute to the astronauts who would not be returning from the Moon.…