The Register

Yes, the one that cost the British Army 25,000 new soldiers when IT went live Capita has scored a payday after the British Army quietly handed it a £140m extension to its shambolic DRS military recruiting contract and tacked on a project to migrate certain systems to Microsoft Azure.…

Ofqual publishes for the sake of 'transparency' but it's clear as mud UK exams body Ofqual has published the code behind the summer's results fiasco. Sort of.…

Also: ESA signs contracts for the Space Rider and Boeing's Calamity Capsule aims for March 2021 In brief Richard Branson might have to wait a little longer to ride in Virgin Galactic's sub-orbital jalopy, SpaceShip Two VSS Unity, after an aborted test flight saw the spacecraft return to Spaceport America in New Mexico.…

Also: PowerShell Crescendo, Visual Studio Code C++ on Pi, and a milestone for SharePoint In Brief Microsoft's Teams continues to play catch-up to Zoom with the long-overdue implementation of Breakout rooms.…

Price believed to be £100m lower than initial estimates Capita has agreed to offload its Education Software Solutions (ESS) biz to a private equity buyer for around £400m, which is understood to be £100m below its lowest valuation when the unit was put up for sale.…

Gmail and co go TITSUP* Google services such as YouTube and Gmail started the week with an almighty bang as the Chocolate Factory's cloud came crashing to the ground.…

The Reg takes sneak peek at source tour, hosted by engineer who wrote it Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has continued his series of Windows insights with a rummage around historical Task Manager source code.…

Animal cognition may be better fit for AI devs than human, adds prof Researchers in Germany have shown that cognitive abilities among four-month-old ravens are about equal to that of great apes at the same age.…

Cool off: It ain't Candy Crush on an iPhone, pal Review The mobile industry has given us 108MP cameras, headache-inducing stereoscopic 3D displays, and the Escobar Phone. Each year, it seems as though some vendor is trying to up the ante with unprecedented levels of weird, leaving you to wonder where we’ll eventually end up. Microsoft Bob Mobile? A Samsung Galaxy S21 Theranos Edition?…

We need regulations on web advertising Column Google makes its money from being the world's middle man for online advertising. It's kind of a tech company too, but in a good-enough sort of way rather than the "hey, we invented the transistor" sort of way. It doesn't do anything nobody else can do, except leverage its search dominance into advertising dominance.…

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr Kubrick Who, Me? Still dipping your toe into this Monday? How about diving into a tale from The Register's Who, Me? archives, which this week is a timely reminder that some things have never been entirely safe for work.…

This is not the way to win more work from China, say some politicians as Samsung signs up to enlarge OLED plant Workers at one of Apple’s three iPhone assembly plant rioted on Saturday evening over unpaid wages.…

We’re not upgrading to gorgeous new hardware because cloud services have stagnated I’ve wanted to want a shiny new iPhone since the last lot were launched, but I haven’t been able to actually make myself desire the new model. Try as I might, it hasn’t worked. My three-year-old iPhone X works perfectly, still has ‘the snappy’, and doesn’t have a scratch. So why would I get a new smartphone?…

HCL heads Hanoi in search for 3,000 new workers, which is just two percent of headcount and one quarter's usual hiring rate, but a vote of confidence Indian IT services giant HCL has gone in search of 3,000 staff who can serve its global clients from Vietnam.…

Supply chain hack linked to attacks on major US agencies possibly by Russia's Cozy Bear gang Updated SolarWinds' "Orion" IT monitoring platform has been compromised, and speculation is swirling that it was used in attacks on major US government agencies that could also be linked to last week's revelation that FireEye's top hacking tools have been accessed.…

New long-term support edition of Linux knocks off year 2038 bug, ends support for Power PC 601, and much more Linus Torvalds has released version 5.10 of the Linux kernel and given developers working on the project a pre-Christmas deadline to get their desired additions for 5.11 into his inbox.…

And the week's other security news In brief A former Cisco employee who went medieval on his former employer and cost the company millions, has been sentenced to two years in prison and a $15,000 fine.…

Plus: Graphcore pits its latest AI chips against Nvidia's A100, and Google CEO apologises for ousting a top AI ethics researcher In brief Huawei, already sanctioned by the US for helping the Chinese government crack down on Uyghur muslims, built facial recognition software to surveil the ethnic group and alert authorities whenever a positive match was detected, it's claimed.…

Big Red says it's down to 'our employees’ quality of life' Oracle is shifting its California headquarters to the Lone Star State, saying change of scene will "improve our employees’ quality of life and quality of output."…

Mysterious message, unread for 51 years, turns out to be a bit dull A team of code breakers has solved a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer known for a Northern California killing spree in the late 1960s who has still not been identified or apprehended.…

.NET devs have been struggling to deal with errors affecting non-Windows SqlClients under heavy load Back in February, .NET software developers using Microsoft.Data.SqlClient, an open source data access driver for Microsoft SQL Server, noticed that certain queries were slow or timed out on Linux under specific circumstances.…

Forum bar and suicide risk keeps him in Blighty for now A grandfather who admitted secretly infecting people's laptops with webcam-activating malware so he could spy on them will not be extradited to the US – thanks in part to the UK's so-called "forum bar".…

For Dev Channel Insiders only at the moment Microsoft has finally released a preview of 64-bit Intel emulation for Windows 10 on Arm in its latest Dev Channel Insider build.…

It only took 16 years in some cases but we're getting there Six former Post Office subpostmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal have become the first to have their names formally cleared after the Court of Appeal quashed their wrongful criminal convictions.…

'Fragile and ageing legacy systems' need to be replaced – now The UK's Ministry of Defence has awarded Boeing Defence UK a £500m contract without external competition to replace "fragile and ageing legacy systems" it had already been charged with swapping out as part of a 2010 contract.…

If you got an unexpected message from the not-footlong guys, don't click links Updated Subway patrons in the UK received suspicious emails this morning and infosec researchers fear this is linked to the theft of customer details – and a Trickbot malware campaign.…

What a useless tool, say folk in freelance community, with months to go before tax reforms introduced to private sector UK.gov's controversial tool used by contractors to determine their tax liability under IR35 legislation is still proving less than reliable just months before tax reforms are introduced to the private sector.…

American cable guy Liberty Global and Spanish multinational Telefónica ask CMA to hurry up and marry their kids The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will subject the proposed merger of Virgin Media and O2 to an investigation to decide whether the combined mega-entity will hurt the market for certain telecommunications-related products.…

We know 2020 has been hard on the standup circuit, but really? Comedian Katherine Ryan has found her eponymous website redirected to an Australian shipping company following a domain expiry.…

Massive planets at far out distances from their stars are possible after all The Hubble Space Telescope has spied a previously unknown exoplanet with similar properties as our Solar System's hypothetical object Planet Nine. This newly spotted body is living on the outskirts of another solar system 336 light-years away.…

Both are driving me up the wall Something for the Weekend, Sir? Do not park in front of my house.…

Company safe... telephone gear... Is this the cleaner's cupboard? On Call The weekend is almost within touching distance, so break out the beverages and enjoy another tale of On Call shenanigans from The Register's put-upon readership.…

VMware’s Rajiv Ramaswami gets Dheeraj Pandey’s job, and the task of fending off Microsoft’s new contender Over the last five years, hyperconverged infrastructure went from being a slightly outré software-defined concept to an infrastructure option that earned a place on almost every infrastructure shopping list.…

We're sure these websites will find some way to rebound from this incredible punishment Google and Amazon have been slapped with €100m and €35m fines respectively after France’s data privacy watchdog declared both companies had placed advertising cookies on people’s computers without their consent.…

Because the balance sheet showed only muted growth while subscription cash starts to flow Oracle has posted modest growth for its second quarter, with SaaS-y ERP a notable exception. But founder Larry Ellison says the numbers don’t reflect its bright new cloudy reality.…

Which is why it's built its own UPS, from the firmware up. And also why Graviton ignores Intel's and AMD's best tricks Amazon Web Services is tired of tech that wasn’t purpose built for clouds and hopes that the stuff it’s now building from scratch will be more appealing to you, too.…

Good luck with your digital transformation without us on board, says Asia Internet Coalition Big Tech’s Asian lobby group has warned Pakistan that the nation's recent content-blocking rules will hurt its economy.…

And repeats that there's no Huawei that Chinese manufacturer is getting its hardware in, either The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday began proceedings to determine whether to revoke China Telecom's ability to operate in America.…

Sophisticated campaign has been going on for months, we're told On Thursday Microsoft warned that there's an ongoing campaign to distribute malware that modifies web browsers to conduct credential theft and ad fraud.…

$500 a pop, $25k 'earned' and not much of a trace left, says Guardicore A “malwareless” ransomware campaign delivered from UK IP addresses targeting weak security controls around internet-facing SQL servers successfully pwned 83,000 victims, according to Israeli infosec biz Guardicore.…

Wormable nasty still doesn't need any user input to pwn target devices A previous patch for Cisco's Jabber chat product did not in fact fix four vulnerabilities – including one remote code execution (RCE) flaw that would allow malicious people to hijack targeted devices by sending a carefully crafted message.…

Open-source API framework aims to make Cassandra a bit easier DataStax, chief commercial cheerleader of Cassandra, has released an open-source API framework for data aimed at easing developer access to the NoSQL columnar database.…

Rocking the Red Hat boat with an alternative distro designed for production use Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project, has kicked off a new venture called Rocky Linux, the aim being to build "a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100 per cent bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)".…

Billing budget? Free plan? All useless when buggy code went into overdrive Sudeep Chauhan, founder of startup Milkie Way, suffered a bad case of bill shock when a test with a $7.00 billing budget and a free database plan on Google Cloud platform (GCP) generated a $72,000 invoice overnight.…

The Pandora's Box that won't stay closed UK trade union Prospect has chimed in with the chorus of disapproval at technologies such as Microsoft's Productivity Score being used on the nation's workers.…

Take those claimed performance gains with a pinch of salt, though Oracle has announced the general availability, at least in the cloud, of Database 21c.…

Blanket deletions will smother internet, EU tech chief told Twitter, Mozilla, Automattic, and Vimeo have signed an open letter aimed at EU tech chief Margrethe Vestager taking issue with new digital rules due to be announced later this month and asking for a more flexible approach when it comes to internet content.…

'Better late than never' opines industry bod The UK's Ministry of Defence has launched a bug bounty scheme, promising privateer pentesters they won't be prosecuted if they stick to the published script.…

New shiny has governance, mailing lists, public repository... but how will Google use it? Google has opened its forthcoming operating system, Fuchsia, to community contributions, but has not addressed the question hanging over it: how will it be used?…

Web advertising giant says it has been working with filter makers, others to 'evolve the platform' Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3.…