The Register

Scheme to encourage hiring pricey brainiacs instead of cheap footsloggers The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.…

Senator Wyden puts surveillance nerve-center on blast It's said the NSA drew up a report on what it learned after a foreign government exploited a weak encryption scheme, championed by the US spying agency, in Juniper firewall software.…

Former cop admits conspiracy to tamper with witnesses, too The Feds have secured another guilty plea in the eBay cyberstalking case where former employees of the online auction house targeted and harassed a couple who were critical of the company in their ecommerce newsletter.…

With few exceptions, the questioning was a national embarrassment Comment This morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing with the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter to discuss making changes to a critical piece of US legislation that provides online platforms, used by billions of people, legal protections from the content those people post.…

Next release will block third-party trackers posing as first-party resources The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies.…

Issue affects Android devices but fix said to be imminent The NHS COVID-19 contact-tracing app has run into further trouble by preventing some people with phones using unsupported languages from accessing parts of the service.…

Comets: Crunchy on the outside... frothy on the inside? ESA scientists have identified the location of the Philae lander's second touchdown site on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and revealed new insights about the space snowball's interior.…

Revelations triggered by previous police abuse, court hears A former BAE Systems software engineer who allegedly leaked top-secret details about a frontline missile system also ignored orders from police to hand over passwords to his electronic devices, a court has heard.…

Stay safe and warm in your C# cocoon Good news landed today for data dabblers with a taste for .NET - Version 1.0 of .NET for Apache Spark has been released into the wild.…

And they're gonna like it Hope is not a strategy, and that common aphorism is coming back to haunt enterprise software outfit SAP.…

Switchzilla cloud glue lashes IT systems together Cisco on Wednesday augmented its Intersight systems management platform with container juggling code and introduced a dashboard for overseeing data center networks.…

Pulling containers from Docker Hub for free will be throttled from 1 November From 1 November, Docker will clap limits on how many container images free users can pull from its Docker Hub before requests are declined, a move that could cause problems for users of public cloud platforms.…

Credit reference agency recycled personal details for marketing purposes, says regulator Experian has been rapped over the knuckles by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after it discovered the credit reference agency was trading "millions" of people's data for marketing purposes.…

BT-owned carrier gets cosier with Swedish comms giant Ericsson has won a major contract to provide 5G RAN equipment to UK network EE as Huawei continues to be sidelined in Britain.…

No Slack in the system amid the irresistible rise of Redmond's collaboration platform Microsoft broke out the collaborative backslappery during its Q1 FY21 earnings call and revealed some actual usage numbers for one of its platforms: Teams has more than 115 million Daily Active Users (DAU).…

Yeah, that Otto work Waymo has partnered with one of the world's largest truck manufacturers to install its fully autonomous self-driving technology into semi-trailer trucks on American roads.…

Update tips more functionality on gizmo's second display Planet Computers has updated the Debian-based operating system for its Cosmo Communicator PDA to allow users to place calls from the device's second screen.…

Michael Dawson, chair of Node.js Technical Steering Committee, talks to The Reg Interview Popular open-source JavaScript runtime Node.js hit version 15 last week, and to bring us up to date we spoke to Michael Dawson, Red Hat Node.js lead, who is also chair of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee and Community Director of the OpenJS Foundation.…

Another 12 months on Itanium and COBOL for the Australian Stock Exchange One of the world's most prominent planned uses of distributed ledger technology has been pushed back by a year.…

Ampere CPUs available for automated deployments as data centre giant takes on public clouds Equinix has joined the ranks of big cloud players offering Arm-powered servers.…

We'd rather see Dr Nick, to be honest Anyone trying to use OpenAI’s powerful text-generating GPT-3 system to power chatbots to offer medical advice and help should go back to the drawing board, researchers have warned.…

Call for papers for next year's edition of our DevOps, CI/CD, and container summit is now open Event Believe it or not, it has been six years since we’ve started the Continuous Lifecycle London conference series with our friends over at Heise Developer.…

Why not get in early before official 31 December demise? If you'd like to exact righteous vengeance on Adobe's Flash, Microsoft has given us all a tool to expunge the software ahead of time.…

3,000 WiFi access points and 150,000 wired ethernet ports The Pentagon, the colossal office that serves as the headquarters of the United States’ Department of Defence, plans to install 3,000 new WiFi access points and 150,00-plus wired ethernet switches after turfing out old Cisco kit.…

Well, that narrows down the list of suspects to just a few billion people Donald Trump's presidential campaign website was briefly hacked and defaced tonight.…

To get a better view of regional hotspots in case things get kinetic The USA and India have struck a new defence pact that will see the two nations share high-quality spatial data and satellite images.…

The $499 equipment cost and laggy latency give room for pause SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink has finally revealed its pricing: $99 a month for speeds that vary between 50Mbps and 150Mbps... plus 500 bucks to buy the necessary equipment.…

Azure revenue up 48 per cent, pretty much everything Redmond makes is up Microsoft on Tuesday reported $37.2bn in revenue for the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, an increase of 12 per cent year over year and more than investors had anticipated.…

Regulator’s monthly meeting provided an opportunity to argue all over again Analysis The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put the final nail into America's net neutrality coffin on Tuesday, approving an order that ties up loose ends from its 2018 decision to “restore internet freedom."…

Perhaps we can talk about extra security and compromises honestly Zoom has finally added end-to-end encryption to its video conferencing service at no additional cost for all users, whether they are paying subscribers or not.…

Choice of LineageOS and Ubuntu Touch as well as Android UK smartphone developer F(x)tec has rolled out the second generation of its sliding keyboard phones, the F(x)tec Pro1 X.…

We'll see how long it lasts as 20H2 starts doing the rounds While Microsoft celebrates Halloween with scary data deletion stories of Windows past, May's Windows 10 has swiped the popularity prize from its predecessor.…

'I've seen programmes on American prisons' says wife A Briton is reportedly fighting extradition to the United States after deploying webcam malware onto hundreds of women's laptops so he could spy on them undressing and having sex.…

First you could break up by text – next year you can take the phone with you UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom is introducing new rules that will stop phone companies selling carrier-locked handsets.…

Intel rival up 50%+ in profits just a week after Chipzilla 30% plunge Chip slinger AMD celebrated bonzer revenue and profit for its third quarter, ended 26 September [PDF] with a $35bn all-stock acquisition of FPGA outfit Xilinx.…

Which is proof such fripperies are down to the developer, rather than Apple Microsoft has finally introduced trackpad support for Office Microsoft 365 on the iPad.…

PSA: Maintaining the open-source OS can turn your beard grey Open Source Summit Europe It's official. The upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel is destined to become the next "longterm maintenance" release for the open-source operating system.…

Microsoft program outputs ready-to-roll model from image input set Microsoft has built a desktop app called Lobe that can be used to train object-recognition models without having to write a single line of code. Getting that model into an application, though, will require some programming.…

Situation: The New Normal? Bork!Bork!Bork! A train with supernatural powers of prediction features in today's edition of signage behaving strangely. Who would could have known that the electronic information panel was warning passengers of what was to come?…

And Deutsche Telekom's happy with this airborne base station plan A British startup is hoping to strap 5G antennas to liquid-hydrogen-powered high-altitude pseudo-satellites in the hope of replacing mobile base stations on the ground.…

Open-source RISC OS 5.28 brings support for latest ickle 'puter as well as hundreds of fixes An update for open-source Arm operating system RISC OS at the weekend features stable support for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer.…

Get a feel for the gizmo's programming environment If you’ve been thinking about playing with an Nvidia single-board computer for an AI task, but you’re not quite ready to part with your cash for something like the Jetson Nano just yet, here’s an application-level emulator of the hardware you can tinker with.…

Analyst firm asserts coordinated action without central brain is the way to cope with turmoil IT organisations that want to thrive in plague-time need to model themselves on jellyfish, says analyst firm Gartner.…

Hotel Zuckerfornia: You can check in but you can never check out... without losing everything Oculus users, already fuming at Facebook chaining their VR headsets to their Facebook accounts, have been warned they could lose all their Oculus purchases and account information in future if they ever delete their profile on the social network.…

Plus: US govt sanctions Russia for refinery-bothering malware In brief Spanish financial giant Santander has downplayed claims its international money transfer startup PagoFX was compromised.…

Injunction against Trump ban upheld, case to return in January 2021 WeChat will remain in US app stores until at least January 2021 after the Ninth District Court of Appeals denied the US Government’s attempt to have its ban re-enforced.…

Alipay operator prices itself as most expensive IPO of all time Alibaba has announced the initial public offering (IPO) of its financial services arm, Ant Group, and is aiming for the world’s biggest-ever float measured by cash raised.…

Taiwanese president says this is about ‘strengthening Taiwan-US cooperation’ Microsoft has announced that it will open an Azure region in Taiwan.…

Irony overload as social media giant accuses NYU of bulk data collection Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform.…

White House immigration restrictions knock less than half a per cent off The Trump administration's June crackdown on foreign workers with H-1B and other visas wiped $100bn off the stock market value of the largest US companies, according to boffins at The Brookings Institution, Harvard Business School, and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.…