The Register

The usual stuff in the spotlight: Google Pay crowding out rivals, search algo bias India’s Competition Commission has launched an antitrust case against Google over its bundling of Google Pay with Android.…

A win for 2020: Polymath's posessions headed back to Sherborne School Missing Alan Turing memorabilia is to be returned to the UK from the US, after it went missing from his old boarding school.…

Starting with just two projects - Baetyl and EdgeX - but eventually all code will be shared behind Great Firewall A Chinese Git-as-a-service outfit named “Gitee” claims it has struck a deal with the Linux Foundation to mirror its projects behind the great firewall.…

Hints at fun to come in 2021, for photographers and industry alike Sony has announced a drone division called “Airpeak”.…

*Hums the GoldenEye theme* America’s largest radio telescope, at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has suffered yet more damage after another cable above the reflector dish snapped and came crashing down last week.…

Crooks want $17m for decryption key Compal, the world’s second-largest white-label laptop manufacturer, has been hit by the file-scrambling DoppelPaymer ransomware gang – and the hackers want $17m in cryptocurrency before they'll hand over the decryption key.…

Vid-chat giant promises never again to make 'misrepresentations about its privacy and security practices' Zoom has been forced to agree to a range of security improvements in a settlement with America's consumer watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission, as a result of earlier wrongly claiming it offered true 256-bit end-to-end encryption.…

We've heard that one before... Atlassian has unveiled plans to give IT Service Management a whacking with the Jira stick in the form of Jira Service Management.…

Inoculation is simple: MFA, regular timely patching A trojan targeting Linux and deployed by a known ransomware gang has been discovered by Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky.…

Offensive cyber operation includes 'encrypting' Vlad and Chums' disinfo servers British eavesdropping agency GCHQ is actively hacking Russian attempts to undermine coronavirus vaccine efforts, according to The Times.…

Don't worry, you'll still get your iPhone 12 Apple confirmed reports this morning that it has sat long-time supplier Pegatron on the naughty step, putting the Taiwanese contract manufacturer on probation until it addresses several labour concerns.…

iSH spared for now, but what will happen to a-Shell? Two iOS terminal applications popular with developers – a-Shell and iSH – have run into problems with Apple, which has said they breach its App Store Review Guidelines, though iSH has been spared deletion after an appeal.…

Still not as fast as an old Pendolino Updated Virgin Hyperboleloop was cock-a-hoop over the weekend after blasting a pair of employees along its Las Vegas test tube.…

Careful with those built-in account names too Microsoft has added another whoopsie to the known issues list for the Windows 10 October 2020 Update: plugging in a Thunderbolt NVMe SSD device could well result in a sudden stop error.…

But that's where German software giant wants its on-prem customers to go SAP customers making the jump to cloud will have to adopt standardised processes and drop customisations, according to a senior veep.…

If only cheaper-than-Apple Logitech kit could turn bog-standard slab into a Pro Review While Apple saw fit to bestow its wallet-crushingly pricey Magic Keyboard on the iPad Pro and Air, no such love was given to the entry-level 10.2-inch iPad, which is a favourite of schools and hard-pressed parents alike. Filling the gap is Logitech's newest Combo Touch keyboard case, which, for the first time, adds a trackpad to the mix.…

It may have escaped the worse of coronavirus, but no one is immune to bork Bork!Bork!Bork! New Zealand may appear to be practically perfect in every way (at least when viewed through the lens of the UK's Lockdown Number Two) but the city of Christchurch is not immune to bork.…

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.…