The Register

'Like an air conditioner with a graphics card'.... Lessons in heat management from Microsoft As excited players fired up Microsoft's latest take on gaming, terrors of the torx screw, iFixit, were busy pulling theirs to pieces.…

Az Predictor aims to spare little grey cells the effort of tracking thousands of cmdlets The Azure PowerShell team has unveiled Az Predictor, a handy command line helper aimed at easing casual users into the often complicated cmdlet world of PowerShell.…

.NET 5, new Visual Studio, F# updates and more Cross platform open source .NET 5.0 has hit general availability and been joined by new versions of C#, F# and the first preview of Visual Studio 16.9.…

Plus: Naming 'n' shaming doesn't stop hostile countries having a pop the UK The former head of the National Cyber Security Centre has warned that some British government figures have a “profound lack of understanding” of cyberspace, online warfare and information security.…

Survey sees CIOs loosening purse-strings, execs feeling mushy about IT crowd (but there are caveats) As the nights draw in, COVID-19 lockdown restrictions tighten across Europe, and the number of cases in the US accelerates, techies who despair may turn to Gartner - the omniscient overseer of IT trends - for a bit of light relief.…

And why not have a server-grade GPU dedicated to game-streaming to test the new abstraction tool Intel would prefer developers stop talking about CPUs and GPUs and instead target "XPUs".…

Project includes shifting back office IT and replacing thousands of devices Transport for London, the body responsible for public transport and infrastructure in Europe’s largest city*, is set to begin talks with suppliers over a potential £1.1bn deal for collecting money for travel.…

'Unusual for a vulnerability on a modern operating system to be this easy to exploit,' says bughunter GitHub security researcher Kevin Backhouse found bugs in Ubuntu 20.04 (a long-term support release) which enabled any desktop user to get root access. The vulnerabilities have now been patched.…

What happens when you mix up the wood and metal screws provided for installation? Heeeeat Updated Amazon’s home security brand Ring is recalling roughly 360,000 of its Wi-Fi enabled video doorbells over concerns they may catch fire when incorrectly installed.…

It's not DNS. It can't be DNS. It's actually a TITSUP* Customers of the UK's self-professed #1 provider of domain names, GoDaddy-owned 123 Reg, have had a frustrating few days after finding DNS records disappearing from their dashboards.…

Full Euro data sovereignty, promises cloud company Google's "first partnership of this kind" with an independent hosting provider sees its Anthos Kubernetes platform offered without ties to Google Cloud, according to the third-party cloud company selling the service.…

And that might be bad news for our sales expectations Swedish telco and network provider Ericsson has warned investors that a potential thawing in relations between the US and China caused by a change of regime in Washington could hurt its bottom line.…

Make it swim with the fishes The US branch of Samsung’s mobile division has asked a New Jersey court to dismiss a proposed class action suit which alleges the business misled customers about the waterproofing on its Samsung Galaxy S7 lines.…

As C# 9.0 is released, a look back at functional programming adoption, what the language is for, and what was a mistake Interview C# Lead Designer Mads Torgersen cracked open a window into the evolution of the language during his spot at the virtual QCon Plus developer conference last week, and was quite frank about what has worked and what has not.…

If you run a physical graphics accelerator and SSD in the G-cloud, pay attention Google Cloud has warned that some of its servers will soon have their firmware upgraded, an event that will likely disrupt workloads.…

TikTok asks court to intervene as administration fails to rule on forced sale ahead of deadline for shutdown TikTok says the Trump administration has gone quiet on whether it will allow the sale of its US operations to Oracle and Walmart.…

No selling to evil folks albeit with a few big loopholes for some The European Union has tightened up export rules on cybersurveillance tools in an effort to limit their spread to repressive regimes.…

Scale the Data Cloud Summit takes place this November Promo There’s probably never been a more appropriate time to move your data to the cloud. Let’s face it, there’s a good chance you haven’t even seen your on-prem infrastructure for months.…

And also – gulp! – figure out when it’s time for a chat about licensing anomalies Microsoft has merrily revealed that it has just given its resellers new tools designed to help them sell you more stuff, more often.…

First stage already on its way to the Red Planet, full steam ahead A joint American-European effort to bring Martian soil back to Earth will need an extra two years and cost about $4bn more than anticipated, an independent review board (IRB) has warned in a report.…

This one's all about putting cricket behind a paywall for nine-figure audiences of ardent fans Amazon has made a big bet on cricket played on New Zealand as a vehicle to help it crack the Indian market.…

Share prices of China’s internet giants slump in wake of call for comment China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has opened a discussion on a revised anti-monopoly law for the Internet age.…

Russian rockets are Putin on the back burner, except for emergencies NASA on Tuesday officially certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule as vehicles capable of flying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, making it the first ever commercial spacecraft system to be approved by the American agency.…

Android, Adobe, SAP, Red Hat join the bug-busting party Patch Tuesday Microsoft published fixes for 112 software vulnerabilities for its November Patch Tuesday, 17 of which have been rated critical.…

Man jailed for 51 months after pilot temporarily blinded by the light An idiot who directed a laser at a police helicopter, temporarily blinding the pilot while he was searching for a shooting suspect, has been sent down for four-and-a-quarter years.…

ARM64 5nm TSMC-made silicon to ship next week, Cupertino claims apps are ready Apple on Tuesday unveiled three computers based on homegrown Apple Silicon processors, marking the start of a two-year transition that will replace Intel microprocessors with Cupertino-designed chips compatible with the Arm microarchitecture.…

They have a point Uber and Lyft have asked a California court to scrap an injunction that forces them to treat their drivers as employees given that the US state's voters backed Proposition 22.…

More data points needed, says academic, but technique could give governments a spoofin' bad headache A group of academics reckon they've found a way to uniquely fingerprint aeroplanes’ Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) tracking transmitters – though an aviation infosec boffin says more research is needed to verify the new technique.…

Pull up a chair with 30,000 of your closest DevOps friends for a free day of learning Promo It’s been a hell of a year. Just as IT pros have been forced to work from home, and DevOps work has shifted into cloud, corporations are learning to scale the education of their employees.…

Obscure interface lets you monitor chip activity with code as if you were physically plugged into it Updated Boffins based in Austria, Germany, and the UK have identified yet another data-leaking side-channel flaw affecting Intel processors, and potentially other chips, that exposes cryptographic secrets in memory.…

Offloaded to local Shenzhen government and Digital China Huawei reportedly intends to sell the Honor mobile unit to a consortium consisting of long-time supplier Digital China and the Shenzhen government, in a deal valued at 100 billion yuan (roughly £11.4bn/ $15.2bn).…

Fancy getting system privs? Swap out a DLL and you're in A British infosec outfit spotted a privilege escalation vulnerability in EA Games’ Origin client after discovering the software was hunting for an absent DLL file when users opened it.…

Pops head around door into party: Oh Qualcomm, you're here too? Taiwanese fabless chipmaker MediaTek today introduced its latest 5G platform for mass-market (affordable) devices: the Dimensity 700.…

Perhaps if you didn't price it higher than the market cap of the entire Group, you'd have sold it before now Capita is still hopeful of finding a buyer for its education software biz despite financial offers reportedly coming in below the expected range of £500m to £700m in mid-October - which at the time was higher than the entire group's market cap.…

Preliminary view is that antitrust rules have been breached After a year of gentle probing, the European Commission has fired off a Statement of Objections to Amazon about the way it accesses sales data generated by third parties on its online marketplace.…

Interconnect tech likely to improve data center operations The CXL Consortium, a standards body focused on interconnect technology, released the 2.0 version of its Compute Express Link specification today.…

Flipping gift cards for cash = fast cars, nice houses and, er, jailtime An ex-Microsoft staffer has been sentenced to nine years in prison after defrauding the Windows giant of more than $10m.…

Licence to float... Financial services software specialist FNI has dodged a $2m licensing bullet by jumping off Oracle databases and lifting its MariaDB environment to the cloud.…

No cure for self-inflicted manufacturing wounds though, sadly Intel's battle to remain relevant continued overnight as it noted the shift to remote working and trumpeted the ways it might assist IT departments dealing with a suddenly remote workforce.…

'It does not set out how the NHS will deliver its ambitions in practice'. As for that paperless NHS? Strategy watered down and deadline dates moved Two years after it began, the NHS digitisation strategy still has no implementation plan and risks repeating the UK health services' legendary IT failures, according to a report by MPs.…

Also: A new Visual Studio Code and back to black for some Dev Channel Insiders In Brief Microsoft's Your Phone has enhanced its Android functionality with a jump from single app support to the considerably more useful ability to launch and run multiple apps on the Windows 10 desktop.…

Pry open that weird little red suitcase and give us a few quid, would you? Cost-cutting at UK tax ministry HMRC has resulted in IT systems that “constitute a significant risk to the department”, according to national spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO).…

Lauches enterprise server trying to make 'pod' data a thing at scale Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is having another crack at fixing the internet’s biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise server.…

Will come as standard from 2022, but other auto-makers have worked on the same kit and code so could catch up fast Hyundai Motor Group has announced an extensive collaboration with NVIDIA that will see the GPU-slinger’s DRIVE platform pull up inside around seven million vehicles each year starting in 2022. But the team-up won’t be hard for rivals in both the car and silicon market to replicate.…

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.…