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Free smartwatch? Don't mind if I do NHS Shared Business Services has awarded seats on a mega framework for computer hardware to a long list of suppliers in a deal worth up to £1bn.…

F-Secure confirms nature of email nasty to El Reg BP Chargemaster, purveyors of sockets for electric vehicles, seemingly had its email domain hijacked by criminals who used formerly legitimate addresses to send banking trojans to customers.…

Before 'end of Q1'* judgment we round up all the legalese into one place Updated Judgment Day draws ever closer for ex-Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch. As the promised “end of Q1”* date for judgment in the years-long case draws closer, The Register has collated a handy cut-out-n-keep guide to what the case is all about.…

Devs scramble for replacement mimetype data package On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.…

Droughts and transport bottlenecks reduce supply and hike costs. Can the world survive this crisis? Between a certain virus, the recession it caused, political turmoil in the USA, and the usual round of strife, the last twelve months have been distinctly sub-optimal.…

Fabric from Wright brothers' aircraft makes it to Mars Ingenuity, NASA’s dual-rotor drone right now strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover on Mars, is set to perform humankind's first-ever powered aircraft flight on another planet within the coming weeks.…

Execs say they're unworried by new Chinese regs on monopolies and online loans Chinese web giant Tencent has told investors it's ready for China's new antitrust and lending regulations, as it announced FY 2020 annual revenue of US$73.9bn in revenue, a 28 percent year-on-year jump.…

Netflix gets the 'won't someone think of the children' treatment over show for adults Content regulation and privacy have become hot topics in India, in three dimensions.…

66 percent jump saw $19bn change hands, but they’re just 14 percent of global spend China’s big clouds went on a world-beating spending spree to acquire new infrastructure in 2020, according to analyst firm Canalys.…

Most intimate snap yet of M87's supermassive abyss Pic + video Astronomers have captured the most detailed image yet of a supermassive black hole, demonstrating at an intimate level how its magnetic field polarizes light from the phenomenon.…

Posting pics of 'I got the jab' certs, complete with their QR codes, has authorities worried Indonesian officials have asked its nation's citizens to stop leaking their own personal data on social media by sharing pictures of certificates attesting to their receipt of COVID-19 vaccinations.…

Top legal eagles urge web giants to do more in this life and death matter In testimonies from the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to Congress, published on Wednesday ahead of a hearing this week on internet disinformation, the trio revealed their efforts to remove misinformation from their platforms.…

They’ve switched tactics. With Malwarebytes, we'll show how you can, too Webcast Much of the tech world patted itself on the back last year, as organisations switched virtually overnight to remote working and online collaboration.…

House panel to quiz web giant CEOs this week. Expect a degree of deja vu The heads of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will be questioned in Congress on Thursday by politicians probing "social media's role in promoting extremism and misinformation."…

Chat app that was supposed to save us from unsolicited email warms to unsolicited messaging. Now it's kinda walked that back Updated Slack, which became popular as a team chat app in part because it's not email, is now letting users invite anyone, via email, to correspond using direct messages in the Slack app.…

And now the circle is complete Sync is here for the wafer-thin Venn intersection of Linux users running the Edge browser and those who are happy to sign in using a Microsoft account.…

Developer appeals decision, saying 'the reasons are ridiculous' The Chrome browser extension ClearURLs has been removed from the Chrome Web Store, for reasons its developer describes as "ridiculous."…

At last, The Reg online standards converter's time has come Updated The ship that spawned a thousand IT container jokes has been partially refloated [ah, yeah, see update below – ed.] after becoming wedged across Egypt's Suez Canal, blocking a crucial global trade artery.…

It must be a coincidence BT has decided to dangle a one-time pandemic bonus under the noses of tens of thousands of workers as it stares down the barrel of potential industrial action.…

Expect a bigger display and slimmer body thanks to Apple's M1 silicon Researchers have uncovered references to two unreleased iMac models in the latest beta version of macOS 11.3 Big Sur, raising the prospect of an imminent refresh.…

This from the CEO who says 'five days is too much family time' SaaSy HR and finance software biz Workday is backing its return-to-office plan with a $172.5m property investment on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay - at a time when flexible working seems here to stay.…

'Strictly private and confidential'? SERIOUSLY? British clothes retailer Fatface has infuriated some customers by telling them "an unauthorised third party" gained access to systems holding their data earlier this year, and then asking them to keep news of the blunder to themselves.…

Idea was to shift all departments to Big Red's cloud, but some are on Microsoft, Workday, SAP, Integra, and so on In charge of policing, UK borders and the courts, the Home Office has gone live with Oracle HR as part of the Fusion suite in Big Red's cloud, completing its move to software-as-a-service just as the government shifts plans for moving all central departments onto the SaaS model for ERP.…

Cuz I got a 5G combine harvester, an' I'll give you the key Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has shacked up with UK government-backed rural connectivity initiative 5G RuralDorset to test mmWave-based smart agricultural kit.…

Palo Alto Networks lays bare a year of dastardly digital doings Cybercriminals ruthlessly exploited the coronavirus pandemic to set up phishing websites that posed as Pfizer, BioNTech and other household-name suppliers of vaccines and PPE, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Big Red hopes automation will tempt new customers to its cloud Last week Oracle launched an upgrade to its data-warehousing technology that puts SQL, the language on which the company has more or less built its vast fortune, in the background.…

Privacy. Are we there yet? No, but there's some progress at least When version 90 of Google's Chrome browser arrives in mid-April, initial website visits will default to a secure HTTPS connection in the event the user has failed to specify a preferred URI scheme.…

It's a grim time to be in the commercial real-estate business KPMG's latest survey of global CEOs shows widespread belief that the remote-working trend will linger into 2022 as the world gets to grip with COVID-19.…

May have something to do with turning your dad into a cyborg at a wedding VIDEO Hyundai Motor Company and Singapore's dominant telecommunications company Singtel have teamed to build 5G-connected smart factories and an electric vehicle battery subscription service.…

Difficult choices face .uk registry Analysis On Monday, 740 members of .uk internet registry operator Nominet made the drastic decision to ditch five of its 11-strong board of directors, including the CEO and chairman, in a fierce rebuke of the company’s efforts to move from a non-profit organisation to a commercial one.…

New boss already spent 11 years at cloud colossus, has been CEO of data darling Tableau since 2016 Former AWS CEO and Amazon.com CEO-in-waiting Andy Jassy has announced his successor: Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky.…

Unix creators’ sequel-of-sorts seeks simpler licensing, fewer forks of OS that offered precursors to Linux, microservices, etc Bell Labs has decided the time is right to transfer copyright of Plan 9, the not-Unix OS it created in the 1980s.…

Ministries all given goals to infuse AI into operations, some in somewhat startling ways Vietnam has set off in pursuit of a ten-year plan to become a middle power in the field of artificial intelligence.…

App's owner says users didn't bail Messaging app LINE has removed Chinese affiliate’s access to personal data, after infosec concerns led Japanese government officials to stop using the app. Information stored in South Korea will also be rehomed to Japan by September.…

Teams with IBM, creates foundry biz to build x86, Arm, RISC-V cores, schedules in-person conf for October Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday outlined his strategy: getting manufacturing processes right so that Chipzilla can create modular products, and either build them itself or work with third-party foundries. And do that all even as Intel makes a serious tilt at the foundry business itself.…

Even FSF seems baffled by the defiant return of RMS Richard Stallman's return to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), from which he parted ways less than two years ago, has not been well received.…

Castanedas pocketed $2.3m from 800 laptops alone, Feds say A sister and brother have admitted over-ordering hundreds of new MacBooks for "a private university" in Silicon Valley to steal and sell the expensive gear for millions of dollars.…

New post accepted as Chief Impact (on Press Coverage) Officer for BetterUp Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have gone full California with the news that the actor’s husband is to become a tech exec.…

Snafu tripped up Gmail, Google Pay, and a variety of other Android apps For about seven hours on Monday, users of Android devices experienced crashes in various applications including Gmail and other applications that loaded web content.…

Chat-room super-app aimed at gamers now used by 140m people a month Microsoft is apparently mulling snapping up Discord, an IRC-a-like-for-the-2020s popular with gamers, techies, and others, for a whopping $10bn.…

AdoptOpenJDK is moving to Eclipse Foundation, but it is a slow process The Eclipse Foundation has introduced a new Adoptium working group whose goal is to promote free, open source Java runtimes, with initial members including Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, New Relic, and Red Hat.…

Meanwhile, Emma is playing video games, and Daniel... well, Daniel is drunk already Transcription service Otter.ai has unleashed another remote-working survey. Today's report revealed that not only are workers not bothering to dispense with nightwear, a minority are content to virtually meet with just their undercrackers on.…

'In my 30-plus years as an IT pro, I have never been a part of a more difficult work situation,' says victim A California federal court has sentenced a "vengeful" techie to two years in the clink after he deleted 1,200 Microsoft user accounts belonging to a client.…

Well, you wanted to be just like Apple, right? The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has followed up its attempts to double a billion-dollar award from Apple and Broadcom for patent infringement by turning its sights on Microsoft.…

Uptick in attacks since schools reopened, warns National Cyber Security Centre Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has urged universities, schools, and colleges to be vigilant following an increase in ransomware attacks targeting educational institutions.…

Software behemoths to spend 2021 fixing CSS pain points While its managers squabble, engineers at Microsoft and Google have put their heads together to ease some of the more severe developer pain points in browsers. Spoiler: it involves CSS.…

Backup company says tracking code now removed, but what info was sent? Backup specialist Backblaze has fixed an issue where a Facebook advertising pixel was "inadvertently" included on signed-in web pages – but users are concerned private filenames and sizes were also sent to the social media giant.…

Public spat over code quality, reworked code set for 13.1 release, pfSense firewall also affected A faulty implementation of WireGuard, a high-performance VPN protocol, has been removed from FreeBSD 13.0, shortly to be released, and a new implementation will not ship until the arrival of 13.1.…

Got a link? Change the last character and bingo, it's blackmail time Exclusive Bulk SMS messages sent by local councils across the UK contained weblinks leading to pages that freely exposed to the public thousands of taxpayers' names, addresses, and outstanding debts, The Register can reveal.…

Sun, sea and software? UK south coast authority goes all in on Redmond Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council has awarded reseller Bytes Software Services a three-year contract for Microsoft software and cloud services that could be worth up to £18m.…