The Register

HGST drives fared best, but vendor was snaffled by Western Digital Backup specialist Backblaze, which has published hard drive failure statistics quarterly since 2013, says its second-quarter 2020 Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) is the lowest ever recorded at 0.81 per cent overall.…

And antisocial network's efforts to stop spread aren't working, says Avaaz At the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic in April, 82 websites spreading health misinformation attracted an estimated 460 million views on Facebook.…

That's a spicy meatball MediaTek has successfully demonstrated a "5G" data transfer using an Inmarsat Alphasat geostationary satellite, located 35,000 kilometres above the equator.…

You can call me Al For a year that belongs in a Philip K Dick novella, now is not the time to welcome prophets of the technological future, and yet here comes Gartner, banging on the door with its Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle.…

JetBrains works on improving language for cross-platform targets JetBrains has released Kotlin 1.4, a significant update to the Google-preferred language for Android development.…

Failing in Falkirk Bork!Bork!Bork! What to do when a touchscreen is having a totter? Today's entry in the encyclopaedia of bork features two approaches taken by users, one involving duct tape and a musically inclined alternative.…

New licensor's clean-sheet keyboard design better be good, as analyst notes: 'The mobile business has never been harder' Because 2020 isn't weird enough already, BlackBerry phones are coming back. This time around, it's not Chinese OEM TCL at the helm, but rather little-known Texas startup OnwardMobility, which has acquired a licence to the iconic smartphone marque and plans to release an inaugural model next year.…

Is this gonna be forever? "Yes, very good, the balls are the same. Now stop distracting me and let me finish this job."…

Plus: Cali uni that paid $1.4m to crims had decent backup software, but they didn't use it on the affected systems The cruise ship industry is all but shuttered worldwide because the floating hotels are a great way to contract coronavirus. And now the industry's biggest player, Carnival Corporation, has also come down with a case of ransomware.…

Thing was the size of a car, moved at 12km/sec, missed us by just 2,950km A space rock the size of a sports utility vehicle zoomed within 2,950km of Earth over the weekend.…

An unlikely requirement for an engine popular on Android and iOS SQLite, which claims to be "used more than all other database engines combined", has been updated to version 3.33.0 with the maximum size increased to 281TB, around twice the previous capacity of 140TB.…

Cloud and e-commerce boom mean it needs more desks and people that originally planned Amazon will expands its presence in six US cities and add thousands of jobs in a bet that the COVID-19 pandemic will not keep workers out of the office for long.…

Encryption's solid yet that's not the whole story by a long chalk Boffins testing the security of OpenPGP and S/MIME, two end-to-end encryption schemes for email, recently found multiple vulnerabilities in the way email client software deals with certificates and key exchange mechanisms.…

$233 billion revenue in 2019, says IDC, with the top five creaming a third of it Global spend on cloud services hit $233.4bn in 2019, says analyst firm IDC, and the biggest five players accounted for a third of it and grew faster than the chasing pack.…

This article will self-destruct in five seconds A former Apple engineer has spilled the beans on what he's described as a top-secret project Cupertino conducted with the US government back in the 2000s.…

Don’t rush out to buy hardware, this is months from deployment The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the body that oversees the wireless standard, has started work on a specification to allow wearable devices to take on the role that smartphone contact-tracing apps currently play in COVID-19 contact-tracing and notification efforts.…

Larry Ellison hailed as 'terrific guy' but Big Red stays shtum on its intentions US president Donald Trump has signaled his support of Oracle as a buyer for contentions made-in-China social media app TikTok.…

Startups encouraged to get busy with open-source 32-bit Shakti, 64-bit VEGA India has announced a national competition to foster the use of the nation's homegrown RISC-V microprocessor designs in the hope the tech will eventually replace imported parts, and be used to create products in demand around the world.…

Gonna blame a software bug again? Jail phone telco Securus provided recordings of protected attorney-client conversations to cops and prosecutors, it is claimed, just three months after it settled a near-identical lawsuit.…

Just imagine how much easier it will be to sell your data... sorry, find, connect, and play with friends Facebook will force users of its Oculus VR headset to sign up for and log into the antisocial network.…

And: 'Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks' to help Donald Trump win White House race The 2016 hacking of the Democratic Party's email system – and subsequent leaking of its messages – was personally ordered by Vladimir Putin and aided by Julian Assange, according to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.…

Cannot infer an appropriate lifetime, indeed Following Mozilla's announcement last week that it would restructure and cut 250 jobs, the Rust Project, which oversees the Rust programming language, on Tuesday said it plans to work with Mozilla to create a Rust foundation by the end of the year.…

Robert Kennedy's son leads legal charge against vaccines, aluminum, paracetamol... Mark Zuckerberg has been personally sued by an anti-5G/anti-vaxxer pressure group for daring to suggest its claims may not be entirely credible.…

Squeaking in a few late changes Microsoft has emitted an update to the preview of its cross-platform scripting language, PowerShell 7.1.…

First step to self-driving vehicles on British roads RoTM Self-driving vehicles have taken a modest step forward towards legality, with the UK's Department for Transport (DfT) launching a Call for Evidence that will determine the safety and efficacy of Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) with an aim to legalise the technology by spring 2021.…

Profits collapse and income slows as virus stymies turnaround plan Capita, wayward poster child of the UK outsourcing industry, has reported a £28.5m loss in the first half of 2020 as it struggles with the effects of COVID-19 as well as executing a much-needed business turnaround plan.…

'How exactly do you expect someone to review this monstrosity?' Paragon Software is trying to get its NTFS driver into the Linux kernel, but has submitted it as a single dump of 27,000 lines of code, sparking complaints that it is too large to review.…

Some of the providers have staggered back to feet Updated One of the UK's larger data centres has suffered a major service outage affecting customers across the hosting, cloud, and telecommunications sectors.…

Oh, that's right. It was a farce Baroness Dido Harding, head of the UK's COVID-19 Test and Trace organisation and former CEO of TalkTalk, is set to lead the National Institute for Health Protection, the agency being created by the government to replace Public Health England.…

'We will never be able to avoid outages entirely' CTO confesses Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, together with principal program manager overseeing "outage communications" Sami Kubba, has posted about advancing the "outage experience" – not the phrase that usually comes to mind when a cloud failure ruins your day.…

Have containers, will travel Interview Edinburgh-based Skyrora launched its two-stage Skylark Micro rocket from Iceland over the weekend. The Register spoke to business operations manager Derek Harris about the mission and what comes next.…

You need to give that plate back to us after you've finished your cake. Yes the fork too. We'll get your coat The clock is ticking. Microsoft has warned customers its services won't be supported on the veteran browser within the year.…

'The world is hybrid,' the enterprise tech goliath keeps saying HPE has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cabinet Office in what the firm itself described as a "significant departure from the Cloud First policy" initially adopted by the British government in 2013.…

But will it be any good? Chinese smartphone maker ZTE is expected to introduce the world's first commercially available phone with an under-screen selfie camera next month.…

Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters can mix and match architectures for production workloads Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now runs and is supported for production workloads on the cloud colossus’ Arm-powered servers.…

If at first you don't succeed, try, try... try, try, try... try again The Node.js community has finally taken steps to address a longstanding bug that has been hobbling XHR requests over HTTP/2 in Chromium-based browsers, though the fix won't be immediately available to everyone.…

Who needs a new phone when 2018-vintage kit still packs a punch? Samsung has has said it will now deliver three generations of Android to many of its smartphones, a significant shift in policy with the potential to shake up the handset market.…

Plotting new Enterprise Video Sharing Cloud, making mischief for Microsoft, or playing politics? Database and ERP giant Oracle is reportedly preparing a counter-bid to upset Microsoft’s planned purchase of video-sharing social network TikTok.…

Vows to vote for Democrat Joe Biden instead - as will ex-HP chief Carly Fiorina Former HPE chief exec and former Republican candidate for governor of California Meg Whitman has said she will support Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the upcoming US presidential election.…

Connected car vision has been in first gear for years, cloudy scale could jump-start plans Toyota has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services in ways that will see many of its models upload performance data into the Amazonian cloud to expand the services the auto-maker offers to drivers and fleet owners.…

Picks out porkie about data leakage as left and right unite to protest ad giant’s objections Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has slammed Google’s campaign against the nation’s imminent laws that would force it to pay local publishers for linking to their journalism.…

How much d’you reckon Trump wants to grant a pardon? Edward Snowden has brought in a healthy $1.25m in speaking fees ever since he jumped on a plane to Hong Kong with a treasure trove of NSA secrets, a new court filing [PDF] has revealed.…

Two-faced ISP gets $250,000 tickle, will be watched by independent monitor CenturyLink has been caught trying to steal rivals’ customers despite signing a court document promising it would do no such thing.…

Brush up on your data security and protection skills in our upcoming show Webcast If ever there was a convenient push to move stragglers into the cloud, the COVID-19 coronavirus has provided that impetus.…

In America, student schools you! Albion College has a plan for students to return safely to campus this fall amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. It involves being tracked by an app that, at least until a few days ago, appears to have been insecure.…

Commerce Department doubles down on China chip sanctions The US Commerce Department on Monday took further steps to deny Huawei access to American chip-making technology – with the announcement of more restrictions on the China-based telecom goliath and its affiliates.…

Ho boy, here we go again The download page for veteran code wrangler Notepad++ has apparently been blocked by Chinese authorities after its website posted a message in support of those opposing China's so-called national security law.…

F**k the algorithm, indeed The UK government has performed a massive U-turn on A Level exam results, promising to use teachers' assessments of students instead of the computer-driven system that caused havoc and sparked protests over the past week.…

We'll help your organisation better run workloads out in the field Webcast We’re not going back to the office anytime soon. Sorry to keep banging on about this, but we’re experiencing one of the most seismic shifts in daily work culture since the invention of the telephone.…

Oof moment for industry body as tests halted for a month Exclusive British infosec accreditation body CREST has suspended all of its accreditation exams after The Register revealed a published cache of files including what appeared to be internal exam sheets as well as docs apparently tied to key industry player NCC Group.…