The Register

Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces – other IRS that can ruin your day Wireless networking researchers have proposed a way to jam wireless signals without power.…

Integration with Azure suits both sides Microsoft was prominent at the virtual Dockercon event last week as the companies extended their agreement to work together on integration between Docker and the Azure cloud.…

Chinese giant slips out superslim - 7.49mm - flagship and pals Chinese smartphone brand Vivo - one of several from the BBK stable - has lifted the lid on its latest flagship phones, whose gimmick is that they are super-slim, although the focus is on photography.…

Cybercrooks take revenge after planned heist failed The REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware gang has just published what it claimed were files stolen from UK power grid middleman Elexon.…

It's too long a retention period, say digital rights campaigners Privacy rights campaigners are to legally challenge the British government's decision to retain for two decades the data of people that test positive for COVID-19 under the test-and-trace system.…

Windows bod acknowledges project's influence on WinGet Microsoft's Andrew Clinick, a group program manager in the Windows team who is involved with the development of the WinGet package manager, has tried to make good with the open-source community by publishing an acknowledgement of what was borrowed from the existing AppGet project.…

But that's exactly what will happen if you decorate Androids with pretty mountain scene A picturesque Android wallpaper image is exhibiting some unwelcome side effects on most Android phones, effectively "soft-bricking" them until the user manages to perform a factory reset.…

Too bad, Craig. Now, about those court costs? A self-described "blockchain expert" claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin has had his attempt to sue a YouTuber, who made a video rubbishing that claim, laughed out of the UK High Court.…

Also: Rocket Lab reschedules, ESA probe eats comet exhaust, China shares space station plans Roundup As well as that launch and docking, there was plenty to amuse rocket fans last week as China unveiled space station plans, ESA aimed for more bonus science and Rocket Lab named the date. Again.…

First financial TITSUP* of June goes to... Updated UK retail banking giant Lloyds Banking Group's online services have rung in June with a wobble.…

Also: Multi-window Teams, Skype does the Blankety Blank dance, and more Roundup It has been a busy seven days in Redmond. In addition to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update finally being released, we also saw Skype flashing nine tired lockdown faces at once, some Azure database tweaks and more.…

You say fintech, they say findom, let's call the whole thing BOFH Bork!Bork!Bork! There is a cautionary tale in today's edition of finest bork as a digital sign does exactly as instructed, but perhaps not quite as intended.…

Here's hoping the winner does a better job than Sopra Steria The UK Home Office is set to begin talking to tech and outsourcing services suppliers to assess how the Visas and Citizenship (V&C) Directorate can hand over large chunks of its operations to the private sector in deals that could be worth up to £1bn.…

And if you win, we'll make it into a kitemark British companies have been offered access to a £400k pot of cash to design a UK-specific "kitemark" assurance scheme for Internet of Things products.…

There are perks to starting out as online-only, says Gartner Most smartphone vendors unsurprisingly experienced precipitous sales declines in the first quarter of 2020. Most, that is, except Xiaomi, which improbably managed to beat the odds by upping shipments to grab market share.…

Even the aircon worked in the Muskmobile SpaceX and NASA have finished a fine weekend's work after the Crew Dragon capsule successfully made it into orbit and docked at the International Space Station…

Beware the forgotten bit of test text lurking in the application Who, Me? Surprise! It's Monday again! The weekend has evaporated once more, so pour a coffee, steal one of the expensive executive biscuits and tuck in for another tale of reader woe in The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Workstation has one job: running VMs. And now it can do it on Windows with Hyper-V enabled Microsoft and VMware have ended an ancient grudge that made the latter's Workstation desktop hypervisor behave badly on Windows.…

As he gives us version 5.7 with support for Apple power tech and better exFAT Linux kernel overlord Linus Torvalds has railed against 80-character-lines as a de facto programming standard and has moved to make reminders to keep things short a thing of the past.…

They’re not very sophisticated, but they’re working: Watch and learn how to fight back Webcast You’ve probably had the COVID-19 coronavirus social-engineering scams quietly filtering into, hopefully, your junk folder by now. Featuring anything from bogus medical research with malware-laden URLs to one-to-one approaches offering fake vaccines, it’s not taken very long.…

Plus: Amazon mulls snapping up self-driving startup Roundup Let's catch up on recent bits and bytes from the world of machine-learning.…

New agency will hustle small retailers onto digital payments and teach seniors how to Internet Singapore has crated a new “SG Digital Office” to “drive the Government’s initiatives to accelerate digital adoption in our community, as we embark on a phased recovery post COVID-19.”…

May well have been killer algorithm, too Australia will refund more than AU$720m (US$480M) to residents adjudged to owe the Federal government a debt that did not exist.…

Plus other news from infosec land this week Roundup Six Cisco-operated servers were hacked via SaltStack security vulnerabilities, the networking giant revealed this week.…

Bob and Doug are first humans launched into orbit by Elon's Muskteers Video NASA has successfully launched two American astronauts aboard an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade, sending them off toward the International Space Station. It also marks SpaceX's first launch of humans into orbit.…

There's a starship waiting for the sky, he'd like to come meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds Video In yet another setback for Elon Musk's beloved steel spaceship, a SpaceX Starship prototype has exploded on the pad during a rocket test burn.…

There's a starship waiting for the sky, he'd like to come meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds Video In yet another setback for Elon Musk's beloved steel spaceship, a SpaceX Starship prototype has exploded on the pad during a rocket test burn.…

'No evidence of damage to network or computers, no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data' On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state's voter registration system.…

'No evidence of damage to network or computers, no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data' On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state's voter registration system.…

Land Of The Free to List All The Websites You Use Twitter, Reddit, and the Internet Association on Thursday filed a legal brief in support of a challenge to the US State Department's policy of requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media handles and profiles.…

Land Of The Free to List All The Websites You Use Twitter, Reddit, and the Internet Association on Thursday filed a legal brief in support of a challenge to the US State Department's policy of requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media handles and profiles.…

Probing by El Reg's Chris Mellor highlighted in class-action complaint A US law firm is seeking owners of certain shingled Western Digital drives to join a class-action suit against the storage slinger, alleging the manufacturer didn't document its use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in kit aimed at RAID arrays.…

Probing by El Reg's Chris Mellor highlighted in class-action complaint A US law firm is seeking owners of certain shingled Western Digital drives to join a class-action suit against the storage slinger, alleging the manufacturer didn't document its use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in kit aimed at RAID arrays.…

SaaS is no replacement for disaster recovery as we're about to find out next month Webcast While moving into cloud working environments often meets a fair degree of push-back, the other side of the coin is that businesses believe throwing everything into the cloud makes them suddenly immune to any of the previous, established occupational hazards of networking technology.…

SaaS is no replacement for disaster recovery as we're about to find out next month Webcast While moving into cloud working environments often meets a fair degree of push-back, the other side of the coin is that businesses believe throwing everything into the cloud makes them suddenly immune to any of the previous, established occupational hazards of networking technology.…

Chief beancounter for cloud quits for pastures new The departure could not have come at a worse time for SAP, but Todd McElhatton, veep and chief beancounter for the Cloud Business Group, is the latest person to hang up their hat at the German database giant.…

Chief beancounter for cloud quits for pastures new The departure could not have come at a worse time for SAP, but Todd McElhatton, veep and chief beancounter for the Cloud Business Group, is the latest person to hang up their hat at the German database giant.…

No Wi-Fi, no newsfeeds – just you, 2G, and your awful music taste The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic was the primary tormentor of late-2000s commuters*. With a powerful built-in speaker and room for a micro SD card, shellsuit-sporting hoodlums could serenade weary bus-goers with the latest computer-generated noise from the Ministry of Sound.…

No Wi-Fi, no newsfeeds – just you, 2G, and your awful music taste The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic was the primary tormentor of late-2000s commuters*. With a powerful built-in speaker and room for a micro SD card, shellsuit-sporting hoodlums could serenade weary bus-goers with the latest computer-generated noise from the Ministry of Sound.…

'In Ihrem Budget fehlen sechs Nullen' warned MP Austria's parliament came within moments of slashing its annual spending limit to peanuts after someone omitted the key words "figures in millions" from its national budget bill.…

'In Ihrem Budget fehlen sechs Nullen' warned MP Austria's parliament came within moments of slashing its annual spending limit to peanuts after someone omitted the key words "figures in millions" from its national budget bill.…

'Keeping all of the best elements from the G1'... and none of the bad, please HP has given the moribund Windows Mixed Reality market a shot in the arm by opening pre-orders for its long-teased HP Reverb G2 headset.…

Now you can program like a native with your £899 Surface Pro X – keyboard not included Good news for those who have splashed the cash on Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro X – the software behemoth has emitted an ARM64 build of Visual Studio Code.…

The Reg speaks to Blood Music about its retrofuturistic love letter to the adventure game golden age The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. 2020 (or is it 2077?) is the year of Cyberpunk on the Desktop, with CD Projekt Red due to release its hugely anticipated project in September. That's still some way away, so we are once again forgoing the enhanced capabilities of our rig in favour of something that wouldn't look out of place in Sierra's early '90s back catalogue. It's also the first video game we've heard of to be published by a heavy metal record label. Do we have your attention? Then let us enter the VirtuaVerse.…

Spawn of ALGOL turns middle-aged Pascal, a descendant of ALGOL 60 and darling of computer science courses for decades, turns 50 this year.…

Fix the crits and backload the rest later Over the first quarter of 2020, the number of security bugs disclosed by software makers fell 20 per cent though not for any of the right reasons, it seems.…

Cold weather missed approaches went left instead of right - and vice versa A very specific software bug made airliners turn the wrong way if their pilots adjusted a pre-set altitude limit.…

Wireless kit has 40 hours' battery life, but turn off the RGB fripperies and you might get 135 days Swiss peripherals maker Logitech has lifted the lid on its latest mechanical keyboard – the G915 TKL.…

Indian giant's center of power moves from Texas to Paris Wipro has named its new CEO: 25-year Capgemini veteran Thierry Delaporte will take the big chair as of July 6th.…

Cultures clash when a combustion turbine goes K-pop On Call Friday has rolled around once more, bookending a sunny week in the UK and promising a weekend free of actual work. Unless, of course, you are one of the unfortunates cursed to be On Call.…