The Register

The vulnerability allegedly leaked his location, making him a target for hitmen The older brother of dead Colombian cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar is suing Apple for a whopping $2.6bn over a security vulnerability that allegedly allowed miscreants to access his location via his iPhone X handset.…

Oh wait You can file this one under: "Better late than never." The General Court of the European Union has annulled an earlier European Commission ruling blocking a merger between O2 and Three on competition grounds, following an appeal from the latter.…

Trendy systems programming lingo tops poll fifth year on the trot Rust for the fifth year in a row has held its position as the most-loved programming language in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, even if it's not the primary language for most programmers and not many jobs require it.…

Not just a bunch of complete bankers Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another entry in the pantheon of borkage. This time from an Android app demonstrating that the path to success is to first find failure.…

'Split-shift model' to safely help 'critical infrastructure workforce' do its thing Broadcom has sent staff back into corporate offices in England – though workers elsewhere in the UK can continue working remotely, a letter seen by The Register reveals.…

A dozen daring firms will duke it out for the right to get India talking and take on the world! HCL and Zoho are among the companies shortlisted in the Indian government's competition to develop a locally-made video conferencing platform for its own use.…

Dev sticks with elderly GTK+2 GUI toolkit because 'we would gain nothing' by upgrading The sound-tinkerers among you will be pleased to learn that Ardour 6.0 is out, representing a major upgrade of the open-source digital audio workstation for Linux, macOS and Windows.…

And still no sign of safe software or approval to fly Boeing has resumed production of the 737 Max, its passenger plane with software so flawed that its certification was yanked after being found to have caused two fatal accidents.…

Losses deepened, optimism increased Nutanix has beaten the interim guidance it offered investors as the COVID-19-induced economic slowdown impacted its operations.…

Unethical developers drum up bogus user counts to gain trust Efforts to manipulate installation counts in Chrome Web Store extension listings appear to be alive and well, despite a developer's personal crusade to call attention to the problem.…

Launch comes ahead of UK rolling out its controversial version Switzerland says it is the first country to roll out a contact-tracing app for the COVID-19 coronavirus using technology and a set of APIs produced jointly by Apple and Google.…

Prime Minister gives e-cash and e-government a hurry-up as Apple tunes in to its manufacturing smarts Vietnam has accelerated its adoption of all things digital.…

Trump's throwing everything at the social wall to see what will stick Opinion “In their natural habitat, when chimpanzees become angry, they often stand up, wave their arms, and throw branches or rocks – anything nearby that they can get their hands on. When chimps are removed from the wild and kept in captivity, they experience stress and agitation, which can cause them to react in the same way – by throwing things,” explains the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada.…

Workers told to take five days of compulsory leave ‘so we can better care for each other’ In the halcyon days of April, before IBM initiated its latest round of mass redundancies, the IT giant told staff in its Australian and New Zealand operations to take a break – and brace for a deluge of post-lockdown work in the third quarter of 2020.…

Demand high, components MIA The three months to April 30 were "complicated," HP Inc said on Wednesday while trying to explain why its sales dropped by double digits in its fiscal second quarter of 2020.…

Lightning strike threat postpones lift-off to Saturday NASA's attempt to launch American astronauts to the International Space Station aboard an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade was aborted today due to bad weather.…

Just don't expect a full battery Apple has released the fifth version of macOS Catalina, and fixed yet another stability issue that saw machines crash during large file transfers; the latest in a long series of problems with version 10.15 of the operating system.…

'Something malfunctioned' as timer was about to hit double digits Wannabe satellite flinger Virgin Orbit has shared more detail on what went wrong and right in the very brief maiden flight of LauncherOne.…

Best change any recycled credentials from your blogging days Russian-owned blogging service LiveJournal has reportedly suffered a hack affecting 26 million user accounts.…

You’ve come to the right place: We’re running a webcast to show you how Webcast “The journey to cloud” echoes through all organisations. It’s a Bildungsroman – a story of empowerment and betterment. A shiny, towering cityscape of gleaming edifices and elegant spires. It’s like an ascension into the actual clouds. Like dying and waking up in heaven.…

Same specs, but now it's a Pro Almost four months after it was first unveiled, Motorola has finally announced a European release for its Moto G Stylus phablet.…

More than dozen services down, customers left unable to work Adobe technicians scrambled on Wednesday to restore multiple cloud services after a severe outage left customers stranded.…

You know sick people call ambulances using mobile phones, right? Another 5G mast has gone up in flames in Liverpool in the UK, in this case mere days after it was erected.…

Still on Java 8? You'll need to upgrade to 11 to use it Updated Google Cloud Platform has added Java 11 support to its serverless Cloud Functions service.…

Reality intrudes into politics and tech once again Updated Cleansing Britain's phone networks of Huawei equipment by 2023 might not be possible, ministers are said to have realised after UK policy changes on the Chinese company in the last few weeks.…

If you're anything like us, you dream of reorganising your country's highways. This is a new system they want to tighten up data streams, but still Highways England is shopping for a new £62m National Traffic Information Service to help collect, process and disseminate real-time data and information about traffic on 4,300 miles (6,920km) of road.…

How may I secure thee, let me count the ways... There was good news for enterprises keen to inflict Microsoft's Edge browser on their users with the arrival of a new security baseline and a way to turn off the Surf game that arrived in version 83.0.478.37.…

Although perhaps your lockdown digs are tidier than ours Audio kit flinger Skullcandy has embedded Tile's gadget-tracking tech to help you skin your knuckles fishing out its latest all-wireless earbuds from under the well beneath your handbrake.…

'It should not be used for interactive shell work' – Windows Terminal chief Microsoft senior program manager Rich Turner took to Twitter in recent days to remind everyone that it really is time to move on from Windows' ancient command processor, cmd.exe.…

Supply and demand in action Crime has never been cheaper to pull off, so long as you're not particular about quality.…

A viable alternative to the platforms with billions of active users between them? There's still work to be done Analysis Rich Communication Services (RCS) was initially pitched as the inevitable successor to SMS, offering enhanced multimedia functionality and other fun stuff, like read receipts.…

Surprise! IBM has brought Netezza back from the dead in a move likely to sow further confusion among customers of Big Blue's enterprise data products.…

Tweeter-in-chief responds by alleging bias and electoral skulduggery Twitter has for the first time acted on inaccurate tweets made by US president Donald Trump.…

Behold, the three error dialogs of the borkpocalypse Bork!Bork!Bork! As the UK tentatively returns to work and those who must venture back onto public transport, we were happy to learn that even in these changed times, Windows remains as wobbly as ever.…

Ride-sharing monster doesn't operate in current home, is illegal in special administrative region Uber has proposed moving its Asia-Pacific headquarters from Singapore to Hong Kong.…

Infosec's Drivergate scandal deepens Microsoft has blocked a Trend Micro driver from running on Windows 10 – and Trend has withdrawn downloads of its rootkit detector that uses the driver – after the code appeared to cheat Redmond's QA tests.…

Peer-to-peer currency exchange without an institution in the middle but with 'controllable anonymity' for central bank China will test a digital version of its currency at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.…

You're working at home, but who’s got the remote control? Promo The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has propelled the trend for flexible and remote working into the stratosphere. Millions of people worldwide are cocooned at home and bent over all manner of devices and apps as they carry on working. But remote working on a giant scale also means the threat attack surface just got much, much bigger.…

Naughty JS can watch you hit control+F, start typing, see what's on your mind Analysis A browser feature being developed for the open-source Chromium platform has raised data-leakage privacy concerns – though the Google engineers working on the project contend the potential benefits outweigh the risks.…

Axed IBMers given chance to write almost-certainly futile letters to defend their jobs after the pink slip arrives IBM’s new round of “resource actions” – Big-Blue-speak for sackings – has reached Australia, The Register has learned, and will result in the creation of new cross-disciplinary teams to serve clients.…

As the legalese changes to extend data retention period India has open-sourced its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app and announced a bug bounty program to detect any security issues.…

Lawsuit claims Charter's 'fixed' monthly fees are anything but Analysis In many ways it’s a rite of passage in America: being ripped off by your cable company and trying to figure out how they did it. Now a lawsuit against Charter Communications is seeking to uncover just that.…

Judge tells US ISP: OK, seems fair Despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, US ISP Frontier Communications has insisted on giving key staff $38m in bonuses and other incentives – and an American judge has agreed.…

Bi-partisan amendment aims to take away easy access to your online life US lawmakers will get another vote on whether the FBI must get a warrant before agents can search Americans’ search and web-browsing histories.…

Daniel Abt's career stalls after he struggled to shift from physical to virtual courses mid-pandemic With motor sports going virtual amid the coronavirus pandemic, it appears not everyone is coping well with the change in gear to online.…

The rules of war that protect hospitals should extend into cyberspace Following the surge of cyber attacks on medical facilities, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and more than 40 other international leaders asked the governments of the world to do more to safeguard critical medical organizations amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

Thank heavens everyone had to start working from home, right? IT number-cruncher-in-chief Gartner has predicted a sharp fall in the sales of personal hardware during 2020.…

'There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill' – sadly no longer the case The Microsoft developer who wrote Task Manager, along with other utilities and games, has popped up to "write this stuff down before I forget it all".…

No win, no fee. But if they win it's an up to £5.4bn fee A law firm that is already chasing British Airways now claims it is suing Easyjet for up to £18bn, intending to take a modest £5.4bn cut for itself, after nine million people's data was stolen from the airline's servers.…

Meanwhile: the UK government is going to clear everything up. Or at least keep an eye on it Roundup Musk may be about to fire off a crewed missile and Virgin Orbit's first attempt to reach space might have fallen flat, but there was plenty of other fun to be had in the rocket-bothering world last week.…