The Register

Not easy to Cobol together support for 50 critical 'heritage' apps used by courts, apparently The UK’s Ministry of Justice has handed incumbent supplier CGI a new £90m contract without open competition in a seemingly desperate bid to keep its Cobol, Fortran, and Pascal applications up and running.…

5G ain't free, you know CK Hutchison Holdings, the Hong-Kong based parent of UK network Three, has confirmed plans to sell its European tower business to Cellnex, a Spain-based operator of wireless telecoms infrastructure.…

No-no-no-no-no! I'm going to lose my bid on the £7 horse mask, um, I mean important lockdown things I need Second-hand tat bazaar eBay was unavailable for some UK users this week, after Virgin Media and TalkTalk mistakenly blacklisted the site’s CDN in their parental control filtering software.…

Don't turn on the camera, don't turn on... Oh hi! Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am going to expose myself.…

Remake of noughties classic HMD Global has served up another ladle of Nokstalgia*, with one more remake of a classic mid-2000s phone - a 4G-capable rehash of the corporate-tastic Nokia 6300, which first saw a release in 2007.…

These algorithms identify different types of viruses, we're told Boffins have demonstrated that machine-learning algorithms may be able to help scientists identify viruses, and could even be used to develop more efficient tests for the presence of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the near future.…

Throw in a clipboard and you look like you're the business On Call Welcome to On Call, the The Register's Friday celebration of those called out for the most spurious and silly of reasons.…

But most recent quarter was a bit grim with revenue down nine percent and switching, routing, servers and wireless sales all slumping Cisco has revealed that the first quarter of its new financial year saw a 13 percent fall in product revenue and “weakness” among commercial and enterprise buyers and while execs have forecast a rebound guidance offered to shareholders is for revenue to be flat or worse.…

Learn to think like an attacker so you can start fighting back Webcast This year has turned corporate IT upside down, scuppering digital transformation plans as tech teams struggle to keep the lights on and support a suddenly remote workforce.…

Taxes change all the time, but shifts in behaviour are usually slower than the rush to WfH Deutsche Bank has proposed governments impose a tax on working from home.…

Says Beijing’s internet monopoly and lending laws are nothing to worry about, pledges IaaS bounce-back Tencent has posted quarterly results that feature the usual assortment of very, very, large numbers heading in pleasing directions, but also admitted that its cloud operation was not able to match the surge reported by other hyperscalers around the world.…

Wipes away gore, dials up data protection and finds $100m to boost local gaming industry Super-popular shooting game PUBG has plotted a route around India’s ban on Chinese apps by announcing a version of the game tailored to the local market's moral and legal sensibilities.…

'No evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised' After months of fretting about the possibility that the 2020 US election might be derailed by tampering or foreign interference, nothing notable happened.…

Server problems mar operating system version 11 rollout Apple on Thursday released macOS Big Sur, the latest iteration of its desktop operating system. Designed to support the iPhone giant's new line of Apple Silicon devices, scheduled to ship next week, the operating system upgrade didn't quite go as planned.…

Because they’re military pawns of evil commies, says president de-elect President Donald Trump has issued an executive order "addressing the threat from securities investments that finance communist Chinese military companies," which will bar US-based companies from investing in several notable Chinese technology companies.…

Coincidentally, Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft Python has surpassed Java to become the second-most popular programming language in the TIOBE index, one of several imprecise yardsticks used to rank what's in vogue among coders.…

How the de-Googled phone works Interview The /e/ Foundation has brought a de-Googled phone to market - we got one to try, and spoke to founder Gaël Duval for all the details behind this brave effort.…

Seeking something perpetual for Windows on Arm? You can make do with a 32-bit Intel emulation There were fresh salty tears from Microsoft fans overnight as the company posted an Arm version of its Office suite. For Mac users.…

Tens of millions of usernames and passwords go walkies amid claims of decryption Child-friendly games website Animal Jam suffered a hack that exposed 46 million user records after a staff Slack channel was compromised by malicious people who discovered a private AWS key.…

CSIS policy wonk describes supply chain attack to Parliament The F-35 fighter jet programme’s costs were inflated after China compromised a software vendor in Lockheed Martin’s supply chain, forcing a ground-up rewrite of a potentially affected system, a policy wonk has claimed to UK Parliament.…

Bought 'estimated onomastic data' tagged onto data of millions of Brit voters The UK's ruling Conservative Party has been using personal data in a way that spots an individual's likely county of origin, ethnic origin and religion based on their first and last name.…

Native wit... but let's see what the 13-inch brings Benchmarks highlighting the performance of Apple’s homegrown M1 chip have surfaced, showing Cupertino’s latest (unreleased) MacBook Air handily trouncing the previous generation 16-inch MacBook Pro in both single-core and dual-core tasks.…

Mesa contributor issues a warning: community matters Intel's driver support for Linux is improving, but has raised an eyebrow or two within the open source community as a Mesa contributor noted that Chipzilla's code-sharing development model was not necessarily a win.…

Wider government only told of encryption machine nobbling a year after it ended Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was (quite literally) owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed.…

Detecting deceptive websites as soon as they get registered may help reduce the contagion of misinformation Academics in the US and UK have created a machine-learning tool for predicting when newly registered internet domains will be used to spread false information, in the hope these sites can be blocked or shut down before they pollute online communication channels.…

EFF on the attack as IT giant tries to claim free supplies during 'device lifetime' just an introductory offer HP Inc is under fire for not only ending its promise of free ink for life but also automatically enrolling customers into a subscription plan to continue using their printer ink.…

There are no tags today, but there will always be bork Bork!Bork!Bork! One benefit of lockdown in the UK has been a surge of national creativity, be it in the form of rainbows crafted from a variety of materials or the sheer quantity of excuses created when faced with a Joe Wicks* workout. But it seems not even a temple for the arts and crafts is immune to the curse of bork.…

The bad guys looking after the good guys... or is that the other way round? Life's so complicated Cleveland Police in northeast England has handed a £4.2m contract to incumbent IT integrator and outsourcing provider Sopra Steria to host and maintain its Oracle E-business Suite applications in Big Red's cloud.…

More than 100 heads to exit UK division in the New Year, and then there's Scandanavia IBM has almost topped and tailed this calendar year with redundancies in the Global Business Services division - staff across Northern Europe are heading into the Christmas period amid uncertainty about whether they’ll have a job in 2021.…

Just tune in next week and find out more Webcast When it comes to speeding up application delivery, one of the biggest sources of friction can be the security team. And that’s entirely understandable, if unfortunate.…

Gmail, Drive to count toward 15GB of gratis cloud space, caveats abound Google will cap its free online storage to 15GB per person, give or take some caveats, and users will have to pay if they go over that limit – or have their excess data deleted – the search giant said on Wednesday.…

AMD’s Ryzen to the challenge with new embedded CPUs AMD’s taken the wraps off four Ryzen processors aimed at embedded applications, thin clients and mini-PCs.…

Geo-boffin urges fellow scientists to consider again link between supernova and radiocarbon levels Astronomers seeking to chart the history of supernovas that once lit up our skies and flooded our planet with radiation ought to take a look at tree rings, it's been suggested.…

Knox and Google device enrolment now play nice together Samsung regularly tops Android handset sales charts and has arguably done more than any other handset-maker to make the OS. Yet the Korean company did not make the list at the launch of the Android Enterprise Recommended program, a scheme that Google created in early 2018 to point out which ‘Droids are ready to offer enterprise-grade services like remote management and swift security updates.…

Cute animals rendered useless for two hours as streaming site got the wobbles The video locker was slow to load videos and balked when asked to upload new content on Wednesday, from just before midnight GMT. While all but night-owl European users mostly missed the mess, North American users woke up without their favourite early morning streams and some Asian users were also deprived of their favourite vids and top notch strategic content like Reg lectures.…

Best result for seven years comes as tragedy shows tech remains out of reach for many India clocked up its most prolific PC-buying quarter for seven years, with 3.4 million new devices shipped in the country between July and September 2020.…

Another one collared by FBI, indicted One day after an idiot was put behind bars for four years for shining a laser at a police helicopter, the Feds announced they've indicted a man accused of risking the safety of three passenger planes.…

Plus liquid cooling to hit 580k orders/second on record $75bn 11.11 shopping bonanza day Video Alibaba claims its online marketplace coped with a peak load of 583,000 orders per second on this year's Singles Day, China’s internet shopping frenzy event akin to Cyber Monday.…

Plenty of money left to play for Epic Games scored a victory in its ongoing acrimonious legal battle with Apple this week after a federal judge dismissed several of Cupertino’s counterclaims.…

Will Section 230 become the new net neutrality? Analysis The FCC has been sucked further into partisan politics with the nomination of a new commissioner to its panel of five overseers.…

Big battle still raging between Apple, Google, Amazon Roku streaming devices will now support Apple’s AirPlay2 streaming and HomeKit smart home protocols.…

Sending codes over the insecure public telephone network isn't the way to go Microsoft on Tuesday advised internet users to embrace multi-factor authentication (MFA)... except where publicly switched telephone networks are involved.…

Upgrade now on Azure App Service, if you can tolerate a 'cold start' Microsoft has released ASP.NET Core 5.0 as part of the general availability of .NET 5 this week, with new features and substantial performance improvements but also some breaking changes.…

'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.…