The Register

Third-party skills and smart speaker incarnations also discontinued Microsoft has decided to restrict the roles that its AI assistant Cortana is permitted to fill.…

Doug Engelbart had the idea. Bill English did the engineering and made the first ever mouse William English, who helped build the first computer mouse in 1963, died last week at the age of 91.…

Behold, the Move of Certain Doom Who, Me? Take a trip back to the 1980s with a Monday morning cautionary tale of cleverness, COBOL and mainframe programming in today's Who, Me?…

Payroll company kept over $70m of tax and founders spent it lavishly The co-founder of a company that left IT contractors unpaid has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years.…

Meanwhile, Linux KDE desktops can be pwned by evil archives In Brief Cisco customers once again find themselves needing to patch critical vulnerabilities in Switchzilla's gear.…

Automation tool RDS can now push MySQL and PostgreSQL onto Arm, MariaDB coming soon Amazon Web Services has made instances powered by its home-baked Arm servers more approachable by starting a preview of its Relational Database Service (RDS) on the hardware.…

Apple leads in shipments, but also records the slowest growth among branded fondleslab-flingers Tablet computer shipments have grown by 18.6 percent thanks to the COVID-19 crisis.…

Lots of love for AMD and POWER 10 and a hint of some Google's operational code making it into future releases Linus Torvalds has released a new version of the Linux kernel.…

‘Appreciates President Trump’s personal involvement’ and promises so much security, you’ll be tired of securing Microsoft has confirmed it is considering the purchase of made-in-China social network TikTok and that its CEO Satya Nadella has spoken with US president Donald Trump to re-assure him about the security and taxation implications of the putative purchase.…

Plus: Latest hardware results from MLPerf and why so-called text deepfakes are dangerous In brief Rite Aid, an American drugstore chain, secretly deployed facial recognition cameras to spy on its shoppers across 200 stores for eight years.…

Book tries to sell science to girls, so our nine year-old Reg reviewer gives her opinion Book review In Dana Dash: First Girl on the Moon, it shouldn't be surprising that Dana Dash, a 10-year-old science-obsessed girl, makes it to and walks on the Moon – but that doesn't make it any less exciting.…

Don't bother packing your bags for HSC J1631+4426 just yet, it's 430 million light years away Astronomers have spied a tiny galaxy with the lowest oxygen levels yet observed, a discovery made possible thanks to a machine-learning algorithm.…

Jeff knows you've gotta spend money to make money Amazon got the stamp of approval this week from America's communications watchdog to operate thousands of internet-relaying satellites into low Earth orbit.…

Biz and city officials 'frequently ignored' invoice rules, prosecutors said An IT provider has settled with the US government regarding a row over medical billing in New York City.…

Alleged 17-year-old mastermind among trio charged over account mass hijackings Three individuals were charged on Friday for allegedly hijacking a string of high-profile Twitter accounts after hoodwinking the social network's staff.…

You lot sort it out In 2015, as part of a privacy review conducted under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nick Doty flagged a potential problem with web applications.…

*If you have a PlayStation 4 The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column back for the first time with an exclusive PlayStation 4 title. This was a big release surrounded by needless controversy and immense expectations that needed some time sunk into it. Does it stand up now the dust has settled? Absolutely.…

No, we have not used the term 'digital transformation'... oh bugger Continuing to democratise IT, the big four scooped up 63 per cent of the whopping $34.6bn that customers spent globally on cloudy infrastructure services in Q2.…

It'll be a tough sell against the OnePluses and Motorolas around Another day, another middle-of-the-road phone. This time it's the turn of Oppo, which just announced the international release of the Reno 4 Pro after an early debut in China. The latest handset from the BKK-owned firm comes with a price tag of (roughly) £355/ $470.…

Don't worry if one's loitering in your garden, it'll buzz off in a while It is the balmy midsummer day when they grow wings, fly about in the hot sun, and get stuck to every kind of food and beverage. Yes, today is SysAdmin Day.…

Total vendor shipments down 88.5 million year-on-year in first half of 2020 Apple was the sole top five smartphone brand to report any growth in calendar Q2 – for everyone else, sales were in free fall as shipments plummeted across the sector by an astonishing 14 per cent.…

$4.5m may have gone into crims' pockets after bookings biz hit by Ragnar Locker nasty Exclusive US corporate travel management firm Carlson Wagonlit Travel has suffered an intrusion and it is believed the company paid a $4.5m ransom to get its data back.…

Get 'em while they're hot Job Alert As the month draws to a close and with the pandemic still biting, we're back again with our free list of job opportunities in the big and beautiful world of tech.…

Couldn't come at a better time as Cambridge museum remains closed Spotify is to music what Steam is to video games – sometimes you just want to spin some classic vinyl while picking through the liner notes, feel the gatefold between your fingers.…

COVID-19 ravages former state monopoly as nearly all divisions shrink While the cloud businesses at Google and AWS are shovelling cash under their mattress and Apple is making bank, back in Britain BT has been left to count the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Inflammatory findings from deadly serious investigation Some 3D printers can be flashed with firmware updates downloaded directly from the internet – and an infosec research firm says it has discovered a way to spoof those updates and potentially make the printer catch fire.…

Join us and find out more with Box in this German-language online broadcast Webcast As the coronavirus crisis has gripped the world for the past few months, it’s become increasingly obvious that remote working can work extremely well with a good many advantages. Collaboration can, in fact, be boosted, with a greater number of remote workers able to work together digitally on projects that may have been, in the past, executed only in an office environment.…

Cow about that? A bit of computing history has been inadvertently unearthed in the Netherlands after a refit of a shop revealed signage for long-forgotten computer brand Gateway.…

That means no security updates, which puts users at risk of compromise An investigation by consumer watchdog Which? has found that nearly a third of all phones sold on second-hand sites are no longer supported by the vendor, leaving punters at risk of being hacked.…

Russian, Chinese, Nork groups named in bank asset freeze The European Union has, for the first time ever, slapped sanctions on hacking crews.…

Three big upgrades since 2018 suggests it's far from terminal Cult text editor GNU Nano has released a major update, taking the terminal-based program to its fifth version in twenty years.…

Careless autoreplies cripple email at the heart of local government On Call The week is drawing to a close and the weekend awaits. Is there a better way to kick things off than with an episode of Register reader experiences in our regular On Call feature? Probably, yes...…

20 light hours from Earth and still sending home data Voyager 1, the first human-created object to leave our Solar System, has quietly knocked off another milestone: it’s now more than 150 Astronomical Units from our Sun.…

Story behind a hasty teardown, fixing of a brute-force vulnerability Zoom has confirmed it fixed a vulnerability that could have been exploited by miscreants to crack the passcodes needed to access strangers' private chin-wagging.…

Attack came in waves that probed for staff with access to the creds crims craved Twitter has offered further explanation of the celebrity account hijack hack that saw 130 users’ timelines polluted with a Bitcoin scam.…

Won't degrade. Won't catch fire. Will be a fine fit for electric vehicles South Korean battery-maker SK Innovation will team up with 2019 Nobel Prize-winner John Goodenough to develop a new solid-state gel battery.…

And is willing to fine them hundreds of millions if they don't play nice Australian regulators have proposed to compel web giants to divulge forthcoming changes to the algorithms they use choose the content their users see, and to submit to binding arbitration when publisher seek payment for their content.…

Chocolate Factory's as-a-service stuff grows as advertising, profit takes a tumble Google-parent Alphabet saw its bottom line take a tumble this past quarter as the coronavirus pandemic cut into its lucrative advertising business.…

And stuff that Cupertino just banked billions from Apple is weathering the COVID-19 storm well so far: on Thursday, it reported a surge in sales from its online souks, and maintained iPhone revenues despite temporarily shuttering stores during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.…

When the economy's tanking, who ya gonna call? Jeff Bezos! Amazon on Thursday reported $88.9bn in revenue for its second quarter of 2020, a 40 per cent increase year-on-year that exceeded expectations and lifted the web goliath's already buoyant stock in after-hours trading.…

Proof-of-concept algorithm-matching system paves way for more complex recommendation engine Intel engineers, and academics from MIT and Georgia Tech, have built a neural network that predicts whether two snippets of code intend to achieve the same aim even if they're written differently.…

Brush up on your RESTful, gRPC, container development skills with us online Webcast Building an application from the ground up for your business has never been quicker or easier. With REST for web services leading to the RESTful architectural style, and containers proving the perfect delivery model, the combination of DevOps, microservices, and automation means an organization can create almost anything, instantly.…

Warnings either not new or need more study, reckons open-source dev team Neal Krawetz, a computer forensics expert, has published details on how to detect Tor bridge network traffic that he characterizes as "zero-day exploits"... which the Tor Project insists are nothing of the sort.…

Some argument over exact numbers affected Dell is laying off staff though there is some dispute over the numbers involved.…

'The concept of paying for monitoring per host has not aged well' Application Performance monitoring (APM) biz New Relic has trimmed its offerings to three core products and is moving away from host-based pricing to a per-user-per-month subscription and pay-as-you-go for data ingested and events processed.…

Larry, stop giving Bill ideas Bill McDermott – the former SAP CEO right now plying his trade at the top of workflow whizkid ServiceNow – has competed hard against Oracle for so long that he seems to have borrowed more than a few lines from Larry Ellison’s playbook.…

Reverse tabnapping is no more Mozilla's Firefox 79 is here, but general users shouldn't get too excited – almost all the new features are aimed at developers.…

Or maybe you want a List. Or a Task. Or a Planner. Just bung it into Teams Microsoft has shared more details about Dataflex, its low-code/no-code app platform that will be embedded into Teams - something it should have done much earlier to help demystify things.…

Folk outside London cry: Why doesn't Alexa understand me? To those of us born here, Britain is a wondrous cornucopia of accents and dialects. To visitors, like US-bred AI assistants, people outside of London may as well not speak English.…

And its lightweight virtualized RAM and CPU project, Napoca, too Security vendor Bitdefender has open-sourced its hypervisor introspection technology, which the Xen Project will adopt as a sub-project.…