The Register

Yeah I've heard you were in a car accident that wasn't your fault. Is that right? *Click* Samsung phones will soon come with automatic spam call blocking. The feature, which is part of Samsung Smart Call, will debut on the Galaxy Note20 and will roll out to all new devices released after 2020.…

Also: Starlinks soar but GPS stays grounded, NASA names first Virgin Galactic flier In Brief There was good news for International Space Station (ISS) residents this week as the crew managed to plug a leak in the orbiting laboratory. While never an immediate threat to the crew's safety, nobody likes knowing that air is escaping overboard.…

Backup, servers, storage, LAN, WAN and SAN, and software galore NHS Shared Business Services, the joint venture between the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care and French outsourcing firm Sopra Steria, has awarded a £500m framework to an army of resellers and technology firms.…

Yes your TV has a 'lifestyle'. Yes we have all been indoors for much, much too long You’ve got the TV. You splashed out on the sound system. But do you have the paint? That’s the question posed by Samsung, which just introduced LivingColour — a range of paint designed to cover the wall behind your pricey flat-screen idiot box.…

Online payment goliath wants to encourage global use of virtual dosh The value of Bitcoin spiked on Wednesday after PayPal said it would soon start accepting cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin, through its online payment system.…

Incredible scoop, read all about it , read all about it Video NASA on Wednesday released images and video footage of the moment this week when its OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft scooped some dirt from the asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles away. The plan is to send the sample back to Earth for boffins to study.…

Finns are going Cray cray HPE will build a Cray EX supercomputer for scientific and AI research in Europe, using AMD Epyc processors and GPUs, it announced on Wednesday.…

And with China’s web giants showing it is capable of enormous scale, there’s still plenty of potential Analysis When OpenStack announced itself on July 19, 2010, it gave itself a mission “to produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”…

You are six nines, I am seven nines, will these reliability stats sink? Microsoft has announced yet another cloud region, this time in Austria.…

No, say it ain't so, maga_christ9000@post.ir Menacing emails to Democratic voters, telling them to vote for Donald Trump in the upcoming US elections or else, were sent by Iran, US intelligence claimed on Wednesday night.…

$2bn Alt-Netflix for those with short attention spans closes after short lifespan Video-streaming upstart Quibi, which tried to differentiate itself from the likes of Netflix by offering episodes that only that ran for ten minutes max, will close its doors.…

Massive public records request reveals scale of warrantless surveillance Never mind the Feds. American police forces routinely "circumvent most security features" in smartphones to extract mountains of personal information, according to a report that details the massive, ubiquitous cracking of devices by cops.…

The swamp is full to the brim as usual in Washington DC, it seems Analysis The powerful US telco lobby has come out fighting against an outsider and its efforts to snaffle tens of billions of dollars worth of much-needed 5G spectrum.…

Digital souks are sitting ducks for identity fraudsters Hackers are breaking into online loyalty card accounts using stolen credentials or easily obtainable information, and then not only ransacking the profiles' balances but also harvesting victims' personal data for subsequent identity theft, Akamai has warned.…

How many times do you want to read the CVSS rating 9.8 today? Oracle has released its final quarterly batch of patches for the year for security flaws in its products. The total this time? 402 fixes, the bulk of which are rated critical in terms of severity.…

Plus: What puts off developers from adopting cloud? Price A new developer survey has shown the popularity of C#, the primary language of Microsoft's .NET platform, slipping from third to sixth place in three years, though usage is still growing in absolute terms and it is particularly popular in game development.…

...even if your 18-year-old mainframe keeps getting flooded and falling over In a warning to all those inclined towards budgetary imagination when finding funds for their next IT project, heed the lessons that are currently being learnt in a certain corner of the midwestern US.…

VIU75 core is 64-bit, runs Linux, supports RV vector extension SiFive, in its ongoing march to help make RISC-V a mainstream processor architecture, will today launch its VIU75 CPU core capable of accelerating vector math.…

Plus: Crowd-sourced data sniffer Ookla hits out at rivals' methodologies Crowd-sourced speed data wrangler Ookla has published its Q3 State of the Internet report, which highlights how UK fixed-line and cellular providers have fared in the months July to September.…

Parallels' Windows on Chrome OS solution is Enterprise-only, but why? Virtualisation software folk at Parallels have released details of a solution for running Windows on Google's ChromeOS.…

One question: Why Redmond, why? Ah, you need to meet developers wherever they are... Microsoft has delivered on its threat to inflict Chromium Edge on Linux. Completist tendencies aside, one would be forgiven for wondering, "Why?"…

Teradata veteran talks up his new home at InterSystems as best of both worlds Interview Tech history comes in waves. One minute you’re riding a crest, the next you’re wiped out. Just ask Scott Gnau, former CTO of Hortonworks, the company once seen as the figurehead of the big data boom.…

Steady as she goes for Microsoft as Edge turns up and Start gets a buffing Good news for Windows fans, the October 2020 Update is here, for some people at least, and the known issues list isn't as bad as the last one.…

Pandemic? Only in that not enough webcams are being made. CEO talks WFH trend, video calls and eSports The pandemic has been kind to some parts of the tech industry and desperately cruel to others. For peripherals-maker Logitech, life has never been so good, with quarterly sales cruising past $1bn for the first time.…

Microsoft says no need to move but gap between .NET Framework and .NET Core is growing AWS has published its Porting Assistant for .NET - which is supposed to help those wishing to convert .NET Framework projects to .NET Core - as open source on GitHub.…

Well, there's a Huawei-shaped opening thanks to Mr Trump and co Another month, and another Chinese mobile behemoth is trying its hand at the European smartphone sector. This time, it's the turn of Vivo, which just released a slew of devices, including its X50 5G flagship.…

No, we're a chemist. We don't sell that sort of patch. Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of computers (largely Windows-based) doing the most annoying of things in public places.…

In case you've forgotten: Google sends Mozilla about $400m a year Mozilla has responded to news of the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google by saying it welcomes it … provided it doesn’t get hurt.…

Websites featuring get super-fast rating despite slower reality In yet another indication that Google uses its domination of the search engine market to benefit its own services, SEO experts have noticed an unusual in-built benefit involve its YouTube video giant.…

If ever there was a job for Docker and containers, this is it India has set itself a new challenge to develop locally-made software that manages shipping – of actual ships, not code - as a way to enhance its regional influence.…

Promises one portal to drive cloud and on-prem workloads, with built-in kit-and-code-mart Dell has announced a new IT as-a-service (ITaaS) experience called “Project APEX” that it says unifies and simplifies the process of paying-as-you-go for enterprise tech.…

This goes some way towards explaining the 5G network kit Jio suddenly announced it had built and would sell Qualcomm and India’s top telco, Jio, have teamed on 5G networking kit.…

Source warehouse asks users to verify recent project commits to ensure they’re not malicious OpenDev.org, which hosts the official OpenStack source code, on Tuesday tore down its Gerrit deployment after realizing it had been secretly hacked two weeks ago.…

Would be nice if civilization could hold out for 2023 to see its return A NASA probe has just now collected material from the surface of asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles (322 million km) from Earth.…

Plus this Chrome one being exploited in the wild, we note The NSA has blown the lid off 25 computer security vulnerabilities Chinese government hackers are using to break into networks, steal data, and so on. The US super-spies said they went public with their list to help IT staff prioritize bug fixing. That is to say: if you're unsure of which patches to apply, do these first.…

Some state AGs feel US govt lawsuit is limited, tech groups worry about implications Analysis The US government finally unveiled its antitrust case against Google on Tuesday, accusing the tech giant of abusing its monopoly of the search and search ad market to keep out competition.…

Beware Greeks bearing gifts Microsoft's born-again love of open source continued today with the sharing of Akri, a project simplifying the use of network edge devices with Kubernetes.…

Adobe issues out-of-band patches, too, for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, etc Sysadmins responsible for VMware deployments should test and apply the latest security updates for the software.…

Search engine giant has officially become 1990s Microsoft Analysis The US Department of Justice has launched its long-awaited antitrust action against Google, accusing the tech giant of unlawfully protecting its search monopoly through “anti-competitive and exclusionary practices.”…

In space, no one can hear you scream, 'Office 365 is down again!' If only there was a way to minimize outages on Earth... Although it may be struggling to keep bits of the Azure cloud vertical in recent weeks, Microsoft continues to eye off-planet applications and connectivity for its data centres.…

Falls short as a generalist database playa, though, says analyst MongoDB - NoSQL database purveyor of the document-store variety - is rolling out a multi-cloud cluster it said will let users deploy a single distributed database across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.…

Lucky old us. Plus: Azure Edge biz service software bundled in US telco Verizon has linked arms with Nokia to build enterprise-oriented private 5G networks.…

ENISA annual report also calls for better use of threat intel by frontline bods Insider threats, ransomware and cyber espionage were all in decline in the early part of 2020, according to the EU’s cybersecurity agency – though the risk of an “uncontrolled cyber arms race” among nation states is growing.…

Can help build more efficient recommendation algos, amongst other stuff it hopes users want Neo4j has added graph embeddings to its machine learning workbench in the hopes data scientists using its graph database will gain a productivity boost.…

Plus: Is it real or is it Photoshop? First preview of Content Authenticity tool Adobe MAX Adobe has updated its Creative Cloud product suite with tweaks including a content authenticity tool for determining what has been faked in Photoshop.…

Distributes it in self-updating Evergreen flavour and Fixed for people who hate surprises Fans of Microsoft's dancing developer goalposts will be delighted to learn that its latest crack at a web control, WebView2, has been declared fit for production.…

Commercially available? Er.... not yet Xiaomi has demoed its latest 80W wireless charging technology that it claims can fully replenish a 4000mAh smartphone battery in 19 minutes.…

Something something national security, right? An obscure court case about radio spectrum licensing law has jumped to greater prominence after a government barrister suggested a High Court judge “left a lacuna in relation to the protection of national security” when he ruled ministers could not tell Ofcom to ignore the law.…

Peddling hard to swerve a pavement pile-up of leased 'mobile assets causing obstructions in the public realm' Transport for London is launching a pilot data project to help it keep track of dockless rental bikes and e-bikes in the UK capital, the aim being to avoid a pile-up of two wheelers dumped on the pavement.…

Agency's 'nauts to ride in US commercial crew capsules 'going forward' ESA handed out contracts last week, with the usual suspects scooping up awards aimed at lunar exploration and beyond. The Register spoke to David Parker, ESA’s director of Human and Robotic Exploration, about the Moon, Mars and when Tim Peake would fly again.…