The Register

'I'm not going to be bullied by someone with deeper pockets' vows Orca boss Palo Alto Networks has threatened a startup with legal action after the smaller biz published a comparison review of one of its products.…

It's 2020. Things are weird. So maybe it's time to dance alone to 'Back Dat NAS up' If you thought things couldn’t get any more weird right about now, then this may be the nadir of an already odd 2020: COVID-19; Trump being Trump; a likely hard Brexit; and now someone working in tech rapping about SQL Server has just released some sounds.…

Better late than never, eh The European Union has imposed sanctions on a Russian military malware developer and the commander of Russia’s MI6 equivalent, a mere five years after the two targeted Germany's parliament with a cyberattack.…

But company also has its eye on Kubernetes at the edge Ubuntu 20.10 is out, with Canonical highlighting its Raspberry Pi support, including not only desktop support but also micro clouds based on MicroK8s, the company's lightweight Kubernetes distribution.…

Gloomy workers unlikely to moan about open plan again as office reopening slides to July 2021 Remote working is the gift that keeps on giving, as Microsoft's workforce reacted glumly to the Windows giant's plan to push back the reopening of its US offices.…

'That button is there on the app' says minister. How many times have you heard a client make wild claims about functionality? The NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app for England and Wales* has a major flaw. Yes, another one. People told to self-isolate by the app are unable to access a code required to claim a £500 financial support grant.…

It takes 'grit' to send in a holograph to meetings instead of struggling with mute buttons yourself... Forrester has offered its contribution to the pantheon of failed predictions gathering smart-dust in the broom cupboard of IT history with its assertion that blockchain is coming to polish up AI's tarnished image.…

Snaps vs Flatpaks, losing in mobile, Microsoft and Linux, and avoiding another GNOME 2 to 3 disaster Interview Patent assertion entities: do not pick a fight with open source. It won't end well for you. This is the message from GNOME Foundation executive director Neil McGovern, who will speak on the subject at the Open Source Summit Europe next week.…

Do you really need so much RAM, though? Six months after OnePlus released a flagship, it followed with a slightly upgraded refresh of the same device. You can distinguish these souped-up variants from their predecessors by the "T" in the name. One such device is the OnePlus 8T — an affordable 5G powerhouse.…

My careful plan to save the economy Something for the Weekend, Sir? People say I don’t care but I do. I care a lot.…

Greasy goodness plays havoc with a PC's disk Bork!Bork!Bork! The best borks are the simplest, and today's is no exception. A black screen, a plaintive message, and a nugget of the Colonel's menu for the hungry masses has been lost.…

IBM builds AI that correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests Machine-learning algorithms analyzing human communication can predict whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease more accurately than standard biomedical screening, say IBM and Pfizer.…

The 'S' in SX, stands for 'Sporty', ok? On Call One of the hardest tasks in IT is giving a user what they need, while also persuading them it's what they want. Join us for another tale from our weekly On Call column where a Register reader achieved the seemingly impossible.…

Immigration reforms allowing more skilled workers to stay seem to have resulted in permanent residency Russia has apparently given super-leaker and former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden de facto permanent residence.…

With DSTI’s data engineering MSc, you can study in Paris, Nice, Lagos… or home Promo Data scientists like to think of themselves as doing the sexiest job of the 21st century, but it’s only because data engineers let them think that way.…

It's saying something when it's easy to believe the US President's passphrase was maga2020! Donald Trump's Twitter password was easily guessed, and he still isn't using multi-factor authentication, claims a Dutch hacker who on Thursday bragged he broke into the President's account last week. Twitter says it has "no evidence" this claim is true.…

Reveals hosting service for WhatsApp Business API and gives its partners reasons to be fearful Facebook wants to host some of your customer data, an offer that hurts its own partner community.…

Privacy crackdown in the land of ubiquitous surveillance, where 5G now blankets all cities Through most of 2020 bans on Chinese apps have meant geopolitical strife, but China yesterday revealed it has started banning some of its own apps.…

Taiwanese chipmaker promises ‘substantial assistance’ in ongoing China IP theft action Taiwanese chip-maker United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) will plead guilty to theft of trade secrets from Micron Technologies and pay a $60m fine to the USA.…

Enterprise and govt data-center sales halve, Xeon processors delayed Intel shares dived today after it revealed a steep slump in enterprise and government sales of its server chips – and delays to its latest Xeons.…

Energetic Bear team caught breaking into govt systems, no harm done to Nov 3 elections The FBI and the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday issued a joint warning that a Kremlin hacking crew is probing or breaking into systems belonging to the US government and aviation industry.…

Mojang bows to the inevita... oh, look – a free cape! With the inevitability of death and taxes, Microsoft-owned Mojang is to require players have a Microsoft account for all its games, including the Java Edition of Minecraft.…

I feel the need, the need for 16mph taxiing in safety Rise of the Machines Boeing has successfully taxied its Loyal Wingman robot fighter jet around an airfield, a key milestone for the aircraft to operate fully autonomously.…

US lawmakers can look away now. Actually, don't Amid grumbling from lawmakers, Microsoft has pushed out a fresh diversity report, sprinkling the odd "must try harder" among the corporate back slappery.…

Mate 40 family could be the company’s ‘last hurrah’ in smartphones outside China - analyst Beleaguered mobile biz Huawei’s Consumer Business Group has rolled out its newest flagship devices: the Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro.…

For everyone else there are splash screens, fixes and iffy anti-malware Fresh from nudging the October 2020 Update out of the door, Microsoft has emitted an update to next year's Windows 10 in the form of a fresh Insider Dev Channel build.…

You know, the firm that runs half of NHS Business Services French-headquartered IT outsourcer Sopra Steria has been struck by a “cyberattack,” reportedly linked to the Ryuk ransomware gang.…

Open source observability for debugging and tracing The OpenTelemetry community has taken another step toward General Availability with the first release candidate of the tracing specification.…

No, he's not dragging his cool vintage steamer-style suitcase onto an IKEA armchair in a host villa ... it's a 'special' design relationship Jony Ive’s design firm LoveFrom has inked a deal with the app-that-takes-a-cut-of-users'-holiday-rentals Airbnb in a multi-year “special relationship,” the short-term gig economy rental platform said today.…

'I didn’t realise that our success would lead to government attention' Microsoft co-founder and long-serving ex-CEO Bill Gates has admitted naivety in his dealings with Washington around the software giant’s fabled antitrust case with the US Department of Justice (DoJ).…

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.…