The Register

'The scope of commercial and creative potential is profound' Ignite Microsoft has bagged exclusive rights to use OpenAI's GPT-3 technology, allowing the Windows giant to embed the powerful text-generating machine-learning model into its own products.…

And shows that even Redmond cannot resist the rise of hybrid Kubernetes Ignite Microsoft has flicked the switch on its Azure Arc hybrid infrastructure manager and unveiled some upgrades to its Azure Stack HCI and Hub hybrid cloud offerings.…

'People analytics' tool touted to count folks, measure how close they are via video cameras Ignite Microsoft's Spatial Analysis, announced at its Ignite virtual event today, uses artificial intelligence to count the number of people in a room and monitor social distancing.…

Domain controllers at risk of hijacking, depending on version and configuration Administrators running Samba as their domain controllers should update their installations as the open-source software suffers from the same ZeroLogon hole as Microsoft's Windows Server.…

Big money, says CEO, but what would it cost not to find and fix these vulns? Bounty-hunting hackers are uncovering new vulnerabilities every two minutes on average, according to bug bounty platform HackerOne.…

Azure Communication Services embeds real-time comms into any app, but sharing tech with Teams not a selling point for everyone Ignite Microsoft has pitched up in the fairly competitive comms API space with Azure Communication Services (ACS), a new service now in preview, which lets developers include voice, video, chat, and SMS messaging in their web, mobile, and desktop applications.…

This means Linus Torvalds has definitely won, doesn't it? Ignite Microsoft will release its Edge browser for Linux next month, initially through the browser's Dev preview channel.…

Birds that aren't geostationary can tap Redmond's Ground-Station-as-a-Service for all their downloading needs Ignite Microsoft has come up with a way to de-orbit data and land it in a cloud.…

Plans HPC play with AMD, Intel silicon, too Oracle will add Arm-powered servers to its cloud and tout them as delivering "the best price-performance compared to any other x86 compute instance on a per core basis with an order of magnitude of cost savings."…

Virtual commutes and touchless meetings Ignite It wouldn't be a Microsoft event without some VP somewhere banging on about Teams, and the company's annual Ignite (now virtual) get-together did not disappoint.…

Flexpai may have been a world-first, but it wasn't very good. The follow-up phone straps on 5G The history books will remember that the first tech company to release a foldable phone wasn't any of the usual suspects but rather a little-known Chinese outfit. Sure, Royole's Flexpai was universally panned, but that hasn't deterred it from releasing a 5G follow-up.…

Sam Newman speaks to devs at GOTOpia Europe Sam Newman, a consultant and author specialising in microservices, told a virtual crowd at dev conference GOTOpia Europe that serverless, not Kubernetes, is the best abstraction for deploying software.…

Also makes itself denser, in a good way, with 128-core N2 upgrade Arm is taking another serious tilt at server silicon with new designs that incorporate the Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) beloved of HPC and machine-learning types.…

You can only use it to weigh yourself now... how disgustingly low-tech In 2015, German sportswear manufacturer Adidas acquired a plucky Austrian IoT startup called Runtastic, which, among other things, manufactured a $129.99 "smart" scale called Libra. Now that product is being discontinued, preventing owners from synchronising their data or even downloading the app required to use it.…

Fitness fans get more battery capacity in thinner case, and replacing it is doable for the brave iFixit, terror of the tri-point, has pulled apart Apple's latest wrist job and found that the friend of the well-heeled fitness fanatic has retained the repairability of its predecessor.…

Yes, why not haul the system into the 21st century? The UK's Ministry of Justice has put out market feelers for the second time in three months in what could amount to a £20m deal, this time for a new payroll system.…

Also: Rocket Lab rehearses for a US debut while Firefly fires up an Alpha In Brief Mother Nature scuppered SpaceX's twelfth operational launch of its Starlink satellites, forcing the company to throw in the towel "due to severe weather in the recovery area."…

Once you're over the learning curve, it's a cross-platform all-rounder Review When you think about iconic mechanical keyboards, the Happy Hacking is among the first to spring to mind. Its compact design is unusual if you're used to full-sized boards with the numpad, function keys, and arrow keys excised. The result is a keyboard that is unfathomably small, occupying little desk real estate.…

Decentralised app rolling out soon, but manual process remains problematic In the absence of a working contact tracing app, the UK government has been forced to rely on manual data collection and human-powered tracing to identify potential cases of exposure to the Covid-19 virus. But, as Parliament’s cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights claims in a new report, this is just as problematic as the original centralized app, particularly when it comes to user privacy…

Single high-level impulse noise kicked in with morning cuppa. Owner vows never to use the set again Turning off an old second-hand television has restored internet services to a village in Wales.…

Join us on September 29 – and get ready for 2020’s OWASP Top 10 Webcast OK, it’s only updated every three years or so, which means it’s not quite the same as breathlessly clustering around the radio to see whether Blur or Oasis have grabbed the top spot or whether Rhiannon’s Umbrella is still number one, or whether team Taylor will see off Perry.…

What strange magic is this? 41st release and sequel to version 3.38 will be called version 40 Popular open source desktop-and-more outfit GNOME has taught itself a new way to count.…

Ambitions to see the rise of a Brit equivalent to Apple is cool and all but that strategy must include safeguarding chip designer, says union The UK government has been urged to add legal protections to the proposed £31bn sale of Brit chip designer Arm to Nvidia to protect jobs, protect its neutral business model, and make sure it remains headquartered in Cambridge.…

Branded tat and disrupto-talks could return - albeit nine months later than usual in Oz plague capital Cisco has invited its faithful to travel abroad to a mass-attendance event in December 2021.…

Scumbag sobs in court as judge orders him to cough up $1.5m The front man for the notorious Dark Overlord hacker gang, which threatened to leak stolen confidential information unless paid off, has been sentenced to five years behind bars in America.…

Court sends him into lockdown that’s not a whole lot nastier than some used to control a certain virus An IT contractor has been found guilty of pinching his employer’s supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency.…

At least one WiFi access point and five FTTP connections in each India’s government has ordered a broadband building blitz that will see all 45,945 villages in the State of Bihar connected by optic fibre before March 31st, 2021.…

Nancy is among 15 former Big Blue workers now suing the mega-corp for age discrimination IBM has once again been sued for alleged age discrimination, this time in Texas on behalf of 15 former employees.…

TL;DR: Trump is confusing everything to stay in the spotlight Analysis Each day for the past six days, the sale of the US wing of the video-sharing app TikTok has been alternatively approved and not approved, each time with a wave of announcements, tweets, press releases and 24-hour news coverage.…

Strange, it didn't show up during development, says social network Twitter says its AI that automatically crops images in tweets didn't exhibit racial or gender bias when it was developed – even though in production it may prefer to crop out dark-skinned people and focus on women's chests. The social network acknowledged it has more work to do to address concerns.…

You will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered Netgear has decided that users of some of its managed network switches don’t need access to the equipment's full user interface – unless they register their details with Netgear first.…

What goes up must come down. Or is it the other way round? Just weeks after Salesforce reported huge Q2 profits only to lighten the company payroll by more than 1,000 staff, the badass of CRM software has now said it plans to hire 12,000 or more people over the next year.…

Comes not long after firm ditched hybrid-electric propulsion demonstrator Airbus has lifted the lid on proposals for airliners that run on hydrogen, months after pulling the plug on a battery-powered testbed aircraft.…

How will CEO Safra Catz manage on her $950k salary in this environment? With the economy in uncharted waters as a result of a global pandemic, and businesses and homes under the spectre of another virus-related lockdown, spare a thought for those less fortunate in our society. Yes, Oracle executives.…

Robert Downey Jr's back to tell everyone how great it is OnePlus has confirmed its 5G-capable 8T flagship phone is scheduled to land on 14 October in an online-only event.…

Also: Darkness beckons for Dev Channel Insiders, TypeScript 4.1 beta arrives, Xbox swallows Bethesda In Brief Release Channel Windows Insiders were treated to Build 19042.508 of Microsoft's flagship operating system last week as Microsoft readied the OS for an October release.…

*Brexit Satellite. What did you think we meant? GPS continues to rule the roost in Blighty for now The UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy today denied the government had reconsidered its position on Galileo following weekend reports about it ditching plans for a homegrown alternative.…

Where are the search warrants for this? asks ex-Brexit Secretary Conservative backbencher David Davis has vowed to ask questions in Parliament over Uber's seemingly unregulated sharing of data with police and transport regulators as it battled to save its London taxi licence.…

It's avoiding the 'constraints of 10 years of design decisions' apparently GitHub has released version 1.0 of its CLI, allowing interaction and control of repositories from the command line.…

Plus: Lazarus Group joins the big league, ex-Aussie PM doxxed, new flaw found in Bluetooth, and more In brief A pair from Russia have been indicted for stealing nearly $17m worth of cryptocurrency.…

Citizen app, reporting for duty UK utility Anglian Water has declared itself in the market for suppliers to help with DevOps, Agile, and big data "transformations", reciting a laundry list of requirements that is as remarkable for its sheer exhaustiveness as it is for swallowing the buzzword dictionary.…

Tripp's off the hook for Tesla's supposed $167.37m market cap damages, though Tesla has successfully torpedoed a countersuit brought against it by a former employee accused of stealing confidential internal info from the luxury electric carmaker.…

A big time saver – but 'we can't tell if the current logic that you have in the code is correct or not.' Oh Oxford-based Diffblue has claimed its AI will automate one of the most important but tedious tasks in software development: writing unit tests.…

Optimistically aimed at airport-bound folk It’s not exactly the best time to launch a travel mouse, is it? Nobody’s going anywhere, except perhaps to the shops. Oblivious to this fact is Swiss peripherals Logitech, which today introduced smaller flavours of its MX Master 3 mouse for both PC and Mac, dubbed MX Anywhere 3.…

Tune in online this week and we'll show you ten things you can do better right now Webcast If working from home is the new orthodoxy, isn’t it time we started laying down some rules about how to do this securely?…

Why is it that ultrabook-makers can't give us more places to stick our USBs? Review September didn’t bring any new Huawei phones, but it did manage to push out a crop of new laptops, including an updated Matebook 14 2020. This machine could be described as a humble mid-ranger, but that would largely be missing the point.…

Estée Lauder’s pricey goop gets seat on next ISS resupply mission as Japanese companies pledge zero-G cosmetics Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of "Advanced Night Repair" skin serum and the suitable-for-zero-G “CosmoSkin” cosmetics-in-space project.…

You've been visited by the Don Corleone of code Who, Me? It is Monday, and time to stare glumly at the week of patching that lies ahead. Pause a while before hitting that update button with a cautionary tale from Who, Me? about support contracts and a naughty, naughty programmer.…

Government sysadmins given weekend to fix ZeroLogon elevation of privilege bug, rest of us given stern warning The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has taken the unusual step of issuing an emergency directive that gives US government agencies a four-day deadline to implement a Windows Server patch.…

Imminent demise of IE 11 and Angular JS means upgrades are incoming VMware is about to make some changes to its vSphere clients and users are going to have to make jump through some upgrade hoops to remain in complete control of their VMs.…