The Register

Just in time for the second wave and new movement restrictions England's National Health Service has finally released its COVID-19 contact-tracing app and while it is late to market compared to other nations' efforts, it appears to have more functionality than many.…

Join us next month to feel the Intel® Optane™ Effect Webcast Whatever the computing problem is, the traditional answer has been to throw more servers at it, which today means throw more processor cores at it. AI model building? More cores. Ecommerce? More cores? Pharma development? More, more, more.…

Also looks to have security and SaaS news in store for next week’s VMworld Strong hints have emerged that VMware is close to making the Arm version of its ESXi hypervisor a proper product.…

Incompatibilities and inconsistent standards support among browsers ensure an ongoing source of headaches Web developers resent having to deal with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, which they cite among their top three pain points, alongside layout and styling inconsistencies among browsers.…

RISC-V design can play nice with Arduino and was totally home-spun so that’s something India has taken another small step towards silicon-self-sufficiency with the unveiling of a new domestically designed system-on-chip. But the microprocessor is a few generations behind best practice and won’t set the world on fire.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Territory wants to snip subjects to squeeze in coding, but knows its teachers aren't up to the job Hong Kong has proposed a new school curriculum packed with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) content – even though it lacks a working definition of STEM and its staff lack the skills to teach it.…

Elon Musk wants his money back, Volvo, Ford, Mercedes also pile in Tesla has sued the US government, seeking to not only end what it described as President Trump's "unlawful" tariffs on Chinese-made components but also a refund on all duties paid – plus interest.…

Video-sharing app appears to have had enough of presidential posturing TikTok has asked the courts for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the the Trump administration from banning the video-sharing app in America this weekend.…

Federal versus state action – the endless conundrum for the United States The legislative dance around a federal data privacy law continued on Wednesday at a Congressional hearing where a range of former FTC officials and California’s Attorney General were quizzed on how to make it a reality.…

Winner winner, lawsuit-binner An administrative law judge this week dismissed the US government's claim that Oracle unfairly underpaid its female and minority workers by hundreds of millions of dollars.…

Proposed Section 230 overhaul shockingly free of hyperbole Analysis The US Justice Department has emitted its proposals for changes in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – the magic shield that, with a few caveats, protects websites from being held legally responsible for their users' comments, posts, and other content.…

Accused senior management insist they weren't involved Four of the seven former eBay employees charged with cyberstalking a couple critical of the web auction house are scheduled to plead guilty next month.…

Tired of all the new at Microsoft's Ignite? Enjoy a bit of DEC goodness Microsoft has followed up the delightfully retro CRT style available in its Windows Terminal application with the arrival of a blinking attribute familiar to DEC fans of old.…

PCs for suited penguins Lenovo is expanding pre-installed Linux support to more of its machines in a bid to court the sizable developer pound.…

New features announced for Dynamics 365, but is it enough in 'notoriously tricky' market? Ignite Microsoft has confirmed new features for its supply chain software in a bid to boost its stature in a market packed wall to wall with established competition.…

Also two new budget blowers including £99 MicroUSB unit His gender politics are questionable. He drinks like Gazza. Put him behind the wheel of a sports car and watch him break every rule in the highway code.…

Google's cross-platform development tool targets the Windows desktop with support now in alpha Google's Flutter team has introduced the first alpha release targeting Windows, extending the cross-platform development tool to enable the same code to run on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS and web apps.…

He either missed the memo or doesn't believe it ServiceNow's unstoppable showman CEO, Bill McDermott, has been telling anyone who will listen that the business's "destiny" is "to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century".…

Same mob promised not to target healthcare facilities The Doppelpaymer ransomware gang were behind the cyber-attack on a German hospital that allegedly led to one patient's death, according to local sources.…

Augment me to the Moon, with AR among the stars Ignite Microsoft will spread its eyewear for the wealthy (or corporate sponsored) across more countries, and has said it is seeing action in NASA's repeatedly delayed mission to the Moon.…

Chucks in Xbox Live Game Pass and other 'freebies' to sweeten the £599+ deal People don't buy flagships like they used to, and you can blame that on coronavirus or the rise of budget-friendly brands like Xiaomi. Regardless, a huge part of consumer smartphone spending is shifting downwards so Samsung has unveiled its latest not-quite-a-flagship device: the Galaxy S20 Fan Edition.…

Not personal info, but there are worries over deanonymisation. Remember that AOL research database? Microsoft exposed a 6.5TB Elastic server to the world, including search terms, location coordinates, device ID data, and a partial list of which URLs were visited, earlier this month.…

67P is a gift that keeps on giving GIF Astronomers have discovered an aurora in an unlikely place: Comet 67P.…

The Redmond-aligned can try the Cupertino-spawned lingo thanks to a Googler's intervention A Google programmer has made tools for Apple's Swift programming language available to developers using Microsoft's Windows operating system, a move likely to rekindle hopes that Swift, open source since 2015, will become popular beyond the macOS and iOS ecosystems.…

Extension developers told to look elsewhere for a sales provider Google has decided to shut down the Chrome Web Store payments API permanently after what was supposed to be a temporary closure at the start of the year.…

MCAS saga still hasn't ended as reps warn of trim wheel problem The British Airline Pilots' Association (BALPA) has told American aviation regulators that the Boeing 737 Max needs better fixes for its infamous MCAS software, warning that a plane crash which killed 149 people could happen again.…

Redmond to take baby steps on desktop while established vendors turn gaze to enterprise deployments Ignite Microsoft has been flexing its muscles in the robotic process automation (RPA) market during its current virtual shindig, promising a happy marriage between bot-building and its low-code development platform.…

Promises full autonomy and big range boost too Tesla will make cars out of batteries and says doing so is the way to cut electric car costs to $25,000.…

No flight info, no adverts, just blackness... Bork!Bork!Bork! In these troubled times, it can often feel like there is no escape. Even an airport, once a gateway to adventure, now shows only a blank screen and, of course, bork.…

It’s always important for us to understand your views. That's why we’re shutting them down In an extraordinary display of raw political power, the organisation in charge of the .uk internet registry has responded to growing criticism of its actions by silencing critics.…

Join us this month to learn how to squeeze 25 years of local backups into the cloud Webcast One of the great things about moving to the cloud is not having to worrying about PST files any more, isn’t it?…

Techie teens, not IT support, tasked with helping work-from-home parents sort out vid calls, Word and Excel files, antivirus – survey report Parents are turning to their kids for tech support rather than the company IT department while working from home, we're told.…

Seeks first-mover advantage and says US dollar ripe to be dethroned China’s central bank has laid out a digital currency world domination plan.…

Operation DisrupTor will 'significantly disrupt the online opioid trade' A nine-month international operation spearheaded by the FBI has led to the arrest of 179 people across the world for selling drugs on the dark web.…

Seemingly ignorant of the fact that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter already operate a similar project Made-in-China social media app TikTok has proposed a code that a coalition of social media firms would use to help identify and remove harmful content from their platforms.…

Releases new Intel-powered server as Chipzilla confirms it won a license to sell .... stuff it won't discuss Updated Huawei rotating chairman Guo Ping has opened the Chinese giant's annual Connect conference by saying the manufacturer's goal right now is “survival.”…

'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.…