The Register

Users will be able to 'override ... restrictions' on phones and other kit, says engineering team Android 11 Beta 2, out this week, is a fairly modest update, focusing primarily on stability and bug fixes. But behind the scenes there are strong indications that a broader shift is afoot, with Google trying to address overall ecosystem inconsistencies that have formed since its initial release.…

Not sure they spent that much on 'high risk' kit from ZTE and Huawei, coughs analyst Analysis The caution couldn't be more stark. In a meeting with the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday, execs from BT and Vodafone warned UK lawmakers that a deadline of 2023 to remove Huawei-made equipment from their networks will result in multi-day mobile signal losses for some customers.…

Just what Vladimir Putin's favourite bank wanted to hear, no doubt Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has declared that governments can't "take 10 years to catch up” with cyber crims – while speaking at an infosec conference organised by Vladimir Putin’s favourite Russian bank.…

You're unlikely to hear someone inflicting their iOS Spotify playlist on the bus today Those using Facebook to log into services such as Spotify on their iOS devices are having a bad Friday, as something has gone awry with Zuckerberg's ad-slinging platform.…

Good news if you're a fan of Topre switches Fujitsu has refreshed its line of iconic developer-oriented Happy Hacking mechanical keyboards.…

No support 'in any capacity' for PHP for Windows for v8 and beyond, but Windows users not to worry, says release manager Born-again open-source fan Microsoft is celebrating 25 years of PHP by, er, pulling its support for the scripting language that is beloved (or dreaded) by server operators the world over.…

The artist formerly known as Advanced Computer Software Group confirms redundancies Brit-based software biz Advanced has confirmed to The Register it is trimming the workforce in response to the commercial impact of COVID-19, with 150 people understood to be leaving the organisation.…

Mazda shrugs off ex-owner's bizarre involuntary data retention story A UK man who woke up one morning to discover his bank account being charged for satnav services linked to a car he'd sold months previously has expressed his frustration at Mazda and TomTom over the strange affair.…

Tech team still 'investigating,' no ETA of fix If a digital bank is unable to regularly provide online banking services, at what point does it cease to be a digital bank? Some disgruntled customers of Smile, a trading division of the Co-Operative Bank, may be posing this very question after five full days of woe.…

Nationwide network operator gets into tizzy with chimney owners IoT biz Sigfox’s British network operator WND-UK has stopped paying people who host its network aerials on their roofs because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, WND-UK has pledged to make its near 2,000 base station hosts whole once the economy stabilises.…

President chooses chip factory to expands program aimed at reducing dependence on Japan South Korea has become the latest nation to decide that it should become more self-sufficient in key technologies and by doing so turn itself into an exporter.…

Supply chains are working again Global PC shipments climbed back into recovery mode for the second quarter thanks to increased demand from the surge of home working.…

Hope for web success, but plan for every possible (and impossible) failure On Call Everyone's favourite day of the week, Friday, has waddled into view. Grab a steaming mug of schadenfreude and settle down with another tale from those Register readers saddled with the On Call phone.…

Revenue fell eight percent but company thinks it can win on new virus-scoured terrain Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has become the first of the big Indian technology services companies to report a quarter’s results and while revenue was down the company found many bright spots that suggest better times lie ahead.…

The us-versus-them mentality between dev and ops is still alive and well, we see Reader survey In an online survey, we asked Register readers for their thoughts on workplace automation and self-service within on-prem environments. That survey is still open, though we took a sneak peek at the data collected so far, and whoa, there are some strong feelings out there.…

There may be a small black hole on the edge of our Solar System? 2020, please stop The suggestion that the Solar System's hypothesized Planet Nine is actually a small black hole could be solved by searching for outbursts of energy using the Vera Rubin Observatory, scientists say.…

Which sounds just like what you’d do if future x86 supply looked a bit iffy KylinOS, the Linux distribution that China’s government has encouraged to become a national OS for desktops and services, has pointed out that it’s clocked up a Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmark running on Huawei’s Arm silicon.…

Most of it to go on new internet infrastructure to keep citizens working and learning remotely The Philippines's Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) has sought approval of a PHP46.6bn ($942m) budget for fiscal 2021 to help the country adapt to the "new normal" during the COVID-19 pandemic - a lazy 750 percent higher than the PHP6bn budget it's working with this year.…

You've got less than 42 hours to regenerate your certs DigiCert says, come Saturday, July 11, it will revoke tens of thousands of encryption certificates issued by intermediaries that were not properly audited.…

Investigation follows Canada's decision to give image-scraping biz the boot Following Canada's lead earlier this week, privacy watchdogs in Britain and Australia today launched a joint investigation into how Clearview AI harvests and uses billions of images it scraped from the internet to train its facial-recognition algorithms.…

Hackers hit honeypots hours after CISO downplays risk, proof-of-concept exploit code emerges VIdeo This week Citrix tried to reassure everyone the 11 security flaws it just patched in its network perimeter products weren't all that bad. Well, we hope they're right because someone's scanning the internet looking for vulnerable installations.…

Tap-tap-tapping on lander's scoop Engineers have hit pause on attempts make the Mars InSight lander's self-hammering mole dig into the red planet as boffins admit "the task is not likely to become easier."…

Finnish firm might do best with telco clouds, says analyst From enterprise behemoths to those desperately home-schooling, the appetite for cloud-based services shows no sign of faltering. Behind the scenes sit vendors like Nokia, which today unveiled its latest network operating system (NOS), which aims to simplify the process of automating and scaling data centre fabrics.…

What's in the box? Not mains charger, sources say Samsung is reportedly considering unbundling mains chargers from some of its upcoming smartphones — supposedly because customers have enough of the things lying around already.…

Tune in this month to hear from Anomali – and get a handle on separating good data from clutter Webcast The advantages of having decent threat intelligence in place are many and various, as the threat landscape continues to widen year-on-year.…

Deep upset at what is perceived as broken commitments Google's creation of an Open Usage Commons organisation to manage trademarks including those of Istio – a key open-source project for many users of Kubernetes – has drawn harsh criticism from other tech giants unhappy with the new approach.…

Print it out, pop a stamp on it, stick it in a pillar box. Might have been quicker Axe-happy Tsohost has found another way to upset its customers this week. Email, it appears, has taken a bit of a totter.…

Are these the O-RAN-compliant goods you were looking for? Samsung has made its open, virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) platform commercially available, allowing carriers to run the external components of a 5G network on off-the-shelf x86-based hardware.…

Oracle nemesis will be focusing on SkySQL cloud product MySQL cousin MariaDB has grabbed $25m in funding in what represents something of a mini fight-back for good ol' relational databases against the NoSQL family of systems, according to the CEO.…

CEO reckons team 'navigated a very challenging environment' Typically when businesses release financial results ahead of schedule it means one of two things: that the numbers were far worse than forecast or better. In the case of SAP it is the latter - not that all that glitters is gold.…

Sorry we missed you. Been binging on Netflix in the delivery van Got an idea on how to use 5G for something useful? ESA and the UK Space Agency want to hear from you.…

Getting to be a real PAN in the OS Palo Alto Networks has emitted its second software update in as many weeks to address a potentially serious security vulnerability in its products.…

Making .NET cross-platform was a radical step but not enough for broad appeal Comment Key people working on the .NET platform at Microsoft are concerned about the continuing perception that it is tied to one company.…

Served up with a steaming side of buttered Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in our series of systems suffering from iffy coding or dirty data in the form of a Bork left hanging out for all to see.…

Thunderbolt 4.0 is nearly upon us and those are apparently its big selling points Intel has revealed the specs for Thunderbolt 4.0 and spruiked its ability to power really impressive dongles connected by long cables.…

With air travel in a horrible hole it’s ahead of its time in a weirdly viral way The beardy-Branson backed company attempting to build a new supersonic airliner will reveal its tech to the world in October.…

Trundle bot must dodge sand dunes in quest to find evidence of life on Red Planet NASA’s hardy Curiosity rover is on the move again: this time, a little road trip to avoid getting bogged down in Martian sand dunes.…

OpenShift and Tanzu get a familiar-looking competitor SUSE has decided to buy Kubernetes-wrangler Rancher Labs.…

Foul play not suspected The CEO of computer hardware and motherboard maker MSI has died after falling from his company's headquarters in New Taipei, Taiwan.…

But only on one AWS, one Spotify and one Netflix - and zero Microsofts Indonesia has made good on its promise to introduce a digital services tax by including four tech titans – but six entities – in its value added tax (VAT) scheme.…

They're more than happy to take Uncle Sam's coin no matter the protests from some corners of Silicon Valley Despite all those protests, internal and external, by tech workers against their employers' selling AI to the US military, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JIAC) this week said the biggest names in IT are lining up to supply Uncle Sam.…

About three /8’s worth is a decent chunk of the total pool and locals unready to go all-in on IPv6 are hungry APNIC, the regional internet address registry for India, China, and 54 other Asia-Pacific nations, has found about fifty million unused IPv4 addresses under the couch.…

Doesn't want to follow Azure and AWS by working with locals Google has scrapped plans to offer cloud services in China.…

Report slams antisocial network's 'vexing and heartbreaking decisions' Facebook on Wednesday published an independent-ish report by civil-rights experts into how it deals with misinformation and hate speech on its platform. The dossier wasn't exactly flattering, and the antisocial network immediately tried to undercut it with an announcement about how it had banned four groups from its site.…

A very busy six months for Redmond's Digital Crimes Unit Microsoft has taken legal action to seize web domains being used to launch coronavirus-themed phishing attacks.…

If you have to play by Redmond's strict rules, people are likely to go elsewhere Video In an attempt to regain market share from Zoom in the pandemic-driven world of video conferencing, Microsoft today launched a “Together” mode for its Teams software.…

Marks for Angular and Gerrit also handled by org designed to provide 'guidance' to industry Google has set up an organization dubbed the Open Usage Commons to manage three open-source projects' trademarks – and provide developers advice on handling and using brands.…

Not for your titchy workloads, Reg sources say Oracle's new on-premises cloud product has prompted concern among commentators, who've said it requires a strong financial commitment and could shift customers to higher cost deals.…

And there is – check out our latest survey findings Reader survey With anyone who can work from home actually doing so during the pandemic, networking – and therefore network security – has become more business-critical than it was before.…

Dark web dwellers can pick and choose from billions - billions - of logins Stolen domain admin login credentials can be resold by dark web criminals for up to £95,000 and a total of 15 billion purloined credentials are traded on illicit marketplaces.…