The Register

COVID-19 had 'minimal net impact' on sales, Windows giant claims Microsoft on Wednesday revealed its financial figures for the past three virus-addled months – and there was some up, and some down.…

Uber is reportedly thinking about laying off 5,000-plus, too Lyft announced Wednesday it will lay off 17 per cent of staff, and furlough five per cent, as its business collapses amid coronavirus lockdowns and slowdowns. That amounts to roughly 980 people axed, and 290 on pause with no pay.…

Millions to go to lawyers after legal brouhaha ends in settlement Apple has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by folks upset the iGiant broke FaceTime overnight on millions of iPhones. The settlement amounts to a few bucks a device, meaning the Cupertino giant almost certainly made a net profit in the process.…

It would be rather awkward if Switchzilla's own video-link app fell over mid-proceedings, wouldn't it? A judge has ordered Cisco to use arch-rival Zoom rather than its own video-conference offering Webex to virtually attend a patent-infringement trial.…

Abby Kearns says she will continue to foster OSS culture in new role Former Cloud Foundry exec director Abby Kearns has rocked up at Puppet as CTO, where she will direct "the company's current and future product portfolio."…

Clue us in so we can better understanding the challenges and opportunities you face Reader survey Relational database systems are in many ways the workhorses of IT. But how are they holding up in the modern age?…

Ubiquitous consumer kit maker EOLs netcam. Oh, AND the cloud services that make it work Oh look, here's another cautionary tale about buying cloud-based IoT kit. On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the "off" switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.…

Slurp everyone's details and you create a hugely valuable hacker target A group of nearly 175 UK academics has criticised the NHS's planned COVID-19 contact-tracing app for a design choice they say could endanger users by creating a centralised store of sensitive health and travel data about them.…

Fans of creaky old hardware can relive their misspent IT youth Bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and left the poor thing mouldering in your gadget drawer? We have news – RetroPie has unleashed version 4.6 of its popular emulator suite.…

Who said open-source alternatives? Haha, no one here said it, you must have imagined it Arm hopes to entice early-stage chip-designing startups into licensing its blueprints – by slashing the cost of entry to zero.…

Oh goody. Yet another tech support channel for relatives to abuse Google is making its Meet video-chat service free to anyone who wants it, as long as you have a Google account.…

Davis ups sticks, takes new job that lets him emigrate to family in Australia In a seemingly abrupt departure, HPE has confirmed Phil Davis, who runs its Hybrid IT division and the ultimately the global sales team, is leaving at the end of the week for new pastures Down Under.…

Generally available, but will never reach parity with Linux on Kubernetes Microsoft's Windows Server Containers is now generally available on its Azure Kubernetes Service, three years after AKS's launch.…

Bloke tells all to El Reg after US, Euro officials say only 'natural' people can be patent inventors AI systems cannot be listed as inventors in patent submissions, the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled this week.…

Ooo, double irony! An EU-sponsored GDPR advice website run by Proton Technologies had a vulnerability that let anyone clone it and extract a MySQL database username and password.…

Trapped between two screens. Forever borked Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's surprisingly long-lived series of Borks and bugs from the UK, Europe and beyond.…

New dump of tracing data and pair of papers reveal plenty about ad giant’s internal operations Google has published a huge trove of new data describing the performance of the "Borg" clusters that deliver its services and the antecedent to Kubernetes.…

And who could blame it? Pics Stargazers hoping to glimpse a comet close to Earth next month are in for a disappointment: it fell apart en route.…

Chip challenger announces 40 percent Q1 growth, lowers guidance Chip challenger AMD has posted a strong set of Q1 results, and made the now-rare decision to provide guidance for the remainder of the year – though also lowered that guidance for the period.…

Korean giant's Q1 held up, but full 2020 outlook looks like worse than the Cats movie trailer Samsung Electronics has posted Q1 2020 results that tell a viral tale.…

After 18 months, they can just fall over. The fix is asking Borgzilla for a new one Resistors, which cost a few cents apiece, are bricking pricey Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASAs).…

Does anything really matter when you have $100bn in the bank and pocketing nearly $7bn a quarter in profit? Google parent Alphabet’s financial figures for its first quarter of 2020 were a mixed bag. Two months of business as usual, if not better than usual, then a miserable March as advertisers shut their wallets amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

World crosses fingers One man’s effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.…

Case that has rumbled on since 2016 may have to be started again from scratch The man accused of hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox and the Formspring Q&A forum, and later selling the stolen data of hundreds of millions of users, has seen his trial disrupted a third time by the coronavirus pandemic.…

No wonder Larry Ellison went on YouTube to heap praise on the web-conferencing upstart A few weeks ago a baseball-capped Larry Ellison stuck a short video on YouTube praising Zoom to the skies, calling it "an essential service." Now we have an idea why.…

Linux distro giant gets cosy with Microsoft among other announcements Red Hat Summit The Red Hat (virtual) Summit is under way, and the Linux distro giant has announced the release of OpenShift 4.4, new deals with Microsoft, and the unboxing of Fedora 32.…

Totally reliable and worked really well last time The son of British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood wants accused US government hacker Julian Assange "furloughed" from Belmarsh prison in southeast London, UK.…

'I move that we merge this RFC,' says Moz's Nico Matsakis An alternative compiler front-end called rust-analyzer has been proposed for official adoption to improve IDE support for Rust developers, and has won backing from the programming language's core team.…

Even Nobel Prize-winning boffins need to take the edge off sometimes For a country of habitual boozers where alcohol sales have leapt recently, Brits won't be surprised to hear that Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate Professor Peter Doherty was sitting at his computer yesterday when he felt the urge for a stiff drink.…

'Not caused by a spike in usage or a lack of network capacity,' says Brit ISP Broadband outages have soared since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, per data from US network intelligence firm ThousandEyes. Among the most recent victims is Virgin Media, which suffered intermittent failures across the UK and Ireland starting yesterday early evening, and continuing into the early hours of the morning.…

Lucky old Pixel owners, eh? Google has released its second-stab at the hearable market — the AirPod-style, earplug-looking Pixel Buds wireless earphones.…

Also: Java 8 support? Linux? Ah yes – that would be the new Microsoft Microsoft has slung a Kafka Extension for Azure Functions out to preview as well as sneaking in Java 8 support for Linux hosting.…

On the plus side, fears about revenue losses and meeting payroll have subsided If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. If Benjamin Franklin's aphorism proves to be true, businesses should be worried by the latest research from Gartner.…

Legacy data warhouse wheezing? It could be an option Parallel processing and hardware optimisation biz Swarm64 has pushed out PostgreSQL acceleration software in the hopes this will set it up to compete against proprietary products.…

Google shores up security for biz users Google has upped security for business customers using its G Suite package, including Windows 10 administration, data loss prevention rules, and access rules based on where you are and what device you are using.…

Going to bed earlier? Getting more exercise? Don't be ridiculous. It's 'the adoption of cloud technologies' Feeling refreshed, revved up and raring to go? No? Well, the chances are you did not get enough sleep. Among the throngs of IT professionals, it would appear you are not alone.…

Democratising mass surveillance, one snafu at a time Exclusive In a blunder described as "astonishing and worrying," Sheffield City Council's automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) system exposed to the internet 8.6 million records of road journeys made by thousands of people, The Register can reveal.…

Also: Russia sends another freighter filled with astro goodies to ISS Roundup Hello, Starlink. SpaceX launched and landed another Falcon 9, Russia sent its next freighter to the ISS and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated failing to explode the latest Starship in the latest space-tastic news roundup.…

'Take legal action' he told the firm. So it (sort of) did "I thought we [could] change one letter of a big brand and make a business and it [would be] alright," wailed a photographer who tried to blag £1m from Snapchat before Nominet stripped him of his ripoff domain name.…

'The average Windows 10 PC has 14 weaponized bugs' A study of vulnerabilities - bugs that can be a gateway for malware or allow privilege escalation by an intruder - shows that Windows platforms have the most by far, but that they also tend to be fixed quickly, compared to Linux systems or appliances like routers, printers and scanners.…

New rules let Beijing review purchases after pondering 'political, diplomatic, and trade factors' for up to three months China has implemented new rules for buying tech equipment in a move to bolster the country's cybersecurity.…

Good option for locals and lowest latency for Austria, Bulgaria and Greece too AWS has opened a new region in Milan, Italy.…

Some shine, come rain Vid The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov shed nearly 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through our Solar System during its visit last year, according to measurements gathered by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.…

As Azure adds Intel's much-probed SGX to its confidential zone Google has made its Shielded VMs the default option in its cloud.…

Why do it at all? Easier to audit and adapt, apparently Analysis The UK has decided to break with growing international consensus and insist its upcoming coronavirus contact-tracing app is run through centralised British servers – rather than follow the decentralized Apple-Google approach.…

Speech recognition purveyor Otter.ai makes a choice to chase Zoom-ing dollars Speech recognition purveyor Otter.ai has added the ability to offer realtime transcription of Zoom meetings, at the expense of some elements out of its free plan.…

COO says plague-time productivity has improved so clients don’t see see WfH as a WtF Indian technology services giant Tata Consultancy Services will increase its use of remote working in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Phone model recorded, unique ID infrequently refreshed – but Atlassian's Mike Cannnon-Brookes says use it and two million peeps agree The design of Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app creates some unintended surveillance opportunities, according to a group of four security pros who unpacked its .APK file.…

Will literally argue anything to tie up VirnetX lawyers for a bit longer Apple’s decade-long refusal to accept it was wrong has hit absurd depths.…

It's pin-everything-on-China season America's communications watchdog will ban four Chinese telcos from operating in the Land of the Free from next month, citing a vague national security threat.…