The Register

'Highly inappropriate' comments senior civil servant Again highlighting cosy relations between Amazon and UK.gov, Alex Chisholm, Cabinet Office permanent secretary and head of the civil service, has confirmed the etail giant's UK’s head Doug Gurr will sit on a panel that chooses the next government chief digital officer (GCDO).…

Officials are better prepared for meddling – so attackers have had to rely on mental games With the United States set to undertake its first Presidential election since the Russian-tinged 2016 race, state governments and social networks are upping their game.…

'Totally bummed out' that Dreamforce isn't happening, though Cloudy CRM slinger Salesforce has filed a buoyant set of results for Q2 ended 31 July in the face of a global pandemic and related economic slump.…

British courts can set global royalty rates for foreign firms Huawei this morning lost a long-running patent lawsuit against Unwired Planet in a case that will determine global FRAND licensing rates for years to come – and also sets London as the jurisdiction of choice for squabbling telecoms multinationals.…

Imagine how the smaller firms are feeling as furlough's end approaches Provided the UK government can provide the requisite "fiscal stimulus" to keep corporate Britain ticking over, the COVID-19 crisis can be viewed as ripe fruit there for the plucking.…

Which is, y'know, telecoms stuff A Huawei phone mast is to be installed next to a secret MI5 data centre, despite government directives to strip the Chinese company's equipment from UK mobile networks in the next seven years.…

You can't trust anyone: Researchers had to lie to participants to get result In a world mired in misinformation and populated by politicians who don't seem to care if they are caught lying, researchers have shed light on the brain activity underlying deception.…

Students taking creative subjects will get preference as lockdown licences few and far between Universities are on the hook for a massive hike in Adobe licensing costs unless they restrict use to students in creative subjects, techies in Further and Higher Education circles have told us.…

CEO Neri claims everything-as-a-service offering GreenLake is growing faster than public clouds HPE has reported strong Q3 2020 results and said they would have been better were it not for problems undertaking cabling and other installation services during the pandemic.…

Right as the Japanese mega-corp seeks to flog the Brit CPU design house Arm has apparently decided against spinning off two of its Internet-of-Things businesses to its owner Softbank just as Softbank chairman Masayoshi Son searches high and low for someone to buy the British chip designer.…

'Iris Ring' cutout in OLEDs let smartmobe cameras focus on the main game without being distracted by peripheral matters Samsung’s Display business has claimed the mantle as the maker of the world’s most advanced holes.…

Machines are just better at finding alien worlds than us humans A machine-learning algorithm has sniffed out 50 highly likely exoplanets previously hidden in data collected by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope.…

None of you trained an AI on this data set, right? Right? In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.…

Being in Wuhan hasn’t helped, but local disputes have also slowed effort to build advanced semiconductors One of China’s flagship efforts to accelerate its semiconductor industry is floundering in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Also claims database breakthroughs with home-brewed MySQL-compatible code Chinese web giant Baidu has followed other clouds by adopting SmartNICs to handle boring bits of cloud workloads and leave its Xeons free to do more heavy lifting.…

Plus other gadget makers, too, we're told, amid China trade fears Taiwanese electronics manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron are, along with other equipment makers, reportedly considering building factories in the sunny climes of Mexico.…

Can’t say much until its results are released tomorrow... conveniently Exclusive Perennial cloud-contender NetApp has pruned its workforce on the eve of its quarterly results.…

Resulting mix means less innovation lag for the Unix-flavored OS On Tuesday years of work culminated in the integration of OpenZFS, an open-source storage platform, into the code base of the FreeBSD operating system.…

Microsoft's 'open source wonk' Sarah Novotny wants to see easier ways for people to get involved Interview Linux kernel development – which is driven by plain-text email discussion – needs better or alternative collaborative tooling "to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future," says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft's representative on the Linux Foundation board.…

npmjs.com, nodejs.org open to spoofing, we're warned Two significant domains for the Node.js community, npmjs.com and nodejs.org, lack DMARC email security policies, an oversight that could allow a miscreant to send easily spoofed emails to the community.…

You had teeth once, FTC – use them Intel, HP, Tesla and a host of other tech giants have written to America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging it to appeal Qualcomm's legal win against the watchdog in a row over patent fees.…

It’s all about big industry and automation – and the money, of course UK-based engineering software group Aveva will pay $5bn for rival OSIsoft, it announced on Tuesday. The bulk of the money – $4.4bn – will be in cash, with $3.5bn of it raised through a rights issue.…

University of London researchers poked around in 'secure' messaging platform, but didn't like what they found An instant messaging app whose creators promoted it as secure and end-to-end encrypted was in fact no such thing, according to researchers at Royal Holloway.…

The Reg chats with co-founder Sven Efftinge Interview GitPod, a platform that enables developers to create cloud-hosted development environments and to code in a web browser, has published its source on GitHub.…

Before you go all Colonel Blimp, remember it's budget-setting season The British Army is looking at ditching its tank regiments and spending the money on keyboard warriors instead, according to reports.…

'If speed is not important, there are 300 other solutions' Database biz Redis Labs has secured $100m in a funding round that sets its valuation at an estimated $1bn.…

But no, Fortnite can't come back to the App Store for now either A Federal US judge questioned why Apple takes a 30 per cent slice of developer revenues as she ruled that while Apple cannot cut off Epic's access to iOS Unreal Engine development tools, she would not order the company to allow Fortnite to return to the App Store.…

Desperately seeks a dirty dozen of DevOps suppliers With £800m of other people's money in hand, UK central government is on the hunt for DevOps folk to build and manage live NHS services and oversee data system migration under the "Digital Capability for Health" scheme.…

We're sure readers can think of a suitable replacement Poll Savvy battered bird flinger KFC has made sure no one will forget its greasy wares during the coronavirus pandemic by ditching its Finger Lickin' slogan.…

Outlines new way of counting pull requests to avoid being swamped Container-flinger Docker has offered further details on why it has changed the terms of service for its Hub service, blaming 1 per cent of its users for making trouble for the rest of us.…

Click here to enable your rights... ha, GOTCHA! Infosec biz F-Secure has uncovered a North Korean phishing campaign that targeted a sysadmin with a fake Linkedin job advert using a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) themed lure.…

'For a fusion company, it's quite nice to have a product that works' UK boffins have used smarts gained through the development of fusion technology to fire up a thruster with the purpose of eventually cutting interplanetary travel times.…

Netizens up in arms over unexpected UI change, missing add-ons support An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.…

Parts of the GCloud are more robust and survived, but the fix is not yet in for others Google has explained how and why big chunks of its cloud crashed last week, and as is often the case the company broke itself.…

Whereas in America spy chiefs retire on full pensions, hit the chat show circuit Denmark's top foreign intelligence chief has been suspended for spying on Danish citizens illegally for up to six years after a whistleblower released a trove of documents to government regulators.…

Then we saw Bill and Steve gyrating to the Rolling Stones on stage… Comment Twenty-five years ago on Monday arguably the most consequential event in modern computing history happened: the release of Windows 95. Let’s take a quick trip back in time.…

Promises to support local businesses and stop forcing local carriers paying for ads and iThing fixes Apple has reached under a Cupertino sofa and found $84m with which to settle antitrust action in South Korea.…

Ties up with TSMC on innovation lab and banks on elasticity speeding up design pipeline Microsoft is cooking up specific Azure instance types optimised for Electronics Design Automation, as part of a new collaboration Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).…

Which probably means silicon, cloud and quantum tech Chinese president Xi Jinping has again urged the nation to develop more the technology it needs to develop its economy.…

Wedge-shaped fondleslab for fun projects, coders will need a keyboard, and you'll just have to ignore the fan Hands-on Sunfounder, based in Shenzhen, China, has released RasPad 3.0, a 10-inch, 1280-by-800 touchscreen for the Raspberry Pi 4, packaged in a wedge-shaped case with a battery that converts your Pi into a tablet computer.…

'Microsoft has confirmed the Teams chat data is not recoverable' Exclusive The personal chat histories of 145,000 Microsoft Teams users at KPMG were inadvertently and permanently deleted last week, thanks to an IT blunder.…

Not a Hollywood action flick by the looks of it The US Air Force has revealed a prototype of a flying car, something the American military has desired for at least a decade.…

Synk accuses China-based Mintegral of distributing malicious SDK Video For over a year, a widely used code library from Chinese mobile ad biz Mintegral is alleged to have been covertly capturing data about app users' online interactions to steal ad revenue.…

Can we make them higher? As if we needed a reminder that joined-up thinking in government is rarer than hens' teeth, New South Wales has bought 10 River Class ferries that won't fit under two bridges in Sydney's Parramatta suburb if people are sitting on the upper deck.…

Mute your mic anyway, the foam is hissing as you open your beer Zoom says it's fingered "the issue" preventing users from authenticating to the Zoom website, or starting and joining Zoom meetings and webinars, so if you thought you'd miss the 4pm "quick catch-up" with sales, your hopes are getting slimmer.…

'Apple’s discontinuation of Epic’s ability to develop and support Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS will harm game creators and gamers,' says Microsoft Microsoft's Kevin Gammill, general manager of Gaming Developer Experiences, called Epic's Unreal Engine "critical technology" in a filing at the weekend [PDF] in support of Epic's motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Apple from terminating its developer account.…

Tender notices cover range of IT needs all the way down to parking meters The government-owned company responsible for England's motorways has launched two streams of tendering covering nearly £2bn in spending on IT and other digital technologies.…

Just don't mention the cow-meleon, OK? Interview SUSE has had a busy year, with a switch of CEO, the ditching of OpenStack, and the buy of Kubernetes darling Rancher Labs.…

Meanwhile, Gmail finally deals with a 'confused mailman' problem In brief It has not been a good week for major Canadian shipping company Canpar Express.…

But it's a complex technology stack, so we're the sole contender The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has handed Accenture a £20m contract extension, without outside competition, to try to keep some seriously ageing applications and infrastructure running.…