The Register

NHS Digital: 'Matter of public health importance to encourage people to download the app' Exclusive The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has confirmed it is investigating grumbles about heavy-handed marketing emails and texts promoting the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracing app in England.…

Under 3 minutes? Not today Bork!Bork!Bork! A return to the hue of blue today, with a cautionary tale of keeping your keys safe and sound when Windows is around.…

Yep, plugs. The things that pick up electrickery from the wall Smart plugs could set your house on fire and let hackers gaze upon your private data, according to consumer champion company Which?…

Buyers aren't super-keen to jump through geopolitical hoops VMworld The US-China trade war has made more trouble for VMware's business in Asia than the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Duncan Hewett, Virtzilla's senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ).…

Brit financial watchdogs foxed by not guilty verdict A Russian ex-banker has been found not guilty of destroying potential evidence after he deleted a copy of WhatsApp from his phone before handing it over to police.…

And then mentions China 18 times and calls for dedicated agency to regulate international data links One of the four commissioners of America's communications regulator has called for more scrutiny of submarine cables between the Land of the Free and "adversary countries".…

You, over there, rustle up a warp drive while we're finding a new galactic pad Video If you’re tired of sitting in your PJs in front of the computer screen all day indoors, and need a new purpose to get you through the COVID-19 virus pandemic, consider helping NASA look for previously unseen exoplanets.…

Consumer tech security rating scheme to launch next week, will be offered to rest of world The assistant chief executive of Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, Brigadier General Gaurav Keerthi, says the island nation now considers providing a secure environment to citizens and businesses the equivalent of providing fresh water and sewerage services, and will next week improve digital hygiene with a voluntary scheme that will rate the security consumer broadband gateways.…

And not just any citizens, but folks stranded overseas and in dire need of assistance Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has just exposed personal details of over 1,000 citizens in an email.…

We've switched to back-up offline procedures, says Universal Health Services Universal Health Services, which operates over 400 hospitals and healthcare facilities in the US, Puerto Rico, and the UK, said on Monday that its IT network was offline due to an unspecified cybersecurity issue.…

Multi-platform not cross-platform, says company – enough to increase interest in the language? Apple has open-sourced Swift System, a library designed to improve the experience of calling the operating system API from Swift on supported platforms, including a new Linux implementation.…

Think your old tools can’t cut it? Here’s the proof Promo Incident response and detection is a critical part of your security operation – it’s hard to defend against what you can’t see, particularly when your attack surface now extends from on-prem and into the cloud.…

Blames market volatility caused by pandemic and US controls over Huawei Kioxia, the flash and SSD fabrication artist formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corp, has called off its initial public offering due next month, citing stock market volatility and the coronavirus outbreak.…

Shaky start out of the gates and still some issues, but at least it's here England and Wales finally have a contact-tracing app. Released last Thursday, NHS COVID-19 allows public health authorities to identify potential disease carriers and stem the spread of coronavirus. But in the days since its release, some bugs have showed up.…

Leading to AU$540m in late invoice payments Invoices worth AU$540m were paid late after a finance and supply chain system built on SAP S/4HANA went live at Australia's Queensland Health.…

Unexpected item in bagging area? AWS has introduced Cost Anomaly Detection, a new feature now in beta driven by machine learning that pledges to notify admins of "unexpected or unusual spend".…

'I didn't expect this kind of work from Apple.' Sorry, did you see Catalina? Apple is apparently so skint that it has had to resort to freebie versions of machine-based translation services for its Dutch legalese.…

Length of operator's licence or related conditions yet to be determined Uber has won an appeal against Transport for London's decision not to renew the ride-hailing app biz's licence for the English capital, ending a three-year tussle between the pair.…

Also, Brazilian teen spots odd Instagram bug and nets $25K In Brief Foreign-backed disinformation campaigns will spread fake news about the results of the upcoming US election in an effort to sow doubt and outrage among the American public.…

Ever seen a Trello board you thought you shouldn't? If you're in UK or US, you're not alone Around 40 per cent of staff in British and American corporations have access to sensitive data that they don't need to complete their jobs, according to recent research.…

Starts trying to make fetch happen... build your own models to parse corporate content Ignite Microsoft's SharePoint Syntex is a new feature of SharePoint online that promises to extract metadata from documents automatically, making it easier to find and categorise information.…

Coffee giant brews UK customers a double shot of cock-up Starbucks' UK rewards card app went down for a prolonged period earlier this week, and a bunch of caffeine fiends are still reporting problems.…

Contesting decision of General Court that Irish set-up was kosher European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager is set to fight to have Apple's tax benefit in Ireland ruled as state aid.…

Beta means fully operational? Haha! Good one! A UK government system to avoid miles of road traffic congestion in the county of Kent as the Brexit transition period comes to an end will rely on software which is not yet in its beta version.…

And if you're keen to place an ad, get in touch – it's free Job Alert Looks like the summer's over and everyone is growing their tech team, judging by the bundle of openings we have this week.…

Hacker had set up shop on network using stolen Office 365 accounts An unspecified US government agency was hacked by a miscreant who appears to have made off with archives of information.…

Dress rehearsals done, nice shingly crater chosen – it's go time Video NASA intends to scoop up material from the surface of the Bennu asteroid on 20 October, and has planned up to three retrieval attempts before returning any samples back to Earth.…

It's the 'gaming funk' edition, also starring Wasteland 3, Crusader Kings 3, and Among Us The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column – the "funk" edition. Maybe you've experienced the sensation, maybe you haven't, but after finishing our last subject, Death Stranding (which was great by the way), we found ourselves in a quandary. WTF do we play next? And can we bring ourselves to write about it?*…

So... totally seamless then Better late than never. Earlier today, the UK government released its long-awaited contact-tracing app to the general populace, called NHS COVID-19.…

As I walk through this world... born-in-the-cloud companies have legacy problems too Amazon Web Services has changed its mind about ending support for the URLs originally used by S3 (Simple Storage Service), though it is delaying rather than ending its deprecation plans.…

Dinosaurs get one last roar Ignite Microsoft revealed plans at its virtual Ignite bash to roll out new versions of its venerable Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Project Server, as well as another perpetual release of its cash cow, Office.…

Digital Growth Experts Ltd hit send on 16k+ messages. The fine? £3.70 per text Digital Growth Experts Ltd (DGEL) is nursing a £60,000 smackdown doled out by the UK’s data watchdog after it sent out thousands of nuisance marketing text messages about hand sanitisers during the coronavirus outbreak.…

The tiny X-ray bullets are only the size of a grain of sand. Pew! Pew! Pew! Perseverance, NASA's latest Martian rover, will extend its two-metre robotic arm and use an AI-powered control system to carefully aim X-ray beams at ancient rock samples that might contain fossilised microbes.…

Telco tells freelancers it 'isn't immune to the economic volatility and uncertainty' caused by pandemic Exclusive BT is slashing day rates for contractors and reducing their notice period by 50 per cent due to the unpredictable nature of the economy caused by the coronavirus.…

Solution? A software update, natch An Ethernet failure aboard popular Swiss-made business jets could prompt the aircraft to move into an emergency descent as flight systems entered a "degraded" mode, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has warned.…

Sure, it's still wedged in the OS, but maybe you'd prefer something shiny and Chromier? Ignite Microsoft used the Ignite product singalong to reassure customers that its veteran Internet Explorer 11 browser would remain supported while also urging users to nuke the thing from orbit. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.…

High Court hears of offshore assets, tax fraud, and freezing orders The crumbling multinational empire of the distie once known as Entatech has come under scrutiny in the High Court again as liquidators working on behalf of the UK's taxman try to seize the assets of founder Jason Tsai and his family.…

Experts from industry and academia tapped to help increase competition The Ministry of Fun* has assembled a new task force of senior mobile industry bods to help diversify the UK's telecoms supply chain and reduce the exposure to so-called "high-risk vendors" such as Huawei.…

If you find yourself wrestling with big docs on small screens, Photoshop maker's iOS, Android apps may be able to help Adobe has introduced Liquid Mode into its PDF reader for Android and iOS, the intent being to make reading PDF documents on mobile a less painful experience.…

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.…