The Register

The look on their wickle faces as they scream: 'Mum, what the heck is Linux?' The COVID-19 pandemic has turned laptops — particularly those deemed "cheap and cheerful" — into a desperately sought-after commodity as education and work moves to the home.…

History tells us tech companies just get bigger, even after being broken up or battered Column Thriving amidst the pervasive chaos of 2020, the world’s largest technology companies - the FAANGs*, as we’ve come to know them - have managed to grow larger, richer and more powerful.…

German biz: You won't need an RPA tool, or not as often. FIGHT, FIGHT!!! The co-CEO at German process mining biz Celonis has talked up its leap into the world of automation by rolling out its own platform, as well as splashing the cash - reportedly a hair over $100m - on automation and integration outfit Integromat.…

Tough luck, bumpkins! Broadband speed gap misery to widen, says report The UK government's strategy for deploying full-fibre broadband shows signs of repeating the errors of previous broadband infrastructure programmes, which failed to extend comprehensive access to rural areas, a report from the National Audit Office has claimed [PDF].…

Airline was saving domain admin creds and card details alike in plaintext British Airways is to pay a £20m data protection fine after its 2018 Magecart hack – even though the Information Commissioner’s Office discovered the airline had been saving credit card details in plain text since 2015.…

Bork, bork, bork on the Autobahn Bork!Bork!Bork! News reaches The Register that even those paragons of efficiency and rule-following, the Germans, are not immune to the curse of Bork.…

How can it be OK when nobody knows what to prepare for, ask IT players Canalys Forum 2020 - updated The IT supply chain remains in the dark over how to plan for Brexit with mere months to go before the UK potentially exits the European Union without a trade agreement, according to one of Britain’s biggest IT distributors.…

And if you're hiring, send us your ads for free promotion Job Alert We've got a couple of interesting developer roles to get your teeth stuck into this week.…

Take your brain to another dimension- sion- sion... Pay close attention Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am out of my head. It’s that Zoom fatigue that I keep reading about.…

Where the data flies, and the travellers cry..... Network Rail, the UK's publicly owned rail infrastructure body, has promised to give passengers' journeys a lift by connecting its sprawling estate of elevator and escalators to the world as an open data source.…

Claims code and infrastructure aren't shared with China or very scary. Also reveals Oracle will win biz from AWS, Azure, Alibaba and Google! TikTok has claimed that the Trump administration’s reasons for wanting it banned are mostly based on incorrect assumptions about its technology.…

Automated alerting? Escalating robo-calling? All ok, but beware the inebriated meatbag in the system On Call It is Friday the somethingth of Marchtober. No, we're not sure anymore either. Still, even in these troubled times there remains a crumb of comfort to be gleaned from the oopsies of others. Welcome to On Call.…

Meet Victoria, who’s fond of K8s, security and complex networking On October 21st, 2010, something new hit the world of enterprise infrastructure software: it was free software called OpenStack “Austin” and comprised the Nova VM-wrangler and the Swift Object store.…

To flog workstations and 'maintain and optimize the experience for esports student athletes' eSports – aka professional competitive computer gaming – is now so widely adopted by schools and universities that Lenovo has built a business unit to service their teams.…

Was given deadline to declare its Chinese ties or leave, chose the latter Alibaba-aligned e-commerce operator Taobao will quit Taiwan.…

Goodbye, Dave A NASA-funded project has demonstrated how deep-learning algorithms can help experts determine from satellite scans whether a volcano is due to erupt or not.…

Pai says he wants to 'clarify' Section 230's 26 words On Thursday, FCC chairman Ajit Pai declared his intention to clarify a law he may not have the authority to interpret.…

And the world breathed a sigh of relief? Updated Twitter is right now suffering a baffling outage in that the website is still up, you can still log in, the apps will run.…

Social distancing isn't just for surviving the pandemic – now this internet giant can add it to your browser Network services giant Cloudflare wants to host your web browser in the cloud so it can send you only safe content.…

After only one public Git commit this year, penguinstas think: Fork it, we don't need Cupertino The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019.…

They nicked six alleged perps last year but only one was charged Britain’s National Crime Agency arrested six men in London on suspicion of laundering “tens of millions” for the Trickbot and Dridex banking malware gangs, the not-quite-police agency declared today.…

Infosec biz issues mildly off-the-wall guidance for incident responders The global switch to remote working in early 2020 gave hackers a whole new set of juicy ransomware targets.…

Fiddling with configuration and getting nostalgic in version 3.4 Norwegian software-maker Vivaldi has emitted an update to its eponymous browser, featuring some additional configuration and reload options as well as a ton of retro-pixelled gaming goodness.…

You were only supposed to blow the bloody bytes off! Europe is to build four Nvidia-Intel-powered supercomputers, one of which will be the most powerful super yet built for AI applications, the GPU giant reckons.…

'Yet another nail in the coffin' says analyst as former fan NL's biggest operator looks to Sweden Dutch network KPN has selected Ericsson to provide the infrastructure for its 5G core network. This decision, although inevitable, represents another setback for Huawei, its 4G provider, which had until now enjoyed a long and intimate relationship with the carrier.…

Plus: Platform censors US newspaper and triggers ordure tsunami American financial regulators in New York have demanded Twitter be subject to harsher rules following the July hacks of prominent users' accounts – as CEO Jack Dorsey furiously backpedals after his website censored a news article from a US newspaper.…

A hornet's nest within a can of worms running systems worth billions of pounds.. NHS England is looking to replace the HR and ERP systems used by hospitals, community services and family doctors with a single integrated ERP based in the cloud.…

Thought Microsoft would resist Google's ad-friendly tweaks to the browser extension API? Think again Microsoft has decided to support the Google-proposed Manifest V3 in its Edge browser - based on the Chromium browser engine - despite continuing concern about the impact on content-filtering extensions such as ad blockers.…

Windows Subsystem for Linux or Linux Subsystem for Windows? Who cares, 'open source has won', says Microsoft MVP and Canonical engineer lead Microsoft MVP and Canonical engineer manager Hayden Barnes has upended the scorn bucket over the dreams of open sourcers that Windows might end up as an emulation layer atop Linux.…

And point everyone at LibreOffice, ta To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch.…

Master builder or vastly inferior? The recently retired (and hopefully soon to be re-released) Lego Saturn V is an impressive beast, but for the more committed rocket fan it lacked that special something: a launchpad. Today we look at a kit aimed at plugging the gap.…

Dare ye use RC2 in production? The version of .NET formerly called .NET Core is crawling closer to its November launch with .NET 5.0 Release Candidate 2 packing updates for key frameworks ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core, and a go-live licence.…

But it’s a tech preview and requires opt-in for every meeting The world’s plague-time video meeting tool of choice, Zoom, says it’s figured out how to do end-to-end encryption sufficiently well to offer users a tech preview.…

Here’s how to make sure truly everyone benefits Promo Digital transformation is pitched as the must-do for all companies, bringing with it benefits, such as a deeper understanding of customers, better return on investment, and even decreased greenhouse emissions. It also aims to deliver benefits for consumers by way of increased responsiveness from the companies they deal with, and a better, more tailored customer experience.…

Users who won’t upgrade to 11.4 given three-year warning of unpleasantness to come Oracle appears to be losing patience with Solaris users who won’t adopt the newest 11.4 release of the OS.…

Lead scientist explains all to El Reg: 'Pressure is the most versatile parameter to create such conditions' Video Scientists say they have forged the world’s first room-temperature superconductor: a powder-like material capable of conducting electricity with zero resistance.…

Which goes a long way towards explaining why Tencent just engineered a mega-merger of streaming services Chinese users of short video services consume an average 110 minutes of such content every day, according to a new report from industry group the China Netcasting Services Association.…

No H-1Bs? No worries! Especially with 99 percent of staff working from home to help costs fall and Q2 results soar Infosys has reported a strong second quarter, a fat order book and a newfound admiration for delivering services wherever its clients do business.…

Nook, line and sinker: Servers restored from backups, punters unable to download purchased e-books Updated Barnes and Noble tonight confirmed it was hacked, and that its customers' personal information may have been accessed by the intruders. The cyber-break-in forced the bookseller to take its systems offline this week to clean up the mess. See our update at the end of this piece. Our original report follows.…

Clarence Thomas reckons web giants need to do more to curb abuse Analysis US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has unexpectedly weighed in on the debate over internet giants' legal protections from the consequences of user-posted content, arguing this litigation shield should be removed or limited in future.…

What she in lacks in ethics, she more than makes up for in persistence Theranos mastermind Elizabeth Holmes, who is accused of defrauding investors of her now-imploded blood-testing company, will face a jury after all: a judge just scrapped her final attempt to avoid prosecution.…

And an open-source Boundary with zero trust to try out Multi-cloud automation outfit HashiCorp has used its annual HashiConf Digital conference to unveil betas galore, as well as pull the covers off a new open source project.…

But when they ship, Chipzilla promises its server silicon will 'double down' on defense mechanisms Intel on Wednesday talked up a set of security features planned for its promised third-generation Xeon Scalable Processors, code-named Ice Lake, which are supposed to show up before the end of the year.…

Yep, there it is. 'Digital transformation' Nokia has inked a five-year deal with Google Cloud to migrate its existing IT infrastructure away from on-premises iron to the ads-and-software juggernaut.…

Ouch, that 'smarts' As one of the pandemic winners (in terms of customers), Atlassian is keen that all those newly remote workers sign up to its cloud services and to that end has waved the machine-learning wand over more of its wares.…

That's if shares sell at the high end McAfee – the antivirus vendor, not the totally sane and level-headed man who founded it – is reportedly looking to raise more than $600m in its upcoming IPO.…

Digital China Group, TCL and Xiaomi said to be among suitors in deal potentially worth £2.8bn Embattled Chinese comms giant Huawei is said to be in discussions to sell its semi-autonomous Honor sub-brand in a deal that could raise up to £2.8bn and help refocus the firm's mobile lineup on high-margin flagships.…

What do you mean you're not on board the Big Data bus? Microsoft has rolled out an Azure Data Explorer connector preview for Azure Synapse.…

Swindon man walks away with two-year suspended sentence A man who spied on unsuspecting victims through their webcams has escaped a prison sentence after buying off-the-shelf LuminosityLink malware and using CCTV software to spy on them.…

Tops Ubuntu for catchy release names Jolla has refreshed Sailfish, the Linux-based mobile operating system designed for those seeking to escape the clutches of Android and iOS.…