The Register

Four more years! Four more years! Outsourcing giant Capita is to continue administering the British Teacher's Pension Scheme for a good few years after the Department of Education extended its contract.…

Cross-platform software acceleration API should be easier to jump on The Khronos Group has pushed out the Open CL 3.0 provisional specification, a major update to the cross-platform API used for accelerating software performance by using the concurrent programming capabilities of GPUs and CPUs.…

There's little 'new' here, but that's a good thing for repairability Serial phone abusers at iFixit have discovered that the iPhone SE 2020 is effectively a specced-up version of 2017's iPhone 8, meaning many of its components are interchangeable with its older brother.…

Peers urge review during delay as witnesses call themselves 'zero-rights employees' The UK's House of Lords has produced a damning report into the government's delayed changes to the IR35 off payroll tax regime, saying they require a complete rethink.…

Also: new .NET previews, 365 rebrando-tanks roll on, and more Roundup Welcome to another rundown of the news you might have missed from the Windows mines deep beneath Microsoft's Redmond campus.…

But they came away with a keg-sized 2.5MW generator, and Rolls will complete terra firma test schedule Airbus and Rolls-Royce have ended a joint venture to produce a hybrid-electric airliner testbed that could have paved the way for electric aircraft of the future.…

An empty station, illuminated by the soft, blue hue of Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! "What does digital signage show when humans aren't around?"…

Planet Computers' gizmo builds a bridge between two worlds, but it's not without limits Hands on It must be stressed right off the bat that a "phone" like Planet Computers' Cosmo Communicator is an incredibly niche device.…

The fruits of labour for world's largest tech firm to be revealed on 30 April Apple is now staring down the barrel of a "second recession of the iPhone era" with handset shipments in China calculated to have fallen off a cliff due to country-specific demand and production issues caused by the coronavirus.…

Proof-of-concept vuln patched a week ago A vulnerability existed in Microsoft's Slack for Suits tool, Teams, that could have let a remote attacker take over accounts by simply sending a malicious GIF, infosec researchers claim.…

As European nations back decentralised plan that leaves data on the device until users call in sick Apple and Google have revealed a little more about their plans to support COVID-19 contact-tracing apps and changed up some of their security plans.…

Broken pencil + ball of stolen Blu Tack = IT joy Who, Me? Today is Monday the 58th of March 2020. As a service to stop the days blurring into one, take a moment to enjoy a tale of NetWare, Blu Tack and a broken pencil in today's Who, Me? reader confession.…

Somebody’s got to help you run legacy apps with dignity AWS has just launched a cloudy FTP service.…

Extra intelligence for end-to-end means less fuzzy video calls. Infradata reveals more Webcast While the traditional methods of “unified communications” have started to fall by the wayside as analogue phone lines have shifted to VoIP, and fax machines move to museums, there’s been concern among the connected working population that the same kind of care and attention that would go into making traditional comms networks flourish hasn’t always been leveled at convincing overburdened office Wi-Fi connections do similar.…

Plans to connect and observe all the things as-a-service, from low-Earth orbit, while building 500 sats a year Chinese industrial conglomerate The Geely Group has completed work on the first two satellites of a planned constellation designed to help power self-driving cars and other services…

Hello, expanded tax base and access to capital! Farewell, land ownership disputes India has launched a new e-government platform for rural villages and hopes it will advance their development and help increase the nation’s tax base.…

Needs bank staff to sort things out, but a certain virus means the contact centre is rather busy right now Rabobank’s Australian outpost has messed up its Android app, leaving an unknown number of users unable to access their bank accounts on mobile devices.…

COVIDSafe application lands for Android, iOS – sans source code Australia has released its promised COVID-19 contact-tracing app.…

Plus Office 2016, 2019 patches – and a barn-load of other security bits and bytes Roundup It's time to dig in to another Register security roundup.…

...Nvidia CEO to unveil new tech on YouTube, and more from machine-learning world Roundup Hello El Reg readers. If you're stuck inside, and need some AI news to soothe your soul, here's our weekly machine-learning roundup.…

So this is how the world ends – as a Matrix fanfic A Microsoft US patent application published last month describes a way to use body activity like brain waves as proof-of-work in a cryptocurrency system.…

Software developers aren't nation states, antisocial giant points out Attorneys for Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary have challenged a plea from spyware maker NSO Group to dismiss the high-level hacking case the two are fighting out, arguing it has immunity from prosecution.…

Serverless NoSQL DB to come up against open source sister Amazon has announced the general availability of a serverless NoSQL database in Amazon Keyspaces, with more than a passing resemblance to the open-source Apache Cassandra.…

Meanwhile, lawyer wanders beaches dressed as the Reaper... it has been a long week. Happy Friday, folks Video Reckitt Benckiser Plc, the British maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, had to hastily issue a statement this morning telling people not to ingest or inject their cleaning products in the hopes of fending off coronavirus.…

New study shows pandemic drove up profits for some... The word “unprecedented” is getting banded about so much these days that it is losing its meaning. It is worth remembering, then, that even seasoned commentators have been left slack-jawed by the continuing economic poo-narmi.…

The Register takes a look at the most famous of the Great Observatories A collaboration between NASA and ESA, and carried to orbit by Space Shuttle Discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is entering its fourth decade of service.…

Courtesy of mapping underdog Here WeGo Huawei is in a fraught battle to narrow the app gap between its homegrown AppGallery and the ubiquitous Google Play Store. Progress has been steady, signing up the likes of Snapchat, Microsoft and, most recently, navigation tool Here WeGo.…

Plus: Multitasking and other functions rejigged, but no promises they'll stick Google's third developer preview (DP3) of the Android 11 operating system is an enticing look at the future of the platform, where new features and UI tweaks abound.…

DevOps, IT crew - time to get to know each other... Oracle has an API hub, SAP has one and so does Infor. WorkDay and Salesforce? Well…you get the idea. RESTful and SOAP APIs have become so widespread that even the loci developed to help manage application interfaces are a bit of a mess.…

They'd been at sea for months – before coronavirus, even A Royal Navy submarine captain is in hot water after returning from a months-long deployment and allowing his crew to have a dockside barbecue to celebrate their return.…

Another one bites the dust LibreOffice has joined the rest of the industry to hammer another nail in the coffin of Adobe's Flash technology with the removal of an export filter from the suite.…

Plus astroboffins confirm 'masked' asteroid heading Earthwards Astronomers have discovered a new population of foreign asteroids that have been quietly orbiting the Sun on the outskirts of our Solar System.…

We've got your back while you hunt for work during lockdown Job Alert Welcome to week four of our mini pandemic response – free job ads for techies. We're trying to keep our readers, their sisters, brothers, friends and relatives in work by providing the industry with free job listings.…

Comma, comma, comma, comma, comma coloring ban. You come and go, you come and go... The web is being reworked to display a rainbow of previously unavailable colors, but part of the transition demands abandoning commas for spaces when coding CSS color-space parameters.…

'Standard C integer types are incredibly wasteful' for certain types of programming Erich Keane, a compiler frontend engineer at Intel, has committed a patch to the LLVM Clang project that enables custom width integers - such as 31 bit, 3 bit or 512 bit.…

Platform is 'tightly' integrated with AWS S3, but now an alternative is needed Few CEOs are upstaged by their own kitchens but, watching Infor supremo Kevin Samuelson drone on about industry disruption, the spotless gleam of his chrome and white backdrop spoke more to viewers of this week's Infor Inspire virtual conference than he did.…

2012: The London Olympics, Baumgartner jumping from a balloon, and TeamViewer revealing someone wasn't using the right licence Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a special edition of The Register's occasional look at sickly screens with some historical hijinks in today's Bork to the Future.…

The curse of RS-232 strikes again in part two of our serial series On Call While the days may seem to be blurring a little at the moment, we can assure you that it is Friday, which means it is time for another in The Register's series of reader experiences at the hands of the On Call telephone.…

We were made for these times, says remote app-slinger, but we’re staying off planes The coronavirus plague has seen plenty of vendors tell investors they just can’t predict what’s going to happen this year, but Citrix has not just issued new guidance but increased the ceiling of its revenue expectations.…

Tune to find out from IONOS exactly how safe your information is from Uncle Sam's prying eyes Webcast When Microsoft loudly and publicly challenges the US government on remote data access, you can bet the Feds and lawmakers won't just sit still and take it.…

As Firepower kit hit by rare and ridiculous ‘silkscreen ID flaw’ A Friday challenge for netadmins: solve a silkscreen ID bug in a Cisco Firepower appliance.…

Possibly picking up China's slack. Fingers crossed for more than that! Taiwan’s posted its monthly Industrial Production Indexes for March 2020 and they contain some nice-looking numbers.…

FCC emits rules to tackle danger of orbital debris Satellite communications companies beaming signals to and from America will need to convince the nation's comms watchdog that any new sats put into orbit won't collide with others and spam space with debris.…

Warehoused servers were ready, but then the world discovered Teams Microsoft has admitted that some Azure regions have experienced coronavirus-triggered capacity constraints, and customers haven’t been able to get all the cloud they want.…

Sales, profit soar in first three months of 2020 as coronavirus helps Chipzilla print money Intel today reported a bumper first quarter of the year, with a big shift to homeworking worldwide partially fueling double-digit growth of its PC processor sales.…

L’ACEI lance le Bouclier canadien dans le but de protéger gratuitement la vie privée et la sécurité des Canadiens en ligne The organization that oversees .CA domains, among other important internet functions, is rolling out a free Canada-wide DNS-over-HTTPS service to protect people's privacy.…

Um, it wasn't doing this already? That explains a lot On Thursday Google said it will require all advertisers on its platforms to verify their identities, an initiative that aims to make online advertising more transparent by allowing people to see who paid for internet pitches.…

Homegrown chip to shift away from Chipzilla? Hey, it could work Apple will reportedly release its own Arm-powered Mac computers next year, marking the biggest component change since Cupertino ditched IBM's PowerPC chips in 2005 for Intel's x86 line.…

Users advised to move file out of folder, let a new one be generated, then copy it back over – if you want to keep them The last major update for Windows Terminal prior to version 1.0 dropped last night but be warned: there are some breaking settings changes.…

World slows down its smartphone buying for a bit LG Display has reported its fifth consecutive loss-making quarter.…