The Register

Plus: Broadband ambitions meet cold water Among the economic doom and gloom of the UK's Autumn Spending Review, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak inadvertently revealed the sop UK.gov plans to throw to telcos after sacking Huawei from the UK's 5G rollout at the behest of an orange one-term president of the US.…

Watching, always watching Microsoft's Productivity Score has put in a public appearance in Microsoft 365 and attracted the ire of privacy campaigners and activists.…

Cheap and cheerful clearly appealed during pandemic It has been a difficult year for the mobile industry as economic uncertainty and widespread national lockdowns further depressed the public's appetite for handset upgrades. Some vendors are faring better than others, however, with Xiaomi proving especially resilient.…

Containers, serverless, CI/CD, tooling – we’d love to hear all about it Event If there’s anything that hasn’t come to a halt this year, it surely is software development and service infrastructure work. We know you’ve all been busy so here’s another chance to get in your presentation proposal for our Continuous Lifecycle Online 2021 conference.…

53 nations and 180 telcos have adopted Clean Network plan – and Huawei fell for it The United States' Clean Network plan has won support from 53 nations and 180 telcos, and Huawei has unwittingly legitimised it.…

Which rather kicks a hole in the planned debut of Slack-like Salesforce Anywhere Salesforce is reportedly deep in talks to buy Slack, according to The Wall Street Journal, which says a deal could happen "in days".…

Left last couple of bans alone but now says national security argument is bogus and calls for mutual co-operation China has responded to India's new round of bans on mobile apps by attacking the reasons for the banishments.…

It flew OK without MCAS – but not well enough to be certified as safe The Boeing 737 Max was safe enough to fly without the controversial MCAS system but would not have met safety certification rules, the EU Aviation Safety Agency has said after confirming the airliner will return to European skies in January 2021.…

French IT outsourcer says its overall losses will deepen as direct result Sopra Steria has said a previously announced Ryuk ransomware infection will not only cost it "between €40m and €50m" but will also deepen expected financial losses by several percentage points.…

Multiple services sickly after Kinesis catches a cold: CloudWatch, DynamoDB, Lambda, Managed Blockchain AWS has delivered the one message that will strike fear into the hearts of techies working out their day before Thanksgiving Holidays: US-EAST-1 region is suffering a "severely impaired" service.…

$2.5m worth – 1,000 pairs of Nike Air Mag sneakers or a second-hand Pagani? Decisions, decisions Is it a vote of confidence when the CFO sells $2.5m in shares as the CEO is about to make his big pitch of the year and the quarterly results are due?…

SMEs are spending again, claims tech giant It is now seven straight quarters since Dell's infrastructure unit last grew but COO Jeff Clarke reckons he's spotted some green shoots of recovery that might bode well for server and storage spending next year.…

Take the M3 exit to offline mail and calendar shenanigans It's been a while coming, but browser maker Vivaldi has finally released a public preview of its long awaited email client.…

Local US carriers to remain unable to buy its kit with federal funding The US Federal Communications Commission has rejected a petition [PDF] from controversial Chinese teleco kit maker ZTE asking the agency to reconsider whether it should be deemed a national security threat.…

'It's like being in my own bubble back here' Though taxis can do a lot of things, like getting one from A to B, emptying out bank accounts, and even transporting BSODs, we suspect that preventing the spread of COVID-19 is not one of them.…

'While Bob never got to play on the big stage, he always followed the band around and got to ride on the bus' One anniversary unlikely to be marked within the bowels of Redmond is that of Microsoft Bob. However, a retired engineer has taken to YouTube to confirm that the unloved interface did indeed enjoy a second life as digital ballast for Windows XP.…

Lawyers for fined firm make eyebrow-raising claim to irate ex-customer Ticketmaster is claiming that the ICO's £1.25m data breach fine clears it of any responsibility for its network being infected by card-skimming malware, according to correspondence seen by The Register.…

Quis custodiet ipsos bork-es? Bork!Bork!Bork! Join us on a jaunt to an Australian shopping centre, where Windows 7 rules the roost and the digital signage, it seems, might be watching your every move.…

Famed director dispenses a reality check for wannabe Martians Film-maker Werner Herzog has upended the scorn bucket over billionaire electric car and space firm mogul Elon Musk's plans to create a city on Mars.…

This must have cost a packet... MongoDB has just found out what it can spend the marketing budget on, if not the usual fodder of canapés and international flights.…

Needed for probe testing how X-59 can break sound barrier without breaking eardrums NASA has revealed it’s building network cables capable of surviving supersonic flight.…

SaaS revenue tops licences for the first time in solid Q3 VMware has reported Q3 growth that beat guidance offered earlier in its financial year but said results would have been better but for a slowdown in “transformational projects”.…

Authorities warn aliens to get a permit before they do this sort of thing Poll The Utah Department of Public Safety has found a mysterious metal monolith in a remote corner of the state.…

Palo Alto Networks spotted subscriber IDs and MAC addresses on the move UPDATED Infosec researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence unit spotted a pair of prominent Chinese apps leaking personal data, and after it informed Google the ad giant dumped the apps from its Play store.…

43 apps axed, including those helping buyers and sellers of digital tat bazaar India has banned another 43 apps from operating in its territory.…

Plus or minus some caveats Comcast has vowed to enforce its 1.2TB-a-month download limit in more US states, expanding the policy to cover the nation's northeast and mid-Atlantic corners.…

Ring, Echo owners get emails explaining how to switch off incoming functionality Amazon is close to launching Sidewalk – its ad-hoc wireless network for smart-home devices that taps into people's Wi-Fi – and it is pretty much an opt-out affair.…

If you've been pwned in the past, pay special attention to this one VMware has published a series of workarounds for critical command injection vulnerabilities in its Workspace One Access, Access Connector, Identity Manager and Identity Manager Connector products.…

Any opportunity to nudge customers cloudwards, but no word on whether generosity will extend to Europeans Microsoft is slicing a chunk off the cost of its subscription productivity suite, but interested businesses must be both small and US-based.…

Hopefully no dogfood was eaten ahead of this incident UK electronic retailer Currys PC World found its website in need of urgent maintenance this afternoon and pulled its online orifice offline.…

What untold treasures could these primitive technologies hold? Carriers are eagerly eyeing industrial IoT as a way to fatten slender margins, and diversify from their traditional bread and butter of handset sales and subscriptions. The latest foray into this space comes from Vodafone, which plans to sell an end-to-end system to UK biz customers.…

Yes, even Amazon got a piece of 'multi-billion' dollar meal AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM can celebrate Thanksgiving safe in the knowledge they have won a place on the US Central Intelligence Agency’s lucrative Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract.…

Stuff that helps with Chipzilla's bottom line, basically Intel CEO Bob Swan has penned an open letter to President-elect Joe Biden congratulating him on his win, and urging his incoming administration to continue investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing.…

Software dinosaur will run alongside new CDS platform, says HMRC A top civil servant has said UK tax collector HMRC has not set a date to end use of a vital 26-year-old customs system, even though plans to migrate began seven years ago.…

What do 20 pizzas and five hours of face time with your most boring mate have in common? Cravings for social interactions affect the same area of the brain hit by hunger pangs after a long absence of nosh, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found.…

2027 ban prelude will be new Ofcom micromanagement powers Not content with its planned ban on Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G phone networks, the British government now wants to threaten Huawei-using telcos with fines of £100,000 a day unless they follow binding new rules on how existing kit can be used.…

Leaky data systems fixed now, but the issue affected millions Feature Two separate internet affiliate networks have closed vulnerabilities that exposed potentially millions of records in one of the most sensitive areas: payday loans.…

Lower back roasting on an open fire, carpal tunnel nipping at your... too early? Review The modern workplace isn't just hopelessly dreary – it may also be ruining your health. Repetitive motions from keyboard and mouse usage can conspire to smite your wrists with carpal tunnel syndrome, for which surgery is often the only cure. And that's before we get into the osteopathic wreckage caused by a career spent plonked on a cheap office chair, glaring into a monitor.…

Check out this OutSystems Tech Talk Promo Today’s dev teams want to collaborate quickly to build great apps but are held back by a variety of challenges, such as limited resources.…

Group claims adtech 'has nothing to do with privacy' but is rather an attempt 'to take control of the web' Google's Privacy Sandbox took another knock today as Marketers for an Open Web (MOW) wrote to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) requesting a block on the technology's launch.…

Nice tweak, but nothing epic enough to erode monopoly money Apple has made another tweak to its rules for in-app purchases.…

And it’s working: metrics measuring contract value grew in Q1 2021 as customers signed for subscriptions When listed companies report their quarterly numbers most start with their revenue figure and then explore other numbers that tell the story they want investors to understand. But Nutanix is now going straight for other numbers related to annual contract value (AVC) that reflect its plan to win one sale and then sell more stuff to the same customer – a practice known as “land and expand.”…

2.45 TeraFLOPS number-munching PCIe card to be bolted into x86 servers NEC will soon sell as a standalone item the PCIe accelerator cards it uses to power modest supercomputers.…

Is it possible to pull the RUG from under these numbers? Comment Intel has taken fresh aim at arch-rival AMD, this month briefing tech journos on benchmarks showing Ryzen-powered laptops not only slowing down when unplugged from mains power but also losing to Intel's latest Core microprocessors whether on battery supply or not.…

As Beijing brings in another that regulates internet infomercials and stops teens buying their tat Imagine if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google supremo Sundar Pichai or Like-seeker-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg gave a major speech that heartily endorsed new government regulations - even though they make business harder - and argued they’re necessary, timely, and just.…

Web traffic, email redirected, personal info exposed in DNS hijacking Miscreants were able to hijack traffic and email destined for various cryptocurrency-related websites this month – by hoodwinking GoDaddy employees.…

Exec, two officers, one other charged Apple's head of global security tried to bung cops hundreds of free iPads in exchange for special gun permits, it is claimed.…

'In his own way, he was trying to fulfil the letter of the law' says cop A Frenchman has been fined after police in Brittany discovered him breaking the country's harsh lockdown laws with a written note saying he'd left home to "smash a guy's face in."…

If all goes as planned China's ambitious Chang'e 5 lunar sample return mission kicks off tonight with a launch from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province.…

Also: Edge to take to the M1, and TypeScript 4.1 is here In Brief Microsoft's army of unpaid Windows Insider testers can look forward to a Windows 10 turkey without that crucial bit of juicy 64-bit Intel on Arm stuffing.…