The Register

300 light years away but hey, why not? Astronomers have uncovered a new exoplanet that's roughly the same size as Earth and lies within its star's habitable zone 300 light years away after checking for software errors.…

Single point of failure, imprecise instructions and not enough labels are a bad, bad, mix Cloudflare has admitted that a four-and-a-bit-hour outage today was caused by someone pulling out cables that should have been left in place, but which were yanked because techies were given unhelpfully imprecise instructions.…

Deal announced two weeks ago would have seen shiny new VooV vid chat tool used around the world The United Nations has reportedly dissolved a deal that would have seen its 75th birthday celebrations conducted using video chat tech from Chinese web giant Tencent.…

US-Cert issues new report on misdeeds of North Korean groups The US government's Computer Emergency Response Team (US-Cert) has posted a new report on the latest exploits of North Korea's Hidden Cobra hacking crews.…

Daming letter sent to California attorney general asks for six-month delay Exclusive ICANN has been accused by its founding CEO and original chair of abandoning the organization’s core principles and accepting commitments it knows it cannot enforce in order to push through the sale of the .org registry later this week.…

Dismissal by both parties almost certainly means a settlement The judge overseeing Jonathan Langley's age discrimination lawsuit against IBM has dismissed the case, which was scheduled to go to trial later this year.…

And why causing a Ruckus is a good thing Sponsored Pervasive virtualisation and cloud adoption have moved more apps to the cloud and made edge connectivity more prominent and wireless. The advent of new and more efficient Wi-Fi such as 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 is expected to prompt a new wave of refresh cycles for enterprises.…

Collective amnesia over claimed 'screw Amazon' comment There is no evidence of wrongdoing or undue influence in the Pentagon’s controversial $10bn JEDI cloud contract award to Microsoft, the Defense Department’s internal watchdog has concluded.…

Times are hard...for you at least On Tuesday, Amazon told members of its affiliate marketing program that it will reduce the commissions it pays them to promote products on their websites.…

Firm blames successful cred-stuffing attack for customer pwnage Router biz Linksys has reset all its customers' Smart Wi-Fi account passwords after cybercrims accessed a bunch and redirected hapless users to COVID-19 themed malware.…

Stay of execution granted after customer 'feedback' Microsoft has indefinitely postponed the deprecation of Transport Level Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 in its IoT Hub.…

iPhone's 'budget' midget gem revival is out You have to give Apple credit for timing. It just announced the iPhone SE 2020. Priced at £419, it's the company's cheapest phone in years and lands at a time when nobody has any money, thanks to everyone's least favourite pathogen: Coronavirus.…

Another impressive (and iterative) update to smartphone lineup More of the same isn't always a bad thing, as demonstrated by the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro. These devices follow the same path as their older siblings, offering an iterative improvement at a reasonable price.…

Email ruse preying on COVID-19 fears sends data to crims, warns Mimecast Email security biz Mimecast has warned of a flight refund scam doing the rounds amid a general uptick in coronavirus-related online crime.…

Options being explored for Digital Interconnect division Enterprise software vendor SAP may jettison its SMS platform to focus on core application business.…

Deprecation of venerable protocol postponed 'in light of the current crisis' Google has switched File Transfer Protocol (FTP) back on in Chrome 81 in response to the COVID-19 situation. The change was made "via server-side configuration."…

Will someone rid us of these mast-er idiots? Vodafone CEO Nick Jeffrey has spoken out after arsonists targeted a phone mast serving the NHS Nightingale Hospital in Birmingham.…

No coincidence that new offer closely matches that from smaller rival GitHub is giving away its core services for free and has slashed the price of its paid Team plan by more than half – from $9 per user to $4.…

Starlink slips, Soyuz arrives and StriX-α sat heads to New Zealand Roundup Catching rockets by helicopter, three more 'nauts arriving at the ISS and COVID-19 causing schedule shuffles - it's been busy in the realm of rockets during this past week.…

Also: 2010 server products to survive into 2021 as overstretched admins given more breathing space Reports of the death of The Update Of The Damned (aka Windows 10 1809) appear to have been premature as Microsoft flung a lifeline to those with a little too much on their plate.…

Sub-domain on the move – you have until 29 May to pick a new one Pondering how to fill your days? Fear not – if you're still using the Demon sub-domain for your email address, you'd best start telling your contact book that changes are afoot.…

That might sound like good news, but it's not. Size isn't everything Prolonged periods in space increases brain mass by as much as 6 per cent, according to a new study, but that's not good news.…

And tosses in a new cloudy manager for good measure VMware has finally delivered on its vision to integrate Kubernetes and vSphere, by making Cloud Foundation 4.0 generally available.…

Overheating HP hardware disrupts festive ad flinging Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of computers getting hot under the collar and flinging bundles of bork at passersby.…

Can: Send rover to Mars and operate it from home. Can't: Remote in to mission PCs or replicate them in the cloud NASA has reverted to using old-school red and blue 3D glasses to direct the Curiosity rover around Mars.…

Welcome to the world of China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier China Mobile today published its 2019 annual report, revealing the extraordinary scale of the business and its ambition to do better beyond China’s borders and in the cloud.…

Ongoing Chrome Web Store security saga deftly straddles tragedy and farce Google has ousted 49 Chrome extensions from its Chrome Web Store because they contained malicious code, a ritual that should be familiar after a decade of purges.…

But we've only done it to help governments understand that virus thing you may have heard about lately Apple has released a set of "Mobility Trends Reports" – a trove of anonymised and aggregated data that describes how people have moved around the world in the three months from 13 January to 13 April.…

Shall we call it the Termin-Acer? Or maybe the ASUS-inator? BenQ for coming – we're here all week Taiwan's going to take a shot at developing military exoskeletons.…

As Prime Minister calls on citizens to inspire adoption of contact-tracing app The Indian city of Vadodara has taken a novel technological approach to coronavirus quarantine surveillance by floating a balloon equipped with cameras and a public address system.…

The Philippine government has demanded the nation's telcos submit continuity plans by the end of this week to ensure that the country maintains uninterrupted internet service during the coronavirus lockdown.…

And help to take small business digital because of y’know that virus thing we keep hearing about The Association of South-East Asian Nations ASEAN has made a regional fake news crackdown and e-commerce enablement a part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

FTC tallies the cost of pandemic rip-offs Fraud related to the coronavirus has cost Americans $13m and so far counting, according to the US government.…

As online grocery shopping gets harder as Amazon moves to invite-only The big four food delivery apps - GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats - are abusing their market power to force restaurants to charge the same for online and in-person order, according to a new lawsuit.…

'The mean police, they live inside of my head, the mean police, they come to me in my bed...' Online Q&A site Stack Overflow aspires to be "a welcoming and friendly place," and to make that so, the biz has deployed sentiment-sniffing code to catch unkind commentary lest it drive members of its online community away.…

Adobe and Intel add their woes Microsoft has delivered another epic Patch Tuesday, dropping fixes for more than 100 security bugs, and Adobe and Intel have added their dose of misery and security too.…

“Repeatedly violated internal policies” means go to the door Updated Amazon has fired another three employees who have been critical of the biz, including two tech workers in Seattle and a warehouse worker in Minnesota. All three have raised concerns about the working conditions at the online giant’s warehouses during the coronavirus outbreak.…

ERP, warehousing, sales, accounts, supply chain all working together Canada's OpenText has claimed its data-integration platform can bring together information from applications both inside and outside company boundaries.…

Oh it can't be that baaa.... $16.7 BEEELLION?! One of Softbank's slogans is that it "invests in human progress." If its latest forecasts are anything to go by, the returns are disappointing, to say the least.…

'It was really a long process because it's just volunteer work' Interview Inkscape, a popular open-source vector graphics application, is heading for its 1.0 release more than 16 years after its first appearance in November 2003.…

Amazingly, contractor for massive UK TV channels differentiates himself from 'mainstream media' Sleepy ITV daytime show This Morning isn't typically the venue for conspiratorial chatter. It's more Loose Women than Loose Change. Still, that didn't prevent Eamonn Holmes* from espousing the belief that the "mainstream media" is participating in a cover-up about the dangers of 5G.…

Plus: New Edge build, more Office 365 branding snuffed Roundup Though there may be no Neo this year, a new Windows is almost upon us as The Register rounds up the emissions from Redmond that you might have missed.…

Conservative politicos including IDS voice anger over 'untimely special pleading' An open letter from Huawei about the UK's 5G strategy in light of COVID-19 has provoked outrage among several key politicians in the country's ruling Conservative Party, who have denounced it as "hubristic" and "arrogant".…

All 'the working from home and virtual desktops' might make you think about data center rebuilds, hmm? AMD is once again hoping to muscle in on Intel's bread and butter with a new line of second-generation Epyc processors aimed squarely at the HPC, cloud, and enterprise markets.…

Distributed computing project sails past anticipated raw power of El Capitan – and you folks are at the forefront Give yourselves a pat on the back, ladies and gents – two teams made up of Register readers are in the top 1,000 out of more than 250,000 in the Folding@home distributed computing project for disease research.…

Enclave-bound service aims to be another nail in the password coffin Hoping to actually make the long foretold end of passwords happen, a startup called Beyond Identity believes it can hasten the demise of the memory-taxing access ritual by embedding a personal certificate authority into mobile devices.…

It’s open source. It will be abused. So we need to design a way out before we dive in Comment The world seems set to adopt smartphone-driven contact tracing to help detect COVID-19 carriers but regulators need to plot an exit strategy from this new form of deeply personal and intensive surveillance.…

Time to break ties with historic corporate inertia Column The suddenness and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic took many CTOs and CIOs by surprise as worries over the impact on a supply chain in China flipped, seemingly overnight, into a fight for corporate survival.…

Revealed: Oracle founder's plan for global wellness Comment Larry Ellison is not one to let anything get him down, least of all gravity. Grave though the global COVID-19 pandemic may be, the Oracle founder, CTO and chairman is a man who produces. And, as intrepid Forbes reporter Angel Au-Yeung found out, the product is "wellness".…

Google Pay is about to get really useful in India's biggest cities Google's India operation has launched a new feature that enables users to find and transact with essential stores during the novel coronavirus lockdown.…