The Register

We watched six hours of congressional hearings so you didn’t have to Analysis For six hours on Wednesday, the Western world’s most powerful tech CEOs – whose businesses have become household names and touch every part of our daily digital lives – were grilled by US lawmakers regarding their market dominance.…

Current and former bods fear cloud work is doomed, IT titan disagrees Over the past two weeks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has axed roughly 150 positions in the US, including Azure Stack Hub engineering roles and at least part of its SimpliVity team.…

Ancient ball of suns smeared across space by our galaxy two billion years ago The Milky Way galaxy ripped apart an ancient star cluster born in the early universe and stole its suns two billion years ago, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday.…

Because no one likes to install spoof system files Microsoft is preparing to once and for all drop support for the SHA-1 hash algorithm.…

Chipzilla faces potential class-action headache after stock price plunge On Tuesday this week, five days after Intel acknowledged that its plan to produce 7nm processors had gone off the rails, a shareholder lawsuit was filed against the chip maker.…

We're gonna keeping punning this until someone pays us $5m An annoying vulnerability in the widely used GRUB2 bootloader can be potentially exploited by malware or a rogue insider already on a machine to thoroughly compromise the operating system or hypervisor while evading detection by users and security tools.…

System Roles another key ingredient in six-monthly update Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 has hit beta, with security and production stability pointed to as key goals for the update.…

What do we all need? Next-gen masts. When do we need them? Sooner than they'll be ready Most UK cities now have some degree of 5G coverage, promising those with capable devices faster internet connections. But how much of a game change is it really? New data from RootMetrics highlight consistently nimble connections, albeit with some major differences between networks.…

Surprise pledge catches company on the hop: 'We have announced no change to our strategy' China's ambassador to Britain has threatened to withdraw Huawei and several billions in investment following the government's decision to ban the manufacturer's products from 5G mobile networks.…

Just be careful it's not 'out of scope' Microsoft has created a new landing page for developers, along with a dedicated feedback repository for reporting issues with Windows.…

Could it be? Something approaching, dare we say, viability? Huawei has highlighted growing adoption figures for its Android software ecosystem - Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and the Huawei AppGallery - following the imposition of US government sanctions.…

Carol and Kevin banned from outback establishment for 'bad behaviour' Heads up, folks. Australia's at it again. From the country that brought you "mortal wombat" comes news that two emus have been barred from an outback pub for "bad behaviour".…

Most of the things Microsoft said would be great were not Windows 10 was made generally available on 29 July 2015, introducing the concept of Windows-as-a-Service, a digital assistant called Cortana, a Universal Windows Platform for developers, Continuum to enable "a Windows Phone to become like a PC", and not forgetting the revival of the Start menu.…

You'll wanna tune into this chat about SD-WAN, then Webcast Research from Vanson Bourne found that more than half of surveyed businesses wished their SD-WAN – their software-defined wide area networking – was provided straight from their cloud vendor as opposed to a third party.…

Vodafone not happy either as telcos complain to defence sub-committee about Huawei removal woes Stripping Huawei from the UK's telecommunications network presents a daunting challenge, executives from Vodafone and BT told the House of Commons Defence Sub-Committee yesterday afternoon.…

Almost 25 years and counting, here's to the luckiest spacecraft off Earth Space Extenders Welcome to the final episode in The Register's series on engineering longevity in space. We conclude with the joint ESA and NASA project, more than 24 years into a two-year mission: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).…

Plus: Don't worry, students. The attackers told us they destroyed your data Nearly half of British university staff say they have received no cybersecurity training, according to a recent survey.…

Passengers will be able to watch themselves float while bathed in Earthlight and surrounded by tasteful colours Passengers that go into space aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo won't just experience weightlessness: they'll also get to watch themselves float in a giant mirror and enjoy decor designed to remind them of Earth's oceans and deserts.…

Toshiba leads effort that aspires to run 100 quantum cryptographic devices for 10,000 users by 2024 Japan is poised to start work on global quantum key distribution service and associated infrastructure.…

Who can you trust these days? The voice applications people use with their Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant smart speaker devices have privacy policies, but most users don't read them and neither device maker has shown much concern about policy problems or inconsistencies.…

Microsoft’s trashing the place, clearly. Or is it? Poll GitHub has announced it will henceforth publish a public roadmap of current features.…

Newsletter-as-a-service outfit Substack does the usual apologising Some advice from The Register: when announcing a new privacy policy don’t do so with emails that reveal 500 addresses in the “To” field of the message.…

'We just wanna design chips without distractions', say staff in open letter British chip designer Arm’s Chinese outpost has called in the Chinese government to “protect” it in an ongoing boardroom dispute with its parent company.…

Calls for e-commerce surge and keeps schools closed due to certain virus that's made news lately Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has threatened a pair of local telcos with expropriation if they don’t improve services.…

Chipzooky's fortunes are Ryzen Epyc-ly AMD on Tuesday said it had made it through a healthy second quarter of 2020 during which its Ryzen and Epyc microprocessor lines doubled their revenues.…

Guess what? Literally everyone thinks this is a terrible idea The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has formally asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to review a critical law that provides blanket liability to online platforms such as Google and Facebook.…

Assuming this weekend's return journey goes well, natch Ahead of a Dragon capsule bringing home a pair of astronauts from the International Space Station this weekend, NASA shared more details of followup crewed missions to and from the orbiting science lab using the SpaceX pod.…

Boyfriend-girlfriend and housemate indicted in US on PlexCoin rap Two Canadian lovers and their housemate have been charged with fraud after allegedly netting $8m by selling a made-up cryptocurrency called PlexCoin to victims.…

Browser quitters say they'll return if web goliath lives up to privacy promises A handful of Chrome users have sued Google, accusing the browser maker of collecting personal information despite their decision not to sync data stored in Chrome with a Google Account.…

'Exceptionally broad' demands reveal too much about our staff! American tech giants have enjoyed a reversal of their EU legal fortunes over the past fortnight as Euro nation courts issued rulings in their favor – and now Facebook has even sued the European Union itself, alleging the political bloc’s agencies broke their own data protection rules.…

Cable named for compsci legend Grace Hopper to link US, UK, Spain Cloud and ads behemoth Google is building a subsea internet cable linking the US to the UK and Spain.…

Put away your Hawaiian shirts, no post-lockdown Vegas January for you The global pandemic just claimed another in-person tech conference – the 2021 edition of CES will be an "all-digital experience".…

'Equity-backed' DB-'n'-services biz hooks up tenants with vetted local repair shops A group of UK housing associations has awarded a framework contract worth up to £400m to property technology company Plentific, in part to help build a trading platform for folks to come in and do repairs and maintenance in people's homes.…

Issues? Visit the website or use Visual Studio Code JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2, a big mid-year update that adds support for Java 15 and Jakarta EE9 as well as improving its GitHub integration.…

Propositions database land with a 'real-time' system Rockset has upgraded its main database engine for more efficient scaling and performance gains by separating storage and compute. The outfit said it also separates the cloud compute resources used for ingesting and querying data.…

Also, half of the world's 5G investment currently is spent by China Worldwide spending on 5G is set to double in 2020, according to analyst house Gartner, in stark contrast to the wider cellular infrastructure sector, which will see revenues plummet overall.…

Just another day for the Investigatory Powers Tribunal The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, has been accused of trying to tamper with a court that is supposed to oversee and regulate it after an extraordinary tale emerged yesterday.…

Uncle Sam tests AI models with pics of immigrants, travelers. Wait, what? Face masks worn to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus typically decrease the accuracy of commercial facial recognition algorithms by up to 50 per cent, according to an investigation by America's technical standards watchdog, NIST.…

Tune in online to get a handle on separating good data from clutter Webcast The advantages of having decent threat intelligence in place are many and various, as the threat landscape continues to widen year-on-year.…

Top court won't nix links to accurate, fair journalism about director of financially rocked charity Germany's high court has sided with Google by upholding lower court rulings that rejected a right-to-be-forgotten privacy claim, and it delayed another case to seek clarification from top Euro judges.…

We can't call it an initial public offering given this is its second time around on the share market Rackspace Technology has revealed the terms of its planned return to the stock market.…

Relying on ads in software designed to block ads is an uphill struggle Privacy-centric startup Brave has included a subscription VPN service in its iOS browser.…

Not so fast - Quick Charge 5 does its best when using new dual-battery tech Qualcomm has unveiled the fifth generation of its Quick Charge battery-charging technology and boasts it can fully recharge a smartphone in 15 minutes.…

Rust enters the top 20, and yes, JavaScript is still number one Python surpassed Java in Redmonk's latest biannual programming language ranking to take second place... by not doing anything.…

Now to figure out how to make and store the gas, and fit fuel cells into bit barns Microsoft has revealed that it ran racks full of servers for 48 hours using electricity generated by hydrogen fuel cells, but the company's aspiration to use the tech again needs careful scrutiny.…

Holy sheet... One of our Sun's large, recent solar flares was formed from the release of 10 to 100 billion trillion joules per second of magnetic energy through gigantic sheets of near-light-speed electrons, scientists say.…

Local SSD block-level storage comes to EC2 instances powered by home-brew Graviton2 CPUs Amazon Web Services has created three more EC2 instance types that run its home-grown Graviton2 Arm-compatible processors.…

Half a billion users for $3.5bn - bargain! WeChat owner Tencent Holdings wants to acquire China's second-largest search engine Sogou for around $3.5bn.…

But won’t reveal the actual algorithms – or even define what an algorithm is New Zealand has created what it claims is the world’s first “Algorithm Charter” that sets out how government agencies should devise algorithms and explain their workings.…

You see, there is a COVID-19 silver lining. For employers. For the rest of us, welcome to the machine Google has gone all-in on its work-from-home policy, telling techies they don’t need to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest.…