The Register

And for my next trick... behold! Digital transformation! The UK government has launched a tender for a £2bn IT services framework contract after the expected value rose to four times the initial estimated price.…

'I'm just not excited at the prospect of a new crop of unknown unknowns' Changes to the way string comparisons work in the soon-to-be-released .NET 5.0 may break existing code on Windows.…

Companies are a bigger threat than governments – because they're less regulated Interview Cyber Privacy: Who Has Your Data and Why You Should Care is the title of a new book from April Falcon Doss, formerly associate general counsel for intelligence law at the US National Security Agency. Doss spoke to The Register about her concerns with pervasive data collection and its potential for harm.…

Security, that's what, for those of you who like your clouds very isolated AWS has introduced a new variant of its EC2 IaaS service that offers no external network connectivity, no persistent storage, and no user access – not even a root user or an admin user on the instance can access or SSH into the instance.…

Huawei stockpiling components helps too, but server memory sales go soft Samsung Electronics has revealed 50 percent growth thanks to a surge in smartphone sales.…

Challenges jury verdict immediately and offers to pay one percent of damages French services outfit Atos has been ordered to pay $855m for pinching a rival’s trade secrets.…

Kaspersky’s License Management Portal helps MSPs and resellers get tech to users fast Promo Cyber-criminals never sleep, so neither should your customers’ security teams or your own managed service operations.…

Kind-of digital currency can shift US Dollars or the Cambodian Riel Cambodia has launched a blockchain-powered peer-to-peer payment system and it’s hoped the scheme reduces use of cash and helps to control the novel coronavirus.…

Smacks down Information Commission by pointing to policy and data revealing the app has probably helped quite a lot India’s Central Information Commission has warned the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that it could face penalties under the Right to Information Act after it was found to have been “evasive” in its response to a request for information about the Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app.…

Scheme to encourage hiring pricey brainiacs instead of cheap footsloggers The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.…

Senator Wyden puts surveillance nerve-center on blast It's said the NSA drew up a report on what it learned after a foreign government exploited a weak encryption scheme, championed by the US spying agency, in Juniper firewall software.…

Former cop admits conspiracy to tamper with witnesses, too The Feds have secured another guilty plea in the eBay cyberstalking case where former employees of the online auction house targeted and harassed a couple who were critical of the company in their ecommerce newsletter.…

With few exceptions, the questioning was a national embarrassment Comment This morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing with the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter to discuss making changes to a critical piece of US legislation that provides online platforms, used by billions of people, legal protections from the content those people post.…

Next release will block third-party trackers posing as first-party resources The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies.…

Issue affects Android devices but fix said to be imminent The NHS COVID-19 contact-tracing app has run into further trouble by preventing some people with phones using unsupported languages from accessing parts of the service.…

Comets: Crunchy on the outside... frothy on the inside? ESA scientists have identified the location of the Philae lander's second touchdown site on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and revealed new insights about the space snowball's interior.…

Revelations triggered by previous police abuse, court hears A former BAE Systems software engineer who allegedly leaked top-secret details about a frontline missile system also ignored orders from police to hand over passwords to his electronic devices, a court has heard.…

Stay safe and warm in your C# cocoon Good news landed today for data dabblers with a taste for .NET - Version 1.0 of .NET for Apache Spark has been released into the wild.…

And they're gonna like it Hope is not a strategy, and that common aphorism is coming back to haunt enterprise software outfit SAP.…

Switchzilla cloud glue lashes IT systems together Cisco on Wednesday augmented its Intersight systems management platform with container juggling code and introduced a dashboard for overseeing data center networks.…

Pulling containers from Docker Hub for free will be throttled from 1 November From 1 November, Docker will clap limits on how many container images free users can pull from its Docker Hub before requests are declined, a move that could cause problems for users of public cloud platforms.…

Credit reference agency recycled personal details for marketing purposes, says regulator Experian has been rapped over the knuckles by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after it discovered the credit reference agency was trading "millions" of people's data for marketing purposes.…

BT-owned carrier gets cosier with Swedish comms giant Ericsson has won a major contract to provide 5G RAN equipment to UK network EE as Huawei continues to be sidelined in Britain.…

No Slack in the system amid the irresistible rise of Redmond's collaboration platform Microsoft broke out the collaborative backslappery during its Q1 FY21 earnings call and revealed some actual usage numbers for one of its platforms: Teams has more than 115 million Daily Active Users (DAU).…

Yeah, that Otto work Waymo has partnered with one of the world's largest truck manufacturers to install its fully autonomous self-driving technology into semi-trailer trucks on American roads.…

Update tips more functionality on gizmo's second display Planet Computers has updated the Debian-based operating system for its Cosmo Communicator PDA to allow users to place calls from the device's second screen.…

Michael Dawson, chair of Node.js Technical Steering Committee, talks to The Reg Interview Popular open-source JavaScript runtime Node.js hit version 15 last week, and to bring us up to date we spoke to Michael Dawson, Red Hat Node.js lead, who is also chair of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee and Community Director of the OpenJS Foundation.…

Another 12 months on Itanium and COBOL for the Australian Stock Exchange One of the world's most prominent planned uses of distributed ledger technology has been pushed back by a year.…

Ampere CPUs available for automated deployments as data centre giant takes on public clouds Equinix has joined the ranks of big cloud players offering Arm-powered servers.…

We'd rather see Dr Nick, to be honest Anyone trying to use OpenAI’s powerful text-generating GPT-3 system to power chatbots to offer medical advice and help should go back to the drawing board, researchers have warned.…

Call for papers for next year's edition of our DevOps, CI/CD, and container summit is now open Event Believe it or not, it has been six years since we’ve started the Continuous Lifecycle London conference series with our friends over at Heise Developer.…

Why not get in early before official 31 December demise? If you'd like to exact righteous vengeance on Adobe's Flash, Microsoft has given us all a tool to expunge the software ahead of time.…

3,000 WiFi access points and 150,000 wired ethernet ports The Pentagon, the colossal office that serves as the headquarters of the United States’ Department of Defence, plans to install 3,000 new WiFi access points and 150,00-plus wired ethernet switches after turfing out old Cisco kit.…

Well, that narrows down the list of suspects to just a few billion people Donald Trump's presidential campaign website was briefly hacked and defaced tonight.…

To get a better view of regional hotspots in case things get kinetic The USA and India have struck a new defence pact that will see the two nations share high-quality spatial data and satellite images.…

The $499 equipment cost and laggy latency give room for pause SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink has finally revealed its pricing: $99 a month for speeds that vary between 50Mbps and 150Mbps... plus 500 bucks to buy the necessary equipment.…

Azure revenue up 48 per cent, pretty much everything Redmond makes is up Microsoft on Tuesday reported $37.2bn in revenue for the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, an increase of 12 per cent year over year and more than investors had anticipated.…

Regulator’s monthly meeting provided an opportunity to argue all over again Analysis The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put the final nail into America's net neutrality coffin on Tuesday, approving an order that ties up loose ends from its 2018 decision to “restore internet freedom."…

Perhaps we can talk about extra security and compromises honestly Zoom has finally added end-to-end encryption to its video conferencing service at no additional cost for all users, whether they are paying subscribers or not.…

Choice of LineageOS and Ubuntu Touch as well as Android UK smartphone developer F(x)tec has rolled out the second generation of its sliding keyboard phones, the F(x)tec Pro1 X.…

We'll see how long it lasts as 20H2 starts doing the rounds While Microsoft celebrates Halloween with scary data deletion stories of Windows past, May's Windows 10 has swiped the popularity prize from its predecessor.…

'I've seen programmes on American prisons' says wife A Briton is reportedly fighting extradition to the United States after deploying webcam malware onto hundreds of women's laptops so he could spy on them undressing and having sex.…

First you could break up by text – next year you can take the phone with you UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom is introducing new rules that will stop phone companies selling carrier-locked handsets.…

Intel rival up 50%+ in profits just a week after Chipzilla 30% plunge Chip slinger AMD celebrated bonzer revenue and profit for its third quarter, ended 26 September [PDF] with a $35bn all-stock acquisition of FPGA outfit Xilinx.…

Which is proof such fripperies are down to the developer, rather than Apple Microsoft has finally introduced trackpad support for Office Microsoft 365 on the iPad.…

PSA: Maintaining the open-source OS can turn your beard grey Open Source Summit Europe It's official. The upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel is destined to become the next "longterm maintenance" release for the open-source operating system.…

Microsoft program outputs ready-to-roll model from image input set Microsoft has built a desktop app called Lobe that can be used to train object-recognition models without having to write a single line of code. Getting that model into an application, though, will require some programming.…

Situation: The New Normal? Bork!Bork!Bork! A train with supernatural powers of prediction features in today's edition of signage behaving strangely. Who would could have known that the electronic information panel was warning passengers of what was to come?…

And Deutsche Telekom's happy with this airborne base station plan A British startup is hoping to strap 5G antennas to liquid-hydrogen-powered high-altitude pseudo-satellites in the hope of replacing mobile base stations on the ground.…

Open-source RISC OS 5.28 brings support for latest ickle 'puter as well as hundreds of fixes An update for open-source Arm operating system RISC OS at the weekend features stable support for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer.…