The Register

It's all about transparency, yet China didn't rate a mention Taiwan and the US have made a joint declaration that calls for “rigorous” checks on 5G kit to prevent interference from foreign governments.…

New iOS update will rob people of personalized ads, wails antisocial giant Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.…

Switchzilla's cloud infrastructure trashed. And his new employer doesn't want to fire him A former Cisco employee pleaded guilty in a San Jose federal court on Wednesday to unlawfully accessing Switchzilla's Amazon Web Services infrastructure and damaging the networking giant's cloud computing resources.…

Thanks for raising the share price 25% *checks HR playbook* now get lost To remind everyone that big biz loves to shave a few per cent off the workforce each year or quarter, regardless of its fortunes, we today present you Salesforce.…

A virtual conference brought to you by our friends at The Next Platform Event The IT world would have been a far simpler and easier place if the relational databases commercialized in the 1980s and expanded in the 1990s and 2000s had absorbed new data types quickly and efficiently while at the same time scaling up in larger machines and scaling out across multiple machines.…

Russian charged with trying to bung staffer cash to infect own bosses' network during DDoS distraction A Russian citizen is accused of flying to America in a bid to bribe a Nevada company employee to infect their bosses' IT network with malware.…

S-1 filing slams Silicon Valley as the real privacy-invading spies, too Reclusive data analytics outfit Palantir has filed to go public, giving a small glimmer of insight into the highly secretive company and its finances, or lack of them.…

Speaking purely hypothetically, of course Pawel Wylecial, a security consultant with Redteam.pl, has published a proof-of-concept exploit for stealing files from iOS and macOS devices via web application code that utilizes the Web Share API.…

Chocolate Factory pitches 'App Modernization' tech at devs, though what added value it brings is foggy It is week seven of Google's OnAir videogasm and that means - if anyone is still paying attention - "Application Modernization", which in Googleland is code for (you guessed it) running your stuff in containers, preferably via the bundle of services it calls Anthos.…

The future of infosec may be software-defined – tune in online and find out how Webcast In terms of cyber-security, things are getting real out there. Ransomware continues to infect organizations, and mitigating this particularly savage form of extortion is now a top priority.…

Attackers aimed to steal pics, vids, and compressed files A hacker crew targeted a luxury estate agency involved in multimillion-pound property deals by deploying malicious plugins for 3D design software Autodesk 3ds Max as part of a potential hacks-for-hire operation.…

And certainly not the best service of its kind out there Hands-on Microsoft has added audio transcription to the paid-for version of Word Online, the in-browser edition of its ubiquitous word processor.…

'Highly inappropriate' comments senior civil servant Again highlighting cosy relations between Amazon and UK.gov, Alex Chisholm, Cabinet Office permanent secretary and head of the civil service, has confirmed the etail giant's UK’s head Doug Gurr will sit on a panel that chooses the next government chief digital officer (GCDO).…

Officials are better prepared for meddling – so attackers have had to rely on mental games With the United States set to undertake its first Presidential election since the Russian-tinged 2016 race, state governments and social networks are upping their game.…

'Totally bummed out' that Dreamforce isn't happening, though Cloudy CRM slinger Salesforce has filed a buoyant set of results for Q2 ended 31 July in the face of a global pandemic and related economic slump.…

British courts can set global royalty rates for foreign firms Huawei this morning lost a long-running patent lawsuit against Unwired Planet in a case that will determine global FRAND licensing rates for years to come – and also sets London as the jurisdiction of choice for squabbling telecoms multinationals.…

Imagine how the smaller firms are feeling as furlough's end approaches Provided the UK government can provide the requisite "fiscal stimulus" to keep corporate Britain ticking over, the COVID-19 crisis can be viewed as ripe fruit there for the plucking.…

Which is, y'know, telecoms stuff A Huawei phone mast is to be installed next to a secret MI5 data centre, despite government directives to strip the Chinese company's equipment from UK mobile networks in the next seven years.…

You can't trust anyone: Researchers had to lie to participants to get result In a world mired in misinformation and populated by politicians who don't seem to care if they are caught lying, researchers have shed light on the brain activity underlying deception.…

Students taking creative subjects will get preference as lockdown licences few and far between Universities are on the hook for a massive hike in Adobe licensing costs unless they restrict use to students in creative subjects, techies in Further and Higher Education circles have told us.…

CEO Neri claims everything-as-a-service offering GreenLake is growing faster than public clouds HPE has reported strong Q3 2020 results and said they would have been better were it not for problems undertaking cabling and other installation services during the pandemic.…

Right as the Japanese mega-corp seeks to flog the Brit CPU design house Arm has apparently decided against spinning off two of its Internet-of-Things businesses to its owner Softbank just as Softbank chairman Masayoshi Son searches high and low for someone to buy the British chip designer.…

'Iris Ring' cutout in OLEDs let smartmobe cameras focus on the main game without being distracted by peripheral matters Samsung’s Display business has claimed the mantle as the maker of the world’s most advanced holes.…

Machines are just better at finding alien worlds than us humans A machine-learning algorithm has sniffed out 50 highly likely exoplanets previously hidden in data collected by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope.…

None of you trained an AI on this data set, right? Right? In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.…

Being in Wuhan hasn’t helped, but local disputes have also slowed effort to build advanced semiconductors One of China’s flagship efforts to accelerate its semiconductor industry is floundering in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Also claims database breakthroughs with home-brewed MySQL-compatible code Chinese web giant Baidu has followed other clouds by adopting SmartNICs to handle boring bits of cloud workloads and leave its Xeons free to do more heavy lifting.…

Plus other gadget makers, too, we're told, amid China trade fears Taiwanese electronics manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron are, along with other equipment makers, reportedly considering building factories in the sunny climes of Mexico.…

Can’t say much until its results are released tomorrow... conveniently Exclusive Perennial cloud-contender NetApp has pruned its workforce on the eve of its quarterly results.…

Resulting mix means less innovation lag for the Unix-flavored OS On Tuesday years of work culminated in the integration of OpenZFS, an open-source storage platform, into the code base of the FreeBSD operating system.…

Microsoft's 'open source wonk' Sarah Novotny wants to see easier ways for people to get involved Interview Linux kernel development – which is driven by plain-text email discussion – needs better or alternative collaborative tooling "to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future," says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft's representative on the Linux Foundation board.…

npmjs.com, nodejs.org open to spoofing, we're warned Two significant domains for the Node.js community, npmjs.com and nodejs.org, lack DMARC email security policies, an oversight that could allow a miscreant to send easily spoofed emails to the community.…

You had teeth once, FTC – use them Intel, HP, Tesla and a host of other tech giants have written to America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging it to appeal Qualcomm's legal win against the watchdog in a row over patent fees.…

It’s all about big industry and automation – and the money, of course UK-based engineering software group Aveva will pay $5bn for rival OSIsoft, it announced on Tuesday. The bulk of the money – $4.4bn – will be in cash, with $3.5bn of it raised through a rights issue.…

University of London researchers poked around in 'secure' messaging platform, but didn't like what they found An instant messaging app whose creators promoted it as secure and end-to-end encrypted was in fact no such thing, according to researchers at Royal Holloway.…

The Reg chats with co-founder Sven Efftinge Interview GitPod, a platform that enables developers to create cloud-hosted development environments and to code in a web browser, has published its source on GitHub.…

Before you go all Colonel Blimp, remember it's budget-setting season The British Army is looking at ditching its tank regiments and spending the money on keyboard warriors instead, according to reports.…

'If speed is not important, there are 300 other solutions' Database biz Redis Labs has secured $100m in a funding round that sets its valuation at an estimated $1bn.…

But no, Fortnite can't come back to the App Store for now either A Federal US judge questioned why Apple takes a 30 per cent slice of developer revenues as she ruled that while Apple cannot cut off Epic's access to iOS Unreal Engine development tools, she would not order the company to allow Fortnite to return to the App Store.…

Desperately seeks a dirty dozen of DevOps suppliers With £800m of other people's money in hand, UK central government is on the hunt for DevOps folk to build and manage live NHS services and oversee data system migration under the "Digital Capability for Health" scheme.…

We're sure readers can think of a suitable replacement Poll Savvy battered bird flinger KFC has made sure no one will forget its greasy wares during the coronavirus pandemic by ditching its Finger Lickin' slogan.…

Outlines new way of counting pull requests to avoid being swamped Container-flinger Docker has offered further details on why it has changed the terms of service for its Hub service, blaming 1 per cent of its users for making trouble for the rest of us.…

Click here to enable your rights... ha, GOTCHA! Infosec biz F-Secure has uncovered a North Korean phishing campaign that targeted a sysadmin with a fake Linkedin job advert using a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) themed lure.…

'For a fusion company, it's quite nice to have a product that works' UK boffins have used smarts gained through the development of fusion technology to fire up a thruster with the purpose of eventually cutting interplanetary travel times.…

Netizens up in arms over unexpected UI change, missing add-ons support An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.…

Parts of the GCloud are more robust and survived, but the fix is not yet in for others Google has explained how and why big chunks of its cloud crashed last week, and as is often the case the company broke itself.…

Whereas in America spy chiefs retire on full pensions, hit the chat show circuit Denmark's top foreign intelligence chief has been suspended for spying on Danish citizens illegally for up to six years after a whistleblower released a trove of documents to government regulators.…

Then we saw Bill and Steve gyrating to the Rolling Stones on stage… Comment Twenty-five years ago on Monday arguably the most consequential event in modern computing history happened: the release of Windows 95. Let’s take a quick trip back in time.…

Promises to support local businesses and stop forcing local carriers paying for ads and iThing fixes Apple has reached under a Cupertino sofa and found $84m with which to settle antitrust action in South Korea.…

Ties up with TSMC on innovation lab and banks on elasticity speeding up design pipeline Microsoft is cooking up specific Azure instance types optimised for Electronics Design Automation, as part of a new collaboration Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).…