The Register

Borrowers can score between £500k and £5m if they have a track record, co-investors, and can afford eight percent interest The UK government will throw £1.25bn at startups and R&D firms that are struggling to survive in the coronavirus lockdown and are willing to pay well-above-market interest rates and give away equity in exchange for a fiscal lifeline.…

CEO says ‘pandemic completely reversed the positive momentum’ but at least its healthcare biz is strong Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has posted slow growth and warned that it will be doing well to match that performance in its new financial year.…

Months of negotiation on voluntary code of conduct didn’t make progress Australia will force social media companies to pay for content shared on their networks and disclose details of the algorithms that determine what their users see.…

Bet you thought the rural internet gap wouldn't cause this kind of disruption Former darts world champion Gary Anderson says he cannot compete in upcoming remote tournaments due to his slow home internet connection.…

Plus some interesting new side-channel attack possibilities for crims to play with With Silicon Valley under lockdown Chrome 82 has been abandoned by Google, but the Chocolate Factory boffins haven't been slacking and on Thursday released the beta build of Chrome 83 ahead of schedule.…

No fuel, no problem! Older space kit to gets new lease of life with extentions The first mission that flew a spacecraft out to save an old telecoms satellite running low on fuel has been successful.…

Amazon, the government, economics? Startup schtum on sudden closure Pulse.io is advising its customers to withdraw all digital funds from the site "as soon as possible," after announcing it'll shut down completely on June 26.…

Thanks to a South African immigrant NASA has set a launch date for the first mission by US astronauts to the International Space Station, using a locally-made rocket taking off from an American launch site, since July 8, 2011.…

Reason behind murky CVSS 10 score revealed by Guardicore A critical vulnerability in VMware's vCenter management product allowed any old bod on the same network to remotely create an admin-level user, research by Guardicore Labs has revealed.…

It's baaaaaack: Devs polishing off Quartz Once upon a time, Paranoid Android was a towering force in the custom ROM world. Then it just… disappeared, allowing rivals like LineageOS to take its place. But, like Lt Commander Data in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard (sorry, spoiler alert), it's back, bringing with it a custom Android 10 image for nine phones.…

Nothing says serious engineering like a collapsible radio aerial Video Spare a thought for Iran's long-suffering scientists today, who had to read the news along with the rest of us that the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have "developed" a gizmo capable of detecting coronavirus... in five seconds. At distances of up to 100 metres.…

A mini revolution against Switchzilla takes form in a corner of industry group There is growing unrest at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) due to the power that some accuse Cisco of wielding over the global community of network designers, operators, vendors and academics.…

G Suite boss promises gallery view on the way for cyber-meeting platform Google is plugging its Meet service into Gmail as the Chocolate Factory rolls out the G Suite tanks in response to the threat posed by rival services.…

Backing for use of L-Band spectrum for 5G Ligado Networks, which is currently seeking approval for a terrestrial low-power 5G network, has won a powerful friend: Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chief Ajit Pai.…

New version of Microsoft's OS shuffles into the Release Preview spotlight Microsoft has finally nudged the next version of Windows 10 into Release Preview and given it a name: The Windows 10 May 2020 Update.…

Employers seek devs, support, and engineers all over the world Job Alert Welcome to the third edition of our barn-storming, ever-growing jobs list. We're publishing jobs every week for free to help keep techies in work during these tough times.…

240 million daily virus themed spams as 'bad actors' feed on people's fear In the past week, some 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails were sent via Gmail to unsuspecting marks, according to Google.…

IBM and Google join the Rolls-Royce programme A cross-industry group started by Rolls-Royce – now including Google and IBM – is in talks with the UK government to use data and analytics to guide policy makers and biz leaders towards the green shoots of economic recovery in the face of the devastating impact of COVID-19.…

Online editing support for Chocolate Factory's open-source dev framework "Social development environment" CodePen has unfurled support for Flutter, Google's open-source cross-platform framework for mobile and web.…

Jeff Bezos imagines the negatives can go out to work and spend, the infected can watch more Amazon Prime Video at home Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has called for a coronavirus testing blitz to help the global economy reopen and has assembled a team to try to make it happen.…

Part 1: No one expects the construction crew On Call Come with us to the 1980s, when computers cost proper money and RS-232 ruled the roost in another edition of Register reader recollections courtesy of On Call.…

No phone numbers needed – but you’ll need Notifications and Bluetooth on all the time The European Commission (EC) has published a document describing how it thinks member nations can best built a contact-tracing smartphone app to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.…

27 years of watching the Milky Way's core – that's how proper science is done Astronomers have observed a star tracing a rosette shape in its orbit around a supermassive black hole for the first time, an effect that provides further proof of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.…

On track to do the deed towards the end of the month Nvidia's $6.9bn deal to networking kit maker Mellanox has been approved by China's competition watchdog.…

Turnaround mission accomplished? Looks like it Citrix has announced the departure of a director and in so doing signified the business has probably turned a corner.…

Holey vid chat service reveals ‘re-architect’ of bug bounty program to ‘get overall security house in order’ India has effectively banned videoconferencing service Zoom for government users and repeated warnings that consumers need to be careful when using the tool.…

DNS overseer accused of ignoring the very people it is supposed to represent ICANN has again delayed a decision on the sale of the .org registry, pushing the issue off for another month multiple sources with knowledge of Thursday's meeting, have told The Register.…

Dust off your COBOL code and give it new life in WebAssembly Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare has implemented a way to run COBOL code on its serverless platform Cloudflare Workers.…

Not boldly seaking out new worlds, mostly checking out the ones we know The European Space Agency’s latest telescope, known as Cheops, has passed its preliminary in-flight tests and will embark on its mission to study exoplanets at the end of April.…

Two-step attack seen on core systems Researchers are warning owners of fiber routers to keep a close eye on their gear and check for firmware updates following the discovery an in-the-wild zero-day attack.…

Zuck's bucks have no luck, for now The Facebook-founded Libra Association has revised its planned digital currency after regulatory concerns and public backlash made the project's initial vision untenable.…

Video chat for the work-at-home world It's as good a time as any to buy a video conferencing and cloud comms firm. Just ask the business arm of US comms behemoth Verizon, which today confirmed it is acquiring BlueJeans Network for an undisclosed (but presumably substantial) sum.…

That's the Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform btw US FPGA manufacturer Xilinx has inked a deal allowing electronics giant Samsung to use its Versal ACAP (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) in 5G infrastructure products.…

Job role was scaled back after 2015 hack, rules employment judge A former Talktalk infosec exec has lost her unfair dismissal and equal pay claims against the UK telco after an employment tribunal rejected her case.…

DRAM and NAND struggle with swollen inventories and low demand – Gartner Famed entrails poker Gartner has pegged revenue decline in the 2019 semiconductor market at 12 per cent to $419.14bn (£335.2bn), thanks to a supply glut of DRAM chips and turmoil in the NAND flash sector.…

Mobile industry cats at GSMA extend congress deal with Spanish city There's some good news for Barcelona's tech-hungry pickpockets: the GSMA has extended its contract to hold annual industry shindig Mobile World Congress in the city until 2024.…

CTO Ahmad Nassri announces intention to bow out GitHub has completed its acquisition of JavaScript package registry NPM Inc, leading CTO Ahmad Nassri to announce his departure "in the near future".…

Cyber-crims bone up on methods for fun and profit, but mainly profit With more people looking to get into the online crime racket and huge caches of personal information cheap and easy to come by, documents describing the process of committing (and getting away with) online fraud are becoming hot commodities.…

Have a pair of Insider builds instead and an exciting Your Phone innovation: file transfer Microsoft treated Windows Insiders to a pair of emissions this week but sadly not the one that many were hoping for as Patch Tuesday came and went.…

Boffins claim to have found path to 'real-world applications' by running hot Scientists in Australia are claiming to have made a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing which could ease the technology's progress to affordability and mass production.…

Atlassian awards personal account to bloke's former employer An issue where Trello user Shashank Tomar was locked out of his personal account because of a secondary email belonging to a company he left five years ago has drawn criticism from users.…

Too many choices? Microsoft's ASP.NET Core, a web application framework (or more accurately, a family of frameworks), has made strides in performance and innovation, but its rapid development has resulted in a bewildering range of choices facing developers.…

Which is a great look in this age of cyber-meetings Hands On Over the past couple of years, teen-tastic mobile brand Honor has diverged from its usual fare, branching into TVs, laptops and the like. These have mostly been Mainland China exclusives, but the latest MagicBook is a notable exception. Vulture Central got its mucky talons on a unit of this shiny groin warmer, and found a surprisingly well-built machine, albeit with a few design quirks.…

Industry lobby says thanks, but we'll take it a bit slower than that The Indian government will allow IT operations to bring half their workforce back to the office as of Sunday April 20th.…

'Adds improved mobility' to pricey workstations without any obviously significant reinvention of the roller In case you needed more proof that the world is in a very strange moment, Apple now sells a US$699 (£560) wheel kit for the Mac Pro.…

Ex-CEO warns that new Chinese owners are exporting away from UK British chip designer biz, Imagination Technologies, is being investigated by the UK government for national security concerns after its former CEO revealed that the company is being increasingly controlled by China.…

FY19/20 results hit the mark as outsourcer says client SLAs being met even with 90 percent of staff at home Wipro has posted strong Q4 and full FY19/20 results, but also declined to offer guidance for the future.…

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.…