The Register

There be dragons, say US authorities, so first planned US-HK cable darkens its last leg Google and Facebook have dumped plans to build an undersea cable between the US and Hong Kong after after US security agencies warned that Beijing could use the link to infiltrate American networks.…

Cloudflare fingers intertwined BGP and Flowspec SNAFUs Internet backbone operator CenturyLink has experienced an outage that degraded performance of major web companies around the world.…

So sorry this keeps happening. Best out of three, er, four, er ten? Stop us if you've heard this one before – or not because you have absolutely heard this one before – but Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is sorry he helped make society a little worse.…

'The future's going to be weird' says startup's founder Elon Video In a late Friday evening reveal, Elon Musk updated the world on his Neuralink brain-to-computer interface startup, with the help of three little piggies. Specifically, his team revealed it has implanted a mind-reading gadget in a live pig's brain.…

Perl clutching time again Stop us if you've heard this one before: a remote-code execution vulnerability needs patching in Pulse Secure VPNs.…

Vacuuming up data? That's our job! Facebook on Thursday said it had filed two separate lawsuits in the US and UK to prevent unsanctioned snarfing of people's personal data and the inflation of likes on posts.…

We're apart but never more together – tune in to make your remote infrastructure sing Webcast As remote and dispersed working continues – and is likely to continue to do so until a COVID-19 virus vaccine is fully deployed, and then some – the IT industry is responding with a number of viable ways of keep business as usual.…

Is this some Apple marketing? Oh no, Intel still hasn't sorted its s*** out The scarcity of PC components – specifically CPUs and screen panels – are threatening to limit availability in the run-up to the Christmas holiday quarter as orders for notebooks keep coming thick and fast, HP execs have warned.…

Firm not the only SaaS-y outfit to enjoy bumper results during pandemic In what has been a bumper week for SaaS slingers, cloudy HR and finance application specialist Workday has shovelled 20 per cent more sales onto its top line and slashed losses.…

Please don't wax philosophical, please don't... Argh: 'Work is something you do, an outcome, not a place or a time' In and amongst Dell Technologies workplace existentialism and talk of "human transformation" in a pandemic, chief operating officer Jeff Clarke last night claimed the majority of his 165,000-strong workforce will not return to the office again on a regular basis.…

Trudging through PC port of 2019 console title in 2020 is weird The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column back once again with some triple-A, PlayStation-adjacent "content" albeit this time on PC. Ah, it's good to be home. Promise we'll get back to something a little more indie once the lamestream stops churning out games we actually want to play.…

What happened? No info. *Total Inability To Support Users with the Particulars Updated It's Friday at month's end just before a Bank Holiday – Pay and Bills Day – and users of Santander's UK arm have been unable to use online banking and apps since 9:49 AM BST. Thousands of companies use the bank to process UK payroll.…

A quick lesson in how not to deploy Sharepoint as a 'my account' file retrieval system Southern Water - British supplier of the liquid of life - botched its internal Sharepoint implementation so badly that a customer was able to view other people’s account details.…

Brushing away the cobwebs of decades-old code like Indiana Jones On Call What's that coming over the hill, could it be Friday? Hurrah! Time to settle down for a reminder about the dangers of over-modifying a system past its prime in today's instalment of On Call.…

The 'ideas factory' falls victim to latest round of corporate penny-pinching NetApp has confirmed it is closing down the standalone Advanced Technology Group (ATG) – an incubation unit that was part of the office of the CTO and once described as the "ideas factory".…

Bosses broke law to punish staffer who raised working practice fears IBM has been ordered to pay £22,000 in compensation and two years' salary to a Brit staffer who blew the whistle on unlawful working practices within the company – only for infuriated managers to lash out at her.…

Developers told to hurry up and get features stable as support for other features extends to help slow upgraders The Kubernetes project has decided the time has come to stop existing in a state of permanent beta.…

New $750m investment from Bain and strong revenue means he reckons the time is right +Comment Nutanix has announced co-founder Dheeraj Pandey will retire from his chief executive role once a replacement has been found.…

All that's necessary is willingness to abuse server keys exposed in apps and some technical know-how Ten days ago, Abhishek Dharani, a Bengaluru, India-based bug hunter who goes by the name Abss online, recounted how he received a reward from Google for reporting a vulnerability in Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service.…

AI-backed gizmo, app will predict your future body if you don't start training, analyzes your voice for unhappiness Amazon has teased a smartphone app and wireless wristband that employ sensors and machine-learning algorithms to depict how fat you'll get unless you do some exercise – and tell you to relax if you sound stressed. All for your own good, of course.…

Well, halo, halo Andromeda sports a ginormous halo of gas with a mass greater than 100 billion Suns that stretches from its outer edges up to two million light-years – a distance that reaches more than halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy.…

More capable cameras, less new plastic. Same opportunity for a warm inner glow Ethical smartphone mmaker Fairphone, the Amsterdam-based social enterprise that designs sustainable phones made in exploitation-free factories, will release a new model of its flagship unit in September.…

But Ireland’s helping with $4.9bn tax benefit from IP shift VMware has posted another pandemic-defying quarter and said it would have better if its customers had been able to go to their offices, especially in the Americas.…

...read the article, of course North Korean government hackers dubbed the BeagleBoyz are trying to electronically rob banks, the United States warned this week.…

Tune in online to find out how to plug security gaps in your own dev projects Webcast It’s always a great idea to put together your own enterprise applications. This software can be finely tuned to your needs, complement your platforms and systems, and be built in-house, keeping it closer to your initial vision.…

Draft spec reduces pages to inscrutable data blobs, says privacy bod A proposed Google web specification threatens to turn websites into inscrutable digital blobs that resist content blocking and code scrutiny, according to Peter Synder, senior privacy researcher at Brave Software.…

When Larry said he wanted the app, he meant on his phone, not... oh God With TikTok under increasing pressure to offload its American operations, or be banned from the States by President Trump, the suitors are lining up.…

Don't worry, there are some useful features in the update too Microsoft has bequeathed new capabilities to both the released and the preview versions of Windows Terminal, a feature-laden alternative to the command prompt.…

Q1 beat analysts' expectations NetApp boss George Kurian has confirmed a guidance-beating 5 per cent revenue jump for Q1 of its fiscal '21 – while also admitting to chopping the same percentage of staff in layoffs, as first revealed yesterday by The Register.…

But all that glitters is not cloud as losses widen The pandemic has sped up Splunk's forecast cloud biz mix by two years, with subscription sales now accounting for half of total software bookings. Sadly – for management – the big data cruncher's losses are widening.…

Script kiddies run rampant in Minecraft Ever torn your keyboard from the desk and flung it across the room, vowing to find the "scrub cheater" who ended your run of video-gaming success? Uh, yeah, us neither, but a study into the crooked practice might help narrow down the hypothetical search.…

Meanwhile, British case awaits judgment Former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain has lost a US appeal bid against his criminal conviction for fraud committed during the sale of the British software company to Hewlett-Packard back in 2011.…

But long-term support won't arrive until 6.0 towards end of 2021 Microsoft has dished out the last preview of .NET 5.0, saying it is feature-complete ahead of general availability in November.…

The provider of that cloud to be chosen by December A council on the south coast of England has decided to climb off the SAP upgrade treadmill and instead seek out a cloudy ERP system.…

Get ready to armor up these systems, scientists warn Non-shielded quantum computers may only be able to run for a few milliseconds before background radiation completely destabilizes the systems, according to lab experiments described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.…

Third-floor UPS suspected A fire that broke out this morning at Telstra's London Hosting Centre (LHC) bit barn in the English capital has disrupted customers' services, with a fire crew called to tackle the flames.…

No idea what it's doing here, said local governor Two people were arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) after the crash of a Google Loon internet connectivity balloon baffled local officials who had no idea the craft was overflying their country.…

Push off, you can't be serious... US electronics engineers and physicists have built micrometre-scale swimming robots that use a new type of actuator, forming the basis for a tiny automaton that could be injected into humans to perform minor medical procedures.…

Thanks The Donald for messing up his dream gig with order for US sale TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, who took the top job on June 1, has told staff he will quit the company.…

Disrupting clock radios and concierges with plan to let Nest Hub devices take orders for fresh towels Google wants its Nest Hub to become a fixture in hotel rooms so that guests can enjoy their stay without having to actually touch any of the amenities they are paying for.…

Earth's crowded orbit may obscure vital readings from space, boffins warn Swarms of small communications satellites saturating space may make it more difficult to observe and track potentially hazardous asteroids zooming toward Earth, astronomers have warned.…

Kid’s alleged 8-month spree could end with food delivery between jail cell bars Singapore police have charged a 17-year-old lad after food delivery service Foodpanda noticed he had allegedly requested refunds for a staggering SG$14,000 (US$10,200) worth of stuff he fraudulently claimed was not delivered.…

Register readers tell of the moment online fashion souk started leaking strangers' details at random "At the moment some stranger is in her account as they keep adding things to her basket and she keeps taking them out."…

So much for NZ as the last refuge of civilisation New Zealand’s stock exchange (NZX) has closed for a third day thanks to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.…

IPO filing spells out fears of being denied tech, cash and people Alibaba’s payment arm, Ant Financial, has filed for its initial public offering and disclosed the current and possible future impact of the China/USA trade war on the companies.…

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.…