The Register

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).…

Which probably means silicon, cloud and quantum tech Chinese president Xi Jinping has again urged the nation to develop more the technology it needs to develop its economy.…

Wedge-shaped fondleslab for fun projects, coders will need a keyboard, and you'll just have to ignore the fan Hands-on Sunfounder, based in Shenzhen, China, has released RasPad 3.0, a 10-inch, 1280-by-800 touchscreen for the Raspberry Pi 4, packaged in a wedge-shaped case with a battery that converts your Pi into a tablet computer.…

'Microsoft has confirmed the Teams chat data is not recoverable' Exclusive The personal chat histories of 145,000 Microsoft Teams users at KPMG were inadvertently and permanently deleted last week, thanks to an IT blunder.…

Not a Hollywood action flick by the looks of it The US Air Force has revealed a prototype of a flying car, something the American military has desired for at least a decade.…

Synk accuses China-based Mintegral of distributing malicious SDK Video For over a year, a widely used code library from Chinese mobile ad biz Mintegral is alleged to have been covertly capturing data about app users' online interactions to steal ad revenue.…

Can we make them higher? As if we needed a reminder that joined-up thinking in government is rarer than hens' teeth, New South Wales has bought 10 River Class ferries that won't fit under two bridges in Sydney's Parramatta suburb if people are sitting on the upper deck.…

Mute your mic anyway, the foam is hissing as you open your beer Zoom says it's fingered "the issue" preventing users from authenticating to the Zoom website, or starting and joining Zoom meetings and webinars, so if you thought you'd miss the 4pm "quick catch-up" with sales, your hopes are getting slimmer.…

'Apple’s discontinuation of Epic’s ability to develop and support Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS will harm game creators and gamers,' says Microsoft Microsoft's Kevin Gammill, general manager of Gaming Developer Experiences, called Epic's Unreal Engine "critical technology" in a filing at the weekend [PDF] in support of Epic's motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Apple from terminating its developer account.…

Tender notices cover range of IT needs all the way down to parking meters The government-owned company responsible for England's motorways has launched two streams of tendering covering nearly £2bn in spending on IT and other digital technologies.…

Just don't mention the cow-meleon, OK? Interview SUSE has had a busy year, with a switch of CEO, the ditching of OpenStack, and the buy of Kubernetes darling Rancher Labs.…

Meanwhile, Gmail finally deals with a 'confused mailman' problem In brief It has not been a good week for major Canadian shipping company Canpar Express.…

But it's a complex technology stack, so we're the sole contender The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has handed Accenture a £20m contract extension, without outside competition, to try to keep some seriously ageing applications and infrastructure running.…

A seaside holiday in the little known Welsh town of Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Blighty is re-opening after a good few months spent staring at the wall and wondering just how much ice-cream is too much ice-cream. Be warned, however, with a restart comes the prospect of unexpected Bork.…

Cloud magically means ‘Microsoft expert’ is less valuable than ‘sales tech expert’, apparently “Historically, IT professionals defined themselves by the vendors whose technology they were good at managing,” says John Stame. “Technology consultants might have marketed themselves as experts in Dell systems, or might have advertised their deep expertise with Microsoft tools.”…

Remember when the only interference was electromagnetic? Who, Me? Monday has arrived, and with it a tale of election predictions past courtesy of The Register's Who, Me?…

Pushes back against accusation of misinformation with argument its only option is to stop indexing almost everything Google’s Australian limb has continued its campaign against the nation’s pay-for-content "News Media Bargaining Code" with a more detailed dive into the reasons it opposes the plan.…

Plus: Formula One teamed up with AWS to rank top 20 race car drivers since 1983 In brief The US Department of Energy has set aside $21m (£16m) to fund the use of machine learning to advance fusion power.…

Plans 35 job losses and even a reduction in IT spend The Bletchley Park Trust, the host of Britain’s National Museum of Computing and the site of critical feats of wartime code-cracking, has hit financial strife and expects to lay off around a third of its staff.…

Users who opt-in will share COVID encounter info with the boss, in the name of returning the economy to a more normal footing India has created an API service that allows third-parties like employers to access information about their staff gathered by its Aarogya Setu COVID-19-contact-tracing app.…

On grounds that Trump administration hasn't allowed proper discussions about security or a sale Made-in-China social network TikTok has decided to challenge the Trump administration’s looming ban on its service by taking the matter to the USA’s courts.…

You broke it, you pay for it A new study of the ice shell encrusting Europa, Jupiter’s sixth-closest moon, suggests it is free floating and shifted 70 degrees after a major geologic event rotated the surface several millions of years ago.…

Web security? We've got that totally under control Google's Chromium team has proposed a way to allow web apps to establish direct TCP and UDP network connections, a powerful capability that could complicate web security.…

What's a monopoly? asks iGiant Apple has filed a scathing response to Epic's lawsuit regarding the ongoing spat over the iOS App Store taking a 30 per cent cut of sales.…

Well, Maverick, you've lost that lovin' feeling and it's gone, gone, gone Video An AI bot defeated a human pilot in a series of virtual dogfights that unfolded in skies albeit within a flight simulator during a competition held by the US military research arm DARPA.…

Detecting ISP shenanigans has led to a constant deluge of packets The Google Chromium team's effort to detect when ISPs are trying to hijack domain name typos has led to a lot of network load: the browser's query response testing routine now accounts for about half of all DNS root server traffic according to a new study.…

'After careful consideration' uni decided to pay up using its insurance policy The University of Utah has admitted to handing over a six-figure pile of cash to scumbags to undo a ransomware infection during which student and staff information was stolen by hackers.…

Don't. Leave. Your. Laptop. Signed. In. Where. Children. Can. Reach. It We've heard it all before – tot addicted to crappy freemium game on Daddy's iPad runs up £3,000 bill from in-app purchases, Dad whinges to local newspaper.…

Plus: Sources showed us some of what was in that Dropbox leak British infosec accreditation body CREST has appointed an ex-police officer to investigate the NCC Group exam cheat-sheet scandal as its chairman temporarily steps aside.…

Meaning general availability can't be too far behind Updated Windows 10 20H2 has arrived for commercial customers to start prodding for pre-release validation.…

Lack of protections around trace facility gives local users read and write access A bug-hunter has uncovered a vulnerability in IBM's popular enterprise database which, if left unpatched, could allow a local user to access data and kick off a denial-of-service attack.…

Brits speak their brains for comms regulator Ofcom's customer audit What do TalkTalk, Three, and Virgin Media all have in common? They've each won a gong for sating the lowest proportion of customers in broadband, mobile, and landline services respectively.…

Or 16.9 NHS budgets, in financial terms Reg Standards Converter British national debt has topped £2tn – meaning the country is now collectively in hock for 16.9831 yearly NHS Budgets, just under 22,442 Paul Pogbas, or, if you're really smart and original, close to 1.46 Apple Incs.…

1903 and 1909 holdouts get their hands on 2004's newest toy Microsoft has backported the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 to last year's Windows 10 – 1903 and 1909.…

Mysterious behavior spotted at the Milky Way's center The Milky Way is shooting blobs of never-before-seen cold, dense gas from its center – and astronomers have no idea how or why, according to a paper published in Nature.…

On the other hand, security of cloud-controlled locks 'quite horrifying' say 'cyber-physical' engineers A computer scientist at the National University of Singapore claims to have demonstrated how recording the sound of a lock turning can be sufficient to make working replica keys.…

Brendan Burns looks forward to 'Visual Basic for the cloud'. Really? Kubecon Europe Two of the early developers of Kubernetes, Brendan Burns and Tim Hockin, took part in (separate) "Ask me anything" events at virtual Kubecon Europe, offering insights into the past and future of the world's favourite container orchestrator.…

Fusion and Workstation just got rather more useful for containerised CI/CD pipelines - and also rather cheaper VMware has announced new versions of its desktop hypervisors Workstation and Fusion.…

The Christmas when your teenage kicks were fixing next door's Amiga On Call Friday signals the end of the week, a well-deserved adult beverage or eight, and The Register's On Call visit to those who must suffer the slings and arrows of user incompetence.…

‘Washington's endeavors to suppress Chinese progress may not be as successful as anticipated’ says China Daily China’s national cut of Linux – KylinOS - has emerged in a major new release and one of its important new functions is a symbol of the nation’s ability to get ahead despite US trade bans.…

Marketing is getting weird in 2020 Comment While the number of so-called "influencers" on Instagram has rocketed a new trend may leave you scratching your head even harder: the arrival of "robot" or "virtual" influencers.…

Sorry we nuked your data with a bad update, here's another update to fix it! Adobe is offering its condolences to customers after an update to its Lightroom photo manager permanently deleted troves of snaps on people's iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.…

Alappuzha's Techgentsia Software has a golden ticket for government work India's tech ministry has named Vconsol as the winner of its competition to find a home-grown video conferencing product the nation's government can use in preference to products sourced from overseas.…

Japan’s iSpace has put itself in the second column but also plans lunar landers of its own Ventures that plan to get stuff into space at low prices are not hard to find. But service providers for those cut-price launchers are a new to El Reg.…

‘Fluid situation’ with USA not overly worrying CEO, who says company will comply with any new rules Alibaba has reported another rampaging quarter in which it recorded US$21.76bn revenue and net income of $5.59bn, a 34 percent and 28 percent jump respectively, but while its cloud unit also posted strong growth the company can’t yet say when it will turn a profit.…

Terror at 1,340,000 feet – if this was anything to truly worry about right now Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will attempt to find and patch the source of a tiny air leak first detected last year.…

Big Blue insists commission 'adjustments' aren't caps Yet another IBM salesperson has sued the venerable computing biz for allegedly capping their sales commissions after agreeing not to do that.…

Say it ain't Joe? As Uber's chief security officer, Joe Sullivan broke the law by hushing up the theft of millions of people's details from the app maker's databases by hackers, prosecutors say.…

Homeland Security swoops on quad who allegedly committed worst US crime of all: Defrauding Big Business Four brothers accused of ripping off Amazon to the tune of $19m were this week charged with fraud.…