The Register

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.…

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.…