The Register

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.…

Fight over driver employment rights to rumble into October amid threats to pull plug on Golden State An California appeals court judge has granted a down-to-the-wire emergency stay on an injunction ordering Uber and Lyft to reclassify their ride-hailing app drivers as employees.…

Normally, Windows has plenty of bugs. This bug has plenty of windows Talk about software floors... The world's second tallest skyscraper can be found in Fawkner, Australia, according to Microsoft.…

Something to consider if you splash out on Samsung's new hotness The Galaxy Note20 is Samsung's most ambitious phone in recent memory, with impressive optics and a redeveloped S-Pen experience. But is it easy to repair? The latest teardown from iFixit suggests not, thanks to liberal use of adhesive.…

Alright! Variadic tuple types The TypeScript team has released version 4 of the JavaScript superset to General Availability.…

Credit giant admits to handing over info after 'fraudulent data enquiry' Credit reference agency Experian has suffered what it somewhat understatedly described as a "data breach" after the firm itself transferred the details of 24 million South Africans to one individual.…

You're only billed for what you use, so keep an eye on those numbers, OK? Microsoft has continued attempts to lure developers to its Azure Cosmos DB NoSQL service with the arrival of consumption-based billing.…

Highways England seems to be losing the war Right, we know this pandemic has gone on quite long enough, but the boredom-busting activities are getting ridiculous. Can someone explain "crockery bombing" to us?…

Seal of approval handed out for supply chain security in various tech sectors SoftBank's Japanese 5G network has been awarded "clean status" by the US government.…

I get knocked down, but I get up again... eventually A UK cloud-based warehouse management software provider was struck by ransomware earlier this week.…

Behold the stability and efficiency of a switch to Linux Bork!Bork!Bork! Switch to Linux, they said. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, if today's edition of The Register's Bork diary is anything to go by.…

IBM's X-Force Red X-reveals X-flaw in Thales X-wireless X-module X-thing A vulnerability in Thales' Cinterion EHS8 M2M module, a Java-powered embedded 3G system used in millions of Internet-of-Things devices for connectivity, was revealed yesterday by IBM's X-Force Red.…

Not all users affected, but it's not a great start. Oh and Slack's out too. Good morning everyone Updated Google cloud services across the world are having a nap, with multiple GCP products including App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Logging and BigQuery down since 06:45 UTC (07:45 UK time).…

We asked hundreds of IT decision makers where their priorities lie – here are the results Reader research We expect more than half of our office seats to go remote in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a slim majority of Register-reading tech pros told us.…

We’re talking about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg here, so the crackdown has cracks Facebook has followed Twitter and decided that QAnon’s Qnonsense represents sufficient risk that it should be turfed out. Or at least some of it.…

Outraged outage-struck Equinix customer billed for dead rack check Equinix has doubled down on efforts to irritate customers following a lengthy bit of unplanned downtime at its LD8 London data centre.…

Network boffin finds packets headed into China go AWOL yet packets coming out do just fine 79 percent of internet traffic flows into China struggle to flow faster than 1Mbps, but the Great Firewall is probably not to blame.…

We haven’t made up our mind, registry claims, we just won’t accept changes UK internet registry operator Nominet has responded to criticism of its plan to overhaul the distribution of expiring .uk domains by promising to listen to feedback… and then immediately refused to accept a petition calling for the plan to be scrapped.…

OpenDaylight-based vendor says proprietary networking is still winning and bemoans lack of VC support Software-defined networking vendor Lumina Networks “has begun an orderly shut-down of business.”…

Buying Mellanox has paid off, gamers are still the bigger prize Nvidia's data centre products have topped its gaming-centric products as a revenue source in 2020's second quarter, thanks to its acquisition of Mellanox.…

On regulatory grounds, but it’s hard not to chalk this up as more anti-China action Taiwan has moved to turf out Chinese video-streamers operated by Tencent and Baidu.…

Aim is for tap-to-pay experience to replace cash, but with bonus pervasive surveillance China has confirmed it is conducting tests of a sovereign digital currency but has timeline for its widespread adoption.…

More expected to leak unless extortionists are paid off The Maze hacker gang claims it has infected computer memory maker SK hynix with ransomware and leaked some of the files it stole.…

DoJ, FAA, FCC, Homeland Security warning highlights legal mess The US government has warned against the use of anti-drone technology by private companies and even American states, saying it could break current wiretap and hacking laws.…

Chinese telco's pleas to not be booted out of America will be passed to prosecutors America's comms watchdog will hand over confidential documents on China Telecom to US government officials probing the state-owned communications giant and its operations in the Land of the Free.…

Chrome engineers experiment with memory-safe language in software that really ought to be memory safe Google's Chromium Project has acknowledged its growing interest in adding more Rust code to the mostly C++ Chromium codebase.…

HGST drives fared best, but vendor was snaffled by Western Digital Backup specialist Backblaze, which has published hard drive failure statistics quarterly since 2013, says its second-quarter 2020 Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) is the lowest ever recorded at 0.81 per cent overall.…

And antisocial network's efforts to stop spread aren't working, says Avaaz At the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic in April, 82 websites spreading health misinformation attracted an estimated 460 million views on Facebook.…

That's a spicy meatball MediaTek has successfully demonstrated a "5G" data transfer using an Inmarsat Alphasat geostationary satellite, located 35,000 kilometres above the equator.…

You can call me Al For a year that belongs in a Philip K Dick novella, now is not the time to welcome prophets of the technological future, and yet here comes Gartner, banging on the door with its Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle.…

JetBrains works on improving language for cross-platform targets JetBrains has released Kotlin 1.4, a significant update to the Google-preferred language for Android development.…

Failing in Falkirk Bork!Bork!Bork! What to do when a touchscreen is having a totter? Today's entry in the encyclopaedia of bork features two approaches taken by users, one involving duct tape and a musically inclined alternative.…

New licensor's clean-sheet keyboard design better be good, as analyst notes: 'The mobile business has never been harder' Because 2020 isn't weird enough already, BlackBerry phones are coming back. This time around, it's not Chinese OEM TCL at the helm, but rather little-known Texas startup OnwardMobility, which has acquired a licence to the iconic smartphone marque and plans to release an inaugural model next year.…

Is this gonna be forever? "Yes, very good, the balls are the same. Now stop distracting me and let me finish this job."…

Plus: Cali uni that paid $1.4m to crims had decent backup software, but they didn't use it on the affected systems The cruise ship industry is all but shuttered worldwide because the floating hotels are a great way to contract coronavirus. And now the industry's biggest player, Carnival Corporation, has also come down with a case of ransomware.…

Thing was the size of a car, moved at 12km/sec, missed us by just 2,950km A space rock the size of a sports utility vehicle zoomed within 2,950km of Earth over the weekend.…

An unlikely requirement for an engine popular on Android and iOS SQLite, which claims to be "used more than all other database engines combined", has been updated to version 3.33.0 with the maximum size increased to 281TB, around twice the previous capacity of 140TB.…

Cloud and e-commerce boom mean it needs more desks and people that originally planned Amazon will expands its presence in six US cities and add thousands of jobs in a bet that the COVID-19 pandemic will not keep workers out of the office for long.…

Encryption's solid yet that's not the whole story by a long chalk Boffins testing the security of OpenPGP and S/MIME, two end-to-end encryption schemes for email, recently found multiple vulnerabilities in the way email client software deals with certificates and key exchange mechanisms.…

$233 billion revenue in 2019, says IDC, with the top five creaming a third of it Global spend on cloud services hit $233.4bn in 2019, says analyst firm IDC, and the biggest five players accounted for a third of it and grew faster than the chasing pack.…

This article will self-destruct in five seconds A former Apple engineer has spilled the beans on what he's described as a top-secret project Cupertino conducted with the US government back in the 2000s.…

Don’t rush out to buy hardware, this is months from deployment The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the body that oversees the wireless standard, has started work on a specification to allow wearable devices to take on the role that smartphone contact-tracing apps currently play in COVID-19 contact-tracing and notification efforts.…