The Register

Not for all patches, not ASAP, not all at once, not for production workloads and maybe not worth it yet? Microsoft has started a preview of automatic guest VM patching on Azure.…

Silently side-step software safeguards Video Boffins in America, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have devised a Spectre-style attack on modern processors that can defeat defenses that are supposed to stop malicious software from hijacking a computer's operating system. The end result is exploit code able to bypass a crucial protection mechanism and take over a device to hand over root access.…

Regional video streaming companies added to list of entities required to pay Digital Services Tax Indonesia has again extended the list of companies it will require to gather the nation’s digital services tax.…

Three Republicans take stab at 'objective reasonableness' Analysis With studied ignorance, yet another piece of proposed legislation targeting social media, and invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has emerged this week.…

There is no good money after bad if you’re the person receiving it Comment In an extraordinary piece of advocacy, the CEO of AT&T has not only highlighted the persistent problem of broadband provision in the US but also offered a solution: giving billions of taxpayer dollars to his company to fund its rollout.…

OpenExpress does away with intellectual property licensing burdens Electrical engineering boffins from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have released NVMe controller technology called OpenExpress to help academic researchers develop faster storage devices without rapidly depleting their budgets.…

The incentive? $89.5m to build a 'cloud-based common infrastructure' for existing ERP systems Not many companies would be willing to walk into a house haunted by one of the world’s biggest ERP disasters, but Accenture is happy to give it a go for a thick wodge of greenbacks.…

Distributed state in the browser made easy but there are snags for real-world use Microsoft has published the code for its Fluid Framework on Github - the framework is a Typescript library for real-time collaborative web applications.…

Telcos wary of new tech spend anyway, say analysts New research from analyst house Assembly suggests the UK faces a £18.2bn hit to its economy as a result of the decision to ban Huawei from the nation’s network. It’s a stark figure, vastly surpassing the one provided by the British govenrment, which estimated the cost to carriers at the £2bn mark.…

Must be Larry trash talking again SAP's chief bean counter Luka Mucic has belatedly rubbished claims by arch rival Oracle that it is poaching some of the German software maker's largest customers.…

Last one standing after Boeing's 2019 bail Northrop Grumman has won an eye-watering $13.3bn deal to update the US's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system.…

New names for old recipes Register Debate Welcome back to the inaugural Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion was proposed, for and against arguments were published on Monday, another round of arguments today, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

US extradition attempt for ex-WikiLeaker now being heard by London beak Julian Assange has been told to hold his tongue and not interrupt court proceedings by a judge as he contests US attempts to extradite him from Britain to stand trial over his WikiLeaks website.…

Take your pick, folks! Latest Magic Birfurcation has some strong caveats, but little is likely to change There's some interesting criticism in Gartner's latest "Magic Quadrant" report on Cloud Infrastructure and Platform services, which covers just seven providers, the only vendors which it considers qualify for the description "hyperscale cloud providers."…

Korean official quoted as saying 'all (domestic) semiconductors' cannot be supplied Huawei’s rotten year looks to be getting worse amid reports in South Korean paper Chosun Ibo that Samsung and SK Hynix will turn off the component tap to the firm from next week, due to pressure from the US government.…

Where's our Zoom miracle, cry investors. Growth for hipster chat platform expected to slow as 2020 grinds on Slack reported 49 per cent revenue growth for its Q2 ended July 31, but its stock nonetheless suffered a pounding in after-hours trading.…

'High risk of disruption' means Big Blue makes gov bods 'appy' for next 3 years IBM has grabbed a £25.25m contract extension from the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions without outside competition, to keep the government ministry’s ageing application estate up and running.…

Six years of No gets heard - but only because of legal jeopardy UK domain registrar Fasthosts has finally promised to stop pushing unwanted .uk domains onto its customers, six years after the scheme was first launched.…

Apple crowd included - as NFC can now be used for something other than Apple Pay Security token biz Yubico has a new key out today, its latest-generation two-factor encryption (2FA) authentication unit, the Yubico 5C NFC, which includes support for PCs and mobile devices using USB-C, as well as a built-in NFC radio.…

Authenticated business: 'No, there's a good reason for this call. Honest. Don't hang u-' Ad slinger Google is rolling out Verified Calls on its Phone App in the hope that its clients might stop you from ignoring calls from numbers you don't recognise.…

How many of you lot need help from an app to cook a steak? IFA 2020 This year’s instalment of Berlin's Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) conference was… different.…

Just don't expect to go mad fondling all those toys Retro computing fans rejoice! The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) has reopened its doors at Bletchley Park.…

Our Register Debates continue in which we spar over hot topics and YOU decide which side is right – by reader vote Register Debate Welcome back to the inaugural Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion was proposed, for and against arguments were published on Monday, another round of arguments today, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

Needs software to join up new 'joined up' system NHS England, the organisation responsible for the management of the country's National Health Service - and the UK’s largest employer - has offered £30m in a tender for HR and staff rostering systems.…

Fixes aplenty for vector graphic editor fans Users accustomed to lengthy waits between releases will be surprised to find open-source vector graphic outfit, Inkscape, has squeezed out version 1.0.1 of its editor mere months after the version 1.0 milestone was achieved.…

Survey was huge, but we can do better - So don't go all '2020 sure is the year for feeling alone' on us, OK? The latest survey searching for signs of alien civilizations radiating from over ten million distant Suns and six known exoplanets in space has thrown up a big fat nothing.…

Founder Dheeraj Pandey shares next five-year roadmap with The Register, predicts tech détente with China EXIT INTERVIEW Nutanix will almost certainly hire its new CEO from outside the company, says retiring CEO Dheeraj Pandey.…

IP addresses and domain names must be kept out of content battles, says RIPE and CENTR Europe’s two largest internet network infrastructure organizations have warned lawmakers not to lump the core network in with online platforms and apps when it comes to content regulations.…

Reminder: Top-tier clouds promise they’re really good at keeping power on all the time IBM’s Sydney cloud data centre lost power in “multiple racks” today.…

Hot on the heels of ɸ-sat-1, the space agency is planning to launch ɸ-sat-2 The European Space Agency is planning its second AI-powered climate-monitoring satellite, the Φ-sat-2, just days after it successfully launched its first one aboard the Vega rocket.…

Revenue dips regardless as big enterprise players struggle during lockdown Hyperscalers went on a buying spree in 2020's second quarter.…

Enterprise edition offers admins more ways to blend work and play Google has loosed Android 11 on a waiting world.…

Quarter of game’s audience is in the sub-continent, making radical action necessary Korean games developer PUBG Corporation has tried to blast its way past India’s ban on Chinese apps by ditching Tencent as its local partner.…

App Store spat heats up with Cupertino counterclaim Apple has filed a countersuit against Epic Games as the two companies continue their battle over App Store royalties.…

Orion WiFi tries to make a market for under-utilized bandwidth Google on Tuesday announced a service called Orion Wi-Fi to allow businesses to sell spare wireless network capacity to cellular service providers.…

FCC rushes auction process through following Defense Department’s agreement The deployment of next-gen 5G mobile network in the US has just got a shot in the arm, with the FCC announcement that at the end of the month it will approve use of a big chunk of mid-band spectrum solely for 5G.…

Don't be so smug, Mac users, you're open to an InDesign project file A nightmare flaw for Exchange Server headlines this month's Patch Tuesday lineup from Microsoft and others.…

We'll just let muted videos autoplay on Chrome for Android because publishers can't be stopped Google's rules for when its Chrome browser allows and blocks the automatic playback of web audio and video have come under fire following a company developer's decision not to address objections to the removal of autoplay blocking controls from Chrome for Android.…

Biz goes public on plans, promises open source tools with kernel code Paragon has submitted code for a read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, and told The Register that it also plans to provide its NTFS tools and utilities as open source.…

Hyperconverged pioneer bids to manage all the things Nutanix will kick off its annual gabfest today with news that it’s completed the set of top-tier cloud alliances by striking a deal with Microsoft.…

Doppelpaymer gang publishes Geordie institution's stolen files online A cyber attack at Newcastle University has turned out to be a ransomware infection courtesy of the Doppelpaymer gang.…

It's our fourth chapter, says CEO Crist Boston-based development veteran Progress – beloved by greybeards for its Progress 4GL – has just spent nearly a quarter of a billion greenbacks on DevOps darling Chef.…

Company confirms redundancies as Enterprise division slashes portfolio Exclusive Huawei is yanking a bunch of Enterprise product lines from the UK in the wake of a business review, admitting that the campaign waged by US President Donald Trump hasn’t helped its plight on this side of the pond.…

State aid needed to nurture the UK’s first-trillion dollar tech company, political puppet-master claims Opinion In an unprecedented year for the world, it might be easy to forget that, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, other unprecedented things are still happening. Yes, the UK’s favourite portmanteau, Brexit, is coming back to blight Britain.…

AppSheet Automation to combine workflow with data-driven applications for - whisper it - citizen devs... Google's Cloud Next OnAir broadcast marathon (56 days and counting) has run into its final week, this one focused on "Business Applications", with the claim its new product "empower[s] non-technical employees to quickly build data-driven applications without coding."…

Go take the dog for a walk... or crack a book, maybe Browser maker Vivaldi has made the bold claim that its latest release will allow users to "pause the internet."…

Our own customers think we're ignoring them, say irate business owners Users of UK web hosting firm 123-Reg’s email service told The Reg this morning that 96 hours after clocking the issue, they are still having trouble sending emails to users with Microsoft's Live, Outlook or Hotmail accounts.…

Also tasked with 'resolving system failures', and that's engineers, biz bods, devs, infoseccers and more UK electricity and gas market watchdog Ofgem has put £30m on the table as it seeks vendors with project management, developer, infrastructure and data skills that can whip out a hard hat - or a soft swivelly chair, we suppose - and respond to "urgent" calls.…

Respectfully, I say to thee... I'm aware that you're borking Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment in The Register's ongoing coverage of unhappy digital signage. Today, the world has been turned upside down by the curse of Bork.…

Apple also in sights of inquiry that could spark more new laws Australia, already embroiled in a nasty fight with Google and Facebook over its plan to make them pay for news links, has opened an inquiry into whether Apple and Google’s app stores offer transparent pricing and see consumers’ data used in worrying ways.…