The Register

Quick! You need to pay for that web address you never asked for so we can make more money Dot-uk registry operator Nominet has again crossed the line from industry overseer to champion for the registrars that sell .uk domains, warning Brits they should pay to renew names they never ordered and didn't want.…

'We understand this news will cause anxiety and dread' CEO tells 360 staff, but won't someone think of the passengers and drivers? Grab, the ride-sharing service that did so well in Southeast Asia that Uber bought a chunk of it and fled, has announced layoffs.…

Upgrade your security protection for the new normal Webcast Is your organization in the middle of a work-from-home trial-by-fire? If so, you are learning all about the security risks of this abrupt change already, and so are your users.…

Light, strong, supportive ... and monitored thanks to ERP integration An outfit named German Bionic has noted that the freight and logistics industries "have been under enormous pressure since the beginning of the pandemic" and suggested exoskeletons-as-a-service as an - erm - helping hand for such workers.…

Plus: Google guide rejects 'ableist language' such as 'sanity check' – and others wonder if ‘blocklists’ could offend ex-Soviet nations Splunk has joined the ranks of software makers pledging to remove objectionable terms like “master” and “slave” from their code.…

On the upside, it's been used to trace contacts about 30 times and downloaded six million times Australia’s “COVIDSafe” contact-tracing app appears still to have problems with Apple’s iOS.…

Commerce Department changes rules because... something, something... innovation The US Commerce Department has confirmed it will publish a rule change to its crackdown on Huawei that will allow US companies to work with the Chinese equipment maker on 5G standards. And artificial intelligence. And autonomous vehicles.…

Internal probe went all the way to the former CEO, CCO after 'smut, fake pig's head, more sent to couple' Six former eBay staffers, including two executives, were hit this week with criminal charges for allegedly serially harassing two bloggers who were critical of the internet tat bazaar.…

Welp, that's one way to block those annoying spam robots Updated T-Mobile US is suffering a nationwide technical breakdown, preventing customers from receiving calls and knackering data connections.…

What time is it? Time to pore over contested multibillion-dollar US military tech deals General Dynamics IT (GDIT) has had its complaint about the handling of the $7.7bn rebuild of the US Navy’s networking infrastructure thrown out by a watchdog.…

Punters asked to hand over their logs if browser keeps coming to life against their wishes Microsoft is investigating claims by some Windows 10 Insider users that Edge pops up after their PCs start up, even if the software has been told not to do that.…

Security biz, academics, tech advocacy groups ask Supreme Court to review ruling that could derail antivirus industry Analysis Last week, fourteen cybersecurity experts, infosec biz ESET, and tech advocacy groups the Internet Association and TechFreedom filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the US Supreme Court to review a 2019 appeals court ruling against antivirus maker Malwarebytes.…

Can't stand losing you... over TCP/IP. So lonely... after connections drop. Message in a bottle... would work better, etc etc Comment SAP CEO Christian Klein's epithet may well be that he appears competent – as in, he's the sort of person whose advice on the best option for life insurance one would be accepted without hesitation.…

Plus: New Java SDK in Cosmos DB, NHS goes all Microsoft 365, and Start Menu gets a bit Clippy Roundup The UK health service can't kick its Microsoft habit, plus there are new toys for Azure botherers out this week.…

Brighton boffin says technology is a 'major engineering challenge' but does not rely on making major physics breakthrough A UK startup has harvested £3.6m in seed funding to put into its vision for the future of quantum computing.…

Days without TITSUP: 0 Microsoft 365 started the week off with an early totter in the Oceania region followed by a full-blown European Outlook client TITSUP*.…

Perp had previous conviction for obtaining property by deception An IT support bod who reportedly stole more than £30,000 in Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum has been jailed.…

'We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files' Linus Torvalds has said that version 5.8 of the Linux kernel is "one of our biggest releases of all time".…

Where the big dogs roam Cloudera has introduced support for the private cloud - built on the Red Hat OpenShift platform and supported by Kubernetes container orchestration - to elbow its way into a whole new world of competition.…

Memory corruption exploitation about to get a lot harder on Chipzilla silicon After years in development, Intel is set to debut security mechanisms in its microprocessors that it hopes will block, at the silicon level, exploitation of a class of software vulnerabilities.…

Though decentralised Deutsche effort hasn't been without problems either Germany will launch its coronavirus track-and-trace app later this week, Federal health minister Jens Spahn has confirmed.…

Add that to the £790k wasted on Xmas 2018 shutdown investigation A couple arrested by bungling local police who wrongly blamed them for the Gatwick drone fiasco have been handed £200,000 in compensation.…

Water filter system requires RFID-chipped part Fed up with the DRM in a General Electric refrigerator that pushed the owner to buy expensive manufacturer-approved replacement water filters, an anonymous hacker went to the trouble of buying a domain name and setting up a website at gefiltergate.com to pen a screed about appliance digital rights restriction management (DRM) and how to bypass it.…

No breakages, no change in operation, no problem OpenZFS is the latest open-source project to eliminate objectionable language in its code.…

This story also mentions QR codes for maximum facepalm effect An infosec researcher reckons Whatsapp was a bit too quick off the mark to blame its users when hundreds of thousands of phone numbers, names and profile pictures were found to be easily accessible via Google.…

You copied our technology! No, YOU copied our technology! Google has accused Sonos of infringing five of its patents in an escalation of a spat that begun five months ago when the speaker slinger alleged the search giant infringed its own IP.…

Using machine learning to get rid of those awkward code breaks Facebook researchers have applied recent advances they've made in the unsupervised machine translation of human languages to a source code conversion system.…

Networked devices work just fine, however Windows 10 users woke up to borked printers following the monthly Microsoft bugfix party, Patch Tuesday.…

Zuck pauses plan to roll out topic moderation tools for its FB-for-biz Facebook this week temporarily halted plans to roll out tools that would have allowed its Workplace customers to censor touchy topics, following a reported internal staff revolt.…

ODMs in Far East make bank as public cloud slingers buy yet more infrastructure Spending on data centre hardware and software dipped in Q1 as enterprises tightened their belts - the reasons for which are clear. As for the purveyors of public cloud, no such concerns existed.…

♫ Now don't go wasting my precious time! Pay the ransom quickly and we'll be just fine ♫ (no, don't) The Maze ransomware gang has struck again – this time targeting an American M&A practice which counts former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham as one of its clients.…

We're gonna need it if we ever live up there – and it looks like a tempting option right now Pittsburgh-based space robot specialist Astrobotic has been picked by NASA to drop a rover onto the surface of the Moon.…

Ex-TalkTalk CEO fails to convince public everything's going swimmingly Comment When something as serious as the UK government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic is being openly mocked on social media, it's clear all is not well.…

Carrier to use Swedish giant's RAN kit to upgrade 3G/4G sites Swedish infrastructure giant Ericsson today confirmed a new deal with O2 UK for its RAN equipment, which will be used to upgrade existing 3G/4G sites across the West of England and Wales.…

UK outfit gets a Streisand effect 101 Comment UK-based infosec outfit Keepnet Labs left an 867GB database of previously compromised website login details accessible to world+dog earlier this year – then sent lawyers' letters to bloggers in a bid to erase their reports of its blunder.…

Tells us more so we can better understand the problems you face Reader survey Everyone says that data is the lifeblood of the organization, yet very few actually take that idea to its logical conclusion, namely that storage is at the heart of the enterprise.…

Chocolate Factory surpasses OnePlus sales for first time, thanks to Pixel 3a 2019 was a good year for Google's mobile hardware division, according to figures from analyst house IDC, which reports record Pixel sales of 7.2 million units – up 52 per cent on the previous year.…

Despite everything going on in the world, you can rely on hyped tech stock to be a bit bonkers Cloud data warehouse specialist Snowflake looks set to file for an IPO valuing the company at $20bn – more than 13 times its valuation of $1.5bn back in January 2018.…

Wake me up before you Go, Code Microsoft has handed over the Go extension for its popular Visual Studio Code editor to the Go community, switching the extension's publisher to "Go Team at Google."…

Positive Technologies analysts less than positive about GTP Long-standing vulnerabilities in older wireless broadband standards will continue to dog new 5G networks, despite efforts to improve network security, a new report has claimed.…

Funny? Only until you read what really happened here A Frenchman who complained that he didn't have enough to do at work has been handed €50,000 (£44,470) after suffering from "bore-out".…

One's 'best served cold with ranch and carrots', the other turns to 'Yoda Speak' An open-source project for automating the installation of free Let's Encrypt certificates for websites built with Microsoft's ASP.NET Core framework was forced to change its name after a trademark complaint from the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).…

And other tidbits from the realm of rocketry Roundup NASA's Gateway edged a little closer to reality last week as the agency took another look at the James Webb Space Telescope's launch date and prepared for the arrival of the solid rocket motors for the SLS.…

You've just splashed the cash on a new Surface. Haven't you suffered enough? Lurking within the epic patch dump offloaded on Windows 10 2004 users last night came the news that Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 owners have been waiting for: fixes for glitches.…

So that's an 'F' for University Technical Colleges then? UK.gov's spending watchdog has found the University Technical College (UTC) scheme introduced by David Cameron's coalition government in 2010 lacks student numbers, is deep in deficit and provides a poor education.…

'This is going to be a problem; we are not on top of this' Interview Expiring root certificates will cause devices like smart TVs and refrigerators to fail in the next few years, security researcher Scott Helme has warned.…

Improved metadata management and easier compliance also required The Scottish Police Authority is on the hunt for virtual data warehouse and data lake providers as part of a £6m tender intended to help the public body derive some value from the huge volumes of data it is sat on.…

Destination 'Preinst aborted' Bork!Bork!Bork! Come join your friends at The Register on a train journey to Bork. Or at least one to destination Aborted.…

€400m for starters, after recent ban on 'untrustworthy' suppliers that sounded a lot like it was directed at Huawei The German government has begun a fund to support locally brewed electronics as the country tries to reduce its reliance on imported kit.…

IBM's server revenue grew rather nicely, but Lenovo's in a more-shipments-less-revenue trap Analyst firm IDC has published its assessment of the server and storage markets for 2020’s first quarter and the numbers are nasty.…