The Register

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.…

State-sponsored infrastructure hacking, backdoors-by-fiat and even lock-in all out of bounds in draft code China has proposed a “Global Initiative on Data Security” that it hopes the world will adopt to govern the collection and use of data by governments and the private sector alike.…

K8s may even make it hard to use the cloud’s best bits Do not make application portability your primary driver for adopting Kubernetes, say Gartner analysts Marco Meinardi, Richard Watson and Alan Waite, because while the tool theoretically improves portability in practice it also locks you in while potentially denying you access to the best bits of the cloud.…

Someone appears to have ignited the Great Firewall with Hong-Kong-related post China appears to have blocked access to the website of coding-for-kids tool Scratch.…

Covered 40kms in that short time and quadrupled previous efforts India claims it flew a perfect scramjet test at Mach 6 on Monday.…

Also: More Starlink and hopping fun for SpaceX and Northrop Grumman lights the blue touchpaper for SLS In brief Those pondering what else Rocket Lab got up to on Flight 14 following the successful deployment of the satellite payload for Capella Space got their answer last week in the form of "First Light", a jumped-up version of the existing Electron Kick Stage.…

'Best approximation of C++ ideals so far,' says Stroustrup - but is it too big and complex? C++ 20, the latest version of the venerable object-oriented programming language, has been unanimously endorsed in ISO's final technical approval ballot.…

Is AI just a rebrand of yesterday's dumb algorithms? We present the argument against this motion – and don't forget to vote Register Debate Welcome 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 is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

Yo Poco! Latest cheap-o blower has no 5G frills or long-lens skills. But it retails at £199 Formaldehyde-free matress, knicker and mobile phone maker Xiaomi has emerged from the bargian basement clutching its latest blower - the Poco X3 (NFC).…

Also: Organisational tools everywhere and mobile commenting in OneDrive In Brief Good news for anyone who has ever tried to use the pure white tile and theoretical quiet of the bathroom as a meeting backdrop without realising their brother was in there: a PowerToys feature that mutes the mic and injects a stream of black instead of video via a virtual driver.…

Seized assets system is 15 years old, counts cash of fraud dept, tax bods, courts, cops and more The UK Home Office is seeking out software vendors to replace a vital but ageing database that helps keep a track of criminals' assets accrued through illegal activity in the UK.…

AWS claims 'blatant political interference' AWS has come out with guns blazing after the US Department of Defense's (DoD) reaffirmed Microsoft's JEDI contract win on Friday, with the cloud vendor alleging the award was a “flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision,” that had been directly and improperly influenced by US President Donald Trump.…

You have until 17 February 2021 to shift off - or it all gets deleted, says Microsoft Microsoft has bitten the bullet and is to drop Visual Studio Codespaces in favour of GitHub Codespaces.…

'Still no clear sense of what we'll be transitioning to' warns Fed of Small Biz SMEs in Britain are urging the government to provide ‘transition vouchers” to be spent on tech, expertise and training as a way to help smooth the waves when the country exits the European Union.…

Today we launch our Register Debates in which we spar over hot topics and YOU decide which side is right – by reader vote Register Debate Welcome 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 is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and we publish a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

An English keyboard maybe Review With its lucrative mobile business being decimated outside of Mainland China, Huawei's youth-focused sub-brand Honor has shifted towards laptops and other personal tech kit. Its latest machine is the MagicBook Pro, which touts a 16.1-inch display and a brisk Ryzen 5 processor.…

WoOoO! Log me iiiin... Press CTRL-ALT-DELEeEeTE Bork!Bork!Bork! It is said that we can never truly escape our past. And there are few companies where this is truer than Clippyzilla itself, Microsoft. Behold a relic of Windows supposedly gone still hanging on in the fine Yorkshire town of Selby.…

Remember how established carrier vendors were going to clean up after Huawei bans? Not so much, maybe ... Samsung Electronics has won a $6.6bn contract to supply 5G infrastructure to Verizon in the US, beating out more established and traditional telco suppliers Nokia and Ericsson.…