The Register

The Great Unicorn Prayer of security services: Stay secure, but - ya know - give us backdoors In a move as predictable as it is wearisome, a bunch of government security agencies have got together and demanded we let them have our data. This latest spooky manifestation is a collection of the Five Eyes - the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - and for some reason Japan and India. Let’s call this coalition of the chilling, JIANUSCUK.…

To survive a war, you gotta become war. Yes, that's a real quote from the movie. Quality While Sylvester Stallone may or may not be done with the Rambo franchise after decades of portraying the eponymous character, its arcade incarnation endures, if a little borked.…

So much for showcasing Redmond's Chocolate Factory alternative Microsoft’s flagship 2020 game Flight Simulator was supposed to showcase Bing Maps and Azure’s streaming capabilities. There’s just one small problem: gamers are overwriting Bing’s in-game 3D photogrammetry with entire cities ripped from Google Earth.…

Fine, try this one: Hmm mmm egregious web monopoly mmm-mmm hmm radicalizing video algorithms mm In brief You can recall a song’s melody clearly in your mind though the name of it completely slips your tongue. What do you do? Well, now you can hum it directly into your smartphone and Google will try its best to detect what tune it is.…

You thought that presentation would be dull as styrofoam flavoured water when... Who, Me? In these times of remote working, we're all a bit more cautious about what might be on our shared screen or lurking on the shelves behind us. Some things never change, as today's Who, Me? makes plain.…

Maybe clouds. Maybe banks. Probably not you, until they matter to developers +COMMENT VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is unsure who will use the recently announced cut of the company's ESXi hypervisor for SmartNICs with Arm CPUs.…

Better-than-before code to make Office more accessible Microsoft has built a machine-learning model that automatically captions images in documents and emails so that the descriptions can be dictated by software for visually impaired users. It's claimed to be twice as good as the automatic captioning code the Windows giant already uses in its products.…

XFS timestamp tweak extends Unix time for a few centuries The forthcoming Linux 5.10 looks like it will include further fixes for the Year 2038 problem, aka Y2K38.…

Includes the usual stuff about not selling weapons, adds wording about tech, data, and reciprocity China has passed new export control laws that give it the power to impose tit for tat export bans.…

Already has QKD in space. Next: ban-busting qubit-crunchers? Chinese premier Xi Jinping has told the nation to hurry up and do whatever it takes to commercialise quantum technology.…

Selfies of rallies can score fines or land you in the slammer Thailand calls on telcos and ISPs to censor information about protests Selfies can score fines or land you in the slammer Thailand has called on the nation’s telcos and internet service providers to censor communication about a wave of protests sweeping the country and made it an offence to take a selfie at protest events.…

US space agency has a mole – and that's a good thing, finally NASA’s off-again, on-again Mars digger nicknamed the mole is finally buried in the planet’s soil and will take readings beneath the surface next year.…

Developer wishes cloud giant gave more thought to not stepping on toes On Thursday, Amazon Web Services launched CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension for recording browser interactions that it copied from the Headless Recorder project created by developer Tim Nolet.…

And the Chocolate Factory isn't the only one bragging about ML with little evidence of its success Distinguished doctors have publicly criticized Google and others for making grand claims about AI research and then not sharing the source code and models to let others replicate and verify the experiments.…

CEO charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, etc The US Justice Department on Thursday charged billionaire software tycoon Robert Brockman with tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, and other offenses.…

And some 800,000 installations facing the internet, patches are available A critical vulnerability in a SonicWall enterprise VPN firewall can be exploited to crash the device or remotely execute code on it, reverse engineers said this week.…

Come on Sammy, you've got form here so don't make the same mistakes again Samsung has wasted no time in poking fun at Apple’s decision not to bundle a power adapter with its latest iPhone.…

From VisiCalc to Google Sheets, none of them are a database Break out the bunting and crack out the Excel-based party puns. Tomorrow is Spreadsheet day, and it's time to party like it's 00/01/1900.…

Large existing install base that's pondering move to cloud will be reluctant to ditch 'existing investments' opines analyst Oracle has brought out a new Exadata Cloud Service based on the Exadata X8M platform, bringing its high-end persistent memory feature to the cloud. Well, Oracle’s cloud at least.…

Will the hardest workers want to go back to the offce for a break? How’s your work life balance? For some people the lines between the daily grind and their personal time has blurred, and they are putting more hours into the job than before the pandemic forced offices to close.…

The look on their wickle faces as they scream: 'Mum, what the heck is Linux?' The COVID-19 pandemic has turned laptops — particularly those deemed "cheap and cheerful" — into a desperately sought-after commodity as education and work moves to the home.…

History tells us tech companies just get bigger, even after being broken up or battered Column Thriving amidst the pervasive chaos of 2020, the world’s largest technology companies - the FAANGs*, as we’ve come to know them - have managed to grow larger, richer and more powerful.…

German biz: You won't need an RPA tool, or not as often. FIGHT, FIGHT!!! The co-CEO at German process mining biz Celonis has talked up its leap into the world of automation by rolling out its own platform, as well as splashing the cash - reportedly a hair over $100m - on automation and integration outfit Integromat.…

Tough luck, bumpkins! Broadband speed gap misery to widen, says report The UK government's strategy for deploying full-fibre broadband shows signs of repeating the errors of previous broadband infrastructure programmes, which failed to extend comprehensive access to rural areas, a report from the National Audit Office has claimed [PDF].…

Airline was saving domain admin creds and card details alike in plaintext British Airways is to pay a £20m data protection fine after its 2018 Magecart hack – even though the Information Commissioner’s Office discovered the airline had been saving credit card details in plain text since 2015.…

Bork, bork, bork on the Autobahn Bork!Bork!Bork! News reaches The Register that even those paragons of efficiency and rule-following, the Germans, are not immune to the curse of Bork.…

How can it be OK when nobody knows what to prepare for, ask IT players Canalys Forum 2020 - updated The IT supply chain remains in the dark over how to plan for Brexit with mere months to go before the UK potentially exits the European Union without a trade agreement, according to one of Britain’s biggest IT distributors.…

And if you're hiring, send us your ads for free promotion Job Alert We've got a couple of interesting developer roles to get your teeth stuck into this week.…

Take your brain to another dimension- sion- sion... Pay close attention Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am out of my head. It’s that Zoom fatigue that I keep reading about.…

Where the data flies, and the travellers cry..... Network Rail, the UK's publicly owned rail infrastructure body, has promised to give passengers' journeys a lift by connecting its sprawling estate of elevator and escalators to the world as an open data source.…

Claims code and infrastructure aren't shared with China or very scary. Also reveals Oracle will win biz from AWS, Azure, Alibaba and Google! TikTok has claimed that the Trump administration’s reasons for wanting it banned are mostly based on incorrect assumptions about its technology.…

Automated alerting? Escalating robo-calling? All ok, but beware the inebriated meatbag in the system On Call It is Friday the somethingth of Marchtober. No, we're not sure anymore either. Still, even in these troubled times there remains a crumb of comfort to be gleaned from the oopsies of others. Welcome to On Call.…

Meet Victoria, who’s fond of K8s, security and complex networking On October 21st, 2010, something new hit the world of enterprise infrastructure software: it was free software called OpenStack “Austin” and comprised the Nova VM-wrangler and the Swift Object store.…

To flog workstations and 'maintain and optimize the experience for esports student athletes' eSports – aka professional competitive computer gaming – is now so widely adopted by schools and universities that Lenovo has built a business unit to service their teams.…

Was given deadline to declare its Chinese ties or leave, chose the latter Alibaba-aligned e-commerce operator Taobao will quit Taiwan.…

Goodbye, Dave A NASA-funded project has demonstrated how deep-learning algorithms can help experts determine from satellite scans whether a volcano is due to erupt or not.…

Pai says he wants to 'clarify' Section 230's 26 words On Thursday, FCC chairman Ajit Pai declared his intention to clarify a law he may not have the authority to interpret.…

And the world breathed a sigh of relief? Updated Twitter is right now suffering a baffling outage in that the website is still up, you can still log in, the apps will run.…

Social distancing isn't just for surviving the pandemic – now this internet giant can add it to your browser Network services giant Cloudflare wants to host your web browser in the cloud so it can send you only safe content.…

After only one public Git commit this year, penguinstas think: Fork it, we don't need Cupertino The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019.…

They nicked six alleged perps last year but only one was charged Britain’s National Crime Agency arrested six men in London on suspicion of laundering “tens of millions” for the Trickbot and Dridex banking malware gangs, the not-quite-police agency declared today.…

Infosec biz issues mildly off-the-wall guidance for incident responders The global switch to remote working in early 2020 gave hackers a whole new set of juicy ransomware targets.…

Fiddling with configuration and getting nostalgic in version 3.4 Norwegian software-maker Vivaldi has emitted an update to its eponymous browser, featuring some additional configuration and reload options as well as a ton of retro-pixelled gaming goodness.…

You were only supposed to blow the bloody bytes off! Europe is to build four Nvidia-Intel-powered supercomputers, one of which will be the most powerful super yet built for AI applications, the GPU giant reckons.…

'Yet another nail in the coffin' says analyst as former fan NL's biggest operator looks to Sweden Dutch network KPN has selected Ericsson to provide the infrastructure for its 5G core network. This decision, although inevitable, represents another setback for Huawei, its 4G provider, which had until now enjoyed a long and intimate relationship with the carrier.…

Plus: Platform censors US newspaper and triggers ordure tsunami American financial regulators in New York have demanded Twitter be subject to harsher rules following the July hacks of prominent users' accounts – as CEO Jack Dorsey furiously backpedals after his website censored a news article from a US newspaper.…

A hornet's nest within a can of worms running systems worth billions of pounds.. NHS England is looking to replace the HR and ERP systems used by hospitals, community services and family doctors with a single integrated ERP based in the cloud.…

Thought Microsoft would resist Google's ad-friendly tweaks to the browser extension API? Think again Microsoft has decided to support the Google-proposed Manifest V3 in its Edge browser - based on the Chromium browser engine - despite continuing concern about the impact on content-filtering extensions such as ad blockers.…

Windows Subsystem for Linux or Linux Subsystem for Windows? Who cares, 'open source has won', says Microsoft MVP and Canonical engineer lead Microsoft MVP and Canonical engineer manager Hayden Barnes has upended the scorn bucket over the dreams of open sourcers that Windows might end up as an emulation layer atop Linux.…

And point everyone at LibreOffice, ta To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch.…