The Register

Microsoft, Google, Facebook and pals weigh in on F-1, M-1 visa lawsuit Big Tech has thrown its support behind a legal challenge to a Trump administration rule that will force foreign students to leave the US if their university courses are online-only amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

Yevgeniy Nikulin faces up to 10 years in a US cooler The Russian hacker accused of raiding LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring, and obtaining data on 213 million user accounts, has been found guilty.…

Trio quits immediately, workers under investigation Three senior Ubisoft execs quit over the weekend amid claims of widespread sexual harassment within the video-game giant's Canadian wing.…

The only winning move is... not to play? Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations.…

More native applications we smoke, yo, our rep gets bigger Microsoft and Google have been working together to help make Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) easier to publish, in the hope that web apps will one day compete with native apps on mobile devices.…

Plus: Teams goes Nationwide and gains new hardware, VS Code updates In brief While many fleshbags won't trouble the inside of an aircraft this summer, Microsoft has thrown those on unplanned staycations a bone with the confirmed release date for its latest Flight Simulator: 18 August.…

CHIEF concerns for customs tech haven't gone away.... The UK government says it has earmarked £115m in spending for new IT systems to help with the management of customs arrangements and border data after the Brexit transition period comes to a close at year end.…

Still won't be as big as Texas Instruments Analog Devices has confirmed an intent to buy rival Maxim Integrated, saying it'll fork out a whopping $20.9bn in an all-stock deal.…

Torvalds worries about compiler bugs: 'Very rare, but incredibly hard to debug' Rust language team lead Josh Triplett has promised to support its use in the Linux kernel, saying: "I'd be happy to have the Linux kernel feeding into Rust language development priorities. If building Rustic interfaces within the kernel requires some additional language features, we should see what enhancements to the language would best serve those requirements."…

Plus: IB students kick up a stink over algorithm grading, and more In brief A man was charged after he was mistakenly identified as a thief by facial-recognition software used by the Detroit Police Department.…

To SD or not SD-WAN is the question? Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is to wolf down Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) outfit Silver Peak for $925m.…

Company 'aware and reviewing' the lawsuit, not your clipboard. Honest Microsoft's social-media-for-suits tentacle, LinkedIn, has attracted legal fire for allegedly peering at the clipboard of iOS devices.…

Hope is to ease procurement while saving cash University of Manchester has dished out a contract worth up to £50m to a handful of integrators to provision cloud services from the big three providers and build a tool for "consolidated and managed billing".…

There's a 0.1mm tolerance and OS has built-in tools for managing peep hole If you've ever been to a tech trade show, chances are you willingly exchanged personal details for a webcam cover. The plastic strips are loved by cheapskate vendors everywhere, but a new advisory from Apple warns against leaving them attached while closing your MacBook lest it utterly bugger your display.…

Plus: Kazakh man charged with corporate mega-hack, and more In brief With world+dog on Zoom these days, news of a zero-day attack against the videoconferencing app would cause a stir, but relax – it's only if you're on Windows 7 or older.…

Redmond will retain stake in popular chatbot service Microsoft has kicked a five-year-old out onto the cold, hard Chinese streets by spinning off its Xiaobing (or Xiaoice) business.…

Plus: New availability report highlights database issues GitHub marked the start of the week with more than four hours of downtime, as GitHub Issues, Actions, Pages, Packages and API requests all reported "degraded performance."…

(No don't. Don't do that. - Ed) Technology might be transient, but paint on bricks is forever Bork!Bork!Bork! In the battle of new versus old in today's example of signage silage, the only winner appears to be Bork.…

'Higher fidelity local debugging experience' than debugging on Windows and deploying to Linux Hands On Microsoft has pushed out an extension for Visual Studio 2019 that lets developers run and debug a .NET Core application on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2).…

Don't even get started on 2021.... please In a world full of surprises where everything subject to change based on humanity’s ability to combat an invisible killer, Gartner has calculated IT spending will crash this year and experience a “swoop” recovery next.…

Maybe Donald isn’t in love with Vlad after all – but he did just give Russia attribution and maybe a peek at tradecraft US president Donald Trump has revealed that in 2018 he authorized an attack on suspected-to-be-state-sponsored Russian internet trolls intent on disrupting the electoral process during Congressional elections.…

Confessions of a student Who, Me? Bid a fond farewell to the weekend and buckle up for the new week with a slightly NSFW example of the breed we like to call Who, Me?…

CMS behind gov.uk and plenty more government sites worldwide promises easy upgrade from current code to new version 9.0 Open-source CMS software Drupal has unveiled its first major update in five years by launching a new version 9.0.…

Embrace the future – because it’s already here Webcast The IT department's evolution from controller to advisor is accelerating as more of us work flexibly, work from home, and collaborate online.…

Oracle rules on-prem, but Alibaba owns the cloud ... and here comes Huawei IDC has had a look at China’s database market and found vendors within the Middle Kingdom are on the rise.…

Other job ads make similar mistakes, and candidates do worse IBM's Global Technology Services has posted a job ad calling for candidates with a “minimum 12+ years’ experience in Kubernetes administration and management”.…

As a colossal commit count crashes into Linux 5.8-rc5 Linux overlord overseer principal developer Linus Torvalds has signed off on a new policy to adopt inclusive language across the project.…

Okta to highlight zero-trust security later this month Webcast So-called zero-trust security architecture is essentially a real-life version of what everybody fails to get right in spy thrillers. While agents carefully check their perimeter, they forget the enemy could be right alongside them the whole time, working within their team for years.…

We've brought together experts across the DevOps field to bring you practical advice and answer your Qs Event Our annual Continuous Lifecycle London conference is online for 2020 – but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking whatsoever, and will be packed with the high-quality content you’ve come to expect.…

At 65 million miles away, that's what we call social distancing A two-pronged comet with billowing tails of gas and dust will streak across the sky this month.…

Shock TikTok block clocked, unblocked as poppycock amid media aftershock Amazon today said an internal email banning its staff from using TikTok on smartphones connected to their corporate inboxes was sent in "error." The admission – or climb down, depending on how skeptical you are – came after the memo was obtained and leaked by journalists.…

Private equity looks to cash in on managed cloud services biz Almost six years after going private, Rackspace is once again dipping its toes into the public market by filing for an IPO in the US.…

ESA emits a guide to picking up Slow Scan TV from the orbiting outpost Got plans for the weekend? No? How about pulling that Pi out of the drawer or dusting off an old laptop and getting ready to grab some images from the ISS, courtesy of locked-down European Space Agency (ESA) boffins.…

Users will be able to 'override ... restrictions' on phones and other kit, says engineering team Android 11 Beta 2, out this week, is a fairly modest update, focusing primarily on stability and bug fixes. But behind the scenes there are strong indications that a broader shift is afoot, with Google trying to address overall ecosystem inconsistencies that have formed since its initial release.…

Not sure they spent that much on 'high risk' kit from ZTE and Huawei, coughs analyst Analysis The caution couldn't be more stark. In a meeting with the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday, execs from BT and Vodafone warned UK lawmakers that a deadline of 2023 to remove Huawei-made equipment from their networks will result in multi-day mobile signal losses for some customers.…

Just what Vladimir Putin's favourite bank wanted to hear, no doubt Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has declared that governments can't "take 10 years to catch up” with cyber crims – while speaking at an infosec conference organised by Vladimir Putin’s favourite Russian bank.…

You're unlikely to hear someone inflicting their iOS Spotify playlist on the bus today Those using Facebook to log into services such as Spotify on their iOS devices are having a bad Friday, as something has gone awry with Zuckerberg's ad-slinging platform.…

Good news if you're a fan of Topre switches Fujitsu has refreshed its line of iconic developer-oriented Happy Hacking mechanical keyboards.…

No support 'in any capacity' for PHP for Windows for v8 and beyond, but Windows users not to worry, says release manager Born-again open-source fan Microsoft is celebrating 25 years of PHP by, er, pulling its support for the scripting language that is beloved (or dreaded) by server operators the world over.…

The artist formerly known as Advanced Computer Software Group confirms redundancies Brit-based software biz Advanced has confirmed to The Register it is trimming the workforce in response to the commercial impact of COVID-19, with 150 people understood to be leaving the organisation.…

Mazda shrugs off ex-owner's bizarre involuntary data retention story A UK man who woke up one morning to discover his bank account being charged for satnav services linked to a car he'd sold months previously has expressed his frustration at Mazda and TomTom over the strange affair.…

Tech team still 'investigating,' no ETA of fix If a digital bank is unable to regularly provide online banking services, at what point does it cease to be a digital bank? Some disgruntled customers of Smile, a trading division of the Co-Operative Bank, may be posing this very question after five full days of woe.…

Nationwide network operator gets into tizzy with chimney owners IoT biz Sigfox’s British network operator WND-UK has stopped paying people who host its network aerials on their roofs because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, WND-UK has pledged to make its near 2,000 base station hosts whole once the economy stabilises.…

President chooses chip factory to expands program aimed at reducing dependence on Japan South Korea has become the latest nation to decide that it should become more self-sufficient in key technologies and by doing so turn itself into an exporter.…

Supply chains are working again Global PC shipments climbed back into recovery mode for the second quarter thanks to increased demand from the surge of home working.…

Hope for web success, but plan for every possible (and impossible) failure On Call Everyone's favourite day of the week, Friday, has waddled into view. Grab a steaming mug of schadenfreude and settle down with another tale from those Register readers saddled with the On Call phone.…

Revenue fell eight percent but company thinks it can win on new virus-scoured terrain Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has become the first of the big Indian technology services companies to report a quarter’s results and while revenue was down the company found many bright spots that suggest better times lie ahead.…

The us-versus-them mentality between dev and ops is still alive and well, we see Reader survey In an online survey, we asked Register readers for their thoughts on workplace automation and self-service within on-prem environments. That survey is still open, though we took a sneak peek at the data collected so far, and whoa, there are some strong feelings out there.…

There may be a small black hole on the edge of our Solar System? 2020, please stop The suggestion that the Solar System's hypothesized Planet Nine is actually a small black hole could be solved by searching for outbursts of energy using the Vera Rubin Observatory, scientists say.…

Which sounds just like what you’d do if future x86 supply looked a bit iffy KylinOS, the Linux distribution that China’s government has encouraged to become a national OS for desktops and services, has pointed out that it’s clocked up a Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmark running on Huawei’s Arm silicon.…