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But the growth can't last forever... The pandemic has been relatively kind to the UK arm of Virgin Media, which reported [PDF] growth in its broadband and contract mobile business units during 2020.…

Be honest, what's YOUR 'bus factor'? DevOps writer Gene Kim spoke at the Dynatrace Perform event last week, saying not a word about Dynatrace but focusing on technical debt and developer productivity.…

'Don't give out the location!!' Everyone has a quirky personal interest or two, but few have pursuits that would move us to drive to Exmouth amid a national lockdown that dishes out fines for non-essential travel.…

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage: Wearable Brick Apple Watch Series 5 or Apple Watch SE owners can now send their devices for a free service after multiple units of the fancy wristwear refused to charge once entering Power Reserve mode.…

Shipments up a whopping 90+% in Q4 despite industry-wide shortages The one-device-per-person trend caused by the pandemic fuelled a boom in notebook sales across Britain in Q4 that resulted in a near year-on-year doubling of shipment growth.…

All these use cases, not much action Wrinkles and bubbles in wonder substance graphene are showing electronic properties researchers say could one day help solve limits on current microprocessor designs.…

Second attempt to run entirely in the browser – but nothing works yet The LibreOffice team has been working on a port to browser-hosted WebAssembly, and hopes for a working demo by summer 2021. "It's the way the industry is heading," said Document Foundation board member Thorsten Behrens.…

Web hosts infiltrated for up to three years in attack that somewhat resembles SolarWinds mess France’s Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (ANSSI), the nation’s cyber-security agency, has identified a years-long campaign to infiltrate IT monitoring platform Centreon.…

LA hosting outfit SkySilk puts itself in the hot seat because it thinks other clouds wrongly act as judges Social network Parler is back online, five weeks after Amazon Web Services told the service company it had breached its terms of service, and therefore shut down its servers.…

Veteran Unix Admins offer new cut of systemd-free Debian derivative and get the name right this time Devuan, the Linux distribution that came into being after the 2014 disagreement over Debian’s adoption of the systemd as the operating system’s init daemon, has celebrated its sixth anniversary by adding a third init option.…

Maybe it can use the spatial data that India also liberalised yesterday to deliver promise of unplugging rogue operators India's government has become so tired of SMS scams that it's creating two new national bodies to deal with the problem.…

Want to shake off NDMP for good? Tune in this week Webcast Ensuring your organisation’s NAS data is protected is fraught with challenges. You need to ensure you’re capturing the right data, at the right time, and if the worst comes to the worst, you want to be certain you can restore it and get your company back in business as quickly as possible.…

Boss reckons half a dozen institutions will follow suit this year Barclays Bank is to join the Open Invention Network (OIN), as is Canada-based Toronto-Dominion (TD) Bank Group, in order to resist what Barclays told us are "overt or veiled threats of litigation from patent trolls."…

Ah, the old 'liquidate your company' trick. Classic Another month and two more British companies behind nuisance marketing calls are collectively facing a £270,000 penalty for breaking the law by calling people registered by the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

Decision would mean less complicated situation for Blighty's digital economy The EU is set to rule that the UK's laws are sufficient to ensure "adequacy" for the safe sharing of personal data, a move promising to end uncertainty over data protection rules post-Brexit.…

Plus: Dodgy-looking AI coding bootcamp and a murderous conversation with OpenAI's GPT-3? In Brief A Korean AI startup has come under fire after it scraped private messages from its users that contained private and sensitive information to train a chatbot.…

Maybe this is why we're single Happy ENIAC Day! Join us for a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.…

Plus: SentinelOne picks up Scalyr, fatal flaws in TCP, and a view on Supermicro In brief Internet Security Research Group nonprofit Let's Encrypt has massively upgraded its certification hardware and software so that it can delete and reissue all its certs in less than 24 hours.…

Fail fast, fail often The UK's Crown Commercial Services has awarded Accenture, Capita and IBM spots on an £800m framework created to help the NHS shift to a more agile and/or DevOps-like approach to development and support.…

IT can be measured to a high degree of accuracy – and what the world needs now is accurate data Column Bitcoin miners are using more energy than Argentina. Turning off your video camera during Zoom will save the planet. I am not a cat, I am a lawyer. Those who laud the transformational power of IT can't overlook that some of these transformations are very weird indeed.…

When imposter syndrome turns out to not be a syndrome at all Who, Me? You can't hurry Linux kernel upgrades, as The Supremes never sang and a Register reader discovers in today's episode of Who, Me?…

Key trends and strategies for digital CX and customer self-service in 2021 and beyond Promo The lockdown has changed our relationship with technology forever. Over a third of customers increased their use of online banking in 2020, and the majority will continue to do so once “normal service” resumes. So, the need to provide a seamless experience to these digital customers is paramount.…

As FireEye reveals how suspicious second phone signed up for 2FA gave the game away Microsoft president Brad Smith said the software giant’s analysis of the SolarWinds hack suggests the code behind the crack was the work of a thousand or more developers.…

Compulsory arbitration code clears committee without amendments, but cracks show as one major local signs big Google deal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai have again spoken to Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg about the nation’s plan to force the two tech giants into compulsory arbitration to pay local publishers for news content shared or indexed on their platforms. Frydenberg added he believed the two companies were close to doing deals to pay local publishers.…

Resets clock to avoid going into safe mode A signal from venerable space probe Voyager 2 reached Earth today, acknowledging that the spacecraft has received its first command since March 2020 and had reset internal clocks as instructed.…

AMD admirers get plenty to swoon over, Intel’s SGX also makes it unto the kernel, as did some head-scratching gaming kit Linus Torvalds has delivered version 5.11 of the Linux kernel to the faithful.…

One small step for man, one giant.... urgh...*clutches heart*... THUD Space is not for the faint of heart. Astronauts will eventually suffer cardiovascular damage if they stay in the void long enough unless we get better at mitigating the effects of radiation.…

CEOs say US needs to invest in home-fabbed tech President Joe Biden intends to sign an executive order to tackle the shortage of chips, as the semiconductor world's top brass urged the Democrat to fund efforts to build more fabrication plants in the United States.…

Subsidize public bus service and slow down production? No thanks, says Bezos Bunch Amazon on Friday sued New York Attorney General Letitia James to prevent her office from bringing legal action that would punish the behemoth computing biz for alleged worker health and safety violations.…

Server maker says latest article is 'a mishmash of disparate allegations' Following up on a disputed 2018 claim in its BusinessWeek publication that tiny spy chips were found on Supermicro server motherboards in 2015, Bloomberg on Friday doubled down by asserting that Supermicro's products were targeted by Chinese operatives for over a decade, that US intelligence officials have been aware of this, and that authorities kept this information quiet while crafting defenses in order to study the attack.…

Lawyers say they need HSBC UK Powerpoint slides to undo Uncle Sam's case against Meng Wanzhou Huawei today turned to the British courts in its fight to keep CFO Meng Wanzhou out of American prosecutors’ hands.…

Promised software may never work as specified, it is feared New Jersey's Microsoft-powered coronavirus vaccine-registration system has not worked properly for the past five weeks, according to officials, and may never work as specified.…

AppGyver disappears inside juggernaut's attempts to nurture more modern image SAP has dipped its hand into the corporate loose change to snap up no-code app development firm AppGyver.…

Accusations of grey hat infosec consultancy extortion ring drop away after El Reg intervenes A cautionary tale about the dangers posed by affordable Internet of Things devices turned into a much more sinister story after a company threatened an infosec bod with a police report (since retracted) unless he deleted a Twitter thread highlighting shortcomings in one of its products.…

If you're keen to place an ad, contact us – it's free Job alert During these difficult times of pandemic induced restrictions and economic turmoil, we're running free job ads to try and keep techies in gainful employment.…

Chuckie Egg and Elite? Oh you shouldn't have! Parents staring down the barrel of half term or computer fans with a fondness for the good old days, rejoice! The National Museum of Computing is marking the 40th anniversary of the BBC Micro with a week of retro gaming, including Chuckie Egg and Elite.…

When people called the Brit software biz a s*** show... ah, never mind Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's extradition hearing took a strange turn on Thursday as an American prison reform campaigner described in excruciating detail how the former CEO would wash himself in a US prison shower.…

Nearly 8 years of extra fees after it 'initially identified issues' with billing in 2011... but nothing came of it Britain's comms regulator has dished out a £10.5m fine to O2 UK, after it found the mobile operator overcharged exiting pay monthly customers by a whopping £40.7m between 2011 and 2019.…

Rethinking the desktop with reference to Apple's early UI guidelines Updated A pre-alpha project to make a new FreeBSD-based desktop operating system has adopted a minimalist design intended to appeal to Mac defectors.…

Getting it half-right means you got it half-wrong Something for the Weekend, Sir? Give me a moment, I'm on another call. Hello? Hello? … Oh, it's just a recorded message assuring me that my call is important to them. Of course it is: it's a premium-rate helpline.…

Does your office have a singing swinger? On Call It seems that hardly anyone is flying these days. Handy because in today's On Call, one false move interrupts the monitoring of air traffic.…

Oodkind look even more terryfing AI researchers have attempted to reconstruct scenes from Doctor Who by using machine-learning algorithms to convert brain scans into images.…

Gives itself power to snoop and block anything, anytime – but at least it’s also consulted with industry Myanmar’s military Junta, which seized power in a coup last week, has drafted new laws that compel local carriers to collect customers’ data and make it available to authorities.…

WPA3 access may cause Blue Screen of Death Microsoft has issued an out-of-band Windows 10 patch to fix a self-inflicted error that can crash devices that attempt to access Wi-Fi networks secured with Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) standard.…

Chinese New Year gift for Beijing, maybe for Oracle too The Biden administration has paused the United States’ attempts to run TikTok and WeChat out of the country.…

Making Google and Facebook cough up could help USA’s currently fragile democracy, argues Pres Brad Smith Microsoft has said the USA should copy Australia’s plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content and suggested that doing so will help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy.…

Another privacy improvement from Cupertino, just a small one Apple's forthcoming iOS 14.5 release, currently in beta, will conceal the IP address of Safari web surfers from Google's Safe Browsing service, integrated into Safari to spot fraudulent websites.…

Victim shot dead a week after he got engaged to fiancée An MIT AI researcher is wanted by police in connection with the murder of a Yale graduate student, who was shot dead last weekend in Connecticut.…

Antisocial network sued by Proofpoint in scrap over domain names Security biz Proofpoint and its subsidiary Wombat Security Technologies have sued Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary to prevent the seizure of internet domain names used for security testing.…

Just don't hit that big, red button Hewlett Packard Enterprise has taken another crack at the ultimate in edge computing with a second launch of hardware to the International Space Station (ISS) in the form of Spaceborne Computer 2.…