The Register

Not sure if we should be honoured or offended, but the Series S is a huge step up from its predecessor Review With Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo hitting the UK this week, global coronavirus cases assuring us the only way is up, and Christmas cancelled, there's never been a better time to sit your bum down, swot up on that "hygge" thing, and learn what it means to stay at home. For real this time. But there's another reason to take on the mantle of social distancing champ 2020 this month – the arrival of Sony and Microsoft's new games consoles.…

Third of customers stalling upgrades, says UK and Ireland user group data A third of SAP users have hit the brakes on migrations to S/4HANA, the German vendor's in-memory database-powered ERP system, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and related economic disruption.…

Pretty standard stuff, says analyst UK telco TalkTalk has asked regulators for an extension on its takeover negotations as it mulls a £1.1bn offer from Toscafund Asset Management.…

We're trying, insists beleaguered Information Commissioner's Office Scofflaws have failed to pay nearly £2m in fines handed out by the UK Information Commissioner's Office over the past 18 months, according to new research.…

And good luck – you're gonna need it A local authority in England's East Midlands has appointed HCL as the lead integrator for its SAP S/4HANA upgrade in a contract worth £1.5m.…

Copyright and trademark infringements alleged by Redmond's legal eagles Microsoft has flung numerous accusations at a reseller based in Florida in the US ranging from copyright infringement to the use of some decidedly iffy licence codes.…

A most uneXPected visitor: Windows cling-on spotted by Reg reader Discovery crew member Bork!Bork!Bork! What is the name of that thing that keeps clinging on even when everyone seems to agree that the time for it to go has long past? Today, Bork brings you the return of Windows XP.…

Security quiz site created by advisors includes inadvertent bonus round A website created for global consultancy Deloitte to quiz people on knowledge of hacking tactics has proven itself vulnerable to hacking.…

Nat Friedman says they'll make it harder to impersonate unsigned commits GitHub's CEO has denied that the site's source code was posted to GitHub.…

So it's been seized, along with a bunch of other sites, with Cloudflare accounts providing critical evidence On US presidential election day, 3 November, the nation's Federal Bureau of Investigation acted to seize 27 domains it says Iran used to conduct disinformation campaigns.…

Just don't think about winter In a bold headhunting effort, the Finnish capital city of Helsinki is offering a sabbatical in the Suomi state for Silicon Valleyites.…

Details vague, but ambitions cover 5G, security of comms infrastructure and sharing R&D India has signalled it will sign up to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom, covering "cooperation in the field of Telecommunications/Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)."…

Strong-arms Q4 and the year as China fuels 5G sales Qualcomm has hinted at future compute-centric products for the network edge and even the data centre.…

Sophos reckons Chinese gangs are behind attack it's charmingly chosen to name ‘KillSomeOne’ Security vendor Sophos has suggested Chinese purveyors of advanced persistent threats (APTs) are behind a recent wave of attacks on non-governmental organisations and other commercial entities in Myanmar.…

Choo choo! Mind the incoming 'A-train' orbital spacecraft A proposed constellation of 243 satellites, designed to beam internet connectivity to smartphones and under consideration by America's comms watchdog, will triple the existing risk of a potential collision with ten Earth science spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, NASA warned.…

James Baugh, David Harville hit with several new counts Two senior eBay executives who have refused to join their colleagues and plead guilty to charges of cyberstalking have been hit with a string of fresh charges.…

And bad news for Facebook, Google after Golden State favors online privacy measures Californians have overturned lawmakers in two critical ballot measures covering the gig economy and online privacy, with broader implications for the whole country.…

Desktop and Android versions both at risk Patch Google Chrome with the latest updates – if you don't, you're vulnerable to a zero-day that is actively being exploited, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned.…

Thanks for the memory An industry-wide supply glut of NAND and DRAM forced prices down over the summer leading to a steep decline in operating profit at SK Hynix, the South Korea memory maker reported today.…

Rules loosened by regulator, concerns raised they favor the rich The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given a big boost to companies seeking crowdfunded investment – think Kickstarter but securities rather than physical stuff you buy. Organizations are now exempt from various regulatory requirements if they raise at most $5m, up from the previous cap of $1m.…

NCRFRILS had never been disclosed publicly – until court case A protester accused of punching a police officer was arrested after he was identified by facial-recognition software that has not been publicly disclosed before: the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System (NCRFRILS).…

That's going to smooth relations between Larry and Jeff Cloud computing superpower AWS has secured the services of Oracle veteran Rich Geraffo as veep for its Americas sales team amid the ongoing market tussle with Big Red.…

Suit pushes Uncle Sam to release documents comms giant alleges were suppressed due to 'policy objectives' Embattled Chinese telecoms outfit Huawei has filed suit against the US government over allegations it is "stonewalling" legitimate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.…

Savage judge condemns crim's behaviour as 'utterly stupid' An Essex IT worker has walked free from court after screwing with the British Business Bank's systems in revenge for not getting a payrise.…

News aggregator says it's 'way more complicated and much harder to parse' The BBC website, the sixth most popular in the UK, has mostly migrated from bit barns to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with around half the site now rendered on AWS Lambda, a serverless platform.…

It has been Biden its time Voters in Massachusetts have approved a ballot measure that is widely being interpreted as a major win for the right-to-repair movement.…

Orbital lab emerges from teens to an uncertain future. How very 2020 The world's space agencies (at least those involved in the International Space Station) popped the Champagne corks this week to celebrate 20 years of continuous human occupation of the orbiting laboratory.…

Gartner's finest – a former vulture – draws clouds over eyebrow-raising connectivity plan A company working with a hydrogen-powered 5G drone maker claims to have built an airborne 5G base station antenna "unlike anything ever seen before" – and that just 60 of them could replace Britain's terrestrial 5G networks.…

Hip to be square and aimed at the Euro crowd Review First impressions are important, and the X51 5G is Vivo's inaugural device for the crowded European smartphone market.…

Oh sorry, did you expect this headline to work out differently? There are less than two months to go before the UK departs its 40-year relationship with the EU and it is still working on the IT systems needed to make the new arrangement work.…

Get ready for Energy Star stickers on your robo-butlers, maybe? Training OpenAI’s giant GPT-3 text-generating model is akin to driving a car to the Moon and back, computer scientists reckon.…

But first, he gets a judicial review and chance to extend eight-year legal saga New Zealand’s highest court has ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States of America to face charges of copyright infringement.…

Critical Acrobat, Reader flaws evidently couldn't wait until next week Adobe on Tuesday published updated versions of its Acrobat and Reader software to fix fourteen flaws, four of which have been designated "critical." These updates should be installed as soon as possible to close off their vulnerabilities.…

And it’ll be in proper SSDs, not cheap NAND muck that drives infotainment systems today, say analysts Passenger cars on sale in 2025 will ship with a terabyte of storage, according to analyst firm Counterpoint, and fully autonomous cabs might need 11TB of capacity.…

Taking a strategic stake in the biz probably helped and shows how big tech is buying into Asia Microsoft has taken a “strategic stake” in Indonesian e-tailer Bukalapak and will run the service in its Azure cloud.…

Fixes look to have landed in GitHub well ahead of disclosure SaltStack has officially revealed three bugs in its code – two of them seemingly critical – and told users: “We strongly recommend that you prioritize this update.” But the biz appears to have known about the bugs for months and quietly patched them over the summer.…

That or Jack Ma mouthing off about the nation's financial watchdogs The Chinese government on Tuesday halted Ant Group's $35bn stock-market debut, which would have been the world's largest-ever IPO had it happened. The move is being interpreted as Beijing punishing one of the planet's richest men, Jack Ma, for earlier running his mouth.…

Dodgy JavaScript code downloaded hundreds of times GitHub's NPM on Monday removed a JavaScript library called twilio-npm because it contained malicious code, which has become something of a recurring theme for the open-source JavaScript code registry.…

'Foreign-born scientists, engineers, developers of emerging technology, other highly skilled workers' locked out of America The battle between the tech industry and the Trump administration over work visas continues apace, with no less than 46 tech companies challenging new rules in court, while the US Chamber of Commerce has accused the government of ignoring an injunction against an earlier set of changes.…

Code shack describes issue as 'moderate' security flaw, plans to disable risky commands gradually Google's bug-hunting Project Zero team has posted details of an injection vulnerability in GitHub Actions after refusing a request to postpone disclosure.…

Reach out to your loved ones - but in Great Britain you'll have to use your phone A handy feature in Google's Nest speakers allows users to place calls to mobiles and landlines free of charge without a subscription or dedicated handset. Sadly, that particular benefit is coming to an end in the UK.…

Jamstack, Kubernetes, community contributions, and automatic translation – what could go wrong? Mozilla's MDN JavaScript and web technology reference documentation is migrating to a new GitHub-based platform, codenamed Yari, which is now in beta and taking contributions.…

Small Brit firm pushes back against Zuckerborg sueball Mobile app developers accused by Facebook of deploying “malicious” SDKs to scrape users’ data from the social network have hit back, telling London’s High Court that nearly all their apps were “not capable” of harvesting data from Facebook itself.…

Drag racing in orbit with Rocket Lab Rocket Lab is planning a 30-satellite launch via its 16th Electron launch from New Zealand. The payload will include a statue of Gnome Chompski*, presumably in an attempt to unlock hitherto unknown Half-Life achievements.…

Just One More Thing, eh? Apple has set a date for the next emission of its inevitably overpriced gear. The socially distanced (and likely pre-recorded) affair will be Cupertino's third event in as many months, and is expected to introduce the inaugural cohort of Arm-powered Macs.…

Also: HoloLens 2 Dev Edition out, .NET 5 prepares debut, and PowerToys Mute gets experimental In Brief It is said that Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.…

D'oh! If only they'd seen bug before issuing those 402 other fixes Oracle has released an emergency patch after a security vulnerability was revealed in its WebLogic middleware last week.…

Just don't leave. Plus: Cloud subscription model is 'increasing customer lifetime revenue' SAP CEO Christian Klein has committed to extending customer payment terms and helping partners struggling as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic grips Europe and governments enforce further lockdowns.…

It's really dope. Yep it's an energy-efficient process kicked off by gadolinium-doped cerium dioxide Researchers in Spain have uncovered a new approach to producing hydrogen via water splitting which could help overcome some of the drawbacks to this promising alternative fuel source.…

But annual report doesn't mention China once The National Cyber Security Centre fended off more than 700 cyber attacks directed against the British state over the last year, of which about a quarter were COVID-19 related.…