The Register

Good for privacy – or an alarming move towards further internet centralisation? Mozilla has started rolling out encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) by default for US users of the nonprofit's Firefox browser.…

Chinese tat bazaar's latest smartphone effort will set you back £459 Xiaomi's Mi Note 10 phablet – first introduced last November – has hit UK shores with the entry-level model retailing at £459.…

Still not the last word for VirnetX after 10-year fight The United States Supreme Court has kicked out Apple's attempt to overturn a judgement in one of the cases in its 10-year patent fight with VirnetX.…

Data warehousers likely hoping it's not, er, Apache on their efforts Databricks, the company behind the popular open-source big data tool Apache Spark, has released an ingest technology aimed at getting data into data lakes more quickly and easily.…

A preview of muddy paws all over your on-prem resources, or a passwordless future? Hybrid environments can now join the preview party for FIDO2 support in Azure Active Directory.…

Throughput boosted and encryption in transit added to temporary counterparts AWS has added persistent file systems for its FSx Lustre storage service, which lets you use a high-performance clustered file system on demand.…

Aw, how generous Hey, Linux fans! Microsoft has got your back over fileless threats. Assuming you've bought into the whole Azure Security Center thing.…

That'll be good for their credit rating Financial software behemoth Intuit – owner of QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint – is splashing more than $7bn to get hold of Credit Karma and its 100 million customers.…

Whew! Defense dept will 'detect and avoid unintended consequences' – so that's fine, right? The US Department of Defense has formally adopted a set principles to ensure the ethical development and deployment of AI technology for military use.…

Lynch's man backed auditor but how much did it truly know? Autonomy trial Mike Lynch's expert accounting witness told the High Court that because Deloitte signed off Autonomy's accounts, everything must have been legal and above board.…

It's going to be hard for the GSMA to come back from this The cancellation of Mobile World Congress over the coronavirus outbreak has had dramatic repercussions – for Barcelona, where the event was supposed to take place; for larger phone brands, which had to radically re-evaluate their launch strategies; and for smaller brands, for whom exhibiting or attending MWC represents a significant chunk of their marketing capital.…

This bodes well Bork!Bork!Bork! There are two things one doesn't want to see before boarding a roller coaster. The first, an employee clutching a large bolt, saying "No, I don't know where it came from either..." The second begins with B.…

Private equity outfit makes concessions, key questions still remain The little-known private equity firm trying to buy the .org internet registry for $1.1bn has made a last-ditch effort to keep the deal alive, promising a series of commitments over pricing and control.…

Appears she ignored report that concluded the tech is highly inaccurate The head of London’s Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, has angered critics of facial recognition technology by accusing them of being “highly inaccurate or highly ill-informed.”…

Cops hope for high-tech solution A small-time criminal's seized €54m Bitcoin fortune has been lost – after the digital keys to unlock the loot were, get this, accidentally thrown away.…

Afil-alas, we hardly knew ye Afilias has pulled out of a controversial race to run Colombia’s trendy .co top-level domain – just days after fresh accusations emerged that the tendering process favored the American corp.…

Absolutely not entertaining an offer that could you just repeat one more time? HP on Monday delivered better quarterly financial results than expected.…

'She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten' Obit Katherine Johnson, the pioneering African-American mathematician whose calculations ensured NASA's astronauts safely set foot on the Moon in 1969, died today. She was 101.…

Inrupt promises a pro-privacy solution to managing, protecting personal data Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has staffed up his startup, dubbed Inrupt, with a handful of notable hires that make its internet salvation mission a bit more plausible.…

Eddy Kayihura hopes to fix troubled regional internet registry Interview In November, Rwandan IT expert Eddy Kayihura took over as CEO of Afrinic – Africa’s troubled regional internet registry, which is responsible for allocating the continent's IP addresses among other resources. This month he spoke to The Register about his plans for the future, including the overhaul of the registry.…

At least it didn't head back to the drawing board like Samsung Huawei has lifted the lid on its latest pholdable – the Mate Xs. This is the follow-up to last year's coveted tablet hybrid, which was released in China late last year.…

Also: Musical Soyuz seats ahead of next ISS mission Roundup SpaceX gets its feet wet, digging for victory with Mars InSight and a changing of the ISS guard await rocket fanciers in this week's summary of space news.…

Internet of Security is the name of the game, instead of that other 'S' word Arriving fashionably late, Azure Sphere, Microsoft's take on turning the Internet of Sh*t into the Internet of Updates, has finally reached General Availability.…

The re-badged progressive web apps should help fill it out a bit Huawei is boasting of some encouraging stats for its Google Play replacement after the Trump administration stopped the Mountain View giant doing business with the Chinese comms bogeyman.…

Moss green? Rust red? Is this Pokémon? Unfazed by the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, Realme has pulled the sheets off its latest blower – the Realme X50 Pro 5G.…

With public cloud vendors now offering on-prem, why OpenStack? Cost and avoiding lock-in – Red Hat Interview OpenStack allows you to say "I am the Jeff Bezos of my cloud," Red Hat's Sean Cohen, senior manager product management, told The Reg at the launch of OpenStack's Platform 16, its enterprise cloud platform, which has just become generally available.…

Plus: Looking for a 'deep learning boost'? Chipzilla's your man Intel will sling out fresh silicon aimed at hardware across the nascent 5G market: including new second-generation Xeon processors and a low-latency Atom P5900 for next-gen mobile base stations.…

But critics advise to take that with a 'pinch of salt' The UK's new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has promised that HMRC will not be "heavy-handed" in pushing its IR35 tax reforms.…

And it does 5G, but who cares? Undeterred by the coronavirus derailing Sony's MWC launch plans, the Japanese firm launched three new devices in a virtual press conference early this morning. Predictably, the most exciting handset is also the newest flagship phone – the 5G Sony Xperia 1 II.…

Tight-lipped chaebol still won't talk about the dodgy app, though Samsung has admitted that what it calls a "small number" of users could indeed read other people's personal data following last week's unexplained Find my Mobile notification.…

Also: Beware the disconnected car Roundup Between fanboys swooning over new Windows icons and a cracking time being had by Surface Laptop 3 owners, over the past week, Microsoft tinkered with backups and nudged Azure Sphere closer to release.…

RIP 'Mad' Mike Hughes The sad news that steam-rocket fan "Mad" Mike Hughes has taken his final flight reached Vulture Central over the weekend.…

Elon Musk roasts OpenAI, says should be more open Roundup Hello readers. If you're struggling to keep up with all the AI-related news spewed out and have already read what we've covered this week, then here's more.…

The operating system that will not die lingers on in NatWest's ATMs Bork!Bork!Bork! In a welcome change from burger-based BSODing, here's Windows 7 tugging at the purse strings in a NatWest ATM in the East Midlands.…

'As soon as I got the note saying I'm inside, I started chasing another role' Ahead of IR35 private sector rules, defence firm BAE Systems has issued a blanket assessment on all its contractors and freelancers that forces them into PAYE terms regardless of their individual circumstances.…

Face it: In 2220, your great-great-great-great-great-great grandkid will not find a compatible SoC for your tat Column If you've got a grand-and-a-half to splurge on rose-gold pocket tech, here are two contenders. One is a 512GB Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max, which can tell the time and make phone calls. The other is an 1820 Garcerand French repeating pocket watch (see below) with verge escapement and quarter repeater, which tells the time. No phone calls, but otherwise in good condition and working well.…

Drain you of your sanity, face the thing that should not be Who, Me? We have yellowing plastic, disintegrating drives and serial shenanigans to start the week in The Register's regular column of reader misadventures. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

Get up to speed with DevOps, containers, and more: Join us this May Event If you want to get up close with some of the finest minds in DevOps, containers, CI/CD and serverless, and save £100s, act now – because the Continuous Lifecycle London early bird offer ends this week.…

And Adobe in remote-code execution patch non-shocker Roundup It's once again time for a security news summary. Let's get to it.…

Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder At the end of August, JavaScript package registry NPM Inc said it intended "to finalize and launch an Open Source funding platform by the end of 2019."…

Anecdotes of bullying customers fall short of legal standard to establish fraudulent intent The financial group suing Oracle for allegedly deceiving investors by inflating its cloud revenue this week took a third stab at articulating its claim against the database giant.…

Treat yourself to a meal out or a case of bevvies... or an appetizer in SF or NYC Victims of dodgy IT support from Office Depot will start receiving compensation checks, a US consumer watchdog said Thursday.…

Photocopier goliath hits back at PC giant's attempt to scupper takeover Xerox has shot back at HP's decision to adopt a shareholder rights plan – a poison pill designed to derail the photocopier titan's $36.5bn hostile takeover of the PC'n'printer slinger.…

Register readers around the globe shared in worldwide oddity Concern is growing over the security of Samsung's Android infrastructure after readers from around the world told The Register that yesterday's Find my Mobile push notification affected them – including on devices where the offending app was disabled.…

Says a big hello to low-cost services land, aka India Managed services pusher Ensono is to chop 137 employees across its UK and US global support desk and technology teams to reduce costs, and has said that hiring in India is a key element of delivering services.…

Dangerous levels of EMF: Evidence-based Measurement Findings UK comms regulator Ofcom today published the results of its latest spectrum measurement tests, which tracked electromagnetic field emissions at 16 of the busiest 5G sites.…

Also slapped with court request not to contact security staffers Members of Silicon Valley-based security firm Urban Tactical Group (UTG), which does "regular" work for Apple, have been granted a temporary restraining order preventing a Californian man from approaching them.…

Resistance no longer futile? There is good news for prospective buyers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi 4 as the USB-C issue that stopped the device working with some power supplies has been fixed.…

Because the human condition isn't harrowing enough Fear, shame, regret and Quarter Pounder with Cheese – now you can relive the scents of last night in your living room thanks to obesity merchants McDonald's.…

Fluent, fluent everywhere but not a patch that works Good news everyone! While Microsoft seems unable to deliver a patch that won't leave Windows 10 in a parlous state for some users, it does possess the will to fiddle with the icons. Again.…