The Register

Hope they've got a dump truck or three to deliver paperwork covering years of acquisitions An American biz watchdog has stepped up its probe into possible market abuse by Big Tech – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft – by demanding information on all acquisitions not reported to antitrust authorities in the past decade.…

It won't be like VBA this time, we promise Microsoft has brought in Office Scripts for Excel on the web and pushed out the XLOOKUP function, a replacement for the well-used VLOOKUP, to both web and desktop versions of the spreadsheet program.…

Three cameras, two models – and someone at Sammy likes SD cards The long-awaited – and highly leaked – Samsung Galaxy S20, S20 Plus, and S20 Ultra flagship phones are finally here along with official glimpses of the folding Galaxy Z.…

If you tell my hand, my achy-breaky hand, it might fling up and hit the fan What even is a flagship mobe these days? In the past few years, punters have been blessed with a bevy of top-notch blowers from firms like OnePlus, Xiaomi and Honor that cost less than £500. In 2020, what's the point of spending more than a grand on a phone?…

So says Malwarebytes, anyway Software nasties targeted at MacOS are on the increase faster than ones for Windows, according to antivirus biz Malwarebytes.…

Default-hijacking browser extension pulled from Office Pro Plus installations Microsoft has U-turned on plans to automatically switch browser search defaults to Bing when users install Office 365 Pro Plus.…

One for the Cold War infosec veterans: CIA and BND literally owned the firm Swiss encryption machine company Crypto AG was secretly owned by the US CIA and a West German spy agency at the height of the Cold War, according to explosive revelations in the Swiss and German media today.…

Literally just for the keyboard. Pipe down, Panos Surface supremo Panos Panay took time out from fondling his slabs (and ordering up new business cards) to make a proposal last night to Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi.…

If you don't have auto-update switched on, time to patch Dell has copped to a flaw in SupportAssist – a Windows-based troubleshooting program preinstalled on nearly every one of its newer devices running the OS – that allows local hackers to load malicious files with admin privileges.…

Ignores 'unwanted' presses from the fat-fingered too, apparently After almost four months on sale in its native China, the Google-free Huawei Mate 30 Pro is finally coming to the UK as a Carphone Warehouse exclusive.…

Now please stop showering cash on consultants Y2K Welcome to Y2K, a mercifully occasional dip into that time, 20 years ago, when the IT world seemed to lose its collective mind, and governments were only too keen to empty their collective pockets.…

A little Shakespearean data centre drama for you There is a disturbance in the bit barn market – Vantage Data Centers has swallowed rival Etix Everywhere as part of a $2bn expansion in Europe.…

Plus: We know people are dying but OMG! China smartphone sales could plunge 50%, say analysts Intel is the latest big name to withdraw from the Mobile World Congress trade show, due to take place in Barcelona later this month amid growing fears about the coronavirus epidemic.…

She applied the fix to fix the fix... I don't know why she did the apply. Perhaps it'll die Like a needy ex-partner that just won't let go, Microsoft's legacy OSes continue to cling to the Windows behemoth's ankles. Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 have once again been bashed with the borkage bat.…

No jokes, just less work for them in the cloudy era Fujitsu is clipping the workforce that provides Projects work for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (UK taxman HMRC) following a reduction in the level of business.…

Also: UK's OneWeb fires off 34 sats and NG-13 Cygnus scrubbed Roundup There was good news and bad news for space fans last week as a veteran probe lived to transmit for another day while issues with a new spacecraft became all too clear.…

The Register goes virtual and gets a bit remote with DeX Review We had a play with the crowdfunded NexDock 2 last month and came to the conclusion that the machine was a handy host for Raspberry Pi-type devices on the move, for a price, but the Samsung DeX experience soon left us pining for a "proper" laptop.…

And it turns out there was an upside to the US-China trade war Global server shipments are forecast to drop nearly 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 as the coronavirus epidemic hits production lines in China, according to new figures from Digitimes Research.…

A nation of takeout deliverers The adoption of industrial robots in France makes manufacturing businesses more productive and profitable but at the expense of jobs, according to a recent paper presented by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization in America.…

The cosmic ballet goes on... We all know the Sun's eventually going to expand and envelop the Earth, but for smaller objects further away our star will still be deadly, as its light will cause asteroids to literally spin themselves to death.…

Old Gigabyte code lets file-scrambling RobbinHood go undetected A kernel-level driver for old PC motherboards has been abused by criminals to hijack Windows computers, disable antivirus, and hold files to ransom.…

El Reg has also invented the warp drive but, ah jeez, we're told we can't show anyone. Shame. It's a tough one There’s a new giant AI language model in town: enter Microsoft’s Turing-NLG system, which apparently contains a whopping 17 billion parameters, making it the largest publicly known model of its class yet.…

And shares with guessable passwords A new variant of the notorious Emotet Windows malware is able to spread wirelessly by brute-forcing Wi-Fi network passwords and scanning for shared drives to infect.…

With PIGIN skewered, take a look at this lovely TURTLEDOVE Last month, Google withdrew a poorly received web proposal for ad management called PIGIN, short for Private Interest Groups, Including Noise, and replaced it with a better branded spec called TURTLEDOVE.…

In today's episode of Absolutely Never Happening, Amazon wants the President to testify whether or not he personally ordered AWS JEDI snub Amazon has taken the extraordinary step of moving to depose the President of the United States as part of its appeal against the Pentagon's decision to award the $10bn JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft.…

* In Simplified Chinese NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has released a free, uncensored version of his autobiography for Chinese readers – after Beijing's censors scribbled out all the parts mentioning the Great Firewall in the official version.…

Mozilla's browser will, from March, require manual override Mozilla Firefox will require user intervention to connect to websites using the TLS 1.0 or 1.1 protocol from March 2020 – and plans to eventually block those weak HTTPS connections entirely.…

It was a state-sponsored attack, declares US Attorney General The United States today announced criminal charges against four Chinese Army soldiers who, it is claimed, are the hackers who stole 145 million Americans’ personal data from credit scorer Equifax.…

Komprise wants to help you kick your storage habit Webcast If the task of storing ever higher piles of unstructured data is overwhelming your data center, you are not alone. Like many other organisations, your company may be devoting much more of its time and resources to buying and managing storage than to the actual data it holds.…

Sun, science and, er, more science The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter launched on time at 04:03 UTC this morning on the back of an Atlas V.…

Rifles down back of sofa, finds extra $3bn for shareholders The mini saga that is Xerox's effort to financially charm the pants off HP Inc shareholders has taken a new twist – the copier biz is upping its bid to more than $36.5bn.…

Meet the Ethos-U55 and the Cortex-M55 for edge devices Arm is aiming two new processing unit designs at slimline AI workloads in smart speakers and other Internet-of-Things devices.…

Can GSMA really assure the event will be safe? It's been a brutal few days for Mobile World Congress, with several of its biggest participants withdrawing from the trade show over fears surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. The latest pack includes household names like Sony, Amazon, NTT Docomo and Nvidia, as well as 5G infrastructure stalwart VIAVI Solutions.…

Locking out network biz 'goes against the principles of a market economy and free trade', says diplomat The Chinese state has gone on a diplomatic offensive over Huawei and 5G, with ambassadors to the UK and France both accusing their host countries of discriminating against the company.…

Users rage, rage against the dying of the light (and support) It's not only end of support that Windows 7 diehards have to contend with. Late last week a new problem emerged – systems that refuse to shut down.…

NASA: Defects risked 'loss of vehicle' Troubled aerospace giant Boeing will "re-verify" the flight software code for its calamity capsule, the CST-100 Starliner, after it was revealed that December's anomaly could have been a lot, lot worse.…

Good news for Windows on ARM64 users in this week's round up Roundup The Microsoft gang managed to find time away from breaking Bing and trashing Teams last week to emit new Windows and update Visual Studio Code.…

Maybe sustainability's not just for hipsters? Column Last November, as I sat in a cafe penning my book Augmented Reality*, my MacBook Pro suddenly turned off in that very final way that lets you know something has gone very wrong. The Genius Bar confirmed a dead mainboard – and an estimated $1,000 repair.…

Even then he said there was no need to break out hardware sales Autonomy trial HPE instructed its accounting expert to assume that Autonomy was knowingly engaged in transactions to falsely inflate its accounts, according to court documents seen by The Register.…

When two become one in the server room Who, Me? Welcome back to Who, Me?, The Register's regular feature covering confessions from readers who just wanted to get the job done.…

Including: Google Maps turns 15 Roundup Here's your latest roundup of AI news beyond what we've already covered on El Reg. And totally written by a human. Honest, $reader_salutation_alt4.…

Including: Why was #RootGoat2020 trending on Twitter? It is as silly as you think Roundup It's time yet again to recap the latest security happenings.…

Prenez-vous les cartes de crédit? asks Tim Cook as he prepares to personally expense this trifling €25m On Friday, the French government fined Apple €25m for slowing down certain iPhone models to preserve battery life, a practice the Cupertino idiot-tax operation acknowledged back in 2017 following complaints about undocumented processor throttling.…

Nor any requests to remove the works of Rob Schneider, Kevin James, or Ashton Kutcher, sadly Netflix has posted its first-ever report into what sort of content governments have asked the streaming giant to pull from its service.…

'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't fetch that document' Continuing to drop flame retardant on the dumpster fire that is web security, Google on Thursday said it will soon prevent Chrome users from downloading files over insecure, plain old, unencrypted HTTP.…

Leaks, damn leaks and £219 phones Motorola will put the lengthy battery-life Power version of its upcoming Moto G8 range on British shelves later this month, after the specs for the latest handsets in its £200-ish budget 'droid "G" line were leaked earlier this week after a rogue Amazon listing went live.…

Security biz says it was a long time ago and he didn't technically work for them anyway Former Autonomy chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain was alleged to be involved in two #MeToo-style incidents while he was working for Mike Lynch's Darktrace infosec biz.…

Plus: Move to Agile is 'high risk' and infosec snafus still not fixed British F-35Bs deploying to the South China Sea next year may not meet key reliability metrics set by an American government watchdog, its annual report has revealed.…

It may or not involve office stationery Greater Manchester Police is struggling with a partial outage of a Capita-built computer system used by frontline officers to input information.…

Bell me to chat about it, eh? US attorney-general William Barr has urged the United States to buy a controlling stake in Nokia and Ericsson to build a competitor to Huawei.…