The Register

Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came open to open source.…

Metropolitan Police's China-style surveillance runs up against reality Counter-coronavirus masks may thwart London police plans to deploy creepy facial-recognition cameras across the capital, senior managers have admitted.…

KCOM owner Macquarie was said to be among suitors Openreach boss Clive Selley has roundly dismissed a report out last night that BT was "in talks" with buyers to flog a multibillion-pound stake in its pipe-laying arm to investors.…

Advertise with us here, or browse the listings to see if a role would suit you Job Alert We've got more jobs for you to sift through this week as we continue our efforts to keep techies in work during these testing times.…

Hey, he's not causing any harm, unlike Norfolk's plague doctor creep While England may be awkwardly stumbling towards easing lockdown restrictions, the message to invading Anglo-Saxons is clear: one does not simply drive into Wales.…

We asked, you answered. Goodness, you answered The Register needed a Regism for our favourite blue screen merchant and we were heartened by the response. But as Connor MacLeod might say: "There can be only one."…

'People are going to lose a lot of time this year' The UK & Ireland SAP User Group has called on SAP to further extend its indirect software access licensing programme to give users time to respond to project timetables delayed by COVID-19.…

Back to the time when tape was king 2020 marks 60 years since ALGOL 60 laid the groundwork for a multitude of computer languages.…

Is that Jam on your XML? Or is it... oh no... Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a tube-sized edition of The Register's column of reader-spotted signage silage, with a Transport for London (TfL) screen displaying its undergarments for all to see.…

Plans new sub cable running from the UK to Spain on just-about the longest route possible Facebook has backed a new submarine cable that it says will circumnavigate Africa and deliver three times more capacity than is currently connected to the continent.…

Tender loving care UK housing association People for Places, which runs a property portfolio worth around £3bn, has awarded Salesforce a software licensing contract for CRM and job scheduling worth £21m.…

Essay on role of internet during plague times also suggests online schooling may not be the finished article TCP-IP-co-developer Vint Cerf, revered as a critical contributor to the foundations of the internet, has floated the notion that privacy legislation might hinder the development of a vaccination for the COVID-19 coronavirus.…

Fault finding fail via the friends and family helpline On Call For those gradually losing track of days, today is Friday. The weekend is upon us, and rather than the communal trip to the pub we might have enjoyed in months past, instead enjoy another refreshing On Call yarn from those poor devils on the frontline.…

And reckons it can crack 100kw per rack with help from Yorkshire company Iceotope Dielectric fluids conduct heat but don’t conduct electricity, which is why they’re a fine way to cool electronics.…

Satellite data shows two huge iron blobs tussling under the surface Boffins think they have figured out why the magnetic North Pole is heading to Russia at such a relatively speedy rate. It's all down to two gigantic magnetic blobs of liquid iron hidden underneath the Earth’s surface, apparently.…

Ticks plenty of diplomatic and supply chain security boxes with build in State tipped to be less MAGA-happy in 2020 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's biggest chip maker, will build a $12bn chip factory in Arizona in what the company is calling a "strong partnership" with the US government.…

Outsourcer Interserve holds a number of UK defense contracts, among others Britain's Ministry of Defence contractor Interserve has been hacked, reportedly leaking the details of up to 100,000 of past and current employees, including payment information and details of their next of kin.…

As IBM becomes only cloud partner permitted to use Virtzilla's special subscription licence scrip VMware has completed the set of major hyperscale clouds running its flagship vSphere natively, after the launch of the Google Cloud VMware Engine.…

One other minimum requirement: You need to be in the southern hemisphere The venerable Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), run by NASA and ESA, has discovered a new comet visible right now with the naked eye from Earth's southern hemisphere.…

Big Blue accused of making 'promises to sales reps it never intended to keep' IBM has been dealt a setback in its effort to limit the commissions it pays salespeople following the revival of a commission-capping lawsuit that had been dismissed.…

Could have done with this years ago to stave off rise of advert blockers but fine, OK, whatever, now it's coming Google is preparing to starve resource-hungry ads that drain mobile device batteries and consume network resources.…

Plus: There are some worrying data protection implications Analysis The current wisdom states that the sole path from COVID-19 lockdown involves vigorous testing of the population to identify new cases, paired with contact-tracing to limit the spread of infections. Smartphones make that easier, and the UK's National Health Service, like many other national governments, is working on an app to make it simpler.…

Angry judgments fly as SAS and World Programming spat rolls on A $79m copyright lawsuit that spiralled into a transatlantic tug of war between UK and US judges has taken its latest step – with an appeals court preventing an American firm diverting the revenues of a British software company.…

It’s like cartography, but with infosec. Probably Webcast There’s lots of talk of the threat landscape, so one useful way to extend the metaphor is to imagine that landscape wrapped around the horizon of an actual globe.…

Please help us rewrite the TypeScript compiler in Rust Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder and Bartek Iwańczuk have slid open the doors to Deno 1.0, the first production release of a new runtime for running TypeScript and JavaScript outside a web browser.…

A desktop browser spring clean can do the soul a power of good Google is taking steps to deal with tab overload in its browser by adding the ability to group the things together.…

And you thought this was purely a NoSQL release this week? MariaDB, which counts Deutsche Bank, Nasdaq and telecoms giant Verizon among its users, has launched a DBaaS rendition of its relational database, adding options to configure and customise it.…

Plus: AWS tool for defining Kubernetes apps without having to write YAML Amazon Web Services and Red Hat have linked arms to bring managed OpenShift, a Kubernetes service, to the AWS cloud. The service is not yet available, but "currently preparing for an early access program".…

Just not very many – don't go all Bitcoin farming on this Storj Labs, which in March launched decentralized storage network Tardigrade, is releasing an app to allow users of QNAP's network-attached storage devices to generate cryptocurrency revenue from their unused hard disk space and bandwidth.…

Your guide to the A100 GTC Nvidia has lifted the lid on a fresh line of products based on its latest Ampere architecture, revealing its latest A100 GPU - which promises to be 20X more powerful than its predecessor and capable of powering AI supercomputers – as well as a smaller chip for running machine learning workloads on IoT devices.…

There ain't no party like a privacy party Microsoft enlivened an otherwise run-of-the-mill Windows Insider Fast Ring emission by quietly adding support for DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to the operating system.…

Mandrake handlers could snoop on whatever victim did with their phone A newly uncovered strain of Android spyware lurked on the Google Play Store disguised as cryptocurrency wallet Coinbase, among other things, for up to four years, according to a new report by Bitdefender.…

Way easier than getting humans to scour petabytes of images by hand, looking for faraway systems Astrophysicists have developed AI software to help scientists automatically detect and describe galaxies snapped by telescopes surveying the distant sky.…

Million-dollar payouts zero out as hackers follow the money en masse Five years ago, Zerodium offered a $1m reward for a browser-based, untethered jailbreak in iOS 9. On Wednesday, the software exploit broker said it won't pay anything for some iOS bugs due to an oversupply.…

Virgin Media users' download speeds did dip a bit, though The surge of furloughed and remote workers caused by the recent COVID-19 lockdown had only a modest impact on UK broadband speeds, claims a new report (PDF) from Ofcom.…

No calls, no texts, no data Updated A software update issued by Vodafone for the Xiaomi Mi 9 phone has left some users unable to connect to the cellular network, preventing them from making calls, sending texts, and accessing mobile data.…

Plus: Python2 slithers away from 21st release of open source cloud infrastructure project The OpenStack Foundation has hit the green button on Ussuri, the 21st release of the open source cloud infrastructure project.…

Mass upgrades all-but ordered at all levels of government, even at unis The Philippines government has urged its public sector institutions to upgrade their IT systems to make sure they're nice and efficient as they adjust to life with COVID-19.…

It’s 64-bit or nothing for PC-makers from now on. And face it, this isn't the year of Linux on the desktop Microsoft has revealed that it’s no longer allowing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to pre-install 32-bit Windows 10.…

Police pining to drop the Lillehammer on crooks, Norfund still worth $1tn+ The Norwegian Investment Fund has been swindled out of $10m (£8.2m) by fraudsters who pulled off what's been described as "an advance data breach."…

Company sees good times ahead as pandemic spurs catch-up investment, but also warns of 'market contraction' for servers Cisco has posted results for the quarter ended April 25th that feature lower revenue than the corresponding period in 2019, but still satisfied investors it’s done well and will continue to do so.…

Update, update, update. Plus: Flash, Struts, Drupal also make appearances Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Office, and Windows Server, for which patches have been available for years, continue to be the favorite target for hackers looking to spread malware.…

Bills going unpaid by service that exists to pay bills One of Australia's largest debt-management services has gone TITSUP, leaving thousands of users in financial limbo.…

Chinese web giant also flings cash at cloud and videoconferencing to capture 'This working from home thing could really catch on' sentiment Chinese web giant Tencent has reported 26 percent growth for Q1 2020, with the novel coronavirus helping things along because customers hunkered down to play its games while in lockdown.…

If you want a flat fabric, Dell wants in and is eyeing off NSX integrations too Dell Technologies has created its own distribution of Linux-based Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) project that emerged from Microsoft, and backed it with enterprise support in a bid to bring the software down from the clouds.…

Also extends exemption on doing business with the pair – a negotiating tactic so incredible it has to keep being renewed President Donald Trump has extended his executive order banning US companies from using or buying telecoms equipment from Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE for another year.…

Thanks for nothing, Bernie Sanders An amendment that would require the FBI get a warrant before they access Americans’ web-browsing history failed to pass by a single vote in the US Senate on Wednesday.…

'Aggressive oversight' needed, Congress urged A prominent senator has called for “aggressive oversight” into the sale of the NSO Group's hacking-and-spying tools to police forces in America.…

You have been weighed, measured, you have been found wanting Oracle has tacked a suite of cloud analytics tools onto its human resources platform with the aim of helping HR teams and line-of-business leaders do some number crunching without outside help.…

And just the thing for remote work, which was so not a thing when these were designed Intel has announced the tenth generation of its Core vPro microprocessors, the silicon it aims at business desktops – and now says the chips are also just the thing for remote working.…