The Register

Workers told to take five days of compulsory leave ‘so we can better care for each other’ In the halcyon days of April, before IBM initiated its latest round of mass redundancies, the IT giant told staff in its Australian and New Zealand operations to take a break – and brace for a deluge of post-lockdown work in the third quarter of 2020.…

Demand high, components MIA The three months to April 30 were "complicated," HP Inc said on Wednesday while trying to explain why its sales dropped by double digits in its fiscal second quarter of 2020.…

Lightning strike threat postpones lift-off to Saturday NASA's attempt to launch American astronauts to the International Space Station aboard an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade was aborted today due to bad weather.…

Just don't expect a full battery Apple has released the fifth version of macOS Catalina, and fixed yet another stability issue that saw machines crash during large file transfers; the latest in a long series of problems with version 10.15 of the operating system.…

'Something malfunctioned' as timer was about to hit double digits Wannabe satellite flinger Virgin Orbit has shared more detail on what went wrong and right in the very brief maiden flight of LauncherOne.…

Best change any recycled credentials from your blogging days Russian-owned blogging service LiveJournal has reportedly suffered a hack affecting 26 million user accounts.…

You’ve come to the right place: We’re running a webcast to show you how Webcast “The journey to cloud” echoes through all organisations. It’s a Bildungsroman – a story of empowerment and betterment. A shiny, towering cityscape of gleaming edifices and elegant spires. It’s like an ascension into the actual clouds. Like dying and waking up in heaven.…

Same specs, but now it's a Pro Almost four months after it was first unveiled, Motorola has finally announced a European release for its Moto G Stylus phablet.…

More than dozen services down, customers left unable to work Adobe technicians scrambled on Wednesday to restore multiple cloud services after a severe outage left customers stranded.…

You know sick people call ambulances using mobile phones, right? Another 5G mast has gone up in flames in Liverpool in the UK, in this case mere days after it was erected.…

Still on Java 8? You'll need to upgrade to 11 to use it Updated Google Cloud Platform has added Java 11 support to its serverless Cloud Functions service.…

Reality intrudes into politics and tech once again Updated Cleansing Britain's phone networks of Huawei equipment by 2023 might not be possible, ministers are said to have realised after UK policy changes on the Chinese company in the last few weeks.…

If you're anything like us, you dream of reorganising your country's highways. This is a new system they want to tighten up data streams, but still Highways England is shopping for a new £62m National Traffic Information Service to help collect, process and disseminate real-time data and information about traffic on 4,300 miles (6,920km) of road.…

How may I secure thee, let me count the ways... There was good news for enterprises keen to inflict Microsoft's Edge browser on their users with the arrival of a new security baseline and a way to turn off the Surf game that arrived in version 83.0.478.37.…

Although perhaps your lockdown digs are tidier than ours Audio kit flinger Skullcandy has embedded Tile's gadget-tracking tech to help you skin your knuckles fishing out its latest all-wireless earbuds from under the well beneath your handbrake.…

'It should not be used for interactive shell work' – Windows Terminal chief Microsoft senior program manager Rich Turner took to Twitter in recent days to remind everyone that it really is time to move on from Windows' ancient command processor, cmd.exe.…

Supply and demand in action Crime has never been cheaper to pull off, so long as you're not particular about quality.…

A viable alternative to the platforms with billions of active users between them? There's still work to be done Analysis Rich Communication Services (RCS) was initially pitched as the inevitable successor to SMS, offering enhanced multimedia functionality and other fun stuff, like read receipts.…

Surprise! IBM has brought Netezza back from the dead in a move likely to sow further confusion among customers of Big Blue's enterprise data products.…

Tweeter-in-chief responds by alleging bias and electoral skulduggery Twitter has for the first time acted on inaccurate tweets made by US president Donald Trump.…

Behold, the three error dialogs of the borkpocalypse Bork!Bork!Bork! As the UK tentatively returns to work and those who must venture back onto public transport, we were happy to learn that even in these changed times, Windows remains as wobbly as ever.…

Ride-sharing monster doesn't operate in current home, is illegal in special administrative region Uber has proposed moving its Asia-Pacific headquarters from Singapore to Hong Kong.…

Infosec's Drivergate scandal deepens Microsoft has blocked a Trend Micro driver from running on Windows 10 – and Trend has withdrawn downloads of its rootkit detector that uses the driver – after the code appeared to cheat Redmond's QA tests.…

Peer-to-peer currency exchange without an institution in the middle but with 'controllable anonymity' for central bank China will test a digital version of its currency at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.…

You're working at home, but who’s got the remote control? Promo The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has propelled the trend for flexible and remote working into the stratosphere. Millions of people worldwide are cocooned at home and bent over all manner of devices and apps as they carry on working. But remote working on a giant scale also means the threat attack surface just got much, much bigger.…

Naughty JS can watch you hit control+F, start typing, see what's on your mind Analysis A browser feature being developed for the open-source Chromium platform has raised data-leakage privacy concerns – though the Google engineers working on the project contend the potential benefits outweigh the risks.…

Axed IBMers given chance to write almost-certainly futile letters to defend their jobs after the pink slip arrives IBM’s new round of “resource actions” – Big-Blue-speak for sackings – has reached Australia, The Register has learned, and will result in the creation of new cross-disciplinary teams to serve clients.…

As the legalese changes to extend data retention period India has open-sourced its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app and announced a bug bounty program to detect any security issues.…

Lawsuit claims Charter's 'fixed' monthly fees are anything but Analysis In many ways it’s a rite of passage in America: being ripped off by your cable company and trying to figure out how they did it. Now a lawsuit against Charter Communications is seeking to uncover just that.…

Judge tells US ISP: OK, seems fair Despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, US ISP Frontier Communications has insisted on giving key staff $38m in bonuses and other incentives – and an American judge has agreed.…

Bi-partisan amendment aims to take away easy access to your online life US lawmakers will get another vote on whether the FBI must get a warrant before agents can search Americans’ search and web-browsing histories.…

Daniel Abt's career stalls after he struggled to shift from physical to virtual courses mid-pandemic With motor sports going virtual amid the coronavirus pandemic, it appears not everyone is coping well with the change in gear to online.…

The rules of war that protect hospitals should extend into cyberspace Following the surge of cyber attacks on medical facilities, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and more than 40 other international leaders asked the governments of the world to do more to safeguard critical medical organizations amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

Thank heavens everyone had to start working from home, right? IT number-cruncher-in-chief Gartner has predicted a sharp fall in the sales of personal hardware during 2020.…

'There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill' – sadly no longer the case The Microsoft developer who wrote Task Manager, along with other utilities and games, has popped up to "write this stuff down before I forget it all".…

No win, no fee. But if they win it's an up to £5.4bn fee A law firm that is already chasing British Airways now claims it is suing Easyjet for up to £18bn, intending to take a modest £5.4bn cut for itself, after nine million people's data was stolen from the airline's servers.…

Meanwhile: the UK government is going to clear everything up. Or at least keep an eye on it Roundup Musk may be about to fire off a crewed missile and Virgin Orbit's first attempt to reach space might have fallen flat, but there was plenty of other fun to be had in the rocket-bothering world last week.…

Scottish trial will courier PPE and COVID-19 tests to remote hospital Remote-control drones are to be used to deliver coronavirus testing kits to a remote Scottish hospital – and they're being flown outside of the operators' direct line of sight.…

But you'll have to convince your mates to part with $599 for 5G-enabled Mova XRSpace, a startup founded by one-time HTC chief Peter Chou, has announced plans to introduce a new 5G-enabled virtual-reality headset in Q3 of this year.…

Meanwhile, A78, Mali-G78 and Ethos-N78 announced, too Arm today will unveil its Cortex-A78 CPU core, lined up for next-gen phones, tablets, and laptops, and go off roadmap with its Cortex-X1.…

Fraud is a big issue for etailer, but there are privacy and consent concerns too Updated Users visiting eBay have spotted that the website runs port scans against their computer, using the localhost address to inspect what may be running on your machine.…

Plus: Getting over the Build hangover with new Windows 10 preview, UK Azure services, and more Updated While Microsoft's virtual Build event rumbled its way through last week, the minions at work in the Windows mines beneath Nadella's cloudy stronghold continued to toil.…

Passport-grade chippery to help mobile devices prove their identity Samsung will launch a new standalone turnkey security chip to protect mobile devices, the company announced today.…

'AI serving platform' runs in database but isn't tied to specific cloud service In February, Oracle slung out a data science platform that integrated real-time analytics with its databases. That's all well and good if developers are OK with the stack having a distinctly Big Red hue, but maybe they want choice.…

The look and feel of UWP without all the baggage Hands On Microsoft has pushed out a preview of WinUI for desktop applications, making it possible for developers to adopt the look and feel of UWP (Universal Windows Platform) without having to adopt the UWP application model.…

Low-profile Chinese firm decides mobile marketing, brand stuff can't be that hard Review Smartphone vendors are almost all universally weird. TCL (not to be confused with 1990’s R&B group TLC, best known for their hit song about the downfalls of wearing medical apparel) is no exception.…

Yes, especially for consumer-facing workloads. But don't expect a comfortable ride The cloud is dominated by American companies. AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle all win more revenue than Alibaba, China's current leader.…

Breaking free from the office – without breaking the office Comment By now you’ve got this working-at-home business covered. Even if you find you’re occasionally eating your own weight in biscuits, you’ve bought a lighting kit to look professional on video calls, and you’ve won the fight for bandwidth by bribing the kids to stay off Houseparty.…

Plus: A peek inside Nvidia's Ampere architecture, and more Roundup Here's your summary of recent artificial intelligence bits and bytes, and related hardware and software.…

Hangzhou wants a 'health and immunity firewall' One of China's major tech hubs is planning to make a health and movement tracking system developed to fight the COVID-19 epidemic a permanent fixture in daily life.…