The Register

Add low latency to the list of things on offer to billionaires building civillisation-fail boltholes in South Pacific Microsoft has announced an Azure region in New Zealand.…

Other fun places also get to let people in again, just don't read the economic data before you go because that's no fun at all Hong Kong will reopen video game arcades as the city begins to ease its pandemic precautions and attempts to kick its economy into a higher gear.…

Which is just dandy seeing as deliveries are just a wee bit important right now Transport company Toll Group has been slugged by ransomware for the second time in three months.…

Late-night notifications come as opposition labels app ‘surveillance system with no oversight’ The Indian government has acknowledged “potential security issues” in the Aarogya Setyu contact-tracing app which its opposition labels as a ‘surveillance system with no oversight,’ but says the code issues are not that big a deal.…

Supremes go live on video If you know anything about law it is probably that you can’t trademark a generic name. But this week the US Supreme Court heard a case that introduces a fascinating wrinkle in that long-standing rule, courtesy of the internet.…

Judge calls for settlement conference as fourth amended complaint filed A former Apple engineer who claims the iTitan screwed him out of proper credit for his work has added an additional eight patents to his lawsuit against Cook & Co.…

Hey, finally an Apple event The Reg can attend, sorta, right? Apple says it will host its annual Worldwide Developer Conference on June 22 within the confines of an iOS app. Users of macOS can view the event on the Apple Developer website.…

Plus: Airbnb lays off 25% of workforce amid coronavirus pandemic lockdowns Ride-sharing app makers Uber and Lyft have been hit with a massive lawsuit from the US state of California for failing to recognize their drivers as employees.…

Big Blue hopes solution in search of a problem might have finally found one Since it burst onto the scene as a Jeopardy-winning AI in 2011, IBM's Watson has been top of the league for interesting solutions in search of a problem.…

Just ask us if you need help, urge NCSC and CISA Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning.…

Other countries have it. Why can't we? The UK must introduce a framework to prevent asset stripping of homegrown tech businesses by foreign powers, former Imagination Technologies CEO Sir Hossein Yassaie has told the British Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.…

Now might be a good time to change your passwords, folks Hosting biz GoDaddy has admitted a hacker tampered with an SSH file on its servers, leading to the theft of 28,000 users' SSH credentials.…

'Only for evaluation environments' say release notes, and they mean it VMware has opened its Tanzu Application Service for Kubernetes to public beta.…

Hybrid IT and sales bigwig enfolded by cloudy arm of Amazon Phil Davis, the former global sales chief and president of Hybrid IT at HPE who exited the business suddenly last week, has landed at AWS, where he will head up operations in Asia Pacific and Japan.…

And how the privacy risk that Redmond said would not be used for tracking was used for tracking Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's former Office and Windows chief, has recalled the impact of early viruses like WM/Concept.A, Melissa and ILOVEYOU, as well as early privacy debates centered on hidden GUIDs (globally unique identifiers) in Word documents.…

Play The Register's naming game for the kid who will definitely be getting an electric go-kart Smoke was seen beneath Elon Musk's mighty Starship prototype overnight as he and his partner, musician Claire Boucher, celebrated the birth of their first child together. Naturally, El Reg is pondering a name for the offspring.…

Survey finds 66% of lazy gits don't change between sites Two-thirds of people recycle the same password or use variations on the same basic one, according to LogMeIn.…

Small Business Administration website sinks after being battered by RPA tech There are times when more automation is not necessarily a good thing. Just ask the US Treasury or the country's Small Business Administration (SBA), which banned a few software bots last week.…

The division, which arrived via Sybase, was valued at $400m in 2006 Swedish cloud comms firm Sinch has snapped up SAP Digital Interconnect for around €225 million ($250m).…

Hahaha, we were pretty gullible Twenty years have passed since cybercrooks demonstrated the role exploiting human psychology could play in spreading malware. Remember "ILOVEYOU"?…

Drama surrounds trendy lucrative top-level domain Analysis Colombia’s startup-friendly .co has erupted in controversy again following the resignation of the government minister responsible for putting the domain registry out for tender last year.…

Code available if you want to toy with similar camera-grabbing projects Video We've written a lot about academic research, startups, and internet giants making use of artificial intelligence. Sometimes source code is shared, and sometimes it isn't, which can be frustrating – we feel that pain.…

Cites uncertain business conditions and they sure are - even tilers working for Microsoft have felt the crunch Nutanix will send at least a quarter of its staff home for two weeks on no pay this year.…

Miscreants too busy mining for crypto to notice the gold lying around them? DigiCert, slinger of SSL/TLS certificates, has warned that it too has suffered at the hands of Salty miscreants as a key used for Signed Certificate Timestamps (SCT) was potentially compromised.…

Herd immunity all over again Comment Britain is sleepwalking into another coronavirus disaster by failing to listen to global consensus and expert analysis with the release of the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracking app.…

Windows 10’s billion users want comfort food and Redmond’s ready to ladle it out as better Bluetooth Microsoft has repurposed Windows 10X, the new cut of its OS introduced in October 2019 to run on dual-screen devices.…

Sign up now to learn how to turn your programmers into self-aware secure nodes Webcast There’s still time to sign up for tomorrow’s webcast, and find out how to make developer teams safe, aware, and front-line members of your cloud security operation.…

For now, you get a preview of the official Azure VMware Solution to play with and a promise of availability in H2 2020 Microsoft has fired up the first previews of its VMware-on-Azure service and hinted at an expanded hybrid offering.…

Renamed 'ExposureNotification' will only only one app per nation Apple and Google will ban location-tracking by apps using their new coronavirus contract-tracing API, newly renamed ExposureNotification.…

Coming real soon now as-a-service. Details on data collection and price? Coming soon, promise Salesforce has created a contact-tracing as-a-service product and promised it’s coming real soon now.…

Side effects may include rapid HPC and large AI workloads GPU biz Nvidia on Monday said it plans to buy network software maker Cumulus Networks, just days after closing its $6.9bn deal to acquire Mellanox, another networking-oriented business.…

US uni goes full honey badger on iPhone giant and its chip sidekick Months after they were found to have ripped off The California Institute of Technology's Wi-Fi patents, Apple and Broadcom remain locked in a legal battle over a damages bill running potentially to billions of dollars.…

I have no mouth, and I must scream Video Israeli cyber-security side-channel expert Mordechai Guri has devised a way to pilfer data from devices that have been air-gapped and silenced.…

The end of an exruciatig seres of ucky keyoards Ding dong, the godawful Butterfly keyboard is dead. With today's launch of the refreshed 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple's loathed keyboard tech is finally gone — although it'll no doubt linger in the form of refurbished and second-hand units.…

Pen Test Partners probes auto collision avoidance system Not only can malicious people make airliners climb and dive without pilot input – they can also control where and when they do so, research from Pen Test Partners (PTP) has found.…

Be. Nice. To. People Comment "Imagine no possessions," John Lennon sang a few years after meeting a guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles' path to India followed in the footsteps of numerous intellectuals and beatniks, including Herman Hesse and Allen Ginsberg. In the billionaire software elite, the journey is less common, although not unknown.…

Brrrring brrrring... Yep it's American cable guy Liberty Global It's official: mobile networks operator O2 is negotiating a merger with Virgin Media. Should the deal — details of which are not yet known — complete, it would see the creation of the UK's largest entertainment and telco provider, spanning mobile, fixed-line telecommunications, broadband, and pay TV.…

Want to opt out of that part? No chance, says NHSX chief Britons will not be able to ask NHS admins to delete their COVID-19 contact-tracking data from government servers, digital arm NHSX's chief exec Matthew Gould admitted to MPs this afternoon.…

'I'm sad, but I'm breathing more freely' says former exec Tim Bray, a co-author of the original specifications for XML, has ended his time as a VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services in outspoken fashion, quitting in dismay at the treatment of Amazon's warehouse workers.…

Homebaked conspiracy fans are really adding some local flair Comment This is one of those that should fall under the title of unlikely things to awaken Brits' patriotic spirit: a gaggle of anti-5G protestors in the UK's capital.…

Also: new toys for Your Phone and The Windows That Microsoft Wants To Forget drops to single digits Round Up The finishing line for Windows 10 20H1 hoved into view, YourPhone got audio toys and differential sync was finally rolled out for OneDrive. Here is a collation of events you may have missed from Microsoft.…

Please phone us if you see our missing 26kg aircraft, say authorities Latvia’s skies have been closed to long distance flights because a military-grade drone is “uncontrolled and lost” somewhere above the eastern European nation – and nobody knows where it has gone.…

Thunderbird also affected as legacy email authentication enjoys a Monday wobble Nobody likes Mondays, least of all Google's Gmail, the POP3 and IMAP services of which fell over this morning to deprive Monday morning mailers their start-of-week fix.…

Ah oh, SaltStack's frightnin' (with apologies to Howlin' Wolf) If your kit is affected, don't wait: unpatched vulnerabilities in Salt claimed two high profile victims over the weekend in the form of popular Google-free Android-based LineageOS and online publisher Ghost.…

Autonomous cars: hardware helps but you can't beat data Intel is being linked with the takeover of Israeli public transit startup Moovit for a cool $1bn, in order to beef up its portfolio in the mobility and transportation markets.…

Plus: Other infosec news from around the internet Roundup Congratulations, everyone. We made it through April. Here's a handy mop-up of bits and bytes of security news beyond what we covered in The Reg.…

And employers that banned personal service companies no longer seem to care. At least not yet, say sources Since chief secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay confirmed a delay to the introduction of IR35, Brit contractors are opting out of the rules in droves – and many employers no longer care.…

Lalalalala, I can still hear you A few unlikely things have come into fashion during lockdown. Shonky home haircuts are one. Not showering for several days is another. And who can forget sweatpants, which are worn for several days at a time, as humankind descends into its natural Stig of the Dump state.…

Beware the dead hand of the product categorisation bot Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of computers behaving badly. Today's instalment is a little different to the usual run of blue, and may reassure those concerned that the machines will one day rule the world.…

Orders 18 RS-25 core-stage engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne NASA has picked an engine supplier for its controversial Space Launch System (SLS) program weeks after an audit chastised the space agency for blowing its budget.…