The Register

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.…

Seven hosts might have been asking a bit much for early footling VMware has shrunk the hardware requirements for its shiny new native Kubernetes on vSphere product, making it rather more affordable.…

First Virgin Orbit test launch glitches out at rocket’s first stage Virgin Orbit, the Richard-Branson-founded effort to launch satellites into space from a rocket that drops beneath the wing of a Boeing 747, has suffered a failure of its first test launch.…

Assuming we ever get into the office again and into the merch cupboard Contest We wanted paperless offices, and instead we got people-less – with in-person chats replaced with the warmth and nuance of video meetings featuring people wearing big ugly headphones while trying to get their children to stop building forts out of pizza boxes.…

This and more bits and bytes from infosec world Roundup It's once again time to catch up on the latest happenings from the world of infosec.…

In the wonderful world of the US military, anything is plausible Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and while the UK is basking in a bank holiday that seems much the same as any other day, your hardworking vultures have another story to tell via our regular Who, Me? column.…

Rocket taxi to fly on Wednesday in first all-American launch since 2011 SpaceX has been given final approval to get into the space taxi business after NASA signed off on “Launch America”, a launch that will see the company’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule used to transport a pair of American astronauts into space.…

But company reckons things are just getting started in China Alibaba has revealed that its cloudy revenue grew 62 percent in the year to March 30th, 2020, for an annual run rate of US$5.6 billion.…

‘My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be’ says Linux overlord Linux overseer Linus Torvalds has binned Intel on his personal PC and hinted that he hopes to one day run an ARM-powered desktop.…

Whoa, no Huawei?! UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reportedly agreed to a plan that will entirely cut Huawei equipment from the nation's 5G networks within the next three years.…

IBM isn't the only IT giant said to be unfairly binning elders HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have been sued for age discrimination by former employee Daniel Cochran, who spent 26 years at HP, and at HPE after 2015 when the biz split in two.…

Tech is perhaps five years away from actual deployment, we're told Australian scientists say they have broken data communications speed records by shifting 44.2 terabits per second over 75km of glass fiber from a single optical chip.…

Hang on, didn't analyst just pooh-pooh demand? Yep It could wishful thinking or bravado on a conference call with analysts but Lenovo is betting the current home working trend and consumers' reliance on online services will run on past the crisis and be a boon for PC makers.…

Zuck has been so good at looking after your data, why not give him more? Born too late to play the role of Star Trek's Commander Data, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg took to the streams last night as the company confirmed a jump in users of its Workplace platform.…

Unsurpisingly budget airline goes cheap: No payout or credit monitoring Victims of the Easyjet hack are now being told their entire travel itineraries were accessed by hackers who helped themselves to nine million people’s personal details stored by the budget airline.…

Take a trip down memory lane back to when every byte mattered Build Microsoft delighted retro fans by closing its Build conference with an open-sourcing of 1983's GW-BASIC.…

Like Inception, but expensive and disappointing. So... just like Inception With antivirus tools increasingly wise to common infection tricks, one group of extortionists has taken the unusual step of stashing their ransomware inside its own virtual machine.…

Automotive driven down, though As many in the broader IT sector walk around with a fire extinguisher, Nvidia is oiling its fiddle, reporting that revenue hit $3.08bn [PDF] for Q1 2021 ended 26 April, up 39 per cent from last year.…

If all goes to plan, firm plans to begin commercial operations within months Virgin Orbit is set to fling a first payload to orbit with its Boeing 747-mounted LauncherOne.…

We're trying, says senior dev evangelist GitLab version 13.0, the company's major release of 2020, is out today.…

And that means Windows 3.0 is too It's a double anniversary today as we take a moment to ponder 30 years since Windows 3.0 set Microsoft on the road to desktop GUI dominance and celebrate three decades of Microsoft Solitaire.…

It crashed the same day it went missing despite 3-day closedown and hunt The runaway experimental drone that closed Latvia's skies to international flights after it went missing has been found lodged in a tree.…

Only the beast of Redmond could meet 'data sovereignty and reliability' needs, says UK.gov department The UK's Ministry of Defence has handed Microsoft a £17.75m contract to run hosted services in the Azure Cloud – and rivals won't even get a chance to compete due to requisite "data sovereignty and reliability".…

Even the bus shelters of the windy city cannot escape the borkage Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another entry in the digital signage corridor of despair, where cock-ups that would normally only trouble a user's screen are on public display for all to marvel at.…

Fondleslab feels like a real laptop, though transition is far from seamless Apple has long toiled to position the iPad Pro as a legitimate computing device like the iMac and MacBook Pro. Earlier this year it tried to take a step closer to achieving that goal with the release of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.…

Moenie die hoender ruk nie Word has reached Vulture Central that Microsoft is to retire support for 27 languages in iOS Outlook from the end of June 2020.…

More 5G. More e-commerce. More IoT. But no growth target for the first time in ages China will move to cut the cost of internet connections for local companies as part of its post-pandemic push to restore its economy.…

German efficiency was no match for user stupidity On Call Welcome to Friday the 82nd of March. Or is it only us for whom the days are blurring? Luckily The Register is here to bookend your week with our regular On Call feature.…

Tune in next month for tips on better use of licenses, and how you can save $$$,$$$ Webcast The problem with Microsoft Office 365 licenses is that while most businesses never quite seem to know how many they’ve got, paying for more of them, or more expensive tiers with existing ones, seems like the easiest thing in the world.…

By the time you get the status check the app needs, and get through the new check-in process, you'll wish you stayed home The Indian government has made its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app mandatory for all air passengers on domestic flights.…

We know this sounds like a tall tail but... Pic Astronomers scanning the sky for potentially hazardous space rocks have discovered a first – a presumed trojan asteroid around Jupiter that is looking increasingly like a comet.…

Oops, spoiler! Suffice to say data-crunching demand remains robust as buyers seek plague-time insight Splunk has reported mixed results for its first quarter, while suggesting that the novel coronavirus won’t kill its ambitions for the full FY 2020.…

Grandchild Digital Picture Removal A court in the Netherlands ruled this month that a grandmother must remove pictures of her grandchildren from her social media accounts after her daughter filed a privacy complaint.…

Services groups bear the brunt as thousands of workers given, in US at least, 30 days' notice, 90 days' pay IBM is swinging the axe on its staff, with significant numbers of employees not attached to the cloud being told their time at Big Blue is up.…