The Register

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.…

What was Monthly is to be Current as Insider is banished in favour of Beta Microsoft has wielded the rebrandogun once more and directed fire at the update channels of its Microsoft 365 productivity cash cow, as well as slipping in a little extra something to "reduce the burden on IT".…

Claims consent was neither informed, nor specific, nor free – but Google says it cannot identify a user from the ID Privacy pressure group Noyb has filed a legal complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming the Android Advertising ID on every Android device is "personal data" as defined by the EU's GDPR and that this data is illegally processed.…

Ooh... Aah... Just a little fix Déjà vu was in the air last night as Microsoft has made yet another final tweak to the upcoming Windows 10 May 2020 Update while encouraging developers to get coding.…

Comms regulator Ofcom yet to rubberstamp proposals Broadband plumber Openreach will discontinue sales of copper-based products in more than 100 exchange areas across the UK, starting from June 2021, it said today. The move is part of Openreach's effort to discontinue the legacy analogue network in favour of full fibre connectivity.…

Assault on TOP500-listed machine may have hit Euro HPC too, warn sysops One of Britain's most powerful academic supercomputers has fallen victim to a "security exploitation" of its login nodes, forcing the rewriting of all user passwords and SSH keys.…

Release hits the waves, beats the competition to full OCI-compliance Harbor, the open-source container image registry, has reached version 2.0, becoming the first open-source registry to fully support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification.…

Bombarding audiences with quick-fire telly spots won't cut the mustard Sky Broadband has been publicly punished for peddling porky pies after running telly ads that made it out to be the UK's cheapest superfast home internet connection.…

Can we have 'Shaddap You Face'* next? We've seen it countless times on the news during the lockdown coverage – Brits getting happy-clappy for our beleaguered National Health Service once a week among other forms of forced fun for the cameras.…

New Edition has those all-important Google services, but dated chippery and no 5G future-proofing Huawei has a new phone! Actually, no. That's not exactly true. The P30 Pro New Edition is almost a carbon copy of last year's flagship blower with a few minor changes.…

Gartner slashes pre-pandemic spending forecast COVID-19 and its resulting economic impact has wiped a whopping $500bn off Gartner's pre-pandemic IT spending forecasts for 2020.…

Ensuring the US lights keep burning aboard the ISS... just in case Great news, everyone (if you're Russian): NASA is hedging its bets on Commercial Crew and SpaceX by spanking a few more million dollars on another Soyuz seat this autumn.…

How about a little stimulus... for anyone-but-China research? A concerted push for the US government to fund research into open 5G technologies has gained additional momentum – with a bipartisan letter from 38 lawmakers to the leaders of the House of Representatives urging them to support the Open RAN initiative.…

I, for one, welcome our robot replacements... Wait, no I don't Businesses should revisit automation with renewed vigour as the COVID-19 crisis abates, according to Forrester.…

Isn't it cute when a coffee machine addresses you in the first person? Bork!Bork!Bork! A vending machine appears to have gained sentience and is pleading for help (or an operating system update) in today's submission for the The Register's hall of shame.…

Revenue's tumbling, but that's also typical of a move to the fluffy stuff Analysis When Oliver Ratzesberger was named as Teradata CEO and president in January last year, it seemed he was made for the job. Not only did he have a background in engineering and software, but thanks to seven years leading analytics at eBay, he was also well versed in the challenges of big data. By December, he was gone.…

CTO Mark Potter to depart as re-shuffle connects boss Neri to product peeps HPE has lost its second key executive in just over a week, as the company announces a reshuffle to better deal with a "post COVID-19 world".…

Now is not the time for Hollywood 'zoom and enhance' fantasies Be wary of medical scans enhanced by AI algorithms: the software is prone to making tiny errors that could lead to incorrect diagnoses, a study has warned.…

In tech and everything else needed in a post-COVID-19 economy Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modhi has signalled that the nation intends to become self-reliant in as many industries as possible and other officials have already started saying that includes tech.…

Oh OK, so now we know who to blame for all this mess on Earth Potentially helping to answer the question of how did we all get here, scientists have found evidence of ideal conditions for the formation of microbial life on Earth – sodium-rich, alkaline fluids present in the early Solar System.…

CEO says it’s to stop fraud and the public seems to be on his side Gaming hardware vendor Razer has offered up to five million free face masks to Singaporeans – if they sign up for its payment system.…

Nothing too scary. Plus updates from SAP, Adobe, VMware The May edition of Patch Tuesday landed this week. And there are scores of security fixes to install.…

‘This workload will self-destruct in 30 seconds’ - now with variable pricing Microsoft’s Azure cloud has started to offer Spot VMs, the pay-what-you’re-willing-to cloudy servers that hyperscalers use to sell off their unused capacity.…

Sure, they should have got more, but let’s not get greedy here The lawyers who successfully sued Facebook for breaking Illinois’s biometric privacy law on behalf of citizens in the US state have hailed the “superb result” that will see them receive a quarter of the settlement.…

As opposition MP criticises slow and incomplete source code release, saying 'Public health messaging shouldn't require citizens to follow GitHub forks' The legislation underpinning Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app makes it possible to demand that visitors to private homes install the app before entry.…

Experienced ‘degraded performance’ earlier in the day, now seems to just be TITSUP Updated Slack is down – in the middle of a pandemic during which millions are working from home and reliant on collaboration tools.…

Social isolation, meet real estate, hardware, HR savings Twitter on Tuesday said employees who are able to work from home can "continue to do so forever," a policy change that suggests the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, and resulting stay-at-home orders, may have a lasting impact on corporate work practices.…

What was really behind Tesla CEO's reopening of factory while daring cops to arrest him? On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dared the authorities in Alameda, where his factory is based, to arrest him for breaking coronavirus lockdown edicts by restarting production in the California county. We're still waiting for the cuffs to come out.…

Free-as-in-speech software is wildly popular – keeping libraries, components up to date is not Ninety-one per cent of commercial applications include outdated or abandoned open source components, underscoring the potential vulnerability of organizations using untended code, according to a software review.…

Here's how you might go about building an infrastructure for modern workloads Comment Data storage is one of the most complex areas of IT infrastructure, as it needs to fit in with a range of conflicting requirements. Storage architectures have to be fast enough to meet the demands of users and applications, but without breaking the budget. They must deliver enough capacity to meet ever growing volumes of data while being reliable.…

Take care what data you enter into apps, it may be stored insecurely Security researchers at Comparitech have reported that an estimated 24,000 Android apps are leaking user data because of misconfigured Firebase databases.…