The Register

Solidarity with their US counterparts in COVID-19 cost cutting measures Hyperconverger Nutanix has asked staff in EMEA and elsewhere "outside of the US" to take two weeks of unpaid leave as it continues to contain costs during the COVID-29 pandemic.…

Material improvements in strategic framework for mobile, web and, tentatively, desktop apps Google's first 2020 update of its cross-platform development toolkit has brought Flutter up to version 1.17 and the associated Dart language to 2.8.…

Happy 1.0 to the fruits of volunteer labour Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development.…

Clock speed? 1Ghz. 5G radio baked in? Nope. Supports display resolutions of 60Hz Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek has officially launched its latest G85 chipset, days after it appeared in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. The platform stays faithful to the company's playbook, and is a solid mid-range SoC, with an emphasis on graphics performance.…

Mozilla's finest shores up security features among other tweaks Third-placed browser Firefox has sought to arrest its slide in the rankings with the arrival of version 76, replete with beefed-up password features and tweaks to Picture-in-Picture functionality.…

Disclaimer: Black hole not visible, southern hemisphere required Astronomers have stumbled across the nearest black hole to us yet. The void lies at the heart of a stellar system just 1,000 light years away, and indications to its location are visible to the naked eye.…

Buddying up with wing man Elon NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has confirmed that sofa-jumping Top Gun star Tom Cruise is working with the agency on a film aboard the International Space Station (ISS).…

Oh mother! Broken compute board? Just slot a new one in Review Intel's Next Unit of Compute PCs debuted a few years back as a small form box that could hang on the back of a monitor using a VESA mount and screws. The machines were supposed to be easy to work on and fix, but were limited in terms of expansion capabilities and for some users, more power was needed.…

And we suppose he has a fantastic alternative too, right? One that has elements in common with VS Code? Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation, has taken another swing at Microsoft-sponsored Visual Studio Code, claiming: "Anyone who relies on VS Code is then dependent on the future investment of Microsoft to continue supporting ongoing development of the product."…

'A new company will emerge from this pandemic' says CEO Nutanix has decided some of its previous financial targets no longer apply and tipped off investors that its Q3 results won't be far off its previous predictions.…

Capsule tested atop Long March 5B can also get China to the Moon China has successfully launched a prototype of its next-generation spacecraft.…

But its language has changed from 'clear a space under the tree' to 'our goal remains late 2020 delivery' Microsoft appears to be softening up gamers for the prospect of no new Xbox for Christmas 2020.…

Also: Arianespace gets ready for a return to action while Rocket Lab shows off its US launchpad Roundup Signs of life were detected back on Earth last week as space launch industry looked to resume operations.…

Naughty posters on hijacked subdomain show up in search results A forgotten subdomain on PricewaterhouseCoopers' dot-com has been hijacked to host ads for porno websites and apps, neatly demonstrating why you should not neglect your corporate DNS records.…

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.…