The Register

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.…

Tech minister says app is 'foolproof'! We imagine Black Hats probably don't agree. And some may have time on their hands at present India has made use of a COVID-19 contact-tracing app compulsory in some parts of the nation.…

But a rather purple tester put paid to that inflation-baiting bug Who, Me? Welcome to the start of another working week and a tale to take us back to the orange and brown hues of the 1970s courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? thread.…

A fortnight after selling a hefty bite to Facebook, which got in when 380-million strong mobile network was cheap Jio Platforms – which operates India’s most-used mobile network - has sold a slice of itself to US private equiteer Silver Lake.…

Plus: OpenAI's music-making software isn't half bad ... and Banjo boss's KKK shame Roundup Welcome to another summary of AI-related news beyond what we've already covered.…

The sequel to Pac-Man was Ms. Pac-Man. And Microsoft’s version of the Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC is called MsQuic Microsoft’s revealed it’s a user of QUIC – the TCP successor that’s integral to HTTP3 but hasn’t quite excited too many folk beyond Google and Cloudflare.…

Even parks and train stations encouraged to use QR codes. Which may show the limits of Bluetooth contact-tracing! Singapore will from May 12th require all businesses to adopt a system that checks visitors into and out of their premises using their smartphones, and has already made using the system compulsory before entering some venues.…

And fires back with 'we do for free what meatspace distributors charge for' argument Google’s Australian tentacle has hit back at Australia’s plan to plan to make web giants pay publishers for content shared on their networks.…

Whitehat and blackhat next? The British government's computer security gurus have announced they will stop using the terms whitelisting and blacklisting in their online documentation.…

IT giant accused of paying women less than men doing exact same roles A lawsuit filed against Oracle on behalf of six women seeking to be paid as much as their male colleagues has been certified as a class action – a legal milestone that will allow thousands of women a chance to have their gender discrimination claims heard.…

Demo-2 mission to send SpaceX capsule, rocket from Florida to the International Space Station this month NASA today introduced to the world the American astronauts set to ride an American rocket into low-Earth orbit from American soil, a journey that will be the first of its kind since the final Space Shuttle launch in 2011.…

Malware maker urges judge to dump lawsuit over WhatsApp phone snooping Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has rubbished Facebook's claim it can be sued in California because it allegedly uses American IT services and has a business presence in the US.…

Puts to rest claims staff should've been paid for time spent in security lines Amazon yesterday settled for $11m with staff at its California warehouses who'd sued it over uncompensated wait times for security checks as they began and ended shifts.…

Coronavirus + entity lists + people not keen to upgrade = 13% dive Early forecasts of the Q1 smartphone sector made for grim reading, with appetite expected to be severely suppressed thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent analysis from Canalys shows those forecasts were bang-on, with worldwide shipments into the channel falling by 13 per cent year-on-year, to just over 272 million units.…

Its servers merely record more HTTPS requests to Mail Online and Amazon than anywhere else Civil servants at the UK's Ministry of Defence are spending a large part of their surfing time gazing at online shopping and news websites, the red-faced government department has admitted.…

IR blasters and headphone jacks, likely south of £350? Oh my Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi's onslaught into the UK market continues with two more phones: the MediaTek Helio G85-powered Redmi Note 9, and the more upmarket Redmi Note 9 Pro, which uses the Qualcomm 720G platform.…

It's not just Skype and Zoom cashing in on remote-working boom Britain's courts are moving to their own video-conferencing platform – for criminal trials rather than business meetings.…

NASA selects three contenders for flag-in-Moon prize With a scant few years remaining until the agency's 2024 boots-on-the-Moon goal, NASA has named the three US companies that will be dealing with the tricky human landing bit of the mission.…

Digital gold rush spurred by global pandemic: Big 4 bag 62% of market Cloud infrastructure providers are making bank following the mass migration of millions of workers from their offices to their homes, with spending on services leaping by 34.5 per cent in Q1 to $31bn.…

Now 'Visual Studio Codespaces': Prices sliced, but won't somebody think of the branded swag? Barely six months on from its grand unveiling, Microsoft is renaming its browser-based code botherer, Visual Studio Online and, more importantly, is trimming its prices.…

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of your partner The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This one has been intensely anticipated by myself and thousands of others for eight long years. We had abandoned all hope, but now it's here and it's not even finished yet. So without further ado...…

Cupertino hamstrung by Chinese factory closures, Samsung tabs up but wider market shrinks: IDC Under the shadow of a pandemic that forced the shutdown of Apple's production lines in parts of China, global sales of iPads are tumbling rapidly.…

You thought that yoghurt in the back of fridge was time-expired? Behold X-ray boffinry YEARS past its design-life Space Extenders Sure – that telescope can be serviced by Space Shuttle astronauts. But how do you keep one running for years past expiration without a prodding by spacewalkers? Behold ESA's XMM-Newton.…

Researchers analysing samples submitted to VirusTotal find new strain Researchers have analysed a new strain of Android malware that does not yet exist in the wild.…

I always feel like / somebody's watching me Microsoft is adding to its slightly worryingly named Productivity Score preview with additional granularity and categories.…

10th-generation Core additions land with up to 10 CPU cores, 5.3GHz max Intel this week unveiled the desktop processors in its 10th-generation Core series, the headline component being the 10-core i9-10900K that can run up to 5.3GHz.…

Claims to be ‘unscathed’ last quarter, will keep hiring and maybe acquiring Atlassian has re-iterated that its business model is “playing offense in stormy weather” and will use the coronavirus crisis to acquire customers with freebies and maybe make some opportunistic acquisitions.…

In praise of helpful friends and handy tools On Call Welcome to another entry in The Register's series of stories extracted from those lucky individuals that find themselves On Call.…

Because if you have to go out in a plague, who wants multiple rides? Uber has started a pilot of pre-paid hourly rentals.…

Find out more at Forescout live virtual event on May 12 Promo Not so very long ago, an office network was just that – in an office, connected to a bunch of servers in the cupboard next to the team room.…

Long-awaited storage consolidation to go hyperconverged lite so that workloads can run next to data Dell will next week announce a significant refresh and consolidation of its storage range and at the same time try to reinvent storage arrays as computing appliances for data-centric workloads.…

Bug can be exploited to hijack server, meddle with block lists Netsweeper's internet filter has a nasty security vulnerability that can be exploited to hijack the host server and tamper with lists of blocked websites. There are no known fixes right now.…

As the Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group launches discussion of Solar System Internet The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has achieved a 100 Mbps ethernet connection from the International Space Station to earth, using lasers!…

Questions linger over what is going on inside DNS overseer ICANN has vetoed the proposed $1.1bn sale of the .org registry to an unknown private equity firm, saying this was “the right thing to do.”…

Or as well as they could once the power went out - yet report says reliance on electricity isn't a resilience issue Back in January when Australia was on fire and the rest of the world wasn’t, locals in the burning zones were advised that the best source of information was emergency services apps. But they were unavailable because mobile networks had gone down.…

Hope on the horizon, says Cook, but it will take some time to get there Apple's cash cow looks to be a bit unwell, as iPhone sales took a rare hit this coronavirus-ridden quarter. On the upside, the Cupertino idiot-tax operation banked billions from folks snapping up wearables, music, apps, video and more to kill their lockdown boredom.…

Cloud-giant-with-a-gift-shop gearing up for the long game Amazon today reported $75.5bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2020, higher than expected though eroded by exceptional expenses. And it told investors to get used to its free spending ways during the coronavirus pandemic.…