The Register

Need $10k off CRM giant? Read on, though it's not a silver bullet Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff must be in a giving mood. His company has just announced an application process and deadlines for $5m in grants to small businesses throughout the USA and globally to help firms with cashflow during the COVID-19 economic fallout.…

Unsatisfying AMA ends up mainly being about Teams Opinion A Microsoft 365 AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread yesterday failed to reveal much of substance about plans for the future or how to fix the platform's many issues.…

ESA chap on astronomy and demagoguery as SpaceX readies the next batch of satellites Interview SpaceX is due to fling another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit tonight. The Register spoke to ESA's Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration, Mark McCaughrean, about the night sky and interstellar specks on the windscreen.…

No plans to lay off staff or freeze recruitment, apparently Analysis On a call with financial analysts yesterday, the leadership team of Germany's enterprise software giant SAP was measured and rational - and quite possibly at odds with the rest of the world's response to the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Buttons hewn from battleship-grey stone the way they should be, right? From the department of Just Because You Could Doesn't Mean You Should comes the arrival of a CSS library to transport your HTML pages back to the world of Windows 98.…

Two-year deal penned by University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust A single-supplier tech framework with the University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust that is worth up to £1bn over a maximum of four years has gone to Dell Technologies.…

Formal attire, no 'BBC Dad' episodes, and absolutely no funky backgrounds Britain's House of Commons' embrace of "hybrid scrutiny" sessions represents the biggest change in its Parliamentary protocol in generations. But guidelines released shortly after the measure was approved show no signs of standards slipping, with members expected to dress smartly and behave with the, er, usual decorum.…

Payment page malware infection live for most of March, snares 20k punters British hardware chain Robert Dyas' website has been hit by credit-card stealing malware that siphoned off customers' payment details including the long card number, expiry date and security (CVV) code.…

'Many customer workloads perform better on Amazon Linux 2' firm claims, but where is the source? Amazon Web Services has pushed out a "Service Ready" software certification program for its homegrown Linux 2 distribution, working with over 20 firms including Chef, Datadog, DataStax, Hashicop, Kong, New Relic, Snyk, Tableau and Trend Micro.…

Bring the eye bleach – humans are weird Before "The Event", aesthetes occasionally visited museums as a low-cost way to ingest some culture. Those vaults of bygone curios still exist, and their staff have had an ingenious idea in this age of isolation – public Twitter throwdowns over which establishment has the best exhibit on various themes.…

Yeah, about that contract you signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement... Microsoft-owned code shack, GitHub, wrung its hands at last night's news that US President Trump intends to temporarily halt immigration, unfortunately forgetting that the internet never ever forgets.…

Decrypted configuration bitstream can be siphoned from chips via side-channel flaw A newly disclosed vulnerability in older Xilinx FPGAs can be exploited to simplify the process of extracting and decrypting the encrypted bitstreams used to configure the chips.…

Pandemc lockdowns forces new measures on crucial crypto process than underpins world's DNS IANA – the body that oversees the internet's IP addresses and domain names – must think it's under a curse in its quest to protect the 'net. Last time it was a malfunctioning safe that blocked its important work to keep the global network glued together.…

A shift in badness doesn't mean more badness overall, says Secureworks Though the number of COVID-19-themed scams has exploded since the start of this year, infosec outfit Secureworks reckons that overall online criminality has remained fairly steady.…

Oslo outfit also unveils first stable release for Android Chromium-based browser maker Vivaldi might have stirred a hornets' nest thanks to inbuilt ad blocking for both its desktop and mobile incarnations of version 3.0.…

What? Why? This one’s all about an eleven-month window of client complications VMware has pointed out that even if you don’t want to move to a newer version of vCenter, Adobe may have already effectively made the decision for you.…

Rebrand Field Book reveals it's versatile as well as 'accelerate' and 'excel' Logowatch Next.js sponsor Zeit has daringly stroked itself with the rebrando-brush and emerged as Vercel following the receipt of $21m in venture capital funding.…

Borg SD-WANS can now drive Chocolate Factory virty cloud networks and the workloads therein Cisco will extend its SD-WAN service into Google's Cloud.…

Get ahead of the trend: Home is the new office Promo The era of the daily commute and the nine-to-five workday at the office is coming to an end. More organisations than ever before have been forced to adopt part- or full-time remote working – and the ongoing global health crisis is swiftly completing the transformation.…

Liverpool followers were Kryptonite for Must Always Walk Alone Man, Dr Disinfector and the rest of the Virus Vanguard Singapore has grounded a superhero squad intended to educate its population about staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because the Lycra-clad creations offended fans of Liverpool Football Club.…

WhatsApp gets a leg-up into m-commerce Facebook has announced a US$5.7bn investment in Jio, India's biggest mobile telco.…

Fine, fine, we'll ban whatever the government says is illegal, just give us back access, says US giant Facebook has given in to Vietnamese government demands, and agreed to remove any content considered “anti-state” after telcos in the nation reportedly cut off access to the social network's systems.…

And starts deploying TLS1.3 to make streams faster and more secure Netflix has released its Q1 FY20 results and revealed some unusual coronavirus impacts.…

Workers complain to The Register of unnecessary COVID-19 risk US telco Charter Communications is facing an investigation from the New York State Attorney General for potentially putting employees at unnecessary risk during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.…

Version 2.7.18 is the last official Python 2 release, but it'll live on The final official release of Python 2 arrived on Tuesday, marking the end of two decades of work.…

When science fact is better than science fiction Gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes with different masses – the heftier one being 30 solar masses and its companion being just eight – have been observed for the first time.…

It's all about the content. And where you can – and can't – get it Nvidia’s GeForce game-streaming service has lost four big-name game publishers, with Xbox Games Studios, Warner Bros, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment pulling their titles by the end of the week.…

IT giant admits it made 'a process error, improper response' to flaw finder IBM has acknowledged that it mishandled a bug report that identified four vulnerabilities in its enterprise security software, and plans to issue an advisory.…

How long till this gets hacked? The House of Commons today approved so-called "hybrid sessions" – MPs participating in Parliament in person and via video conferencing – marking arguably the biggest change in British parliamentary procedure in centuries.…

It’s time to strengthen your enterprise apps with the help of Nutanix Webcast You are still trying to decide whether public cloud computing is right or wrong for you. Maybe the snag is regulation, maybe it's GDPR, maybe you fear the loss of control and ballooning management costs, or maybe your applications just work better on your IT infrastructure.…

Cash-flingers see dollars through a Blue Prism Purveyor of software robots, Blue Prism, has hired a new CEO and bagged £100m in funding, proof of market confidence in the technology concept in the face of strong economic headwinds.…

Crims slope off with a slice of dabatase including emails and encrypted passwords but no credit card deets Independent record label Burning Shed has informed musos of a digital burglary involving the partial theft of its customer database, though no payment records were accessed.…

Let's stow the snark a mo and acknowledge this helpful tech Roundup In a departure from our usual snark, The Register presents a trio of tales of tech companies doing some good in the current pandemic.…

Survey shows preference for Linux, some aversion to Microsoft Azure The Go team's latest developer survey shows that most "Gophers" like the language but highlight poor debugging tools and lack of generic support as top issues for improvement.…

The world's crappest superheroes Huawei has posted its lowest revenue growth in years – the result of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, as well as a campaign by President Trump to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the Chinese biz.…

Redmond reckons you've probably got enough on your plate right now Microsoft is pausing automatic upgrades for its Azure Service Fabric "until further notice" as the Windows giant reacts to the current COVID-19 situation.…

National Cyber Security Centre publishes scam-busting address The National Cyber Security Centre has launched the Suspicious Email Reporting Service: a new email address for reporting scam mails to a government department that might actually do something about it.…

Also: Asteroid landing dress rehearsal, 'new' Russian module for the ISS, another Starlink volley ready to go Roundup Astronauts said goodbye to the ISS as a lander said hello to the asteroid Bennu in another Register rundown of all things rocket-related for the week.…

No wonder it came all the way over to our Solar System Astronomers have for the first time measured the chemical composition of an interstellar comet: 2I/Borisov, which strayed into our Solar System last year.…

Domain names, astroturfing, gun rights, FB groups... and lots and lots of shouting Opinion If there was any hope that the coronavirus crisis would put a stop to the culture wars that ravage American society, it has long since died.…

'Seemingly no transactions were made' but problem highlights risks of software supply chain A researcher has uncovered malicious packages in the RubyGems repository, one of which was downloaded more than 2,000 times.…

The apocalypse may have started, but we'll always have artisanal bread... and BSODs Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's occasional series on blue screens and broken dreams.…

Cisco shows off how you can brick it on a Catalyst 9300 Cisco has published a guide to running Minecraft on its switches.…

Who wants to know about their biz plans? Someone determined As American crude oil crashed on Monday, leading to the bizarre situation of a negative futures contract price, our attention was drawn to a spear-phishing campaign against organizations involved in global oil production.…

Zero-trust access to web applications with very fine-grained access controls Google has productised a remote-access tool it uses internally, because it thinks the world might be quite keen on this sort of thing right now.…

Outsourcing deal with Sopra Steria ending, and good times ahead for in-sourced tech crew propping up crumbly software Cleveland Police force in north east England has set aside £2.5m of taxpayer's cash for a managed services provider that can drag its 8-year-old HR software into the cloud, without a significant upgrade.…

Cloud colossus has gone very niche with video-shifter AWS has announced a very niche piece of on-prem tech and a related new cloud storage tier.…

Follow a step-by-step guide to the Cloud Infraspace suite Promo In these competitive times, a growing number of businesses are tempted by cloud computing, due to its much-touted ability to help them respond quickly to market changes and grab opportunities thrown up by new technologies.…

Another one bites the dust A massive exoplanet some 25 light years away may be nothing of the sort, astroboffins now believe – which isn't surprising seeing as it just vanished.…

So why not just buy new servers? That’s where this gets curly One of the few clouds to offer 64-bit Arm-compatible servers is dropping the architecture.…