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How much d’you reckon Trump wants to grant a pardon? Edward Snowden has brought in a healthy $1.25m in speaking fees ever since he jumped on a plane to Hong Kong with a treasure trove of NSA secrets, a new court filing [PDF] has revealed.…

Two-faced ISP gets $250,000 tickle, will be watched by independent monitor CenturyLink has been caught trying to steal rivals’ customers despite signing a court document promising it would do no such thing.…

Brush up on your data security and protection skills in our upcoming show Webcast If ever there was a convenient push to move stragglers into the cloud, the COVID-19 coronavirus has provided that impetus.…

In America, student schools you! Albion College has a plan for students to return safely to campus this fall amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. It involves being tracked by an app that, at least until a few days ago, appears to have been insecure.…

Commerce Department doubles down on China chip sanctions The US Commerce Department on Monday took further steps to deny Huawei access to American chip-making technology – with the announcement of more restrictions on the China-based telecom goliath and its affiliates.…

Ho boy, here we go again The download page for veteran code wrangler Notepad++ has apparently been blocked by Chinese authorities after its website posted a message in support of those opposing China's so-called national security law.…

F**k the algorithm, indeed The UK government has performed a massive U-turn on A Level exam results, promising to use teachers' assessments of students instead of the computer-driven system that caused havoc and sparked protests over the past week.…

We'll help your organisation better run workloads out in the field Webcast We’re not going back to the office anytime soon. Sorry to keep banging on about this, but we’re experiencing one of the most seismic shifts in daily work culture since the invention of the telephone.…

Oof moment for industry body as tests halted for a month Exclusive British infosec accreditation body CREST has suspended all of its accreditation exams after The Register revealed a published cache of files including what appeared to be internal exam sheets as well as docs apparently tied to key industry player NCC Group.…

Kubernetes is too complex, so we made a dashboard for 'normal devs' says senior engineer Kubecon Europe Mirantis, which sells a cloud platform based on OpenStack, has acquired the intellectual property rights for Lens, an open-source management dashboard for Kubernetes.…

Now with 67-70 per cent real turkey! You would hope that we've run the gamut of inappropriate British monuments in 2020, but this one really takes the formed-meat biscuit.…

Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you American chip designer Qualcomm has demonstrated what it claimed was the world's first high-bandwidth 5G data call using the n28 (700MHz) low-spectrum band.…

Also: NASA and SpaceX name the date for Crew-1, Orion assembly almost done, and more In brief Arianespace logged a fifth successful mission for 2020 with the launch of the delayed Ariane 5 from Guiana Space Center at 22:04 UTC on 15 August.…

ISA-agnostic OpenFive unit will focus on custom SoCs while parent will crack on with CPU blueprints RISC-V processor specialist SiFive will double down on improving its CPU cores after pushing its system-on-chip design efforts into a new unit.…

Why? It's all about DevOps, says CTO Chris Wright Interview As KubeCon Europe and CloudNativeCon 2020 gets under way, delivered this time in the cloud, Red Hat has said its OpenShift Kubernetes distribution is now ready for edge computing.…

Also: Visual Studio Code update, new toys for Kubecon, and 25 years of the Start Button In brief While eyes were on its new phone, Microsoft slipped out a pair of updates to the Insider version of Windows 10.…

Age-old franchise gets new lease of life, albeit with rough edges Review Tomorrow the eagerly awaited 2020 incarnation of Microsoft Flight Simulator lands. The Register had a play with the release version and was impressed with this first draft.…

Plus: AI app for the visually impaired – and Clearview lawyers up In brief A tech savvy Reddit dweller has trained a machine-learning model to mimic David Attenborough’s world-famous plummy voice.…

Two other councils named in suit say: Not us, guv Facial-recognition tech firm Neology is suing a bunch of town and city councils in the UK after it failed to win a contract to install ANPR cameras across the North East.…

Astoundingly naughty students are your new case study on how not to manage personal device access to SaaS 94 Australian public schools will be without email for up to a week after students responded to mistaken use of a mailing list with horrible content, which in turn sparked a Reply-All storm that asked for the circulation of email nasties to stop.…

But please be aware this is a family museum Bork!Bork!Bork! Everyone loves a big a screen, none more so than Microsoft's Windows, which finds the devices irresistible when it comes to splashing unfortunate messages all over them.…

Did you know email can reach almost anyone in the world instantly and is great for marketers? Thanks for letting us know, SAP SAP has published a “Business trends” blog post that offers business etiquette advice so utterly obvious that a million thrice-recycled LinkedIn posts explaining how not to fail at life now seem clever by comparison.…

Cookies? Check. Coffee? Check. Warned security that the cast of The Matrix is on their way up? Er... Who, Me? Monday is here and sunshine has turned to showers in the UK. Take your mind off the "shorts or umbrella" quandary with an unusual tale of vampires, dating, and recreating The Matrix in Sun Microsystems' Chicago lobby courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? column.…

Plus: Someone's gunning for Mac developers In brief The US Department of Justice said a combined operation has led to its largest seizure of terrorist-owned cryptocurrency, taking around $2m (£1.5m) from Hamas’s military wing, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).…

Up to 15 SMT8 CPU cores per chip, Power ISA 3.1 support, and other bits and bytes Hot Chips Big Blue hopes to roll out its first commercial 7nm data-center-grade processors – the IBM Power10 series – by the end of 2021.…

President says ‘other’ Chinese companies could feel the ban-hammer US president Donald Trump has suggested the United States may ban Chinese tech giant Alibaba.…

Already a big mover in Foundation projects like Presto, GraphQL, Osquery and ONNX, so why not go all-in? Facebook has upgraded its Linux Foundation membership and by doing so will assume a seat on the organisation's board.…

YouTubers advised of opportunity to ‘get involved’ in some kind of push-back Google’s Australian tentacle has published a pair of protestations that repudiate Australia’s “News Media Bargaining Code” plan to have the advertising giant pay local news outlets for linking to their content.…

Which may be why PM Narendra Modi has also announced a cyber security policy Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has marked the nation’s Independence Day by pledging to connect all of India’s villages to optic fibre within 1,000 days.…

One-year deal worth quarter of a million dollars The US Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $224,000 contract to Clearview AI to purchase “information technology components,” in a deal sealed this week.…

DoD said to get extension to avoid crackdown on Chinese comms kit The crackdown on telecoms gear from Huawei and other Chinese companies in federal networks will not apply to US Department of Defense, at least for a few more weeks.…

China wants to break free from reliance on those outside the homeland More than a hundred TSMC employees have fled the world’s largest semiconductor fab, by market cap, to join smaller, less well-known Chinese chip factories after being promised much higher salaries.…

So surprising, what with the pandemic and Uncle Sam being so welcoming for immigrants right now Too few H-1B hopefuls applied for employment visas this year that the US government has held an unprecedented second lottery to reach its annual quota.…

How beams of light can boss around smart speakers Boffins affiliated with the University of Electro-Communications in Japan and America's University of Michigan have devised a way to use lasers to inject audio commands into mic-equipped devices.…

And there might be a delay before devs warm up to dual screens Comment The Surface Duo isn't an original idea – just look at LG's newest V60 smartphone or Toshiba's quirky Libretto Libretto W100 laptop. There's an air of experimentation about these devices, appearing to outsiders as a less-than-serious punt on a new direction. A gamble, essentially.…

You say broker, I say trojan, let's call the whole thing off Those wondering when the Microsoft love-in with Citrix might end will be relieved to learn that Microsoft Defender decided yesterday that Citrix Broker and High Availability Services bore all the hallmarks of a trojan.…

First Safe Harbor gone, now its replacement... Schrems the breaks! The long-running kerfuffle over the so-called Privacy Shield EU-US data protection agreement took another lurch this week after politicos announced plans to ponder an "enhancement" to the framework.…

*Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy A government drone pilot watched $950 meet a watery end after a bald eagle took umbrage at a DJI Phantom 4 Pro being used to map the shoreline of Lake Michigan.…

Case to be filed in the Netherlands and London Salesforce and Oracle are to face a GDPR lawsuit in London and the Netherlands that could cost them up to €10bn in fines, a legally aggressive privacy campaign group has claimed to The Register.…

Why does it always rain on me? Hewlett Packard Enterprise's UK operations were already feeling the squeeze before the COVID-19 pandemic made enterprises tighten spending on traditional infrastructure, according to the latest financial accounts.…

Infosec cert body looking into it as under-fire firm starts its own probe Exclusive British infosec accreditation body CREST has changed some of its exams after cheat sheets containing exam answers and practical walkthroughs were posted on GitHub in a repo that NCC Group confirmed included its own documents.…

The Register Theatre Company presents: Waiting for Windows Bork!Bork!Bork! Sometimes Windows sits and thinks, and sometimes it just sits. Today's entry in The Register's pit of signage silage is an example of Microsoft's former finest that sums up the last few months better than we could ever hope to.…

Lawyer driving case said to have been re-assigned and filed complaint against boss over alleged sub-$40m settlement United States labor secretary Eugene Scalia has reportedly personally intervened in Oracle’s wage discrimination case and suggested it could settle for a modest sum.…

And with a wave of his hand, the printer was fixed On Call Friday is here and while we cannot promise a break in the weather, we can bring forth another recollection from those brave souls staffing the helpdesk courtesy of The Register's On Call mailbag.…

If you haven’t touched yours for six-plus months, you have to cough up to prevent erasure come November Docker has warned that it plans to delete 4.5 petabytes of container images that haven’t been used for six or more months.…

Not just Germany stepping up to the plate – Ireland, too, we're told Britain's NHS has released its second go at a contact-tracing app to help limit the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus infections, thanks in part to some help from the neighbors.…

If you think the quantum world is confusing, wait until you see the pricing Amazon Web Services has fired up a cloud quantum computing service.…

‘Honoring the honest’ is the catchphrase for massive new online scheme India has announced a new technology-powered tax collection scheme that it hopes will increase its revenue.…

Ponders giving 'em immunity too for countermeasures up to hacking back. Australia’s government has proposed giving itself the power to take over private enterprises’ response to cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure.…

$2.5m-a-year CEO set to take a pay cut, so that's all right, then Mozilla has renewed its lucrative nine-figure deal with Google to ensure its search engine is the default in Firefox in the US and other parts of the world.…