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How units derive from first principles enshrined in Great British law As much of the world's capitals erupt in protests and millions look fearfully at news of job losses and economic contraction, Great Britain has taken the legal step of redefining the metre and kilogram in law.…

Software company wins over Northern Ireland and Manchester NHS trust Epic Bristol, a specialist healthcare software company, has won a brace of UK public sector contracts worth a total £454m.…

Hey kids, fancy migrating to something a bit more 'paid subscription'? The clock is ticking for students that require Adobe software for their courses as campuses remain shut and the vendor's "at-home" access deal nears its end.…

And then derides them as legacy apps you’ll put up with while you ascend to cloud Google has teamed with Parallels to bring Windows apps to Chromebooks under the Chrome Enterprise program.…

What's a flailing investor to do? SoftBank has begun preparations to offload the bulk of its stake in US mobile carrier T-Mobile as part of the Japanese conglomerate's plan $42bn debt reduction plan.…

Then again, cloud providers aren't exactly playing the smart game either Infosec pros and hackers regularly abuse cloud service providers to conduct reconnaissance and attacks, despite efforts by cloud providers to limit such activity.…

Portugal event is on, say organisers, even though events with more than 20 are currently barred Web Summit, Europe's largest web-centric conference by attendees, will go ahead in November as planned, according to the event's organiser.…

Tencent and Baidu sign for optical data center interconnect kit Nokia has scored data centre interconnect wins with Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu.…

Collection of bugs, dubbed Ripple20, sink widely used TCP/IP stack A bunch of flaws in a commonly used TCP/IP software stack have put potentially tens of millions of Internet-of-Things devices, healthcare equipment, industrial control systems, and other network-connected gear at risk of remote attack, it is claimed.…

Contract awarded for 300,000 units and another tender has been issued The island nation announced the wearable, known as the “TraceTogether Token”, on June 9th and quickly defended the device’s privacy features on grounds that it lacks GPS features and is intended to make contact-tracing possible for those who either don’t use a smartphone or lack a suitable model. Authorities also did not rule out making the device compulsory.…

Worry about user privacy also results in Norway pulling its virus tracker The Attorney General of New York has warned Apple and Google she expects the tech giants to keep an eye on an upcoming crop of coronavirus contact-tracing apps, particularly when it comes to the accumulation of personal data.…

That's Sub-6GHz 5G alongside octa-core processor, GPU and AI units Qualcomm is bringing its 5G connectivity to its mid-range 600-series of Snapdragons for the first time.…

Database giant's Q4 earnings call was quite the ride amid virus-hit revenues Oracle shares slipped in after-hours trading as the database giant reported fiscal fourth quarter results weighed down by the global coronavirus pandemic.…

What's that Lassie? You need a 400MB firmware update and a reboot? Video Boston Dynamics has put its robot dog Spot on the open market at $74,500 a pop, as long as you promise not to turn it into a home hound.…

Another set of ideas from storage firm – but can it pull it off this time? Dropbox is entering the password manager market with a slew of new features and services, including the ability to store and save login details, as well as a vault feature for sensitive documents.…

Internal report confirms what we all feared: Lax controls led to WikiLeaks Vault 7 hack tools blab The CIA was so focused on developing whizzbang exploit code, it left any thought of basic computer security principles on the kitchen counter before dashing off to work each morning.…

Adobe emits bonus security fixes for creative software including Premier Pro, Campaign Classic Adobe has emitted security patches for six of its most prominent software bundles, including Illustrator, After Effects, and Premier Pro.…

And announces a bunch of other tweaks at today's virtual shindig Cisco Live Like pretty much all tech events at the moment, this year's Cisco Live conference was forced online by the coronavirus pandemic. Being a networking giant with Webex up its sleeve, this shift from physical to virtual should have been a cinch for Switchzilla.…

'Significant brainpower' has gone into playing catch-up with rival Infor SAP has launched a set of prepacked industry-specific services in an effort to woo users onto its enterprise software platform.…

The most valuable commodity on the planet? Yep, outsourcing Irish Water has placed the "transformation" and management of its customer contact centres in the hands of everyone's favourite outsourcing badass, Capita.…

It was a fraudster! Finally an excuse for why there's a £250 Lycra bodysuit on your bank statement Updated Brit cycling equipment shop Wiggle confirmed to The Reg today it was delinking customers' payment cards from their accounts, two weeks after first receiving complaints that orders were appearing on customers' accounts that they had not made themselves.…

App Store cut and Cupertino's NFC platform in competition crosshairs Updated In the words of Brenda from Bristol: Another one? Yes, afraid so. The European Commission has opened up a fresh investigation into Apple's business practices, this time focusing on the App Store and Apple Pay.…

Company must be hoping new 5G number revives its bloodbath Three years after flogging a sizeable chunk of its phones biz to Google and going all-in on VR headsets, HTC is back with two new mid-ranger blowers, including its first 5G handset.…

Plus: SpaceX tests a Starship tank to destruction Roundup It was a busy weekend for lovers of rockets: SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 from the US, Rocket Lab dodged the New Zealand wind with an Electron and in the UK Skyrora reached 6km altitude from Shetland.…

New time-saving extension works only with old .NET Framework, for now Microsoft has released an early version of Web Live Preview, a Visual Studio extension that enables hot reload for ASP.NET web applications.…

Virtual summit sweetener unlikely to mean much to serious customers Amazon Web Services is offering attendees of its virtual summit for Europe, Middle East and Africa a $50 credit for turning up, watching sessions and submitting feedback.…

Coder urges peers to spend more time tuning plugins for performance Matt Zeunert, founder of website monitoring biz DebugBear, has analyzed the performance of the 1,000 most popular Chrome extensions, and found that more than a few of them could be coded better.…

Forget voice calls and SMSes - time to flog edge services and apps Hewlett Packard Enterprise is trying to grab the attention of telcos that in turn need to make a buck from their pricey 5G infrastructure by selling low-latency edge computing applications to biz customers.…

Sage Drive enters its third day of wobbles and woe Darling of the beancounters, accounting behemoth Sage is having a mid-year wobble as EU customers of Sage Drive enter Day Three of iffy service.…

18 county and city councils – as well as an NHS trust – get ready to dish out taxpayers' cash Capita is among a bunch of resellers to win a place on a four-year framework worth up to £500m, set up for city and county councils across England to buy software, commodity hardware and related services.…

From gravitational discoveries to controlled 2029 re-entry, they sure knew how to build 'em Space Extenders In this penultimate edition of The Register's series looking at how ESA keeps its fleet of spacecraft ticking over, years or even decades after their expiry dates, we turn to INTEGRAL.…

We've kept this story safe for work... which is perhaps a little odd because you're all working from home anyway Hundreds of thousands of sensitive dating app profiles – including images of "a graphic, sexual nature" – were exposed online for anyone stumbling across them to download.…

Redmond decides volunteer crash-test dummies care about quality, not speed Microsoft has announced major changes to Windows previews.…

Quick! You need to pay for that web address you never asked for so we can make more money Dot-uk registry operator Nominet has again crossed the line from industry overseer to champion for the registrars that sell .uk domains, warning Brits they should pay to renew names they never ordered and didn't want.…

'We understand this news will cause anxiety and dread' CEO tells 360 staff, but won't someone think of the passengers and drivers? Grab, the ride-sharing service that did so well in Southeast Asia that Uber bought a chunk of it and fled, has announced layoffs.…

Upgrade your security protection for the new normal Webcast Is your organization in the middle of a work-from-home trial-by-fire? If so, you are learning all about the security risks of this abrupt change already, and so are your users.…

Light, strong, supportive ... and monitored thanks to ERP integration An outfit named German Bionic has noted that the freight and logistics industries "have been under enormous pressure since the beginning of the pandemic" and suggested exoskeletons-as-a-service as an - erm - helping hand for such workers.…

Plus: Google guide rejects 'ableist language' such as 'sanity check' – and others wonder if ‘blocklists’ could offend ex-Soviet nations Splunk has joined the ranks of software makers pledging to remove objectionable terms like “master” and “slave” from their code.…

On the upside, it's been used to trace contacts about 30 times and downloaded six million times Australia’s “COVIDSafe” contact-tracing app appears still to have problems with Apple’s iOS.…

Commerce Department changes rules because... something, something... innovation The US Commerce Department has confirmed it will publish a rule change to its crackdown on Huawei that will allow US companies to work with the Chinese equipment maker on 5G standards. And artificial intelligence. And autonomous vehicles.…

Internal probe went all the way to the former CEO, CCO after 'smut, fake pig's head, more sent to couple' Six former eBay staffers, including two executives, were hit this week with criminal charges for allegedly serially harassing two bloggers who were critical of the internet tat bazaar.…

Welp, that's one way to block those annoying spam robots Updated T-Mobile US is suffering a nationwide technical breakdown, preventing customers from receiving calls and knackering data connections.…

What time is it? Time to pore over contested multibillion-dollar US military tech deals General Dynamics IT (GDIT) has had its complaint about the handling of the $7.7bn rebuild of the US Navy’s networking infrastructure thrown out by a watchdog.…

Punters asked to hand over their logs if browser keeps coming to life against their wishes Microsoft is investigating claims by some Windows 10 Insider users that Edge pops up after their PCs start up, even if the software has been told not to do that.…

Security biz, academics, tech advocacy groups ask Supreme Court to review ruling that could derail antivirus industry Analysis Last week, fourteen cybersecurity experts, infosec biz ESET, and tech advocacy groups the Internet Association and TechFreedom filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the US Supreme Court to review a 2019 appeals court ruling against antivirus maker Malwarebytes.…

Can't stand losing you... over TCP/IP. So lonely... after connections drop. Message in a bottle... would work better, etc etc Comment SAP CEO Christian Klein's epithet may well be that he appears competent – as in, he's the sort of person whose advice on the best option for life insurance one would be accepted without hesitation.…

Plus: New Java SDK in Cosmos DB, NHS goes all Microsoft 365, and Start Menu gets a bit Clippy Roundup The UK health service can't kick its Microsoft habit, plus there are new toys for Azure botherers out this week.…

Brighton boffin says technology is a 'major engineering challenge' but does not rely on making major physics breakthrough A UK startup has harvested £3.6m in seed funding to put into its vision for the future of quantum computing.…

Days without TITSUP: 0 Microsoft 365 started the week off with an early totter in the Oceania region followed by a full-blown European Outlook client TITSUP*.…

Perp had previous conviction for obtaining property by deception An IT support bod who reportedly stole more than £30,000 in Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum has been jailed.…