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Publicity-hungry crims find new way of pressuring victims A California university which is dedicated solely to public health research has paid a $1.14m ransom to a criminal gang in the hopes of regaining access to its data.…

8-strong national body asks government for cash to hire 2 more "A consistent refrain I recite at the many conference speeches, media interviews and workshops I attend is the importance of transparency and openness in the use of public space surveillance," said Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC) Tony Porter in his most recent annual report.…

Plus: On-orbit battery replacement and scrub-a-dub-dub, my launch is a dud? In brief Spaceport America took another tentative step toward actually being a spaceport last week as Virgin Galactic took its SpaceShipTwo for another glide back to the runway.…

Plus: Windows Forms on Arm64 in .NET 5, Live Events to live on In brief While not able to undelete Microsoft's shuttered stores, accidentally borked files stand a chance at redemption thanks to the Windows File Recovery tool.…

Trying to reduce waste or funnelling punters into investing in AirPods? There's no such thing as a free lunch or, indeed, a free power adapter if the latest reports from famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo are correct.…

Out-of-date law prevents Britain from fully developing its cybersecurity industry, say campaigners British infosec businesses are celebrating the 30th birthday of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 by writing to Prime Minister Boris Johnson urging reform of the elderly cybercrime law.…

IMGworks' new owner Sondrel demands £1.4m handed over tout suite Imagination Technologies is being sued by the buyer of its IMGworks division after allegedly failing to pay an invoice in a £27m contract for Russian customer Elvees RnD Center.…

The PowerPoint presentation is nice and all, but the proof is in the eating SAP is striving to rid itself of its reputation as a provider of monolithic ERP systems that are highly embedded in the business but difficult to change, plus costly and time-consuming to upgrade.…

Who are we kidding? TfL's prisoners will just resign selves to 20 hour wait Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in the The Register's inexplicably long-running series of sickly signage and distressed displays.…

Google, Microsoft already on board. AWS not far behind. Sources say plucky Brit upstart vows never to practise tax avoidance UKCloud has agreed specified discounts on a range of fluffy white services - public, private and hybrid - under a framework agreement with Crown Commercial Services (CCS), the procurement agency acting on behalf of British government.…

Containerization, DevOps, compliance, service meshes – there’s so much to discuss in just one day Event The need to say it seems almost moot but, no, The Register’s Continuous Lifecycle London conference isn’t happening in-person in 2020. Instead, we’ve taken all that scheduled goodness and packed it into one of the busiest and most content-filled one-day virtual events you’re likely to find – and tickets are on sale right now.…

The UPS gets its revenge in a tale of fire, fury and farming Who, Me? Monday is here once more, bringing with it the promise of a clean slate, a fresh week and a mailbox full of problems. Put all that to one side and take solace in another Reg reader's misadventures courtesy of Who, Me?…

Plus: DDoS'er jailed, and more In Brief Redmond is bulking up the security around its AzureStack hardware-to-cloud bundle by acquiring infosec firm CyberX.…

Plus: Amazon buys self-driving startup, and more In brief A handful of Democrat Senators and House reps say they will introduce legislation that would stop the Feds and cops in the US from using facial-recognition surveillance gear.…

World will marvel at tiny electronic brain made of sand taught to think NASA is developing a Mars rover AI system designed to sift through sensor data for signs of life on the Red Planet and send back relevant readings to its Earth base all by itself.…

Cupertino idiot-tax corp is fashionably late to the party WWDC Apple this year will boldly go where its peers have gone before by implementing support for encrypted DNS in iOS and macOS.…

Crooks threaten to leak swiped software blueprints Maze ransomware masterminds claim to have stolen source code from LG after hacking into the electronics giant.…

Regulators freeze funds, stop affiliated finance apps from functioning German electronic payment whizzkids Wirecard AG has filed for bankruptcy, three days after the arrest of ex-CEO Markus Braun on fraud charges – and the company's admission that €1.9bn in assets ($2.1bn) were missing and may never have existed.…

Next week: Explore how keeping email safe can be part of a wider corporate strategy Webcast Leaked emails are the IT security mishap that just keeps on giving. From salacious tabloid headlines to lost elections to international security crises, a hacked or misfired email is the ultimate piece of first-hand evidence to light up a scandal, or ruin a reputation.…

Orgs still fixated on getting remote working right, says user group chief SAP customers are hanging fire on major migrations and upgrades as the COVID-19 pandemic draws companies' attention away from their long-term enterprise application strategy, according to the Americas' SAP User Group (ASUG).…

Plus: Home Office urges judges to leave lax legal framework as is South Wales Police and the UK Home Office "fundamentally disagree" that automated facial recognition (AFR) software is as intrusive as collecting fingerprints or DNA, a barrister for the force told the Court of Appeal yesterday.…

'Reimagined' flagships to endure, but that place you used to go to when the Apple Store was too busy is going away Microsoft has a new approach to retail. One, it appears, that does not involve its physical store locations.…

The question that not even quantum computing can solve It's that time of year again when National Cream Tea Day asks the age-old question: cream then jam or jam then cream?…

Never mind the ball-based shenanigans – how about some love for Windows Activation? Bork!Bork!Bork! There has been a tinge of Scouse to our bork column this week, which culminates in a football win for Liverpool - it won the English Premier League yesterday - and a pleading for activation from Windows.…

Stripping radar-based tech would cut price and allow phone's sale in markets where 60GHz spectrum is restricted A new filing by the US Federal Communications Commission suggests the upcoming Google Pixel 4A phone will ditch the Soli gesture-recognition system that featured on its flagship predecessor.…

Human: Fall Flat, Left 4 Dead 2, Embr, Sea of Thieves – goodness, we've been having a blast The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Since lockdown, a handful of vultures have been trying to fill the social-distancing void by playing video games together, and, hey, if you don't hate your colleagues' guts, maybe there's something here you could introduce to them in lieu of the pub.…

Snyk survey puts cross-site scripting top of the list for security holes – but watch out for prototype pollution too Open-source security specialist Snyk has released a new survey combining data on vulnerabilities in available packages with responses from developers and DevOps teams about how they handle the challenge this poses.…

'We want to promote UK tech on a global scale' – aw, nice of you Chinese comms bogeyman Huawei has won approval to build a £1bn optoelectronics R&D facility in South Cambridgeshire, UK, near the leafy village of Sawston.…

As Japan's virtual space tourism rig is readied for bolt-on to ISS Russia's space agency Roscosmos has re-entered the space tourism market and this time will offer one person the chance to spacewalk.…

There's a rat in my system, what am I gonna do? On Call It's Friday! That time of the week when thoughts turn to the weekend, a well-earned rest, and a vermin-infested tale from The Register's On Call archives.…

Version 8.2 supports bigger hosts, improves network security and bins old Windows versions as guests In around 2013 Citrix stopped trying to keep up with VMware and Microsoft in the server virtualisation market. The company therefore slowed development of its XenServer hypervisor, but kept it alive and suggested it as a fine underpinning for its own products –especially for virtual desktops - but not as the foundations of a private cloud.…

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... NASA is mulling sending a fleet of steam-powered robots capable of hopping large distances to Europa, Enceladus, or Titan – Saturn's moons that may harbor hidden liquid oceans.…

Oh, snap Japanese optics manufacturer Olympus is winding down its 84-year-old camera division and selling it off to private-equity firm Japan Industrial Partners (JIP).…

Umm, kid: us computer folks are supposed to be the smart ones An Australian university may euthanise campus foxes after they bit computing students.…

Bid that proposed using Chinese vendor’s kit scores only limited network access Singapore has named two carriers as having won the right to build nationwide 5G networks, and both promptly named tech providers other than Huawei as their network providers of choice.…

To help Indian small businesses cope with COVID crunch Google’s Indian outpost will soon help small businesses to find loans.…

Former employees missed court appearence, maybe because a Taiwan court already found two of them guilty The US Justice Department has been granted arrest warrants for three Taiwanese nationals charged with stealing semiconductor secrets from US-based Micron Technologies.…

Last November: These ISPs know too much! June: God bless the ISPs Comcast has agreed to be the first home broadband internet provider to handle secure DNS-over-HTTPS queries for Firefox browser users in the US, Mozilla has announced.…

WikiLeaker accused of tapping up LulzSec's Sabu as a source Prosecutors in the US have upgraded their case against Julian Assange with a second superseding indictment claiming he sought out the services of a notorious hacker who, unbeknownst to the WikiLeaks boss, was secretly working with the Feds.…

Virtualization an option, Rosetta x86 Windows emulation doubtful Apple has confirmed its forthcoming Mac hardware using Arm-compatible Apple-designed processors will do away with Boot Camp, the iGiant's tool for booting Microsoft Windows directly on Macs.…

Time to trawl through some data lakes In a busy 24 hours Databricks has handed over MLflow – a machine learning management tool – to the Linux Foundation, bought an analytics biz and moved the status of its Delta Engine to General Availability.…

Too little, too late – but the inquiry is rolling Fujitsu has told UK Parliament it is no longer supplying evidence to the Post Office to convict sub-postmasters of criminal offences invented by the firm's Horizon IT system.…

Port will handle SPEC's SERT and Java suites, with more features soon While Apple's foray into the Arm world snagged much of the limelight this week, Microsoft quietly announced that the first phase of its port of OpenJDK for Windows 10 on Arm was complete.…

Botnet C2, denial-of-service, phishing – and that's after filtering Web traffic to the servers of the notorious Dutch-German Cyberbunker hosting biz was filled with all kinds of badness, including apparent botnet command-and-control and denial-of-service traffic, says SANS Institute.…

Well, that and the 'contract losses' Capita, the UK's fave outsourcing badass, estimates revenues for the first half of calendar 2020 to be down by double digits due to contract losses and customers tightening their belts during the pandemic.…

Salesforce Anywhere beta due to drop in July, full release in Q4 Salesforce is trying to tweak the nose of Microsoft Teams and Slack by building enterprise collaboration into its applications and platform in a move designed to make it integral to business process workflow.…

On a scale of 1 to 10, how shocked are you? The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed it placed Huawei on a list of organisations with ties to the Chinese military that trade in the US. While this doesn't have an immediate impact on the firm's business, it opens the possibility for further punitive sanctions down the line.…

Little more than online spreadsheets shared with a private team for now Amazon has unveiled Honeycode, a browser-based tool for building no-code applications that run on the AWS cloud platform, currently in public beta.…

'Unexpected removal' of crucial format-stripping app reversed in latest build Forget Linux GPU support, Microsoft has emitted a new Dev Channel Windows 10 build that fixes a far more serious problem: the disappearing Notepad.…

ISP and London users are both TITSUP* (Too Irritated To Smile at Usual Platitudes) Updated Just days after the ISP boasted about its network resilience in the face of spiking post-lockdown broadband usage, Virgin Media's customers across the UK capital are reporting being unable to get online as they attempt to work from home, do their schoolwork and watch Netflix.…