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When 'works OK on my machine' goes global On Call Welcome to another in The Register's series of stories from those receiving calls for help and slightly passive-aggressive helpdesk tickets. Start your Friday with a helping of On Call.…

Go forth and test code that may never become a product if you dare VMware has announced that its flagship vSphere virtualization suite now offers a continuous beta.…

Q2 revenue and subs surge, annual guidance boosted again Quarterly earnings calls for public companies usually start with the CEO and other officers spending fifteen minutes or more showing slides full of numbers that prove the business is in good shape.…

Slurps quote-to-cash specialist to boost Cloud business unit that's already big with SAP and Oracle Indian services giant Wipro has acquired Salesforce specialist 4C as it eyes expanding its operations in Europe.…

Three collared, one in hiding at San Francisco consulate Four Chinese academic researchers in the United States have been accused of failing to declare on their immigration paperwork their true involvement with China’s People’s Liberation Army.…

CEO Bob Swan suggests his chips may some day be TSMC-flavored Intel on Thursday reported second quarter sales of $19.7bn, up 20 per cent year-over-year, and still investors distanced themselves from its stock, which was down around 10 per cent in after-hours trading following the manufacturer's earnings report.…

Insurer is first biz to be charged in New York for data security negligence after exposing millions of records to the web A California-based insurer that inadvertently left tens of millions of private customer records open to the internet has become the first company to be charged by New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS) for cybersecurity rule violations.…

Want your AI assistant to shout obscenities or hate speech at your child? There's a program for that Amazon claims it reviews the software created by third-party developers for its Alexa voice assistant platform, yet US academics were able to create more than 200 policy-violating Alexa Skills and get them certified.…

Two directors from Google, no other vendors represented. That's vendor-neutral? Google's open source director Chris DiBona has defended the web giant's motives in forming a new foundation to manage open-source trademarks during a Knative community meeting.…

'Most stable' release yet boosts scaling speed, data observability The beta version of Apache Cassandra 4.0, the most significant new release of column-oriented NoSQL database in years according to those involved, hit the downloads centre this week, with the promise of a 5x scaling speed improvement, new observability features and less "unnecessary garbage".…

Tech emphasises interoperability, but here firms will find out if it's ready for the prime time Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has cut the ribbon on a new lab that will allow cellular vendors to test interoperable networking kit.…

Flames contained – but expect slow 'staged restoration' of services Thousands of customers of BT's fixed-line broadband and telephone services are experiencing major disruption in North East England after an exchange in Newcastle caught fire.…

No Connect, Web Shop, call centres or customer support – users are worried Updated Garmin's Connect service has been down for more than seven hours today to the frustration of fitness enthusiasts keen to upload running times or synchronise with other services such as Strava. So, too, is the company's web shop and support forums.…

Waves subside for now as microblogging site faces tough questions Twitter has admitted that the naughty folk who hijacked verified accounts last week read a portion of hacked users' direct messages.…

That's what a sluggish pandemic response and 'world-beating' testing programme gets you The UK is to see technology spending fall by 9.3 per cent in 2020 followed by a more modest 1.1 per cent decline in 2021, according to research by Forrester.…

Yes, it's going to cost a bob or two, but the option's there Marvell will today formally open the doors of its bespoke tailor shop, though rather than cutting and sewing cloth, it's crafting custom 5nm semiconductors.…

Panto season starts early in Redmond Microsoft celebrated the end of its Inspire conference and the release of its financials with a pantomime-like Windows 10 Insider update. At least as far as AMD-based PCs were concerned.…

Qualcomm rival aims SoC at mid-tier next gen 5G mobiles, doesn't appear to support mmWave Taiwanese Qualcomm rival MediaTek has lifted the lid on its latest 7nm-process chip, aimed at the mobile mid-range.…

Bad traffic rules from HQ caused intrusion detection and prevention on gateways to just stop working Ubiquiti got a lesson in never blindly trusting external input this month.…

Retired judges now to take greater part in overseeing council snoopers A very rare thing has happened to British state spying laws: they have been tightened up after parts of the so-called Snoopers' Charter were formally commenced into law.…

'Security Research Device' is for lab use only by those willing to help Cupertino find flaws Apple has announced the existence of a new and very limited-edition iPhone.…

But users are 'always one small event away from frustration' when platforms clash, claims IT support biz Interview At Google's Cloud Next '20 On Air event, the company announced new integration features in G Suite, which VP and GM Javier Soltero says "almost realises what we've been chasing after the whole time which is a more complete collaborative experience."…

No honor among thieves The denizens of online forums dedicated to trading in stolen credit cards have been shown to be wretched hives of scum and villainy.…

And use the experience as a template for new products everywhere WhatsApp's Indian operation will shortly commence tests that make its platform a distribution channel for pensions, insurance and small loans.…

State media posts short vid and says Tianwen-1 is doing just fine so let’s just go with that shall we? China has successfully launched a Mars probe.…

SD-WAN can bump up your network defenses – and our next webcast will show you how Webcast Your organisation is probably deploying apps in the public cloud by now, either because you're following the industry norm of general migration into off-prem environments, or perhaps because you're having to support a dispersed workforce as we enter the "new normal" of a world battling COVID-19.…

Gassy giants make Jupiter look like an absolute tiddler Pic and video Astronomers say they have snapped a multi-planetary system containing a Sun-like star for the first time.…

‘Abort’ is gone, too, and so is ‘segregate’ and ‘kill’ VMware has joined the ranks of companies issuing style guides that remove discriminatory language – though gone further than some of its peers by addressing gendered terms for hardware and virtualization-specific language.…

Decision may help clarify law following landmark Supreme Court decision The privacy and constitutional rights of a suspected armed robber were not infringed when cops trawled records from cellular towers near two robberies and spotted a device using his phone number.…

Cali federal judge admits he can only do so much against businesses based in Middle Kingdom Three Chinese companies accused by Cisco of selling counterfeit components badged with its logo on have had their US bank accounts frozen by a federal district court judge.…

Welcome to the new Digital Transformation, folks? Microsoft on Wednesday reported $38bn in sales for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, an increase of 13 per cent that failed to impress investors, even though this exceeded Wall Street's expectations.…

Well, when the chips are down... Nvidia is reportedly pondering snapping up Arm, going as far as approaching the Softbank-owned microprocessor designer to talk about a potential takeover.…

Fair(ing) play, engineers SpaceX has pulled off another remarkable feat of space rocket recycling, capturing both pieces of a nose cone shield from its most recent launch, using giant nets suspended over the back of two boats in its fleet.…

Cloaking code contaminates snapshots so they're useless for face matching Researchers at the University of Chicago's Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.…

New, or just a rebrand of Common Data Service? A bit of both Microsoft has announced Dataflex, a "low code data platform for Teams," showing off the relational database management technology to its partners at its virtual Inspire event.…

Immigrants crossing Bering land bridge would have found folk already there Humans are likely to have occupied the Americas from 30,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought.…

Commons tech committee does some soul-searching as costs mount Excising Huawei from the UK's 5G networks promises to be an expensive task that has ramifications for the nationwide rollout of 5G.…

Behold the ghost of Browser Wars past Updated From the department of "if you can't beat 'em..." comes the inevitable sueball slung by Slack over Microsoft's bundling of Teams into its Office behemoth.…

15% of customers affected as Canadian partner promises 'full mailbox services' today Customers of UK2 hosted email services have been complaining of missing emails from clients, as the platform heads into a sixth day of wobbles. Problems appear to have begun on Friday for users connecting via IMAP and POP3 and were said to be due to "a service failure" at the UK company's Canadian service partner Tucows.…

Chocolate Factory actively pushing lightweight OS on less powerful devices Google will reportedly make Android Go the default for low-RAM devices once the 11th major version of the mobile OS is released.…

One more to go until Satya Claus delivers the first RC, children! Slipping under the (un)Inspire radar this week was an update to .NET 5 and a peek at where Microsoft plans to take Azure DevOps.…

Taxpayers shelled out £1.3bn for this 'abysmal' flop Capita's 2017 decision to implement bespoke IT systems on a £1.3bn British Army recruiting contract led to nearly 25,000 fewer applications to join the military in the following year, new figures have revealed.…

Move your legacy apps to the cloud in just a matter of days Webcast As your business-critical systems get old, operating costs explode and the risk of breakdowns increases dramatically.…

Brit registry is the cash cow that keeps on giving. Whether it wants to or not Analysis UK internet registry operator Nominet has decided to reform the way in which expired .uk domains are released and, to no one's surprise, has decided that the best solution is one that will result in it receiving millions of pounds in profit.…

Still cheap to run. Now also running the code you prefer, wherever you need it, and with cloudy sandboxes for tests Interview Arm thinks its architecture is primed to win enterprise workloads thanks to a combination of AWS, cloud-native development and open-source software.…

Heavily leaked Nord is a smartphone, not an incontinent Scandinavian Apple's foray into the smartphone market middle ground presents a major threat to phone makers like OnePlus, which yesterday countered with its own sub-€400 effort: the OnePlus Nord.…

Gives itself a job to ‘protect the public conversation’ Twitter has decided to crack down on QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory that suggests US president Donald Trump is working to expose a cabal of deep-state Satanist paedophiles that secretly runs the world.…

Sadly, missing all of us by 800 million years A massive asteroid broke apart within the inner Solar System and showered the Earth and Moon with up to fifty quadrillion kilograms of meteoroids, say a trio of Japanese scientists. That's approximately 30 to 60 times more cosmic material than the Chicxulub prang that thoroughly ruined the dinosaurs' day.…

But only for one HPC-oriented instance type, with steeper exit charges and deeper discounts Microsoft has quietly added a five-year term to Azure reserved instances, the commit-for-years-and-score-deep-discounts option in its cloud.…

Ability to debate frankly in private versus right of netizens to know what exactly is discussed Since October 2019, people participating in discussions about the way the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) builds web standards have been unable to decide whether meetings held by the standard's body's various groups should be recorded or not.…