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A capable bargain-bin blower, just beware the bloatware Hands On The Redmi Note 9 Pro is Xiaomi's latest blower for the UK market. At £250, it occupies a frightfully competitive sector of the smartphone world. Can it compete with similar efforts from Nokia, Samsung, Honor, and Realme?…

IBM says phishing operation could be effort to get upper hand in negotiations Hackers are targeting German companies tasked with replenishing the nation's supply of personal protective equipment.…

Remember when an error message at McDonald's was all we had to worry about? Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork goes back to its roots in today's edition of problematic panels, with a seriously distressed McDonald's order screen from back when we were allowed in such places.…

You should check how long a vendor intends to support the kit, says Which? A report from consumer advocates Which? highlights the shockingly short lifespan of "smart" appliances, with some losing software support after just a few years, despite costing vastly more than "dumb" alternatives.…

Also: Cisco and Apple push out patches It is time once again for El Reg's weekly security roundup. Here's a look at a few of the more interesting stories making the rounds over the past seven days.…

A bit more time on coding could save hours in the mail room Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and with it another confession from a Register reader to make one consider one's own programming choices in the latest entry of our Who, Me? saga.…

Also, you can read the first AI-generated manga comic in English Roundup Welcome to this week's roundup of AI-related news.…

Economy Ministers mark official launch of GAIA-X project The Economy Ministers of Germany and France, Peter Altmaier and Bruno Le Maire, held a media event on Thursday to talk up GAIA-X, an EU data infrastructure initiative aiming to take on Silicon Valley and Chinese behemoths to protect data.…

2002 NN4 will visit us fairly frequently, and always miss - ignore the clickbait An asteroid described as larger than the Empire State Building will whizz past Earth, making its closest approach on 6 June.…

Don't aim for the bottom, go top down In his 1959 address to the American Physical Society at Caltech, physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture titled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," laying out the opportunity ahead to manipulate matter at the atomic scale.…

That's Systems Operating Centre to you. Chuffed with that, says Royal Signals brigadier The British Army has raised a new regiment that will take charge of its in-house security operations centre, a move calculated to make cyber defence a more mainstream part of all things armed and camouflaged.…

Happy 8th (or 9th) 'launch day' birthday, IPv6. Your daddy ain't dead yet IPv4 is here to stay with us for a good few years yet, reckons the the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre's (RIPE NCC) public policy manager, eight years after IPv6 was supposed to replace it.…

Publishing platforms, hosts being targeted by Stealthworker malware Servers are being targeted with a malware attack that uses its infected hosts to brute-force other machines.…

How may I infringe thee? Let me count the ways... A funny thing happened overnight in the world of space and politics as a campaigning video featuring SpaceX's commercial crew launch and promoting US President Donald Trump was abruptly pulled from YouTube.…

Questions linger over involvement of biz linked to Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave campaign UK government has published the contracts it holds with private tech firms and the NHS for the creation of a COVID-19 data store, just days after campaigners fired legal shots over a lack of transparency.…

Celebrating two years of merged activities by hitting the Off button IP blacklist frequenter tsoHost has taken time out from borking emails to let customers know that its recent acquisition, website builder MrSite, is for the chop.…

You perceive more faults, and they may not be faults in the first place A chunk of the UK's broadband users claim their connections worsened in the days following lockdown, according to a YouGov survey of 2,301 adults.…

Pip White among bunch of new EMEA hires at Chocolate Factory offshoot Pip White, senior veep and general manager of industry sales at Salesforce, has been nabbed by Google to head up its Cloud business in the UK and Ireland.…

Don't bother picking that tie for the Zoom session, resellers UK government procurement unit Crown Commercial Service is sizing up the market for new back-office systems for central government in deals that could be worth up to £400m.…

Plenty of competition out there for Big Blue IBM brought its flagship data warehousing product Netezza back from the dead because customers were having trouble migrating to the IBM database DB2, according to an analyst blog published today.…

Places your job ads with us for free or take some time to browse the listings for suitable roles Job Alert The Register has got more jobs for readers to peruse this week as we continue efforts to keep techies in work during these testing times.…

Blur tool brings privacy protection to images, in these troubled times Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, secure comms biz Signal has deployed a blur tool in its messaging and calling app to allow users to obscure faces in app-captured snapshots.…

Mein OS tut weh Bork!Bork!Bork! Willkommen to today's edition of Bork, The Register's glimpse at what digital signage does when it thinks nobody is looking.…

Google's free IDE is high quality but doesn't remove all the annoyances of Android development Google has released Android Studio 4.0, a massive update to its IDE for mobile app development, with features like an upgraded Layout Inspector, and the brand new Build Analyzer and motion editor.…

Utility creator claims OTT security hoops are harmful to indie devs A developer of a Windows utility has protested that "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is hurting independent developers" because of the number of warnings and obstacles placed in front of users who download installers that are not signed or sufficiently well known.…

That escalated quickly Elon Musk has called for Amazon.com to be broken up because it declined to sell a book.…

There's Samsung to be said for having an in-house 5G vendor, right, Korea? A new report has put the UK sixth globally for 5G adoption – behind the usual heavyweights of South Korea and Switzerland, as well as the US, Kuwait, and Qatar.…

All Amazon staff are slackers now as AWS chat backend Chime's in Slack has posted strong growth for the first quarter of FY 2021 and declined to measure its performance by comparing adoption rates with Microsoft Teams.…

The perils of 'bring your child to work' day On Call We have stepped into Friday, and the weekend is only a few short hours away. Take a break from wondering what a trip to the park might do to the "R" number and join us for another adventure of those Register readers cursed with the On Call phone.…

And teases pay-by-credit-card options for its AWS service VMware has extended the supported life of vSphere 6.7 for 11 months.…

Admins told ‘It will not be possible to opt out’ but also promised transition should be painless Google has advised G Suite administrators that its replacement for Google+, “Currents”, will debut on July 6th.…

Fraud allegations regarding health company transaction mean more strife for Lee Jae-yong South Korean prosecutors have requested an arrest warrant for Samsung Group heir, Lee Jae-yong, as part of a investigation into an alleged $3.9bn accounting fraud.…

Leaving more room for false ads bought by local politicians, which it still allows Facebook will hide ads bought by state-owned media outlets from its US-based users, as part of its plan “to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate ahead of the November 2020 election in the US.”…

And we’d do it anywhere else, anytime, says veep Google India has explained why it yanked an app called Remove China Apps from its “Play” digital souk.…

The beloved mole hasn't been able to dig into the Red Planet's regolith for ages NASA’s Insight lander is back in business after the agency reported that its "mole," a digging probe designed to burrow into the martian soil, is now back in action after suffering months of mishaps.…

One employee went on to infect her cousin, who later died Amazon.com employees have sued the e-commerce giant for failing to protect them against the coronavirus, after they contracted COVID-19 and infected their relatives or partners.…

Security firm's swallowing may leave many staff out in the cold VMware is acquiring antimalware company Lastline to boost its network security offerings.…

Chinese telecom companies and authorities want more network control to keep everyone...uh, safe online Chinese telecom companies and the Middle Kingdom government contend that the TCP/IP protocol stack is ill-suited for future networking needs and have proposed reworking the internet's technical architecture with new, more secure internet protocols.…

That's one way of making people check for updates A hapless IT bod found the Have I Been Pwned service (HIBP) answering its own question in a way he really didn’t want – after a breach report including a SQL string KO’d his company’s helpdesk ticket system.…

Fill out our questionnaire, and we’ll share the report once we’ve collated the data Reader survey Some company directors respond well when you wave a pie chart in their face to get what you want, and we’re offering you an opportunity – if you work in database storage and workloads – to help create that kind of budget-relocating study yourself.…

Biz committee chairman asks whether firm accepts software had issues A senior Brit MP has written to Fujitsu demanding answers from the company over its role in the Horizon IT system scandal that has rocked the nation's Post Office.…

We need to look further to glimpse Population III fireballs – where's that James Webb Telescope? European astronomers, using data from the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, have suggested the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe happened earlier than thought.…

'Government is moving too fast, and breaking things as a result' Open Rights Group has instructed lawyers to lodge a complaint with the UK's data watchdog over the rollout of the Test and Trace system because it says the system breaches the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Firm denies shutdown of marketing organ but heads may well roll Exclusive Sophos has placed 100 staff at risk of redundancy and is said to be shutting down its Naked Security blog, sources have told The Register - although the private equity-owned biz denied this.…

Be the hero who carries a thermometer around in their mobe Niche, China-exclusive smartphones seldom get a nod in The Reg's pages, but allow us to make an exception for Honor's latest flagship, the Play4 Pro.…

Aussie homeowner moves press conference off freshly seeded grass In these dark times, at least we still have the no-nonsense attitude of Australians to lift the mood – though the country's prime minister found himself at the pointy end of it this morning.…

Let's play 'That's Not My Subdomain' There was another twist in the long-running Demon subdomain saga yesterday as Namesco accidentally mixed up some customers due to a "scripting error."…

Exploding sun's shock wave may have sparked light from interstellar gas More than 20 years ago a huge wave of energized interstellar gas was detected passing through the Big Dipper – or The Plough as it's known in the UK. Now astrophysicists think they've figured out the cause of the cosmic commotion: a ripple from a massive supernova explosion passing through the Milky Way.…

Forget Industry 4.0 – we're on Data 4.0 now, if Informatica is to believed Web 2.0, Analytics 3.0, Industry 4.0. A world-weary tech worker would be minded to add TotalBull 5.0 to the list. Tech industry vendors are prone to promote grand visions that on close examination turn out to be a mishmash of concepts and technologies congregating only to shift more units.…

A little more short-term revenue never hurt any.. er, well.. You know how it is: the economy is in meltdown; half the company is working from home and the other half is furloughed. What is there to look forward to? Software audits, that's what.…