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Electrolyte breakthrough preserves charge capacity The world's mobile electronics, from phones to cars, largely run on batteries containing lithium, which is relatively expensive. Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper to make, but they rapidly wear out compared to their Li-ion cousins.…

Compatibility hold slapped on affected kit with fixes in 'upcoming release' It's only the second week of Windows 10's May 2020 Update and things are going... about as well as one might expect. Which, sadly for Microsoft hardware owners, is not ideal.…

We want COTS, industry-standard processes... you know... make yourself replaceable The UK government is calling for service-pushers to help it overhaul central and local government back-office functions, with a view to deals which could be worth up to £100m.…

Blue light at night, shepherd's not right Lab mice don't have much to laugh about but scientists in China have found new ways of making them depressed – and it's not good news for anyone that loves some screen time before shut-eye.…

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you and your friends British people will soon begin receiving random phone calls from so-called "contact tracers" warning them about having been in close proximity with potential coronavirus carriers. One of many problems with this scheme is it's dangerously easy to pose as a government contact tracer.…

China cited as an example to follow, not a rival in plan to lure five global whales India has announced three new plans it hopes will make electronics manufacturing its number one industry.…

Ethical hackers detail how they popped vCloud Director, the tool Virtzilla offers to service providers hosting pods of private clouds Ethical hacking firm Citadelo has explained a bug it discovered which allowed complete takeover of multiple VMware-powered clouds.…

Do you have automation and self-service capabilities in place that aren’t being used? Reader survey While debates continue over how best to lift the coronavirus lockdowns and regain some semblance of normality, IT teams are still very much dealing with the impact of the pandemic.…

Web sites and services tied to older versions of OpenSSL and GnuTLS have been dropping like flies On Saturday, at 10:48 UTC, Sectigo's AddTrust legacy root certificate expired, causing a bit of weekend havoc for thousands of websites and services that rely on it for making a secure TLS/SSL connection.…

Internet Society also weighs in with worries about vague definition of 'open' Mozilla has cautioned that the Indian government's plan to develop a national GovTech framework risks "open-washing".…

Maybe hitting Intel's year-old Project Athena spec counts? Fujitsu’s PC unit has announced a new range of laptops it says are "optimized for remote work".…

Just what will happen to all that tasty location and contact data? A bi-partisan group of US senators are preparing a new bill that would ensure privacy protections in coronavirus tracking apps, as legislative interest grows in what contact-tracing will entail.…

Driver braked but it was too late Video A Tesla Model 3 plowed straight into the side of an overturned truck lying across a highway in Taiwan, sparking fears the driver trusted the car's Autopilot a little too much.…

Yeah, we know 'just' is doing a lot of hard work, we're being flippant Security researcher Bhavuk Jain has landed a $100,000 payday after he reported a critical flaw in Apple’s sign-in system that could be exploited to access countless accounts on sites from Dropbox and Spotify to Airbnb.…

And, oh look, Anonymous returns. Completely forgot all about them As US cities saw cops fly off the handle at those protesting police brutality and systemic racism over the weekend, drama inevitably spilled into the electronic world, although in unusual ways.…

Copyright infringement claim 'not in anyone’s interest' responds org Several of the world’s largest publishers have sued the Internet Archive for its “emergency library” of 1.3 million books, claiming the organization is engaging in “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”…

Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces – other IRS that can ruin your day Wireless networking researchers have proposed a way to jam wireless signals without power.…

Integration with Azure suits both sides Microsoft was prominent at the virtual Dockercon event last week as the companies extended their agreement to work together on integration between Docker and the Azure cloud.…

Chinese giant slips out superslim - 7.49mm - flagship and pals Chinese smartphone brand Vivo - one of several from the BBK stable - has lifted the lid on its latest flagship phones, whose gimmick is that they are super-slim, although the focus is on photography.…

Cybercrooks take revenge after planned heist failed The REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware gang has just published what it claimed were files stolen from UK power grid middleman Elexon.…

It's too long a retention period, say digital rights campaigners Privacy rights campaigners are to legally challenge the British government's decision to retain for two decades the data of people that test positive for COVID-19 under the test-and-trace system.…

Windows bod acknowledges project's influence on WinGet Microsoft's Andrew Clinick, a group program manager in the Windows team who is involved with the development of the WinGet package manager, has tried to make good with the open-source community by publishing an acknowledgement of what was borrowed from the existing AppGet project.…

But that's exactly what will happen if you decorate Androids with pretty mountain scene A picturesque Android wallpaper image is exhibiting some unwelcome side effects on most Android phones, effectively "soft-bricking" them until the user manages to perform a factory reset.…

Too bad, Craig. Now, about those court costs? A self-described "blockchain expert" claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin has had his attempt to sue a YouTuber, who made a video rubbishing that claim, laughed out of the UK High Court.…

Also: Rocket Lab reschedules, ESA probe eats comet exhaust, China shares space station plans Roundup As well as that launch and docking, there was plenty to amuse rocket fans last week as China unveiled space station plans, ESA aimed for more bonus science and Rocket Lab named the date. Again.…

First financial TITSUP* of June goes to... Updated UK retail banking giant Lloyds Banking Group's online services have rung in June with a wobble.…

Also: Multi-window Teams, Skype does the Blankety Blank dance, and more Roundup It has been a busy seven days in Redmond. In addition to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update finally being released, we also saw Skype flashing nine tired lockdown faces at once, some Azure database tweaks and more.…

You say fintech, they say findom, let's call the whole thing BOFH Bork!Bork!Bork! There is a cautionary tale in today's edition of finest bork as a digital sign does exactly as instructed, but perhaps not quite as intended.…

Here's hoping the winner does a better job than Sopra Steria The UK Home Office is set to begin talking to tech and outsourcing services suppliers to assess how the Visas and Citizenship (V&C) Directorate can hand over large chunks of its operations to the private sector in deals that could be worth up to £1bn.…

And if you win, we'll make it into a kitemark British companies have been offered access to a £400k pot of cash to design a UK-specific "kitemark" assurance scheme for Internet of Things products.…

There are perks to starting out as online-only, says Gartner Most smartphone vendors unsurprisingly experienced precipitous sales declines in the first quarter of 2020. Most, that is, except Xiaomi, which improbably managed to beat the odds by upping shipments to grab market share.…

Even the aircon worked in the Muskmobile SpaceX and NASA have finished a fine weekend's work after the Crew Dragon capsule successfully made it into orbit and docked at the International Space Station…

Beware the forgotten bit of test text lurking in the application Who, Me? Surprise! It's Monday again! The weekend has evaporated once more, so pour a coffee, steal one of the expensive executive biscuits and tuck in for another tale of reader woe in The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Workstation has one job: running VMs. And now it can do it on Windows with Hyper-V enabled Microsoft and VMware have ended an ancient grudge that made the latter's Workstation desktop hypervisor behave badly on Windows.…

As he gives us version 5.7 with support for Apple power tech and better exFAT Linux kernel overlord Linus Torvalds has railed against 80-character-lines as a de facto programming standard and has moved to make reminders to keep things short a thing of the past.…

They’re not very sophisticated, but they’re working: Watch and learn how to fight back Webcast You’ve probably had the COVID-19 coronavirus social-engineering scams quietly filtering into, hopefully, your junk folder by now. Featuring anything from bogus medical research with malware-laden URLs to one-to-one approaches offering fake vaccines, it’s not taken very long.…

Plus: Amazon mulls snapping up self-driving startup Roundup Let's catch up on recent bits and bytes from the world of machine-learning.…

New agency will hustle small retailers onto digital payments and teach seniors how to Internet Singapore has crated a new “SG Digital Office” to “drive the Government’s initiatives to accelerate digital adoption in our community, as we embark on a phased recovery post COVID-19.”…

May well have been killer algorithm, too Australia will refund more than AU$720m (US$480M) to residents adjudged to owe the Federal government a debt that did not exist.…

Plus other news from infosec land this week Roundup Six Cisco-operated servers were hacked via SaltStack security vulnerabilities, the networking giant revealed this week.…

Bob and Doug are first humans launched into orbit by Elon's Muskteers Video NASA has successfully launched two American astronauts aboard an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade, sending them off toward the International Space Station. It also marks SpaceX's first launch of humans into orbit.…

There's a starship waiting for the sky, he'd like to come meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds Video In yet another setback for Elon Musk's beloved steel spaceship, a SpaceX Starship prototype has exploded on the pad during a rocket test burn.…

There's a starship waiting for the sky, he'd like to come meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds Video In yet another setback for Elon Musk's beloved steel spaceship, a SpaceX Starship prototype has exploded on the pad during a rocket test burn.…

'No evidence of damage to network or computers, no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data' On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state's voter registration system.…

'No evidence of damage to network or computers, no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data' On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state's voter registration system.…

Land Of The Free to List All The Websites You Use Twitter, Reddit, and the Internet Association on Thursday filed a legal brief in support of a challenge to the US State Department's policy of requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media handles and profiles.…

Land Of The Free to List All The Websites You Use Twitter, Reddit, and the Internet Association on Thursday filed a legal brief in support of a challenge to the US State Department's policy of requiring visa applicants to disclose their social media handles and profiles.…

Probing by El Reg's Chris Mellor highlighted in class-action complaint A US law firm is seeking owners of certain shingled Western Digital drives to join a class-action suit against the storage slinger, alleging the manufacturer didn't document its use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in kit aimed at RAID arrays.…

Probing by El Reg's Chris Mellor highlighted in class-action complaint A US law firm is seeking owners of certain shingled Western Digital drives to join a class-action suit against the storage slinger, alleging the manufacturer didn't document its use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in kit aimed at RAID arrays.…

SaaS is no replacement for disaster recovery as we're about to find out next month Webcast While moving into cloud working environments often meets a fair degree of push-back, the other side of the coin is that businesses believe throwing everything into the cloud makes them suddenly immune to any of the previous, established occupational hazards of networking technology.…