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First step to self-driving vehicles on British roads RoTM Self-driving vehicles have taken a modest step forward towards legality, with the UK's Department for Transport (DfT) launching a Call for Evidence that will determine the safety and efficacy of Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) with an aim to legalise the technology by spring 2021.…

Profits collapse and income slows as virus stymies turnaround plan Capita, wayward poster child of the UK outsourcing industry, has reported a £28.5m loss in the first half of 2020 as it struggles with the effects of COVID-19 as well as executing a much-needed business turnaround plan.…

'How exactly do you expect someone to review this monstrosity?' Paragon Software is trying to get its NTFS driver into the Linux kernel, but has submitted it as a single dump of 27,000 lines of code, sparking complaints that it is too large to review.…

Some of the providers have staggered back to feet Updated One of the UK's larger data centres has suffered a major service outage affecting customers across the hosting, cloud, and telecommunications sectors.…

Oh, that's right. It was a farce Baroness Dido Harding, head of the UK's COVID-19 Test and Trace organisation and former CEO of TalkTalk, is set to lead the National Institute for Health Protection, the agency being created by the government to replace Public Health England.…

'We will never be able to avoid outages entirely' CTO confesses Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, together with principal program manager overseeing "outage communications" Sami Kubba, has posted about advancing the "outage experience" – not the phrase that usually comes to mind when a cloud failure ruins your day.…

Have containers, will travel Interview Edinburgh-based Skyrora launched its two-stage Skylark Micro rocket from Iceland over the weekend. The Register spoke to business operations manager Derek Harris about the mission and what comes next.…

You need to give that plate back to us after you've finished your cake. Yes the fork too. We'll get your coat The clock is ticking. Microsoft has warned customers its services won't be supported on the veteran browser within the year.…

'The world is hybrid,' the enterprise tech goliath keeps saying HPE has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cabinet Office in what the firm itself described as a "significant departure from the Cloud First policy" initially adopted by the British government in 2013.…

But will it be any good? Chinese smartphone maker ZTE is expected to introduce the world's first commercially available phone with an under-screen selfie camera next month.…

Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters can mix and match architectures for production workloads Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now runs and is supported for production workloads on the cloud colossus’ Arm-powered servers.…

If at first you don't succeed, try, try... try, try, try... try again The Node.js community has finally taken steps to address a longstanding bug that has been hobbling XHR requests over HTTP/2 in Chromium-based browsers, though the fix won't be immediately available to everyone.…

Who needs a new phone when 2018-vintage kit still packs a punch? Samsung has has said it will now deliver three generations of Android to many of its smartphones, a significant shift in policy with the potential to shake up the handset market.…

Plotting new Enterprise Video Sharing Cloud, making mischief for Microsoft, or playing politics? Database and ERP giant Oracle is reportedly preparing a counter-bid to upset Microsoft’s planned purchase of video-sharing social network TikTok.…

Vows to vote for Democrat Joe Biden instead - as will ex-HP chief Carly Fiorina Former HPE chief exec and former Republican candidate for governor of California Meg Whitman has said she will support Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the upcoming US presidential election.…

Connected car vision has been in first gear for years, cloudy scale could jump-start plans Toyota has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services in ways that will see many of its models upload performance data into the Amazonian cloud to expand the services the auto-maker offers to drivers and fleet owners.…

Picks out porkie about data leakage as left and right unite to protest ad giant’s objections Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has slammed Google’s campaign against the nation’s imminent laws that would force it to pay local publishers for linking to their journalism.…

How much d’you reckon Trump wants to grant a pardon? Edward Snowden has brought in a healthy $1.25m in speaking fees ever since he jumped on a plane to Hong Kong with a treasure trove of NSA secrets, a new court filing [PDF] has revealed.…

Two-faced ISP gets $250,000 tickle, will be watched by independent monitor CenturyLink has been caught trying to steal rivals’ customers despite signing a court document promising it would do no such thing.…

Brush up on your data security and protection skills in our upcoming show Webcast If ever there was a convenient push to move stragglers into the cloud, the COVID-19 coronavirus has provided that impetus.…

In America, student schools you! Albion College has a plan for students to return safely to campus this fall amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. It involves being tracked by an app that, at least until a few days ago, appears to have been insecure.…

Commerce Department doubles down on China chip sanctions The US Commerce Department on Monday took further steps to deny Huawei access to American chip-making technology – with the announcement of more restrictions on the China-based telecom goliath and its affiliates.…

Ho boy, here we go again The download page for veteran code wrangler Notepad++ has apparently been blocked by Chinese authorities after its website posted a message in support of those opposing China's so-called national security law.…

F**k the algorithm, indeed The UK government has performed a massive U-turn on A Level exam results, promising to use teachers' assessments of students instead of the computer-driven system that caused havoc and sparked protests over the past week.…

We'll help your organisation better run workloads out in the field Webcast We’re not going back to the office anytime soon. Sorry to keep banging on about this, but we’re experiencing one of the most seismic shifts in daily work culture since the invention of the telephone.…

Oof moment for industry body as tests halted for a month Exclusive British infosec accreditation body CREST has suspended all of its accreditation exams after The Register revealed a published cache of files including what appeared to be internal exam sheets as well as docs apparently tied to key industry player NCC Group.…

Kubernetes is too complex, so we made a dashboard for 'normal devs' says senior engineer Kubecon Europe Mirantis, which sells a cloud platform based on OpenStack, has acquired the intellectual property rights for Lens, an open-source management dashboard for Kubernetes.…

Now with 67-70 per cent real turkey! You would hope that we've run the gamut of inappropriate British monuments in 2020, but this one really takes the formed-meat biscuit.…

Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you American chip designer Qualcomm has demonstrated what it claimed was the world's first high-bandwidth 5G data call using the n28 (700MHz) low-spectrum band.…

Also: NASA and SpaceX name the date for Crew-1, Orion assembly almost done, and more In brief Arianespace logged a fifth successful mission for 2020 with the launch of the delayed Ariane 5 from Guiana Space Center at 22:04 UTC on 15 August.…

ISA-agnostic OpenFive unit will focus on custom SoCs while parent will crack on with CPU blueprints RISC-V processor specialist SiFive will double down on improving its CPU cores after pushing its system-on-chip design efforts into a new unit.…

Why? It's all about DevOps, says CTO Chris Wright Interview As KubeCon Europe and CloudNativeCon 2020 gets under way, delivered this time in the cloud, Red Hat has said its OpenShift Kubernetes distribution is now ready for edge computing.…

Also: Visual Studio Code update, new toys for Kubecon, and 25 years of the Start Button In brief While eyes were on its new phone, Microsoft slipped out a pair of updates to the Insider version of Windows 10.…

Age-old franchise gets new lease of life, albeit with rough edges Review Tomorrow the eagerly awaited 2020 incarnation of Microsoft Flight Simulator lands. The Register had a play with the release version and was impressed with this first draft.…

Plus: AI app for the visually impaired – and Clearview lawyers up In brief A tech savvy Reddit dweller has trained a machine-learning model to mimic David Attenborough’s world-famous plummy voice.…

Two other councils named in suit say: Not us, guv Facial-recognition tech firm Neology is suing a bunch of town and city councils in the UK after it failed to win a contract to install ANPR cameras across the North East.…

Astoundingly naughty students are your new case study on how not to manage personal device access to SaaS 94 Australian public schools will be without email for up to a week after students responded to mistaken use of a mailing list with horrible content, which in turn sparked a Reply-All storm that asked for the circulation of email nasties to stop.…

But please be aware this is a family museum Bork!Bork!Bork! Everyone loves a big a screen, none more so than Microsoft's Windows, which finds the devices irresistible when it comes to splashing unfortunate messages all over them.…

Did you know email can reach almost anyone in the world instantly and is great for marketers? Thanks for letting us know, SAP SAP has published a “Business trends” blog post that offers business etiquette advice so utterly obvious that a million thrice-recycled LinkedIn posts explaining how not to fail at life now seem clever by comparison.…

Cookies? Check. Coffee? Check. Warned security that the cast of The Matrix is on their way up? Er... Who, Me? Monday is here and sunshine has turned to showers in the UK. Take your mind off the "shorts or umbrella" quandary with an unusual tale of vampires, dating, and recreating The Matrix in Sun Microsystems' Chicago lobby courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? column.…

Plus: Someone's gunning for Mac developers In brief The US Department of Justice said a combined operation has led to its largest seizure of terrorist-owned cryptocurrency, taking around $2m (£1.5m) from Hamas’s military wing, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).…

Up to 15 SMT8 CPU cores per chip, Power ISA 3.1 support, and other bits and bytes Hot Chips Big Blue hopes to roll out its first commercial 7nm data-center-grade processors – the IBM Power10 series – by the end of 2021.…

President says ‘other’ Chinese companies could feel the ban-hammer US president Donald Trump has suggested the United States may ban Chinese tech giant Alibaba.…

Already a big mover in Foundation projects like Presto, GraphQL, Osquery and ONNX, so why not go all-in? Facebook has upgraded its Linux Foundation membership and by doing so will assume a seat on the organisation's board.…

YouTubers advised of opportunity to ‘get involved’ in some kind of push-back Google’s Australian tentacle has published a pair of protestations that repudiate Australia’s “News Media Bargaining Code” plan to have the advertising giant pay local news outlets for linking to their content.…

Which may be why PM Narendra Modi has also announced a cyber security policy Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has marked the nation’s Independence Day by pledging to connect all of India’s villages to optic fibre within 1,000 days.…

One-year deal worth quarter of a million dollars The US Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $224,000 contract to Clearview AI to purchase “information technology components,” in a deal sealed this week.…

DoD said to get extension to avoid crackdown on Chinese comms kit The crackdown on telecoms gear from Huawei and other Chinese companies in federal networks will not apply to US Department of Defense, at least for a few more weeks.…

China wants to break free from reliance on those outside the homeland More than a hundred TSMC employees have fled the world’s largest semiconductor fab, by market cap, to join smaller, less well-known Chinese chip factories after being promised much higher salaries.…

So surprising, what with the pandemic and Uncle Sam being so welcoming for immigrants right now Too few H-1B hopefuls applied for employment visas this year that the US government has held an unprecedented second lottery to reach its annual quota.…