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We all need to tighten our belts For the first time in over three decades, BT has suspended its dividend scheme as the former state-owned teleco grapples with the fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the financial uncertainty that'll inevitably ensue.…

Secarma may be next for Inflexion buyout Cloud hosting biz UKFast's founders, Laurence and Gail Jones, have "exited the business" as a private equity firm ups its stake – all as UKFast itself starts eyeing up Jones-owned infosec biz Secarma.…

Things will change forever, nods ex-Facebooker Alex Stamos Video conferencing software biz Zoom has bought Keybase in a surprise move just weeks after hiring Facebook's one-time CSO.…

Multinationals' UK arms pair up to take on Voda and former state-owned telco Telcos Telefónica and Liberty Global today confirmed plans to join their O2 UK and Virgin Media subsidiaries into one combined entity in a deal analysts branded a "blockbuster merger".…

Advertise your open positions here for free, no catch, and find opportunities within Job Alert This week we've got job openings from all over the globe to tempt you, your friends or your past colleagues back into work, or indeed into new ventures.…

'B' is for basic controls that up and disappeared A study of the UK online advertising market, conducted by global accounting firm PwC, has found that publishers get just half of what advertisers spend, with the other half siphoned off by ad-supply chain intermediaries.…

NoSQL, no problem for Facebook-originating RocksDB MongoDB and fellow database biz Rockset have integrated products in a bid to make it easier to work with the NoSQL database through standard relational database query language SQL.…

One has the vulns, the other has the brass neck to pull off heists. Right? Russia might begin carrying out cyber attacks against Britain's 5G networks "at the behest of China", the chairman of a Parliamentary Select Committee has ventured.…

At last, we can write headlines with all the letters intact For a company defined by design and attention to detail, the Butterfly keyboard was a tremendous humiliation for Apple. Conceived in 2015, it replaced the previous scissor-switch mechanism for one with a smaller profile, allowing Cupertino to continue shrinking already-svelte laptops.…

It is time. We need a new Regism and cannot go to the pub to think of one. Can you help? It is no secret that we like to use the odd bit of shorthand at The Register when biting the hand that feeds IT. Now we need a fresh one for Microsoft.…

Remember when all we had to complain about were crappy rail services? Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's inexplicably long-lived series of digital signage suffering the odd public whoopsie.…

Cracks the 150,000-employee mark as revenue falls just short of $10bn Indian services giant HCL Technologies has wound up its 19/20 financial year by reporting 15 percent annual growth but a flat Q4.…

Automated operators can pay up like anyone – or anything – else Microsoft has detailed a new form of software licence it offers to non-human users.…

Enterprise demand set to soften, offset tier-two cloud, telco sales Global server shipments reached an industry record-breaking 3.3 million units in the first quarter of 2020, marking a 30 per cent year-on-year growth, Omdia analysts estimated this week.…

Lee Jae-yong ends dynastic control and will even let staff join a union Samsung's heir has said that he will not pass down management of the South Korean conglomerate to his children, ending three generations dynastic rule.…

Doesn't play well on iPhones, but bureaucrats rushed it out rather than wait months for perfection. Meanwhile serious bug reports have emerged Australia’s “COVIDSafe” contact-tracing app was rushed to market in the knowledge it would perform poorly on some devices and without agreements in place to let actual contact-tracers use the data it collects. As a result, no collected data has been used in at least 10 days since its launch.…

Decades-old theory may require a rethink thanks to Japanese probe The Moon is believed to have formed from the leftovers of a proto-Earth smashing into a Mars-sized Theia nearly 4.5 billion years ago.…

Australia bit barn outfit NEXTDC adds classic film reference to usual mix of resilience, connectivity and security Australian serial entrepreneur Bevan Slattery has revealed that he told the architects of a data centre he funded to make it resemble the sets used in classic submarine flick The Hunt for Red October.…

Microsoft, Cisco, Google etc gang up to form Open RAN Policy Coalition Some of America’s super-corps have remembered how the US became the dominant global technology force it is, and have vowed to use innovation over threats to counter Chinese dominance in 5G markets.…

OK, a third agreed with Thales when it asked the question About a third of firms and organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa still believe the humble password is a good enough security measure, according to a survey carried out by French firm Thales.…

ML eggheads, devs get more bang for their buck, say OpenAI duo Machine-learning algorithms are improving in performance at a rate faster than that of the underlying computer chips, we're told.…

Politicos watered down earlier efforts, so data defenders will fight to the end The small group of policy wonks that forced California’s legislature to rush through privacy legislation two years ago are back – and this time they want a ballot.…

Very '90s kit was everywhere – and it saved Apple's ass too On this day in 1998, Steve Jobs took to the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco for a product launch that would indelibly change the face of computing and arguably save the firm he founded almost 22 years earlier.…

It's a long, long buildup to CEO's soliloquy, it's a long way to go Knowledge 2020 With the long flights, late nights and early starts, IT conferences might seem endless. But with the shift to the online format becoming standard, for now at least, participants might be spared the trial of endurance.…

No, you still can't edit tweets Although editing published tweets still remains strictly verboten on Twitter, the microblogging anger echo chamber intends to prompt English-speaking iPhone-wielding users to double-check content before posting a reply that they might regret.…

'Seriously sometimes seems Google's moderators are only optimized to respond to social media outrage' Three weeks after Google removed 49 Chrome extensions from its browser's software store for stealing crypto-wallet credentials, 11 more password-swiping add-ons have been spotted – and some are still available to download.…

£399 for entry-level lappy, £1,599 for high-end pro kit Lockdown hasn't stopped Microsoft from releasing some of its new kit at least – the Washington-based tech giant today announced the Surface Go 2 and the Surface Book 3.…

Cisco's switch-slinging nemesis warns of business slipping back to 2018 levels Lead times for some of Arista's most popular network kit has doubled due to disruption to the supply chain caused by the novel coronavirus, and won't improve any time soon, CEO Jayshree Ullal is warning.…

Rub-a-dub-dub, give your buggy code a scrub GitHub has made its automated code-scanning tools available to all open-source projects free of charge.…

Last chance to have your say and share your experiences Reader survey With the IT world turned upside-down for many organisations, it’s a good time to talk network security. Or at least, it ought to be. Because while it’s something we all need more than ever, there’s almost always a gap between demand and budget, or between need and the ability to service that need.…

Bit lacking in the playback stamina stakes, however Huawei's wireless earbud lineup just got a new addition in the form of the Freebuds 3i, which packs active noise cancellation and a sub-£100 price tag.…

Developer biz bets virtualized environments will make it easier to engage with repos A year and a half after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub has integrated the company's popular source code editor, Visual Studio Code (VSC), and plans to make it available to users through a hosted service called Codespaces.…

Solidarity with their US counterparts in COVID-19 cost cutting measures Hyperconverger Nutanix has asked staff in EMEA and elsewhere "outside of the US" to take two weeks of unpaid leave as it continues to contain costs during the COVID-29 pandemic.…

Material improvements in strategic framework for mobile, web and, tentatively, desktop apps Google's first 2020 update of its cross-platform development toolkit has brought Flutter up to version 1.17 and the associated Dart language to 2.8.…

Happy 1.0 to the fruits of volunteer labour Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development.…

Clock speed? 1Ghz. 5G radio baked in? Nope. Supports display resolutions of 60Hz Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek has officially launched its latest G85 chipset, days after it appeared in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. The platform stays faithful to the company's playbook, and is a solid mid-range SoC, with an emphasis on graphics performance.…

Mozilla's finest shores up security features among other tweaks Third-placed browser Firefox has sought to arrest its slide in the rankings with the arrival of version 76, replete with beefed-up password features and tweaks to Picture-in-Picture functionality.…

Disclaimer: Black hole not visible, southern hemisphere required Astronomers have stumbled across the nearest black hole to us yet. The void lies at the heart of a stellar system just 1,000 light years away, and indications to its location are visible to the naked eye.…

Buddying up with wing man Elon NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has confirmed that sofa-jumping Top Gun star Tom Cruise is working with the agency on a film aboard the International Space Station (ISS).…

Oh mother! Broken compute board? Just slot a new one in Review Intel's Next Unit of Compute PCs debuted a few years back as a small form box that could hang on the back of a monitor using a VESA mount and screws. The machines were supposed to be easy to work on and fix, but were limited in terms of expansion capabilities and for some users, more power was needed.…

And we suppose he has a fantastic alternative too, right? One that has elements in common with VS Code? Mike Milinkovich, exec director of the Eclipse Foundation, has taken another swing at Microsoft-sponsored Visual Studio Code, claiming: "Anyone who relies on VS Code is then dependent on the future investment of Microsoft to continue supporting ongoing development of the product."…

'A new company will emerge from this pandemic' says CEO Nutanix has decided some of its previous financial targets no longer apply and tipped off investors that its Q3 results won't be far off its previous predictions.…

Capsule tested atop Long March 5B can also get China to the Moon China has successfully launched a prototype of its next-generation spacecraft.…

But its language has changed from 'clear a space under the tree' to 'our goal remains late 2020 delivery' Microsoft appears to be softening up gamers for the prospect of no new Xbox for Christmas 2020.…

Also: Arianespace gets ready for a return to action while Rocket Lab shows off its US launchpad Roundup Signs of life were detected back on Earth last week as space launch industry looked to resume operations.…

Naughty posters on hijacked subdomain show up in search results A forgotten subdomain on PricewaterhouseCoopers' dot-com has been hijacked to host ads for porno websites and apps, neatly demonstrating why you should not neglect your corporate DNS records.…

Add low latency to the list of things on offer to billionaires building civillisation-fail boltholes in South Pacific Microsoft has announced an Azure region in New Zealand.…

Other fun places also get to let people in again, just don't read the economic data before you go because that's no fun at all Hong Kong will reopen video game arcades as the city begins to ease its pandemic precautions and attempts to kick its economy into a higher gear.…

Which is just dandy seeing as deliveries are just a wee bit important right now Transport company Toll Group has been slugged by ransomware for the second time in three months.…

Late-night notifications come as opposition labels app ‘surveillance system with no oversight’ The Indian government has acknowledged “potential security issues” in the Aarogya Setyu contact-tracing app which its opposition labels as a ‘surveillance system with no oversight,’ but says the code issues are not that big a deal.…