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Big Blue reopens window of opportunity, no end date mentioned IBM has extended the window of opportunity for its Global Technology Services workforce in the UK to nominate themselves for voluntary redundancy after too few people put their hand up in the allotted time.…

Less fashionable than React Native, but a mature solution for .NET developers Microsoft continues to evolve its Xamarin technology for cross-platform coding with .NET, even though alternatives like React Native and Blazor are getting plenty of attention within the company.…

Look on my beanpoleness, ye Blighty, and mea-sure! Far away enough? Check our converter and find out! As you nervously shuffle away from your close-talking neighbour who always stood too near at the best of times, tutting and muttering "social distancing", you may wonder to yourself just what two metres or six feet should really look like. Luckily, El Reg's Standards Soviet is here to help.…

Your search ranking will suffer less if you just make it a bit rubbish instead As companies shut their doors against the coronavirus outbreak, Google has released a set of guidelines to website owners on how to minimise the long-terms effects on their business's search ranking.…

How to Excel (sorry) on the helldesk On Call Well done! You've made it to Friday! As a reward, treat yourself to another cup of tea and an extra slice of toast, and enjoy a morning story of panicking users and level-headed IT pros in today's On Call.…

Folks at one Antarctic base have noisy, stinky, neighbors right now. And they're isolated until November Reg readers confined to quarters for the duration of the global coronavirus pandemic are probably not enjoying being at home all day, every day.…

We talk to CF's CTO as missing piece added to open-source application platform Cloud Foundry, an open-source foundation dedicated to a cloud-oriented application platform, is now incubating the KubeCF project, and has also welcomed Google upgrading its membership to platinum – the highest level.…

Symantec, Cisco, Uber and the loathsome Juul shed most staff in the tech sector The State of California has released its newest report on job losses, and it's not pretty.…

Terahertz nanoplasma kit makes traditional transistors look slow in comparison Scientists have crafted a tiny flexible electrical device capable of generating terahertz waves that can penetrate walls and microscopic cells, potentially paving the way for new imaging techniques – and fast switching in chips.…

The nation is already well and truly routed, and telcos have new taxes to pay India’s networking equipment market collapsed before the Coronavirus could stab it in the back, thanks in part to a new tax on telcos.…

Vodafone, Orange, AT&T, and Softbank are already users, will soon have Azure option Microsoft has become the latest company to have a crack at helping telcos prepare for 5G by acquiring network specialist Affirmed Networks.…

You can’t seriously be asking why. Do you live under a rock? The reason is coronavirus Dell today slipped out a regulatory filing in which it withdrew the financial guidance it offered in late February.…

Videos claiming to have magic savior pills racked up millions of views amid allegedly fraudulent investment scheme A social-media marketer is understood to be the first person to be hit with a federal fraud charge in the US for allegedly trying to trick people into investing in a bogus COVID-19 cure.…

Presumed pandemic profiteering may be just confused staff Analysis Earlier this week, Monkeybrains, a San-Francisco-based internet service provider, asked ZayoGroup, a communication infrastructure biz based in Boulder, Colorado, to temporarily upgrade a network circuit from 2Gbps to 10Gbps.…

Team Redmond stokes the flames as an exercise in black humor Microsoft is right now groaning under the weight of a 52,000-person internal Reply-All email storm.…

Oh Ce-Celia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to phone home For much of its life, Huawei didn't have to think too much about its software ecosystem, at least with regard to its once-growing Western market. But then Donald Trump pulled the rug out from underneath the Middle Kingdom mobe maker with a Google embargo.…

'We believe the stolen graphics IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of our graphics products' On Wednesday, AMD confirmed intellectual property related to its graphics processors was stolen last year, though insisted the leaked files will not damage its business nor compromise product security.…

East Coast looks to be hardest hit. C'mon, Chocolate Factory, we're relying on you to pull us through A bunch of Google services, from Gmail and Google Drive to Hangouts and Classroom, fell offline for unlucky netizens in North America today.…

Chocolate Factory's software souk still Trumped, so you'll have to make do with AppGallery Undeterred by US boycotts, Huawei has pushed out a new range of Android smartphones without the Google software that usually comes with them.…

Was 0.5mm of laptop really worth five years of pain, Tim? Teardown terrors iFixit have opened up the innards of the new MacBook Air to reveal not only the departure of the hated butterfly keyboard, but also tweaks that might make things a bit more repairable. Kind of.…

Online sales up 72%, but retailer warns of impact of store closures Online sales at Dixons Carphone shot up as Brits began preparing en masse to work from home by shelling out on notebooks, printers and – to keep the kids happy – games consoles, in response to the spread of COVID-19.…

Flagship's snappers would be great if we weren't under lockdown Hands on Huawei, when translated from the original Chinese, means "terrible timing"*. Case in point: the Huawei P40 Pro packs one of the best smartphone cameras yet, but comes at a time when most people are (or should be) self-isolating.…

Citrix, Cisco and Zoho-pwning APT41 attack wave seems in awfully bad taste Proving that no good crisis ever goes to waste, Chinese government hacking crew APT41 launched a campaign that abuses vulns in Citrix Netscaler and Zoho ManageEngine, according to threat intel outfit FireEye.…

Try the Tablet Experience and pretend the Windows 8 Tablet Mode never happened Microsoft celebrated the arrival of a new boss for the Windows Insider Program with a fresh build and another crack at dealing with Windows 10's often maddening approach to tablets.…

Erm, guys, this is lovely. But isn't selling new kit pretty important? Samsung has announced an update for the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10 that will imbue them with powers previously only available on the newer Galaxy S20 range.…

Microsoft makes sandwiches and Intel empties its factories of protective gear Roundup Welcome to another round-up of bandwagon-hopping and genuine altruism from big tech as the industry continues its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Pyjama party for NAND and DRAM flinger Chipmaker Micron forecast quarterly revenues above analysts' estimates as the novel coronavirus outbreak fuels demand for notebooks and data centre services.…

What will be the fate of an open-source project relied upon by so many? In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.…

Java Database Connectivity built in to hook up easily with analytics tools Graph database spinner Neo4j has built Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) into its tech as standard with the promise of making life easier for users of popular analytics and visualisation tools who want to work on graph data.…

No snark, just something to help an IT industry in need It won't have escaped anyone in the tech community and the wider world that we are in for some challenging times.…

Zoomarine: Oceans of fail Bork!Bork!Bork! Worried about The Rise Of The Machines in these troubled times? Cheer yourself up with another example of what computers get up to when humans aren't watching, courtesy of your self-isolated vultures at The Register.…

Sure, the bullet couldn't shift a big boulder, but it may have learned Ryugu's composition and birthday Astroboffins have analysed what happened when the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 shot a 2kg Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) at asteroid Ryugu in 2019.…

Sure, we'll delete local data after seven days but there's a way to avoid that After three years of escalating restrictions on third-party cookies to protect user privacy, Apple on Tuesday went all-in with full third-party cookie blocking.…

And ready to build the stuff that the rest of the world needs to stay online during the CoronaCrisis The vast majority of Huawei's employees are back to work following nationwide shutdowns implemented in response to the coronavirus outbreak in China.…

Isolation is the perfect time to learn new skills Promo Amid this planet's ongoing pandemic and stay-at-home measures, if you’re keen to repurpose all that time previously spent commuting, attending conferences, and so on, why not take a look at the SANS Institute’s Online Cybersecurity Training.…

Spacecraft instruments switched off after COVID-19 outbreak forces mission control to send workers home ESA will pause on-board operations of its spacecraft exploring our Solar System – after sending its mission control center staff home to help contain the coronavirus pandemic.…

Terms not revealed, but hopes are high that consolidation will be a good thing Japanese display giant Sharp will gobble NEC's display business in a push to expand into North America and Europe.…

And that's perhaps not the worst of viral idiocy in Australia: One minister made up a cyber-attack to cover for inadequate web provisioning Police have charged an Australian moron who coughed on a copper in Coffs Harbour and claimed he was suffering from COVID-19.…

Team explains privacy preservation plan and how smartphones' wireless prowess is wildly variable Singapore plans to open source a smartphone app its digital government team has developed to track citizens' encounters with Coronavirus carriers.…

Execs make new plea to shareholders in hostile takeover battle Executives at HP Inc have made yet another pitch to shareholders in their effort to ward off a hostile takeover by Xerox.…

Alternative headline: Jun Murai remembers he has a /8 under the fridge Special report IPv6 advocate Jun Murai today announced he will effectively sell more than 14 million IPv4 addresses and put all the proceeds – expected to top US$300m – into a trust co-owned with APNIC, Asia-Pacific's internet overseer.…

Majority of academic studies into hospital image processing aren't subjected to clinical testing Don’t fall for overblown claims that AI algorithms are just as good as, or even better, than human doctors at diagnosing diseases from medical images. That's according to a study published in The British Medical Journal on Wednesday.…

And now back on their feet after global two-hour wobble Symantec customers, or rather Broadcom customers these days, were taken offline for a while on Wednesday when the security service's data centers around the planet went down.…

Having trouble wrangling your data? It can probably automate that Informatica is boasting a total of 25 new features across its suite of data management technologies which could all be grouped under the phrase "we can automate that!"…

Get your patch in place to avoid future data loss HPE has told customers that four kinds of solid-state drives (SSDs) in its servers and storage systems may experience failure and data loss at 40,000 hours, or 4.5 years, of operation.…

Flight risk remains, says judge as she refuses bail attempt Julian Assange has failed to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to get out of prison – after a judge ruled that his previous antics made him a flight risk.…

Staying upright as more restrictions slapped on its clouds Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put a brave face on things yesterday as the Windows giant's infrastructure creaks under "unprecedented" load.…

We've already made that 'Royole with cheese' joke, right? In late 2018, Shenzhen startup Royole released the world's first commercially available foldable phone – the Royole Flexpai. Reviews weren't great, with one journo describing it as "charmingly awful". It only really entered the public consciousness due to the antics of Escobar Inc, which rebadged the Flexpai and sold it for £300. None were actually delivered.…

Branded lunchbox biz didn't answer for 5 days, alleges infosec firm Tupperware, maker of the plastic food containers beloved of the Western middle classes, has an active and ongoing malware infection on its website that steals credit card data and passes it to criminals.…

Microsoft expands preview of T4 Tensor Core-flavoured Azure Stack Edge It isn't only workers being sent home as Microsoft announced an expansion of its warmed-over Azure Stack Edge preview, replete with Nvidia GPU goodness, at the GPU Technology Conference this week.…