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Drones and satellite imagery probably better than sending out four helicopters at a time – or counting poop Herbivores may not be the first things that spring to mind when devising the latest application of the technology world's overflowing toolbox, but there it is.…

A big, red triangle on your screen? A security issue, not a foreign film alert Bork!Bork!Bork! UK broadcaster ITV came under the baleful gaze of bork over the weekend as an unexpected expiration left its online player shorn of those precious advertisements.…

Letter to Brit-based workers talks of 'new uncertainties for business' caused by pandemic Wipro has warned UK staff that some of them may be laid off due to "uncertainties" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – even though the chairman claimed at an AGM that no jobs would be shed during the global crisis.…

UK portable sales-out (the stuff shipped to customers) more than double in lockdown buying frenzy Businesses and consumers emptied distributors’ warehouses of notebooks across the UK during Q2 as lockdown kicked in, even buying stock that had been sat on the shelves for 12 months gathering dust.…

Systems dev, technical product manager, and more Job Alert It's Friday again, and we're back with another list of opportunities for roles in the big and beautiful world of tech.…

Damn you coronavirus, and save some anger for the technical challenges plaguing heir-to-Hubble NASA has announed a seven-month delay to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the thirty-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.…

Up from the depths / Thirty stories high / Breathing fire / Its head in the sky / IT'S EMAIL! On Call The week is almost done, and Friday sees the start of the delightful tumble that ends in the weekend. Start your roll with a tale from those unfortunates forced to deal with the foolishness of others in The Register's On Call feature.…

Helped by product business growing well and staff not being keen on new jobs right now Indian services outfit HCL says the worst of the COVID-19-induced economic downturn is behind it. And we should all wish that our worst is as bad as HCL’s because the company just posted strong results for Q1 2021.…

Seemingly offers Huawei alternative and challenges old-school telco vendors. Now to prove its chops by building an Indian 5G net for Jio Platforms Indian industrial conglomerate Reliance Industries has announced that it has developed its own 5G network infrastructure and hopes to offer it as a manged service to carriers worldwide.…

World Wide Web Consortium urged to get its governance act together Earlier this week, 20 web advertising companies wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Advisory Board to ask that the standards organization revise its governance process to prevent ad tech giants like Google from running roughshod over the concerns of others with an interest in the web.…

We've heard of a code freeze but this is ridiculous: Microsoft finishes burying repos in Norwegian archipelago Microsoft's GitHub on Thursday said that earlier this month it successfully deposited a snapshot of recently active GitHub public code repositories to an underground vault on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.…

New rules define allow lists and deny lists, send masters and slaves to the Trash Apple has issued a new style guide that deprecates what it calls “non-inclusive language”, and has started to apply it to Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects.…

ASEAN to throw big sale on August 8th – a super-lucky day according to Chinese numerology The ten-state Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade bloc has decided that a regional internet splurge can help the region rise from plague-induced economic torpor.…

Chairman Mark Liu is carefully abiding by Uncle Sam's new rules Super-duper chip maker TSMC told investors it will stop exporting supplies to its number-two customer Chinese telecoms manufacturer Huawei from mid-September.…

Make sure your iThing installs these patches Apple has released a fresh batch of software security updates for its flagship devices.…

Power-sipping, phat bandwidth and dope density Great news for anyone who wants to use Slack and Google Chrome simultaneously: The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has formalised the spec for DDR5 SDRAM, expected to become the standard memory for most computing devices.…

'Completely unacceptable' spouts British Foreign Secretary Russian hackers at the state's FSB spy agency have been caught breaking into Western institutions working on potential vaccines for the COVID-19 coronavirus in hope of stealing said research. That's according to the British National Cyber Security Centre and America's NSA today.…

Chat and Meet rolled into the inbox along with other bells and whistles Google is to shovel yet more bells and whistles into its Gmail client in an effort to demonstrate its collaborative chops in an increasingly crowded marketplace.…

But don't try roasting a marshmallow over these hotspots ESA and NASA's Solar Orbiter probe has sent back images showing omnipresent miniature solar flares near the surface of the Sun, dubbed "campfires" by astroboffins.…

Ugggghhhhh, it's so unfair! Vodafone has urged the UK government to cancel Ofcom's upcoming 5G spectrum auction, where carriers can bid for access to the 700MHz and 3.6-3.8GHz bands.…

Shouty social network hopes external coders can make it a better place For the first time in eight years, Twitter plans to introduce a major revision to its API that describes how developers can access the platform's data.…

The spice data must flow (and it will – just through SCCs) The EU Court of Justice has struck down the so-called Privacy Shield data protection arrangements between the political bloc and the US, triggering a fresh wave of legal confusion over the transfer of EU subjects' data to America.…

Calm down, Intel. It'll be fixed Microsoft teased a future that Intel could only dream of as it unleashed a new Dev Channel build of Windows 10 that was deemed unsuitable for AMD CPU-equipped PCs.…

Will drive investment inwards as trade war continues Shares in SMIC — mainland China’s answer to Taiwanese silicon fabricator TSMC — soared nearly 202 per cent in their first day of trading, after the chipmaker debuted its public listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Board.…

Colossus Mk2 boasts of even more transistors than the top GPU Video British AI chipmaker Graphcore has announced a new series of hardware products based on its latest second-generation Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) known as the Colossus Mk2 GC200.…

They're still more popular in America... even 7 years after shopping spree Although proximal to the global application giant SAP, German-speaking users have yet to significantly take up its line-of-business applications, which arrived via acquisitions made during the nine-year tenure of former CEO Bill McDermott.…

And who's that in the background? Just Oracle and its *cough* 443 bugs Cisco has emitted 33 security bug fixes in its latest crop of software updates, five of those deemed critical.…

Major open-source projects need paid-for developers, but what is the business model? Interview The companies that do most to develop and evolve the LibreOffice productivity suite, both for desktop and cloud, say the project's business model is "beyond utterly broken" and that The Document Foundation (TDF), the charity that hosts the project, has to change its approach.…

Can't go worse than that time it bought 2.3 million Oracle licences. Right? The UK's Ministry of Justice has attempted to grab the interest of ERP software slingers by wafting around the prospect of a £100m deal.…

Asia-Pacific internet address registry strategist says smaller nations get better access – when their broadband works The move to virtual meetings among internet governance bodies has had mixed results, according to Joyce Chen, a senior advisor for strategic engagement at the Asia-Pacific internet registry APNIC.…

Pipeline looks good as C-level crystal balls predict need for more tech Indian services company Infosys has said that lower-than-planned costs for visas have helped it to record better-than-expected results for the first quarter of its financial year.…

Open-source Windows lookalike aims to fix its 'long neglected' storage stack The open-source ReactOS project has marked a "major milestone" by hiring a developer "full time at near-market rates."…

Failing mega-group discovers again it didn’t buy the right biz Arm was pressured by its owner Softbank to jack up its processor core licensing fees for some of its customers in an effort to squeeze more money out of its $32bn buy of the British chip designer, sources say.…

'Coordinated social engineering attack’ paved the way for miscreants to tweet out Bitcoin scam to millions Twitter has offered its initial analysis of the Wednesday mass hijacking of prominent twits' accounts – and suggested it all kicked off after its staff fell for social engineering.…

And lets the rest of its staff stay at home, because coronavirus Yahoo! Japan, the no-longer-a-joint-venture-with- Yahoo!- and still rather successful outpost of the web portal pioneer, has decided it will hire 100 strategic advisors and wants them to treat the company as a side hustle.…

$4.5bn splash turns out to be first installment in $10bn ‘Digitisation fund’ and development template for new products Google has revealed that $4.5bn of the $10bn “Indian digitisation fund” it revealed on Tuesday will go towards an investment in mobile carrier Jio Platforms.…

Multimillionaire found dead in flash pad by sister Tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh was discovered dismembered at his New York City condo this week.…

Financial bod suggests this will go nowhere, which is just what Dell's share price is doing, dammit! +Analysis Dell this week announced it is exploring a sale of the 81 percent chunk of VMware it owns and that is not publicly traded.…

Details start to emerge on real-world impact of Prez-signed secret memo The CIA is running a secret cyberwar including Russian-style hack-and-leak operations with little or no oversight, US officials have warned.…

Staff face being turned away at the border for nation's treatment of Uyghurs The US government announced on Wednesday it will "restrict" the US visas of foreigners working for Huawei and certain other Chinese technology companies.…

All work and no play makes… you’re coming with us, you clown Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is heading back to jail after he pleaded guilty to defrauding several thousand people out of millions of dollars by pushing what he claimed was a new, better, Bitcoin.…

Miscreants have already obtained more than $110K from the credulous Updated The Twitter accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and other celebrities were briefly taken over on Wednesday, along with the accounts of various cryptocurrency businesses and affiliated executives, to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

Autopsy finds rip-off gear is mainly about making coin, not bugging your network Two types of fake Cisco switches – discovered after a software upgrade hobbled counterfeit gear at an unidentified IT firm – appear to have been designed for profit rather than espionage.…

Admins sent scrambling after software mysteriously starts crashing Updated Microsoft's desktop email client Outlook has stopped working worldwide for countless users, whether they are using it with an on-premises Exchange server or with the Office 365 cloud.…

What are the upstarts doing right and the market incumbents doing wrong? Reader survey With network security increasingly positioned as an enabler of future business success, making the right purchasing decision in this area is more important than ever.…

'Retaliation should be public and painful' says Beijing-approved rag The ink has scarcely dried on the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport's speech to the House of Commons that confirmed Huawei would be banned from the UK.…

Sales crash by 20% and that break-even period has just been pushed out by up to another year Brit retailer Dixons Carphone has cautioned that the COVID-19 crisis is wreaking havoc on its already struggling Mobile division as sales continue to plunge and the prospect of breaking even is extended further.…

Vestager vexed Apple has had a €13bn (£11.6bn) tax bill overturned after the EU's General Court ruled that the iGiant was not the recipient of unlawful state aid from the Republic of Ireland.…

Ex-MD Jens Amail returns to Germany, and we can't blame him Former Microsoft veep Michiel Verhoeven has been appointed as the new managing director of SAP UK & Ireland to replace Jens Amail who is returning to Germany after two-and-a-half years in the role.…

Yet Virtzilla still won't say how many paying punters are actually using its Amazonian cloud VMware has made some notable tweaks to its AWS-powered cloud service.…