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Plus: Zuck wants machines to spot bad memes on Facebook Roundup The world of artificial intelligence keeps on turning: here's a summary of what's been going down.…

What lots are in the public sector pork barrel? Hardware, software, cloud services, security... plus chatbots and blockchain A group of London NHS trusts has awarded a gaggle of IT resellers, integrators, and service companies a place on a framework contract worth up to a total of £3bn.…

Japanese Uber-investor refreshing board as Ma heads off to do good works Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma will step down from the board of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank after a 13-year stint.…

This hack owes it all to a dalliance with a TMS9900 40 years ago. How about you? Times are tough for the custodians of Blighty's computing history as both the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and Cambridge's Centre for Computing History have found themselves bereft of visitors, events and income, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown. Can you help?…

Reg man samples the Google-free life Review For over a month, I've immersed myself in Huawei's latest flagship blower: the P40 Pro. Not only does it represent the pinnacle in Huawei's R&D efforts, but it's also indicative of another thing: a schism in how Android works.…

Plus: Pop's Lady Gaga popped in hack, and more Roundup Let's catch you up on infosec news beyond the bits and bytes we've already reported.…

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the... BOOM Who, Me? The weekend is receding, and Monday lumbers into view. Delay the inevitable with a tale of nautical nonsense from The Register's regular Who, Me? column.…

Old treaties don't mention space mining and a new one could take forever the sign off. Enter the new 'Artemis Accords' NASA has laid out a new set of principles that it hopes will inform how states and private companies will interact on the Moon.…

Snyk offers a new approach for a new reality Webcast Digital transformation is a major change to your organisation and business. It means more software, and that means more software risk. The cloud means your infrastructure is now part of your application, blurring the lines on who is responsible for security. And DevOps has accelerated the deployment of software.…

Five Eyes-style Euro intel alliance Maximator tipped UK off about Crypto AG machines Dutch spies operating as a part of a European equivalent of the Five Eyes espionage alliance helped GCHQ break Argentinian codes during the Falklands War, it has been revealed.…

The Register presents White House transcript obtained by Stealth Anti-Tracing Intelligence Remote Exfiltration The Register has obtained the following transcript of a recent White House conversation between US President Donald Trump and advisors regarding the ban on American technology reaching Huawei.…

Seeing as India has launch sites nicely close to the equator, they should be interested India has decided to open its space industry to private companies.…

To boost the post-pandemic tax base Indonesia has released details of its tax on digital services, revealing it will kick in on July 1st at a rate of ten percent.…

To facilitate global payments, which is surely of interest to an investor in Alibaba Singapore’s state-owned investment firm Temasek holdings has joined the Facebook-led Libra not-a-cryptocurrency project.…

55 million users of $10 Bluetooth-enabled phones come into embrace of closed-source app India has delivered on its promise to adapt its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app for feature phones.…

Jeez, talk about bitter Setting aside the serious consequences of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic – loss of life, economic hardship, rising authoritarianism, and blissfully clear roads – there is a lesser but still troubling development.…

Export of semiconductors built using US tools to Chinese giant banned without a license The Trump administration on Friday officially clamped down on the use of US technology worldwide to manufacture chips for Huawei, cutting off the mega-corp from vital semiconductor supply chains.…

Lawsuit filed by shareholders who thought chip biz was onto something long-term rather than serving a fad Nvidia has been accused of under-reporting sales of graphics processors for cryptomining in an effort to distance itself from the volatile market.…

Programming language ready to leave the wilderness for mass adulation The Rust programming language celebrated its fifth birthday on Friday and says the future looks bright.…

Google's next, warns chief product officer Software AG is shunting its webMethods.io Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) at Microsoft's Azure cloud environment to snuggle up closer to the beast of Redmond.…

Don't worry, you can still microwave your dinner – even if this smells of ransomware An important middleman in the UK's electrical power grid has suffered a cyber attack, though the lights are still on across good old Blighty.…

Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came open to open source.…

Metropolitan Police's China-style surveillance runs up against reality Counter-coronavirus masks may thwart London police plans to deploy creepy facial-recognition cameras across the capital, senior managers have admitted.…

KCOM owner Macquarie was said to be among suitors Openreach boss Clive Selley has roundly dismissed a report out last night that BT was "in talks" with buyers to flog a multibillion-pound stake in its pipe-laying arm to investors.…

Advertise with us here, or browse the listings to see if a role would suit you Job Alert We've got more jobs for you to sift through this week as we continue our efforts to keep techies in work during these testing times.…

Hey, he's not causing any harm, unlike Norfolk's plague doctor creep While England may be awkwardly stumbling towards easing lockdown restrictions, the message to invading Anglo-Saxons is clear: one does not simply drive into Wales.…

We asked, you answered. Goodness, you answered The Register needed a Regism for our favourite blue screen merchant and we were heartened by the response. But as Connor MacLeod might say: "There can be only one."…

'People are going to lose a lot of time this year' The UK & Ireland SAP User Group has called on SAP to further extend its indirect software access licensing programme to give users time to respond to project timetables delayed by COVID-19.…

Back to the time when tape was king 2020 marks 60 years since ALGOL 60 laid the groundwork for a multitude of computer languages.…

Is that Jam on your XML? Or is it... oh no... Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to a tube-sized edition of The Register's column of reader-spotted signage silage, with a Transport for London (TfL) screen displaying its undergarments for all to see.…

Plans new sub cable running from the UK to Spain on just-about the longest route possible Facebook has backed a new submarine cable that it says will circumnavigate Africa and deliver three times more capacity than is currently connected to the continent.…

Tender loving care UK housing association People for Places, which runs a property portfolio worth around £3bn, has awarded Salesforce a software licensing contract for CRM and job scheduling worth £21m.…

Essay on role of internet during plague times also suggests online schooling may not be the finished article TCP-IP-co-developer Vint Cerf, revered as a critical contributor to the foundations of the internet, has floated the notion that privacy legislation might hinder the development of a vaccination for the COVID-19 coronavirus.…

Fault finding fail via the friends and family helpline On Call For those gradually losing track of days, today is Friday. The weekend is upon us, and rather than the communal trip to the pub we might have enjoyed in months past, instead enjoy another refreshing On Call yarn from those poor devils on the frontline.…

And reckons it can crack 100kw per rack with help from Yorkshire company Iceotope Dielectric fluids conduct heat but don’t conduct electricity, which is why they’re a fine way to cool electronics.…

Satellite data shows two huge iron blobs tussling under the surface Boffins think they have figured out why the magnetic North Pole is heading to Russia at such a relatively speedy rate. It's all down to two gigantic magnetic blobs of liquid iron hidden underneath the Earth’s surface, apparently.…

Ticks plenty of diplomatic and supply chain security boxes with build in State tipped to be less MAGA-happy in 2020 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's biggest chip maker, will build a $12bn chip factory in Arizona in what the company is calling a "strong partnership" with the US government.…

Outsourcer Interserve holds a number of UK defense contracts, among others Britain's Ministry of Defence contractor Interserve has been hacked, reportedly leaking the details of up to 100,000 of past and current employees, including payment information and details of their next of kin.…

As IBM becomes only cloud partner permitted to use Virtzilla's special subscription licence scrip VMware has completed the set of major hyperscale clouds running its flagship vSphere natively, after the launch of the Google Cloud VMware Engine.…

One other minimum requirement: You need to be in the southern hemisphere The venerable Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), run by NASA and ESA, has discovered a new comet visible right now with the naked eye from Earth's southern hemisphere.…

Big Blue accused of making 'promises to sales reps it never intended to keep' IBM has been dealt a setback in its effort to limit the commissions it pays salespeople following the revival of a commission-capping lawsuit that had been dismissed.…

Could have done with this years ago to stave off rise of advert blockers but fine, OK, whatever, now it's coming Google is preparing to starve resource-hungry ads that drain mobile device batteries and consume network resources.…

Plus: There are some worrying data protection implications Analysis The current wisdom states that the sole path from COVID-19 lockdown involves vigorous testing of the population to identify new cases, paired with contact-tracing to limit the spread of infections. Smartphones make that easier, and the UK's National Health Service, like many other national governments, is working on an app to make it simpler.…

Angry judgments fly as SAS and World Programming spat rolls on A $79m copyright lawsuit that spiralled into a transatlantic tug of war between UK and US judges has taken its latest step – with an appeals court preventing an American firm diverting the revenues of a British software company.…

It’s like cartography, but with infosec. Probably Webcast There’s lots of talk of the threat landscape, so one useful way to extend the metaphor is to imagine that landscape wrapped around the horizon of an actual globe.…

Please help us rewrite the TypeScript compiler in Rust Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder and Bartek Iwańczuk have slid open the doors to Deno 1.0, the first production release of a new runtime for running TypeScript and JavaScript outside a web browser.…

A desktop browser spring clean can do the soul a power of good Google is taking steps to deal with tab overload in its browser by adding the ability to group the things together.…

And you thought this was purely a NoSQL release this week? MariaDB, which counts Deutsche Bank, Nasdaq and telecoms giant Verizon among its users, has launched a DBaaS rendition of its relational database, adding options to configure and customise it.…

Plus: AWS tool for defining Kubernetes apps without having to write YAML Amazon Web Services and Red Hat have linked arms to bring managed OpenShift, a Kubernetes service, to the AWS cloud. The service is not yet available, but "currently preparing for an early access program".…

Just not very many – don't go all Bitcoin farming on this Storj Labs, which in March launched decentralized storage network Tardigrade, is releasing an app to allow users of QNAP's network-attached storage devices to generate cryptocurrency revenue from their unused hard disk space and bandwidth.…