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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.…

Prices undisclosed but you can bet it was cheaper Xerox might not have been able to prise HP Inc stock from the hands of shareholders yet but it has snaffled British print services specialists Altodigital and ITEC Connect for an undisclosed sum.…

Slips out door with 620,000 shares to enjoy a life less ordinary British reseller giant Softcat's managing director, Colin Brown, is standing down at the end of July, just months after he offloaded 125,000 shares for £12 each – totalling £1.5m – giving him a cash pillow to see out the coronavirus lockdown and beyond.…

*Not a new backcronym, but 'Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control' Updated BT is to halt all home visits by its Openreach broadband engineers except for essential ones needed to keep critical businesses and vulnerable people connected to the outside world.…

OpenCL and OpenGL wrappers in development for Microsoft's platform Microsoft and Collabora are developing OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers for DirectX so that software developed for these open standards will run correctly on all DirectX 12-enabled devices.…

Social network reportedly looking to buy a slice of country's biggest mobile provider Facebook is reportedly in talks to buy a multibillion-dollar stake in India's largest mobile network, Reliance Jio.…

Attention! Stand up straight you 'orrible lot! The UK's Ministry of Defence is on the hunt for an infrastructure and platform service provider to host servers supporting its Primavera project management software.…

Please update your contact details in this handy spreadsheet ... oh A UK housing association blurted 3,500 people's sensitive personal data as part of a bungled "please update your contact details" email exercise, The Register has been told.…

Impact will be 'deep, immediate, and long-lasting' Analysts are painting a particularly bleak picture for IT services companies and application software vendors as they struggle to pick up business in the face of the global coronavirus lockdown.…

Online marketplaces descend into wretched hives of scum and villainy Consumer watchdog Which? has unveiled an investigation demonstrating that the laws of supply and demand are in fine fettle at Amazon and eBay, despite protestations to the contrary.…

Security updates immune to freeze, we note Microsoft on Tuesday said it has decided to halt Windows preview releases in May due to health concerns arising from the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.…

Already shipped a million units to good reviews, now says DDR5 will launch in 2021 Samsung is confident it has the future of DRAM in the bag after successfully producing memory using a cutting edge ultraviolet lithography technology (EUV) process.…

Dozens of bugs swatted in latest Cupertino updates Apple has emitted a bundle of security fixes ranging across its product lines.…

Magic potion finally runs out for famed artist and author Asterix comics co-creator Albert Uderzo has died of a heart attack. He was 92.…

Orange light has been on in Sydney for over 36 hours A VMware warning on cloud capacity shortages does not mean users have issues to worry about, but the company is adding new hosts to increase capacity anyway.…

DO: Keep essential services humming. DON'T: Sneak in client work and claim it's critical India's technology services industry has been granted a limited exemption from the nation's 21-day lockdown aimed at preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus, but also been warned not to abuse its privileges by sneaking in work to avoid contractual complications.…

Public also urged to report stay-at-home scofflaws Hong Kong says it used a "government electronic monitoring system" to nab potential novel coronavirus carriers who flouted quarantine regulations. By monitoring system, it most likely means its wristband-based smartphone-tracking technology.…

You can still watch in HD, but, please, maybe not? If you start noticing a slightly blurrier quality to YouTube videos, no, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you.…

Global crisis necessitates extreme copyright flexibility, educators insist The Internet Archive on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Emergency Library to make it easier to borrow from its collection of ebooks during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.…

Lack of varied training data to blame, say researchers Speech-recognition software developed by top tech firms struggle to understand black people compared to white people, according to research published this week.…

Patch this flaw, unless you want random docs to wipe out your work Adobe has issued a patch for a critical flaw that can be exploited to delete files from Windows computers running the Creative Cloud client.…

Duff release, not extra traffic, behind remote desktop software falling over Having lifted connection checking on its freebie remote-access product, TeamViewer celebrated with a good, old-fashioned falling over.…

UK lacks formal emergency messaging system, so Big 4 carriers helped out Throughout the day (24th March), the British government is set to text UK mobiles to reinforce the prevailing advice amid the COVID-19 outbreak: stay home.…

Integrate your disconnected products and management if you want to survive Webcast In a recent survey, nine out of 10 organisations that suffered a significant security attack were running up-to-date cybersecurity software. They did what everyone told them to do, and it wasn’t enough.…

Brit telco and reseller giant in talks... presumably over a very long desk London-listed tech reseller Computacenter has confirmed it's in talks to hoover up the lion share of BT's French domestic operations.…

Bad time to request new resources, and existing ones have problems too Customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues.…

In space, no one can hear you scream 'Who used the last sheet of toilet roll!' Roundup In a week that marked the 55th anniversary of the first space walk and the first corned beef sandwich in orbit, rocket fans had plenty to keep them occupied.…

Azure security dashboard now covers Kubernetes service - at a price Microsoft's integration of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Security Center is now out of preview. In addition, the company has added Flatcar Linux to the Azure marketplace to replace CoreOS Container Linux, which goes end of life in May.…

Move over, Summit. Distributed computing project hits 470 PFLOPS A distributed computing project for disease research now has more data-crunching chops than the world's current most powerful supercomputer – IBM's Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.…

Also: Edge hits the pause button and F# 5 Preview 1 is here Roundup In a week that saw ups and downs for collaboration platform Teams, Windows 10 cross the magic billion mark and Apple admit that maybe Microsoft was right about the whole Surface thing, the Redmond gang continues its remote toiling.…

No word on what digi burglars lifted The parent firm of directory enquiry service 118 118 has yanked offline its finance division's website after detecting unauthorised access by a person or persons unknown, The Register can reveal.…

Free for 90 days as more and more people told to go into lockdown Enterprise software outfit SAP has made certain previously paid-for courses free for 90 days as governments enforce mass home working.…

Yes, you may have detected some sarcasm An annoying security flaw been disclosed and promptly fixed in the fairly popular memcached distributed data-caching software.…

Exec raises spectre of other cost-cutting activities but doesn't yet mention redundancies Capita's CEO, Jon Lewis, and his chief bean counter are taking a "voluntary" pay cut of 25 per cent for six months from 1 April in and among other "difficult decisions" the business says it will be forced to make during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Walmart Canada takes a break from slinging ads Bork!Bork!Bork! In today's edition of sickly signage, we have a prime example of transatlantic bork from one of Canada's finest retailers.…

Step one: Check if you really need new tools. If yes, prioritise and take small steps. And don't assume users are in great shape to learn new tricks IT projects with vast resources and years of planning all too often result in horrendous messes or failures. So what to do if you need to stand something up in a hurry to give your business extra capability or resilience during the coronavirus pandemic? Or if the boss likes the idea of the many free offers for collaborationware that have recently hit the market?…

In case force majeure means they can't deliver. And right now some haven't delivered detailed continuity plans NASSCOM – India's peak body for the IT and business process outsourcing industries – has advised its members to read the fine print in their services contracts so they understand the implications of a long lockdown that leaves them unable to deliver.…

Including effort to land first woman on the lunar surface NASA has temporarily suspended operations for its James Webb Space Telescope – and halted testing of its Space Launch System, a rocket due to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 – amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

We're guessing May's virtual Dell World conference is no mere webinar In an interesting IP rights grab, Dell has filed to trademark the word "Podference".…

What a pair of asswipes – they even pulled a knife at a supermarket Police in the Australian State of New South Wales have published an image of two men they say conducted a series of brazen toilet paper robberies and called for community assistance to flush them out.…