Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Webcast You merged. You sold a company. You’re migrating to a sovereign data centre. Whatever the reason for your Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration, it can be one of the most important and stressful projects you will ever take on.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 7:00 am
Exclusive Faced with spiralling costs for its Space Launch System (SLS) and pressure to put American boots on the Moon by 2024, NASA is to return the Saturn V to flight.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 6:15 am
The Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong has increased the subsidies offered to local business’ technology investments by 50 percent.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 5:49 am
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sparked security concerns on Tuesday when he shared a screenshot of “the first ever digital Cabinet” on his Twitter feed. It revealed the country’s most senior officials and ministers were using bog-standard Zoom to discuss critical issues facing Blighty.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 5:11 am
The State of Western Australia has given itself the power to install surveillance devices in homes, or compel people to wear them, to ensure that those required to isolate during the coronavirus crisis don’t interact with the community.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 4:14 am
Singapore will bin the physical tokens used to provide two-factor authentication (2FA) for some digital government services.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 3:26 am
Australia will arrange rescue flights for lobsters, shellfish, and other seafood, to ease the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy. No, it's not that kind of rescue: they're going to be eaten, hopefully.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 2:25 am
With the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, on its third week of self-quarantine, and facing at least another month of being stuck in near-lockdown at home, habits have changed.…
Posted on 1 April 2020 | 1:44 am
With workers opting to telecommute and dial into video conferencing amid the coronavirus lockdowns, where possible, sales of formalwear are up... partially.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 11:52 pm
Xerox said on Tuesday that it is ending its hostile bid to acquire printer-and-PC maker HP due to financial complications arising from the ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 11:19 pm
MariaDB has updated its cloud-native SkySQL database, promising a slew of features addressing deployment, management and analytics.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 11:01 pm
Samsung Display will discontinue production of LCD panels by the end of the year due to falling demand for the increasingly marginalised tech and a supply glut in the market.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 10:20 pm
NoSQL slinger DataStax has released an open source Kubernetes operator for Apache Cassandra as it seeks to cosy back up to the community.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 9:30 pm
Over half of Chinese electronics, scooters and underwear corp Xiaomi's revenue came from smartphone sales, according to audited figures published today [PDF].…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 8:27 pm
Hands On Microsoft made a number of Office 365 Microsoft 365 announcements yesterday, including touting an expanded set of AI capabilities in its core applications.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 7:25 pm
Group video chat app Houseparty has offered a $1m bounty to identify what it claims is an organised campaign to falsely depict it as a hackers' backdoor.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 6:30 pm
Netizens probing websites' algorithms for bias and discrimination, against the sites' terms and conditions, can breathe a small sigh of relief. A US federal court has ruled it's not a criminal offense to flout a consumer-grade website's fine-print.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 5:42 pm
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison may have to eat his words on how to limit the spread of coronavirus after the country's westernmost state announced "extreme and draconian" measures all of its own.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 4:56 pm
Marriott Hotels has suffered its second data spillage in as many years after an "unexpected amount" of guests' data was accessed through two compromised employee logins, the under-fire chain has confirmed.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 4:01 pm
Huawei's rotating CEO reckons the Chinese government will retaliate against the US tech industry rather than allow the giant of the Middle Kingdom to be "slaughtered on the chopping board"* of US sanctions.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 3:03 pm
The Eclipse Foundation has pulled back the curtains on version 1.0 of Theia, an alternative to Microsoft's developer darling of the hour, Visual Studio Code.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 2:00 pm
Two years ago, network infrastructure biz Cloudflare launched the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver, with the promise that internet users could use the service to surf the internet without being tracked - by Cloudflare at least.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 1:00 pm
A community effort to improve the internet's routing security has won the backing of some of the web's biggest names.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 12:00 pm
Two-thirds of polled Register readers, on average worldwide, said it was business as usual in their IT departments amid the ongoing global coronavirus crisis. And fewer than one in ten said they were paralyzed by the pandemic.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 11:00 am
Job alert We've received a couple of solid responses to our offer last week, in which we invited organizations seeking tech staff to tackle the coronovirus pandemic to send in their recruitment ads and we would run them for free online. No catch, no snark, nor strings attached.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 9:56 am
Space extenders As the European Space Agency flicked the standby switch on some of its long-lived spacecraft in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, The Register figured it was time for a look at how the agency has kept its fleet flying far beyond expectations. Today, the veteran Mars Express orbiter.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 9:00 am
Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in our uplifting series of incidents where someone else's IT misdemeanours are flashed at an unsuspecting world. Behold the bork.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 8:15 am
India is the dominant source of offshored IT workers, and home to big facilities for plenty of global IT companies. India is also in lockdown and workers there cannot leave their homes except under limited cirumstances.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 7:35 am
Opera has updated its lightweight browser for Android so that it can access unofficial .crypto domains, primarily to exchange cryptocurrency.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 7:04 am
Oracle will offer free training and learning material during the coronavirus lockdown.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 6:35 am
Promo You’ll probably be more than familiar with open banking standards by now. Launched in the UK by the Competition and Markets Authority in January 2018 and increasingly adopted in the wider world, 202 (and counting) regulated providers are now on board.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 6:00 am
Future astronauts will need to be prepared to shed blood, sweat, tears, and, erm, possibly urine, too, if they want to build a home base on the Moon.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 5:03 am
Google’s cloud is experiencing trouble.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 3:46 am
Microsoft has corrected its own claim that it had "seen a 775 per cent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders".…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 3:02 am
India is advising its citizens that cloud storage can help to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 1:59 am
The US government is cracking down on Voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers accused of giving safe harbor to robocall spammers.…
Posted on 31 March 2020 | 12:17 am
Microsoft on Monday teased a few future features of its Edge web browser and Teams slack-killer. It also announced the rebranding of its cloud productivity suite Office 365 as Microsoft 365 – a subscription offering that already included Office 365, alongside Windows 10 Enterprise services and security features.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 9:32 pm
Analysis The price of dot-coms will steadily increase over the next four years following DNS overseer ICANN's controversial renewal of Verisign's contract to run the top-level domain.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 8:59 pm
European cloud giant OVH is suffering a substantial outage today: if there's a website you can't reach right now, it's perhaps hosted by OVH..…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 6:53 pm
Roundup Cross out the expiry date on your rapidly ageing role-based certification - you've got an extra six months. But that wasn't the only thing to break from Redmond in the past week, here are the best bits.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 4:50 pm
John Manzoni – permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office and CEO of the UK civil service who had an agenda to introduce more digital services – has been replaced with Alex Chisholm.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 3:52 pm
BT has begun asking contact centre employees to return to work as it grapples with an increasing number of customer calls resulting from the UK-wide lockdown.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 3:30 pm
Developers using Adobe's PhoneGap framework for building mobile apps for iOS and Android may soon be unable to submit to Apple's App Store, thanks to Adobe's use of an old iOS SDK.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 2:45 pm
BT has won a legal application to restart a decade-old court case in the hope of clawing back more than £90m in VAT the telco claims it overpaid to HMRC from 1978 onwards.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 2:10 pm
The digital burglary at 118 118 Money exposed recordings of customer service calls that included a raft of personal information although thankfully not payment data.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 1:14 pm
We're all told from a tender age not to shove things up our noses – Lego, chickpeas, pencils, fingers – but it seems even grown-up astrophysicists can have difficulty grasping these most basic recommendations when it's in the name of science.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 12:29 pm
The team working on the Swift programming language has said its goals for the upcoming version 5.3 will include "adding support for Windows and additional Linux distributions".…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 11:29 am
Roundup It's once again time for the El Reg security roundup.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 11:06 am
Roundup Hello Reg readers. Here's a quick roundup of bits and pieces from the worlds of machine learning and AI.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 10:09 am
Comment You've been there, done that and you quite literally have the T-shirt. Love them or loathe them, IT conferences are a feature of industry life. My first was CA World in New Orleans in 1998. In front of an audience of thousands, then Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang wandered across the stage pontificating as a chorus of children danced about him (no, really) and I knew I had indeed entered a whole new world of weird.…
Posted on 30 March 2020 | 9:15 am