The Register

Suspects rocks are the problem, not probe NASA's first attempt at having the Perseverance rover retrieve a sample of Martian rocks for later return to Earth has not gone as planned.…

And a very scary story of a job that went from white hat to murky shades of gray in the United Arab Emirates In Brief After a year off due to a certain virus, the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences returned to Las Vegas last week, just in time for the US government's attempts to foster more collaboration across the infosec industry.…

Chinese chipmaker SMIC also reports trouble getting the American kit it needs to expand Chinese tech giant Huawei has reported a 29.5 per cent year-on-year plunge, blaming it in part on US sanctions, but also shrugged off the situation.…

Plus: British MP wants to ban AI deepfake smut tools In brief Neural networks can correctly guess a person’s race just by looking at their bodily x-rays and researchers have no idea how it can tell.…

Combined with its Super Heavy booster, Starship stood briefly as the tallest rocket yet The Jeff Bezos-bearing Blue Origin New Shepard rocket elicited attention for its shape when it launched last month.…

Other Big Tech companies, however, still want workers in this autumn Amazon has delayed staff returning to its offices around the world from September this year to January 2022, as the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus continues to spread.…

Security researchers found they could snoop on dynamic DNS traffic Until February this year, Amazon Route53's DNS service offered largely unappreciated network eavesdropping capabilities. And this undocumented spying option was also available at Google Cloud DNS and at least one other DNS-as-a-service provider.…

Electronics giant must conquer its supply chain as US eyes domestic production Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has purchased a chip plant for $90.8m from its compatriot, Macronix International.…

Hi-res, MQA, DSD, supports Apple Music's highest quality – but is it worth the hassle? Review Apple introduced hi-res lossless audio to its music service last month, but third-party hardware is required to enjoy it – if indeed the difference is audible. We took a look at the THX Onyx, a portable DAC and headphone amplifier that claims to be just the thing.…

'A different way of thinking about applications' says project lead An open-source Kotlin framework for cross-platform applications, based on Jetpack Compose for Android, is now in preview.…

Detailed diagnosis of tech industry delusion falls short of prescribing a cure Book review Seasoned industry watchers will welcome Your Computer Is on Fire as a thorough and unflinching debunking of Big Tech's outlandish self-mythologising. They might even hope that governments, business, and the media organisations who buy into the barrage of propaganda start to ask a few important questions. But there are limits to this niche text that is at times prone to academic navel-gazing.…

Plan to deal with fatbergs NOT related to that £90m fine for dumping effluent into sea on England's south coast Where's there's muck there's brass, and there won't be many places more mucky than a sewer system as bidders for a network digitalisation contract in southern England are about to rediscover.…

Here's how to switch around account numbers, slip past moderation, and mix up names in production-level models Analysis Computer scientists have detailed ways in which AI language systems – including some in production – can be hoodwinked into making bad decisions by text containing unseen Unicode characters.…

About 238,855 miles would do the trick Something for the Weekend, Sir? More good news for Team GB's Tokyo Games medal winners: you're going to the Moon.…

Here I am to save the day! On Call That Friday feeling is upon us again after a week of dealing with IT issues and dodging the gimlet gaze of the boss. Hopefully yours didn't involve some impromptu debugging in production. Welcome to On Call.…

$500bn a year to be spent on electro-brain and supporting tech vs $400bn on cloud infrastructure Analyst firm IDC has predicted that by the year 2025 more money will be spent on artificial intelligence software and services than on infrastructure-as-a-service and platforms-as-a-service.…

Back on terra firma, ransomware rampage sees elevated security threat levels and giveaways to SMBs South Korea has this week announced two new weapons: grenade-launching drones for its military, and anti-ransomware software for businesses.…

Edge is getting a 'Super Duper Security Mode' to test the idea. Yes, that is the actual name Microsoft is conducting an experiment it hopes will improve browser security – by making its Edge offering worse at running JavaScript…

Players in ‘Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative’ include Microsoft, AWS, and Google The United States' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has announced the "standup" of a body called the "Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative" (JCDC) that it hopes will spark ideas for new and improved national responses against electronic threats.…

Uncle Sam wants digital asset brokers to log customer info but didn't clarify who counts as a broker or not US senators revised a section of the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Thursday to ensure cryptocurrency miners, hardware vendors, and software developers are exempt from collecting user data required to report taxes.…

Where there's a will, there's Huawei Andy Purdy, CSO for Huawei USA, believes the US needs to be more active in the development of global security standards rather than being aloof.…

For now it's child abuse material but the tech has mission creep written in Apple is about to announce a new technology for scanning individual users' iPhones for banned content. While it will be billed as a tool for detecting child abuse imagery, its potential for misuse is vast based on details entering the public domain.…

Replacements for cookie-based tracking still pose privacy problems Mozilla on Wednesday published an assessment of two proposed ad tracking mechanisms intended to fill the void left by third-party cookies and found that both make web privacy worse.…

Admits some customers, including one in top ten yet to return its network Remember that monster outage in June when Fastly managed to take down huge chunks of the internet? The CEO of the US-based cloud computing services provider has admitted some customers still do.…

Prepare to take the NextStep at this free virtual event in November Promo If adversity is the mother of invention, the last year and a half should have fostered a whole slew of software innovation.…

'All meeting recordings will be saved to OneDrive and SharePoint' from 16 August Microsoft's technology for recording Teams meetings, Stream, will fully transition to a new version from 16 August, though some users have concerns over transcription features still under development.…

$400m Series E values outfit at $4.6bn In line with investors' obsession with all things to do with data, Dataiku, a provider of data management software, has secured a $400m investment that values the business at around $4.6bn.…

Chipzilla exec and vineyard owner Robert Crooke to run operation … in between picking grapes SK hynix intends to set up its soon-to-be acquired Intel NAND business as a standalone US-headquartered company.…

Patches issued for two CVE-rated vulns Cisco has published patches for critical vulns affecting the web management interface for some of its Small Business Dual WAN Gigabit routers – including a 9.8-rated nasty.…

Big brands might take solace that in 2025, 4.4 million pages will still be printed every minute Around 450 billion fewer pages were printed from home and office devices in 2020 as COVID-19 disrupted the world of work.…

Caltech received $100m for the project and is only just telling us now Billionaire Donald Bren was behind a quiet $100m donation in 2013 that established Caltech's Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP) in an attempt to harness solar power from outer space, the California private research university revealed this week.…

Party denies naming activist to police but apologises anyway A "left-wing" German infosec researcher was this week threatened with criminal prosecution after revealing that an app used by Angela Merkel's political party to canvass voters was secretly collecting personal data.…

Knock-on effect for NAS and SSD devices too The Chia cryptocurrency craze is fuelling record sales growth in Europe among distributors of hard disk drives (HDD), according to calendar Q2 shipment data from venerable number cruncher Context.…

Are we approaching peak computing? What are the alternatives? Feature In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.…

'This is peak Chrome; a reasonably good idea hampered because it was pushed out thoughtlessly' Google has temporarily reversed Chrome's removal of browser alert windows and other prompts created via cross-origin iframes after a rocky rollout over the past two weeks broke web apps and alarmed developers.…

'Some forms of encryption used today can be broken by future large-scale quantum computers, which drives a search for alternatives' Amazon Web Services has partnered with the National University of Singapore (NUS) in hope of improving quantum technologies and their applications. The duo announced they had signed a Memorandum of Understanding this week.…

Congrats, $2.15 is on its way to you. And millions on lawyers and admin costs Check your bank accounts this month. A settlement payment from Google, regarding a privacy hole in its now-defunct Google+ social network, may be winging its way to you. All $2.15 of it.…

'Free and fair election was impossible' Amazon interfered with a formal election by its warehouse workers in Alabama to unionize – and staff ought to be given a second chance to vote again, an official at the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has concluded.…

Heaven forbid someone lifts the lid on social network's disinformation and public manipulation Facebook, which has repeatedly touted its transparency efforts, on Tuesday disabled the accounts of independent ad transparency researchers.…

Isn't that work-at-home-workforce eyeing a return to the office? RingCentral is all about the integration of apps in the comms and collaboration sectors to boost productivity and efficiency, but the biz might just need someone to run the same rules over its own bloated overheads.…

Trust us – you need to tune into this Webcast Some say the best form of defense is offense. But when it comes to modern ransomware from cyber-crime orgs that are well-funded, possibly have state actor backing, and have your data under their control, just how offensive can you afford to be?…

USENIX will continue to create similar content for SREcon USENIX, the not-for-profit advanced computing association, has decided to put an end to its beloved LISA sysadmin conferences, at least as a standalone event.…

Company says it didn't skimp on security before everything went wrong SolarWinds is urging a US federal judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against it by aggrieved shareholders who say they were misled about its security posture in advance of the infamous Russian attack on the business.…

Potential customers or freeloaders to blame? Also: Everything coming up Dutch for one UK user A free two-month trial for Windows 365, a virtual PC running Windows 10 on Microsoft's Azure cloud, has been withdrawn after only a day having "reached capacity."…

Now that's an expensive contract The UK government has let nearly £40m in contracts to a single supplier for a text message, email, and "letter management" platform.…

Security not good enough, claims Chocolate Factory engineer Google's open security team has claimed the Linux kernel code is not good enough, with nearly 100 new fixes every week, and that at least 100 more engineers are needed to work on it.…

Spared prison but must give Panther and AA gun to collector or museum An 84-year-old German man has been fined €250,000 (£212,796.10) for keeping stockpiles of Second World War-era weaponry in his basement – including a 45-ton tank.…

Last claim standing relegated to the County Court after judge's ruling A Brit who tried to sue Dixons Carphone over the 2018 hack of 10 million customers' details, including 5.9 million payment cards, has had his case booted out of the High Court.…

Business teams might want to look at their operating models post-pandemic, user groups suggest SAP customers need to change the way they operate to shift their ERP systems to the cloud, according to the CEO of the Americas' SAP Users' group (ASUG).…

Pandemic also behind fall in breaches, according to ICO annual reaport The UK's data watchdog has defended its approach to regulating government health technologies during the pandemic as "pragmatic."…