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According to simulations, anyway The gravitational field of neutron stars is so strong that so-called mountains poking out from their surfaces only grow to a fraction of a millimetre in height in simulations.…

No rudeness. No cute kids spruiking tat. No violence. No fan frenzies. And no smutty emoticons The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) today announced a "Summer Youth Network Environment Improvement" – a massive cleanse of the Chinese internet to make it safe for kids aged 16 and under.…

How do you feel about your cloud now? Comment Amnesty International's allegations this week that NSO Group's spyware products have been widely abused have rightly sparked a debate about the ethics of digital surveillance.…

Previous bans were imposed for nasty content, then lifted after promises of proper moderation. And here we are again Pakistan has banned made-in-China social network TikTok for the fourth time, and there's no sign this one will prove any stickier than previous efforts.…

Short influencer-fronted infomercials may seep into YouTube YouTube announced yesterday it signed a definitive agreement to acquire India's two-year-old social e-commerce platform, Simsim. The transaction is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.…

Perhaps coincidentally, Google extended deadline of enforced Play-to-Pay on the very same day South Korea will attempt to pass a law that gives app developers the right to use in-app payment services other than those offered by app stores.…

Patches available for priv-esc bug in the open-source software, at least Move over, PrintNightmare. Microsoft has another privilege-escalation hole in Windows that can be potentially exploited by rogue users and malware to gain admin-level powers.…

Deletion of employer's YouTube account deemed violation of release Former journalist Matthew Keys, who served two years in prison for posting his Tribune Company content management system credentials online a decade ago in violation of America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, has been ordered back to prison for violating the terms of his supervised release.…

Twitter, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft have reopened, kind of Apple has pushed back the reopening of its offices to October, allowing staff to work from home for an extra month as coronavirus cases increase across the US.…

'Who knows how he may be received...' Audacity's new owner Muse Group has been accused of threatening to land a developer in legal hot water, a move that could result in the programmer being forced to return to China to face a government of which he has been a vocal critic.…

HCSEC board's 2020 report filled with pats on back for Chinese biz Huawei has made "no overall improvement" in software engineering processes for its UK telecoms equipment's firmware, its GCHQ overseers have warned.…

A crunchy compendium of strangeness from around the globe Roundup We at The Register are constantly on the lookout for important technology and science news to bring you, our smart, funny and data-hungry readers, because we know you need to be kept up to date.…

Head this way to find out Promo IT directors face two major headaches with historic data. They know that they could free up valuable, on-prem, high-performance storage by migrating cold data into the cloud. But they also worry this could cause access problems should some of it could become “hot” again in the future.…

Baldly going where beardy has gone before, except a bit higher Wally Funk has finally gone to space, accompanied by the Bezos bros and Oliver Daemen aboard Blue Origin's sub-orbital New Shepard.…

Cure worse than the disease for anyone with the 'fgfmsd' daemon activated Security appliance slinger Fortinet has warned of a critical vulnerability in its software that can be exploited to grant unauthenticated attackers full control over a targeted system, providing a particular daemon is enabled.…

Improving the Google-free mobile OS has proven to be an uphill struggle UBports, which took on the task of maintaining the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS after Canonical abandoned it, has released OTA-18 with lots of improvements, but still based on the ancient Ubuntu 16.04.…

Better get a wiggle on because the work is stacking up, those potentially massive fines won't write themselves Tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google face fines of up to 10 per cent of turnover if they're found to be in serious breach of new regulations being considered by the UK government.…

£17m on shiny new Flowbird touchscreen kiosks well spent, apparently Publicly owned rail operator Northern Trains has an excuse somewhat more technical than "leaves on the line" for its latest service disruption: a ransomware attack that has left its self-service ticketing booths out for the count.…

Because Verify was roaring success and cos digi ID will 'reduce cases of online fraud'. Ahem The UK government is launching proposals to boost the legal status of digital identities, something it claims will ensure they are trusted as much as physical documents such as passports.…

Doctors wrote to UK government saying they would refuse to hand over data NHS Digital has again delayed plans for what has been called the biggest data grab in NHS history, introducing new caveats to the extraction of personal medical information. No new implementation date as been set.…

Those affected get free protection services – but only if their Social Security numbers were exposed Law firm Campbell Conroy & O'Neil has warned of a breach from late February which may have exposed data from the company's lengthy client list of big-name corporations including Apple and IBM.…

The Register rakes a talon over next year's battery-powered jalopies As traditional car makers seek to make electric vehicles that won't scare off the buyers, others are taking a slightly different path. Enter Triggo and Microlino.…

Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on Review OnePlus has been under fire in recent weeks over benchmark tests that appeared to throttle real-world performance of the OnePlus 9 series, dividing fans who think a fullbore Snapdragon 888 might be overegging the pudding for most use cases and others who like to run a hotter handset.…

Video didn't kill the radio star – it made it stronger than ever Feature With demand for airborne bandwidth at an all-time high, thanks to ever-flashier streaming and our new Zoomified lifestyles, researchers, standards bodies, and equipment makers are keen to push on and create more capable radio systems.…

Hiring sprees planned to keep up with demand across many sectors and around the world India's big four IT services providers – HCL, Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro – have all come through the country's savage second wave of COVID-19 with impressive financial results and huge appetites for hiring new talent.…

One publisher's attempt to roll the internet back to a more innocent time In January, an online publisher launched a website called Lab 6 that serves its content as a PDF to protest the state of the modern web, and has caused quite a stir.…

After hundreds of hours of work, engineers called out of retirement for help Pics The Hubble Space Telescope is back in action doing what it does best – capturing stunning images of the universe – after more than 50 NASA engineers worked hundreds of hours to get the instrument working again.…

Pre-bid manoeuvring won 27 per cent of shareholders, £919M offer was a winning move Chinese gaming and web giant Tencent will acquire UK games developer Sumo Group, which has created games in the Hitman, Sonic, and Little Big Planet franchises, for £919 million (US$1.24B).…

Dances around the issue of whether it used NSO spyware at all as local politicians and media named as targets Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has denied the nation illegally used the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, but hasn't denied that India used it.…

Big Blue is the only leading supplier from 2020 to lose ground IBM has been demoted from Leader to Challenger in Gartner's 2021 Enterprise Backup and Recovery Magic Quadrant – the only leading 2020 supplier to be so treated.…

The other bidder is China mobile, so top Oz telco has been approached to step in Australia's dominant telco, Telstra, has revealed the nation's government has asked it to consider a partnership to acquire Digicel Pacific – the largest mobile carrier in the Pacific Islands – in a move seemingly designed to contain China's influence in the region.…

Maybe keep the email systems down a little longer if it helps this much? IBM on Monday reported better than anticipated revenue for Q2 2021, sending its shares up in after-hours trading.…

Veep of cloud devrel exits after 'beyond car crash' all-hands meeting Google Cloud's veep of developer relations abruptly left the web giant late last week after sharing a lengthy essay on how he no longer hated "all the Jewish people."…

And increase output of Fab 8 plant by 150,000 wafers per year GlobalFoundries will build a second chip fabrication plant by its Fab 8 facility in Malta, New York, where it is now headquartered, and pledged to invest $1bn to increase that latter factory's output.…

Brace yourself, there have been some changes to the Start menu, File Explorer Hands On In its publicity for Windows 11, Microsoft has focused on the "simplified design and user experience" of the operating system along with a few headline features: a centered Start menu that looks more like a dock from other OSes, Android apps in the Microsoft Store, Teams Chat in the taskbar, Widgets, and more.…

Plus: Telegram security probed, CISA boss confirmed, and more In Brief Cloud-based IT provider Cloudstar has been hit by ransomware, taking down its systems. It said it is currently negotiating with the crooks that infected its computers.…

A tale of two holes and two mechanics of two different heights A British Airways Boeing 787's landing gear collapsed during a botched test after a short mechanic asked a taller co-worker to insert a lock-out pin into a hole he couldn't reach – only for the second mechanic to put it in the wrong place.…

Now supports drag-and-drop editing and live data Visual Studio 2022 has a new designer for Web Forms, the original web application framework that goes back to the first release of .NET.…

MoD, game developer take extremely dim view of excessive rivet-counter point-scoring Hungary-based game developer Gaijin Entertainment found themselves in a tactically difficult position last week when a user of their combat simulator War Thunder tried to win an online argument by sharing classified documents in the company's game forums.…

Multinational software peddler decides Maidenhead just doesn't have the je ne sais quoi it needs SAP is going to new heights to raise its profile in UK business. A year and a half after Britain’s formal departure from the EU, Europe’s biggest software biz is unleashing €250m of investment in the next five years, including a new London office in The Scalpel, a 38-storey skyscraper at 52 Lime Street in the City of London.…

It's working now and they're very sorry Lloyds Banking Group – which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland among its stable of financial operators – is back up and running after online and mobile banking services took a tumble earlier today.…

And US indicts four Chinese spies on suspicion of the hacks The Microsoft Exchange Server attacks earlier this year were "systemic cyber sabotage" carried out by Chinese state hacking crews including private contractors working for a spy agency, the British government has said.…

Coronavirus restrictions lifting, but to what cost? Police and anti-lockdown protesters are clashing outside the Houses of Parliament with tempers boiling over in Westminster just as "Freedom Day" in England hits the half-day mark. And according to the ONS, their concerns seem to be shared by those less likely to chuck a bottle too.…

Pandemic smiles on Unified-Comms-as-a-Service biz Zoom is making a full-blown entry into the cloudy Unified Comms business by hoovering up Contact-Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) outfit Five9 in an all-share transaction valued at a whopping $14.7bn.…

System compatible with existing infra. No you can't eat it now, kids, it's for later, for upcoming 5G backbone Japanese researchers have broken the world record for the fastest internet speed by transmitting data at 319 terabits per second (Tbps) using modern day compatible fibre optical cable, according to the country's primary comms research institute.…

Torvalds: 'At some point somebody just needs to actually submit it' The latest release candidate of the 5.14 Linux kernel is a hefty beast, Linus Torvald remarked yesterday, seemingly impatient over how long it is taking Paragon to send in its long-awaited and much-reviewed NTFS driver.…

Bid to build the most stable iteration of the columnar database has its price Cassandra 4.0 – the open-source distributed NoSQL database used by Apple, Netflix, and Spotify – has been delayed at the 11th hour after a developer spotted a bug in the code.…

Gamify all the things! UK map maker Ordnance Survey is bringing a new concept to the mobile gaming market: not looking at your phone.…

These are a few of our favourite things Bork!Bork!Bork! Beer and bork: two of our favourite things here at Vulture Central. And also, it seems, at the Co-Op.…

RTFM: Read the [fine] manual Review Traditionally the Darktable project only releases one update a year, with a new version arriving on Christmas day. But the developers behind Darktable have been adding new features and improving existing ones so quickly that one a year is no longer enough.…