The Register

Don't rocket the boat, says agency - you'll hear from us soon NASA's Office of Inspector General has stuck another knife in the agency's dreams of a 2024 Moon landing by pointing out [PDF] that, er, the astronauts will have to be good at holding their breath because the space suits are unlikely to be ready before 2025.…

Anyone fancy applying? Baroness Dido "Queen of Carnage" Harding will step down from her role as NHS Improvement chair in October.…

Bye Sierra Microsoft is wielding the axe on the OneDrive sync apps for older versions of macOS and will focus only on the three most recent incarnations from September onwards.…

You looked like you needed some good news In what is good news to everyone except possibly the most introverted masochists out there, boffins have decided that it is possible to rid the earth of COVID. In fact, it's probably easier to do than polio, but harder than smallpox, said researchers in the online journal BMJ Global Health.…

Could the fastest Windows on Arm PC be made by Apple? Mac virtualization veteran Parallels has released an update to its flagship Desktop software, with support for the rounded bits of Windows 11 and Mac-in-a-Mac courtesy of the upcoming Monterey update.…

Someone must have broken in and taken docs, said Leathermarket Community Benefit Society A man who viewed documents online for a controversial London property development and shared them on social media was raided by police after developers claimed there had been a break-in to their systems.…

Doc reveals more of what's causing industry to tear its hair out Britain's Telecoms Security Bill will be accompanied by a detailed code of practice containing 70 specific security requirements for telcos and their suppliers to meet, The Register can reveal.…

Unless that's an ad for American Megatrends? Bork!Bork!Bork! Double the advertising space can sometimes equal double the potential for borkage, as this freshest example of the breed demonstrates.…

The machine learning model was trained and tested on limited data Analysis The idea of so-called “master faces,” a set of fake images generated by machine learning algorithms to crack into facial biometric systems by impersonating people, made splashy headlines last week. But a closer look at the research reveals clear weaknesses that make it unlikely to work in the real world.…

RDP-enabled instances attacked, perhaps via Iran and China, then use Telegram desktop client for command and control Data analysis firm Splunk says it's found a resurgence of the Crypto botnet – malware that attacks virtual servers running Windows Server inside Amazon Web Services.…

How much work can you do with eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores? Russia's government and military may be about to find out Russian fabless semiconductor company Baikal is celebrating after local PC-maker IRU started using its silicon in a workstation.…

Industrial parks in Bac Giang, home to Apple and Samsung suppliers, battled shutdowns and skyrocketing COVID infections among workers since May The Vietnamese province of Bac Giang, home to numerous factories that contribute to tech supply chains, is back in full swing after a rocky few months full of COVID outbreaks and related shutdowns.…

South Korea needs Samsung monopolising effectively as it pursues industry development plans Samsung Electronics boss Lee Jae-yong will be released from prison on parole this Friday.…

When it comes to ownership then details count Last December, GitHub recognized that it hadn't revisited the dispute policy for npm packages since acquiring NPM in March, 2020, and in February this year, it suspended transfers of abandoned packages until it could come up with a system that's fair, consistent, and enforceable.…

Coin miners and digicash researchers could be in the clear US Senators have reached an agreement to amend the definition of who counts as a digital asset “broker” in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, a change that makes sure cryptocurrency miners and engineers are exempt from the proposed regulations.…

Offer may not apply in China, or anywhere else warn experts Apple's announcement last week that it will soon be scanning photos on iPhones and iPads that sync to iCloud for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) prompted pushback from thousands of security and privacy professionals and a response from the company that attempts to mollify its critics.…

Previous statements yanked while charter is 'formalized' Perl enthusiasts looking forward to a relaxing summer could be in for disappointment after the foundation put the Community Affairs Team (CAT) on hiatus and the chair resigned.…

Anyone want to start a Kickstarter page for a Reg reader getaway? The Microsoft founder who isn't Bill Gates, Paul Allen, died in 2018 of complications from cancer. Since then, his greatest excesses – like a MiG-29 fighter jet – have been up for grabs.…

'We have labelled this as an enhancement' says engineer Elastic has modified the official Python client for its Elasticsearch database not to work with forked versions, and closed the GitHub issue to comments.…

Plus: Google 'contemplated buying some or all of Epic' A freshly unsealed filing [PDF] in the Epic smackdown between the maker of the Fortnite video game and Google reveals claims that a "senior Google Play" exec had noted users might be put off by the "frankly abysmal... awful experience" of directly downloading and installing games on Android kit.…

Update better aligned with GTK widgets but UI is controversial Red Hat's Allan Day, a member of the GNOME design team, has said that the project's new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are now official.…

The pandemic and a tale of two HPs Hewlett Packard Enterprise's UK operation recorded a 20 per cent slide in revenues during pandemic-struck 2020, according to the latest filing at Companies House.…

Orthodox Christian said mouth-watering banner made her break Lent fast Advertisements are so prevalent that many of us have developed internal ad blockers and probably don't rush out for a cheeseburger just because we saw one on the telly or a poster.…

AWS and Azure cruise into government agency The UK's Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has inked cloud deals valued at around £15m with Microsoft and AWS.…

Watts coming down may not go up Column There's a fine line between madness and magic in technology. Unless you're talking about wireless power transmission, where woo outweighs watts every single time.…

Going out with a bang Who, Me? The weekend is over and that means time for a nice biscuit, a hot beverage, and another tale from the vaults of Who, Me?…

Chinese netizens and State media unleash as it emerges web giant lacks formal sexual harassment policy Content warning: sexual assault Chinese tech giant Alibaba has terminated the employment of a manager accused of sexually assaulting a female colleague.…

Wants less 'vanity hardware', more modular and scalable kit The Open Compute Project has outlined a strategy to take it into its second decade, and will pursue open silicon designs and do more work to enable future innovations in optical networking, AI, and immersion cooling.…

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.…