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Plus: Minotaurs are from MARS, ANASIS-II awaits, and a cool half billion for Skynet In brief NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed last week that the intrepid SpaceX duo, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, would be departing the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 August, with a splashdown of the Crew Dragon capsule targeted for 2 August.…

But take that with a pinch of salt Computer misuse crimes across England and Wales have declined over the past year – with credential theft attacks remaining more or less flat in the pre-COVID reporting period.…

Payments provider cops to 'processing issues' caused by 'equipment change' Global online payment provider Worldpay is experiencing an ongoing outage affecting businesses and organisations in the UK.…

Plus: Skype plays catch-up, Barracuda goes Azure, and WinUI slings another preview In brief Having issued an all-too-brief stay of execution on the decidedly whiffy Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 protocols in Microsoft 365, the Windows giant has announced that deprecation enforcement will kick off again from 15 October.…

Also: Create the killer AI Doom player on a workstation In brief A judge in Munich has ruled in favor of banning Tesla Germany from repeating misleading descriptions of its Autopilot software in adverts.…

The little guys could get caught out with costly consequences Comment On 16 July, the European Court of Justice struck down Privacy Shield, an EU-US agreement that required American companies to sign up to a higher standard of privacy to be considered, perhaps somewhat condescendingly, "adequate*" for compliance with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).…

No evidence of data being used unlawfully, says health department The UK government has admitted it deployed the COVID-19 Test and Trace programme without a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) required by law, according to privacy campaigners the Open Rights Group (ORG).…

I am not a .... {NASA nightmare brought to life by AI} On the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, MIT boffins have given an insight into an alternative history, one where US president Richard Nixon paid tribute to the astronauts who would not be returning from the Moon.…

Tune in and find out how to plug the leaks in your Microsoft ecosystem Webcast Full Office 365 security compliance is one of those things most enterprises will have on the to-do list somewhere, but it’s surprising how few actually get around to it.…

Plus: BitTorrent CEO puts a $1m bounty on Twitter hackers In Brief Here's something you don't see everyday. The crew at IBM X-Force has uncovered a massive cache of files, including about five hours of training videos intended for a select crew of hackers in Iran known as ITG18.…

We'll raise a glass of the good stuff to that Brit utility firm Southern Water is tendering for a bunch of IT services that fall roughly into the bucket of application lifecycle management in contracts that could be worth up to £50m.…

At least it’s a better excuse than Switchzilla’s ‘cosmic radiation errors’ Cisco watchers may recall that the company is infamous for two particularly odd bug reports.…

At under £30, it'll do as a burner or mp3 player. Also, Snake Review Nostalgia's a weird thing. If you're a techie, things have never been better. For less than £500, you can get a tiny battery-powered computer that's faster than the workstation your boss spent £2,000 kitting you out with just 15 years prior. Yet there's always the nagging temptation to take a stroll down memory lane.…

Domestic companies to be mashed together in the service of digital transformation, 5G and cloud Fujitsu will relaunch several of its domestic business services units under a new company called Fujitsu Japan.…

Aimed at VFX creators working on shows it has commissioned, not the rest of us sadly Netflix has teased a desktop-as-service (DaaS) offering.…

Each one unique, and they'll keep coming till there's no paper left... or someone kills the power Who, Me? Another week means another tale of reader misdeeds in The Register's ongoing Who, Me? series.…

Perps tried to sell high-profile usernames after possibly perusing private data Twitter has revealed more about the July 15 attack that saw several prominent accounts hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

You can thank GDPR for that Violating Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules is a costly mistake that is only getting more expensive, according to lawyers totaling up fines from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

‘Hope’ mission is first interplanetary effort from Arab world, aims to sniff Martian atmosphere The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a Mars probe.…

To help plague time working and learning, even though schools are to remain closed until a vaccine is found The Philippines has revealed plans to install 23,100 free WiFi sites to help adapt the country to remote work and education during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.…

Land of the bureaucratic stamp wants to be ready if plague and natural disasters coincide Japan has announced a policy to modernise its government with a massive new program of digitisation, because the nation has decided it needs better information infrastructure to cope with both the current pandemic and other future challenges.…

You're gonna need something to secure those Doordash orders over Morse code A Second World War cryptography artifact – a 1944 Enigma M4 machine – has sold at auction for £347,250 ($436,000).…

Network-connected gear stuck in boot loop needs replacing Analysis Since the middle of last month, thousands of Samsung customers found their older internet-connected Blu-ray players had stopped working.…

'Just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling' says MIT assistant prof High-energy X-rays emanating from a gigantic black hole rapidly petered out before it roared back to life again, leaving astronomers bewildered.…

Pentagon can't wait to do some 'experimentation and testing' in space The Pentagon wants an unmanned military outpost in orbit one day – and this week hired the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) to build a prototype.…

DNS provider goes dark amid bad routing, world+dog goes through nine minutes of terror Updated Global internet glue Cloudflare experienced a brief network outage on Friday that broke multiple apps and websites, including your humble Register.…

Maybe it was the old Lionel Hutz play: 'No-logging VPN? I meant, No! Logging VPN!' A string of "zero logging" VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.…

Legal discovery team could turn up some very interesting, and possibly embarrassing details Facebook won a significant legal victory on Thursday when the judge hearing the lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group declined to dismiss the case – and allowed the crucial discovery process to move forward.…

Just a coincidence it put out a statement amid the Twitter mega-hack Blackbaud, a cloud software provider specializing in fundraising suites for charities and educational institutions, quietly paid off a ransomware attacker – and then got around to telling customers about it a full two months later.…

XSS vuln could hijack websites so update your All in One pack A popular WordPress search engine optimisation plugin with around two million installs could have been abused to hijack a target website, according to a threat intel firm.…

What's inside the mystery tube? It is 45 years since US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts first shook hands in space. The Register presents "When Apollo met Soyuz".…

Repairability score good? Well, yes actually Infamous tech vivisectors iFixit have dug into the innards of Dell's latest XPS 15 ultrabook. And what did they find? Philips screws, user-serviceable components, and very little adhesive.…

COVID-19 downturn only hastened Boeing aircraft's inevitable demise British Airways has revealed that it probably won't be flying the Boeing 747 anymore.…

Which, let's be real, is a fancy way to say 'we got phished' Twitter has said that around 130 accounts were targeted by miscreants this week as high-profile individuals and businesses had their accounts hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

Tata Consultancy Services to run application and infrastructure support - oh, and security Exclusive The tech function is being consolidated across The Co-operative Group with redundancies "inevitable", the company has told staff. At the same time, the management of certain areas including application support is to be outsourced to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) along with the TUPE transfer of some staff.…

Drones and satellite imagery probably better than sending out four helicopters at a time – or counting poop Herbivores may not be the first things that spring to mind when devising the latest application of the technology world's overflowing toolbox, but there it is.…

A big, red triangle on your screen? A security issue, not a foreign film alert Bork!Bork!Bork! UK broadcaster ITV came under the baleful gaze of bork over the weekend as an unexpected expiration left its online player shorn of those precious advertisements.…

Letter to Brit-based workers talks of 'new uncertainties for business' caused by pandemic Wipro has warned UK staff that some of them may be laid off due to "uncertainties" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – even though the chairman claimed at an AGM that no jobs would be shed during the global crisis.…

UK portable sales-out (the stuff shipped to customers) more than double in lockdown buying frenzy Businesses and consumers emptied distributors’ warehouses of notebooks across the UK during Q2 as lockdown kicked in, even buying stock that had been sat on the shelves for 12 months gathering dust.…

Systems dev, technical product manager, and more Job Alert It's Friday again, and we're back with another list of opportunities for roles in the big and beautiful world of tech.…

Damn you coronavirus, and save some anger for the technical challenges plaguing heir-to-Hubble NASA has announed a seven-month delay to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the thirty-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.…

Up from the depths / Thirty stories high / Breathing fire / Its head in the sky / IT'S EMAIL! On Call The week is almost done, and Friday sees the start of the delightful tumble that ends in the weekend. Start your roll with a tale from those unfortunates forced to deal with the foolishness of others in The Register's On Call feature.…

Helped by product business growing well and staff not being keen on new jobs right now Indian services outfit HCL says the worst of the COVID-19-induced economic downturn is behind it. And we should all wish that our worst is as bad as HCL’s because the company just posted strong results for Q1 2021.…

Seemingly offers Huawei alternative and challenges old-school telco vendors. Now to prove its chops by building an Indian 5G net for Jio Platforms Indian industrial conglomerate Reliance Industries has announced that it has developed its own 5G network infrastructure and hopes to offer it as a manged service to carriers worldwide.…

World Wide Web Consortium urged to get its governance act together Earlier this week, 20 web advertising companies wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Advisory Board to ask that the standards organization revise its governance process to prevent ad tech giants like Google from running roughshod over the concerns of others with an interest in the web.…

We've heard of a code freeze but this is ridiculous: Microsoft finishes burying repos in Norwegian archipelago Microsoft's GitHub on Thursday said that earlier this month it successfully deposited a snapshot of recently active GitHub public code repositories to an underground vault on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.…

New rules define allow lists and deny lists, send masters and slaves to the Trash Apple has issued a new style guide that deprecates what it calls “non-inclusive language”, and has started to apply it to Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects.…

ASEAN to throw big sale on August 8th – a super-lucky day according to Chinese numerology The ten-state Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade bloc has decided that a regional internet splurge can help the region rise from plague-induced economic torpor.…

Chairman Mark Liu is carefully abiding by Uncle Sam's new rules Super-duper chip maker TSMC told investors it will stop exporting supplies to its number-two customer Chinese telecoms manufacturer Huawei from mid-September.…

Make sure your iThing installs these patches Apple has released a fresh batch of software security updates for its flagship devices.…