The Register

... but humans still needed to fix the 'Hygiene Compartment' NASA has conjured imaginings of an orbital Roomba after boasting of a "sweep" of the ISS interior by an Astrobee robot as hardworking 'nauts keep the outpost up and running.…

But beware last week's update: WSL borkage may await ye with sharp, pointy Element Not Found errors Although Windows 10X remains missing in action, Microsoft dished up some more goodies for Linux fans in the latest Dev Channel build of Windows 10.…

Special source poured into GitHub Microsoft has published the kernel for its new Surface Duo smartphone to GitHub, making it easier for third parties to develop their own custom ROMs for the unusual, yet critically panned dual-screen blower.…

The only lockdown excursion we'll be taking - courtesy of some heated hardware Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork leaves the shores of the UK today and returns to Italy, country of culture, history and the finest of bork.…

Oracle wins protest after agency failed to get it kicked out for not being a reseller In a decision [PDF] issued yesterday, a US public watchdog said the Library of Congress needs to stop asking contractors to supply brand-name-only commercial stuff for a five-year $150m cloud hosting contract.…

Remember when The Reg told you in 2012 that they were taking over? A UK government desperate for good news in the face escalating cases of COVID-19 has finally announced a launch date for its contact-tracing app, once said to be the "cornerstone" of Blighty's pandemic response.…

Doing the right thing - after trying all the wrong things first A “female social network” called Giggle whose operators left its user database unsecured has triggered a wave of Twitter controversy after its founder threatened to sue a UK infosec firm who pointed out the vulnerability.…

Spoiler alert: Not that machine-learning salesperson Register Debate How does that saying go? I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist. That's pretty much how I'd sum up our first-ever Register Debate, which ran this week.…

Android skin has some worthwhile updates, despite software lag Huawei has claimed to be prepping its Android-challenging homegrown mobile operating system, but still has to look after its existing smartphone customers.…

Supply chain woes also fingered after second quarter of pain in Europe Western Europe led a decline in the value of EMEA external storage systems sales in Q3 with a recovery in the remainder of the year obviously hinging on whether a second wave of infections leads to further lockdowns.…

So says Pro Privacy after automatedly gazing at 82,000 sites British charities are sharing information about people visiting their websites with adtech data brokers, according to a report.…

And there you were thinking the annual developer conference was all about software It wasn't just software that hogged the limelight at Huawei's annual developer conference, the embattled Chinese company's PC hardware got a fresh lick of paint too.…

Fab: Boffins etch cooling into chip design Researchers in Switzerland demonstrated an approach that may have gone some way to addressing the sweltering heat and worrying carbon emissions from large computer systems: by integrating liquid cooling into microprocessor fabrication.…

The Orange One was using a password breached four years previously Three “grumpy old hackers” in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack.…

$9m already coughed up with more to come, plus 'contrition payments’ to Australian government IBM’s Australian limb underpaid 1,647 staff and has been forced to pay them AU$12.3m in back pay (US$8.97m or £6.98m) and make “contrition payments” to Australia’s government.…

BORKlife! Flaw allows overwriting of keys by the habitual voyeur The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has admitted some previous iterations of its technology had a flaw that could be exploited to hijack or eavesdrop on nearby connections.…

Luckily, earthly pleasures dished out by the exorcist On Call Those of a religious bent might want to look away now, or be regaled by the story of a server room seemingly haunted by a demon that really didn't like Windows in this week's On Call column.…

Q1 revenue climbs a couple of points, led by cloud and apps, as COVID fails to bite Oracle this week reported two per cent revenue growth for the first quarter of its 2021 financial year, along with strong demand for its hardware that caused a backlog of orders for Exadata and other equipment.…

'No government should politicize 5G' says position paper published to mark United Nations’ 75th birthday China has made treatment of its 5G vendors an issue of the same rank as its aspirations on issues like climate change and trade liberalisation.…

Aadhaar-adjacent app will put beasts' full history in farmers' hands India has launched a new app to help farmers access information about livestock and expects it will cut the cost of cattle and make farms more efficient.…

OpenAI's GPT-3 can go from zero to QAnon stan in 60 seconds... or however long it takes to ask it a couple of questions OpenAI’s powerful text generator GPT-3 can, with a little coaxing, conjure up fake political conspiracies or violent manifestos to fool or radicalize netizens, according to fresh research.…

Only accessible through underwater tunnel attached to Casino (and a few years behind the back-blocks of Cambodia) Apple has opened a store housed in a floating glass dome in Singapore's Marina Bay.…

UK political parties probed, too, reckons Redmond as it wades into debate with call for extra election security funding Microsoft believes there have been extensive “cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election,” and that foreign government hackers responsible for attacks ahead of the 2016 vote are back with new and nastier tactics.…

Hand-over to happen on the lunar surface. Legally speaking Got a Moon rocket handy? NASA is looking for proposals from the private sector for scraping bits off the surface of the Moon.…

Databases, info pipelines, software... 'that is where the fight of 20 years will be won' The nation to dominate modern warfare with AI will not have necessarily built the most deadly killer robot or algorithm – it’ll be the one that has the best infrastructure to support and quickly deploy new technologies in the battlefield, according to US military experts.…

Protectionist public policy prompts fresh focus on infosec fears Chinese drone maker DJI has commissioned yet another security audit with FTI Consulting that's given it a clean bill of health, as the US government reportedly prepares to ban its remote controlled aircraft from American skies.…

Here’s an ebook just for you, courtesy of Rapid7 Promo When you’re running security, it can be hard not to feel you’re slogging away in the trenches, saving your organisation on a daily basis, but getting precious little in the way of recognition and even less in terms of budget.…

Ladling out custom brew to its devices Android 11 is coming to Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro smartphones, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has confirmed.…

Hayabusa's heading home, but 8K's going to Mars The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) are planning to pop a "Super Hi-Vision Camera" with 4K and 8K capabilities onboard JAXA's 2024 mission to Mars.…

Homegrown system – previously a 'lightweight' OS for IoT – punted onto smartphones After years of speculation, Huawei has confirmed it will release the homegrown Harmony operating system for smartphones, theoretically posing a direct challenge to the enduring Android and iOS duopoly.…

Swansea-based CPS Advisory hit dial 106,987 times in 80 days, says ICO Britain’s data watchdog says it has snared Swansea-based business CPS Advisory for making more than 100,000 “unauthorised direct marketing calls” to people about their pensions, and subsequently fined the company £130,000.…

Games dev pleads with users to set up a password before they get locked out Epic Games, which is currently in a tit-for-tat litigation spat with Apple regarding the in-app payment system on iOS, has warned its users that they will lose the ability to log into an Epic Games account via "Sign in with Apple" from tomorrow: 11 September.…

The pubs may be problematic, but the bork is bountiful at Tennent's Bork!Bork!Bork! While we may now be allowed to visit a pub and enjoy a cooling beer, 2020 has not been kind to the hospitality industry, as evidenced by a screen of purest blue stuck on the side of a Tennent's brewery.…

Project leader Jonathan Carter explains problems facing this key Linux distro Debian Project Leader (DPL) Jonathan Carter has described the key problems in the Debian community as not a lack of funds, but rather a shortage of developers.…

Anti-social network asked to stop piping Irish uncles' mutterings to America Facebook has been reportedly asked to stop sending data from Ireland to the US, on orders from the EU.…

That’s the price and specs difference between the full XBOX X and its new smaller XBOX S sibling Microsoft has announced a new cut-down and teeny-weeny XBOX.…

Something that doesn't involve viruses, politics and wildfires Speckles of dirt kicked up from Bennu’s surface can stay suspended in space and sometimes they even orbit the asteroid, only to come crashing back down onto its equator, giving it its spinning-top or diamond-like shape.…

The taste of failure ... You fool. You absolute fool. Do you think you’re special? Do you think you’re hot? Your mind is a foggy Louisiana swamp. You’ve got all the focus of the 2019 Labour manifesto. And that is why you ... always ...lose. Fortunately, laptop brand Razr has the cure for what ails you.…

Indian Customs delays and security suspicions behind odd purchasing preference Some server-buyers are asking Lenovo to provide product made in Mexico, rather than made in China.…

Insists your kit there is safe because the isolation you'd expect from a rack-renter has worked Equinix has warned customers it has been infected with ransomware.…

Diamonds are forever, scholarly articles not so much, it seems Academics studying the longevity of online scholarship say that 176 digital open-access journals have vanished from the internet over the past two decades.…

‘Anti-China elements viciously attacked’ with links to racy personal service provider and propaganda China’s UK embassy has lashed out after the Twitter account of its ambassador Liu Xiaoming was apparently hacked.…

'Particularly students in high school and college classes' Researchers have published the first detailed look into what makes people troll Zoom calls and other video-conferencing meetings – and found the vast majority are inside jobs, and unique per-person access codes could end the practice.…

Since we can't build a planet Scientists have trained a neural network on a supercomputer to simulate how hydrogen turns into a metal, an experiment impossible to reproduce physically on Earth.…

Not for all patches, not ASAP, not all at once, not for production workloads and maybe not worth it yet? Microsoft has started a preview of automatic guest VM patching on Azure.…

Silently side-step software safeguards Video Boffins in America, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have devised a Spectre-style attack on modern processors that can defeat defenses that are supposed to stop malicious software from hijacking a computer's operating system. The end result is exploit code able to bypass a crucial protection mechanism and take over a device to hand over root access.…

Regional video streaming companies added to list of entities required to pay Digital Services Tax Indonesia has again extended the list of companies it will require to gather the nation’s digital services tax.…

Three Republicans take stab at 'objective reasonableness' Analysis With studied ignorance, yet another piece of proposed legislation targeting social media, and invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has emerged this week.…

There is no good money after bad if you’re the person receiving it Comment In an extraordinary piece of advocacy, the CEO of AT&T has not only highlighted the persistent problem of broadband provision in the US but also offered a solution: giving billions of taxpayer dollars to his company to fund its rollout.…

OpenExpress does away with intellectual property licensing burdens Electrical engineering boffins from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have released NVMe controller technology called OpenExpress to help academic researchers develop faster storage devices without rapidly depleting their budgets.…