The Register

This year is just one disappointment after another, eh? The black hole thought to be nearest to Earth – a mere 1,000 or so light years away – may not exist at all, more than a dozen scientists have warned.…

Find out how to weather the storm – tune in online here this month Webcast The financial services world has had a tough decade. From a global financial crisis to an uptick in regulation to the COVID-19 coronavirus, and possibly yet another financial crisis off the back of that, it’s no wonder the sector is often seen as traditionally slow to digitally transform. With everything else going on, it often feels like there’s simply no time.…

There's iron in them hills, maybe The latest measurements from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest the Moon contains more metal than previously thought.…

Golden State AG prepares crackdown Today is the first day that California will start enforcing its new data privacy law, so if your website doesn’t have a “Do not sell my personal information” link in, say, the footer, you may soon regret it.…

Senior techie sues, says he was snubbed due to Dalit ancestry, HR ignored complaints A senior engineer working at Cisco headquarters in Silicon Valley claims he was mistreated by coworkers and managers because of his Indian caste status – and that HR ignored his complaints about the matter.…

Stability gains for Windows-fiddling throwback Microsoft has freshened up its PowerToys preview with a 0.19 release aimed at making things a bit more stable.…

Still outstanding issues but gaining ground faster than previous efforts The Windows 10 2004 rollout is moving a little quicker than the last major update to Microsoft's OS.…

New Regular Expression evaluator borrowed from Chromium V8 - a sign of more collaboration to come? Mozilla has released Firefox 78 with a new Protections Dashboard and a bunch of updates for web developers. This is also the last supported version of Firefox for macOS El Capitan (10.11) and earlier.…

244 workers TUPE'd to new employer UK retailer John Lewis Partnership is buddying up with services giant Wipro and ejecting 244 tech staff into the arms of the outsourcer as it does so.…

New skills aplenty and Teams tweaks from Uncles Brad and Satya Kind old Microsoft is discounting certifications in its technology and making access to training via LinkedIn free as businesses swing the axe in the post-lockdown world.…

Privately owned vehicles still illegal on public highways, however Electric scooters are finally coming to the UK after the Department for Transport confirmed it would allow limited trials of rented two-wheelers from this weekend.…

Outsourcer charged with bolstering PPI chaser's business transformation Global consultancy-cum-IT services outfit Capgemini has won a £40m contract from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) to provide IT and developer support to its new business strategy.…

A delay until 2022 looms as sensor problems on Atlas V add a few more days to schedule It is squeaky bum time at NASA after the launch date for the agency's Perseverance Mars rover was pushed back yet again, raising the spectre of a multi-year delay.…

Legislation to root out subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces following year of civil unrest China's mainland government has enforced a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong, increasing its hold on the territory in what HK's chief exec, Carrie Lam, has described as the "most important development" in the former British colony's history since its handover.…

Deutschland, uber alle allies Germany is helping the UK develop its new decentralised contact-tracing app, the country's ambassador Andreas Michaelis told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.…

Top uni takes action after El Reg highlights concerns by academics Special report MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.…

It's free too – until you've burned through £1,000 worth of data, that is UK map boffins at the Ordnance Survey (OS) have opened up its shiny new Data Hub, replete with APIs and access to MasterMap data.…

Please, sir. I want some more TikTok OPPO yesterday pushed out its latest smartphone for the UK market: the bargain-basement A72, which packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 platform and retails at £219.…

Oh Snap: Based on Ubuntu but without package manager. Warpinator anyone? The Linux Mint team has released Mint 20 Cinnamon, a long-term support (LTS) release. It is based on Ubuntu 20.04, will be supported until 2025, and new Mint versions will use the same package base until 2022.…

CodeGuru guesstimates how much AWS will charge you to run that source on its cloud Amazon has made its machine-learning-tools that automatically review and profile code, so you can find out where bottlenecks are and how it's going to cost you in the AWS cloud, generally available.…

Make a secure digital transformation possible Webcast Most businesses tell us that they think email encryption is a priority that's part of their digital transformation and cloud migration. But not many of them use the security mechanism consistently.…

Or was target practice for a Death Star? Astronomers are on the hunt for a rare gigantic star located 75 million light years away that seems to have disappeared after nearly 20 years of observations.…

EvilQuest targets Mac pirates, poses as legit network security and music tools Security bods are sounding the alarm following the discovery of a rare brand-new strain of Mac ransomware.…

So much for preventing malicious software from peeking at sensitive files Six months after software developer Jeff Johnson told Apple about a privacy bypass vulnerability opening up protected files in macOS Mojave, macOS Catalina, and the upcoming macOS Big Sur, the bug remains unfixed – so he's going public.…

Man claims life savings lost in theft aided by telco staff AT&T has been sued for a second time over allegations its staff gave thieves control of a specific individual’s cellphone number to steal a large chunk of cryptocurrency.…

Bogus signatures may fool your corp network's gatekeeper Palo Alto Networks has issued a fix for a security hole in its firewall products – one so serious, Uncle Sam urged organizations to patch it ASAP as foreign hackers "will likely attempt to exploit it soon."…

Lawyers lick their lips at litigation to come Analysis The internet's domain names have become potentially trademarkable following a decision by the US Supreme Court today that Booking.com can in fact be registered with America's Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – against officials' objections.…

Open-source database project gets new heads, inclusive code of conduct Salvatore Sanfilippo, better known by the nickname antirez, stepped down on Tuesday as the maintainer of Redis, a popular open-source database project released in 2009.…

Norwegian cancels 97 orders, sues for compensation over halted fleet A Boeing 737 Max has flown for the first time since the fleet was grounded globally after two total-loss crashes – on the same day a European airline cancelled its order for almost 100 examples of the controversial aircraft and sued its US manufacturer over the debacle.…

Follows its customers into the cloud Couchbase's database-as-a-service product has hit general availability – although this is just on Amazon Web Services initially, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform soon to follow.…

It's has been 6 months since researchers spotted RCE flaws Netgear has now patched 28 out of 79 vulnerable router models, six months after infosec researchers first noticed security problems potentially allowing an attacker to remotely execute code as root.…

With devices packing Helios G25/G35 coming in at £60-£80 and £1,000+ for a desktop PC, we see the appeal Fabless smartphone chipmaker MediaTek today announced two new budget platforms: the Helio G25 and G35.…

Big boots to fill as NoSQL company's founder moves on to advisory role NoSQL database slinger MongoDB has appointed former Oracle and AWS tech leader Mark Porter as its chief technology officer.…

Magical Black Box of Suspects to Arrest is updated annually, says firm Facial-recognition technology used by British police forces does not rely on trawling the internet for random face photos to use as training data, an NEC manager told the courts.…

Abort test simulated a very bad day – now, how about getting it to the ISS? Boeing has put the CST-100 Starliner's parachutes through their paces with a simulation of an abort early in the launch.…

Yep, that's WD and Xilinx smirking in the background Analysts today noted that memory maker Micron's latest results suggested "healthy" data centre demand, as the American firm's CEO pointed to uptick in capacity requirements as the "pandemic driv[es] rapid change in consumer and corporate practices..."…

AU$1.35bn fund follows revelations that country was hit by state-run attack Australia will hire 500 hackers as part of a AU$1.35bn (£754m, $925m) boost to protect the nation's networks from a wave of cyber attacks.…

Before you get too excited 1) They're benchmarks 2) New consumer Arm-based Macs might use something else Benchmarks from the Mac Mini-based Developer Transition Kit powered by Apple's homegrown silicon have started to appear on GeekBench, showing competitive performance despite the inevitable hit from Cupertino's Rosetta 2 compatibility software.…

Platform aims to help research into disease prevention and cures Health Data Research UK has awarded business advisory firm PA Consulting a £5.3m contract to develop a web application to manage researchers and private-sector firms' access to health research data, including that held on the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Will code move on to a language such as Rust? 'I'm convinced it's going to happen' says kernel colonel Linux creator Linus Torvalds spoke about the challenge of finding future maintainers for the open-source operating system, at the (virtual) Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux conference under way this week.…

But it is American law, not Chinese, that might make all the difference Feature When people think about Hong Kong, money usually comes to mind. Over the past two decades, as China beefed up to become the world's second-largest economy, Hong Kong has carved out its role as middleman to the rest of the world.…

Blighty pondering OneWeb as the new Brexit Satellite The saga of the UK's Brexit Satellite (BS)* took another turn last week as rumours circulated that the government might take a stake in stricken OneWeb with a view to repurposing the constellation for satellite navigation.…

Judge lays out rules from one-time passwords to window snooping A judge has approved the use of so-called remote review laptops in a patent battle between Apple and Japanese tech manufacturer Maxell so lawyers can continue their case during the coronavirus pandemic.…

Skia and Vulkan graphics in Windows version, better compatibility and performance The Document Foundation has released a second beta of LibreOffice 7.0, with general availability expected at the beginning of August.…

No more paying for non-existent employees, users, page views, or transactions, says Forrester Research group Forrester has predicted Software-as-a-Service providers will have to adapt their commercial models and offer more flexible deals in response to economic changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.…

About the same as a deposit on a nice house The UK government’s affordable housing arm was left with egg on its face when it allowed a useful domain name to expire, taking down a website for first-time buyers.…

Chinese chap swiped communications blueprints from what-is-now-Broadcom on behalf of Beijing An engineer-turned-spy stole confidential blueprints of American wireless electronics on behalf of the Chinese government to run a rival factory churning out the components in the Middle Kingdom.…

This July, explore ways to make our new reality a good one Webcast No matter how old-school, there’s unlikely to be an IT desk in the world now that’s not slightly relaxed its grip on the daily lives of its users. Putting down the screwdrivers and moving almost full-time to facilitating 24/7 remote working has become the stock-in-trade of maintaining a business’s digital infrastructure.…

From Sept 1, new TLS certificates valid for more than 398 days will be snubbed From September 1, Apple software, from Safari to macOS to iOS, will reject new HTTPS and other SSL/TLS certificates that are valid for more than 398 days, plus or minus some caveats.…

Easy to fool safety system, in theory – in practice, well... Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) are used in aircraft to avoid hitting other aircraft in flight. And like many electronic systems, they weren't designed for security.…