The Register

Apollo 12 @ 50 is just around the corner, but it wouldn't have happened without Apollo 4 "Our building's shaking here, our building's shaking! Oh it's terrific... the building's shaking! This big blast window is shaking! We're holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go... enter the clouds at 3,000ft! Look at it going... you can see it, you can see it..."…

Plus: New toys for Teams, a fresh Visual Studio Code, and more Roundup Despite it being Ignite week for much of Microsoft, there was still plenty going on in the house that Bill built.…

From a time before: 'This will do something awful. Are you sure? (Y/N)' Who, Me? Welcome back to Who, Me?, The Register's weekly dip into the suspiciously bulging mailbag of reader confessions.…

Plus, rConfig flaw raises alarms Roundup Time for a look at some of the other security stories making the rounds in the past week.…

Also Uber to Waymo - I wish I could quit you! Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's roundup of AI news. Read on for a fun and, frankly worrying, quiz that tests if you can tell if something was made up by an AI text generation model or said by Trump, and more.…

Code hosting company considers risk of pressure to betray customer data too great GitLab's director of global risk and compliance, Candice Ciresi, has resigned from the company, accusing the code hosting biz of engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior.…

Rare sign of criminal justice system actually working for these kinds of cases A man from Virginia has been handed a six year prison sentence for stalking and threatening two ex-girlfriends with revenge porn pictures and video clips.…

Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats not happy with Ajit Pai It’s been 18 months since it emerged that US mobile companies were selling the location data to their tens of millions of users with little or no oversight, and Congress wants to know what the hell the FCC is doing about it.…

It's like thunder, lightning, the way you code me is frightening Machine learning algorithms can predict when and where lightning will strike, according to new research published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.…

Also organizational chaos, secrecy and self-regulation Key details about the failure of Europe’s Galileo satellite system over the summer have started to emerge - and it’s not pretty.…

Boffins build search engine based on feelings expressed about programming interfaces Developers looking for guidance about APIs may wish to try a search engine prototype called Opiner to assess how their peers feel about specific programming interfaces, based on a limited set of data pulled from Stack Overflow.…

Tsinghua Unigroup chairman says American firms could do more to ease trade tensions One of China's largest chipmakers is calling on corporations in the United States to bring more pressure to bear on President Trump to end his trade row with the Middle Kingdom.…

'We're still good pals,' says Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raiberts, chief executive of Boston Dynamics, has admitted tipping a toddler in his quest to probe how humans balance.…

Supreme Court wraps up legal submissions from supermarket and breach victims "Cutting to the chase, it's not a case where the office cleaner finds a thumb drive, picks it up and takes the opportunity to make some use of it," barrister Jonathan Barnes told the Supreme Court as he urged judges to dismiss Morrisons' appeal against liability for its 2014 payroll data breach.…

(Tech adoption x tech capability ) ^ trust, anyone? Ignite Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came as close to a "developers developers developers" dance as he is ever likely to during this year's Ignite.…

Home broadband, mobile data package part of IP-only move BT has launched a new 5G mobile and fixed-line home broadband service, dubbed Halo, in a bid to muscle into the converged market.…

Meet Gordon, a man who knows all about job losses, uncertainty and bankers Where one Hoff once claimed victory for helping to tear down the iron curtain, the real Hoff – Gordon, an exec at DXC – is seeking to erect new barriers with the EU.…

Team chilling over weekend to pick it back up on Monday The Bloodhound land speed team hit 500mph (804kmph) yesterday but had to call off today's target of 550mph (885kmph) after an engine temperature warning.…

All that is needed is an email inbox, say civil servants The UK Home Office insists that a new law forcing it to create a new registration system for potentially millions of deactivated firearms and their owners will need neither a new database nor more public spending.…

And how I got blackmailed by a computerised French lesson Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hello Mister Dabbs, yes? I am calling from Microsoft Windows organisation, yes? I am calling to advise you of a security problem with your Microsoft, yes?"…

It's got another display on the back and everything Are smartphones getting interesting again? For the longest time, handsets occupied the same tedious rectangular form-factor. The sole areas of differentiation were found in the components under the hood.…

If there's anything that gets my backup ... On Call Friday is here! A chance to slope off early, enjoy a few brews and look back on a week of hard work. Unless, of course, you are one of the unfortunate souls destined to be forever at the beck and call of users. Bask in the fact that it's not you as you peruse this latest instalment of On Call.…

Email scans try to spot brain damage before it kills you Machine-learning algorithms might be able to work out if your brain is turning to mush from end-stage liver disease just by reading your emails, according to preliminary experiments.…

Taking a leaf from nature Video Scientists have fashioned an unsinkable type of metal by etching the surface with lasers, creating an unusual “superhydrophobic” layer.…

Reformed JavaScript killer now useful on the command line Google software engineers have delivered Dart 2.6, an update to the open source programming language that provides the ability to create self-contained, native executables for the major desktop operating systems.…

But sure, it's Huawei that's the big security threat Staff were cuffed in a police raid on Thursday at the offices of US surveillance equipment vendor Aventura Technologies. The workers are now facing criminal charges for allegedly passing off Chinese-made gear as stuff built in America, and selling it to Uncle Sam and its military.…

Beak denies wrongdoing in baffling malware probe case A judge in the US state of Georgia is facing hacking charges after she allegedly hired private investigators to look into what she believed was a spyware infection on her office computer.…

Mobile app SDKs sport dodgy crypto defaults, set bad examples – updates available It has been revealed that Adobe's Experience Platform mobile SDKs, used to create apps that interact with the company's cloud services, until recently contained sample configuration files that created insecure default settings.…

You didn't ask for it, we didn't tell you about it, but hey, it clears GDPR so what you gonna do? Ubiquiti Networks is fending off customer complaints after emitting a firmware update that caused its UniFi wireless routers to quietly phone HQ with telemetry.…

Tales from the coal face as experts reflect on what can possibly go wrong on the job Analysis It has been six weeks since Coalfire's Gary Demercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested in Dallas County, Iowa, while performing a paid-for security penetration test at a courthouse. Despite everyone acknowledging there was no foul play, the pair still face criminal charges. They deny any wrongdoing.…

Data analytics helps to boost contributions by 151% GitHub's annual "State of the Octoverse" report shows that Python has overtaken Java as the second-most popular language after JavaScript, based on the primary language of repository contributors.…

A swappable battery would be icing on the cake, though The Surface Pro X is in the hands of US users and the iFixit crew has already ripped into it. The repairability results might please Microsoft's legions of loyalists but give iPad fanbois pause for thought.…

From legacy migrations to data management, the cloud has its perks and pitfalls Webcast You’re counting down the days until you can finally pull the plug on your expensive and inelegant on-premises servers. Like countless businesses before you, you’re embracing the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud.…

Debut adventure of tween occultist goes for $150,000 A first-edition copy of history's most influential takedown of creationism has sold for $564,500 at auction, the highest amount yet for the tome.…

Only 18% of mobile users across world will have access to 5G in next 5 years China will dominate the global 5G market by 2025, along with the US, Japan and Korea, leaving Europe to lag behind, according to a study by global mobile operator data-wranglers at GSMA's Intelligence branch.…

Windows and Office teams shun Xamarin in favour of JavaScript/C++ solution Ignite Microsoft has hinted that cross-platform development framework React Native is a key solution to the problem of writing applications that span both Windows and mobile.…

Supermarket takes appeal to most senior legal eagles Brit supermarket Morrisons is arguing in the Supreme Court that it shouldn't be held vicariously liable for the actions of a rogue employee who stole and leaked the company's payroll.…

Look like RoboCop, play with holograms The wait is over. Microsoft has finally begun shipping its pricey augmented reality headgear to customers.…

Mobe chip flinger's investors seem chilled, though, as it predicts 2020 bonanza In the driver's seat of the 5G hype bus right now is mobile chip designer Qualcomm with its forecast that up to 225 million smartphones running on the next-generation chipsets will find a buyer in 2020.…

Information Commissioner's Office is very knowledgeable about why that's bad A strong grasp of data privacy is key for anyone wanting a job at the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), according to the blurb on its microsite. Just one catch: the site itself enables hundreds of cookies – seemingly without consent.…

AI, AI! You can't go looking at that! Ignite Got governance? Microsoft reckons there is room for improvement – it should know – and has used its Ignite Florida knees-up to batter compliance with its overused AI stick.…

Hyatt, we've had a problem The Register is at Microsoft's Ignite shindig in Orlando, Florida and while the event itself has been liberally hosed with the cloud and decked with impressive workflows, we reckon the Windows giant might want to offer up some of the assembled engineers to work out just what the heck is going on with Hyatt hotel's booking system.…

Don't spend a thousand quid before you fish around, folks What even is a flagship phone anymore? It was only a few years ago that the line of demarcation between a scrappy midranger and a high-spec handset was well defined.…

Infosec veteran Marc Rogers on why we need a better system to rate vulnerabilities Disclosure The way we rate the severity of computer security vulnerabilities and bugs needs to change if people and businesses want to be better protected from malware and cyber-crime.…

But you're going to have to insert a decoder yourself as Microsoft's left the safety on this tech Microsoft researchers have built a chatbot from OpenAI’s text-generating model GPT-2, and trained it on millions of conversations scraped from... oh crap.…

Your guide to some of the security enhancements announced this week Ignite Amid the flood of news from Microsoft's Ignite conference in Florida this week, Redmond dropped word of several new features and additions to its cloud services aimed at protecting user data.…

Chipzilla says it didn't intentionally mislead anyone Intel on Wednesday disputed a news report that Chipzilla had intentionally published misleading benchmarks in a comparison between the Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 and the AMD second-generation Epyc 7742 processors.…

One cuffed by Feds this week Two now-ex Twitter employees have been charged with spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia – after they allegedly leaked internal records for accounts linked to critics of the Saudi royal family, including the assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while working for the social network.…

As thousands of internal files leak revealing antisocial biz's pressure on app makers California’s attorney general has gone to court to force Facebook to hand over documents as part of an investigation into the company.…

The App Defense Alliance posse will scrutinize Android app code before release Google, after more than a decade of dealing with Android malware, has formed an alliance with three security companies to help it defend its mobile platform.…