The Register

There's rich, and then there's 'shrug off 24% profit drop' rich Google execs are upbeat for the future of the Chocolate Factory even as its quarterly haul took a hit in the profits department.…

Spherical shape kicks asteroid into new role PIC There may be a new dinky dwarf planet that’s even tinier than Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt that currently holds the title as the smallest dwarf planet in our Solar System.…

Winners and losers speak out after $10bn contract award Late on Friday, word broke that the US Department of Defense had decided to award the massive 10-year, $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative contract to Microsoft.…

Phone biz refers to crash as 'early soft landing' On Saturday, a phone-toting high-altitude balloon launched by Samsung to promote its Galaxy S10 5G phone crashed into the front yard of the home of Nancy and Dan Welke in Gratiot County, Michigan.…

Looks like some security staff were asleep at the switch Amazon has still not provided any useful information or insights into the DDoS attack that took down swathes of websites last week, so let’s turn to others that were watching.…

We're unlocking productivity! Microsoft has defended a policy decision for its "Power platform" – part of Office 365 – to let end users bypass Office 365 admins and make their own licence purchases.…

Hayi wena! Jozi officials claim they'll have 80% of systems back online as deadline expires Several hours past the payment deadline, Johannesburg has vowed not to give in to criminal hackers who demanded £29,000 (4 bitcoins) not to publish its data, four days after the South African city shut down its public sector networks in response to the breach.…

America's regional internet registry slammed by critics, snubbed by ISPs Analysis A key internet infrastructure organization is undercutting efforts to make the internet more secure by insisting ISPs accept a legal agreement before using a security framework, critics charge.…

Stop, collaborate and listen "We have six or seven projects which are doing kernel testing, so much so that we're getting really annoyed," kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman told a crowd today.…

In other words, you're waiting 26 seconds for that movie to download A first and limited look into the UK rollout of 5G has revealed punters enjoying median speeds up to four times faster than standard 4G, with EE coming out on top and Vodafone managing to be just twice as fast.…

That's the idea behind £34m investment in autonomous care for elderly research Rise of the Machines A nightmarish vision of our future dotage awaits: government-built "care robots".…

Also: Android integration pays off and recent crack at BASIC turns 11 Roundup While Microsoft basked in the warmth of soaring digits last week, former technical evangelist and engineer James Whittaker was there to tip an icy scorn bucket over Windows and the culture lurking behind it.…

The case of the disappearing ATMs, shonky backends and Total Sh*tshows of Banking The Treasury Committee has told UK bank regulators they must do more to force banks to improve their woeful record on IT.…

Let's bring you up to speed on the latest misuses of machine-learning tech Roundup Here's our latest summary of AI news beyond what we've already covered. It’s all about two favourite topics in machine learning today: facial recognition and deepfakes.…

CEO Evan Goldberg on Big Red migration and the Suite smell of Success Oracle-owned NetSuite has plugged cookie-cutter SuiteSuccess tooling at its London SuiteConnect shindig as customers face up to a migration to Big Red's cloud.…

And we invite you to grab your easel and brush A competition to produce stock pictures of infosec that does not involve hoodies or waterfalls of 0s and 1s has yielded a mixed bag of images to illustrate the industry's digital doings for the world's consumption.…

Ah, the old lost disk scenario... Despite the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recently slapping record megafines on British Airways and Marriott for data leakage, it's actually the UK's public sector that racked up the biggest volume of breaches in the last eight years.…

Disturbing omissions in 747 documentation Who, Me? We're back again with Who, Me?, The Register's Monday morning crowdsourced tale of reader misdeeds and close calls.…

Plus, Kaspersky opens doors on its intelligence portal Here's your Reg roundup of security news beyond all the bits and bytes we've already covered.…

New language model can think in both directions, fingers crossed Google has updated its search algorithms to tap into an AI language model that is better at understanding netizens' queries than previous systems.…

A bird on the band is worth more than your entire research budget MegaFon, the second largest mobile phone operator in Russia, has offered to pay the messaging charges accrued by a group of cell-strapped eagles after a crowdfunding campaign raised part of the funds.…

Congratulations, America, the home of Clippy (and Azure) is now running the US military's IT Microsoft has been awarded the $10bn decade-long US Department of Defense JEDI IT supply contract that will see the nation's military switch to the cloud.…

It's yes-way, Huawei for at least another generation Chip designer Arm says it will be able to continue licensing its blueprints to Huawei five months after it would have had to stop working with the Chinese comms equipment giant.…

Developers! Developers! Developers! Oh, wait, that's a different company Google is still working on a much-needed and overdue revision to its Chrome Extensions platform known as Manifest v3, but extension developers complain that the ad-slinger doesn't do enough to support them.…

No passwords, banking details, but enough info to convincingly phish someone Adobe has pulled offline a public-facing poorly secured Elasticsearch database containing information on 7.5 million Creative Cloud customers.…

Release Candidate drops just in time for Microsoft's Ignite As its Florida Ignite shindig looms large, Microsoft has settled on a Release Candidate for TypeScript 3.7 ahead of an imminent launch.…

We really needed to take a look before you published The US government has gone back to court in a bid to get a summary judgment against whistleblower Edward Snowden and Macmillan – the publisher of his memoir, Permanent Record.…

Engine maker Pratt & Whitney says it's working on a fix Software alterations have been fingered as the cause of Airbus A220 airliner problems that led to at least three emergency landings after excessive vibration caused engines to fail, according to reports.…

Verdict of two halves Amazon has failed to stop high-flying salesman Philip Moyer, who once flogged its cloud services to the financial services industry, from moving to Google's cloud division, although its efforts were partly upheld by a Seattle court.…

It's 2019 and government sites still require Internet Explorer Companies using the Australian Border Force's (ABF) Integrated Cargo System (ICS) are having problems connecting to the portal using Internet Explorer.…

Snap-happy sorts will still support the One mobe Iconic camera company Red has upped sticks and quit the smartphone biz following the retirement of its founder Jim Jannard and mobe-fondlers' dismal reception of the firm's first effort, the Hydrogen One.…

Never mind the AI, Hancock. I just want to turn my sodding computer on, mutters another Fancy a new job and a pay packet of upwards of £131k per year? Well, if you don't mind working with the ever-beaming Matt Hancock, the health service's newly formed digital quango, NHSX, is looking for a full-time chief technology officer.…

He's got the key, he's got the secret – allegedly Apple's head of corporate law, Gene Levoff, has been indicted on charges of (PDF) insider trading.…

Our speakers are here to help, whatever your platform Event Whatever platform you rely on for your serverless strategy, you can guarantee the speakers at Serverless Computing London will help you get the most out of it.…

Finally, a government decision we can all get behind We're not getting an extra bank holiday for the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, but we will get a couple of extra hours in the pub.…

Coverage in the back of beyond The UK's mobile operators have pledged to stump up half the cash for a £1bn "Shared Rural Network" (SRN) to tackle 4G notspots.…

Postmortem report emerges for last week's partial downtime Microsoft says last week's multi-factor authentication (MFA) partial outage, which hit its cloud-based services, was due to a dodgy network route between its servers and Apple's backend.…

All we know is hate and machinery Something for the Weekend, Sir? My pants are on fire. Would you like to take a look?…

Also: a few surprise chips and a lot of adhesive Google's Pixel 4XL may still be wet behind its ears, but it couldn't escape the indignity of a teardown by spudger-brandishing folk at iFixit, who came away unimpressed after some tinkering with the screwdrivers.…

Another piece of kit for youngsters to tussle over in the form of Robo Wunderkind As the global focus on computing curricula intensifies and parents continue to push their kids towards STEM subjects in the hopes that leads to better opportunities later on in life, the proliferation of "coding kits" aimed at kids is keeping pace.…

Everybody's gone quaffin', quaffin' USA On Call Welcome back to On Call, The Register's weekly womble into the sometimes sticky situations readers find themselves in when responding to a user's plea for help.…

Grab your favorite browser, tune in from the comfort of your desk, cafe, bar... Promo As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, and business applications proliferate across devices and locations, the soaring volume of internet traffic puts pressure on organisations' security systems and policies – and introduces new risks.…

Boffins pour, er, cold liquid on theories of melting water The mountains and ridges on Mars – which some believe are carved from melting ice – can also be formed by landslides, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Thursday.…

But the damage is already done Plans to prevent UK citizens from owning .eu domains are on ice following the latest Brexit madness from the British Parliament.…

Profit crunch looks to carry on into the holiday season Amazon, a cloud giant with a supplementary online souk, saw a rare drop in profits in its latest financial results, published Thursday.…

Device, server... something with electricity in it, possibly, blamed by US cellular giant Some AT&T customers are locked out of their voicemails due to a buggy software upgrade.…

And tears wraps off yet another alleged Arm killer: this time, low-power x86 Tremont cores Intel on Thursday reported $19.2bn in sales for its third quarter 2019 earnings, a quarterly record for the company.…

Web giant insists 'small number' of voice-controlled gizmos killed by firmware bug Google has somehow managed to brick some of its own smart Home and Home Mini devices, leaving an unknown number completely unresponsive after an automated update.…

Dev may not have known code was being used for scam traffic The iOS App Store is 18 applications lighter today after the software was caught harboring malware that secretly clicked on ads, signed up punters for premium services, or deliberately overloaded websites.…

Amazon dismisses duo as opportunistic publicity hounds On Thursday, US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked the US Federal Trade Commission to examine whether Amazon Web Services may have broken the law by renting defective servers.…