The Register

Geoblocking, weaponisation and more in Parliamentary committee's sights The British government should make it a crime to disable geofencing and electronic conspicuity on one’s drone, according to MPs from a parliamentary committee looking at future drone regulation.…

You shoved your documents where, exactly? On Call Friday is that special time of the week when clocks seem to slow to a crawl and software giants drop their buggiest code. It is also the time when The Register pokes a talon into the sack marked "On Call".…

Be the first to see tech giant’s global trends report Promo Cisco is inviting the world’s IT leaders to join its Networking.Next Virtual Event on 24 October, offering up a panel of experts who will examine the diverse trends of today, that are shaping tomorrow’s network.…

Redmond's bundled group chat app draws fire from Slackville Several months after Microsoft crowed about how its Teams group chat app has reached 13 million daily active users, rival Slack has fired back with figures of its own.…

Turmoil in Redmond over deals with US immigration agents Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary are under fire from some of their own employees over service contracts with America's controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.…

That's the way the Cook, he crumbles: HKmap banned again Apple has once again taken down an iOS app aimed at helping Hong Kong protesters avoid police crackdowns in the troubled city.…

'If only you could see what I've seen through your eyes'... A Japanese man indicted on Tuesday for allegedly attacking a 21-year-old woman last month appears to have found where his victim lived by analyzing geographic details in an eye reflection captured in one of her social media photos.…

Media giant says it can now pay back subscription fees Adobe has reversed course on its decision to withhold refund payments from customers in Venezuela.…

Haben sie nicht von dem Streisand-Effekt gehört? Malware authors behind the Finfisher spyware suite, well beloved by dictators, have sent legal threats intended to silence a German news blog that reported them to criminal prosecutors over allegedly illegal malware exports.…

1803 to be euthanised in November Two faithful Windows 10 versions are to be led out behind the barn by a sad-faced Microsoft engineer.…

'Hookers.nl is committed to privacy and we deeply regret the situation.' Ja, hoor! A Dutch vBulletin forum for sex workers and their clients has reportedly been hacked using that infamous RCE vuln, baring the privates (and data) of a quarter of a million people.…

Another Parliamentary enquiry? Huawei, the Brexit of network policy decisions British telcos and academics have told a Parliamentary enquiry the UK needs to get on with allowing Huawei equipment into the heart of its future 5G networks.…

200,000 homes and biz have gigabit-capable connections Step forward, Hull: first city in Blighty to claim the title of full-fibre connectivity.…

Top brass on keeping ISS lights on and life after Brexit ESTEC The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, Netherlands, opened its doors to the public last weekend, and The Register braved the rain to grill top brass on spaceships, partnerships and the "B" word.…

'Hyper-aggressive' company offers workflow portability for multiple clouds "We want GitLab monitoring to be a complete replacement for DataDog," GitLab's director of product, Eric Brinkman, said yesterday. And he didn't stop there, referring to a whole swathe of "tools that GitLab can replace" at the firm's Commit event in London.…

Especially to Boris Johnson Liverpool is the most gobby verbal region in the UK, according to Ofcom – something prime minister Boris Johnson would no doubt have confirmed had he visited the city today.*…

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do If humans are to go beyond the Moon, they must rely less on ground control and more on AI systems to perform operations like flying and conducting scientific experiments more autonomously, according to a NASA paper (PDF).…

Public beta for new shiny, plus many Tasks make a Plan in upcoming Enterprise 2019.2 Puppetize PDX DevOps darling Puppet took to the stage at the company's Portland Puppetize PDX shindig yesterday to whip the covers off Project Nebula, before giving us a sneak peek at an updated Puppet Forge and a preview of Puppet Enterprise 2019.2.…

49-year-old to appear at the Old Bailey next month A former BAE Systems defence contractor has appeared in court accused of leaking "highly sensitive" secrets to foreign governments.…

Join us with Google Cloud for advice to the brave Webcast If your strategy depends on using data to disrupt the market, then unstoppable data growth, a change of business strategy, or a fast-moving competitive landscape, are likely to present challenges.…

There’s nothing like reasoned policy debate. This is nothing like reasoned policy debate The European Union has published a risk assessment of next-generation 5G mobile networks and concluded that everyone needs to think differently about security, given fundamental changes in how the new networks will operate.…

Now if only they'd accept the Queen back again... The US National Security Agency (NSA) is warning admins to patch a set of months-old security bugs that have recently come under active attack.…

It's time to update or call 0118 999 88199 9119 7253 The author of popular macOS open source terminal emulator iTerm2 has rushed out a new version (v3.3.6) because prior iterations have a security flaw that could allow an attacker to execute commands on a computer using the application.…

Man alleged to have faked identity as game developer A man from Singapore has been indicted in the US for impersonating a game developer in order to steal time on cloud compute systems and mine cryptocurrency.…

Authoritarian regimes continue wrestling internet back into box China and Russia will sign a joint treaty aimed to tackling “illegal internet content” later this month, the Russian telecoms regulator has announced.…

Goodenough for Goodenough as boffin is still working at 97 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three pioneers in the field of lithium ion batteries, which form the power storage unit of most modern technology.…

Aussie user's AMD GPU breaks hash in just four days Back in 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen found an /etc/passwd file among a file dump from the BSD 3 source tree that included the passwords used by various computer science pioneers, including Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Steve Bourne, and Bill Joy.…

Whew, you're a bit of a rust bucket, aren't you?! Come with us International Launch Services (ILS) sent up a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome this morning with a payload containing the first commercial spacecraft designed to service and extend the life of satellites in orbit.…

Non-Indian call centres and High Street shops on the way These truly are strange times. BT is plotting a return to the High Street, unleashing hundreds of tech troubleshooters onto the unsuspecting public - and onshoring all of its call centres to Britain quicker than scheduled.…

Yep, storage firm's software pre-installed on HPE servers Hyperconverged playa Nutanix opened its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen with a triple announcement: an HPE GreenLake deal, its software pre-installed on HPE servers, and integration with ServiceNow for automated incident-handling.…

Delicate thing doesn't like turbulence, apparently A second Airbus Zephyr high altitude pseudo-satellite (HAPS) drone, built for the UK's Ministry of Defence, has crashed in Australia while on a test flight.…

Let's all pretend that we don't remember the layoffs in March What Larry snatcheth away with one hand, he giveth with another. Oracle is hiring a couple of thousand infrastructure services sales bods and has promised to swing open its data centre doors to more cloud regions.…

Plus: New build brings Cortana resizing to all. Hurrah! Microsoft squeezed out a fresh build of Windows 10 last night, and finally released the much-anticipated Calls feature to eager Windows Insiders.…

Senior beak overrules Upper Tribunal judges' refusal Aria Technology Ltd, the company that used to run e-tailer Aria PC, is headed for the Court of Appeal in a third attempt to overturn a £750,000 VAT fraud ruling.…

That means Kubernetes and DevOps for the Linux veteran Linux veteran SUSE has decided to kill off development of its OpenStack Cloud product line and cease sales to focus on its investments in application delivery.…

Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart take a moment to chat with 'the enemy' ESTEC Apollo astronauts Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart spoke at ESA's 2019 ESTEC shindig in the Dutch beach town of Noordwijk over the weekend, and The Register was fortunate enough to chat with the pair.…

Buddy Pivotal will operate managed framework on Azure Kubernetes Service Microsoft and Pivotal have used the latter's SpringOne shindig in Austin, Texas, to show off Azure Spring Cloud, which is now available in private preview.…

100% capacity doesn't mean 2/3 of the true figure, growls ad watchdog TalkTalk has been slapped down by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after emailing lies to its customers as part of a hard-sell tactic for expensive fibre broadband.…

Incoming unit prez revokes licence to print money HP is overturning a print sales model that helped it amass billions in profits over the decades but is now challenged by rival supplies makers luring customers with cheaper ink and toner cartridges.…

It will also be restricting visas to Communist Party officials too The US government has blacklisted 28 Chinese companies, including some of the world’s most valuable AI startups, for being complicit in China’s effort to crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population.…

Get serverless, practically Event Our Serverless Computing Conference kicks off in just four weeks – and there’s still time to snap up tickets for both our conference and workshops.…

That was just an unfortunate accident that ended up padding Jack's bank account Twitter says it was just an accident that caused the microblogging giant to let advertisers use private information to better target their marketing materials at users.…

Turns out the Feds make the CIA and NSA actually look good The FBI routinely misused a database, gathered by the NSA with the specific purpose of searching for foreign intelligence threats, by searching it for everything from vetting to spying on relatives.…

On the bright side, nothing from Adobe to install this month Patch Tuesday October brings a relatively light patch load for admins and users, thanks to Adobe's decision to sit out this month's update bonanza.…

Protect your business with Carbon Black Webcast Stop press: there are miscreants out there, and they are looking to break into your computer systems and steal your data. But you knew that, right?…

James Peebles gets half, whilst Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz share a quarter each Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of how the early universe evolved after the Big Bang and finding the first exoplanet orbiting a faraway star.…

'Every voice matters' unless there's renminbi to be had US games company Blizzard has caused a storm of protest for suspending a professional gamer after he made comments in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.…

Nearly all admin warnings are false alarms, says Kaspersky, and that's not a bad thing Just one per cent of all Indicator of Attack (IOA) warnings are actually caused by network attacks.…

RISC-V, accelerator pressure leads to customizable Armv8-M instructions TechCon Microprocessor designer Arm will allow chipmakers licensing its blueprints to, in certain circumstances, alter the holiest of holy scriptures: its CPU instruction set.…

That'll give them something else to moan about BT's budget broadband pusher Plusnet is about to give customers something else to complain about, having just announced a price hike before Christmas.…