The Register

New decade, independent geo-time keeping The US-based GPS, a network of more than 30 satellites, is used by millions of phones, handsets and other devices in this country, for satellite mapping, navigation and communications technology.…

Shipped from expensive shop X? In the shed, you say? Researcher spots badness Parcel wrangler Yodel has caulked up a security hole in which random user data leaked to people using its Android app.…

Fixing the unfixable – AMS-02 gets a new pump The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA astronauts have concluded the third, and arguably most challenging, of the four spacewalks required to replace the cooling system of the International Space Station's (ISS) Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)…

Anger rises over ten-figure sale of registry Analysis The price tag for one of the internet’s largest and most important domain-name registries has finally been revealed: $1.135bn.…

Because eight billion euros just ain’t enough The European Commission has confirmed it is carrying out yet another investigation into whether Google has abused its market position, this time digging into the search giant’s data collection around local search and ads.…

Photosynthesis alone ain't going to cut it as an explanation The chemical reaction that produced the outburst of oxygen on Earth was sparked by volcanoes belching carbon dioxide after a major tectonic plate shifted about 2.5 billion years ago, according to the latest research.…

Online tracking report explores persistent privacy problems As the sacred shopping season gets underway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a report detailing the privacy cost of surveillance-based commerce.…

Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years Imagination will today launch the tenth generation of its PowerVR family, with GPU cores aimed at rendering 3D graphics and other imagery for all sorts of stuff, from phones and cars to PCs and servers.…

Feds tell senator that age-filter toy a possible security risk Netizens who fire up FaceApp for fun may be unknowingly putting national security at risk, according to the FBI.…

DeepComposer is certainly no maestro re:Invent Amazon is releasing DeepComposer, a software package to help machine learning enthusiasts automatically generate jingles using a mini keyboard.…

TrueDialog, Mixcloud, Magento Marketplace expose accounts Thanksgiving is an ideal time to either hack (IT admins need holidays too) or to drop news of hacks (because no one's reading much news) so here's your roundup of the weekend's shenanigans.…

Rent-a-server biz readies week-long fanboi rally re:Invent In advance of its Las Vegas-based re:Invent confab this week, Amazon Web Services announced a handful of additions to a product menu that at last count included more than 165 distinctive ways to be billed.…

Aw man, I was still downl...err.. great work everyone! Europol says its latest piracy takedown netted three arrests and more than 30,000 website takedowns.…

Modem biz sale was made 'at a multi-billion dollar loss,' complains Chipzilla Apple's acquisition of the bulk of Intel's smartphone business, valued at $1bn, was completed today against the backdrop of of a complaint from Chipzilla that the deal was done "at a multi-billion dollar loss".…

There's more than enough crap up there already Roundup As ISS astronauts get cracking with the next AMS spacewalk, take a moment to look back at the week in rockets. Arianespace celebrated its 250th launch, Russia and India fired off some of their own, and Rocket Lab spared us all more space junk.…

Hey contractor techies, the politicians really want your vote The UK's would-be chancellor of the exchequer has promised to review the extension of IR35 to the private sector – if the Conservative Party wins the General Election on 12 December.…

Video link request from September finally granted Julian Assange will be interviewed via video link by a judge investigating claims that a Spanish company orchestrated a spying operation against him while he resided in the Ecuadorian embassy.…

More than half won't pull suitcase from the attic for at least two years As the UK and Ireland SAP User Group conference opened in Birmingham today, customers of the enterprise software monolith gave their verdict on the cloud-and-AI platform S/4HANA.…

Mike Lynch currently in the UK facing HPE civil case The United States Embassy in London has filed a request to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch to face charges of wire fraud.…

Got a problem with $2.6bn deal? The CMA wants to hear from you The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is considering whether Google's takeover of Looker Data Sciences is likely to have a negative impact on the market.…

Plus: New Surface SDKs, Outlook as web app, Azure updates and more Roundup It may be 2004 within the bowels of Redmond, but the eyes of Windows 7 users are nervously fixed on 2020 as the end of support nears.…

Yes, we'll definitely use this for spreadsheets and charts and not video games, nope, no way The Register got its talons on Lenovo's monster monitor, the 43.4-inch ThinkVision P44W-10 curved display. Was it worth the desk space?…

Nudity, inebriation and a desire to see a band live on stage. The Christmas countdown has begun! Who, Me? Crack open the advent calendar, chow down on some stale chocolate and join us in celebrating the prospering of cheats with a Who, Me? featuring a reader very much on the naughty list.…

Arm yourself with the latest cybersecurity know-how Promo As more and more organisations move to new technologies, data thieves constantly try to find ingenious new ways of penetrating even the most well-protected systems.…

A better operating system thanks to Rust's combination of safety and performance? The Redox OS, written in Rust and currently under development, is only "a few months of work away" from self-hosting, meaning that the Rustc compiler would run on Redox itself, according to its creator Jeremy Soller.…

Competent corporate workhorse with a funky finish and a price tag to match Nippy, fixable but oh-so-scuffable. Lenovo's premium X1 Carbon ThinkPad has had an update, but is it any good?…

NatWest, RBS, FirstDirect and Ulster all on the fritz Updated UK banks Royal Bank of Scotland, FirstDirect and NatWest are all struggling to keep their websites up today, which is nice considering it's pay day.…

Manned aviation spreads its wings over growing young industry +Comment Fresh from the latest Gatwick drone controversy, aviation charity CHIRP is launching a confidential drone incident reporting service for commercial and recreational drone fliers.…

Chief scientist reveals why company hasn't released an API for facial recognition Google has announced a new Explainable AI feature for its cloud platform, which provides more information about the features that cause an AI prediction to come up with its results.…

Beancounter continues biz services shopping spree Geordie accounting software provider Sage is continuing its shift to general cloud-based business services by scoffing human resources software company CakeHR.…

Clip 'could damage perceptions of our impartiality', says Auntie The BBC has complained to the Conservative Party over a Facebook advert that features video clips of news reporters Laura Kuenssberg and Huw Edwards.…

Windows struck down at Asda Click & Collect 'Drive Thru' For the latest in The Register's sporadic series of Windows falling over in strange places, we present UK retailer Asda and its borked Click and Collect "Drive Thru" terminal.…

Inside the decided mind of Andrew Sullivan Interview El Reg has quizzed Andrew Sullivan, the president and CEO of the Internet Society (ISOC), about his organistion's decision to sell the non-profit .org registry to private equity outfit Ethos Capital.…

Read on, partner [decent GPU required] The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. We're living the dream now because Rockstar clearly doesn't give a toss about previous coverage and gave us one of the most anticipated PC titles of the year. Cheers!…

You can't leave your hat on Something for the Weekend, Sir? The customs officer likes my smile. He smiles back.…

Yeah, we're gonna need you to bring us his head On Call Welcome back to On Call, The Register's weekly trip down memory lane with those poor buggers who have to deal with whatever lurks on the other end of the phone line.…

Message for Mr Peake: The station called and wants its former resident Brit back ESA bigwigs were cock-a-hoop today as the agency's Ministerial Council passed a bonzer budget, with the UK, Germany, Italy and France splashing the most cash.…

Not 'Music For Extraditions' Acclaimed lift music composer Brian Eno is orchestrating a mass mail-in to Brit home secretary Priti Patel so the great unwashed can tell her: "Don't Extradite Assange."…

AWS SSO? AWS IAM? AWS Cognito? All is explained Just ahead of its big Las Vegas re:Invent knees-up, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has extended its Single Sign-on service to support Azure Active Directory – as used by Microsoft's Office 365.…

Tune in to hear advice from Box and Freeform Dynamics Webcast Let’s be realistic: nobody sets out to create computer systems that get in the way of good business.…

Adtech firm also sent 12k phishing warnings to users of its services Google has said it fired off 12,000 warnings to unlucky users of its GMail, Drive and YouTube services telling them that they’re being phished by state-backed hackers.…

Can't connect? Try a lower rez, or a different HDMI cable Users of the Raspberry Pi 4 mini computer are puzzling over an issue where setting some display resolutions have the side-effect of killing the Wi-Fi connection.…

Jagex Ltd's gross misconduct efforts blasted by judge A RuneScape artist who found a document on an office printer that stated a senior veep's salary and mentioned it to colleagues was wrongly fired by red-faced managers, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled.…

14 days till the General Election Updated Controversial UK tax legislation IR35, coming to a private sector near you from the spring, is the latest tool being used to curry favour and win votes in the upcoming General Election in Britain.…

You can be fast but they're always faster Cloud-'n'-comms biz Datrix has suffered a phishing attack that resulted in some customers' contact details being compromised – though the company reckons it contained the attack within 15 minutes.…

Plus: Chilling details of the AI police state in Xinjiang Roundup Welcome to an early edition of this week's AI news summary, brought forward as some of us are away for Thanksgiving...…

Sixty of them are bad enough, let alone the planned 12,000 Skywatchers in Spain recording meteors being transformed into brilliant streaks of light by atmospheric compression are a bit miffed – as their view was rudely interrupted by a slew of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.…

Plus more from the world of infosec Roundup Here's a summary of recent infosec news beyond what we've already covered – earlier than usual because some of us have Thanksgiving to get through in the US. By the way, watch out for hackers taking advantage of IT teams suffering turkey comas.…

How dare you say we can’t underpay women and non-Caucasian staff! Oracle has finally addressed long standing accusations that it discriminates against and underpays women and minorities by... suing the government department that has repeatedly flagged the issue, claiming it has no authority over Larry and his boys.…

From scale to cost, our friends at Intel and Redis will tell you what you need to know Webcast The modern connected business never sleeps. Around the clock, your customers expect constant availability, and an experience that’s blazing fast and responsive.…