The Register

Hey, leave some room in orbit for the rest of us? One of the companies that hopes to beam internet access down to Earth from space has applied for permission to put an extraordinary one million mini-satellites into orbit.…

Big Blue hands over spare change to make allegations against subsidiary vanish IBM will cough up $15m to settle a major gripe over its development, or lack thereof, of software for a health insurance website for the US state of Maryland.…

You can now pre-order this underpowered, over-priced, untested, over-complicated toy. What are you waiting for? After two years of delays and missed deadlines, Atari has announced at the E3 games conference this week that its VCS games console is finally available. For pre-order. Again.…

Now you can do exactly what she didn't: Pore over it – download our obtained copy of the report Autonomy Trial Cathie Lesjak, HP’s former chief financial officer, told the High Court in London this week that she did not read a KPMG due diligence report on British software firm Autonomy before her company blew $11bn buying it.…

Armchair aviation geeks, assemble! Comment Earlier this week Microsoft announced that it was getting back into consumer flight simulation, nearly 15 years after abandoning the PC gaming field it largely pioneered in the public mind.…

Get thee down to the pub, fix out over the weekend maybe Docker botherer Quay.io's webhook integration with Bitbucket is looking a bit green around the gills.…

If it looks like a hyperscaler, swims like a hyperscaler... Akamai Edge World Content delivery network Akamai runs a distributed computing platform consisting of 250,000 servers. At this scale, every bit of IO and every Watt of power consumption matter – so instead of buying hardware off the shelf, the company designs its own.…

HMP Belmarsh resident preps for next legal fight WikiLeaks' Julian Assange will face a full extradition hearing on 24 February next year, Westminster Magistrates' Court ruled this morning.…

You lovely bunch of, um, brand strategists. We knew you'd treat them right El Reg this week asked readers to lean their e-bike against the Japanese maple that overlooks the strategy boutique to help Ed Ho, GM for the Build division at DXC Technology, determine what his employer's brand stands for.…

Splashes £78.9m on IP, space smarts and general boffinry Canadian IT consulting giant CGI has settled its crosshairs on Brexit-dodging SCISYS, ponying up £78.9m in cold, hard cash to acquire the Dublin-based software 'n' services outfit.…

Digitisation programme already at 'serious risk' of missing deadline Exclusive A raft of senior techies working on £1bn project to modernise Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) have stepped down amid concerns the flagship project is floundering.…

Click on the toothbrush, toggle the flange and press 'Harp'. It's obvious Something for the Weekend, Sir? Haha, what an idiot! He was clicking like mad and nothing was happening! Of course it wasn't because – haha – he was clicking in the wrong place! He looked utterly baffled!…

Book tickets now for our machine-learning conference this autumn Event You know that you could achieve great things if only you had time to get to grips with TensorFlow, or mine a vast pile of text, or simply introduce machine-learning into your existing workflow.…

Guys, your security hygiene stinks Akamai Edge World Players of games like Fortnite and Minecraft have emerged as juicy targets for cybercriminals.…

Yep, and two sets of bills VMWare's Rajiv Ramaswami, Cloud Services COO, has told investors that VMs (virtual machines) are here to stay, even as container-based applications grow in popularity. Well, he would, wouldn't he.…

Howz ur spelan? On Call Friday has arrived, and with it the promise of a weekend free of workplace distractions. It also brings another tale from one of the unfortunates who will be spending their Saturday and Sunday awaiting the dreaded phone call. Welcome to On Call.…

Wait, wut? Surviving in zero gravity takes its toll on the human body. Muscular atrophy sets in, and astronauts should not only exercise regularly but consider taking testosterone shots too, according to new research.…

Isn't that what we all want for our kids, after all? A descendant of the notorious Mirai Internet-of-Things botnet has apparently cast a wider net than its predecessors, potentially infecting systems normally found within enterprises.…

CEO speaks to The Reg as we dig into labor complaints, future of npm CLI Special report JavaScript package registry and aspiring enterprise service NPM Inc is planning to fight union-busting complaints brought to America's labor watchdog by fired staffers, rather than settle the claims.…

People will share anything scandalous, duh – El Reg might well be Exhibit A Analysis The US House of Reps' Intelligence Committee on Thursday held its first hearing into computer-fabricated videos dubbed deepfakes, quizzing experts from across worlds of AI, social policy, and law.…

For FIPS sake! Yubico is recalling one of its YubiKey lines after the authentication dongles were found to have a security weakness.…

No, of course not. It's all perfectly fine Comment The man heading up any potentially US government antitrust probes into tech giants like Apple and Google used to work for... Apple and Google.…

Lawmakers threaten to rewrite rules that shield sites from netizens' dodgy uploads US lawmakers have warned they may revisit American tech corporations' blanket legal protections – specifically, the ones that shield internet giants from the fallout of user-posted content – in order to tackle the rise of deepfakes.…

Uncle Sam sounds alarm after Windows CE SMB left wide open on hospital equipment Two security vulnerabilities in medical workstations can exploited by scumbags to hijack the devices and connected infusion pumps, potentially causing harm to patients, the US government revealed today.…

Customers didn't like how much data spare parts package was funnelling back to America The F-35 fighter jet project has been hit by yet another set of controversies including a kerfuffle over US data-slurping, flight control problems and its stealth coating melting at supersonic speeds.…

All the while more WPF source trickles into GitHub Microsoft has continued its quickfire pace of .NET Core 3 updates, flinging preview 6 at developers keen on the open-source platform.…

Have you appointed your designated droner? Everyone has a mate who won't stop droning after a few bevvies – and the Japanese government clearly thinks the activity is dangerous enough to be outlawed.…

That Guns N' Roses album* might be out soon... or not Chat app Telegram has reportedly been DDoS'd, with its downtime coinciding with protests in Hong Kong against repressive new Chinese laws.…

Immerse yourself in forensic training with autumn Promo If you work in digital forensics or incident response and would like to advance to a higher level, the annual Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) event staged by security training company SANS is a must.…

It's fun to trademark your brand in CA, it's fun to trademark your brand in SK...ay Huawei has been spotted nestling in datasets hosted by colourful UN patent body WIPO, but rather than having any sort of dispute, it has been filing a barrow-load of trademarks on the term "Hongmeng" – thought to be the preferred moniker for its homegrown Linux-based mobile OS.…

Huawei with you! It seems the rest of the world can't get enough of 5G – Germany has just raised €6.6bn (£5.8bn) in its spectrum auction, and more than a million folk in South Korea have subscribed to a 5G contract.…

Collaboration toys, ransomware protection and a 20% price hike Dropbox has announced new features and partnerships with Atlassian, Slack and Zoom – but it comes after a price rise that has some users feeling hit under the collar.…

OMG, emoji panel also fixed in Microsoft's 2020 OS Microsoft has given its army of unpaid testers some Linux loving with the latest build of next year's Windows 10.…

Sajid Javid inks court papers for hearing tomorrow UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid revealed this morning that he has signed papers to have Julian Assange extradited to the US.…

Ground-penetrating radar and micro ducting to keep that lovely cathedral untouched The sleepy English city of Salisbury – infamous for the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal last year – is once again the target of an underground network. Yep, Openreach's full-fibre plans.…

CEO Tom Leighton pitches CDNs for enterprise Akamai Edge World The future of enterprise IT is not in centralised clouds, but in a complex interplay between massive core data centres and small edge locations.…

Office 365 to demonstrate legendary ability to not fall over when pushed to the front line Lucky London plod have been gently nudged down the Microsoft 365 staircase with the cloudy platform rolled out to Metropolitan Police employees.…

Simplify your technology estate and move onto more effective platforms Sponsored webcast Total Gas & Power supplies gas and electricity to industrial, commercial, and business customers across the UK.…

CFO said she talked 'dead man walking' down Autonomy Trial One-time bungling HP chief exec Leo Apotheker seriously considered slurping two software giants in addition to the disastrous buy of Autonomy – but was talked out of it by HP's then-CFO Cathie Lesjak.…

Euro super-boffins embrace MAlt right after academic discount axed For the past twenty years, European boffinry nerve-center CERN has enjoyed licensing Microsoft products on favorable terms as an academic institution.…

Talk about a high profile discovery Wooden burners unearthed from ancient Chinese tombs dating back 2,500 years have revealed the earliest evidence of humans smoking cannabis yet.…

'It is something we are interested in … but the economic model hasn’t worked out yet' Akamai Edge World Akamai CEO Tom Leighton – an expert in distributed computing with 50 patents under his belt – has thrown shade on Google’s plans to launch a cloud-based gaming platform.…

We want to make Chrome safer... by taking away the API we used to race Firefox Analysis Google on Wednesday defended its pending work-in-progress updates to Chrome that will change the way extensions filter out web adverts and other content.…

If it's not a 50in TV or a huge fridge of soylent, we don't want to know Off-the-shelf object-recognition systems struggle, relatively speaking, to identify common items in hard-up homes in countries across Africa, Asia, and South America. The same software performs better at identifying stuff in richer households in Europe and North America.…

La Liga says privacy watchdog is Barca-ing up the wrong tree A top Spanish soccer body is facing a six-figure GDPR fine for inappropriately and covertly accessing the microphones of fans using its cellphone app.…

I'm sorry, I won't comment on ongoing litigation: Two privacy lawsuits filed against Amazon Amazon has been hit with two lawsuits in the US regarding the recording and storage of children's voices through its Alexa digital assistant.…

All that was missing was a Beware of the Leopard sign A "highly skilled IT professional" has lost his fight to be paid his unused vacation days as well as a non-trivial bonus, after a judge stuck to a law he admitted was outdated.…

Welcome to Vim Sh*tty 2000 Proof-of-concept text files are now available that, when opened in a vulnerable installation of the Vim and Neovim, will execute commands on the underlying machine, or even open a backdoor.…

Next up, Falcon Heavy and thinking about those Crew Dragons for Bigelow SpaceX nailed a second landing of a Falcon 9 first stage at its Vandenberg Landing Zone 4 today after punching through the Californian fog to send a trio of Canadian satellites into orbit.…

OK, it has Files On-Demand, but haven't the people suffered enough? Uneasy bedfellows Apple and Microsoft have hooked up to update the PC client for the fruity firm's cloudy storage service.…