The Register

No more $15-and-done option – cough up $70 every year, please Microsoft is continuing its campaign to drive Office users onto a subscription plan by killing off its discounted Home Use program.…

1.5 EFLOPS monster will chew through simulations, modeling, and more, when it, fingers crossed, spins up in 2023 Cray will build Uncle Sam's 1.5 exa-FLOPS El Capitan supercomputer for $600m, it was announced today.…

Operators cut throttle during go-around. Aircraft crashed A British Army Watchkeeper drone that crashed near its home base of Aberporth in south Wales did so after its crew overrode its autopilot, causing the unmanned aircraft to hit a tree.…

Also: Redmond buddies up with Reliance Jio Infocomm (no, not that Infocom) Roundup Welcome to your midweek Microsoft roundup – stories you might have missed amid another seven days of Nadella action.…

And look how BC Partners' ownership went for them A British cloud software company has sold a 50 per cent stake to the private equity firm that owned British phone retailer Phones4U at the time of the company's demise.…

IT kit recycling arm that 'wasn't core' turns out to be important London-listed tech supplier Computacenter has revealed it snapped up the IT asset disposal business RD Trading (RDC) in the UK from Arrow Electronics Inc, just four years after flogging it to Arrow's British tentacle for £56m.…

DirectX 11 and Catalina support will please, the price may not Virtualization outfit Parallels celebrated International Left Handers Day* with an update to its Desktop package.…

But it claims just 32 people had 'non-public' info disclosed. Eh? The American Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be investigating a US insurance company that allegedly left 885 million personal records accessible "without authentication to anyone with a web browser".…

Two more chances to get it right or we could be looking at 2022 European Space Agency and Roscosmos's 2020 ExoMars launch is in jeopardy after a failed parachute test.…

Alternative Services spec bungled by browser makers The HTTP Alternative Services header can be abused to conduct network reconnaissance and attacks, to bypass malware protection services, and to foil tracking defenses and privacy assumptions, according to a paper scheduled to be presented at the WOOT '19 security conference on Tuesday.…

Big Brother rang... New research suggests almost 40 per cent of people will have some sort of unique mobile identifier service by 2024.…

You know, the US spy station with the golf balls A curious thing happens when you look at a map of fibre-optic cables – most of the UK section of American cable operator GTT's network appears to link the NSA spy station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire with continental Europe.…

(Yes, pedants, we know natural methane is odorless. Don't get in the way of a Bowie headline) Ever since methane was detected on Mars, boffins have been trying to find out how it got there. Research published in Scientific Reports on Monday has ruled out one source – rocks being eroded by wind.…

Grab a Register reader discount – and learn to sharpen your negotiation tactics and reduce costs Promo Is your organisation equipped with the IT services and products it needs to achieve its business objectives? Are your procurement processes adequate in this fast-moving era of digital business? How quickly can you introduce new ideas and solutions? Have you thought about the future of your critical IT services, your software leases and your cloud contract?…

Nature isn't perfect either, eh Aussie astroboffins think they have worked out one of the more unusual oddities in the universe – glitchy pulsars.…

Expensive renewals once a year... or free certificates any time? Tough choice CA/Browser Forum – an industry body of web browser makers, software developers, and security certificate issuers – is considering slashing the lifetime of HTTPS certs from 27 months to 13 months.…

Child abuse swap-shop admins to spend decades behind bars The FBI is keeping quiet how exactly it brought down a Tor-hidden pedophile haven, having secured decades-long prison sentences for four of the website's administrators.…

Government officials will guess the future and deny those likely to utilize public benefits The Trump administration on Monday previewed a pending rule change that will make it more difficult for legal immigrants to obtain green cards or temporary visas in Amerca if they use public benefits like food stamps or Medicaid.…

Powerful code signed by Microsoft littered with vulns DEF CON Too many trusted Windows 10 peripheral drivers, signed off by Microsoft and running with powerful kernel-level privileges, are riddled with exploitable security vulnerabilities, according to infosec biz Eclypsium.…

Plus: The spambot that actually DOES record screens of pr0n users Roundup Here is your friendly summary of recent news from the front lines of information security beyond everything else we've already reported.…

Politicians appeal to hackers to take up the fight DEF CON Despite some progress, the US is still massively underprepared for a serious cyber attack and the current administration isn't helping matters, according to politicians visiting the DEF CON hacking conference.…

Or why My Chemical Romance broke up South Korea has retaliated against Japanese trade measures by removing the country from its white list of automatically approved export partners.…

Faulty F-15s, at-risk airbases and much more DEF CON For the first time, Vegas's annual DEF CON hacking conference has an "aviation hacking village", and the US military is scouting around there for a few good hackers to find bugs that its own hackers have missed.…

More unregulated creepycams blight London Britons working for Google at its London HQ are being secretly spied on by creepy facial recognition cameras – but these ones aren't operated by the ad-tech company.…

Interim measure until Brexit, or never... whichever happens first The UK government has threatened hosting platforms with big fines for providing access to unpleasant videos and will task UK comms regulator Ofcom with looking after how that happens.…

Not ready for production yet, warns team as it expands support for file system Canonical is expanding Ubuntu's support for ZFS, an advanced file system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.…

'It should be up to Android users which search engine they use, and absolutely not up to Google' Tree-planting search engine Ecosia has said no thanks to the Android search choice screen Google was forced to offer users as part of a European Commission settlement.…

This is fine Newly analysed recruitment figures from British Russell Group universities show a slowing of recruitment of European academics and increasing departures.…

Not working as intended, says browser security team The next version of Google's Chrome web browser, 77, will not indicate whether a site has an EV (Extended Validation) certificate unless the user drills down into the Page Info dialogue.…

Just you wait, Matthew Hancock! Just you wait! UK health secretary Matt Hancock has been accused of being "obsessed by technology" for its own sake following the UK government's vague announcement about injecting £250m into a AI laboratory for the NHS.…

Thousands of tons of metal and iPads don't mix, it would seem The US Navy is ditching touchscreens and going back to physical throttles after an investigation into the USS John S McCain collision partly blamed poor design of control systems for the incident.…

UK industry survey sheds light on ridiculous hours, culture of harassment and bullying The majority of video games devs do long stretches of unpaid overtime, and bullying and harassment is rife within the sector, according to a survey by entertainment trade union BECTU.…

For goodness sake, please don't go reading any printer manuals Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, The Register's weekly column of confessions from the darker corners of our readers' memories.…

You've heard of ROP? Now get a load of QOP DEF CON At the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, infosec gurus from Check Point are scheduled to describe a technique for exploiting SQLite, a database used in applications across every major desktop and mobile operating system, to gain arbitrary code execution.…

Elaborate browser break-out betrayed by unusual behavior Coinbase chief information security officer Philip Martin this week published an incident report covering the recent attack on the cryptocurrency exchange, revealing a phishing campaign of surprising sophistication.…

While so many orgs shift their bytes off prem, here's why you may want to repatriate your information Analysis The concept of cloud repatriation – shifting systems back in house from the cloud – is nothing new. For as long as there have been cloud services, there have been those who have hosted applications and workloads off-premises before bringing them back in.…

DoD daleks want to exterminate Oracle's Vulcan mind-meld with White House The US Department of Defense is pushing back against criticism of its proposed $10bn winner-takes-all cloud mega-deal, dubbed JEDI.…

The benefits of outsourcing your IT's infosec – and what to look for. Here's our gentle guide for you Backgrounder Managed security services are – by revenue – the fastest expanding field of cyber security, according to IDC, which reckons they should grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.2 per cent to 2022. Gartner says managed and subscription-based security services will account for half of all cyber-security spending by 2020.…

That parping sound you just heard is Mark Zuckerberg paying attention Facebook will face a class-action lawsuit with a payout potential of $35bn over how its photo tagging and facial recognition software works.…

Does this taste off to you? Former Xbox fiddler Seamus Blackley has baked a loaf of bread using yeast extracted from an ancient Egyptian pot.…

Not quite an Android replacement then? Huawei has pulled the sheets off HarmonyOS – a microkernel-based operating system initially aimed at smart TVs, wearables and in-vehicle devices.…

Frankenfirm optimises downwards in fiscal Q1 DXC's stock took a pummelling last night as the outsourcer published a grim set of figures for fiscal Q1 2020.…

Hey, Insiders! Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Microsoft emitted two fresh builds for October's Windows 10 last night, although which one you'll get depends on your current build or, for new Insiders, a "virtual coin toss".…

National roaming still not a thing Only 20 per cent of UK parliamentary constituencies receive full 4G coverage from all four mobile operators, according to research by consumer charity Which?…

Apart from the poor sods paying for the service, that is Microsoft has blacklisted Brit hosting outfit TSO Host's bulk email domain, meaning anyone trying to send large quantities of mail over its infrastructure cannot deliver it to an Outlook or Hotmail address.…

Your wondrous Amazon smart speaker may be tainted with the paw prints of child labour Updated An investigation by China Labor Watch has found that Amazon's Alexa and Echo devices are being made by child interns, some forced to work night shifts so suppliers can keep up with peak demand.…

Maybe Douglas Adams was right about mice Black Hat Deepfakes, the AI-generated talking heads that can say whatever their creator wants them to, are getting harder to detect. But boffins have enlisted an unlikely ally in the quest for truth – mice.…

Fix for security issue but LibreLogo still installed by default on Windows The Document Foundation has made some tweaks to improve file loading and save times in its word processor and spreadsheet programs in the latest version of LibreOffice, 6.3.…

Legacy security outfit to vanish into the 'rightsizing' grinder Broadcom has swallowed Symantec for a bargain-bin price of $10.7bn (£8.82bn) in cash, boosting the chip maker's enterprise security clout.…

Revenge plan morphs into data leak discovery Black Hat When Europe introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) it was supposed to be a major step forward in data safety, but sloppy implementation and a little social engineering can make it heaven for identity thieves.…