The Register

Tanks of nitrous oxide needed for, erm, science eh? A team of researchers have built a terahertz laser that might one day see through clothes, book covers, and even skin, using laughing gas, according to a paper in Science.…

The case that just won't die The US Supreme Court has agreed to once and for all decide the copyright case between Oracle and Google after nine years of legal wrangling.…

Illinois man gets more than a year in the slammer for $550K DDoS scheme A US court has sentenced the operator of a massive DDoS service to 13 months in prison.…

Meanwhile, his co-defendant has troubles getting into land of the free The US State Department has until 1 December to get its paperwork in order and show how it wishes to proceed in attempting to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch to face charges.…

Though not much detail on said list, except security and privacy Some 14 years after it was founded and with no external funding taken in during that time, 1Password has finally succumbed to the charms - and $200m in cash - of venture cap biz Accel.…

Just goes to show, stick with what you know The ill-conceived and costly error of doubling down on the crypto-market is almost a distant memory for Nvidia as the GPU maker reported results that indicate an upward turn in fortunes.…

Change rolled back, but it's not a good look An experimental feature silently rolled out to the stable Chrome release on Tuesday caused chaos for IT admins this week after users complained of facing white, featureless tabs on Google's massively popular browser.…

Admits open-source API bigger than any one company, but it is not letting go Google's Cloud Run service, which lets you run containers on Kubernetes (K8s) using a serverless model, has hit general availability, and El Reg has taken it for quick spin.…

'The news overnight ... making everybody in the sector pause and consider' TalkTalk has yet to find a buyer for its infrastructure investment vehicle Fibre Nation, the business revealed in its results for the half year to 30 September.…

Still a better love story than Twilight NSFW In what is certainly a crowded field, step forward the Doncaster Free Press and take a bow for the best local news headline of 2019: "Doncaster traffic bollard used by man for sex 'killed' in road smash".…

Bezos' empire strikes back claiming 'unmistakable bias', self-recused defense chief denies it Amazon is headed for court to contest the surprise decision to hand Microsoft the $10bn US Department of Defense JEDI IT supply contract.…

Mate 30 Pro's modular innards praised, but glue still abundant The good geeks of iFixit have ripped open Huawei's first Google-free handset, the Mate 30 Pro, to find a serious battery powering the big screen and sophisticated camera setup.…

I'll huff and I'll puff... Something for the Weekend, Sir? Help, I forgot my keys! [rummage] Oh yes, of course – ah don' need no stinkin' keys, my front door locks smartly.…

Amazingly made it to 2 years without telling anyone his name The High Court of Justice in London yesterday dismissed another attempt by an unnamed man, who refuses to identify himself to the UK courts, to take his Right To Be Forgotten legal action to the Court of Appeal.…

The 1980s called and wants its state-owned telco-provider back Labour will today pledge to give the good folk of Britain free broadband by 2030 by part-nationalising BT - if the political party gets elected.…

*Cough cough* The privacy-focused Brave web browser has reached version 1.0, available now for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.…

Well, Clarice? On Call Hit reset on the working week for Friday has arrived and with it another entry in The Register's long list of on-call shenanigans.…

How neuroscience can help AI In a bizarre experiment, researchers recorded the brain activity of mice staring at images and used the data to help make computer vision models more robust against adversarial attacks.…

Sophos sees common behavior across various infections Common behaviors shared across all families of ransomware are helping security vendors better spot and isolate attacks.…

Satellite radar imaging shows explosion was 17 times more powerful than Hiroshima The explosion from North Korea’s sixth nuclear test in 2017 was seventeen times more powerful than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945, according to a paper published in Geophysical Journal International.…

Cloned kit had real IMEI and serial numbers, keeping the scam going for eight years US federal authorities on Wednesday announced the arrests of 11 people from a group of 14 indicted for tricking Apple into accepting about almost 10,000 fake iPhones and iPads and replacing them with genuine iDevices.…

Bill would require cops to get a court order for any surveillance A bipartisan bill making its way through the US Senate asks that federal law enforcement get a court order before any use of facial recognition tech.…

Rallies partners and shares tools to reduce software bugs GitHub, Microsoft's cloud version control service and gripe forum, has joined with a handful of like-minded partners to form GitHub Security Lab (GSL) to better find bugs in open source software.…

Account takeovers allegedly used to plunder digital wallets Two men from Massachusetts have been arrested and charged with 11 criminal counts stemming from a string of account takeovers and cryptocurrency thefts.…

Inspector General's report slams agency for overly optimistic costings NASA's Office of the Inspector General has emitted a report (PDF) yesterday that made for difficult reading for agency bigwigs, as the bean counters made clear the challenges presented by the agency's headlong rush to the Moon.…

Plus: Windows 10 19H2 quietly shuffles out of the shadows The first official build of Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser has arrived a week after the Arm-based Surface Pro X began shipping to eager fans.…

Rule 1-404: Thou shalt not launch if the weather is crap It is half a century since NASA's second crack at landing a crew on the Moon had a shocking encounter on the way to orbit.…

Who needs truffles at a cocaine party? As if Italy's wild boar population wasn't enough of a problem for farmers while it's sober, some of the brutes have rooted out and destroyed a €20,000 stash of cocaine hidden in woodland of eastern Tuscany.…

'Unnecessary scaremongering' but still some work to be done Reports that the Home Office's Brexit app contains "serious vulnerabilities" that could expose the phone numbers, addresses and passport details of EU citizens are overblown, say security experts.…

Connectivity tests check config but do *not* actually test connectivity Google has pulled the dustcovers off a new tool that will monitor and optimise the network performance of VMs and applications deployed to its cloud.…

Watch out, Carl's about It was only a matter of time before Carl Icahn got involved in the developing story that is HP and Xerox's marriage. The IT industry's biggest, baddest corporate raider is using his $1.2bn stake in HP to push for nuptials.…

Wait, wait, wait... there is good news: It has a Spotify app. What a winner Analysis Augmented reality hype-merchant Magic Leap has had to whip out its begging cap, sorry, sorry, its once-in-a-lifetime investment chest again for venture capitalists to top up with with millions of dollars.…

GitHub opens beta of handheld tools, unveils Arctic stunt, and other stuff GitHub used the first day of its Universe developer conference to roll out a slew of new projects, including a dedicated mobile app.…

A64FX: Big in Japan, big in the US, UK at this rate Cray has said it will build a family of supercomputers for government research labs and universities. The kicker? The exascale machines will be powered by Arm-compatible microprocessors.…

US government told it must give a reason to snub policy A federal judge in the US state of Washington has struck down a settlement that would allow people to post blueprints and instructions to 3D-print guns, claiming it was unlawful.…

Plans to continue with $35m to back Hub and Desktop. Yes, Kubernetes has truly won Docker has handed the Enterprise portion of its containerization business to Kubernetes cloud outfit Mirantis in a surprise sell-off.…

Make a notebook, fanbois A 16-inch MacBook Pro – with a freshly designed keyboard that isn't trashed by dust and includes a "physical" escape key – has landed, but it won't come cheap, costing the same as a modest family holiday or a second hand car.…

It's happening! Vodafone has replaced 2,600 roles with "600 bots" as part of a "long-lasting structural opportunity to reduce cost", the company revealed in its half-year results earnings call.…

Has it found an investor in £1.5bn venture to build 3 million FTTP connections? TalkTalk has today delayed its financial results due to "advanced negotiations with interested parties regarding its FibreNation business".…

Was UK even really in the running? 'Leccy car baron and space botherer Elon Musk has unveiled a surprising pick of Berlin for the company's European "Gigafactory 4", quickly following up by blabbing to car mag Auto Express that "Brexit had made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK."…

Woman fined £1,500 for tirade over commuter's weird brekkie Eating on the train is no yolk. One woman felt so strongly about it, she's now nursing a £1,500 fine after eggsploding with rage at a fellow commuter for gobbling a hard-boiled pre-chicken on the service from Chelmsford to London Liverpool Street.…

Also: what's in Redis 6 ... and how to compete with free Redis on public cloud Interview "Almost every one of our on-prem customers is shifting to K8s," Redis Labs CTO and co-founder Yiftach Shoolman tells The Register.…

Supermarket says it's innocent and we don't need more than that, ICO told judges The UK's Information Commissioner urged the Court of Appeal to side with Morrisons in the supermarket’s battle to avoid liability for the theft and leaking of nearly 100,000 employees’ payroll details – despite not having read the employees’ legal arguments.…

Or you could try Gitpod... Microsoft is offering cloud-hosted developer environments for those using Visual Studio Code or, in private preview, Visual Studio.…

Case to be heard in full next year A man will appear at Crown court in December to answer charges that he used hacking program Sentry MBA to access and take money from online UK National Lottery gambling accounts.…

Chipzilla, Mozilla, Fastly, and IBM's red-hatted stepchild plot browser-breakout On Tuesday Fastly, Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat teamed up to form the Bytecode Alliance, an industry group intent on making WebAssembly work more consistently and securely outside of web browsers.…

It might be organic life, but more likely chemistry says NASA A new Martian mystery has left scientists baffled. The oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere seems to rise every spring and summer and fall during autumn and winter, and scientists have no idea why.…

Set your developers free to innovate Webcast Skilled developers are a valuable asset – so how do you make the most of their time as constant requests and projects compete for their attention?…

Prosecutors say 29 year-old was mastermind of prolific 'Cardplanet' operation A Russian man was detained at Dulles airport in Washington DC on Monday and charged with running a stolen card trading ring that was responsible for $20m worth of fraud.…

Meanwhile Facebook appears to have shot itself in the foot Up is down and down is up when it comes to one of the most important, and now controversial, US legal protections for internet companies.…