The Register

Cuddly Earth to stay in orbit. For now. SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft safely returned to the Earth today, dropping into the Atlantic Ocean following a successful mission to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Microsoft now only 200 million short of that tricky first billion Microsoft has confirmed that the company is still quite some way shy of its first billion Windows 10 users.…

Outage hits websites, apps, international payments French bank BNP Paribas's systems have been down for more than 24 hours in its home nation, with customers complaining they can't transfer money or access the website or app.…

Vulnerable kit can immobilise motors and even unlock doors Researchers have discovered that "smart" alarms can allow thieves to remotely kill your engine at speed, unlock car doors and even tamper with cruise control speed.…

Hello? Is this thing on? Good news, everyone! Now you can shout "Hello? Can you hear me?" at Skype on the web just as if you were using the app.…

Building to nowhere Analysis The UK's four big mobile network operators dropped in on Whitehall yesterday to plead their case for taller masts and other policy tweaks. With the public thirsting for better data, but derailing attempts to improve it, they're treading a delicate line.…

Stern words to sites that deny access if users reject trackers Take-it-or-leave-it cookie walls don't comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Dutch data protection authority has said.…

Researcher's stumbling on bug was risky to say the least A cybersecurity professor has insisted he was not hunting for a vulnerability when he found a denial-of-service bug on an in-flight entertainment screen during a long-haul flight. His findings could affect a number of airliners running Thales-made equipment.…

Ah, nice move, Big Red – but what's the plan for next year? Oracle's UK tentacle has reported a 103 per cent increase in revenues after making tweaks to its financial reporting – a much needed boost following a slump in the previous year.…

Confuse those cyber attacks by placing a bucket of water on every floor Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's important – and responsible – to use adequate protection. My own helmet, for example, is wrapped in tin foil.…

Chap does a lot of travel, zero work for penny-pinching customer On Call Gather round, readers, as we have a good root in our On Call mailbag for this week’s tale, fresh from one of your fellow techies.…

Panic, flee, cry – or just update Windows for fsck's sake A new malware strain tapped into GitHub posts and Slack channels to siphon precious data from infected Windows PCs, it is claimed.…

Still looks slim thank to Spanx-like dark matter NASA and the European Space Agency have teamed up to attempt to answer what seems like an impossible question: what is the mass of the Milky Way?…

Wham bam, thank you, MRAM Samsung this week claimed it is mass-producing and commercially shipping embedded magnetic RAM (eMRAM) to replace EEPROM, SRAM, and NAND memories in embedded electronics.…

Now Homeland Security committee sticks the boot in Credit-rating monitor Equifax ignored years of warnings and red flags before it was thoroughly ransacked in 2017 by hackers, who made off with the personal information of roughly 150 million Americans, Brits, and Canadians, according to another congressional probe.…

How agents tracked down half-inched Surface Pro slabtops to eBay store An IT contractor for a US government fraud and abuse watchdog pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing 16 US government computers.…

Privacy, encryption, vaccines, fake news, er, Messenger themes, uh, emojis? We have obtained a transcript of a secret crisis meeting held last week between top executives at Facebook, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, hammering out a corporate response to the social network's non-stop rollercoaster of scandals. We present it here unedited.…

Democrats launch new legislation that won't pass, but will cause months of argument Analysis Here we go again. As promised, Congressional Democrats introduced legislation that would restore America's net neutrality rules, which were overturned by Ajit Pai's FCC, claiming the proposed law would "save the internet."…

This is the crypto-exchange that said only dead boss could unlock $137m in wallets When Gerald Cotten, CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, died late last year, we were told no one at his company knew how to access the offline digital wallets storing his customers' digital dosh.…

Plummeting chip prices are collateral damage from ongoing Intel CPU shortage The cost of DRAM chips has seen its largest decline in nearly eight years, as global prices fell by nearly 30 per cent.…

Plus: Security sandbox escape vuln in 32-bit Windows 7 boxes exploited Updated If Google Chrome is bugging you to update it right now, please stop what you're doing, and get that upgrade.…

Bonzer Arm update SoCs it to 'em Raspberry Pi fans rejoice! Support for another of the diminutive computers has been added to the next version of Linux Kernel, 5.1.…

Makes a nice change from restructuring and layoffs Veritas has said it will buy privately held analytics biz Aptare for an undisclosed amount.…

How to wind up your opponents 101: Refuse to engage The adtech industry was unable to muster even a single speaker to fill a 10-minute slot to discuss the security implications of programmatic advertising at a much-anticipated event yesterday.…

OK, whatever you say China's Meizu has disowned its crowdfunded project to create a button-less and port-less smartphone as a daft publicity stunt.…

At last: a Trump innovation we can all get behind Comment US prez Donald J Trump may not leave a wholesome legacy behind him, but one of POTUS's more useful innovations was showcased yesterday: the revival of the occupational surname.…

Faint hopes of a Visual Studio 2019 treat dashed on the rocks of 'late 2019' A third preview of .NET Core 3 has hit, along with the news that, no, the framework isn't going to feature in the upcoming Visual Studio 2019 until the second half of this year at the earliest.…

Oof. Crop of vulns include remote code execution as root Cisco has published patches for a plethora of problems with its products, including vulns that could trigger denial-of-service conditions – and a sneaky one that "could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges".…

Big Red details 5G plans Vodafone played down 5G expectations as it elaborated on its own 5G plans today - and warned that interference over Huawei by Government would retard the UK’s mobile network leadership.…

Owner finds out the hard way after group of townsfolk decide venue is a 'house of ill repute' To the whimsically Arthurian-named town of Lostwithiel in Cornwall, England, where the owner of a wine bar has found himself defending his biz in the local media against claims that it looks more like a bordello.…

'I want to explain why it was necessary' Java has a problem – the language and platform is evolving faster than ever, but many developers are stuck on the five-year-old Java 8.…

Get deep on DevOps, Containers, CI/CD and more Events Serverless, containers, CI/CD and DevOps, are changing how software is developed and deployed, and you get an up close view of how this is happening in the real world at Continuous Lifecycle London in May.…

Something about calc.exe bugging you? Get in there and fix it Microsoft has slung the source code for the Windows Calculator onto GitHub under the MIT licence in the hope of building a community around it.…

Storage firms' disk drive developments diverge Seagate's next-generation HAMR disk drive will be a drop-in replacement while Western Digital's MAMR drive will not, The Register can reveal.…

But ISP won't nuke nuisance without proof of ID TalkTalk has refused to delete a former customer's email address which was taken over by spammers – because the unfortunate person cancelled their contract eight years ago.…

'Everything we do has a moral dimension ... we are responsible for the world we create with our technologies' RSA If you're looking to the US government to save your electronic privacy, don't hold your breath: Europe looks to be the real hero in this fight.…

GOOD ENOUGH TO RECOGNIZE MUSIC VIA SHAZAM IF YOU TURN IT UP TO 11 It's not just the walls that have ears. It's also the hard drives.…

Plus: Introverts' must-have Duplex – that restaurant robo-caller – served up to Pixels Google on Wednesday emitted a TensorFlow preview, finally put its Edge TPU hardware on sale, and rolled out its dreaded robo-caller Duplex – all amid its annual Tensorflow developer conference in Silicon Valley.…

Hardware maker asks Texas court to undo banishment of IT gear from federal networks Huawei is suing Uncle Sam to overturn a ban on its communications hardware from US federal government computer networks.…

Top tip: Ask your vendor what it plans to do about adversarial examples RSA It’s trivial to trick neural networks into making completely incorrect decisions, just by feeding them dodgy input data, and there are no foolproof ways to avoid this, a Googler warned today.…

Prosecutors mull complaint against the 'safety' driver, tho This month last year, one of Uber's self-driving cars operating in autonomous mode hit and killed Elaine Herzberg as she walked a bicycle across a road at night in Tempe, Arizona. The deadly crash is believed to be the first pedestrian death attributable to autonomous vehicle.…

Who'da thunk it? 3 out of 10 for repairability, must try harder While many spend their first few hours with a new phone setting it up, teardown crew iFixit prefers to rip 'em apart. Their latest victim? The Samsung Galaxy S10.…

Oh, we'll let regulators know about it next time, promise The UK Ministry of Justice is mooting a rollout of biometric technology in prisons to cut down on visitors bringing in contraband, reporting that a "successful" recent trial had a deterrent effect.…

Beats the other big boys to region, Blobs go Premium, DevOps go on-prem, oh my With Premium Blobs, Azure DevOps Server and a new Africa Azure region, Microsoft has spaffed out cloudy goodness like a Roomba in reverse.…

ManTech was using Lockheed Martin files illicitly, court told An American jury has awarded $1.5m to a former NASA engineer who was fired by his contractor ManTech in retaliation for his blowing the whistle over documents from Lockheed Martin.…

Could errors affect other applications? Dunno. When will new systems be online? Dunno The Home Office is making life-changing decisions using "incorrect data from systems that are not fit for purpose" and has not fixed the "appalling defects" identified during the Windrush scandal, MPs have said.…

Get the forecast right and you'll get a, er, discount Google has squeezed out a plan for what it calls "predictable" cloud storage pricing, locking customers into a year-long payment commitment.…

YEAH! SCIENCE Normally a headline like "The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same" would elicit much rolling of eyes here at Vulture Towers.…

Some police keeping their feet on ground despite pleas from on high Six years after the UK government introduced its "Cloud First" policy, a load of police forces have continued to mostly keep their feet firmly planted on the ground, a survey has revealed.…

Big Red puts name on $3m NSF project: Because academics love a good cloud credit, amirite? Oracle's battle to keep from being left behind by cloudy competitors AWS and Google has taken an academic twist – it has stuck its name to a project assessing how cloud computing can be used for research.…