The Register

Briefcase-sized spacecraft will continue to float in space peacefully around the Sun NASA has said goodnight to its two experimental CubeSats, sent into space to monitor America's InSight probe as it landed on Mars, after failing to communicate with the gizmo duo since January.…

YesYesYes.org ended up No! No! No dotcom! A senior exec at British biz that makes and sells sex aids was sacked after he shifted the company's website from a .org to a .com, an employment tribunal heard this week.…

Come comrades, join the coding collective Enterprise Linux biz Red Hat, plated for consumption by IBM later this year, said on Tuesday that its containerized cloud development environment, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, has ripened to the point of general availability.…

Software and cache acceleration ramps restore rapidity remarkably Dell is claiming a 2.5 to 4x increase in restore speed for software and cache updates to its Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance products, and has added extended public cloud support.…

It's 2019. Should billion-dollar corps do better than offer swag for vulns? Analysis Hunting for exploitable security bugs in software is not an easy way to make a living, and vulnerability researchers say vendors who don't pay out for reports are making life even harder while putting their own products at risk.…

The hits, misses, and axings by the newish CEO Stepping into the sweaty shoes of Steve Ballmer was never going to be an easy task. Satya Nadella’s first five years as third CEO of the software giant has brought pain to fans of Microsoft's consumer tech but delight to investors.…

And I'm OK with this, says chief of HaveIBeenPwned During its incessant web crawling, Google's search engine constantly encounters credentials dumped by hackers or left exposed by the careless. And because it can, the ad confectionery copies and encrypts these spilled usernames and passwords.…

QuadrigaCX granted 30-day legal protection by judge A Canadian court today granted legal protections to a Great White North cryptocurrency exchange that is holding some $190m that can't be accessed – allegedly because its founder, the only person with the passwords to the digital vaults, died.…

Think we may just get away with this one, eh mes amies? Apple has agreed to pay France an estimated €500m ($570m, £440m) in back taxes following several years of protests – and a decision by the French government to pass a new tax aimed at US tech giants.…

Copyright leak prompts Big Tech angst Analysis The EU's copyright reform is being watched globally as an experiment in taming Big Tech – but fears grow that it may make Silicon Valley even stronger. The Register has seen a draft law dated 4 February that gives some credence to this.…

Series E funding round values company at $2.75bn Analytics biz Databricks has doubled its total funding with a $250m investment, valuing the company at $2.75bn.…

Case referred up to the Grand Chamber The UK's mass surveillance regime is to be ruled upon by Europe's highest human rights court after civil liberties groups pushed back against a previous decision.…

Join Carbon Black at livestreamed event based on global independent research Promo As cyber attackers evolve their techniques, businesses are exposed to a relentless stream of worrying data security breaches. The latest big one hit hotel group Marriott International in November 2018, and may have led to the personal information of up to 500 million guests being compromised.…

Slack: Cute Series A. Check out our proposed public listing... Slack-for-engineers Mattermost has said it plans to plough its $20m Series-A funding into privacy and security.…

Chairman tells MPs its budget may need revising upwards in future The UK government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation has £2.5m for its first year of work, in which it will probe microtargeting and algorithmic bias – but its chair has warned it might need more cash in future.…

Hosting outfit wants to get up close and personal Manchester-based hosting outfit UKFast has squeezed out a developer platform in the hopes of fending off the relentless march of cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft.…

25 bugs, three apps – endless pwnage Security firm Check Point has found some 25 security vulnerabilities in three of the most popular remote desktop protocol (RDP) tools for Windows and Linux.…

Colossal intercepts are just the Bombe Bletchley Park's National Museum of Computing will be exhibiting original, freshly discovered decrypted WWII messages to coincide with the 75th anniversary of D-Day this June – messages that were broken by the Colossus machines based on the museum's site.…

I really neeeeed to learn. 'Cos buyers aren't draining high-cap drive pools Seagate was caught out by an unexpectedly deep drop in disk drive demand and saw its revenues fall 7 per cent. Along with the rest of the tech world, it talked about a recovery mid-year, and promised world+dog at least one more lousy quarter.…

Grey area in comms law needs a tad more black and white Can the UK Home Secretary order Ofcom to ignore its own legal duties? A court case that effectively began with the trial of a GSM gateway operator will soon decide the answer to that difficult, and potentially expensive, question.…

Plus: Lucy in the sky with Trojans, and ISS 'nauts splash around in a water party Roundup Over the past week in space, SpaceX pressed go on the first flight Raptor, the Lucy mission inched closer, and the ISS crew battled with some dodgy plumbing.…

Predictive plod practices bake bias into systems people don't understand, says Liberty Human right group Liberty is urging UK cops to stop using predictive policing programs that put a "technological veneer of legitimacy" on existing biased practices.…

Lots of unanswered questions remain – and nobody's talking Retro Computers Ltd, which absorbed £513,000 of backers' money to produce ZX Spectrum-themed game consoles it then failed to deliver, has been wound up – by Private Planet.…

Boffins scrape together a dataset to aid in the fight against modern day slavery AI is the latest recruit in the ongoing efforts to stamp out the scourge of human trafficking – by helping police figure out which hotels victims are being held.…

Seismometer looking for whole lot of shakin' going on Pic NASA’s InSight lander has been revamped to let scientists study the interior of Mars for the first time.…

Costs on the rise but still added $99m a day to its bottom line in Q4 2018 Google parent company Alphabet says it logged a 23 per cent jump in revenues in the final quarter of 2018, even as losses from its various side projects continue to mount.…

E-waste partly to blame for proliferation of deceptively marketed silicon Rogelio Vasquez, the owner of California-based PRB Logics Corporation, has pleaded guilty to selling fake branded semiconductor chips from China, some of which made their way into US military systems.…

Vuln exposing intimate snaps left open for 'months' – you may want to delete your pics Dating-slash-hook-up app Jack'd is exposing to the public internet intimate snaps privately swapped between its users, allowing miscreants to download countless X-rated selfies without permission.…

Snotagram accuses comms regulator chief of being a Useful Ajit for telcos The chairs of the US House of Reps' commerce and technology committees have picked a fight with FCC boss Ajit Pai, accusing him of being a corporate stooge.…

Prof asks: What good comes from letting everyone know a vulnerability exists? A computer engineering professor has an interesting idea for how to handle the public disclosure of serious vulnerabilities: don't.…

Just use manual control, says biz. Then why did we buy 'smart' controls, ask customers Honeywell's remote-control "smart" thermostat platform has been down for a week, leaving thousands of customers fuming.…

Remote scripting flaw in open-source productivity suites is at least partly fixed A security flaw affecting LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice has been fixed in one of the two open-source office suites. The other still appears to be vulnerable.…

Thanks to whip-round from WD investment arm and co Data management startup Komprise has more than doubled its funding, collecting a $24m third round to grow its file-moving and managing tech.…

Hackers can talk to and locate the wearer, warns notice The European Commission has ordered the recall of a smartwatch aimed at kids that allows miscreants to pinpoint the wearer's location, posing a potentially "serious risk".…

Others still can't even get that far It has been a trying time for Microsoft punters after a Windows Defender update left some PCs unable to boot last week, while other folk continue to struggle to even get to the update service.…

GCHQ limb tight-lipped but we can read between the lines Huawei is nursing bruises from a fresh round of bashing in the popular press, this time from a report stating that Britain is to criticise the embattled Chinese telco kit maker over ongoing security vulnerabilities.…

Senior officials briefed on public bodies that still need data milled or stored in EU Senior government officials have reportedly been warned that public bodies are not prepared for the implications on crucial data transfers if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal.…

Are you sitting comfortably? Perhaps not for much longer For many people, the toilet is a place of quiet contemplation, somewhere to escape the pressures of work or home for a while. But that might be over soon – as boffins eye up the data they can collect while you're sitting on the throne.…

TSB TITSUP: Tirelessly Sucky Banking, Total Inability To Shock Us, Period. Totally Shocked Businesses have faced a morning without access to their online accounts following yet another IT meltdown at embattled TSB.…

New exec, new dev toys, and more from the world of Microsoft Roundup Over the past week in MicrosoftLand, Windows Mixed Reality continued its slow shuffle to relevance, a new Project Rome ushered in a world of cross-platform data slinging and Insiders had a play with the latest Skype tweaks.…

Biz's tech lets infoseccers check it won't suck up your data Smut empire Mindgeek's age verification arm, AgeID, has commissioned an independent security assessment and pledged not to store data in a bid to reassure detractors it won't create hackable databases of users' kinks.…

And claim your reward for filling in Western Digital’s storage survey Promo In this rapidly changing, data-centric world, relentlessly driven by new technologies and applications, IT decision makers are increasingly having to anticipate developments and implement solutions that harness the power of data to drive productivity.…

Shaking those digits is HARD: 'eFax' halfway-house to chuck machines and meet targets Leeds Hospital NHS Trust has created what it is calling an "electronic" fax in its bid to ditch the legacy message-slingers.…

Unless he gets off the sofa and finds another job beforehand Oh to be on the executive merry-go-round: BT CEO Gavin Patterson left his post on Friday, but will continue to rake in filthy lucre from the corp until the latter part of October – seven big ones to be precise. That is assuming he doesn't take up a job with a rival in the meantime.…

PMem software hustle for the hyperconverged – if all goes to plan... Analysis NetApp intends to extend its MAX Data persistent memory (PMem) server tiering scheme to its hyperconverged systems, potentially creating hideously fast HCI nodes.…

Whoops! I've broken the internet... but hey, everyone gets a coffee break Who, Me? Monday, bloody Monday. But fear not – Who, Me? has a suitably stressful story to remind you things can always be worse.…

Android apps for TP-Link, LIFX, Belkin, and Broadlink kit found with holes, some at least have been repaired Evaluating the security of IoT devices can be difficult, particularly if you're not adept at firmware binary analysis. An alternative approach would be just to assume IoT security is generally terrible, and a new study has shown that's probably a safe bet.…

The week's other news in AI Roundup Here's a roundup of this week's other AI news. In short: experts continue to snub Amazon's facial recognition service Rekognition, and there's a new deepfake for you to stare at in horror.…

Your rapid-fire guide to all the other infosec news of the week Roundup This was the week we saw GPS grumbles, shady speakers, and Yahoo! Losing! Again!…

Appeals court hears arguments over whether watchdog was right to tear up protections Analysis A year after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was sued for scrapping America's net neutrality rules, the issue finally ended up in court on Friday.…