The Register

Shock after accelerometers hacked, in the old-school sense, and rock density probed Brainiacs have today revealed how they rejigged instruments aboard NASA’s Martian rover Curiosity to measure changes in the Red Planet's gravity over its surface.…

You have been warned... Tech giants abuse dev program, iPhone maker eventually undoes ban Analysis After briefly punishing Facebook and Google for violating the rules of its enterprise developer program, Apple has relented. Cupertino is in the process of restoring the digital certificates used by Facebook and Google to sign and distribute in-house iOS apps internally to employees, after revoking them within the past 24 hours.…

Revenue growth appears to be slowing, though... Shares down in after-hours Amazon closed out 2018 with a bang, well, a $72.4bn fourth quarter, according to figures released Thursday.…

Never mind these scandals, says social media giant. We're the good guys! Analysis Weathering the blowback from two other missteps this week, Facebook found time on Thursday to provide yet another update on the removal of propagandists from its platform, this time from Iran.…

Yes, let's distract killer neural networks with boredom-killing toys Vid Here’s a robot you could take down the pub with you. It won’t bore you to death with politics and sport, nor add to your round, though it will kill time playing Jenga with you.…

Jizhong Chen accused of copying work drive, snapping pics of highly secretive project A second Apple engineer has been arrested by the Feds for allegedly stealing copies of the tech giant's self-driving car blueprints.…

Swan's throng. Chipzilla's only Swan and done it. And Swan more for luck, etc etc Intel on Thursday filled its vacant CEO slot with the appointment of Robert Swan, who has been moonlighting as interim CEO over the past seven months while simultaneously serving as CFO.…

Networker still mum on Intel slurp rumours though Hot on the heels of Intel's reported acquisitive interest, Ethernet and InfiniBand networker Mellanox has closed out its final quarter of 2018 with an Ethernet-boosted bottom line.…

JSON writing gets snappier while Remond nails its colours to the IoT mast Microsoft has kicked out a second preview of .NET Core 3 and naturally we fired up the IDE to see what has changed.…

Privacy advocates: You're not road builders, you're the traffic authority A war of words – in the form of automotive analogies – has erupted between privacy advocates and the Interactive Advertising Bureau over a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaint filed over ad exchanges.…

Techies exhausted, customers deflated, management tyred... you can't get better Car servicing chain Kwik-Fit has suffered a malware attack that has caused delays in customers' car repairs.…

It's just one big opportunity to make money Canadian-owned integrator CGI seems to be salivating over the prospect Brexit, irrespective of whether Britain leaves with a no deal – which looks increasingly unlikely – or a so-called softer version.…

Complainant seeks damages for 'lost ability to earn a living' A Texas lawyer is suing Apple over its FaceTime eavesdropping bug, claiming it allowed someone to overhear a meeting with a client.…

Sandbox test environment door left wide open Rubrik has fingered one of its developers after a database packed with customer information was left exposed. Security researcher Oliver Hough spotted the database, which apparently was not protected by a password.…

Advanced composites, Eurofighter... lots of goodies ripe for espionage Comment Airbus has admitted that a "cyber incident" resulted in unidentified people getting their hands on "professional contact and IT identification details" of some Europe-based employees.…

Cams trained on entrance today and tomorrow – so tough luck if that's on your commute route London cops' controversial public trial of facial recognition technology is coming to an end this week in Romford – and campaigners hope it will be the last time the force uses the kit.…

That's what happens when you axe the jobs of your nearest and dearest... BT's exiting chief exec Gavin Patterson is bowing out on a relative high as profits leapt by more than a quarter for the first nine months of this fiscal year, boosted by the cost-cutting programme.…

Says named documents are already covered by the record Oracle's bid to depose two former US government staffers and pull in extra material to support its legal wrangling over the $10bn Pentagon cloud contract has failed.…

Opportunity still maintaining a Martian silence China’s Chang’e 4 lander and rover combo have awoken from their lunar slumbers after a chilly first night on the far side of the Moon.…

Up to 4TB spinners to hold *gasp* more than eight titles Seagate has launched an external disk drive for the PlayStation 4 so gamers can cram more gear into their consoles.…

TechUK wonk warns of hiring freezes, contract renegotiations and general uncertainty The majority of trade group TechUK's smaller members haven't begun preparing for a no-deal Brexit, while others are being forced to renegotiate entire contracts with European partners or put UK hiring on ice, MPs were told this week.…

Iran, spying on foreigners within its borders? Shocked, shocked, we tell you A newly uncovered spyware-slinging operation appears to have been targeting foreign diplomats in Iran for more than three years.…

Capsule8 demos takeover technique to help sysadmins check for vulnerabilities Those who haven't already patched a trio of recent vulnerabilities in the Linux world's SystemD have an added incentive to do so: security biz Capsule8 has published exploit code for the holes.…

This is fine, everything's fine, CEO assures analysts on call. Look, we made $1bn in profit! Despite revealing licensing and chip sales fell by 20 per cent in its latest quarter, shares in Qualcomm managed to hold steady in after-hours trading on Wednesday. They were up a tad over two per cent to $51.40 apiece following a bold outlook for the year.…

So lonely, so lonely without my hacked PCs Analysis Uncle Sam has infiltrated and somewhat knackered what it claims is a North Korea-operated botnet of hijacked Microsoft Windows computers.…

What went well? Services, services, services, services! Microsoft on Wednesday credited a boost in its web services operations in driving a 12 per cent jump in sales.…

FTC calls for end of smartphone modem 'monopoly', Qualy quietly confident of victory Analysis It's been a couple of weeks of contradictory arguments in US trade watchdog the FTC's lawsuit against chip designer Qualcomm. So perhaps it was appropriate that the whole thing ended with a meta-contradiction concerning the nature of the legal system itself.…

Hard evidence that some coding lingo encourage flaws remains elusive Tempting through it may be to believe that certain programming languages promote errors, recent research finds little if any evidence of that.…

Five-minute gap in which transactions for some punters are toast Exclusive The Azure outage of January 29 claimed some unexpected victims in the form of surprise database deletions for unlucky customers.…

Internal FB apps in chaos, lawmaker on warpath Facebook has yet again vowed to "do better" after it was caught secretly bypassing Apple's privacy rules to pay adults and teenagers to install a data-slurping iOS app on their phones.…

Linux distro image seeks USB drive for private liaison. Discretion assured The Linux distro for the security-conscious has been updated with a fresh USB installation method.…

40% of exports to France won't be a problem, right? With a mere 58 days remaining until Brexit, the UK government has published a cheerful insight into the "size and health" of Blighty's space industry.…

Forget Skype for Business, we have Jira and Confluence integration Microsoft has given its collaborative platform, Teams, some Atlassian affection this week while dropping another subtle hint to Skype for Business users that it is time to stop putting off that migration.…

Ethernet and InfiniBand kit would be tempting for Chipzilla Intel has offered up to $6bn to buy Israeli InfiniBand and Ethernet networking manufacturer Mellanox, according to local reports.…

Snow joke, we really want to know if they'll land in the UK Apple has refused to tell The Reg whether the premium iPhone price cuts that CEO Tim Cook promised for punters outside of the US will reach the UK, citing inclement weather as an impediment to comms. A local price cut seems unlikely.…

Route to Ireland via UK will be surveyed, says local ministry Iceland has made public its plans to build a fourth undersea internet cable to Europe. While one Icelandic news outlet reported that this was because of "security reasons", the truth appears a bit more mundane.…

April still on top as Microsoft's difficult October update slowly trickles onto PCs With the next release of Windows 10 edging closer, users continue to steer clear of Microsoft's October 2018 update.…

Judge dismisses Big Red's 2016 copyright claim Oracle's copyright battle with HPE over operating system software has been kicked out of court.…

So far, it's just sounds you hear – it can't read your mind or anything... yet AI algorithms can help scientists process brain waves and convert them directly into speech, according to new research.…

Continuous Lifecycle early bird ticket offer ends in weeks Events Whether you’re just piloting your first DevOps projects, want to scale things up, or are ready to leap into Kubernetes or Serverless, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle London, 2019.…

Consumers pinch pennies while Brit biz tries to get the budget spent before you-know-what Tech analyst IDC said Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) PC market shipments slid in calendar Q4 due to shortages of a certain processor and turbulent politics.…

'Suspend all action' against IT man's suspension as fresh inquiry starts, UN patent body urged The legal brief of Wei Lei, the UN patent body's CIO – temporarily suspended amid a probe into an allegation of misconduct – is claiming that Geneva's Public Prosecutor has opened its own investigation into the case.…

We have 'unparalleled arrangements' don't you know While the US was preparing criminal charges against Huawei and its exec, British government spokespeople were telling Parliament they are quite happy with the UK's "unparalleled arrangements" for finding backdoors in Huawei source code.…

Calling all IT pros – tell El Reg the true cost of those application platforms Reader Survey You’ve heard the rhetoric that deploying applications to the cloud, rather than running them on-premises, will always cheaper. If you’re an experienced IT pro, though, you’ll know that such generalisations don’t always reflect reality.…

Internet giants hand in their homework – here's a summary Tasked with detailing their defenses against disinformation, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter, and ad biz trade groups on Tuesday turned in their homework to European Commission.…

Boffinry on a shoestring finds icy chunk that's just 1.3km across A plucky group of low-budget astronomers has pulled off quite a coup by spotting the smallest object yet in the Kuiper Belt, the donut of icy objects swirling around in the outer Solar System.…

CEO: 7nm will give bright future despite graphics downturn AMD stock edged upward in after-hours trading merely for meeting investor expectations, because it could have been much worse given Nvidia's recently trimmed guidance and TSMC's manufacturing troubles.…

Cook and co get a boost after topping their own low bar Apple managed to turn what was expected to be a terrible quarter into merely a not-so-great one as the Cupertino phone-flinger barely topped its own recently lowered estimates.…

Expect trolls, cyber attacks, and even deep fakes in next election Attacks intended to sway the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election are probably already underway, according to the nation's head of intelligence.…

Not so much crying wolf as taking wolf out for all-expenses paid dinner Analysis Facebook has cut off independent reviewers of political ads that run on its platform, citing security concerns. That's a claim the reviewers have rejected.…