The Register

Three aboard Boeing freighter killed after mystery plummet Three people were killed when an Amazon Prime Air-branded cargo flight crashed near Houston, Texas, on Saturday afternoon.…

New kit runs a bit faster, costs less MWC Huawei's impressive business laptops are now a bit more affordable. The burgeoning PC giant is bringing MateBook X features to a new lower-priced range announced on Sunday at Mobile World Congress.…

Plus: Windows Mixed Reality sulks in kitchen while HoloLens 2 hogs limelight Roundup While the Microsoft team were setting up shop at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress (and frantically plugging HoloLens 2 leaks), things continued apace back in Redmond.…

Five shiny lenses at a sensible price MWC HMD Global's Nokia business has been puttering about with Android for a couple of years now, respectably rather than spectacularly, trading largely on the goodwill of the brand. The Nokia 9 PureView, unveiled on Sunday in Barcelona, tries to change that, recapturing some of the premium market.…

Big speakers, big venue….small prices Events Our early bird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle finishes this week, so if you want save £100s AND learn from some of the finest in DevOps, Containers, Continuous Delivery and Serverless, the time to act is now.…

This may be proof that ET doesn't need the same DNA chemicals we need Scientists say they have crafted a semi-synthetic DNA and RNA molecular system that is able to usefully store genetic information. It's hoped that alien lifeforms exist out there with similar exotic biological structures.…

But at around £2,000, you might want to wait MWC Huawei's foldable phone made its debut at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, and it's the most impressive attempt yet at creating a new consumer device category: the phone that becomes a tablet.…

Also, DeepMind published new code to help train agents play football Roundup It's Monday. It's a new week. The coffee's on. The hangover's over. Let's brighten your morning with some developments from the world of machine learning.…

We'd like to Azure you, mixed reality has a business application MWC With mixed reality in danger or becoming the cold fusion of technology hypes (i.e. it never arrives), Microsoft has reminded everyone it has built up a significant body of practical know-how at MWC this week.…

Ah yes, that cheque, just make it out to a Mr Stonking C*ck Who, Me? Good Monday morning, dear Reg readers. If you were faced with doing overtime this weekend, rather than going out for beers, this episode of Who, Me? might be right up your street.…

Processor designer says he's right about one thing: The need for end-to-end dev platforms Linux kernel king Linus Torvalds this week dismissed cross-platform efforts to support his contention that Arm-compatible processors will never dominate the server market.…

Contrarian command-in-chief tweets, world scratches head Comment President Donald Trump appears to have undermined an increasingly aggressive push by the US government and telcos to pressure the world to shun Chinese equipment in next-generation 5G networks.…

Nothing like a little reminder of who's really in charge The chairman of a US Senate committee mulling privacy protections will be thrown a reelection fundraiser by, er, the privacy-trampling telecoms industry literally the day before a key hearing.…

Hard drives not included, for obvious reasons Fancy owning a piece of Silicon Valley history? Hundreds of PCs, notebooks, and monitors used by infamous biotech cluster-fuck-up Theranos are set to be sold off following the $10bn-peak-valued biz's collapse.…

Profitable secure SIM firm in the bag by March, Thales hopes French defence tech conglomerate Thales has flogged off its hardware security module biz nCipher Security, a sale demanded by competition regulators over Thales' buyout of Gemalto.…

Confusion not severe enough to stop $60m Series E round Redis Labs has jettisoned the Commons Clause software licence introduced last year for its Redis Modules, saying the earlier change had left some users "confused."…

Asteroid bits collected. Next step, to hadouken a crater Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has successfully collected a sample from the surface of asteroid Ryugu following a careful descent last night.…

Speak up and you might recover some of that £513k People who paid for one of the infamous ZX Spectrum Vega+ handheld game consoles are being urged to register themselves as creditors of the company before a liquidator is appointed.…

Enterprise+: One toolkit to deliver them all DevOps darling JFrog has snapped up cloud-based Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) outfit Shippable.…

NVMe drives speed VMs, but be warned – it ain't persistent AWS and Google Cloud virtual machine instances – and as of this month, Azure's – have NVMe flash drive performance, but user be warned: drive contents are wiped when the VMs are killed.…

There's a PhD position in it too, if you want to get involved NCC Group and the University of Surrey have set up a "Space Cyber Security Research Partnership" to investigate the security issues faced by satellites.…

Ad giant plans reshuffle to focus on privacy, anti-trust – reports Facing down an increased interest in tech regulation, Google is said to be rejigging its global lobbying efforts and upping its focus on privacy and competition.…

Rest of the portfolio couldn't keep up with Nimble HPE storage revenues – like NetApp's – grew just 2 per cent year-on-year in the firm's first 2019 quarter, with Nimble all-flash arrays leading the charge amble.…

The iceberg has begun to change course Stinging from British criticism over its slow pace, Huawei has promised to start addressing security fears from the country's spy agency, GCHQ, by June.…

Search giant lifts ban on out-of-court talks, class-action suits Google has said it will end forced arbitration next month and lift a ban on class-action suits after intense pressure from staffers.…

If it works. Comms sat also along for ride, but there are loads already so... SpaceX has sent the first privately funded lunar lander on its way to the Moon following an evening launch from Canaveral Air Force station.…

It's not big and it's not clever. Well, not clever, anyway Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Where's the intelligence?" cried a voice from the back.…

'The perils of wrist-based motion sensors' Ah the perils of a connected society were evidenced once again this week when some techies we know took on a pimply faced, smartwatch clad youth as an apprentice.…

Uhhh... we can't log in. Doughnut, anyone? On Call After a long, hard week, what better way to start Friday than with a dose of On Call, El Reg's weekly column for tech traumas, mishaps and eureka moments.…

It's time we rise up against these AI overlords and overthrow their useful technologies Neural networks have proven surprisingly adept at detect radar signals – and could help the US Navy and civilian mobile networks better share their overlapping radio spectrum.…

Ad giant must divorce IoT subsidiary, privacy warriors tell sleepy watchdog Following Google's acknowledgement that it made a mistake by failing to mention that its Nest Guard alarm hub includes a microphone, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to force the ad biz to sell its Nest division and surrender data snarfed from Nest customers.…

Looks like someone's thought ahead this time The Carnegie Institution for Science, a research hub headquartered in America's capital, is asking for the public’s help to name five of Jupiter’s newly discovered moons.…

CEO Antonio boasts of big earnings to come HPE got a boost from Wall Street Thursday even after falling short on revenues for its latest financial quarter.…

Also: Letting people pay to stop FB snooping wouldn't be fair on the poor, apparently Facebook is not going to give people the option to pay it to stop gathering and selling their private information because it wouldn't be fair to those that can't afford it.…

Don't need reason, don't need rhyme. Ain't nothing I would rather do: going down, party time US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has confirmed that Uncle Sam will no longer provide top-secret intelligence to countries that use Huawei equipment in their core networks.…

Plus: How Microsoft Edge helps Facebook Flash files dodge click-to-play rules in Edge Adobe is taking a second crack at patching security bugs in its Acrobat and Reader PDF apps.…

Lawsuit accuses Big Red of fraud, breach of contract Software giant Oracle was sued on Wednesday by Worth & Company, a Pennsylvania-based mechanical contractor, over a failed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software deal.…

Meanwhile, .gay comes out of the commercial closet Google has launched a new internet extension specifically for developers but if you want to get a good name, you're going to have to pay for it.…

As experts worry about the potential for rapid unscheduled in-flight rocket disassembly NASA this week set a date for the launch of the much-delayed Demo-1 – the first test flight of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule that will, fingers crossed, eventually ferry humans to the International Space Station.…

We're Europe's tech hub, crows minister, but investment weedy compared to the US and China Google's DeepMind is among 11 companies to fund artificial intelligence masters degrees in the UK under a government-backed range of training programmes, including fellowships and PhD centres.…

Cybercrims aren't just raking it in – they're dishing it out too Extortionists are promising salaries of more than a quarter of a million pounds to skilled infosec folk willing to put on a black hat, according to research outfit Digital Shadows.…

For the BOFHs: Admin Center preview loaded with Software Defined Networking goodness In a busy week for Windows Insiders, Fast-Ring fans got a fresh build of Windows last night, hot on the heels of a new preview of the Windows Admin Center.…

App piracy fighter Tapcore strenuously denies involvement A major ad fraud operation could be sucking your phone of juice and using up more than 10GB of data a month by downloading hidden vids, Oracle has claimed.…

But... but British Gas customers are making cost savings, though The British government is "sugar coating" its smart meter project and pretending that "everything will turn out alright in the end", according to Parliament's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee (BEIS).…

Worse to come as market doldrums deepen An abrupt quarter-on-quarter revenue cliff drop affected all the main flash vendors, except Intel, which saw revenues rise despite falling prices.…

If you like that then you'll just LOVE our 365 range Microsoft has updated the My Office app and would like to remind users that there's a free, online version of the suite.…

Breakaway MPs accused of making off with info The UK's Labour Party has been forced to lock down access to membership databases and campaign tools over concerns the info was being sucked up by breakaway MPs, in a possible breach of data protection laws.…

It's patching time again for Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Updated Oops! Microsoft has published an advisory on a bug in its Internet Information Services (IIS) product that allows a malicious HTTP/2 request to send CPU usage to 100 per cent.…

Innovation? In my smartphone market? It's more likely than you think Some day in the future you'll have a piece of material you can fold neatly away in your pocket, a canvas that just happens to be a communication and information device. Until that day, "foldable" phones will be transitional things, reminding us how far short we fall of the ideal.…

Just one week to save a bundle with our early bird tickets Events If you're gearing up supercharge your software development and deployment operations, whether by adopting DevOps, getting serious about containers, or adding serverless into the mix, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle London in May.…