The Register

Fingers crossed that the wee probe has enough energy to send something back Kepler’s resurrection from hibernation has been short-lived - NASA has put the veteren space telescope back in sleep mode after it was up and running less than a month ago.…

Land of the Long White Cloud's new 'digital strip-search' law Customs laws in New Zealand now allow border agents to demand travellers unlock their phones or face an NZ$5,000 (around US$3,300) fine.…

Gaze at the computer-created horror of Dogball Pics Images generated by AI have always been pretty easy to spot since they are always slightly odd to the human eye, but it’s getting harder to differentiate what’s real and fake.…

Chip timing could be as effective and harder to hack Hardware-based random number generators (HWRNGs) for encryption could be superseded after a Philippines-based researcher found that side-channel measurement of the timing of CPU operations provide enough entropy to seed crypto systems with the necessary randomness.…

Hi, Vinod, is that permit application in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see us? The US Supreme Court has put an end to the embarrassing eight-year legal battle over access to a California beach by refusing to hear an appeal from Sun Microsystems co-founder and obstinate billionaire Vinod Khosla.…

Like the blueprints we gave away last time... but... better XDF If you've ever wanted to embed cheap-and-cheerful Arm Cortex CPU cores into your Xilinx FPGA designs, well, now's your chance.…

Researcher earns $2,000 for unmasking flaw Telegram has paid out a €2,000 bounty to a researcher who uncovered a vulnerability that caused the messaging app to expose users' IP addresses. The programming blunder has been fixed in the latest version.…

Ding-ding, round three in the internet access battle begins Analysis Within minutes of California signing a net neutrality bill into law on Sunday, the US Department of Justice sued the state claiming the new legislation is illegal.…

Big Blue will 'consider' giving staff access to e-voucher biz offers through corporate plan Groupon has managed to secure a money-off deal in its court battle with IBM over e-commerce patents.…

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a robot? A Windows robot? RoTM The robots are coming, and they will be powered by Windows. The Robot Operating System for Windows, that is.…

WWW daddy punts decentralised internet project WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee has taken aim at the internet giants with his new decentralised web project Solid, which pushes for individuals, not firms, to control their data.…

Private equity holdings shuffle Kaseya has bought in-cloud backup supplier Spanning as Insight Venture Partners, which owns the latter and has a controlling stake in the former, shuffles its holdings pack.…

Every little helps: Penalty slashed with 60% discount The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has slapped a £16.4m fine on Tesco Bank for the security vulnerabilities that led to millions of pounds being pilfered from thousands of customers’ online accounts two years ago.…

Remember 1981? You should... As Microsoft gears up to unleash the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Rich Turner, guardian of the command line at Redmond, took a moment to remind us of simpler, MS-DOS-based times.…

Dieselgate car maker goes all SaaSy on us Volkswagen is plugging its cars – and your data – into a cloud built on Microsoft Azure.…

Great Scott! It's the week at Microsoft Roundup While Microsoft partied the week away in Orlando during its annual Ignite shindig, there was a significant lack of build news as Windows 10 crested an important milestone. And as Skype Classic reached the end of the road, other Microsoft apps also faced the axe.…

Newbies to join CC staffers in the land of baseball Computacenter has flipped on its head the old phrase about Americans being oversexed, overpaid and over here. Well the last bit of it anyway. The reseller has bought US dealer biz FusionStorm.…

While Nadine Dorries' website extols 'block-chain spanning the 499km Irish border' The UK's Conservative Party has kicked off its annual conference by exposing its MPs' phone numbers to anyone able to guess their email addresses.…

Spends three hours recreating the device tree by hand, leaves with heart in throat Who, Me? Welcome once again to El Reg’s weekly instalment of Who, Me?, where readers get monumental cock-ups and heart-stopping near-misses off their chests.…

Re-discovering the final frontier with Professor Mark Hannam If you think the revolution in our understanding of the final frontier ignited by the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 is over - think again.…

Tomorrowland technology yours for a few million quid and a bit of patience Interview A British startup has proposed combining the "maybe one day" technology of fusion power with the "slowly, slowly" tech of ion propulsion to create an engine capable of sending humanity to the stars.…

The view from space and your pocket Analysis It was 40 years ago that the first experimental Block-I GPS satellite was launched to help test the viability of a global positioning system.…

Net vendors at Ignite, Barefoot wanders into programming, Intel transceivers and more Microsoft's Ignite conference attracted some attention in the networking biz this week, with Fortinet and Riverbed putting up the jazz hands to get attention.…

Field both embraced, feared by enterprise Comment We're hearing more about AI or machine learning being used in security, monitoring, and intrusion-detection systems. But what happens when AI turns bad?…

DeepMind also collaborating with Unity Roundup Welcome to this week's AI Roundup. It looks live the US government does care about AI, and four Senators are urging the government to use more of it in new legislation. Microsoft had a few announcements at its Ignite conference, and DeepMind is collaborating with Unity for its research.…

BBFC gets a side job shilling shoes Roundup One or two things happened this week on the security front, like the elimination of the White House cyber czar, the massive leak of code from Aeroflot , and the debut of UEFI rootkits.…

Client and server, meet 'originless' apps Content delivery biz Cloudflare on Friday added distributed key-value storage to its Workers service, making a greater range of network-hosted applications possible.…

Friday afternoon – a great time to bury bad news, like the exit of your product president It's Friday afternoon on the US West Coast, and everyone's playing pingpong in the office. The East Coast is ordering the next round of martinis. The Europeans are stumbling home from the pub. The Australians are hitting the beach.…

The new method destroys rubbish naturally A group of scientists have proposed a new method to clear up space junk using a satellite that shoots out powerful beams of plasma.…

Horn-dog developers red-faced over avatar antics Video The maker of super-hit video game Fortnite issued a red-faced apology on Friday after its new female character was seen to have some extra wiggle.…

PC sales surge, cloud demands complicate Chipzilla's struggle to produce 10nm processors Intel on Friday published a letter from CFO and interim CEO Robert Swan reassuring customers that the chip biz will be able to make enough processors to satisfy its customers.…

Translation: No jail time for Oz Apple file teen thief The Australian teen who last month admitted hacking into Apple's internal network and stealing data from the Cupertino giant has been spared jail.…

Miscreants harvested tens of millions of profiles via 'View as...' feature, dodgy API Updated Facebook confessed today that buggy code potentially exposed all of its users' accounts to hackers over the past 14 months. It reckons miscreants snooped on least 50 million people's private profiles, and perhaps as much as 90 million.…

Miscreants harvested info from tens of millions of profiles via 'View as...' feature, dodgy API Facebook confessed today that buggy code potentially exposed all of its users' accounts to hackers over the past 14 months. It reckons miscreants snooped on least 50 million people's private profiles, and perhaps as much as 90 million.…

Accidental project managers in the crosshairs with the latest cloudy collaboration release Microsoft has announced a single redesigned service to take on duties from Project Online and Project Server – but not right away.…

My box is bigger than your box AWS has wheeled out a fresh version of EC2 with high amounts of memory available – up to 12TB today, the firm says, with promises of 24TB by next year.…

Firm failed to monitor CRM system thousands could access International health insurance business Bupa has been fined £175,000 after a staffer tried to sell more than half a million customers' personal information on the dark web.…

Alphabet-owned VT upgraded for corporate threat hunters Alphabet-owned malware aggregator website VirusTotal has given itself an enterprise-focused makeover.…

Energy, telecoms, banking sectors in the firing line The UK government is pushing telcos, banks and energy firms to improve data portability in a bid to tackle the scourge of consumers everywhere – confusing, complicated and hard-to-escape contracts.…

Not much to learn on 9 October bar price and release date The launch of the Google's Pixel 3 has become the leakiest since an Apple employee left a prototype iPhone 4 in a bar.…

Remember remember the first of November Skype 7 (aka Classic) has finally run out of lives. Microsoft yesterday announced plans to kill it off once and for all in an update to a two-month-old blog-post.…

Warns troops 2018 will 'bomb' if they don't turn it around Sopra Steria's UK head of the Government division has delivered a motivational speech to his staff in which he, er, blames them for a multimillion-pound shortfall in forecast profit for 2018 and demands instant results.…

Warns troops 2018 will 'bomb' if they don't turn it around Sopra Steria's UK head of the Government division has delivered a motivational speech to his staff in which he, er, blames them for a multimillion-pound shortfall in forecast profit for 2018 and demands instant results.…

I'm a nonentity, get me out of here Something for the Weekend, Sir? I stumble on a large root. At least that's what I think it is. For all I know, it could be a low fence, a rotting corpse or a very hardy badger. Some dodgy software has led me here, maybe some even dodgier software is waiting to mug me behind the next tree.…

HSBC joins TSB Updated It's Friday, it's payday, and UK online banking has once again come under fire, though if you're with TSB or HSBC you'll already know this.…

Encrypted sync and faster – up next is Mail and a phone version, CEO promises Interview This week the Vivaldi browser received its biggest update, adding secure sync across devices and making many operations speedier.…

Engineer ecstatic that late night solved his team's circuit board head-scratcher On Call Hello, Friday, El Reg’s old friend. We’ve come to talk with you again… because the vision that has softly crept in must be the latest instalment of On-Call.…

Cupertino company's culture turns to crap under Cook, complaint carps Analysis A former Apple engineer is suing his old employer to force it to acknowledge his role as the inventor of "Find My iPhone" and to compensate him for unfair dismissal.…

Chip cost fixing scandal is still dragging through the chambers It is possible that Infineon was not as deeply involved in a price-fixing cartel as previously assumed, the European Court of Justice has ruled.…

There's Norway you can escape detection, thanks to computers, software, and skills Researchers from the University of Oslo in Norway have developed a system that tries to combat rogue employees and inside jobs – by combining cyber and real-world security knowhow.…