The Register

Phosphine tests hint at development of DNA, RNA Molecules essential to life on Earth may have been delivered to our home world by meteorites and comets, according to the results of experiments.…

We'd assume sysadmins knew this, if SamSam wasn't still rampaging through nteworks The FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security have added their voices to warnings of insecure deployments of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services.…

Deep dive into motherboard firmware-lurking code A UEFI rootkit, believed to have been built by Kremlin spies from an anti-thief software program to snoop on European governments, has been publicly picked apart by researchers.…

'Competition' and 'alternatives' offered to change Papua New Guinea government's mind Australia is once again trying to get Huawei removed from a submarine cable contract in the Asia-Pacific.…

Good thing Congress has been so forceful in improving security Hackers probing America's electronic voting systems have painted an astonishing picture of the state of US election security, less than six weeks before the November midterms.…

What goes up, Musk come down, says SEC: Now CEO may have to pay high price Tesla and SpaceX supremo Elon Musk has been accused of fraud by America's financial watchdog – after he mused on Twitter about taking his automaker private.…

NASA mapping data educates computers for safe landings MIT boffins reckon they can use old-school artificial intelligence to do much of the grunt work in the tricky task of picking suitable landing spots for spacecraft.…

Hackers share general public's love of popular programming language Python, either the world's most popular programming language or a close runner up, turns out to be the most widely used language for hacking tools.…

Stay decrypted, San Diego The Port of San Diego in California has shipping in outside help to deal with a crippling ransomware infection that is now in its third day.…

Hadoop? Spark? Teradata? Oh my! Ignite SQL Server 2019, the latest version of Microsoft’s venerable database, dropped into preview at the company’s Orlando shindig, Ignite, this week.…

Top US court will resolve circuit courts' split over non-taxable costs The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear third-party support outfit Rimini Street's appeal against Oracle in the long-running battle over copyright violations.…

You thought you were buying better security, right? Enterprises buying TLS proxies to improve their network security could easily be making things worse, according to Canadian research out this week.…

Larry et al miss out on performance-based stock options for 2018 – must console selves with $3m cash bonus Oracle is hoping stockholders will finally approve its executive pay plan – having failed to get the thumbs-up for six years running – at its annual meeting in November.…

Researchers check bootstrap enrolment tech, suck teeth, whistle Hackers can blow holes in Apple's managed service technology and sneak their own rogue devices onto corporate fleets of mobile iThings.…

Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson takes the reins Julian Assange has stepped down and named one of his former mouthpieces as WikiLeaks' new editor-in-chief.…

Learn the dos, don'ts and dangers - plus Q&A session for Reg readers Broadcast On October 11 at 11am we'll be broadcasting a live discussion on the challenges of multi-cloud. If you aren’t one of the organisations lucky enough to be shifting all of your IT onto a single cloud provider, you might just find this useful.…

Damning report shows Uncle Sam falling behind Comment A cybersecurity czar has been a long-established presence in US government – until recently. Against a rising tide of attacks on the nation's infrastructure and election systems, Donald Trump eliminated the post through an executive order in May.…

All the sights, all the sounds, none of the smells Virtual reality, the technology that is forever an answer seeking a question, has found a new use in the UK: recruiting prison officers.…

And they'll keep winning while everyone still wants Gmail and YouTube Comment Google has received massive fines for its recent stewardship of Android, but there was no conspiracy or underhand tactics about how it got there: Google won this monopoly on merit.…

Get patching – except for the ones where you, er, can't Cisco's six-monthly security update contains a baker's dozen of vulns and flaws in its IOS and IOS XE suites – including a backdoor that "could allow an unauthenticated, local attacker to bypass Cisco Secure Boot validation checks and load a compromised software image on an affected device".…

Fancy something a bit lighter? Fill your books with Azure Sphere hardware Microsoft has released 1.0.2 of its Azure IoT Edge, which now allows Edge devices to function offline "indefinitely" while finally tipping its Azure Sphere service into public preview.…

Nice. Ride-hailing app firm also vows to comply with law Uber will pay $148m to US state authorities in a settlement for the 2016 data breach that saw hackers steal information on 57 million people.…

Really, people are sending them 'junk' mail Online gift store Moonpig has implored its customers not to keep customising greetings cards with photos of their bits.…

Orchestration for the Internet of Things Two high-profile open-source collaborations are putting their heads together to work out how to take Kubernetes, more familiar in hyperscale environments, out to Internet of Things edge computing projects.…

The world's first iron-framed building will return to service soon Geek's Guide to Britain The top of Flaxmill Maltings' Jubilee Tower makes you feel like you're standing on the highest turret of a massive castle built to command Shropshire. You can look down on suburbia and ahead to the centre of Shrewsbury, while in other directions the Wrekin is to the east and the Welsh hills are to the west.…

Bartender says: Why the tent pose? Review The Yoga form factor has been one of Lenovo’s biggest successes, and in 2013 the company slapped a business suit on it and brought the it into the Thinkpad fold. Three years later it added the X1 branding, and a premium OLED display.…

Impact power sent electrons shooting off into space The volume of bombs dropped by the Allied Forces in the Second World War were powerful enough to send shockwaves that rippled throughout the skies, weakening the Earth’s ionosphere.…

Talos turns up obfuscation, lateral attacks, and proxies Cunning malware VPNFilter remains under active development, and is acquiring ever more dangerous features.…

Claim your £25 reward for doing 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.…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS users at risk A new Linux kernel vulnerability that can only be locally exploited is nonetheless proving a bit of a nuisance.…

Recruitment effort based on popular meme called out for gender discrimination A job ad using the ubiquitous distracted boyfriend image, fodder for countless social media posts, has been declared sexist by Sweden's advertising ombudsman following a handful of complaints.…

Just worms for Oracle as integrated platform market tanks in Q2 Nutanix, Dell and VMware are walking away with the hyper-converged infrastructure market as converged systems and reference architecture setups continue to suffer from shrinkage.…

2020s cloud contract demands 1990s delivery method The Pentagon's JEDI system, a cutting-edge cloud platform designed to take the US Department of Defense well into the next decade of technology, will require companies to utilize a delivery system straight out of the era of dial-up modems and pagers.…

Google Instant Apps still needs a lot of work on security Password managers on mobile devices can be tricked by imposter apps into handing over a user's passwords.…

Machines still need humans to build decent game levels AI can get pretty good at creating content like images and videos, so researchers are trying to get them to design game levels.…

US fines two scumbags $120m but still the calls carry on It was supposed to be a moment of victory: the FCC had tracked down two people responsible for making tens of millions of robocalls in America, and is planning to fine them $82m and $37.5m respectively.…

You lucky NEXT 2018 people Hitachi's data subsidiary Vantara has dumped a load of announcements on attendees of its NEXT 2018 user conference in San Diego.…

Bandwidth Alliance decides to throw us a bone Updated The Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) has teamed up with Microsoft, Google, IBM Cloud, and others to form the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies committed to trimming fees for data passing through the CDN.…

Container images leak through insecure registry Exclusive Russian airline Aeroflot has exposed to the public internet the internal blueprints for its website, aeroflot.ru, The Register has learned.…

The Simpsons meets next-gen mobile broadband policies If you were to pick a moment in which America's telecoms regulator disappeared down the rabbit hole at its monthly meeting, it would probably be when the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Ajit Pai provided a full "up is down" statement.…

Failover is not an option The team behind Microsoft's Visual Studio Marketplace has issued an explanation as to why it also took the day off after Azure's weather-based wobble.…

1PB of Fedex-able rack-on-rollers Ignite Microsoft has released the Azure Data Box, another hardware appliance for booting business data into the cloud.…

Orgs failing to pay fee will get smacked with further penalty The UK's privacy watchdog has slapped down 34 organisations that haven't paid fees under the country's new data protection regime.…

Of course Big Red finds another thing needing more automation IT bosses are crossing their fingers that biometrics and artificial intelligence will save them from security vulnerabilities that can emerge from an ever expanding corporate network.…

What's better than one Linux distro? Dozens of 'em, of course! The Windows Subsystem for Linux has begun to attract the attention of custom distributions with the arrival of Debian-based WLinux in the Microsoft Store.…

In 2024, boffins realise a Saturn V is parked outside Houston US space agency NASA published its long awaited National Space Exploration Campaign Report this week, and it makes for sobering reading for those still recovering from its 60th birthday celebrations.…

No soldering required – the Steves did it all for you A rare Apple-1 computer was yesterday sold to an unknown bidder for $350,000, fetching $50,000 more than seller RR Auction first anticipated.…

Safety critical feature plugged into high-end processor design Japanese chip designer Arm really doesn't want to be overtaken in the world of autonomous cars by the likes of Intel, Nvidia, and other rivals.…

Signs so far point to no data leak UK-based insurance services firm Premium Credit has hauled itself back online following a malware-based attack that struck the business more than a week ago.…

El Reg’s AI and Machine Learning conference lands next month Events We’ll be opening the doors at MCubed in just over two weeks time, but there’s still time to grab your space at The Register and Heise’s hype-free exploration of machine learning, AI and data science.…