The Register

But the mission is far from over, say scientists Cassini, one of NASA’s flagship spacecraft, is poised to meet its fiery end today as it plunges down into Saturn’s atmosphere at a speed of 123,000kph (77,000mph) per hour, where it will soon vaporise.…

Sounds like a good idea but looks can be deceptive Something for the Weekend, Sir? Right. Right. Right. No, left. I said LEFT! Oh for the love of humanity, swipe left now! My eyes! Sorry, no, I mean "My EARS!"…

It's 2017 and SVGA device can p0wn enterprise software. Sigh VMware's given vAdmins a busy Friday by disclosing three nasties to patch.…

We like your startups – now help post-Brexit UK and start selling abroad DSEI 2017 Britain should ramp up exports of defence tech wares after Brexit - and this means more than the traditional guns ‘n’ spyware, according to defence procurement minister Harriett Baldwin MP.…

You are our product, says The Social Network™, and we productised your racism Facebook has blamed its users for the fact that advertisers on The Social Network™ could target their ads to “Jew-haters” and other anti-Semitic terms.…

Lock down your UIs, developers – customisation can confuse cretins ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, the Friday feature in which we help Reg readers to recount times when they were asked to fix problems that should never have happened.…

Why people hate cheese and speaker worn in the vagina also score 'make you laugh, then make you think' awards 2017's Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded, again with the aim of shining a light on science that first makes you laugh and then makes you think.…

S3izure made things tricky for an hour, but was no apocalypS3 to match March mess The world received an unpleasant reminder of what it's like to live without the cloud on Thursday, after Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service fluttered for an hour or so.…

Jobs look to be on their way to India Storage management software vendor Veritas is shrinking its Sydney office, a move The Register understands will mean the loss of over 65 jobs in the support team stationed in the Australian city at risk.…

You're going to run a pair of servers to run things and pre-analyse their data, OK? The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has decided the world needs a benchmark for the Internet of Things, or at least for the gateways that will do initial processing of data that things generate.…

Bank wants centrally-managed control over access control Australian bank Westpac has decided the time is right to bring its Distributed System Access service in-house, rather than continue an arrangement that saw it tended by IBM.…

It's only 0.0026 per cent of traffic, but it's all in plaintext so deserves a red flag Google's Chrome browser will soon label file transfer protocol (FTP) services insecure.…

50 apps get pulled as ExpensiveWall malware runs riot in the store Google has had to pull 50 malware-laden apps from its Play Store after researchers found that virus writers had once again managed to fool the Chocolate Factory's code checking system.…

Women get the lowly frontend jobs, while the men bask in backend glory Three former Google employees filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the company on Thursday over charges of unfair pay and promotion.…

Larry previews 'self-driving' database plans Oracle kicked off its 2018 fiscal year by reporting more than $9bn in total revenues.…

Cloud-slinger trots out 4TB instances for in-memory databases Amazon Web Services has released a new line of server options aimed at companies looking to run in-memory databases like SAP HANA in its cloud.…

Black planet, black world Scientists studying WASP-12b, an exoplanet 871 light years from Earth, have determined that it reflects almost no light, making it one of the darkest planets in space.…

It did land, just not in one piece Video Elon Musk is succeeding in his ambition to make space launches boringly reliable, but it still understands that people like to watch things blowing up.…

Streaming operating systems, virtualizing base stations Cloudflare Internet Summit At the launch of the Mobile World Congress earlier this week, the mobile industry begrudgingly accepted that tech giants like Facebook, Apple and Google were increasingly influencing its business.…

Data science fad just won't die Not content to bait developers by declaring that Python is the fastest-growing major programming language, coding community site Stack Overflow has revealed the reason for its metastasis.…

Joins the blockchain bandwagon Microsoft has a unveiled a set of services it hopes will alleviate security concerns with its public cloud service.…

Former National Security advisor and CIA deputy head reflect on the online world Cloudflare Internet Summit The United States needs to define a new set of international rules that decides what the cyber equivalent of a missile attack is.…

Out of the way, I've got an IPO Spotify is embroiled in new legal objections over how it pays songwriters royalties... or doesn’t, as the songwriters insist.…

Something smelled fishy Iceland’s home delivery service exposed sensitive customer information for months until the problem was plugged this week, a UK security researcher discovered.…

We saw what you did there, Windows 10 web browser bods Microsoft held its Edge Web Summit on 13 September, announcing that the web browser now has “330 million active devices”, just over two years since its launch with Windows 10 in July 2015. The stat was explained as devices where someone actively uses Edge during the course of a month.…

Routine maintenance was just routine, not connected says retailer Argos shoppers who prefer to buy online rather than in-store via the laminated catalogue of dreams were out of luck this morning as the website crashed intermittently and pricing errors showed up.…

Jacky Wright to lead tech for UK tax collector HMRC has named Microsoft veep Jacky Wright as its next CIO, The Register can confirm.…

Tariq Rashid on programming AI Interview If you're going to learn about neural networks, you could do worse than learn it from someone who got five A levels (all grade As), has his MSc in Advanced Computing, and can tell you how to build your own neural network in 30 lines of code, even if you don't know any calculus.…

So if re-identifying folk from anonymised data is to be a crime... The UK’s Data Protection bill has landed with a hefty thud, offering up 200-plus pages of legislation for the geeks and wonks to sink their teeth into.…

www.howaboutno.co.uk, .uk, ... nope Customers of 123-Reg are experiencing a familiar feeling of annoyance, this time over a decision to automatically register them for .UK domains, which they will then have to pay for after two years.…

HMRC: About £1.5bn lost due to overseas sellers' tax swerve MPs have accused Amazon and eBay of profiteering out of companies based overseas that are fraudulently using their platforms to dodge VAT - and supposedly putting Brit SMEs out of business while they're at it.…

This Chinese firm is touting plastic ones DSEI 2017 A Chinese company reckons it’s going to test fly a personal drone air taxi in the UK - letting any old bod take to the skies after bonking two buttons in an app.…

Doctrine? More like advocacy The Ministry of Defence has issued a new strategy document for its drones, stating humans will be kept in the decision-making loop – yet critics are unhappy with the questions the doc sidesteps.…

Feed your brain over a beer Reg Events Forget information, bitcoin, even porn. There’s only one currency that ultimately matters in the digital world, and that’s power.…

Not looking good for the Thales Watchkeeper fleet Another two Watchkeeper drones crashed in the last year, taking the number of Watchkeepers destroyed in crashes up to four.…

Eight months sound like enough? No? Welcome back from the summer. Feeling refreshed? Good, now let’s talk General Data Protection Regulation from the European Union, due to swing into effect on May 25, 2018. You now have eight months to get your data infrastructure, tech policies and related procedures ship-shape. Not feeing so refreshed now, are you?…

Don't agree to new terms? No salary or bonuses for you Frankenfirm DXC Technologies is proposing to kill off the final salary pension scheme for former EDS staff and will refuse to fund pay rises and bonuses to those affected who do not sign over to the new package.…

Carry on, X-IO: Suitcase-sized Axellio for the edge computing crowd X-IO has devised a portable Axellio all-flash server/storage system that you can take on an airline, with the flash in the overhead locker and the main enclosure in checked luggage in the hold.…

The inevitable kick in the arse Promo Two much-publicised ransomware attacks earlier this year, including one on the NHS, have raised the profile of the ransomware menace that hangs over businesses of all sizes.…

Backscatter boffins get Things talking over kilometres One of the favoured low-power radio techniques in Internet of Things research is “backscatter communications”: the transmitter sends a signal to a Thing, and the Thing modulates its data onto the reflection, and that's then decoded by a receiver.…

Distributed cloud company now working on Ryzens that warm your shower French cloud concern Qarnot wants to use AMD processors to heat water.…

Just landed on the Moon and fancy a drink? Step on up Scientists have created the first map that traces the water content on the surface of the Moon, in the hopes that it may come in handy for astronauts searching for drinking water or fuel.…

Electronics resurgence program gets US$75 million more for 2018 The United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to find the electronics industry's next iteration of Moore's Law and has loaded up a US$75 million defibrillator to jolt industry into making it happen.…

Kuiper-belt-bound craft needs a few weeks of tweaks to prepare for Space Duck 2.0 The New Horizons probe has successfully ended its five-month hibernation and resumed chats with its mission controllers.…

Sigh. Admins of free AWS instances just didn't tick the right boxes. Lazily-configured software has again created a security incident, this time resulting in 4,000 instances of open source analytics and search tool Elasticsearch inadvertently running PoS-stealing malware.…

Says this will send you to 'Trellotopia'. Seriously. Who writes this stuff? Trello has figured out that there's life beyond the confines of a browser, so has created desktop apps for MacOS and Windows.…

Apache Struts was popped, but company had at least TWO MONTHS to fix it Equifax has revealed that the cause of its massive data breach was flaw it should have patched weeks before it was attacked.…

Enterprises can lock down Telemetry a little more Microsoft's taken another small step towards addressing those worried about Windows 10's impact on their privacy by adding more controls over what apps can do in the Creators Update of the OS.…

说下次你是俄国人 The Trump administration has blocked the purchase of a US semiconductor company by a Chinese investment firm, citing national security concerns.…

Plan to dehumanize shopping taken as threat to beloved mom-and-pop stores A startup called Bodega AI, facing an unanticipated Twitter tempest, has rushed to reassure people that it isn't out to kick mom-and-pop stores to the curb.…