The Register

Artificial Van Allen belts, auroras, geomagnetic storms, just another day in the Cold War Space weather is usually driven by the Sun – but a bunch of data about Cold War nuclear tests has given NASA boffins the chance to measure whether humans can affect what goes on in Earth's neighbourhood.…

First they came for the activists and I did nothing… British police have charged a man under antiterror laws after he refused to hand over his phone and laptop passwords.…

Microsoft advises how to harden cloudy Windows, cos it runs a cloud not your OS Microsoft Windows users already know what to do to defeat WannaCrypt (unless they've been asleep for a week). Now the company's published its advice for its Azure customers.…

Julian Assange tweets his delight, but nothing on his promise to visit the USA As expected, leaker extraordinaire Chelsea Manning has left the United States Army's Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after her sentence was commuted in the last days of Barack Obama's presidency.…

By our reckoning this means a mouse could let a RAT into your computer If you're using an HP Inc wireless keyboard/mouse combo and the cursor starts behaving badly, someone might be pranking you.…

Trumpian chaos and router collapse clip Switchzilla's wings, again Administrative chaos in America has put a dent in Cisco's financials, and the company has announced its intention to cut another 1,100 jobs.…

Centrelink's buggy “Robodebt” program to get another audit Australia's Department of Human Services (DHS) might have given itself a clean bill of health over its notorious “Robodebt” data-matching program, but Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim wants to check it out for himself.…

Some greenfields won't get fibre, company tells Senate Remediating and backfilling copper networks for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) was always going to need new copper, and now Australians know how much: 15,000 kilometres.…

Plutus Payroll's owners arrested, aircraft seized, tax office suspends senior staff … and tech contractors sweat When Australian payroll-for-contractors outfit Plutus Payroll stopped paying its customers, several pointed out that the company looked too good to be true – because it did not charge for its services. And now we know why: the biz has been named at the centre of an AU$165 million (US$122.5m, £94.5m) fraud against the Commonwealth of Australia.…

Appropriately named Panic has its repository raided after founder gets infected The head of a Mac-centric software studio is coming clean today after a malware infection on his OS X machine last week resulted in the loss of source code for several products.…

Compatible with 'droid libraries, statically typed language is leaner and safer Google on Wednesday said it has made Kotlin a first-class language for Android development, alongside Java and C++.…

Beauty website suffers ugly IT security breach Cosmetics peddler Tatcha is warning customers after hackers were able to compromise its website and harvest payment card details as orders poured in.…

Biggest issue may be Partisan Pai and his Trump-like behavior Analysis Despite more than a million comments opposing it, tomorrow at around 12:00pm Eastern time, the three FCC commissioners will vote 2-1 to approve a so-called "notice of proposed rulemaking" and start on the rocky path to rescinding net neutrality rules.…

Ads giant flashes TPU 2 machine-learning ASIC Google I/O On Wednesday, Google kicked off its annual developer conference and media spectacle, Google I/O, at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a stone's throw from its Mountain View, California, headquarters.…

Windows Server 2k3 kit yanked, replacement slow to arrive Fasthosts left some customers without access to their backups for roughly six days – after it tore down systems it feared were vulnerable to the WannaCry malware.…

Effort to redraw online copyright rules receives furious response Internet giants Google, Facebook and a wide range of organizations from Pinterest to Kickstarter to Wikimedia have responded furiously to a recent decision by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that could have huge liability implications for online companies.…

Oi, Amazon. Still think you're going to do domestic drone deliveries? The UK's Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy “don’t understand” airspace traffic management – and UK‑focused drone software startups might be closer to the government view than they like to think.…

It's all to play for Samsung has finally launched its mobile payments service, Samsung Pay, in the UK. The chaebol acquired the technology by buying LoopPay and launched the service in South Korea in August 2015.…

Files complaint over claims contract makers withholding license payments Qualcomm is suing Chinese iPhone and iPad contract makers it says have stopped paying it royalties at the behest of Apple.…

Data centre CPU boasts more cores, IO, memory bandwidth than Intel's AMD has renamed its Zen-based Naples processor as the EPYC brand, pitching it as a data centre server CPU, and hopes to make inroads into both the dual-socket and single-socket server markets.…

The SS300 comes in 2bits/cell and 3bits/cell variants HGST has released the Ultrastar SS300, an enterprise server SSD that's 1.6 times faster than its predecessor.…

Stand down, folks. Back to Defcon none A ransomware variant, dubbed Uiwix, that abuses the same vulnerability as WannaCrypt has turned out to be something of a damp squib.…

SolidScale software supplier gets closer relationship with up-the-stack moving MIcron We understand Micron has invested in Excelero, the software supplier for its SolidScale all-flash NVME array.…

If you want to slash overheads, you're learning from the best Beleaguered Canadian train and plane giant Bombardier has signed a six-year $700m contract with IBM to outsource tech management and, er, cut costs – something Big Blue has expended considerable effort doing itself.…

Mr Slurpy lives next door Review The Galaxy S8+ is like a nine course meal of desserts – tiramisus, trifles, ice creams, one after another – that you have to eat with chopsticks and a straw.…

This (probably) isn't a spear phishing attack but we were too afraid to verify Official anti-ransomware advice issued by UK police to businesses can only be read by clicking on a link titled "Ransomware" which leads direct to a file helpfully named "Ransomware.pdf".…

Pricking your memory, anyone? West Yorkshire police are seeking a giant penis who may have witnessed a serious assault in Leeds city centre in April.…

That is if you ever want to sell or use UK-certified kit abroad The UK's ability to successfully export – and import – drone technology relies on our aviation safety regulators staying as closely aligned with the EU as possible, Royal Aeronautical Society UAV committee chairman Tony Hadley told The Register.…

Optane persistent memory support from Cascade Lake Xeon SPs in 2018 Intel says its coming Xeon SPs (scalable processors) will run in-memory SAP HANA workloads 1.59 times faster than a Xeon E7 v4 system, and has demonstrated Optane DIMMs.…

Significant number of devices continue to expose Windows SMB on port 445 Vulnerable Windows Server Message Block (SMB) shares central to last week's WannaCrypt outbreak are still widely deployed and frequently hunted, security researchers warn.…

Over 1k complain about free tablets, smartwatches wheeze The Information Commissioner's Office has fined Fareham telco Onecom Limited £100,000 for sending spam texts.…

I need to take a cold shower Global travel systems business Amadeus is testing 100TB SSDs.…

Plus: Is America anti-innovation?

Young servers, old servers, no middle-aged servers "In our country," Alice told the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, "you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."…

By reinventing ILM, HSM and file data management Analysis Komprise is a data management startup saying it will save enterprises money by identifying and analysing file/unstructured data sprawl then shift it to cheap on-premises or in-cloud storage. This is a message put out by others, such as Catalogic and Primary Data. It overlaps with the copy data managers, such as Actifio, and the secondary data convergers such as Cohesity.…

Drone traffic management, or 'how to regulate the skies' The skies of the future could be divided into “manned” and “drone” segments as regulators struggle to work out how commercial drones should interact with traditional human-piloted aircraft.…

Google, Azure and AWS all on board, the latter in a VMware-like managed service SAP's decided the time is right for its cloud to play nicely with other clouds.…

Building a bot for the co-pilot's seat may be cheaper than adding automation software An outfit called Aurora Flight Sciences is trumpeting the fact that one of its robots has successfully landed a simulated Boeing 737.…

The 17:21 to Happy Town is going in and out and is aaah-aah-bout to finish its journey Commuters at Washington DC's Union Station were left unsure if they were coming or going on Monday, when streamed smut started to appear on digital signs during peak hour. And it appears there's a rash of such incidents taking place around the world.…

You're not helping by allowing server sprawl and ignoring backup, though You're probably cocking up the cloud, but clouds themselves are part of the reason why.…

Sysadmins, don't hurt your necks shaking your heads Still reeling from criticism over the WannaCrypt attack, Microsoft has stuck its hat on a stick and raised it out of the trench to see how its proposals for Internet of Things security might be received.…

Microsoft's weird DaaS licensing melts away when it has a sniff of Azure usage VMware's got the green light to deliver virtual Windows desktops and packaged apps from Microsoft's Azure cloud.…

.SCF files present ID, password to fetch icons for attack file Google's Chrome team is working to fix a credential theft bug that strikes if the browser is running on Microsoft Windows.…

Gene research a test market for cloudy graph engine With AWS, Google, and IBM's Watson already camped in the high-performance cloud business, it's hardly surprising that Cray would tread carefully as a late entrant into the supercomputer-as-a-service business.…

To other vendors using embedded Windows: where are your warnings and patches? Here's why infosec needs to quit yelling “if you didn't patch it's your fault” about WannaCrypt: Cisco has announced it's investigating which of its products can't be patched against the ransomware.…

The Chocolate Factory is spared the aspirin treatment by the 9th District Court Google has won the rights to keep its name a proper trademark after a US court found its search engine is not quite ubiquitous enough to be considered a generic term.…

Droids given 'one shot' lessons to stack blocks The ultimate goal in robotics is the ability to train a machine to perform general tasks after it learns from a few examples. OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research organization, is a step closer to achieving this by applying a new algorithm called one-shot imitation learning to a robot arm.…

Post-Uber, more claims of tech bros gone wild Updated A female former employee suing UploadVR for discrimination and sexual harassment has filed documents containing lurid goings-on at the virtual reality cheerleader.…

Don't worry, no bank card info taken, eh Bell Canada said Tuesday 1.9 million customer account details were swiped by hackers – although stressed no payment card numbers or passwords were slurped.…

Just make sure you still resemble your passport photo Delta Air Lines plans to deploy four self-service bag drop machines at Minneapolis–St Paul International Airport this summer, one of which will include a facial recognition system to match those depositing bags with their passport photos.…