The Register

'Tabby's Star' gets a friend and it's even stranger, but let's not do the 'alien megastructure' thing again okay? One curious case of “what's that?” in astronomy is a puzzle: two gets astrophysicists on the way to an answer. An oddly-dimming star called EPIC 204278916 (EPIC in this article) might help boffins understand the “Dyson sphere” (no, it's not) Tabby's star.…

Australia's QANTAS has already had one Lithium-Ion fire after seat crushed a mobe PIC Your correspondent noted something odd during his flight to VMworld 2016 aboard Australian airline QANTAS: during the pre-flight safety briefing passengers were told to ask the crew for help if they lost their phones aboard the A380 and not, repeat not, to try to find it themselves.…

Call this number to sort things out - from some other phone Samsung Australia recalled all of the Galaxy S7 Note phablets-come-firelighters sold in Australia.…

Happy Labor Day, US sysadmins. Everyone else, you know what to do Debian's maintainers have moved to plug the TCP snooping flaw that emerged in August 2016.…

Don't even think about it, thunder Telstra, Optus The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has sparked a Telstra-Optus love-in by looking into whether mobile roaming should be a regulated service.…

Human guinea pigs to be subjected to more testing after arrival Three astronauts from the International Space Station are expected to fly home tomorrow after spending 172 days floating in space.…

El Reg offers readers chance to perform positive vetting on 00 section’s next recruit Actor Daniel Craig has reportedly been offered a cool $150m to play James Bond for another two films, such is the uncertainty surrounding the suitability of his potential replacements.…

Nothing says business like... oh, hang on UK bank HSBC will allow business customers to open new bank accounts using selfies as part of plans to simplify its application process.…

Retailer to ship out 400 IT and logistics jobs from London Marks & Spencer is to ship 400 IT and logistics roles out of London, part of a structural shake-up which will also see the retailer axe 525 roles.…

Policy to prevent plummeting 'plump' pupils pushed out The great war against the big-bellied is well under way in China, with certain uni students at a hall of residence told to bed down in the bottom bunks to avoid potential damage caused by falling fatties.…

What now as the Aussie system dream lies in tatters? Comment After a summer of vagueness, prime minister Theresa May is starting to define Brexit, with controlling immigration at the top of her list. That is likely to mean ending the freedom of European nationals* to work in Britain on the same basis as the locals – which will have a major impact on the many British IT employers who draw a significant proportion of their tech staff from elsewhere in Europe.…

SSP tells The Register 'We are aware of the issue' Hapless insurance tech biz SSP Worldwide is now on its tenth day of a services outage, which has had a huge impact its broker customers.…

Japanese companies are unhappy ... but what about Japanese-owned firms? Japan fired a shot across Britain's bows at the G20 yesterday, publishing a “message to the United Kingdom” warning that Japanese companies might relocate their head offices out of the UK if Brexit trade negotiations with the EU don't favour them.…

Black is the new BSOD Users of Sophos’s security software were confronted with a black screen on starting up their Windows PC over the weekend as the resulted of a borked antivirus update.…

Forced to find funds for €50bn deficit Spanish telco Telefonica has indicated it could soon hold an IPO of O2 in order to raise funds to pay off debt.…

Terror law review project turned in at the holidays... and now we wait IPBill Parliament has returned from recess (only for a fortnight before conference season begins) and the House of Lord’s committee stage examination of the Investigatory Powers Bill will resume this afternoon.…

Consumer-style product choice or product overlap mercy killings? Analysis September 7 sees Dell Technologies absorb EMC and its VMware holding. Storage watchers are seeing lots of overlap between the Dell and EMC storage products and wondering if there is going to be a product cull.…

Let us explain why things are so crap Our latest reader survey was a little different to usual. Normally we research new stuff like the latest hot technologies and ideas. On this occasion, though, we looked at a discipline that's been around for decades – capacity planning.…

Better late than never for Mars InSight and its thermo-hammer plan to drill 5 metres into Mars We're going back to Mars, quite probably on Monday, November 26th, 2018.…

AU$128.4 million about to flow, to 180 companies we now know will have our data Australia's attorney-general The Hon Senator George Brandis has announcedAU$128m in grants to telcos to fund their data retention efforts.…

Interesting slices in vendor revenue pie chart The August 2016 Wikibon report "Server SAN Readies for Enterprise and Cloud Domination" repeats the message of its Server SAN Research Project 2014 report, saying that "storage is moving inexorably from traditional storage arrays to Server SAN in a server rack."…

Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Authors of the Sundown exploit kit have proven themselves masters of copy and paste, stealing exploits from rivals and borking encryption when they opt for originality.…

Japanese companies want to know what they – and their regional HQs – are in for Japan's foreign ministry has taken the unusual step of publishing a very public Message to the United Kingdom and the European Union (PDF) in which it outlines how it wants Brexit to happen in order to protect the substantial investments its businesses have made in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom.…

One cable to rule them all … and in the darkness stream them HDMI Licensing, the administrator of the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) spec, has decided that the time has come to do away with dongles and given the thumb's up to USB-C.…

More BSODs for your schadenfraude It's not only size that matters: sometimes, the context of a BSOD also makes it fun.…

Redmond's Family Settings now block browsers-without-filters by default, but which ones? Microsoft has updated its family filters to block some rival browsers and says it's done so to think of the children.…

Like humans, machines can ID obfuscated faces - only faster Pixellating images turns out to be a dodgy way of obfuscating identities, say researchers from the University of Texas and Cornell Tech who reckon computers can be trained to identify the “protected” people.…

Probably-NSA-sourced bug isn't being patched, even by UK government users Tens of thousands of Cisco ASA firewalls are vulnerable to an authentication bypass exploit thought to have been cooked up by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).…

Sueballs loaded; take ten paces, turn and fire John McAfee wants to put his name on a business again, and that's got Intel hot under the collar, so it's off to court they go.…

Hand over $50m in compo or at least a free flight, says Israel's Spacecom Battered by the loss of its satellite in last week's SpaceX earth-shattering kaboom, Israeli company Spacecom wants Elon Musk's launch company to part with cash or a free flight.…

Hacker stole your phone? Time to OEM panic. Google has patched a bypass hole in Nexus 5X devices that allowed attackers to dump memory from locked phones.…

Vodafone and Telstra paid to consolidate - not extend - coverage One in five new mobile phone towers built with Australian government money did more for telcos than for coverage-craving folk living in regional areas.…

ACCC tells Telstra's right hand to pay no attention to left hand The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has flagged Telstra's deal to build and maintain plenty of the hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) parts of the National Broadband Network (NBN) as something it needs to watch.…

Cortana spying on your cheese Microsoft has added another wrinkle to an idea that refuses to die: the 'net-connected refrigerator.…

Chipzilla gets clearance to conduct skycopter light shows Intel says recently passed United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations on commercial drone flights are helping it extend the public performances of its Project 100 light show demonstration.…

Truly bizarre decision over web post about invasion of Poland in 1939 The Russian Supreme Court has upheld a conviction against a blogger who correctly noted that the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland with the Nazi government in 1939.…

No Hexagon like on Saturn, but still the joy of six: half a dozen megabytes of Juno data took 6 hours to download Jupiter doesn't have a colossal hexagon at its North Pole, unlike it celestial cousin Saturn.…

Inteno says SOHOpeless security problem should be fixed by carriers European customer-premises equipment (CPE) kit-maker Inteno has said it isn't going to patch a hole that has been sitting in some of its routers for the last nine months, saying it's not the firm's problem.…

Software hit by dev drought: Patch it or lose it The Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining itself in an energetic manner. The retirement of the project is a serious possibility.…

Possible 40 years in the Big House for 2011 infiltration of open-source world's servers A man who allegedly hacked the Linux Kernel Organization's kernel.org and the Linux Foundation's servers has been collared by cops.…

Fans cry foul over excessive recording powers The Golden State Warriors have been sued by a bunch of fans who claim the basketball team's mobile app is eavesdropping on them.…

Get your hand out of the Cooky jar, says Cabinet The Irish government formally decided to appeal the European Commission's $14.5 billion back-tax demand on Friday.…

I think I'm a clone now, there's always two of me just a-hangin' around Mobile apps that generate on-screen tokens for two-factor authentication can be examined and cloned by malware, a security researcher warns.…

Brits invited to hand over their flammable phablets Samsung Electronics has recalled its exploding new phablet model after an increasing number of miniature blasts – and their internal investigation discovered a "battery cell issue".…

Old Sun Microsystems patent prompts judge to order retrial EMC's $14m patent award against Pure Storage has been set aside by a judge who has ordered a new trial.…

All this the weekend before kids go back to school It was with "great regret" that Orbit, makers of an app for professional childcare services, informed its customers that it lost all of their data during a weekend site upgrade – before discovering their backups hadn't been working for a year.…

Geology, space-style Ahuna Mons, the 13,000 foot high, 11 mile wide volcano on dwarf planet Ceres is made entirely out of ice – and provides evidence that water may have once existed beneath the planet's surface.…

Software-focused firm backs out of hardware idea Google has suspended Project Ara, its plans to build a modular smartphone that allows users to customise their own mobile phones, Reuters reported today.…

Why catch crooks when you can DDoS them from the nick? Traditional law enforcement techniques are incapable of tackling the rise of cybercrime, according to a panel of experts gathered to discuss the issue at the Chartered Institute of IT.…