The Register

Mini-sats to buzz Luna and snap its sunny shores in 2018 NASA and Lockheed Martin have finalised the contract for an upcoming CubeSat mission called SkyFire.…

Australia needs a transparent, independent, Data Broking agency The ongoing argument over the 2016 Australian Census highlights a broader problem, argues opposition MP Tim Watts: the lack of any kind of national information policy.…

Previous owners won't be needing them any more The US Marshals have set the date for an auction of Bitcoins seized in the takedown of the Silk Road market and its aftermath.…

Shops, hotels worldwide warned after support portal pwned Hackers infected hundreds of computers within Oracle, infiltrated the support portal for its MICROS payment terminals division, and potentially accessed sales registers all over the world.…

Shoving NAND on a DIMM with a DRAM cache to speed access Gold plate can give a durable and affordable alloy a 24-carat veneer finish, adding value to cheap metal. DRAM gives Samsung-Netlist Hybrid DIMMs a cache veneer, providing what looks like DRAM to applications but is really persistent NAND underneath, cheaper than DRAM and lots of it.…

DEA agents stumble onto billing scheme during bust US telco giant AT&T has been fined $7.75m after scammers were found sneaking bogus charges onto customer bills.…

Organic compounds unlikely to have survived cosmic pummeling, say scientists Scientists hoping to find signs of Martian life on the surface of the Red Planet may not be in luck.…

Tenth straight loss-making quarter for Nexsan owner as sales plunge 37 per cent Nexsan-owner Imation's second quarter of 2016 marked its tenth straight quarterly loss. But hey, at least it was the smallest loss of the ten.…

Punters are now getting more matches so we've got better things to do, says regulator Blighty's communications regulator Ofcom has dropped its probe into how the Premier League sells live UK audio-visual media rights for football matches.…

We're, um, Straight Outta 'fourth' 'trons... 'trinos... you know what we mean – scientists Scientists are almost certain that the sterile neutrino does not exist after failing to find any sign of the ghostly particle at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole.…

Care.data closed Opinion The realisation of some digital health benefits within the NHS might have been delayed by the extra requirement for consultation on a new consent model governing the use of patient data.…

En garde, An Garda External attempts to hack into the IT systems of the Garda Síochána prompted a temporary shut down of several Irish police systems last week.…

Aww, you shouldn't have. No really, you shouldn't have A marketing campaign by O2 that sent customers USB-embedded pens backfired last week – after it transpired a number of devices contained a "Windows-specific virus."…

Insourced servers downed, thousands flightless A computer outage has caused worldwide delays for thousands of passengers using Delta Airlines.…

Necromancer-loving author wrote 'tricky' malware at its core A previously unknown group called Strider has been conducting cyberespionage-style attacks against selective targets in Russia, China, Sweden, and Belgium.…

Pavilion Data Systems slowly doffing kimono An NVMe over Ethernet storage startup is slowly emerging from stealth, exhibiting a system in Seagate’s booth at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, August 8-11.…

Escalate, escalate PagerDuty is looking to save CEOs, sales types and Europeans from the tyranny of midnight pagers, under newly swiped CEO Jennifer Tejada.…

Time to re-discover the lost art of selling PCs After 12 months of “free” upgrades, it's now business for usual for Microsoft and the hard work begins on trying to shift paid-for Window 10.…

Here's what really goes down at Old Street after dark New figures from Transport for London reveal just how much naughtiness goes on at the Tube stations nearest to London's technology firms.…

Some advice when you're trading off information for performance Many companies have, understandably, a burning desire to learn things from their data. There's a cost and this manifests itself in one – or, frequently both – of two forms: money and time. Big data equals big storage and big processing power, and both of those equate to a financial cost.…

Grinding research finds gold in failed header checks Black Hat Deep Instinct researcher Tom Nipravsky has undermined the ubiquitous security technique of digitally-signed files by baking malicious code into headers without tripping popular security tools.…

The bad ones send passwords in plaintext, the good ones can't survive a screwdiver DEF CON Bluetooth-enabled locks are increasingly popular, but an analysis of 16 such devices shows 12 are easily hackable with inexpensive kit and some can be broken into from 400 metres away.…

This time with Wi-Fi, a state-owned telco on board and maybe the return of Free Basics Facebook's trying to bring affordable internet access to rural India again.…

Pro-tip: Spend less on SEO and more on scrubbing the universal decrypt key from your code Symantec malware manglers Sam Kim and "Val S" have spent 90 minutes on the phone to ransomware purveyors while researching a new variant that encrypts PCs through fake Windows 10 activation dialogues.…

In the 'sharing economy' you pay when sites get hacked Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, which last week closed itself down after being hacked, has now told account-holders they'll all have to pay for the mess by surrendering some of their account balance.…

Monitoring code put through the virtualisation atomiser Network function virtualisation (NFV) is important to telcos and big data centres, who use it to toss dedicated appliances like firewalls in favour of virtual machines that can spin up and down on demand.…

10787 files changed, 612208 insertions, 272098 deletions and lots of doc updates Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 4.8 of the Linux Kernel.…

Researchers able to watch wire-fraudsters operate in real time The ancient-in-internet-years “Nigerian e-mail” scam remains popular and profitable for its operators ... when they don't shoot themselves in the foot.…

Nexus users move right along. Everyone else, read on and hope your mobe-maker fixes it Four Qualcomm vulnerabilities grant malware writers total access to modern Android smartphones.…

Microsoft's response: Have you tried uninstalling it and installing it again? Users are reporting that upgrading to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update renders their PCs unusable.…

Yutu – aka Jade Rabbit – ground to a halt years ago, but is now pining for the craters China never fails in its high-profile scientific endeavours, so news that its Yutu lunar rover has stopped functioning is being spun as a triumph for its space program.…

Kit from NUUO, Netgear has face-palm grade stoopid There are multiple Web interface vulnerabilities in a network video recorder under Netgear's ReadyNAS brand and various devices by video recording company NUUO.…

Bluetooth hack lets Australian researchers reveal your deepest desires DEF CON DEF CON has a lot of odd talks, but the successful hacking of a vibrator by two Australian researchers drew a big crowd.…

Data appears to be encrypted in transit, but not at rest An Australian IT consultant has cast doubt about whether the country's Census is as secure as the Australian Bureau of Statistics thinks it is.…

Congressmen want to protect commerce, but also give law enforcement powerful tools DEF CON It’s going to be at least a year or so, and probably a lot longer, before the United States Congress gets around to ruling on the second war on encryption, two members of the US House of Representatives told the DEF CON event.…

Uber-nerd Tarah Wheeler aims to build bridges DEF CON Hardcore hackers and the corporate security industry have never really got on that well. Symantec is looking to change that after hiring Tarah Wheeler to act as its cybersecurity czar.…

Brit overseers not interested, so groups ask ECHR instead Having failed in its bid to block GCHQ's hacking activities at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, advocacy group Privacy International says it will now take its fight with the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights.…

Auntie denies it 'sniffs packets' for licence-fee dodging Updated The BBC's creepy detector vans will be dragged into the 21st century to sniff Brits' home Wi-Fi networks, claims the UK Daily Telegraph's Saturday splash.…

If only they were this protective of their hockey teams The government of Canada has laid out a cloud computing strategy that could bring more data center facilities to the Great White North.…

Thanks, Obama DEF CON While some fear the US government is hoarding a vast pool of zero-day security vulnerabilities, the reality is that it probably holds just a few dozen, according to a study by Columbia University.…

New paper from academics and ad giant highlight size of problem As some point you have probably downloaded a "free" piece of software only to find it has come with a whole host of other unwanted friends that go on to redirect your browser search bar or inject ads where there weren't any before.…

Scientists bundled out of labs despite reassurances Blighty can still get at Euro funds Following anecdotes of British scientists being axed from EU-funded projects, one academic has revealed actual evidence of UK boffins being dumped from Euro research efforts in the Brexit aftermath.…

Builders bemoan browser-based banner buster being blatantly banned The makers of the AdBlock Plus (ABP) say their ad-blocking browser plugin has been effectively outlawed in China by the Chinese government.…

Canadian mobe biz sues Avaya Analysis When Blackberry announced earlier this year it was going to give up making mobile phones, most wondered what it would actually do as a company. Part of the answer is rebadged Android gear.…

Peggle Crew speaks out on hard drive nuke stunt The hacking group credited for compromising FossHub and briefly infecting downloads of Audacity and Classic Shell says the fallout from the website's insecurity could have been far worse had they not got there first.…

Unprofitable firm still down on market expectations Operating losses at Hadoop-flinger Hortonworks deepened to $64.3m (£49.3m), compared to a loss of $42.9m (£32.9m) during the second quarter last year. It's not looking good for Big Data.…

No new features until then, apparently Microsoft is planning two releases of Windows 10 in 2017.…

Get on stage with us on May 17 to 19, 2017 Continuous Lifecycle is coming back to London next May, and it’s time for you to play your part by responding to our call for papers.…

Durham Uni-based adventurers given gold* for their efforts Durham University quantum physicists have been funded to run a Skyrmion Project involving other British universities, which, among other aims, could mean less electricity was needed to power the world.…

Science by a 1,000 cuts: Power of kirigami adds 3D Engineers at the University of Bristol have applied the traditional Japanese art of Kirigami - where paper is folded and cut to construct intricate models - to create a new shape-changing metamaterial.…