The Register

Королёв, we have a problem … We don't mean to alarm you, but a Russian Soyuz vehicle docked at the International Space Station (ISS) is leaking a "significant" amount of something, resulting in the cancellation of a spacewalk.…

Beijing cracks down on undeletable pre-installed bloatware and dodgy apps This week the kings of the Middle Kingdom issued directives to address some of the biggest annoyances associated with smartphones applications: copycat apps and bloatware.…

Windows giant fears coin crafting may upend its servers Updated Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds.…

Meanwhile, Moscow ponders a ban on offshore tech workers China has reportedly banned the export of chips that use the locally-designed Loongson architecture.…

If you get email from 'Samantha Wolf', congrats: you're important enough to make a decent target An Iranian cyber espionage gang with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has learned new methods and phishing techniques, and aimed them at a wider set of targets – including politicians, government officials, critical infrastructure and medical researchers – according to email security vendor Proofpoint.…

Would you ride to the Moon in a sightly used spaceship? Yeah, it's got some miles on it … NASA's Orion capsule – built to send the first woman and another man to the Moon – has arrived at a US naval base in San Diego, California, and will be dragged ashore for inspection.…

Big Red doesn't charge more when users add cores, so Big Blue plans to triple the count. Because why not? IBM has quietly announced it's planning a 24-core Power 10 processor, seemingly to make one of its servers capable of running Oracle's database in a cost-effective fashion.…

… a working Exchange inbox tree There's no end – or restored data – in sight for some Rackspace customers now on day 12 of the company's ransomware-induced hosted Exchange email outage.…

Handy tools to kill off security protections get Redmond's stamp of approval Microsoft says it has suspended several third-party developer accounts that submitted malicious Windows drivers for the IT giant to digitally sign so that the code could be used in cyberattacks.…

Nuclear, hypersonic hardware is one thing, but you can probably keep the quantum computer stuff, Vlad The US Department of Justice unsealed a 16-count indictment today accusing five Russians, an American citizen, and a lawful permanent US resident of smuggling export-controlled electronics and military ammunition out of the United States for the Russian government.…

Not Amazon's fault buckets are exposed, but the loaded shotgun and your foot are all there ready and waiting Amazon wants you to know that it's not to blame for the data you've exposed though its cloud storage service. AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is, after all, simple.…

'Challenging economic conditions' blamed for delays, but here's $13,000 for your troubles Amazon is reportedly delaying the start date for an unknown number of college graduate hires, telling them in an email they wouldn't be able to start until well after their planned May 2023 start dates.…

If you listen really closely, you can hear Mark Zuckerberg's excitement The US government's crackdown on TikTok continues, with the latest salvo being a bipartisan bill that would outright ban the popular social media app from doing business in the country.…

That's a lot of personal data and cat videos per second Arista Networks is expanding its 7050X4 Series and 7060X5 Series of leaf and spine datacenter switches with an eye on hyperscale and enterprise buyers and their ever growing bandwidth requirements, including support for 800Gbps connections.…

Something's broken, mom! Microsoft offers workaround while trying to think up a fix Updates to Windows Server that were included in Microsoft's Patch Tuesday batch of fixes this week could trip up users who want to spin up new virtual machines in some Hyper-V hosts.…

'Kristina' is a sculpture of a woman with her face in a bowl of soup We doff our caps to the two London police officers who smashed down the doors of a small art gallery to rescue a woman who appeared to have collapsed and drowned in a bowl of soup.…

Campaigners say it's unlikely to pass a test in the courts, though The EU has issued a draft decision agreeing that measures taken by the United States ensure sufficient protection for personal data to be transferred from the region to US companies.…

Alibaba reportedly pulled into the fray, plus: world's top chipmaking equipment maker, ASML, pushes back Chinese companies are being further hit by US-led export controls on advanced chip technology, with reports that the e-commerce giant Alibaba is being denied access to Arm's Neoverse V-series processor designs.…

'Technical issues and proliferation of hateful content' blamed More than 32 million Twitter users are forecast to ditch the social media platform within the next two years as they become "frustrated" by technical matters and the rise in post they deem offensive.…

As customers grapple with pricey AI systems and nontraditional compute, HPE, Dell, and Lenovo circle in wait Comment There's no arguing that the cloud has changed the way we think about deploying our applications and workloads. It served to normalize consumption-based pricing and gave birth to a slew of as-a-service platforms from legacy vendors desperately trying to keep up with changing customer appetites.…

Don't worry, there are some other improvements thrown in too The last new version of Firefox for 2022 is out on Mozilla's FTP server, with a more widespread release to follow soon.…

So says Samsung, which wants to add your cat's collar to the Internet of Stuff Forget lines of business, et cetera – it is people's pets that are shaping the future of tech.…

Stand up and be counted, ye ancient code wizards The Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group is seeking to discover just how much the venerable programming language is still being used in the industry, and it would like your help.…

Siri? Google? Alexa? Could ChatGPT save us from this data harvesting nightmare? Opinion We were promised an age of wonders. By 2022 we'd have self-driving cars, robo-maids, even voice-activated "friends" – digital companions to keep us well-informed. What went wrong?…

Despite dire predictions about sideloading, iGiant said to be ready to comply with EU law Apple is said to be preparing to end its exclusive control over iOS app distribution – but only in Europe – by allowing third-party app stores as required under European law.…

Yet more pain for the software formerly known as NetScaler The China-linked crime gang APT5 is already attacking a flaw in Citrix's Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway products that the vendor patched today.…

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a ... oh Electric car maker Rivian just can't seem to catch a break - it has posted staggering losses this year, has had to recall nearly every vehicle it sold in October, and now it's announcing a hold on its joint electric van plant with Mercedes-Benz.…

Initial attempt at longitudinal magnetic map of our local star China's National Space Science Center has released the first six images of the Sun captured by the nation's Advanced Space-Based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), aka Kuafu-1.…

First ignition is awesome, but economics and engineering to deliver clean energy promise are nowhere Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have achieved fusion ignition in a nuclear reactor, it was announced on Tuesday.…

Just as Tokyo reportedly agrees to back US chip sanctions against China IBM will help Japan's new government-backed semiconductor company commercialize advanced 2nm chips to revitalize the country's role in the industry and diversify the global supply chain. …

Ah c'mon, we've gotta be better than this Airbnb guests perceived to be Black by hosts are slightly less successful at booking properties than White guests, according to a report from Airbnb itself.…

I used to be a missileer like you, then I took an ARRW in the knee The US Air Force says it has successfully tested its first fully equipped prototype hypersonic missile.…

I demand to speak to the space manager A soon-to-launch NASA satellite will be able to account for much more of the water on our planet without having to extrapolate from geographically limited data sets.…

Plus there's a PoC for this unpatched Cisco bug Patch Tuesday For its final Patch Tuesday of the year, Microsoft fixed one bug that's already been exploited in the wild – and another that's publicly known.…

Databases, details of 'sexual proceedings in court' and more apparently pilfered from finance IT LockBit claims it was behind a cyber-attack on the California Department of Finance, bragging it stole data during the intrusion.…

Thankfully no customer info – but the spotlight is back on third-party attacks Uber, which has suffered a few data thefts in its time, is this week dealing with the fallout from yet another – this time from one of its technology suppliers.…

Korean tech giant claims big performance, energy efficiency gains with memory tech Samsung has built a claimed first-of-its-kind supercomputer containing AMD datacenter GPUs affixed with its processing-in-memory chips, which the company said can significantly improve the performance and energy efficiency of training large AI models.…

Billions in people's private funds siphoned off to bankroll hedge fund, watchdogs say Police in The Bahamas on Monday nabbed Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), former CEO of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, at the request of the US government, based on charges filed by multiple federal agencies.…

Plus: Elon Musk is now a number 2 Comment Twitter has taken a match to its Trust and Safety Council, the group of 100 civil rights organizations formed in 2016 to tackle issues like hate speech, child exploitation and suicide on the platform.…

Software behemoth reportedly wants a chat with the regulators – on the other side of the pond this time Updated Microsoft, already under the European Union's microscope for its $69 billion bid for game maker Activision Blizzard, reportedly wants to talk to regulators there to try to see off legal action against Teams based on an antitrust complaint levied two years ago by rival Slack.…

Audio recordings of local whirlwinds provide data on Mars weather, wear and tear of space hardware Audio data recorded by a NASA rover has, for the first time, allowed earthbound humans to hear the sound of a dust devil passing on the Martian surface.…

The 'good old days' were sometimes ugly, but please let us experience their good bits Feature When the market for proprietary UNIX workstations collapsed, few vendors survived… and those that did seemed not to learn much from it.…

That summer heatwave in Britain? Our servers were just resting Oracle execs are all smiles following a stellar showing for their cloud operations in the latest full quarter, and Larry Ellison is obviously feeling a little dizzy, telling the world – or anyone who would listen – that Big Red's cloud never fails.…

America: Yeah but they can't help you if it's national security. And it totally is China is fighting back against Washington's semiconductor wars by filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against US chip export controls, claiming they threaten global supply chains.…

Oh joy. Effect on software development inevitable, but it's clearly not devs' replacement, says analyst The global market for low-code development technologies is set to grow nearly 20 percent from 2022, to reach $26.9 billion in 2023, according to a forecast from Gartner.…

Recommendation from top CNIL advisor claims Cupertino broke EU privacy laws Apple tracked users without their consent and deserves to be fined €6 million, according to a top advisor to France's data privacy watchdog. …

Didn't the x86 giant just blow up its data storage biz? The US Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs believes that novel memory tech may be the secret to faster, more accurate nuclear weapon simulations.…

Another Linux OS – but this time it's all about the software packaging NixOS is a distro built with a new sort of software build tool. You can install it and it works, but oddly that isn't really the point.…

German software giant unlikely to repeat 2020's concession to users pressure SAP is likely to hold firm on the 2027 support deadline for ECC, its earlier-generation ERP solution used by thousands of businesses worldwide, making a repeat of 2020's concession unlikely, according to one user group leader.…

Smells like Russian miscreants A type of cryptomining malware targeting Linux-based systems has added capabilities by incorporating an open source remote access trojan called Chaos RAT with several advanced functions that bad guys can use to control remote operating systems.…