The Register

Ready or not, ISS is coming down in 2031, and Amazon, Boeing and more are ready for business NASA has given the go-ahead for the first commercially owned and operated space station, Orbital Reef, to advance to design phase.…

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta spends billions on the concept COMMENT While Meta has been hemorrhaging billions trying to bring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse to life with little to show for it, China has decided it too will take a crack at the virtual-reality concept.…

Top secret tech theft admission sealed into top secret plea deal An ex-Apple engineer who worked on Titan – the company's "need to know basis" self-driving car project – yesterday admitted to stealing proprietary tech while he was working for the company.…

CEO pledges to 'keep moving Moore's Law forward' during Hot Chips keynote Hot Chips Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger sees a future where everything is a computer assembled from chiplets using advanced packaging technologies like Intel's own as the chipmaker seeks to keep Moore's Law alive.…

Privacy case claiming Big Red contravened a string of US laws follows boasts made by Larry Ellison in 2016 Oracle is the subject of a class-action suit alleging the software giant created a network containing personal information of hundreds of millions of people and sold the data to third parties.…

Airbus's solar-powered Zephyr nosedives after more than 64 days aloft An unmanned, solar-powered drone was hours from breaking the world record for the longest-duration flight before it suddenly crashed.…

Telco billionaire purchase A-OK from national security standpoint, apparently, but will he buy up more? The UK government has declared it will take no further action regarding the purchase of BT shares by French telco billionaire Patrick Drahi, following a national security assessment into his Altice company becoming the largest BT shareholder.…

From original author Brian Kernighan, one of the original Unix team In Unix terms, this news is akin to Moses appearing and announcing an amendment to the 10 commandments.…

Japanese giant will stop making mainframes four years later Fujitsu has been awarded a renewed contract for support and maintenance of the aging UK Police National Computer (PNC) after no other companies tendered for the work.…

Energy costs are up 40 percent and OVH isn't going to eat that without sharing some pain French cloud company OVH has announced it will hike its prices.…

New and friendlier CAC, after years of cracking down The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has signaled it would like to smooth growing tensions with internet firms after a couple of years in which it strongly asserted its powers.…

Oh wow, get a load of Google using strcpy() all wrong – strcpy! Haha, you'll never ever catch us doing that Microsoft has described a severe ChromeOS security vulnerability that one of its researchers reported to Google in late April.…

Here's how to detect an intrusion via vulnerable email systems Organizations that didn't immediately patch their Zimbra email systems should assume miscreants have already found and exploited the bugs, and should start hunting for malicious activity across IT networks, according to Uncle Sam.…

Hopefully Lucky 13 spots suggested, all on the south pole near water ice The next US astronauts to set foot on the Moon will find themselves on the summit of a mountain range or the ridge of a crater near the lunar south pole.…

Timing for plan to redirect HTTP requests now indeterminate to allow for further feedback More than a decade after implementing support for secure HTTPS connections on its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is finally planning to begin redirecting insecure HTTP connections to the more protected spec.…

But don't worry, Zuck would never misuse this type of sensitive data Novant Health confirmed that it may have disclosed 1.3 million patients' sensitive data, including email addresses, phone numbers, financial information - even doctor's appointment details - to Meta.…

Scammers are using cloud services to create and host web pages that can be used to lure victims into handing over their credentials Criminals are slipping phishing emails past automated security scanners inside Amazon Web Services (AWS) to establish a launching pad for attacks.…

There is a madness to the methods Boffins at universities in France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Sweden took a deep dive into known Java deserialization vulnerabilities, and have now resurfaced with their findings. In short, they've drawn attention to the ways in which libraries can accidentally introduce serious security flaws.…

Washington, Seoul, Beijing, Taipei and ...Mexico City battle to attract vendors Mexico is the next country in line to offer incentives to tempt semiconductor manufacturers to set up shop, and may be aiming to take advantage of the US desire to bring manufacturing closer to home.…

Here's your latest excuse to miss that Zoom meeting Another Windows update, another Windows problem. Microsoft has admitted that a July update for Windows 10 may have broken audio for some users. …

For 'limited, serial number-authorized repairs' in move unlikely to appease critics Loyal Mac fans inclined to break out the WD-40 and duct tape when their trusted devices misbehave now have access to an official Apple Self Service Repair program.…

Prolific group pummeled days after claiming to be file thief behind attack on cybersecurity vendor The LockBit ransomware group last week claimed responsibility for an attack on cybersecurity vendor in June. The high-profile gang is now apparently under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) because of it.…

In the battle between bandwidth, latency, and starvation, we'll always be choosing two Trying to create a network that's fair, equitable, and starvation-free may simply be impossible – at least with current congestion control algorithms (CCA), an MIT study has found.…

Fellow group member Taiwan claims it never got the invite A South Korean official confirmed on Thursday that the country would attend the preliminary meeting of the so-called international Chip 4. Fellow prospective member, Taiwan, claims it had not been given any details of the event.…

A faster 51.2Tbit/sec co-packaged switch is also in the works Broadcom will deploy its 25.6Tbit/sec Humbolt co-packaged optical (CPO) switches in China-based cloud provider Tencent's datacenters in a bid to accelerate adoption of the emerging network tech.…

Liz Truss to go over IR35 off payroll tax as ruling party voters gear up to pick their leader The leading candidate to replace Boris Johnson as the UK's prime minister has said she would review changes to the IR35 tax rules so often criticized by IT contractors.…

PowerPoint presentations are all well and good, but for Peter Beck, you can't beat something physical Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck spoke at the SmallSat 2022 conference and offered up words of wisdom for anyone pondering an entry into the lighter end of the launch market.…

No country for old menus Opinion A year ago, corporate VR sucked deep on the hype pipe and offered it around. We weren't convinced. All that investment, all that technology, to recreate a drab pastiche of the very environments we'd gratefully escaped in the magical world of WFH.…

New kid on the block risked decimating colleagues' side hustle Who, Me? When you start a new job, you always want to impress the boss by going the extra mile (or kilometer). But doing so can risk incurring the wrath of co-workers. …

It's getting hot in here so take down all your nodes Comment This year's summer heatwaves aren't just making your average Brit's life a bit miserable, it also caused problems for some cloud providers and server admins trying to keep their gear running.…

Plus: See if in-app browsers are monitoring you, a novel industrial network attack technique, and more In brief Zoom fixed a pair of privilege escalation vulnerabilities, which were detailed at the Black Hat conference this month, but that patch was bypassed, necessitating yet another fix.…

Controversial Pegasus spyware maker to focus on NATO sales while battling various court cases Pegasus spyware slinger NSO Group announced on Sunday it will reorganize, replacing its CEO and letting go of around 100 workers.…

Plus: Indonesia's four-hour takedown demand; Peak Facebook in Korea?; Alibaba frees font; and more. Asia In Brief Huawei last week unveiled initiatives to encourage developers to work on its Harmony OS – the platform it created after US sanctions denied the Chinese giant access to Google's Android operating system.…

Plus: How US Homeland Security uses AI – and text-to-image systems deployed in social media In brief Elon Musk wants Tesla's robot butler to be able to cook, mow lawns, and care for the elderly, he wrote in an essay published in a magazine backed by the official Cyberspace Administration of China.…

Traffic is growing 30 percent every year, there's no reason to believe that'll change, BT's Andrew Lord argues Every year the bandwidth that telecom networks carry increases by roughly 30 percent. To keep up, the interconnects on which these networks are built are going to need to get a whole lot smarter and more capable before long, BT's Andrew Lord said during his Hot Interconnects keynote early this week.…

Hopefully these probes won't end up as target practice for some aliens in a few centuries The most distant human-made objects, Voyager 1 and 2, are still cruising in interstellar space, more than 12 billion miles from Earth, as NASA today celebrates the 45th year of its longest-operating mission.…

Sandia has been working on the project for more than a decade – now comes scaling When it comes to turning turbines, steam is out and supercritical carbon dioxide is in – as demonstrated by Sandia National Labs when it connected a closed-loop system to the local grid, supplying about 10 kilowatts of power for nearly an hour. …

Shakeup in teaching looms as code-completion tool lets students 'bring an Uzi to a knife fight' Microsoft's AI code-suggestion tool GitHub Copilot is showing itself to be so capable that educators may have to rethink how they teach computer science.…

Tesla sedan, 46 Chanel bags, 16 Rolexes, and more equals three years behind bars Now-former HP finance manager Shelbee Szeto has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to forfeit more than 250 luxury items after she blew $5m on herself using company credit cards.…

Realizes there's a big beautiful world out there and sets sail for Japan Microsoft has taken a tentative step to expand the Windows Subsystem for Android outside of the US by making the preview available in Japan.…

Imagine how much Apple would charge for a power lead that long A spacewalk by a pair of cosmonauts working on the European robotic arm on the International Space Station ended prematurely due to battery power issues.…

We look at the official flavors, but there are more out there Alongside the official flavors, some of Ubuntu's other remixes have new 22.04.1 versions out: Unity, Cinnamon, and Kylin.…

AWS said to be taking an interest in homegrown silicon, meaning chipmaker must have a functional demo Chipmaker Qualcomm is said to be preparing to re-enter the Arm server market, based on technology the company gained from its acquisition of startup Nuvia last year.…

Customers could be better off with specialist providers and service partners, Chocolate Factory decides Google Cloud is turning off its IoT services as of August 2023, leaving customers with less than a year to find alternatives.…

If you absolutely must keep using those proprietary formats, walk this way Just over six months on from version 7.3, LibreOffice 7.4 Community has arrived, boasting improvements in Microsoft Office compatibility.…

Trail from Super Orange HK Holding Ltd leads back to National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund The UK government has blocked the sale of a British chip design software outfit to a Chinese company, citing national security. The move is the latest step the government has taken in its increasingly defensive stance against foreign ownership of UK technology companies.…

Well now there's an idea In what may be a major shift, Google plans to revise its search algorithm to rank content crafted primarily for people rather than content designed to impress web crawlers and indexing bots.…

Long list of open standards contributions part of journey to REST-based GIS stack, companies say Database vendor MariaDB has forked out an undisclosed sum for CubeWerx, a geospatial data specialist, in the hope of making make these features easier to build into data-hungry applications.…

Not to mention the severely disadvantageous subscription model Something for the Weekend I have an app whose sole purpose is to launch another app.…

Who knows where all those cables go anyway? On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's ongoing chronicle of IT incidents that readers have managed to survive, divert or diminish, while emerging with reputations intact.…