The Register

Comet BB is not only largest of its type that we know of, it was likely active billions of miles from the Sun Not only is comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein the largest of its kind known, it’s also one of the most active, distant comets, likely spewing plumes of gas further out from the Sun than expected.…

Restores twin CEO structure that ended in 2020, no indication this has deeper meaning SaaS sultan Salesforce has announced a new CEO: Bret Taylor, previously the company's president and chief operating officer.…

Suggests collaboration with OS suppliers is the best way to innovate, ignoring that Google just designed its own silicon for Pixel 6 Qualcomm has distanced itself from Apple, and took a veiled shot at its rival as it tried to clear the air on its relationship with Google.…

China is on the march, Russia loves to destabilise, no intelligence agency can stop 'em without help The head of the UK's secretive Military Intelligence Section 6 agency – popularly known as MI6 – has delivered a rare speech in which he has warned that China, Iran, and Russia use information technology to destabilise rivals, and that the agency he leads can no longer rely on in-house innovation to develop the technologies the UK needs to defend itself.…

Power supplies are screwed up because they're not all screwed in Cisco has warned owners of its UCS servers that they may have a screw loose. In the UCS X9508 chassis that houses their servers, that is.…

CEO Adam Selipsky takes the stage in Vegas – and may be on a collision course with customers Re:Invent Adam Selipsky gave his first Re:Invent keynote as AWS CEO on Tuesday, introducing a range of services, and hinting that the cloud giant may move toward more packaged solutions rather than primarily offering infrastructure-as-a-service.…

Do you want a smartphone to know you that well? Qualcomm today will unveil its latest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, a greatest-hits compilation of the US giant's fastest CPU, GPU, camera, and modem technology.…

US watchdog tosses previous result in the trash after election fairness slammed America's labor watchdog has given workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, another crack at voting for unionization after their first attempt failed earlier this year.…

And a bunch of bank-account-raiding trojans also identified FluBot, a family of Android malware, is circulating again via SMS messaging, according to authorities in Finland.…

Assemblers unite Ruby developer and internet japester Aaron Patterson has published a REPL for 64-bit x86 assembly language, enabling interactive coding in the lowest-level language of all.…

There's always Use Another Browser As the festive season approaches, Microsoft has decided to add "Buy Now, Pay Later" financing options to its Edge browser in the US.…

Patches available for 150 affected products Tricking users into visiting a malicious webpage could allow malicious people to compromise 150 models of HP multi-function printers, according to F-Secure researchers.…

Parachute snagged on ship's bows Video Video footage has emerged of a British F-35B fighter jet falling off the front of aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth after a botched takeoff.…

And they might attribute cyber attacks if governments won't Lloyd’s of London may no longer extend insurance cover to companies affected by acts of war, and new clauses drafted for providers of so-called "cyber" insurance are raising the spectre of organisations caught in tit-for-tat nation state-backed attacks being left high and dry.…

CMA finds that deal would be bad for consumers and tighten Zuck's grip on almost half of £7bn digital ad spend The UK competition watchdog has ordered Meta, the owner of Facebook, to sell Giphy after deciding purchase of the animated GIF creator platform will damage rivals, consumers and advertisers.…

Broken antenna will have to wait as warning comes in less than 24 hours before airlock opening NASA has delayed a spacewalk scheduled today from the International Space Station amid concerns about debris.…

The snag: This programming language is safe and efficient, but hard to learn, impacting productivity Re:Invent Here at a depleted AWS Re:invent in Las Vegas, Rust Foundation chairwoman Shane Miller and Tokio project lead Carl Lerche made the case for using Rust to minimize environmental impact, though said its steep learning curve made the task challenging.…

From the data centre to the desktop, here is the green solution Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

All thanks to CPython, WebAssembly, and some clever developers (And yes, there's Pyodide, too) Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages, may soon become even more ubiquitous as it finds a home within web browsers.…

Mods to the design of EDSAC were 'considerable' says boffin Seventy years ago this week, LEO, the world's first computer for business, ran one of the first enterprise applications after several experimental test runs.…

Regulator's 'assertions are factually and legally incorrect' biz tells El Reg Clearview AI, the controversial startup known for scraping billions of selfies from people's public social network profiles to train a facial-recognition system, may be fined just over £17m ($22.6m) by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).…

IDC reckons industry will be worth $8.6B a year – or about a quarter of one Dell quarter Don't rush to convert your analog computing skills into the quantum realm – analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) reckons that in 2027 the annual market for quantum computing globally will still only be worth $8.6 billion. Which sounds like a lot, but really isn't.…

Work continues on code to make the observatory operate happily when control unit message sync glitches out NASA has successfully restored another instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope.…

Aka 'rebalancing global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem' The European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) has published a letter signed by ten telco CEOs that calls for, among other things, Big Tech to pay for their network builds.…

Xenobots scoop up loose cells to make more of themselves. We welcome our new overlords In January of 2020, scientists from the University of Vermont announced they had built the first living robots; this week they have published reports that those robots, made from frog cells and called Xenobots, can reproduce and have found a new way to do so.…

Spotted the crack after it ended – still not sure what was lost Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has admitted it's been popped, and badly.…

In the dark about how New H3C chip org ended up on USA’s naughty list HPE has said it sees “no indication” its technology has been sold to China’s military…

Will it fly by Christmas? Betteridge's law probably applies The very-much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope is being pumped with fuel and prepared for liftoff after an anomaly knocked back its launch date to no earlier than December 22.…

That's so Meta Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned on Monday, anointing CTO Parag Agrawal as the social network company's new chief executive and announcing the elevation of board member Bret Taylor, former CTO of Facebook, to Independent Chair of the Board.…

Performance-critical tasks scheduled on efficiency cores, fix emerges The mixture of performance and efficiency CPUs in Intel's 12th-gen Core processors, code-named Alder Lake, hasn't just been causing problems for some Windows gamers – it almost introduced complications for Linux.…

Could be a Christmas surprise in store from Priti Patel Autonomy Trial Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's pending extradition to the US has been kicked into the long grass again by the UK Home Office.…

A British success story... what happens next? Industry talk is continuing to circulate regarding a possible public listing of the UK makers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer.…

Security, collaboration, flexible working: Fleet does it all apparently JetBrains has introduced remote development for its range of IDEs as well as previewing a new IDE called Fleet, which will form the basis for fresh tools covering all major programming languages.…

No, it isn't the limited levels of storage that have irked European businesses EU software and cloud businesses have joined Nextcloud in filing a complaint with the European Commission regarding Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behaviour over the bundling of its OS with online services.…

10 days after attack 'almost all systems' up and running, refuses to say if ransom was paid Wind turbine maker Vestas says "almost all" of its IT systems are finally up and running 10 days after a security attack by criminals, confirming that it had indeed fallen victim to ransomware.…

User group survey shows concerns linger about support skills for upgrade UK SAP users stuck with their migrations to S/4HANA during COVID-19 lockdowns this year, according to fresh figures released today. But skills among partners and SAP technical resources are still a worry.…

Submissions must create a 'sense of pride.' What could possibly go wrong? Good news for those in the UK with primary school-aged kids and wondering what to do when the next bout of home-schooling hits: design a logo for the first UK satellite launches.…

3D Investments said plan will result in 'three underperforming companies' A fund that holds around 7 per cent of Toshiba stock – making it the company's second-largest shareholder – has opposed the Japanese industrial giant's proposed split into three companies, and called for a review of alternative strategies.…

We're back with another debate you can vote on as we argue back and forth – this time over cloud computing Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.…

Multiple Windows in WinUI 3? Next version. Open source? Maybe one day Microsoft released the Windows App SDK 1.0 earlier this month, the first full release of "Project Reunion", but there is some confusion about what it is and whether developers need it.…

IoT still needs its lightbulb moment Opinion Tech is a great leveller. You can drop £50k on a shiny Tesla and £1k+ on the latest iPhone 13 Max Grunt to unlock it. But if some netops drone located half the globe away misconfigured a server, you're walking home just like a peon with a scratched-up Android and a battered Peugeot who dropped their keys down a drain.…

'Keep it running a few weeks.' Fast-forward 5 years. 'Why'd it break, man!?' Who, Me? We've all heard the phrase that "best is the enemy of good", but we've all also shoved in that "temporary" solution that ended up being a bit more permanent than we'd hoped. Welcome to the home of duct tape and prayers: Who, Me?…

Oh-em-gee, it's only another free web lecture from our MCubed team Special series An old truism of machine learning states that the more complex and larger a model is, the more accurate the outcome of its predictions – up to a point.…

For those of you who virtualise Microsoft’s finest and struggle with the pointer, this developer has an answer Two thousand and twenty-one might not seem the obvious year – or century – to give the world a new mouse driver for Windows 3.1, but a developer named Calvin Buckley has written one nonetheless. His motivation apparently is to ensure rapid and reliable rodent operations when Microsoft's venerable OS runs as a virtual machine.…

Meanwhile, the Middle Kingdom’s military plans an AI offensive – in the labs and on the field of combat Tech consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton has warned that China will soon plan the theft of high value data, so it can decrypt it once quantum computers break classical encryption.…

If you are going to sell satellite internet subscriptions in India, you Musk get a license, says regulator The government of India has advised locals not to subscribe to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, revealing that it does not have a valid license to operate on the subcontinent.…

The cloudy concern is a prodigy, but early promise is no guarantee of dominance re:Invent 2021 Heading into Christmas 2005, could you have imagined that 16 years later a new player would have rewritten the rules of how business tech is delivered?…

At the same time, will overrule court decision that traditional publishers are liable for comments on social media Australia's government has announced it will compel social media companies to reveal the identities of users who post material considered defamatory.…

Send an iMessage to Facebook, and we'll talk The European Parliament's new Digital Markets Act, adopted as a draft law this week, could compel big platforms owned by large firms including Apple, Google, and Facebook to make their tech interoperable.…

Lighting and warming homes in winter, or ransoming encrypted files and buying drugs? Hmmm The directors general of Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority and Environmental Protection Agency have called upon both the EU and Sweden's government to ban cryptocurrency mining.…