The Register

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.…

Privacy, it's a useful marketing term. *Offer does not apply in China Apple has left a VPN bypass vulnerability in iOS unfixed for at least two years, leaving identifying IP traffic data exposed, and there's no sign of a fix.…

A350 saved from peril by sharp-eyed ground crew Australian wasps have once again brought a passenger aircraft to the brink of peril.…

'We're placing a high priority on it' NASA is pushing ahead to recruit a panel of experts and publish a much-awaited report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), all with a budget of up to $100,000.…

Tech preview is Azure-only for now, adding to previous AWS Arm adventures Red Hat has delivered a tech preview of its OpenShift containerization platform that can drive clusters spanning both x86 and Arm silicon.…

Mandate goes into effect October 1, but industry players will have a year to comply Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications updated cybersecurity laws this week to mandate Big Tech and telecoms companies store user data locally, and control that data with local entities.…

Don’t Panic if you run terabytes of RAM and need to understand a dumped snapshot Oracle's Solaris operating system remains widely used, even though Big Red more or less froze development of the product in 2018 save for regular Support Repository Updates (SRUs) that add minor updates and bug fixes.…

There's always a get-out clause An attempt by lawmakers to improve parts of the US government's cybersecurity defenses has raised questions – and hackles – among infosec professionals.…

Sure, it's pricey, but not using it would be more expensive, says drug maker A one-time gene therapy treatment recently approved by America's FDA is gaining attention not just for its clinical value, but for its price: at $2.8 million, Bluebird Bio's Zynteglo is the most expensive drug in US history.…

Staff remind CEO 'don't be evil' and treat workers equally Hundreds of Googlers this week demanded CEO Sundar Piachi do a better job protecting people seeking abortions by refusing to hand over to law enforcement any customer data that could be used to build a criminal case, and extending the health benefits full-time employees enjoy to contract workers.…

Aiming to make Helium the standard for decentralized networks DIY 5G network outfit FreedomFi has been bought by Nova Labs, the founding team behind the Helium Network.…

Utility companies are offering $2 per kWh for power stored in battery tech More Tesla Powerwall owners in California are getting the option to help fight blackouts – and get paid for it – as thecompany expands its virtual power plant (VPP) program to new areas of the Golden State. …

Best before September 15, 2023 Microsoft has demonstrated that it really does care about Windows on Arm with a new Dev Channel build for Windows that brings native Arm64 support to its camera app as a low-impact start.…

Beijing says legislation designed to interfere with its own efforts to build homegrown semiconductor industry China has reacted negatively to the passing of the US CHIPS Act, saying that the program is anti-competitive and aims to block the Middle Kingdom's efforts to build up its own semiconductor industry.…

46 million requests per second network flood comes as attacks increase by more than 200% compared to last year Google says it has blocked the largest ever HTTPS-based distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June, which peaked at 46 million requests per second.…

Yep, that’s the same company a short-seller is alleging is a ‘useless toy’ Quantum computing startup IonQ now has a second system available on Microsoft's Azure Quantum cloud platform, claiming it will open quantum systems to a wider audience.…

It's taken Mountain View a year to refine the service for the Continent It has taken just over a year, but Google has finally made its Google Workspace Individual product available to European customers.…

As mission-critical nature of software supports prices, users also find reason to invest Despite inflation hitting a 40-year high and expected recessions, growth in enterprise software spending is expected to plow on at a steady 12 percent, according to figures from Forrester.…

For all the billions poured in, is a 'Made in America' sticker worth it? Analysis With all the fanfare and foundry expansions around the signing of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the semiconductor shortage will soon be over, and the US will emerge as a silicon powerhouse rivaling that of Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix.…

'Even on a small coin battery, it could run for more than 10 years' claims researcher A newly published research paper describes a compute-in-memory (CIM) chip that combines artificial neurons with resistive RAM (RRAM) so that the AI model weights can be stored and processed on the same chip.…

Financial Services Commission also creates a digital assets task force South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit (KoFIU) said on Thursday it has identified 16 foreign crypto businesses it will investigate for operating unregistered.…

First stage hot fire and launch from UK soil in 2023 Brit rocketeers Skyrora have perched a second stage of its orbital class Skyrora XL atop a stack of containers and performed a successful static fire test of the engine.…

And it IS a crowd – marketplace is busy, so it's hoping open approach sets it apart Former Hadoop stalwart Cloudera has announced a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) version of its data platform which it claims is more open than rivals in the over-crowded market.…

Is this it? The robo-butler dream is coming true? Video Google's largest AI language model is helping robots be more flexible in understanding and interpreting human commands, according to the web giant's latest research.…

Which flavors are the lightest and the heaviest disk and memory-wise? The Reg FOSS desk has lined up the official Ubuntu remixes to see which ones hog the most or least of your computer's resources.…

Food and fuels, too? Totally not sounding like a Star Trek replicator Last year, NASA produced oxygen on Mars. Now, scientists experimenting here on Earth may have found a much more efficient method of doing so for future missions. The resulting equipment could be used to produce the necessary materials for human colonization, too.…

Hardware still required – plus tolerance for visiting the office and remote collaboration Microsoft has advised its partner community that it will soon drop the price it charges for Teams Rooms, and add a version of the product aimed at small business.…

Clop gang thought it hit Thames Water – but real victim was elsewhere A water company in the drought-hit UK was recently compromised by a ransomware gang, though initially it was unclear exactly which water company was the victim.…

Nastymail tracking service blames sloppy sending practices for swelling lists of dangerous mailers Spam-tracking service Spamhaus reported Tuesday that some of the world's biggest brands are getting loose with their email practices, causing its spam blocklists (SBL) to swell significantly.…

Another reason not to play 1989's Rhythm Nation – it messes with some hard disk drives The music video for Janet Jackson's 1989 pop hit Rhythm Nation has been recognized as a cybersecurity vulnerability after Microsoft reported it can crash old laptop computers.…

Network boffins can't say why, suggest not using the worst providers China's DNS resolvers fail two thirds of the time when handling queries for IPv6 addresses, and botch one in eight queries for IPv4, according to a group of Chinese academics.…

As if the VR giants will let that stand – worth a try, though Imagine for a moment that you wanted to spend time in what Meta solipsistically calls the metaverse, a keiretsu of interactive cartoon panoramas powered by commercial surveillance and payment persuasion.…

Chrome flaw has public exploit, WebKit hole actively abused along with kernel escalation Google has issued 11 security fixes for desktop Chrome, including one bug that has an exploit for it out in the wild.…

Looking to book a large house on a weekend? You'll have to jump through a few hoops Pleased with the "success" of a pilot program in Australia, Airbnb is bringing its "anti-party technology" to the US and Canada. …

Top tip: Your RSA private key should not be copied from a public code tutorial A developer says he was able to run his own software on his car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicle's manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from programming examples.…

.NET-based malware can push wide range of malicious payloads, and evades detection, Secureworks says A highly pervasive .NET-based crypter that has flown under the radar since about 2015 and can deliver a wide range of malicious payloads continues to evolve rapidly, with almost 10,000 code samples being uploaded to VirusTotal over a 16-month period.…