The Register

Fixing the talent pipeline so that finding rocket scientists doesn't have to be rocket science NASA has been set the ambitious targets of taking humans back to the Moon by 2024, then to later make the order-of-magnitude leap on to Mars. Even for the globally renowned space agency, it is a struggle.…

FINRA cites suicide of man who was 'inaccurately' told by the app he was $750k in debt Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.…

'This technology is too dangerous to be regulated, it shouldn’t be used at all' Feature The State of Maine has enacted what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes as the strongest state facial-recognition law in the US amid growing concern over the unconstrained use of facial-recognition systems by the public and private sector.…

We're still keeping everything crossed that the engineers extract a rabbit from a hat once again Updated The outlook continues to look a little bleak for NASA's veteran Hubble telescope as a former astronaut and a Space Shuttle manager weighed in on repair options and the possibility of a fix.…

Amazon's AWS next cloud platform in line for adversarial tactics framework MITRE's Centre for Threat-Informed Defence (CTID) and Microsoft have jointly rolled out Security Stack Mappings for Azure, aimed at bringing the former's Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) framework into the latter's cloud platform – with rival platforms to follow.…

Desert storm of entirely the wrong kind lands unfortunate Egyptian national in very hot water A man has been arrested in Kuwait for allegedly insulting the weather on social media app TikTok.…

So what's with the TPM malarky? The enthusiast community has thumbed a nose at Microsoft's hardware requirements for Windows 11, with Insider builds demonstrated on Raspberry Pi hardware and the inevitable mobile phone.…

Thousands struggle with intermittent failure of multiple messaging services IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days.…

Vendor claimed not to log user data – we'll see Europol, the US Department of Justice, and Britain's National Crime Agency have taken down a VPN service they claimed was mainly used by criminals – boasting that they hoovered up "personal information, logs and statistics" from the site.…

New take on GNOME designed for productivity System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04, based on Ubuntu 21.04 but with a distinctive desktop called COSMIC.…

Internet Explorer 11 and the Adobe Reader plug-in? Is this bork bingo? Internet Explorer 11 may only have a year left, but Microsoft still found itself releasing a patch to resolve some PDF issues in the elderly browser.…

Cupertino insists it works best when they're all together It's safe to say that many Apple employees aren't particularly enthused about the return to the office but HQ isn't backing down, as demonstrated by a leaked video message sent to the workforce.…

Kill this service immediately An infosec firm accidentally published a proof-of-concept exploit for a critical Windows print spooler vulnerability that can be abused by rogue users to compromise Active Directory domain controllers.…

But mobile biz continues to wane The boss of Dixons Carphone has delivered a bullish assessment of the UK retailer's performance in a year when online tech sales spiked and revenues from its ebbing mobile business continued to slide.…

Shifts strategy to work more closely with industry on digital projects Singapore wants to change the role of industry to co-develop digital projects alongside government and leave behind the days of wholesale outsourcing, or so says GovTech, the city-state's digital services arm.…

Now banned from using Tor or VPNs – and 'vanity' handles on social media A British script kiddie who DDoS'd a Labour Party parliamentary candidate's website in the runup to the last general election has been banned from using the Tor browser.…

Well-travelled billionaire's likeness very likely to follow recent examples of other questionable public art The city of New York received an addition to its trove of often obscure and peculiar statuary when a life-sized polyester resin figure of famously charismatic Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was unveiled in Downtown Manhattan.…

Vuln thankfully patched following Google Project Zero disclosure Google's Project Zero has emitted another vulnerability report, showing off a proof-of-concept exploit against the open-source KVM hypervisor that allows an attacker to escape a virtual machine on AMD-based servers – taking control of the underlying host system.…

Won't someone think of the children Former Microsoft engineer and creator of the Windows Task Manager Dave Plummer has issued a reminder to all programmers to take care over the imagery conjured up by a quickly typed description.…

That's tough talk – especially after the amazing reversal on £680k it spent on anti-fraud ads with search giant The UK's financial regulator has given a lukewarm response to Google's plans to tighten the promotion of scams on its platforms.…

Christian org becomes latest victim of latter-day IT scourge Exclusive Criminals infected the Salvation Army in the UK with ransomware and siphoned the organisation's data, The Register has learned.…

Turn off. Tune out. Relax Feature Just because the internet is always on doesn't mean that we should be. People need time away from work to relax and recharge, unencumbered by phone and email when working outside the office.…

Concerned researchers suggest some form of subtle regulation to prevent end of humanity as we know it A group of 17 researchers from a wide cross-section of different disciplines have come together to contribute to a paper suggesting social media might be a risk to humanity's continued existence as we know it.…

But only in India, and only in English … for now at least Google has announced SMS-grooming tech that it will only offer in India.…

Well, that was a busy month for gravitational wave boffins Gravitational wave detectors have reportedly spotted the merger of a black hole and a neutron star – not once but twice in the same month.…

Global median score jumped by ten per cent in two years — and just as well The United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published its 2020 Global Cyber Security Index on Tuesday, and listed the US first in overall ranking, followed by a tie for second place tie between the UK and Saudi Arabia.…

United Airlines buys 200 planes — plans to give ’em ten inches of entertainment and a double dose of wireless US-based mega-airline United Airlines has announced it will purchase 200 new planes — a mixture of Boeing 737 Max and Airbus A320 Neos — and equip the lot with in-seat Bluetooth.…

An eager queue has already formed in Asia, Latin America, and Africa — but do those nations know about the glitches, or the digital divide issues? India has decided to open-source the Co-WIN platform it created to arrange bookings for COVID-19 vaccinations.…

Admins tend to forget that subdomains don’t inherit security controls, leaving the likes of CNN, Harvard, Cisco, and US health authorities with vulnerabilities Abandoned or ignored subdomains often include overlooked vulnerabilities that leave organisations open to attack, according to a team of infosec researchers from the Vienna University of Technology and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The team’s work will be presented at the 30th USENIX Security Symposium this August.…

Maybe call it backseat programming for now? GitHub on Tuesday unveiled a code-completion tool called Copilot that shows promise though still has some way to go to meet its AI pair programming goal.…

An Ocean's 11 of exploitation involving guessable random numbers and hostname shenanigans Google Compute Engine virtual machines can be hijacked and made to hand over root shell access via a cunning DHCP attack, according to security researcher Imre Rad.…

NewsBlur RSS tracker accidentally left MongoDB store facing public internet during migration to containers NewsBlur, an RSS news reading app for the web and mobile devices, recently had one of its databases deleted thanks to an insecure default setting that has dogged developers using Docker since 2014.…

Impressive, but it's still no Apple Samsung today committed to provide its enterprise-edition flagships with half a decade's worth of security updates.…

Only academics, researchers, nonprofits need apply to AIER initiative AMD has rolled out a programme that it hopes will tempt scientific computing types away from Nvidia and the CUDA ecosystem and onto its own Instinct accelerator range and ROCm run-anywhere software platform: the AMD Instinct Education and Research (AIER) initiative.…

Localised brain sleeping behind wakeful forgetfulness and poor atten Neuroscientists have developed a method for predicting when your mind might go blank or completely forget whatever it was we were talking about.…

Plus: 10nm Sapphire Rapids Xeon chips delayed to Q1 2022 Intel has officially sounded the death knell for Transactional Synchronisation Extensions (TSX) on a selection of processors from Skylake to Coffee Lake – a security-enhancing move which will have an oversized performance impact on certain workloads.…

Join us online and set your data free Webcast Unlocking the value your corporate data is one of the core elements of digital transformation.…

Plus great news for all seven of you: An ARM64 build of its software suite Amid the unveiling of Windows 11 and the backlash over the frankly pisspoor way Microsoft handled the operating system's hardware requirements, the software behemoth quietly emitted a native ARM64 build of its Office cash cow.…

Companies rely on estimates that are often wrong, says Finops Foundation A report on Kubernetes expenditure from the Finops Foundation, in association with CNCF, shows that costs are rising and companies struggle to predict them accurately.…

No indication any of it went on preventing theft of CCTV footage, though, eh Matt? The Cabinet Office spaffed almost £300,000 on cybersecurity-related training for its staff in the last year – an eye-popping increase of almost 500 per cent on the year before.…

Double-digit LTE coverage increases projected for low-population areas Far-flung parts of Scotland and Wales have been promised a major boost in mobile connectivity by 2025, according to a roadmap for the Shared Rural Network that UK government published today.…

'Smart Fund' would be redistributed among creators and performers Leading lights in the world of "the arts" have called for a techy tax on mobiles, laptops, and PCs to help finance creative industries they claim have been ravaged by lack of revenue and funding.…

Rugged fondleslab ideal for field work starts at £2,218 with lots to configure Panasonic's Toughbook G2 tablet will feature 10-finger touch even with gloves on and full Windows 11 compatibility.…

Amazon boss's Blue Origin New Shepard launch currently scheduled for 20 July A pair of rich white men look set to duke it out at the edge of space after Virgin Galactic was given the green light by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly customers to space.…

Nice work if you can get it Fujitsu has been awarded a £9.2m contract extension by the Northern Ireland Education Authority for changes to the implementation of an Oracle HR and payroll system that is already nearly three years late.…

'All software must be safely and securely deployed within guidelines provided to us,' says outsourcer French outsourcer Atos has been charging NHS England between £6,000 and £8,000 for packing up popular free and open-source software requested by workers in the non-departmental government body.…

But Brits can seemingly keep using the website The UK's financial watchdog has fired a warning shot across the bow of Binance, and ordered it to place a notice on binance.com scaring off Brit crypto fans.…

If you'd like to restart and try ag- Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft Windows is notable for its ability to fall over pretty much anywhere, but this is, we think, the first time it has disgraced itself over the side of a hotel.…

Clawed critters less depressed as human drugs pollute their freshwater homes A study by freshwater crustacean boffins in Florida has revealed that feeding antidepressants to crayfish can make them more outgoing and adventurous — which is more or less a definition of how antidepressants are supposed to work. On humans, at least.…

You'll need two hubs and about £300 The M1 MacBook Pro is like that brilliant colleague who insists on microwaving fish in the office kitchenette. Good at its job, certainly, but also deeply annoying.…