The Register

Only then will it be known if the UAE's Hope probe was a success The United Arab Emirates' "Hope" probe is due to reach Mars orbit tomorrow (9 February) and give engineers and scientists their very own 27 minutes of tension.…

Frustration with bot-like support leads to cancellation of popular game What do you do if Google disables your cloud life? Andrew Spinks, co-author of the Terraria game and president of Re-Logic Games, does not know either, but has declared Google "a liability" and cancelled the port of Terraria to its Stadia platform.…

Mozilla moves Rust under a non-profit foundation Almost six years after it debuted, the Rust programming language is moving out of the Mozilla's house into a foundation of its own.…

That's the Snoopers' Charter in action for you British prosecutors can make use of evidence gathered by the French and Dutch police from encrypted messaging service Encrochat’s servers thanks to a legal interpretation of whether RAM counts as data storage, the Court of Appeal has ruled.…

Project will share more resources with Fedora and use a single login The CentOS board conducted a public Q&A just ahead of last week's FOSDEM 2021 open source conference – and there was an awkward silence when someone asked whether changing the end-of-life (EOL) date for a released project is something that might happen again.…

Hits UK shops in March Xiaomi has launched its first flagship blower of 2021 for the global market: the Xiaomi Mi 11, competing directly with the Galaxy S21, which has a slower processor and smaller screen.…

But then there's the issue of mega-constellations to contend with The long-awaited Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) has continued its march to reality with the launch of an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to radio astronomy.…

£93k should help interested parties stomach challenge amid tumultuous change England's NHS has advertised for two top tech jobs as the service struggles with an ongoing pandemic, a supposed digital transformation, and imminent central government reform.…

Tosses in extra cash 'to recognize the tremendous effort ... put into creating amazing universal apps' Hell hath no fury like a code monkey scorned. Don't believe us? Just ask Apple, which has been forced to dramatically improve the incentive offered to convince its Developer Transition Kit (DTK) users to return the prototype machines.…

Plus: Check if your Flickr photos are in facial recognition engines and and the list of NSFW words for AI Canada’s privacy watchdog has found Clearview AI in “clear violation” of the country’s privacy laws, and has told the facial-recognition startup to stop scraping images of Canadians and delete all existing photos it has on those citizens.…

The locked-down world and their Chromebook would like a word... Column Microsoft has changed a lot since Steve Ballmer left. It's hard to imagine Satya Nadella fostering an environment where workers felt they had to hide their iPhones for fear of enraging the boss. Microsoft is contributing so much to open source now it almost feels unfair to mention that Ballmer called open source "cancer". Almost.…

Well, what's an English degree gonna do when we're all strapped to PCs? Figures from UK university admissions service UCAS show computer science has seen a steady rise in popularity over the last decade.…

Redmond says it used forensics to find files on its own gear... rather than avail itself of deals for rivals Intel has accused a former staffer of not only leaving the manufacturer with a trove of confidential documents but also trying to use the information they contained to help Microsoft.…

We’re blinded by our trust of the Search box and its inscrutability Column A friend recently texted me in a panic from Florida, where he’d been consoling relatives following a death in the family. Those relatives had returned a positive COVID-19 test, then a negative test. My friend was exposed to them, so got his own test. It came back negative. His relatives were tested again. Negative.…

Just because you could, doesn't mean you should Who, Me? We start the working week with a Who, Me? reminder that in the world of databases, there is a difference between knowing you're right and knowing your rights.…

Warns €67.50-per-share offer would represent a very tidy premium, but may not happen British chip design company Dialog Semiconductor has confirmed it is in “advanced discussions” with Japan’s Renesas Electronics Corporation regarding a possible acquisition.…

After minister suggests current rules should be reviewed The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) – big tech’s Asian lobby group – has written to Pakistani attorney general Khalid Jawed Khan with some helpful hints on good ways to frame a new content-blocking regime.…

But for less than two years and while putting distance between staff donors and Microsoft itself Microsoft used the take-out-the-trash time of Friday evening to announce its political action committee (PAC) has suspended donations to US politicians who voted to object to the certification of electors in the 2020 US presidential election, or who “supported such objections or suggested the election should be overturned.”…

Internet traffic dips markedly as protestors take to the streets Myanmar’s military junta has ordered fresh blocks on the internet.…

Linux quarterback wants you to test hopefully final rc of kernel 5.11 instead of ‘standing around, waiting for the next commercial to come on’ Linus Torvalds has strongly suggested that next week will see the release of a new version of the Linux kernel, assuming nothing odd happens and testers don’t watch too much footy on the telly.…

Plus: British Mensa in data leak blunder, DARPA are Star Wars fans, Sonicwall patch out, and more In brief Email security biz Mimecast not only fell victim to the SolarWinds hackers, leading to its own customers being attacked, it is also trimming its workforce amid healthy profits.…

Deep Space Food Challenge could also help solve nosh dilemmas here on Earth NASA has teamed up with the Canadian Space Agency to launch a competition to challenge foodies and engineers to design new food production systems that will feed future astronauts exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond.…

For best results, take a second dose of privacy cleanse Google on Friday removed 25 Android apps from the Google Play Store after missing them during a prior purge. The apps contained the X-Mode SDK that the Chocolate Factory previously banned for selling location data.…

Trio introduce SAFE TECH Act to US Senate US Senators Mark Warner (D-VA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on Friday introduced draft legislation to limit the legal protections available to social networks, websites, and anything else that provides an “interactive computer service.”…

If you started off there, best change your reused credentials SitePoint, an Australian learn-to-code publishing website, has been compromised while promoting the book Hacking for Dummies on its homepage.…

Feeling less than agile? So is the competition Promo If 2020 has left you reeling, we’ve got some bad news. The seismic changes the past 12 months have had on the economy and society are still playing out, meaning more disruption is on the horizon.…

Company notes that it can always take its biz elsewhere as tech firms jostle to move to Lone Star state Samsung is seeking a taxpayer bung of almost $1bn for its proposed semiconductor fabrication plant in Texas, according to documents filed with the state.…

Electron 11, source control tweaks, plus general spit and polish Microsoft has pushed out another update to dev favourite Visual Studio Code, but opted to hold off on the Apple Silicon version after a last-minute bug reared its head.…

Install your updates pronto If you use Google Chrome or a Chromium-based browser such as Microsoft Edge, update it immediately and/or check it for updates over the coming days: there is a zero-day bug being "actively exploited" in the older version of Chrome that will also affect other vendors' browsers.…

'We've effectively configured our transition to a subscription model' Teradata has beaten its own and the market's expectations for the fourth quarter of 2020, more than doubling its cloud revenue.…

In reality, eschewing cables remains a bad idea until wireless tech catches up What happens when you prioritise form over function? You get Xiaomi's latest futuristic concept phone, a port-less and borderless slab of glass and metal designed to give the appearance of a free-floating display.…

All over the world... Job Alert We're doing our bit to keep techies tech'ing with free job listings for anyone looking to hire such skills in the midst of these testing times.…

Insists 'We're not backtracking' as tenants given longer to move to something more secure Microsoft has shifted gears on plans to disable Basic Authentication for five Exchange Online protocols this year, provided your tenant is actually using them.…

Plus a mangle of other applications on track to be switched for cloud platform Brit transport giant FirstGroup, which runs rail and bus companies in the UK and US - including North America's Greyhounds - is looking to replace decade-old HR and payroll systems with a single cloud solution in a five-year contract.…

R, me hearties: Boffins sift through 6.5 million individual dataset Banking data from 6.5 million individuals over six years is providing evidence that even moderate gambling can be associated with financial distress, negative lifestyles, and an increased likelihood of death.…

Today's bork is brought to you by the keys ctrl, c and v Bork!Bork!Bork! Tesco, king of the High Street Bork, may have departed the Thai retail business, but it has left a little bit of borkery behind.…

I tried calling all 27 countries for some help with Acrobat but their mums said they were out Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have never indecently exposed myself. On the contrary, I do it rather well.…

They still laid him off, though On Call This week's episode of On Call, as ever, comes with a warning: Be careful moving that beige box, for you may not realise what it does.…

And we all know how good small business are at patching... NOT Cisco has addressed a clutch of critical vulnerabilities in its small business and VPN routers that can be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user. All the attacker needs to do is send a maliciously crafted HTTP request to the web-based management interface.…

Every breath you take, Google’s watching you - and offering an alternative to recently acquired Fitbit Google has announced that its own Pixel Android phones will soon gain the power to measure users heart rate and respiratory rate.…

Android edition just didn’t do the job and Health Ministry knew it. Now Japan is in its third and nastiest wave of infections Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has admitted that the Android version of its COVID-19 contact-tracing app has not informed users of contact with virus carriers since September 2020.…

A whole new dimension of social responsibility as Taiwan’s population falls while demand for stuff it makes surges Hon Hai Precision Manufacturing – aka Foxconn – reported two sets of numbers this week: record revenue, and record birth-rate among staff.…

Turns out words have consequences Electronic voting machine maker Smartmatic has sued Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump’s loyalists – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – for an eye-popping $2.7bn in defamation damages over the false claims it stole the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.…

Modis also accused of suspending techie for criticizing working conditions The Alphabet Workers Union on Wednesday filed a labor complaint against Google contractor Modis, claiming that for the past six months the staffing firm has prevented workers from discussing wages and job conditions as allowed under US law.…

Another day in the world of the Bezos-built worker's panopticon +Comment Amazon has installed AI cameras inside its delivery vans to nitpick its drivers for, we're told, safety reasons.…

New Jersey court says defendant must be able to challenge evidence A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.…

'Try telling leaders of libpng, libjpeg-turbo, openssl, ffmpeg etc they can't make "unilateral" changes to their own projects' Google has proposed a framework for discussing and addressing open-source security based on factors like verified identity, code review, and trusted builds, but its approach may be at odds with open-source culture.…

Out-of-work actors beware, Azure can take on voice-over duties Microsoft has pushed its Custom Neural Voice service to general availability, although you'll have to ask the company nicely if you want to use the vaguely unsettling text-to-speech service.…

Openreach FTTP doing very well, thanks FTTP rollout numbers from the BT Group's "arm's-length" infrastructure arm, Openreach, were the bright spot in an otherwise difficult quarter, which saw consumer and enterprise revenue slump.…

Plus: Parliament says UK was too hasty booting Chinese giant off networks EU infosec agency ENISA has announced that it will begin licensing 5G network equipment providers as Britain's Parliament issued a report criticising the way Huawei was kicked out of the UK's 5G networks.…