The Register

It never really took off (commercially), apparently Alphabet has stuck a pin in its Project Loon broadband project, which sought to use high-altitude balloons to extend connectivity to areas considered hard to reach by traditional telcos.…

HMRC spent £53.2m maintaining creaky tech estate – report An ageing IT estate is responsible for the bulk of the UK tax collector's costs in adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from Parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee.…

'Not us, guv' from all involved – except TiVo, which fixed it while blaming nameless third party NSFW-ish The mystery began when a Reg reader wrote in to say their Xbox Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) was displaying an image of a suggestively posed semi-nude person alongside BBC4 while the channel was off air.…

Project members discuss conflict between principles and pragmatism because of need for non-free drivers A post on the Debian developer list about issues installing the operating system on a laptop sparked a debate about whether Debian's free software principles have become a blocker to adoption.…

You might want to wash the rolling pin first Something for the Weekend, Sir? Three weeks in to 2021 and we’ve run out of the leftovers at last. Things tend to get somewhat overcooked over the traditional holiday period and I’m pleased to see the back of them. They were getting hard to digest.…

Mice do like cheese after all On Call Welcome back to The Register's series of On Call stories from those who have to face the most unpredictable resource in the IT world: the user.…

And also fix up these other holes that can be exploited via HTTP requests, SQL injection, etc Cisco this week emitted patches for four sets of critical-severity security holes in its products along with other fixes.…

Saturn moon's largest liquid sea mapped by radar – and soon, robots? Titan’s largest sea of liquid is estimated to be up to 1,000 feet deep, judging from new radar analysis, making it an ideal location for a future autonomous robotic submarine to explore.…

Financial figures released minutes ahead of schedule after 'hacker' swipes and shares infographic Intel beat Wall Street’s expectations in its latest financial earnings on Thursday amid a rough year in which the semiconductor giant reached out to rival fabs for help in meeting demand for its silicon – and felt the pressure from AMD and others.…

Red Hat and off-prem see growth while revenue, profit down overall IBM on Thursday reported $20.4bn in revenue for its Q4 2020 earnings results, a decline of six per cent, and $73.6bn for the full year, down 4.6 per cent year-on-year.…

Fork that noise, says cloud giant amid licensing drama Amazon Web Services has responded to Elastic adopting more-restrictive software licenses by simply forking the latter's Elasticsearch and Kibana products with an open-source license.…

Deplatformed again, huh? Maybe take the hint A US federal district judge has turned down Parler's request for a preliminary injunction to force Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the social network, which is dominated by hate-and-misinformation-spewing netizens cast out or shooed away from other platforms.…

Net neutrality, internet-for-students advocate awaits Senate confirmation President Joe Biden has made Democrat FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel acting chairwoman of America's communications regulator.…

Boffins develop improved image poisoning technique to preserve privacy A group of computer scientists has released a privacy-focused web application to poison people's online images so they confuse commercial facial recognition systems.…

ASOP effort could help bring GUIs to industrial, IoT, embedded gear Alibaba-owned T-Head Semiconductor says it has ported Android 10 to its own RISC-V chips, highlighting increased momentum for the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) against proprietary alternatives.…

Department for Education says 'we believe this is not widespread' A shipment of laptops supplied to British schoolkids by the Department for Education to help them learn under lockdown came preloaded with malware, The Register can reveal.…

Thorough counter-detection methods laid bare by Redmond The SolarWinds hackers triggered one of their Cobalt Strike implants in the firm's network through a cunning VBScript that was activated by a routine system process, Microsoft has said.…

Tune in this month and learn about the promise of SuperPOD with DDN Webcast We all have problems, so wouldn’t it be great if we could all apply a supercomputer to cracking them?…

Groovy Gorilla 'completely usable' but some of the hardware remains off-limits Things can move fast in the IT world, and Linux on Apple silicon has gone from "ooh look, text on a screen" to something considerably more usable in a matter of days.…

Raising possibility of buildings that flex in earthquakes, and much more Engineers working in Switzerland say they have developed a method of writing data directly into materials, a process that changes the material's physical properties at the same time.…

Also: Survey shows IDE's dominance among .NET Core developers, despite cross-platform options Preview 3 of Visual Studio 2019 16.9, the next big release of Microsoft's Windows IDE, features debugging for Chromium-based WebView, audio cues in tests, and updated C++ support.…

But that's fake news President Trump's last financial disclosure form makes for interesting reading. In addition to listing his various property holdings and business interests, it also reveals a number of gifts received by business leaders, including a Mac Pro from Apple CEO Tim Cook.…

Former NASA test engineer steps into the hot seat as acting head NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has left the US space agency with none of the drama associated with certain other American government handovers.…

The most expensive 119 words he's ever going to write A man who branded a Leicester law firm as "another scam solicitor" on review website Trustpilot has been ordered to pay it £28,500 in libel damages and legal costs.…

So are ya open source or aren't ya? Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon has attacked AWS for what he claims is unacceptable use of the open-source Elasticsearch product and trademark.…

And the possible impact of erased DNA and fingerprint data on live police investigations? Nope, doesn't know that either UK leader Boris Johnson has admitted he does not know how many live legal cases "will be frustrated" by the loss of 400,000+ records on the Police National Computer and cannot say when the data will be reinstated.…

And 3nm mid-to-high-end silicon to follow, claims analyst house Ahead of Intel publishing its latest quarterly financial results on Thursday, let's have a quick reminder of who is actually making chip manufacturer Intel's chips these days.…

Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ board for hobbyists and power users alike The Raspberry Pi team has announced its latest bit of hardware – the $4 microcontroller-class Raspberry Pi Pico.…

As Amazon tells the President: Vaccinate our staff, and we'll help you distribute it to everyone else It’s day one of President Biden's administration, prompting the question: what can we expect when it comes to technology over the next four years?…

Offer to challenge rules a 'scam', too, we're told The maker of a disallowed iOS app called Coronavirus Reporter has sued Apple claiming the iPhone overlord's refusal to approve the software violates America's antitrust law.…

A last gasp for the era of alternate facts Analysis Ajit Pai has left his position as head of the FCC – America's communications regulator – marking the end of an extraordinary four years where telecoms policy was dragged into the era of alternate facts. With sad inevitability, Pai has a list of his accomplishments in a similar fashion.…

Know-your-client demand may just be ignored by incoming Biden admin On Tuesday, during his last full day as US President, Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to curtail cyber attacks by directing the government to come up with rules requiring cloud service providers to better identify foreign customers.…

'The employment will be maintained, so there is no need to worry,' says CEO LG Electronics is reportedly considering leaving the smartphone business this year, according to a leaked internal memo issued by CEO Kwon Bong-seok.…

'First of many new programs,' says biz, but it is no substitute for free CentOS Red Hat, which is killing CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, will extend its developer subscription to allow free production use of RHEL for up to 16 systems.…

We must put long-underused spectrum to its best use, says outgoing chairman The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected a petition seeking to block Ligado Networks from deploying its LightSquared nationwide 5G network.…

As recommended by Peter Thiel On his last day in office, US president Donald Trump pardoned 73 people and commuted the sentences of 70 others – including Anthony Levandowski who admitted stealing trade secrets from Waymo while a self-driving car researcher.…

Rapid reuse in sight, as are yet another batch of Starlink satellites SpaceX has landed an individual Falcon 9 booster for a record eighth time after pushing the envelope on winds above the waiting drone ship.…

Let’s think about what data management should look like in the future – tune in here next week Webcast What’s your tech infrastructure going to look like in the next few months or years? You know, once we get past the current situation and find time to start innovating again. All of which may come sooner than you think.…

Storage cost saver combines IBM tape, Atempo software and OVH data centres OVHcloud has introduced tape-storage-as-a-service, based on IBM technology, in response to European data sovereignty and localisation requirements.…

O2 regained lost ground, while EE continued to assert its dominance The second half of 2020 brought improved 5G availability in the UK with London seeing some of the biggest gains, according to research by RootMetrics.…

Points finger at privilege escalation via application rights in Azure AD, which Microsoft says is as designed Security company Malwarebytes suspects a breach of its Office 365 and Azure tenancies is by the same attacker behind the SolarWinds hack, but reckons flaws in Azure Active Directory security are also to blame.…

Nearly every division enjoyed double or triple-digit growth for Q3 '21 The pandemic has been kind to Logitech, whose profits have almost quadrupled from what they were a year ago.…

Also: Qualifying Starliner and Blue Origin gets ready for humans In brief After an initial failure in 2020, the Virgin Galactic spinout reached orbit on its second try, with the LauncherOne rocket deploying its payloads to a 500km orbit.…

Element Matrix Services adds to the messaging interoperability toolbox Element Matrix Services is adding a bridge between hipster chat platform Slack and the open-source world of Matrix messaging.…

Scrutiny system worked OK until firm was forced off western chip tech US sanctions on Huawei got the Chinese firm kicked out of Britain, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has told Parliament – adding that he didn't feel under pressure to change the body's own verdict on keeping Huawei in UK mobile networks.…

A confession from ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer. Also: WPA fun in the Registry The product activation inflicted on Windows by Microsoft has few fans, but one of its creators stepped up over the weekend to explain and defend the maligned technology.…

Azure wins on Ultra Disk storage but it's expensive, says Cockroach Labs Distributed SQL database biz Cockroach Labs has analysed public cloud performance and concluded that Google Cloud Platform wins on throughput, although AWS is ahead on CPU performance and network latency.…

Surprisingly fixable... with a bulging toolbox AirPods are as close as you can get to a swearword in the repair world, known for being almost impossible to service thanks to their densely packed circuitry and closed design. Mercifully, that isn't the case when it comes to Apple's hugely expensive AirPods Max headphones.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

These things could be more common than first thought Astronomers have discovered the two largest-known radio galaxies to date. At a whopping 62 times the size of our own Milky Way, they are believed to be the largest single objects yet found in the universe.…