The Register

Guess what? Literally everyone thinks this is a terrible idea The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has formally asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to review a critical law that provides blanket liability to online platforms such as Google and Facebook.…

Assuming this weekend's return journey goes well, natch Ahead of a Dragon capsule bringing home a pair of astronauts from the International Space Station this weekend, NASA shared more details of followup crewed missions to and from the orbiting science lab using the SpaceX pod.…

Boyfriend-girlfriend and housemate indicted in US on PlexCoin rap Two Canadian lovers and their housemate have been charged with fraud after allegedly netting $8m by selling a made-up cryptocurrency called PlexCoin to victims.…

Browser quitters say they'll return if web goliath lives up to privacy promises A handful of Chrome users have sued Google, accusing the browser maker of collecting personal information despite their decision not to sync data stored in Chrome with a Google Account.…

'Exceptionally broad' demands reveal too much about our staff! American tech giants have enjoyed a reversal of their EU legal fortunes over the past fortnight as Euro nation courts issued rulings in their favor – and now Facebook has even sued the European Union itself, alleging the political bloc’s agencies broke their own data protection rules.…

Cable named for compsci legend Grace Hopper to link US, UK, Spain Cloud and ads behemoth Google is building a subsea internet cable linking the US to the UK and Spain.…

Put away your Hawaiian shirts, no post-lockdown Vegas January for you The global pandemic just claimed another in-person tech conference – the 2021 edition of CES will be an "all-digital experience".…

'Equity-backed' DB-'n'-services biz hooks up tenants with vetted local repair shops A group of UK housing associations has awarded a framework contract worth up to £400m to property technology company Plentific, in part to help build a trading platform for folks to come in and do repairs and maintenance in people's homes.…

Issues? Visit the website or use Visual Studio Code JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2, a big mid-year update that adds support for Java 15 and Jakarta EE9 as well as improving its GitHub integration.…

Propositions database land with a 'real-time' system Rockset has upgraded its main database engine for more efficient scaling and performance gains by separating storage and compute. The outfit said it also separates the cloud compute resources used for ingesting and querying data.…

Also, half of the world's 5G investment currently is spent by China Worldwide spending on 5G is set to double in 2020, according to analyst house Gartner, in stark contrast to the wider cellular infrastructure sector, which will see revenues plummet overall.…

Just another day for the Investigatory Powers Tribunal The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, has been accused of trying to tamper with a court that is supposed to oversee and regulate it after an extraordinary tale emerged yesterday.…

Uncle Sam tests AI models with pics of immigrants, travelers. Wait, what? Face masks worn to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus typically decrease the accuracy of commercial facial recognition algorithms by up to 50 per cent, according to an investigation by America's technical standards watchdog, NIST.…

Tune in online to get a handle on separating good data from clutter Webcast The advantages of having decent threat intelligence in place are many and various, as the threat landscape continues to widen year-on-year.…

Top court won't nix links to accurate, fair journalism about director of financially rocked charity Germany's high court has sided with Google by upholding lower court rulings that rejected a right-to-be-forgotten privacy claim, and it delayed another case to seek clarification from top Euro judges.…

We can't call it an initial public offering given this is its second time around on the share market Rackspace Technology has revealed the terms of its planned return to the stock market.…

Relying on ads in software designed to block ads is an uphill struggle Privacy-centric startup Brave has included a subscription VPN service in its iOS browser.…

Not so fast - Quick Charge 5 does its best when using new dual-battery tech Qualcomm has unveiled the fifth generation of its Quick Charge battery-charging technology and boasts it can fully recharge a smartphone in 15 minutes.…

Rust enters the top 20, and yes, JavaScript is still number one Python surpassed Java in Redmonk's latest biannual programming language ranking to take second place... by not doing anything.…

Now to figure out how to make and store the gas, and fit fuel cells into bit barns Microsoft has revealed that it ran racks full of servers for 48 hours using electricity generated by hydrogen fuel cells, but the company's aspiration to use the tech again needs careful scrutiny.…

Holy sheet... One of our Sun's large, recent solar flares was formed from the release of 10 to 100 billion trillion joules per second of magnetic energy through gigantic sheets of near-light-speed electrons, scientists say.…

Local SSD block-level storage comes to EC2 instances powered by home-brew Graviton2 CPUs Amazon Web Services has created three more EC2 instance types that run its home-grown Graviton2 Arm-compatible processors.…

Half a billion users for $3.5bn - bargain! WeChat owner Tencent Holdings wants to acquire China's second-largest search engine Sogou for around $3.5bn.…

But won’t reveal the actual algorithms – or even define what an algorithm is New Zealand has created what it claims is the world’s first “Algorithm Charter” that sets out how government agencies should devise algorithms and explain their workings.…

You see, there is a COVID-19 silver lining. For employers. For the rest of us, welcome to the machine Google has gone all-in on its work-from-home policy, telling techies they don’t need to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest.…

Big Tech pushes back, says band use Hertz no one The argument over opening up the 6GHz spectrum range, allowing it to be used for things like private indoor Wi-Fi, is heating up with TV broadcasters now suing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).…

What, or rather, who's that going under wheels of Chipzilla's bus? Intel on Monday shook up its engineering management ranks after not only admitting its 7nm manufacturing pipeline had stalled due to defects but also that it is considering asking rival factories for help.…

It's time to think beyond simple perimeter defenses Webcast The adoption of mobile and cloud, and the coronavirus pandemic forcing people to work from home, shows you can no longer rely on computer security based on a simple network perimeter.…

If you're still using a vulnerable box, you ought to factory reset it before patching The number of QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) boxes infected with the data-stealing QSnatch malware has reached 62,000, the US and UK governments warned today.…

DoJ unhappy with ASTA CRS but not as much as former employees An American IT staffing'n'consultancy company has been banned from running job ads that say only temporary work visa holders need apply.…

Nothing to say, Larry? Makes a change SAP took a gut-punch in the form of an 18 per cent dive in software licensing revenue to €0.77bn for its Q2 ended June 30, but it also chalked up a 20 per cent jump in contractually committed cloud revenue to €6.65bn.…

How about inheritance? 'One of the bigger open questions' says author of proposal The next major version of the PHP language will support named arguments after 76 per cent of lead developers voted to include it.…

Wouldn't a child's sippy cup be cheaper? Airbus has solved the ongoing problem of cack-handed airline pilots spilling coffee over vital cockpit electronics – with a plastic cover.…

Research showed 'reduced deviation' when it made a 0.5mm x 0.5mm slice Researchers have built a 2.4g robot that could be capable of eye surgery, inspired by the ancient paper-folding art of origami.…

Somebody light that pilot light Updated Garmin services appear to be in the process of being restored after the company was reportedly hit with ransomware, though its aviation services remain offline at the time of writing.…

Instant startup, expanded execution, and more programming languages Interview Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince doubts developers care all that much about speed.…

Is there room for another player in the Western market? Another day, another pie, another finger. Chinese retailer Xiaomi is believed to be working on a new e-reader after references to the upcoming product appeared on the website of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.…

'I don't even have a bath' A chap from County Durham in northeast England is suffering a very specific mallardy – one of rubber ducks sent to his home address from Amazon with alarming regularity.…

Plus: AI finance software house reportedly outsourced paperwork processing to... humans In brief An infosec biz has shared an audio clip of what may be a software-generated voicemail message, designed to impersonate a CEO to trick a company employee into unwittingly committing fraud.…

Edge and serverless about to slide into the trough of disillusionment Clouds have gone private, mutated into hybrids, gone virtual and/or private and attracted many other labels beside.…

Tawdry political scuffle over database access binned for lack of evidence A lawsuit alleging that ex-UKIP leader Richard Braine took part in blackmail and data breaches has been all but thrown out of the High Court as a judge said it was "without any proper and sound evidential foundation".…

The more you worry about what's going on below the belt, the further the price drops. Now to short the market Australian personal protective equipment company Ansell has started pricing its condoms using a value calculated by analysing Google search trends.…

Beware the wandering buttock Who, Me? As the weekend recedes and the workday begins, tarry a while with a beverage of your choice and today's entry in The Register's file of reader Who, Me? confessions.…

Chondritic and achondritic? Back to the drawing board, then Meteorites discovered strewn across Earth after the 1960s may have broken off the same planetesimal body. What’s more, scientists have discovered signs this ancient body had a molten core, which turns some cosmological thinking on its head.…

Game mod pipes VirtualBox into virtual blockputers A developer who goes by "Delta2Force" has created a Minecraft mod that runs virtual machines on virtual computers built inside Minecraft.…

Wants 10kw delivering 120V DC because solar cells have limitations and we can’t schlep fuel up there The US Department of Energy has published an RFI for a lunar nuclear power plant.…

Alleges opt-in that promised “more control” actually sent more data without informed consent. Google 'strongly disagrees' The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has hauled Google into the nation’s Federal Court for misleading local users “… to obtain their consent to expand the scope of personal information that Google could collect and combine about consumers’ internet activity, for use by Google, including for targeted advertising.”…

Plans to retain sales and dev umbilical cord to CX outfit German software giant SAP will float its data analytics subsidiary Qualtrics, less than two years after convincing the firm not to list itself.…

Ahem, hey, any chance LOHAN can hitch a ride? NASA wants to lift a 2.5-metre-long, reusable far-infrared telescope into Earth’s stratosphere using a massive high-altitude balloon in 2023 to check out the heavens more economically.…

Plus: US govt sounds the alarm on industrial equipment attacks In Brief Cisco this week emitted fixes for potentially serious vulnerabilities, one of which is already being exploited in the wild.…