The Register

Trundle bot must dodge sand dunes in quest to find evidence of life on Red Planet NASA’s hardy Curiosity rover is on the move again: this time, a little road trip to avoid getting bogged down in Martian sand dunes.…

OpenShift and Tanzu get a familiar-looking competitor SUSE has decided to buy Kubernetes-wrangler Rancher Labs.…

Foul play not suspected The CEO of computer hardware and motherboard maker MSI has died after falling from his company's headquarters in New Taipei, Taiwan.…

But only on one AWS, one Spotify and one Netflix - and zero Microsofts Indonesia has made good on its promise to introduce a digital services tax by including four tech titans – but six entities – in its value added tax (VAT) scheme.…

They're more than happy to take Uncle Sam's coin no matter the protests from some corners of Silicon Valley Despite all those protests, internal and external, by tech workers against their employers' selling AI to the US military, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JIAC) this week said the biggest names in IT are lining up to supply Uncle Sam.…

About three /8’s worth is a decent chunk of the total pool and locals unready to go all-in on IPv6 are hungry APNIC, the regional internet address registry for India, China, and 54 other Asia-Pacific nations, has found about fifty million unused IPv4 addresses under the couch.…

Doesn't want to follow Azure and AWS by working with locals Google has scrapped plans to offer cloud services in China.…

Report slams antisocial network's 'vexing and heartbreaking decisions' Facebook on Wednesday published an independent-ish report by civil-rights experts into how it deals with misinformation and hate speech on its platform. The dossier wasn't exactly flattering, and the antisocial network immediately tried to undercut it with an announcement about how it had banned four groups from its site.…

A very busy six months for Redmond's Digital Crimes Unit Microsoft has taken legal action to seize web domains being used to launch coronavirus-themed phishing attacks.…

If you have to play by Redmond's strict rules, people are likely to go elsewhere Video In an attempt to regain market share from Zoom in the pandemic-driven world of video conferencing, Microsoft today launched a “Together” mode for its Teams software.…

Marks for Angular and Gerrit also handled by org designed to provide 'guidance' to industry Google has set up an organization dubbed the Open Usage Commons to manage three open-source projects' trademarks – and provide developers advice on handling and using brands.…

Not for your titchy workloads, Reg sources say Oracle's new on-premises cloud product has prompted concern among commentators, who've said it requires a strong financial commitment and could shift customers to higher cost deals.…

And there is – check out our latest survey findings Reader survey With anyone who can work from home actually doing so during the pandemic, networking – and therefore network security – has become more business-critical than it was before.…

Dark web dwellers can pick and choose from billions - billions - of logins Stolen domain admin login credentials can be resold by dark web criminals for up to £95,000 and a total of 15 billion purloined credentials are traded on illicit marketplaces.…

Right-to-repair movements blows in from US Europeans and Canadians with busted iPhones will soon be able to swerve the Genius Bar and associated lengthy waiting lists, as Apple expands its Independent Repair Provider (IRP) program to third party technicians.…

App framework extends its reach to Canonical's Snap Store Google has hauled in Canonical to help extend the search giant's Flutter development framework to support Linux desktop applications.…

Claims 'restrictions by the US will take months to fully understand' Embattled Chinese tech bogeyman Huawei has decried the UK government's mooted plan to ban it from domestic 5G networks over reliability concerns caused by the imposition of punishing US sanctions.…

£9 a month mumble mumble, terms and conditions apply The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has put O2 on the naughty step after it deemed two of its print adverts for the iPad and Surface Pro tablets misled customers about the overall cost.…

Keeping up in performance stakes vital as data science sector explodes, says analyst Exasol, the company behind a distributed in-memory database namesake, has pushed out its latest upgrade, touting support for GPUs and semi-structured data.…

End of milk-based monstrosity... or overpriced harmless fun? You be the judge The hipster entrepreneur in all of us died a little bit today with confirmation that Cereal Killer Cafe, the best place in London Town for overpriced bowls of breakfast foodstuffs and milk, is not going to re-open its doors.…

Eleven flaws cleaned up including one that may be exploited to sling malware downloads Citrix has issued patches for 11 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its various networking products.…

Ban, no ban, trade war, 'useful idiots'... it's a big pie and everyone's grabbing a slice Britain is all a-tizzy about Huawei again as talk swirls over the imminent release of an unofficial report into the Chinese company’s influence over prominent Britons and a ban on its telco equipment.…

Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another in The Register's series of public whoopsies by customer-facing IT. Today it is the turn of perennial favourite, British Airways.…

No, not the Nottingham-born designer of natty suits, the former Proctor & Gamble chap who also spent time in the channel Salesforce exec veep and UK GM Paul Smith has quit to join cloud platform rival ServiceNow in the same role but for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.…

Neural network trained to spot emigrated suns in our Milky Way uncovers mysterious Nyx collective Deep-learning software has singled out a group of 250 stars in the Milky Way that appear to have been born outside our galaxy. That's according to a research paper published this week in Nature Astronomy.…

Watch live online this week – and turn that existential threat into a competitive advantage Webcast It’s been a challenging decade in the financial services sector to say the least. From the global financial crisis to environmental, social, and governance regulation, with digital transformation on top. Now the COVID-19 virus outbreak has provided the impetus to accelerate those digital transformation plans.…

Peggy Johnson will take over after she approached ailing upstart Augmented-reality flop Magic Leap has received an unexpected credibility boost: a top Microsoft exec has jumped ship, and will take over as CEO in August.…

All eyes were instead on SpaceX and its newer programming techniques At a press conference on Tuesday, NASA confirmed why Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spaceship failed to hook up with the International Space Station last year. The answer: as expected, buggy code.…

The last thing America needs right now is a brain drain Science and tech leaders, and immigration lawyers, have reacted with alarm to a Trump administration diktat that foreign university students in the US must return to their home countries if their college course is online-only mid-pandemic.…

Jeepers, Keeper The payment-card-skimming Magecart malware has turned up on yet more websites, this time 570 spanning 55 countries, it emerged this week.…

Exec admits launching racist tirade at family in restaurant Updated Another day and another racist rant in America has gone viral. This time the perpetrator appears to be a British founder of a cloud computing consulting company based in San Francisco.…

Microprocessor core designer says it just wants to focus on designing microprocessor cores Arm today said it hopes to transfer its Internet-of-Things management cloud to its owner Softbank so that the chip designer can focus on its primarily function – designing chips.…

Enterprise edition ahoy as project tries to puzzle out its business model Updated The LibreOffice community has protested at the appearance of a "personal edition" label in the forthcoming version 7.0 of the hitherto free office suite, and the suggestion that paid-for enterprise editions are in the pipeline.…

First 'affordable' 5G phone for the budget blower brand Motorola today whipped the sheets off its first mid-tier 5G blower: the Moto G 5G Plus.…

Shining a Rust-based forensic light into the darker corners of images Boffins in Microsoft Research has pulled the covers off Project Freta, a free service aimed at spotting memory malfeasance.…

Customers' decision to hit pause on spending compounds HP Software indigestion woes Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Micro Focus: its shares took a bath this morning on the back of a $1bn plus loss, largely due to a whopping goodwill impairment charge made to account for uncertainty caused by COVID-19.…

It's all about Kubernetes, Program Manager Jeff Hollan tells The Reg Microsoft has provided an Azure Functions extension for Dapr - Distributed Application Runtime - but currently it cannot be used with the hosted Azure Functions cloud service.…

British military continues push for new autonomous tech Britain's Ministry of Defence is offering a £400,000 pot of cash to anyone who can develop an autonomous submarine capable of withstanding naval depth charges.…

Grab your virtual tickets now for Continuous Lifecycle Online Event Depending on where you are, life is slowly returning to normal-ish. Yet it's going to be a while before bringing people physically together again is a good idea.…

The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking... Google and pals tackle heterogeneous hardware subsystems Google, chipmaker Qualcomm and transportation tech firm OpenSynergy have teamed up to create a reference platform for virtualising Android Auto, Google's OS for vehicles.…

Contract could be repurposed kit and services to support 'other uses' besides clean air... The transport authority for Greater Manchester in northeast England is seeking an IT systems maker to help build a clean air zone scheme and fine drivers of prohibited vehicles in a deal which could be worth up to £235m.…

5 months after request for proposal, Satya and Jeff left to languish on sidelines Deutsche Bank has snubbed the world's two biggest purveyors of clouds to name Google Cloud in a deal that the German giant said "is as much a revenue story as it is about costs".…

Plus: SpaceX launches another GPS satellite, the next Mission Extension Vehicle arrives in French Guiana and.... come ON, Tim! In Brief Rubbing salt into wounded British pride over a lack of prime contracts, Thales Alenia Space trumpeted its ESA awards last week.…

Plus: US govt says it's 'looking at' banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok Social media businesses are making moves to block Hong Kong authorities from accessing their user data, days after Beijing imposed a new national security law on the territory.…

Plus: A release candidate for Azure DevOps, Pylance gallops into VS Code and hairdressing in Teams In Brief Microsoft's browser gang at Edge has said it will take a breather in order to "stay aligned with Chromium Project's release schedule."…

No NFC, but it's great for productivity Review Nokia has traditionally been typified by utilitarian phones* that get the job done — from the legendary Communicator series to the indestructible 3310.…

Slower than an iPhone, faster than a 2019 MacBook Air: It's an iBook that's over a decade old Column The modern always-on workplace isn't designed for everyone. And that's why a search for a coping strategy for dyspraxia* took me to eBay, where I bought an archaic Apple iBook for the princely sum of £40 (excluding shipping).…

Experiment to diversify academic workforce falls foul of human-rights watchdog Eindhoven University of Technology has been told to stop posting women-only job ads as part of a push to diversify its academic workforce.…

DNS entries left pointing to Azure-hosted server names snatched by miscreants for mischief More than 240 website subdomains belonging to organizations large and small, including household names, were hijacked to redirect netizens to malware, X-rated material, online gambling, and other unexpected content.…

Antisocial network accused of unfairly snubbing Black people when it comes to jobs, promotions Facebook has been formally accused of racial discrimination in a complaint from three Black plaintiffs, one a manager at the social network and two applicants who have repeatedly been rejected by the web giant.…