The Register

We might just be witnessing a final state of these incredible space rocks Not only did a telescope on Earth spot, for the first time in history, an extinct comet on a close fly-by of our home world but scientists now reckon the space rock is covered in a substance similar to talcum powder.…

Membership data row ascends to desk of California attorney-general The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has taken legal action it hopes will prove that members’ personal data does not remain in the possession of the rival International Association of Atheists.…

Looks like the Galaxy S21 did well, and Texas storm shutdown blew over Samsung has pre-announced its Q1 2021 earnings and predicted $58.1bn of consolidated sales and $8.3bn of operating profit.…

36 years for the first. Then it was like buses: none for ages, then 2 zettabytes came along almost at once Disk-maker Seagate claims to have become the first company to ship three zettabytes' worth of data storage devices.…

What’s this got to do with Big Blue's hybrid cloud obsession? Cloudifying COBOL ... until you repent and go back to z/OS IBM has announced a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86.…

Labs offered tech by Arm as well as its upstart rival and others Engineers and scientists working on American military research programs can now access RISC-V processor core designs and associated blueprints through DARPA's Toolbox, and use the technology in their prototypes and experiments.…

If you can’t guess why, how’s life under that rock? The organisers of COMPUTEX, Taiwan’s annual PC-tech-fest, have shelved plans to run a real-world event this June.…

WebNX facility falls offline in blaze, takes customers down with it A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild.…

So please don't delay in applying updates, says, well, everyone SAP and security analysts Onapsis say cyber-criminals are pretty quick to analyze the enterprise software outfit's patches and develop exploits to get into vulnerable systems.…

Forget smartphones – whaddabout motors? The US automotive industry has warned it faces a bleak six months of disruption caused by the global shortage of semiconductors, adding that the chaos will result in 1.28 million fewer cars made this year.…

'Improving the state of the world'... by not paying the government SaaSy CRM giant Salesforce.com is among the tech companies named in a think tank report for paying no corporate income tax in the US despite sizeable earnings.…

Join us with Red Hat and IBM – and learn how to apply a little data discipline in the cloud Webcast Security and governance are tough enough problems when it comes to conventional computing. When it comes to cloud native, they can be enough to stop a migration project before it’s even off the drawing board.…

Would-be Node.js successor gets $5m cash injection Deno, the JavaScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, is now a company with nearly $5m to fund development – though its developers say it will remain "permissively free."…

Timing is everything It may be chilly in the UK this week, but that is nothing compared to the state of Hell as Microsoft continued its support of OpenJDK.…

Stop, collaborate and listen, Chipzilla's back with its brand new invention Intel on Tuesday announced the availability of its "Ice Lake" 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, intended for applications running on servers, high-end workstations, and in data centers.…

Shouting cyber cyber cyber, mega mega fail thing The UK Cyber Security Council announced itself to the public realm last week by touting a domain it doesn't own. Helpfully, internet jokesters then bought up variations on the official address.…

Nothing to do with THAT court case or lack of Oracle certification on GCP. Nope. Definitely not Google owner Alphabet has switched from Oracle to SAP for its main financial software in a move that has dented Big Red's share price.…

Now to recreate re-entry with a short drop onto a hard floor We bring our Lego My Own Creation (MOC) odyssey to a close today with a bit of unabashed self-indulgence in the form of a Skylab model and Skylab modification for the enormous Lego Saturn V.…

If you can't measure it, you can't research it A team of European researchers have succeeded in slowing down antimatter in a study that could lead to more accurate measures of this strangely elusive substance and help confirm the fundamental symmetry of nature.…

Not to worry, zombies with a gambling addiction probably won't eat your enterprise brains Column It seemed like a classic April The First spoof. Indeed, some tech titles had it on their lists of best pranks of the day. But it's true: the software zombie court case to end all zombie software court cases has woken from its slumber. Nearly 29 years after it first lurched from the crypt, SCO v The World Of Linux is back, and it smells just as bad as ever.…

Starts year-long proof of concept for the basics, meanwhile China is already testing cross-border crypto-payments The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has announced it will study the feasibility of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).…

The ‘we think this is mostly for SmartNICs’ stance is looking a little thinner VMware has released an update of the mostly experimental cut of its flagship ESXi hypervisor for the Arm architecture, adding support for 80-core server processors and hinting that more server-makers have come aboard.…

Plus: Waymo CEO is standing down, Volvo is partnering with a self-driving startup to stay relevant In Brief Twitter has suspended multiple accounts purporting to be Amazon warehouse workers defending the mega-souk’s working conditions and speaking out against unionization.…

Yes, this could mean Zuck gets your passport and credit card. We’re sure he’ll take care of them properly … An Australian Parliamentary Committee has recommended that locals be compelled to hand over identification documents to sign up for and use social media.…

Workers to get earlier, longer, holiday, probably paid (fingers crossed) Japanese auto-maker Subaru announced Monday that it is making “production adjustments” - aka making fewer cars - due to semiconductor supply chain issues.…

As night-time internet cut-offs stretch beyond 50 consecutive days Myanmar’s military junta has ordered the suspension of wireless broadband services.…

Plus: Top universities hit by data-stealing extortionists in Brief It was a tsunami of DNS queries that ultimately took out a host of Microsoft services, from Xbox Live to Teams, for some netizens about an hour on April Fools' Day, Redmond has said.…

Lack of product enthusiasm in a stale market during a semiconductor drought finally killed it LG Electronics' board has tired of its loss-making smartphone business and ordered its closure.…

May the 4th not be with you Yahoo! Answers is shutting down in a month's time after nearly sixteen years online.…

Account info swiped in 2019 via security hole, sold online, now given away for free Reams of personal data – including phone numbers, email addresses, and birthdays – obtained from 533 million Facebook accounts was offered to all for free on a cyber-crime forum over the weekend.…

America's top judges decide copied code in Android is fair use The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-2 decision that Google's limited copying of Oracle's Java APIs in its Android operating system constitutes fair use under US law.…

Surely this back light problem would have come up in testing, court mulls A US court has rejected Apple's request to throw out a potential class-action lawsuit accusing the iGiant of knowingly selling MacBook Pro laptops with defective display cables.…

Halt and catch fire Who, Me? A blast from the past, and possibly the future, as a Register reader regales us with a tale of carnets in the pre-Maastrict Treaty era. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

Remote code execution hole, arbitrary file writing flaw could make a mess of stored files Updated Some QNAP network attached storage devices are vulnerable to attack because of two critical vulnerabilities, one that enables unauthenticated remote code execution and another that provides the ability to write to arbitrary files.…

Google comes in late too Apple has begun warning iOS developers that it will reject apps containing advertising SDKs that use data from the device to create unique identifiers, or fingerprints, in preparation for the upcoming release of iOS 14.5.…

Join us online for three days of DevOps, containers, CI/CD Event Theory is great, but you’re never going to put it into practice without having the right tools – and knowing how to use them.…

Semiconductor sovereignty, meet supply chain security Analysis Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also known as TSMC, plans to spend $100bn over the next three years in response to chip demand and has advised its customers to expect to pay more.…

Nothing like a steaming bowl of freshly picked spaghetti Something for the Weekend, Sir? No, not wabbit. Not even chocolate eggs. I'm hunting wild asparagus.…

Register reader finds that some Apple fans are... not very bright? On Call The weekend is upon us, and we can think of no better time to celebrate the efforts of those courageous individuals tasked with sorting the problems of users. Be they Mac or PC-based. Welcome to On Call.…

UCL astronomer tells us: 'We were surprised by our discovery' Mysterious X-rays have been spotted emanating from Uranus for the first time, according to the latest observations made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.…

Good times for NVMe-based flash arrays and Cisco India’s overall network and storage market both showed declines in the final quarter of 2020 due to lingering work and school from home measures and banking organizations spending less on storage.…

It's not DNS. There's no way it can be DNS... It was DNS Updated Unlucky netizens are right now unable to log into Microsoft's online services, including Azure, Teams, Dynamics, and Xbox Live, due to an ongoing global outage.…

Chatty digital assistant can still be found on Outlook, Teams, Windows It's the end of the line for the Android and iOS incarnations of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana.…

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Asking for a friend's machine-learning code Top datasets used to train AI models and benchmark how the technology has progressed over time are riddled with labeling errors, a study shows.…

'The regulatory frameworks we rely on to support these efforts are dated' FCC acting commissh Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed giving the US commercial space industry a dedicated block of spectrum in order to support future rocket launches.…

And drought in Taiwan threatens supply. Good news for firm's wallet, not so much for chip buyers Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has warned about a "severe shortage" of supply in the DRAM memory market, with the situation expected to worsen as the year progresses.…

Handy in an emergency, but only for Nitro instances and requires work in advance AWS has introduced the "interactive EC2 Serial Console", enabling troubleshooting of virtual machines when normal SSH access is not working, with one user gushing: "I have been waiting 10 years for this moment."…

Join us with Red Hat and IBM – and find out how to deploy your workloads on Kubernetes and much more Webcast The world of cloud native might look very different to traditional enterprise computing, with the promise of enhanced scalability, increased automation, and blurred lines between public and private infrastructure.…

Thousands of people's personal information purloined after UAE hotels compromised The Netherlands Data Protection Authority has fined Booking.com €475,000 for notifying it too late that criminals had accessed the data of 4,109 people who booked a hotel room via the website.…

Mere months to go before 1.21 arrives Kubernetes 1.20 has finally put in an appearance on Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), just squeaking into March and a good few months since the upstream release.…