The Register

Updates on its blow-up space station while Bigelow threatens to burst NASA's bubble Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has unveiled plans for an enormous inflatable space station tended by cargo and crew carrying versions of its Dream Chaser spaceplane.…

Also: Accessibility improvements and cosmetic tweaks included A new version of Visual Studio Code has arrived just in time for Chocolate Egg Day featuring "official support for Raspberry Pi OS", which might come as a surprise to those who have spent the last month or so complaining about it.…

Plus other improvements to the Linux service manager Version 248 of systemd, a widely used system and service manager for Linux, adds a feature called system extension images, designed to allow system files to be added, or appear to be added, even on read-only file systems.…

Remembering airports of the past and borked kiosks of today Bork!Bork!Bork! In some parts of the world a festival involving chocolate eggs and bunnies is about to begin. For this poor kiosk, it appears festivities are temporarily at a halt.…

BT Group arm says it'll 'encourage' switch to modern kit; ISP says consumers on legacy CAN'T switch Openreach has said it will raise the cost of installing and delivering certain “legacy” wholesale products, including FTTC and copper, in order to spread the cost of the ongoing full-fibre rollout.…

The hidden cost of multi-cloud, and how full open source reduces lock-in The X.Org Foundation has successfully completed a migration from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to Packet, which it reckoned "should save us around $30 per day."…

Crackdown on offshore payments to freelancers hits a nerve Pakistan’s minister for IT and Telecom, Syed Aminul Haque, has protested the government’s new tax treatment for IT companies.…

Search giant insists it's necessary, iTitan didn't have anything to say Android and iOS phones transmit telemetry back to Google and Apple, even when users have chosen not to send analytics data.…

Capitalizing on preparing digitally novice businesses for post COVID era Hitachi announced it will purchase US software deevloper GlobalLogic for US$9.6B.…

Extraordinary response by .uk registry operator effectively dares members to fire the rest of them Nominet has rejected calls for serious change at the .uk registry operator despite losing its CEO, chairman, and three board members to a membership vote earlier this month.…

Says customer data wasn't touched, doesn't say much about being rooted Wi-Fi kit-slinger Ubiquiti has suggested the attacker that accessed some of its cloud-hosted systems in January 2021 may have made off with source code and employee logins, not the customer data it initially warned could be in peril.…

Programming pioneers bag $1m prize This year’s Turing Award has gone to two men who helped create the foundation on which modern software is built.…

Best not to go long on printer shares, IDC predicts copy shops will rise again Analyst firm IDC has spotted up an uptick in the Asia Pacific region's printer market, thanks to a certain virus you may read about in the news of late.…

Gives Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning Microsoft has agreed to supply at least 120,000 production units of its HoloLens augmented-reality headsets to the US Army.…

Big Blue and its claret-capped subsidiary accused of nicking UnixWare blueprints, lying, and conspiring Updated Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.…

Plus $50bn pledge to boost chip R&D and fabbing in Land of the Free A new national infrastructure plan outlined by US President Joe Biden on Wednesday equates fast internet access – broadband – with other utilities including water and power.…

It's all about driving down costs on OCI... so it can compete with AWS, claims analyst Oracle has launched a free service it hopes will convince more customers to shift their applications to the cloud – Oracle’s cloud, that is.…

Global pandemic and sanctions? Yes, they played a bit part too Huawei was forced to rely solely on the buying power of its domestic customers in calendar 2020 as foreign trade melted away in the face of US-led sanctions and a global pandemic.…

That schedule, however, is looking a lot less shiny The ambitiously named Virgin Galactic has unveiled the latest vehicle in its fleet – the Spaceship III named VSS Imagine.…

Falls back on ancient mainframe as Workday protests state has 'no basis to terminate our agreement' The US state of Maine is requesting an official review of its $54.6m project to renew its HR system, currently being built by Workday under a contract the state is threatening to cancel, a move which could leave the state government continuing to rely on its 30-year-old mainframe-based system.…

Planting that Bezos flag in the newest cloud sector: spaaaaaace Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is known for his proclivity towards all things space, and now the Web Services wing of his empire has earmarked $1m in cloud credits that will be evenly distributed to 10 space startups.…

...but only on clouds it controls. Multi-cloud licensing is still all sorts of fun VMware has taken another step towards turning its crown jewels into a subscription service, but the path it has chosen to walk is narrow.…

A fine Australian tradition stomped on A school in Perth, Western Australia, has turned arbiter of fashion and declared something we all know deep down to be true – that the mullet is "not acceptable".…

Welcome to the new bland People who listen to rock or hip hop are harder for music recommendation algorithms to please, according to a study by machine-learning experts and data scientists.…

No new plaintiffs allowed to join IBM will have to face several civil claims of age discrimination filed in a collective action by former workers, a federal judge has ruled, while rejecting Big Blue’s attempt to entirely dismiss the action.…

That and the $950k salary Poor old Safra Catz has had to find some way of making ends meet since she was offered no increase in her salary, no bonus, no new equity grant, and no performance-based equity vesting for her role as CEO of $40bn-revenue Oracle.…

One final update for its 'couple of thousand' users then it's just a hobby It's a bad week for anyone still using a PowerPC-based Mac. The developer of TenFourFox, the last real modern browser for the platform, has thrown in the towel.…

Security and privacy still left to fix, preferably before launch In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors, capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed by their signals.…

Alleges staff took down the internet when investigators visited, even got a little physical South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has recommended Apple’s local outpost be prosecuted for hampering its investigations into its affairs and slapped it with a 300 million Won (US$264,000) fine.…

Then issuing tens of millions in fake invoices A duo in China has been accused of tricking a government-run identity verification system to create fake invoices.…

Also reveals first foldable with U-shaped hinge to lighten things up Logowatch Chinese consumer tech enfant terrible has pledged to build electric cars.…

Talk about living in hope Indian payment app maker MobiKwik has denied its security has been breached, saying that if it's true, as has been claimed, that its customers' information has appeared on the dark web, then some other platform was totally responsible for that.…

Was it a coded message? The password for accessing nukes? Nope A cryptic message sent from the Twitter account of the US Strategic Command, then deleted, could have been many things.…

Research agency and housing board sign a deal as COVID-19 makes manpower and materials scarce Singapore's industrial research agency has started work on 5G-enabled drones that use LiDAR and cameras to monitor construction sites, then send the data they collect to systems that create digital models of buildings that change in real time.…

High stakes battle could go on for days There are a maximum of 6,000 votes to count but the push by workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama to unionize could take days as the high-stakes battle acts as a much larger proxy across America.…

FTC cites 'significant headwinds' in trying to fight the San Diego chipmaker Updated The Federal Trade Commission has given up its antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm although the US watchdog still claims the chip maker violated fair competition laws.…

Privacy don't like it, block the tracker, block the tracker Eliminating third-party cookies will not stop companies from tracking web users, says DuckDuckGo, which claims it can help with its desktop browser extensions and mobile apps.…

Staff quit as board refuses to budge on controversial decision Updated Three key staff members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have resigned in protest at the organization’s decision to reinstall Richard Stallman as a board member.…

Apple fans will need to wait just a little longer Mozilla's attempts to augment its income continued apace with an update to the company's VPN subscription service.…

Join Lenovo at Nvidia's GTC '21 and accelerate your learning Promo Mention GPUs these days, and you’ll naturally think about how they can accelerate the most challenging AI and machine learning workloads in addition to gaming platforms.…

CEO reckons this tech will be used in 300 billion chips Arm has set out its stall for the first major new version of its instruction set architecture – Armv9 – in about a decade, and promised compatible chips will have improved machine-learning and security capabilities.…

Explosions in the mist SpaceX continued its rich tradition of destroying Starship prototypes with SN11 succumbing to an explosive end during a high-altitude flight test.…

Team is 'SUPER EXCITED' but will devs welcome another Windows-only, incompatible framework? Microsoft has released an early version of Project Reunion with support for production use – provided developers do not target Universal Windows Platform (UWP).…

ThousandEyes agent to run on switches that don't do Docker, hook into AppDynamics to monitor all the things Cisco has baked network monitoring and visibility tools it bought along with ThousandEyes into its Catalyst 9300 and 9400 switches, and integrated ThousandEyes with its AppDynamics application performance monitoring line.…

New CloudLinux-sponsored distribution hits GA ahead of Rocky Linux The AlmaLinux project, sponsored by CloudLinux, has issued its first stable release along with details of a new open-source foundation set up to manage the project.…

A small victory, but campaigners say they will be keeping a close eye The UK government has caved at the threat of a judicial review into its £23m contract with controversial US AI firm Palantir in setting up the NHS COVID-19 datastore.…

Two ingredients that don't really go together. Like, er, AI and Ethics? RoTM Following Microsoft's 2019 foray into whisky-making, Google has got into the AI-infused consumables game with the frankly horrific-sounding Marmite and Maltesers® cake.…

The Harris Federation learns infosec lessons the hard way The Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity responsible for running 50 primary and secondary academies in London and Essex, has become the latest UK education body to fall victim to ransomware.…

C-suites need a kick up the proverbial, says Lindy Cameron in first speech So-called cyber-attack insurance "cannot be a substitute for better basic cybersecurity," the National Cyber Security Centre's chief exec has said in her first major speech since taking office.…

Developers liked WPF but Microsoft neglected it. Avalonia is a possible solution Interview Avalonia, a cross-platform framework for desktop applications, has built up a considerable user community but is it a viable alternative to Microsoft's official solutions?…