The Register

Spindly thing claimed to stay airborne for a year with 15kg payload A BAE Systems pseudo-satellite drone has made its maiden flight in Australia, just under two years after being announced as a marketing concept.…

'Horrible news' for invested devs Microsoft is shutting down its Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), part of App Center, to the dismay of developers using it.…

Plus: Did NASA just accidentally give the game away? Roundup Cygnus flies, SpaceX stands down, Rocket Lab is going to the Moon and New Horizons drops a massive dump (of new data) in this week's roundup. A heck of a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of a view of Earth from really, really far away.…

Plus: Trump budget favors AI, 'patent troll' backs down, and CEO quits amid sex pest claims Roundup It's a long weekend in the US, though sadly not in Blighty. So, for those of you starting your week, here's some bite-sized machine-learning news, beyond what we've recently covered, if that's your jam.…

Good hook if you're already all-in. Oh, and there's an elephant in the room: full Hadoop implementation Analysis After securing a lofty position in enterprise applications and databases, Oracle has fixed its eyes on data science. And though analysts have expressed doubt about whether Big Red is producing technologies new to the field, its shiny Cloud Data Science Platform might appeal to those already heavily invested in Oracle's software.…

Now, where was I? [tappity tap] ... BALLS! Who, Me? Hey hey hey, it's Monday! The new week is but a caffeinated beverage away. Come join us in celebrating another Register reader's flirtation with career-ending disaster with a morning dose of Who, Me?…

Plus: Iranians accused of hacking IT service providers to get at their customers Roundup Everything is insecure and everything is broken, exhibits A through Z:…

And also, crucial point, the software may be wrong and we'll never be released by these angels of death A neural network has identified eleven asteroids once thought to be benign that may actually come close enough to hit Earth.…

'A combination of losing Huawei and slower than anticipated ramp in 5G' A small round of layoffs at Silicon Valley's Xilinx was the result of the US government's ongoing war on Huawei, one of the FPGA designer's top customers.…

Ah, bless Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison is planning to hold a fundraiser at his California estate in Rancho Mirage on February 19 to help re-elect US President Donald Trump.…

Who will join the IT giant in staying away from San Francisco? Updated IBM has pulled out of annual security shindig RSA Conference, due to be held in San Francisco at the end of this month, to avoid its staff catching the Wuhan novel coronavirus that's spreading worldwide.…

Malvertising campaign makes big bucks for online criminals Google has removed more than 500 Chrome extensions in response to a report from a security researcher, who found the browser plugins distributed through the Chrome Web Store facilitated ad fraud and data theft.…

Techies quit to go it alone, iGiant tries to lure away their staff – then sues – court told Apple's iPhone chip designers mulled creating their own homegrown server processor for the Silicon Valley giant – but were shot down by Steve Jobs after they presented the idea at an internal meeting.…

Also: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 eyes its operating system shackles Microsoft flung out fresh updates to its cross-platform data wrangler Azure Data Studio, the Windows Terminal and continued to tease a standalone Windows Subsystem for Linux last night.…

Does this mean things are looking up for the industry? Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's board of directors has approved a $6.74bn budget for expanding its factories.…

That's phone, broadband and pay TV Starting from tomorrow, telcos who fail to offer their customers their best deals will find themselves on Ofcom's naughty step, potentially helping millions of customers in Britain.…

Russia denies claims from well-informed broadcaster that it was homegrown Turla malware baddies Austria's foreign ministry has said a weeks-long cyber attack from a "state actor" against its systems has ended – amid local reports that pin the blame on a Russian hacking crew and its initial four-byte payload.…

Buy to boost cloud, automation and visibility chops Arista has beaten several rival suitors to snap up software-defined networking (SDN) specialist Big Switch after months of negotiations.…

As 1809 is nudged toward the darkness, the Baron of Bork has plans for 1903 and 1909 There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and duff patches from Microsoft. So, yes, some Windows 10 users have found their PC unhappy following Tuesday's patch shenanigans.…

Sold out in China, no word when it arrives in the West Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi just peeled the wraps off its latest flagship smartphones – MWC or no MWC.…

Productivity or performance? Hey, why not both? On this day 25 years ago, Borland Software trotted out version 1.0 of the Delphi application development product, making the announcement at the Software Development '95 event in San Francisco.…

Maybe stick to walking the beat instead of infosec advice, eh? The National Crime Agency has publicly distanced itself from a poster urging parents to call police if their child has installed Kali Linux, Tor or – brace yourself – Discord.…

The days of spinning rust in lappies looks numbered and deskops will be next, says analyst Dearly beloved, let us take a moment to remember the spinning rust featured in PCs for the last four decades. This year "no new laptops" will have an HDD inside, and desktops' innards will go the same way in 2020.…

The Register talks to Carolyn Porco, Garry Hunt and Alan Stern about the picture that almost wasn't Thirty years ago, the Voyager Project celebrated 14 February not with a card, but with a family portrait of the Solar System, which would give rise to the celebrated "Pale Blue Dot" concept. The Register spoke to the scientists involved, as well as those who might snap a future image.…

The ball's in your park and I'm just happy for the team Something for the Weekend, Sir? Call me paranoid, call me suspicious, call me an ambulance [slaps thigh], but I'm not sure I'm seeing things in the way I'm supposed to.…

Windows XP – the gift that keeps on giving (until you need it to actually do something) Bork!Bork!Bork! Like that ageing celebrity you thought kicked the bucket years ago, Windows XP keeps popping up on screens to wheeze the IT equivalent of "I'm not dead yet!"…

Come, let us gaze into the black pit of desktop support On Call Hurrah! It's Friday, which means it's time for another recollection from readers lucky enough to have support tickets assigned to them. Welcome to On Call.…

Final bill for My Online Business Education? More than £230m An Australian fella who made bank from thousands of military veterans and retirees through a 21-step “proven system” of internet marketing must cough up £13m ($17m) in settlements – and is banned from selling any similar programs in future.…

Monster telco says it's working to resolve whatever's going on Encrypted email service Tutanota on Thursday accused US mega-telco AT&T of blocking its service in some parts of America, and cited the service interruption, ongoing for more than two weeks, as evidence for the need for net neutrality.…

Now that's toke'n ring networking: Code of America happy to pass around its tools to scrub cases under US state law More than 60,000 cannabis convictions in Los Angeles County are set to be overturned, thanks to computer algorithms.…

The past twelve months have not been good for GPU giant Nvidia talked up its data center AI sales and strong just-past quarter to keep everyone's eyes distracted from an otherwise lukewarm financial year.…

Pentagon's $10bn winner-takes-all cloud super-contract in stasis as Starship Bezos opens fire A US federal court today slammed the brakes on the Pentagon's decision to award Microsoft the JEDI cloud mega-contract.…

California Supreme Court skewers iGiant for stiffing loyal drones Apple will have to pay its retail store workers back wages after the California Supreme Court ruled staff should be compensated for the time they spend every day having their bags checked by security.…

Shoddy code allegations are just FUD, software maker insists Only a week after the mobile app meltdown in Iowa's Democratic Caucus, computer scientists at MIT have revealed their analysis of the Voatz app used in West Virginia's 2018 midterm election.…

CFO – and daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei – Meng Wanzhou named in fresh criminal indictment Updated Huawei has been charged by the US government with 16 counts ranging from fraud to conspiring to launder money and steal trade secrets to racketeering.…

Limited functionality and cloud only, but improvements are on the way A beta of GitHub's command-line interface for managing issues and pull requests is available to download for macOS, Windows and Linux.…

Apparently the UK's CMA has never heard of Amazon Google Cloud has completed its $2.6bn acquisition of data analytics and machine learning outfit Looker after getting the thumbs-up from the UK's competition authorities.…

Repairs require complete disassembly The Motorola Razr is back and while the 2000s stalwart had a reputation for toughness, you'll probably want to be careful with the refreshed version. A recent teardown from the T3-wielding terrors at iFixit has proven it to be nigh-on impossible to repair.…

Surface Neo is the most interesting new Windows device in years, but will weary devs support it? Microsoft's dual-screen Surface devices for Windows (Neo) and Android (Duo) come out later this year, but how will devs write or re-write their apps to support them?…

Misnomer of the century Essential Products, the troubled handset manufacturer from Android daddy Andy Rubin, has ceased operations.…

GPU shenanigans and Linux love also headline a Fast Ring build with… wait for it… new stuff Microsoft finally flinched last night and acquiesced to the demands of Fast Ring Windows Insiders with a fresh Windows 10 build that at long last contained some new toys.…

Letter delivered to chancellor demanding tax reform be halted Sign-waving contractors and freelancers accumulated outside the Houses of Parliament in London's Westminster yesterday morning to protest against the UK government's controversial IR35 tax reforms.…

Should they be allowed to grab our stuff just cos it's 'popular' and it works? Not to be outdone by Google in ominous warnings over the future of software, Oracle has declared to American Supreme Court justices that no company would make an "enormous investment" like it did in Java SE if rivals get a free pass to copy code simply because it is "popular" and "functional".…

Over the air? More like over the aarrrggghhh A trio of boffins at Singapore University this week disclosed 12 security vulnerabilities affecting the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) SDKs offered by seven system-on-a-chip (SoC) vendors.…

Plus: Clock is ticking on early-bird ticket offer Event We’re thrilled to announce that Charity Majors will be delivering a keynote at our Continuous Lifecycle London conference this May.…

That's enough time for all Nickelback's albums in one sitting! Samsung Unwrapped wasn't all shiny flagships and foldable phones – the South Korean tech giant also tore the wrapping paper off its latest wireless earbuds.…

I'll miss the MWC muggers, not the marketeers Column One of the biggest experiments in algorithmic price management is currently underway, as the GSMA, the mobile industry's lobby body, has scrapped this year’s Mobile World Congress gabfest.…

Bots are getting themselves in trouble – who gets the blame? Tech firms have a history of getting in legal hot water over antitrust issues – being probed or dragged through the courts for collusion or for acting anti-competitively.…

After panel urges halt to live matching, top brass says it would only be 'used in an intelligence-led, targeted way' A Scottish Parliamentary panel has urged police to not invest in live facial-recognition technology, and the plod seem to agree.…

Infosec biz offers to guide you, step-by-step, in eliminating vulnerabilities Webcast Cyber-attacks have more than doubled in the past 12 months. Whoever you work for, your organisation is now being probed more than once every minute.…