The Register

Birdsong, traffic sounds... Bueller? Bueller? It's hard, isn't it — plugging in kit? You've got to grab the item in question, find a charger, and then give it a bit of USB-C. Wouldn't it be simpler if your gadgets just magically charged themselves, using the abundant energy provided by the Sun's rays?…

Fast Ring fans to get code 'no longer matched to a specific Windows 10 release' Mixed news for Windows Insiders today as the window for jumping to the Slow Ring slammed shut amid promises of minty fresh code for those on Fast (but don't ask for which version of Windows, m'kay?)…

Singing songs around the bonfire of billions and other stories Roundup A fair bit happened in the world of space this week, with NASA showing off its mighty booster as Boeing looked set to end 2019 with a jaunt to the International Space Station.…

Old world vendors should club together, form new biz called 'Screwed by Cloud' Hyperscale operators accounted for a whopping third of the $38bn spent on data centre kit and software during the first nine months of 2019 – indicative of the buying power the largest cloud builders wield over legacy tech makers.…

Good news for Check Point; less so for blabbermouths with regrets Security investigators say they have uncovered a vulnerability in WhatsApp that will gladden the heart of anyone who's ever wondered how to permanently wipe that incriminating group chat.…

Until you step on one... The National Museum of Computing got a helping hand from some Lego-curating volunteers last week to get ready for post-Christmas activities.…

Getting tooled up for future crimes The Metropolitan Police Service dispatched more than 4,000 staff to attend so-called "cyber" training courses over the past two years.…

Games streamer sued for streaming games, but not the electronic kind Internet TV network Twitch, which lets anyone stream stuff from video games to programming, is being sued for allegedly illegally streaming English Premier League matches in Russia.…

And you thought it was just ICANN and the Internet Society having a bad month Comment The organization responsible for allocating internet addresses across Africa has yet again become embroiled in scandal, this time over long-standing claims of corruption.…

It's the first bit of evidence that confirms carbon born in ancient stars spreads throughout space For the first time, astronomers have stumbled across ancient, ginormous clouds of carbon ions, stretching more than 30,000 light-years across and enveloping young galaxies.…

That kill-everyone-onboard flaw that was supposed to be fixed by now? Yep, still an issue Boeing said on Monday that it plans to temporarily suspend the production of its 737 Max jets next month to focus on clearing out the 400 or so aircraft currently grounded in storage.…

Habana joins the ranks of runaway successes Movidius and Nervana Intel has snapped up AI accelerator chip designer Habana Labs for a hefty $2bn to bolster its efforts in bringing Chipzilla-flavored machine-learning tech to cloud platforms and big biz.…

Woke tech giants sued for 'knowingly benefiting from ... the cruel and brutal use of young children' Google-parent Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla have been accused of "knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to mine cobalt," a key component of the lithium-ion batteries that these companies obtain from suppliers like Glencore, Umicore, and Huayou Cobalt to power their products.…

Investors to crack open a cold one if exhumation request successful A group of aggrieved crypto-coin investors want to exhume the corpse of a digital money exchange boss in a bid to find their missing millions.…

Board 'upset', eh, amid claims PFYs sacked after discovery Updated The head of Canada’s .ca internet registry is under fire following allegations multiple IT staffers were axed after a porn stash was apparently discovered on his iMac and reported to HR.…

Feds are not amused A Wells Fargo employee is accused of stealing bank vault deposits – and posting pictures of the alleged purloined loot on Instagram and Facebook.…

The feature was originally ditched over quality control issues During the heady beta days of Android 10, Google showed off a feature that would allow users to automatically activate Dark Mode depending on the time of day. Sadly, despite an enthusiastic reception, it never made it into the finished product, due to several technical hurdles.…

IRC-for-millennials biz shrugs: Yeah, we might fix that later Security researchers have uncovered a flaw in messaging app Slack that allows a file shared in a private channel to be viewed by anyone in that workspace – even guests.…

'Unfortunately local storage was missed off the list of files migrated' A change to the location of profile data in Chrome 79 on Android, the new version rolling out now, means that applications using the WebView component lose data stored locally.…

Things you don't do with Elasticsearch dbs, number 1: Put them on the web Exclusive Infosec researchers have uncovered a data breach affecting 1.3TB of web server log entries held by Chinese e-commerce website LightInTheBox.com.…

Poor entropy in embedded devices leading to weaker certificates: study A preponderance of weak keys is leaving IoT devices at risk of being hacked, and the problem won't be an easy one to solve.…

Maintainer: 'Most companies were reluctant to support the project their product depends on because it is available for free' Interview In May this year, users of popular open source project FUSE for macOS noticed the source code for the latest update was missing. The project had become closed source and was no longer free for commercial use. But as The Reg discovered when we had a talk with its maintainer, there was a very good reason for that – and it's not a good look for the many companies that used it.…

Also: Office 365 goes Swiss and Visual Studio for Mac gains scaffolding Roundup Microsoft has had a busy week, from hammering the final nail in the coffin of its previous mobile strategy to unveiling a black monolith of an overpowered games console. Today's roundup takes a look at what you might have missed in all the excitement.…

Season's not much of a miracle for under-pressure workers, says union Amazon Germany is facing potential strike action at a bunch of its logistics hubs, but is reassuring punters that they will still get their packages in time for Christmas.…

Your quick catch-up on neural-net news Roundup It's nearly the end of the year, and if you're not bored of AI yet, here's more bits and bytes for you to consume.…

Your quick summary of infosec news beyond everything else we've reported Roundup Here's your Register security roundup of infosec news about stuff that's unfit for production but fit for print.…

Gone fishing for power – with a coat hanger Who, Me? Monday has arrived, and with it another tale to send administrators scurrying for their event logs, and engineers reaching for the coat hanger. Yes, it's Who, Me?…

Catch up with public sector developments and more Promo If you missed this year's re:Invent – the annual Amazon Web Services cloud-computing mega-conference held in Las Vegas at the beginning of December – you can catch up with some of the highlights in London, England, on 22 January.…

Scammer and pals blew the cash on cosmetic surgery, jewelry, swanky pads, flash motors A 73-year-old fraudster has been sentenced to four years in prison for conspiracy to defraud – after bilking investors out of $2.3m (£1.7m) by convincing them that they were investing in a sure-fire winner: caffeine-infused chocolates for the tech sector.…

...So consider rerouting your journey through that Scientists have discovered a dangerous hotspot in Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts that spews so-called “killer electrons” that can knacker satellites and spacecraft.…

Car smash-and-grab ends with loss of payroll details for 20,000 employees Facebook has lost a copy of the personal details of 29,000 of its employees after hard drives containing unencrypted payroll information were stolen from an employee's car.…

Pending tariffs on notebooks, phones, monitors shelved as super powers strike 'prelimary' deal Chinese officials have announced a preliminary agreement on phase one of negotiations with the United States - and of course US President Trump has leapt onto his favourite digital soap box to add his cents worth.…

Launch opportunities per year now over 130. Actually launched in 2019: 6 Peter Beck, boss of upstart small-sat flinger Rocket Lab, gave himself an early Christmas present this week as he declared the company's second launch complex, this time in the US, operational.…

Probably a better investment than WeWork If you thought the service at your local Starbucks was robotic and impersonal, you might want to give Softbank’s newest Tokyo cafe a miss. Working alongside the company’s meatbag workers are a small army of Softbank Robotics’ droids, who’ll help serve and entertain the punters, and will even clean up after them.…

Plus: Meg Whitman and Co had 'buyer's remorse' over $11bn purchase Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch was "thoroughly unreliable" and "willing to lie" to the High Court about the $11bn purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett Packard, according to HPE's lawyers in court yesterday.…

The 'experience' will be available from mid-January, 2020 Microsoft has been alerting admins today to changes to its Microsoft Teams Exploratory "experience", which effectively allow users to sign up for a trial rather than requiring admins to grant the privileges.…

Maker of cloudy PDF and services software ... yes, that's Perpetually Dosh Forming It was ho-ho-ho and a kerching for reassuringly expensive graphic design software maker Adobe last night as it danced all the way to the bank, reporting double digit spike in Q4 revenues (PDF) and an upward swing in profit.…

Redmond tears wrapping on new retro-look gaming console It's always interesting to see where industrial designers source their inspiration. Tesla, in creating the futuristic CyberTruck, looked to the dystopian world of Blade Runner. Iconic '80s movie Back To The Future directly inspired Nike’s self-lacing MAG kicks. And in creating the upcoming Xbox Series X console, Microsoft's muse was presumably a Gateway tower PC from the 1990s.…

Flexible workforce look to pre-election promises Contractor organisations are insisting the Tory government sticks to promises to revisit IR35 reforms as it emerges that GlaxoSmithKline is ordering contractors to switch to pay as you earn tax arrangements or leave the company.…

Like Trump’s Twitter feed, except not Her Majesty the Queen is after a head of digital engagement to run a small team of specialists based at Buckingham Palace.…

Arbitrary code execution in a controller, what could go wrong? Siemens industrial control systems designed specifically for energy plant gear are riddled with dozens of security vulnerabilities that are, luckily enough, tricky to exploit from the outside.…

But Danish boffins tapped cans on the side, not the top – we demand a retrial Should you be faced with the horrors of a shaken can of beer and an urgent need to open it, science has solved the question of whether or not tapping the can helps reduce the fizz when it is opened.…

Will no one think of the SMEs? Oh, actually some have made the grade The UK's central government is dangling up to £6.5bn under the noses of resellers to supply commodity hardware, software and services across the British public sector for the next four years.…

A tale of entry-level electrical skills On Call There's just one more day to get through before the weekend is upon us so burn a few minutes by chortling at the misfortune of others with On Call.…

We want to hear you share your insights, experiences, and plans Event Our machine-learning conference MCubed returns to London next October, and we’d love to hear about your latest adventures in the worlds of artificial intelligence and analytics.…

Either way, we'll take a one-way ticket, please. Now. Thanks. Good A hundred red objects blinking in and out of existence across Earth’s skies over the past 70 years have left scientists giddy: they believe this could be evidence of previously unseen astronomical phenomena or – and hold tight, now – alien civilizations.…

Trio of vulnerabilities made registry full of uncertain code even more of a risk On Wednesday, NPM, Inc, the California-based biz that has taken it upon itself to organize the world's JavaScript packages into the npm registry, warned that its command line tool, the npm CLI, has a rather serious security vulnerability. Version 6.13.4 has been rushed out with a fix.…

Think of a number, triple it, add seven, multiply by zero, and that's pretty much this tech giant's Q2 revenue growth Oracle's financial figures were more or less flat in its latest financial quarter compared to a year ago.…

Let's grab a nice cold drink on the Red Planet. Don't forget to pack a shovel There’s water ice buried below the surface of Mars, and all you’ll need is a shovel to dig some up, according to research published in Geophysical Research Letters this week.…

Techies lay out modest ambition to provide development framework for everything. Where have we heard that before? Google has translated Java's "write once, run anywhere" promise into the words "ambient computing," which it has begun using to explain Flutter's reason for being.…