The Register

Rambler claims code creator was working for them at the time and so they own tech worth $700m Nginx's Moscow office was raided today by police after the ownership of the popular web server's source code was disputed.…

Here's a rundown of some of the Middle East's cyber argy-bargy Iran claims to have staved off a major cyber attack on its national infrastructure, a couple of months after the Middle Eastern theocracy was blamed for real-world assaults on two Saudi oil refineries.…

Sentencing due in January for Sentry MBA shenanigans A London hacker is facing jail after he admitted illegally accessing National Lottery gambling accounts.…

OpenWorld moving to Vegas, baby: SF now too expensive not to mention the filthy streets, open drug use... Oracle's massive OpenWorld shindig is relocating from hipster central to the desert, or put another way, from San Francisco to Las Vegas.…

You know it's solid reporting when trial lawyers start quoting it Autonomy trial The Autonomy trial has resumed – with The Register being furiously quoted in legal arguments as Britain's biggest fraud trial begins slowly rolling towards its close.…

Postcards from the edge... of space? It has been a while but after a hiatus of more than seven months and a weather-induced delay, the rocket outfit bankrolled by billionaire box-flinger Jeff Bezos has sent its New Shepard booster into the blue.…

Plus: Insiders yanked from their rings Microsoft has decided that the Calls feature of its Android-bothering Your Phone app is ready to be unleashed upon the wider world.…

It's Lumen awful: Space Drop halted due to excessive douchebaggery Citing an explosion in fraudulent accounts, Keybase says it is ending its maligned Stellar Space Drop giveaway.…

Loss-making unit still putting hurt on 'puters 'n' phones biz If ever there was a good time to release bad news, it is today. As luck would have it, Dixons Carphone has filed a set of crappy half-year financials that show the extent of the damage that its loss-making mobile business is wreaking.…

Split between 550 subpostmasters accused of theft, that's not much The UK's Post Office has finally agreed to settle a long-running case brought by postmasters the company accused of theft based on evidence from the Horizon IT system.…

Yes, it's the debris tail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the source of the annual Geminids meteor shower Asteroid 3200 Phaethon's thick trail of debris, which is the source of the annual Geminids meteor shower here on Earth, has a mass of about a billion tons, is 60,000 miles wide, and is more than 14 million miles long.…

Uni brains pitch smart math for speeding up establishment of circuits in anonymizing onion network Academics in Germany say they've found a way to make Tor and similar onion networks more efficient and lower their latency.…

Billions wasted, lawsuits launched Enterprise resource planning projects are notoriously difficult to get right. While everyone wants the latest tech, that is less than half the challenge, and whether organisations choose Oracle, SAP, Infor, or IFS, they face a dilemma.…

'Sir, they're about to disclose the vulns!' 'Damn it. Accelerate the rollout!' How does Microsoft mitigate the risk of speculative-execution bugs on its Azure platform? The US goliath is unwilling to comment, despite running a session at its Ignite conference last month on exactly this subject.…

Problem: We have to do work. Solution: Delete all the work! Capita has told local councils up and down Britain that it will be closing all bug reports for its One Revenues and Benefits software suite which are more than 12 months old – even though these include flaws in the way student loans and housing benefits are calculated and paid.…

Talk about gone in a flash Video A pentad of bit boffins have devised a way to integrate electronic objects into augmented reality applications using their existing visible light sources, like power lights and signal strength indicators, to transmit data.…

We guess you could call this a.... mass debate An impossibly massive black hole that defied conventional theories has been called into question after multiple researchers suggested the data used to estimate the object’s mass may have been wrong.…

Nine 'commercial models' to access central database mulled at hush-hush meeting Exclusive Talks to package millions of British medical records into a vast, commercially valuable database that may then be sold on are already underway between NHS England bosses and global giants, documents exclusively obtained by The Register show.…

Gap in browser privacy tech embarrassingly detected by Google Apple on Tuesday updated its Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) system in its WebKit browser engine because it could be tracked.…

House of Representatives OKs Trump plan because it wants federal parents to take time off President Trump’s dream of a special space force have come true just before Christmas, with the US House of Representatives approving the new zero-gravity guardians in a monster military bill on Wednesday.…

Justice Department wins chance to track fitness-tracking purchase The US Department of Justice has beat out the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to become the top dog in an antitrust review of Google’s proposed purchase of fitness tracker Fitbit.…

And in the darkness bind them – to next year's IT budgets Cisco has launched a single chip architecture that it claims will work well in network routing and switching gear, and manage data better than existing processors in both categories.…

Dude, pass the indictment Three men have been arrested and charged with masterminding what prosecutors claimed is a $722m cryptocurrency ponzi scheme.…

Early adopters left out of pocket as winter and Facebook costs kill biz In a savage blow to the notion of nominative determinism, e-scooter startup Unicorn is shutting down after blowing all its money on Facebook ads.…

El Reg checks all the boxes. Dell: 'Hold my beer' Apple's Mac Pro turned up on the company's website this week and, yep, it's eye-wateringly expensive.…

Not cool, Coolest Cooler backers say If you want to hear a tale of woe, you don't need to dust off some Dostoyevsky – just head to Kickstarter, which has no shortage of stiffed punters and failed projects. The latest example in a long line of crowdfunding cockups is the Coolest Cooler, which raised over $13m in 2014 and collapsed earlier this week with 20,000 orders unfulfilled.…

You are the weakest Lynx A salutary warning arrived this week for those seeking to impress at the Christmas disco after a school bus had to be unloaded due to an excessive discharge of body spray.…

Good news? There is no good news File this one under "not everything needs a computer in it". Finnish security house F-Secure today revealed a vulnerability in the KeyWe Smart Lock that could let a sticky-fingered miscreant easily bypass it.…

Hot mic snafu reportedly caught by TV station Updated China's ambassador to Denmark has reportedly threatened to kill off a proposed free trade deal unless the semiautonomous Faroe Islands sign a deal with Huawei for 5G mobile network equipment.…

There is no escape from collaboration Microsoft has plugged the wafer-thin niche of Linux desktop users that want a native app for the company's Slack-for-suits platform, Teams.…

Double-encrypted. That said, if you're worried about over-sharing, what are you doing on Chrome? A new feature in Google's Chrome browser will warn you if your username and password matches a known combination in a security breach every time you type credentials into any website.…

That's quite the appetite you've got there Pirate lord or prodigious porn pumper – how much did YOU download this month? The majority of us will be on unlimited connections and such a question won't matter outside of mobile data.…

Yep that's our old friend Earworn Wearables by another name Wearable tech is seemingly big business, and according to number-cruncher IDC, the market grew by 94.6 per cent year-over-year in Q3 2019.…

Latest Which? study with NCC Group highlights toys it ain't smart to buy It seems to come around quicker every year – the failure of so-called smart toys to meet the most basic of security requirements. Which? has discovered a bunch of sack fillers that dirtbags can use to chat to your kids this Christmas.…

AI really is glorified statistics when it's applied to biology AI algorithms are helping scientists map ten billion cells from the human body in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of how life emerges from the embryo, or how diseases like cancer manifest.…

AWS tech academy, aka Her Maj's Government, trains next gen of Amazonians Amazon Web Services has once more dipped into its public sector employee tech training academy – also known as Her Majesty's government – and made off with another senior head to bulk out its division.…

Sprinkles from extrasolar red giants found here on Earth Everything in the Solar System, from the massive hot burning Sun to the blue ice giant Neptune and all asteroids and bits of dust and rock in between and beyond, are made from dead, leftover stardust.…

Do as we say not as we do, DNS overseer sternly tells Internet Society Three weeks after the Internet Society announced the controversial sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm, the organization that has to sign off on the deal has finally spoken publicly.…

Took you long enough, smirks Microsoft In another sign that investors in augmented reality company Magic Leap had had enough of blue-sky thinking and want to see green paper, it has “launched” a new business-focused product.…

Professional licensing rules collide with common parlance, again Electrical engineer Greg Mills sued the Arizona Board of Technical Registration for fining him thousands of dollars and threatening to close his twelve-year-old electronics business because he called himself an engineer.…

Senate Democrats push for another vote; get rejected again Comment Making it clear that the issue of net neutrality has become an entrenched partisan battle, Democratic Senators used the two-year anniversary of its death on Tuesday to push for a vote that would reverse the decision.…

Feds get extradition for 64 year-old fraud suspect who allegedly netted hundreds of thousands of dollars A 64 year-old man from Nigeria is set to be tried in the US on charges he was the brains behind a string of business email hacks and romance scams.…

End 2019 with a Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, Adobe, SAP and Intel With the year winding to a close and the holiday parties set to kick off, admins will want to check out the December Patch Tuesday load from Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, and SAP and get them installed before downing the first of many egg nogs.…

I don't care if it's mathematically impossible, make it happen nerds! In its latest attempt to come up with a digital encryption scheme that's both secure and not, the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday heard conflicting testimony from industry, academics, and law enforcement about whether encryption can simultaneously protect information and also reveal it on demand.…

Not for the mobe market, more an IoT future for microkernel-based system 2020 probably won’t be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’ll be the year Huawei starts aggressively rolling out its Harmony OS operating system, according to a company spokesperson.…

More stuff that'll get under Arm's skin Updated The RISC-V Summit kicks off in Silicon Valley today, and there were a few interesting announcements this morning.…

I was caught in the middle of a memory attack, and I knew there was no turning back Intel on Tuesday plans to release 11 security advisories, including a microcode firmware update to patch a vulnerability in its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) on recent Core microprocessors that allows a privileged attacker to corrupt SGX enclave computations.…

Now, about the history with the South China Sea... HMS Prince of Wales, second of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, has been commissioned today at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard.…

Oracle DBs particularly vulnerable to fake decryptions, say researchers If you're an Oracle database user and are tempted to pay off a Ryuk ransomware infection to get your files back, for pity's sake, don't. The criminals behind it have broken their own decryptor, meaning nobody will be able to unlock files scrambled by the malicious software.…

Then mercilessly evict it: Out, darned Spot Microsoft has teased Azure Spot Virtual Machines, discounted VMs that can be "evicted any time if Azure needs capacity".…