The Register

Debris removal missions to eventually outnumber actual debris? The European Space Agency (ESA) has commissioned a mission to remove an item of debris from orbit as the space around Earth gets progressively more cluttered.…

I'm not crying, there's just a little bit of dust in my eye Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to pay final respects to Microsoft's last foray into the mobile phone market: the Windows Phone.…

Except it looks like all the trusts already have plans Hundreds of thousands of devices managed by the UK's NHS are still running Windows 7. With the end of support looming, is the service about to have another Windows XP moment? Er, probably not.…

*Total Inability To Shuffle money Using Phone The Co-op Bank's app and online services are enjoying an extended lie-in today with multiple customers complaining they're locked out.…

Open-source product now has yet another paid option on top Black Hat Europe Elastic, the biz behind open-source search engine stack Elasticsearch, has launched its own SIEM – a somewhat counterintuitive thing to do, you'd think, until you look at how many others are using Elasticsearch for lucrative security products.…

OS director on staying safe and advantages of Amazon's Nitro hypervisor Interview At the AWS re:Invent conference last week, The Register asked Chris Schlaeger, director of kernel and operating systems, how the cloud giant protects itself and its customers from speculative execution bugs in Intel CPUs.…

Drivers, translators, factory workers, programmers, IT pros... and now animators Boring 2D images can be transformed into corresponding 3D models and back into 2D again automatically by machine-learning-based software, boffins have demonstrated.…

Popular to-do app dies in May. And here’s a worse version... Three months after its former CEO pleaded with Microsoft to sell him back Wunderlist, the software giant has confirmed the worst: it really is killing the popular to-do app.…

Got a Sammy telly older than a few years? No iAuntie for you this Christmas, we fear Owners of some Samsung smart TVs are finding themselves unable to watch BBC iPlayer on their gear after support for scores of models was suddenly dropped.…

We've read enough sci-fi to know how this turns out Scientists in China are laying claim to the first ever pig-monkey chimeras to be born in what they hope will be a breakthrough for biomedicine, not just fuel for your nightmares.…

Lawyer attempted to argue theft of domain name at gunpoint was too stupid to be true An internet frat boy has been sent down for 14 years in America for trying to steal a domain name.…

Dude was distracted by his dog when flash motor pranged police, officers say A man driving a Tesla Model 3 on autopilot mode rammed into the back of two police cars and another vehicle parked on the side of a highway in Connecticut, USA, on Saturday. No one was injured in the crash.…

CEO accused of breaching contract with Cupertino, fires back in court Apple is suing the former chief architect of its iPhone and iPad microprocessors, who in February quit to co-found a data-center chip design biz.…

They also want a ban on interfering with their cookies Amid the final rulemaking before the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is scheduled to take effect next year, five ad industry groups have asked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to remove a requirement that businesses honor the privacy choices internet users make through browser settings, extensions, or other controls.…

'Blatant and sustained effort' to deny AWS Pentagon IT mega-contract, cloud giant claims Amazon has officially accused President Donald Trump of pressuring the Pentagon not to award it a $10bn cloud contract because he hates its CEO Jeff Bezos.…

And thus the age of the Glasshole passes into history Google Glass Explorer Edition was an ambitious but ultimately doomed look at a possible next frontier of human-computer interaction. Almost seven years after its initial release, Mountain View is finally putting it to pasture with one last update.…

Let's strap these bricks together and maybe we'll make a boat Xerox is taking the gloves off to launch a hostile takeover bid for HP Ink, er, Inc – by courting its shareholders with a 33-page document explaining why the pair will be a corporate match made in heaven for investors.…

Plus: Commercial crew news and NASA publishes what ISRO won't Round Up SpaceX landed another Falcon 9, Rocket Lab took a first step toward reuse, and it was handbags at dawn for lunar boffins in this week's curation of all things space.…

They can live in my new world or they can die in their old one Ming-Chi Kuo, the analyst widely regarded as the most accurate soothsayer when it comes to Apple's product intentions, reckons it's lights out for the Lightning cable.…

Optimize the performance, cost and capacity of data-driven apps with Intel Webcast We live in a connected world and expect that our services are always-on and instantly available.…

But it's all anonymised data so who cares, right? The UK Department of Health (DoH) has released a redacted copy of its contract giving Amazon access to data on the NHS Direct website, following a Freedom of Information request from civil rights group Privacy International.…

Swedish comms flinger enters agreement with DoJ and SEC Swedish telco slinger Ericsson has paid $1bn to end a double probe into bribery allegations by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).…

Next thing she's wearing my Casio A jailed hacker who profited from the Angler Exploit Kit has been ordered to sell his £5,000 Rolex watch after the National Crime Agency (NCA) applied to confiscate £270,000 of criminal proceeds from him.…

Adrian Cockcroft talks to El Reg about cloud architecture – and why we need more chaos in our systems re:Invent The advent of Outposts, Local Zone and Wavelength - released at AWS' Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas - amounts to a "new platform" that is now distributed rather than centralised, a company veep has told The Reg.…

New Zealand's Inland Revenue Department has questions about transfer pricing A week after Microsoft paid just under NZ$25m (£12.41m/ $16.93m) to New Zealand's Inland Revenue Department in a dispute over transfer pricing, Oracle has revealed it is also under investigation.…

Been down this path and it ain't that easy, says man who knows Black Hat Europe A veteran drone hacker reckons the recent release of the Dronesploit framework won't go down quite as its inventors hope.…

Windows giant shows off smart-metered, connected office in Stockholm The Register took a trip to Microsoft's shiny new Stockholm HQ to check out what the company's employees have to look forward to over the next decade - and came away more informed about smart metred loo roll.…

Who needs who more? China has ordered all government offices to start ripping out non-Chinese computers and software in order to bolster domestic manufacturers and suppliers.…

Northamber founder passes after 'short illness' Obit The Brit tech industry has lost one of its founding fathers, a literal and metaphorical giant who pioneered hardware and software distribution. David Michael Phillips, Northamber's founder and – until recently – its long-serving chairman, has died.…

New builds, Project Scarlett and much more Roundup New builds, a prolonged farewell to old friends and a new toy (for the boss, at least). That's right, it's the past week at Microsoft brought to you in bite-sized chunks by El Reg.…

So the decades we invested in the last platform mean nothing? The lure of shiny new things is particularly irrepressible in December as Christmas approaches, but SAP customers seem to be able to resist it.…

Not just server pain, PCs too, says new CEO Hewlett Packard Enterprise is feeling the effects of Intel shortages in the server market, the company CEO has told us.…

It only took colleagues an hour to notice our hero was missing Who, Me? Welcome to back Who, Me?, The Register's weekly dip into the bottomless pool of cunning and calamity supplied by readers who have, in a real sense, been there and most definitely done that.…

And why China might not be as big as first thought in AI spending Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's machine learning musings. We bring you news about the hottest topics in AI: Facial recognition, the so-called AI arms race between the US and China, and erm, GPUs in the cloud.…

Meanwhile, the DOJ sets its sights on money mules Welcome to yet another El Reg security roundup. Off we go.…

Trade boss says long-dead biz was indeed deceiving the public The US Federal Trade Commission has issued what looks to be a largely symbolic ruling against the remnants of data-harvesting marketers Cambridge Analytica.…

CEO's tweeted taunt totally fine, twelve jurors decide Billionaire Elon Musk did not defame British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth, a Los Angeles jury concluded on Friday.…

We're never gonna survive unless, we get a little crazy NASA’s science team has a new female recruit and she's probing the watery depths of the Antarctic in a quest to help climate eggheads understand our climate.…

Standardization of wasm for the web offers a new take on the same old problems The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Thursday published three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, officially endorsing a technology touted for the past few years as a way to accelerate web code, to open the web to more programming languages, and to make code created for the web more portable and safe.…

Protest organizers come under fire from network traffic barrage China is reportedly using the 'cannon' capabilities of its massive domestic internet to try and take down anti-government websites in Hong Kong.…

Squaring up to the iPhone 11 Samsung is expected to next year release its newest flagship, the Galaxy S11. And, as is the case with any high-profile phone release, details are steadily leaking from the chaebol's notoriously porous supply chain.…

Not even a wafer-thin blade? The global server market hasn't been able to match the heady highs of 2018 so far this year and Q3 was no exception as both shipments and the value of those boxes dropped.…

May we suggest a rebrand? B.ICONIC, the parent of one of Ireland's largest Apple Premium Resellers (APRs), is buying Stormfront – the UK Apple retailer that is, rather than the Aryan social network.…

19.11 brings penguin support and a Visual Studio Code extension Microsoft's forever-in-preview Azure Sphere received an important update this week, bringing a Linux SDK (also in preview form) and Visual Studio Code support.…

But get ready to flip your cables cos it's microUSB HMD Global, the licencee of the once-ubiquitous Nokia mobile phone brand, today unveiled its latest budget blower, the Nokia 2.3.…

Fix it to a wall, stick it on a shelf While the public cloud might have once been all the rage, the cold light of day has brought the realisation that bandwidth, compliance and convenience means that something a little more local is needed.…

UK regulators hash out cheat sheet to avoid total meltdown The Bank of England has teamed up with other regulators to offer UK banks a little advice on sorting out their woeful IT systems.…

Save yourself a few quid and we'll see you in May 2020 Event If DevOps, containers, CI/CD and serverless are on your agenda for next year, grabbing a blind-bird ticket for our Continuous Lifecycle London conference should be top of your end-of-year todo list.…

NVM, we'll give you a toggle to deactivate UWB... in the future-ture-ture For a company that prizes itself on its privacy credentials, Apple received a bit of a bloody nose earlier this week when long-time security journalist Brian Krebs revealed the iPhone 11 Pro intermittently seeks the user’s location — even when there are no applications with location permissions in use.…

Come with us through the gates of Jenkins Land to admire the Java dinosaurs within DevOps World Lisbon Love was in the air at the CloudBees-sponsored DevOps World in Lisbon this week as the 900 or so attendees were treated to public displays of affection with Google both on stage and behind the scenes.…