The Register

Pumice-like stuff spotted by Japanese Hayabusa2 probe would float on water Asteroid Ryugu, the rock from which Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe brought home some samples, is home to highly porous boulders that might just have been the stuff of which planets were made.…

24 out of 26 tools vulnerable – with bonus JavaScript attack for Adobe A pair of techniques to surreptitiously alter the content of certified PDFs have been detailed by researchers in Germany.…

Drive looks to be an industrial model, so probably not a wider threat Cisco has named Micron as the supplier of solid-state disks that put themselves to sleep after 28,224 hours of operation.…

Sixth big outage in seven weeks, this time users were unable to access more than a dozen services IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.…

Hasn't said which brands have signed up, but is happy to have them make 2G and 3G kit for a decade Analysis Pakistan has announced it has secured 19 cellphone manufacturers willing to work on its soil, and that their efforts will improve device affordability and availability for locals and help the nation’s prospects as a tech exporter.…

Unauthenticated remote code execution possible thanks to vSphere Client bug VMware has revealed a critical bug that can be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in the very core of a virtualised system – vCenter Server.…

Meanwhile, fans may enjoy Linux GUI apps on Windows Subsystem for Linux Build Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened day one of the company's Build 2021 conference, virtual again this year, with a pitch to be the platform for platform creators.…

It started out as an innocent book store and now it's Barnes & Ignoble The District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday, claiming the internet goliath is illegally abusing its power to manipulate online retail prices and screw over merchants.…

If you want to be happy at work, never meet more than twice a day If you want to make a software developer's day, don't interrupt, minimize meetings, and encourage moments of self-reflection. By doing so you may enhance productivity and promote worker retention, according to GitHub's latest research.…

It will even keep working if Microsoft's cloud has an outage, honest Build At its virtual Build 2021 event, Microsoft has introduced features in Arc, its hybrid-cloud system for centralized management of Kubernetes clusters and other services, that will now run selected Azure services on-premises, including App Service, Logic Apps, and Function Apps.…

Also: Blockchain Ledger for Azure SQL Database Build Microsoft's attempts to bring Cosmos DB to the masses continued at Build 2021 as Redmond threw emulators and freebies at developers, while the more sober world of Azure SQL Database was given the Ledger treatment.…

How low (code) can you go? Build Any souls wondering what Microsoft would do with its GPT-3 investment have been given an answer with a Power Fx update lightly seasoned with the AI tech.…

Iron Oak fails to convince the Feds that Patent Board misinterpreted key phrase in the patent Samsung, Microsoft, and Google have prevailed at US Federal Appeal Court [PDF] in a patent battle with Iron Oak Technologies.…

Says privacy and freedom of expression breached, but upholds sending surveillance product to foreign countries Surveillance laws permitting GCHQ to operate its Tempora dragnet mass surveillance system broke the law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.…

Updated Toolkit, new Developer Portal, custom Together Mode themes ... but not what users ask for most Build Microsoft has introduced new features and developer tooling for Teams, calling it (along with Microsoft 365) a platform for "a new class of apps designed for hybrid work."…

Refund rights for customers The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has reached agreement with antivirus vendor McAfee that means some customers whose software subscription was automatically renewed will be able to get a refund.…

Ampere’s Altra gets the gig at a cent-per CPU hour, with managed K8s for starters, managed MySQL coming soon Oracle has made good on its promise to fire up an Arm-powered cloud by revealing it will offer Ampere's 80-core Altra processors for one US cent per hour per core.…

MPs ignore calls for regulation to help contractors MPs in the UK’s Parliament decided not to select amendments to the 2021 Finance Bill designed to offer contractors protection from rogue umbrella companies accused of skimming off pay and holding back holiday pay.…

Homegrown code spotted in the wild Google’s Fuchsia operating system has started winging its way to real-life devices, with owners of the company’s 2018 Nest Hub the first to get the upgrade.…

Processor core among raft of designs for upcoming devices Arm will today unveil two trinities – a family of three CPU cores, and a family of three GPU cores – for system-on-chips powering future laptops, smartphones, smart home entertainment equipment, and similar gear.…

No alarms, no surprises We’ve crossed the point where teardowns of Apple’s computers cease to be a genuine assessment of fixability, and become an intellectual exercise into seeing how they’re built. iFixit’s preliminary teardown of the 24-inch M1 iMac is a good example of this.…

Hålp, I äm stuck in emergency möde Bork!Bork!Bork! Nature is healing and bork has returned to the wild. Or at least nestled within the plastic greenery in a Birmingham Ikea.…

'The decision was made to return an error message that gave people an ability to contact us' Interview Last December, the Python development team overseeing the Python Package Index (PyPI) temporarily disabled the search endpoint on its XML-RPC API because its infrastructure has been overwhelmed by "abusive clients."…

You've heard of Continuous Integration – how about Continuous Review for your Jamstack? Interview Netlify has acquired FeaturePeek, a system for simplifying the flow of feedback on web application previews and prototypes.…

November scripting error havoc finally fixed Around three weeks late — a fairly good result for anything to do with the UK government's Home Office IT — technology professionals have been able to recover all of the 413,000 records of evidence deleted from the Police National Computer (PNC) in January this year.…

Also steps into future by allowing plug to be pulled on 2G networks The Republic of Korea took two bold steps into the future on Tuesday, by announcing that the last of its 2G networks will go offline in June and that it will initiate large-scale adoption of communications protected by quantum encryption.…

Acquisition expected to complete in April 2022, empty positions can't be filled until then Exclusive Arm has entered an engineering hiring freeze that may last until April 2022 when it expects its acquisition by Nvidia to complete.…

Spanish authorities say there’s no reason to suspect foul play A man has been found dead inside a large model dinosaur in the Spanish municipality of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, on the northern outskirts of Barcelona.…

Brit thrown in the clink for 13 years after 'palm-print' lifted from internet photo A drug dealer's ham-handed OPSEC allowed British police to identify him from a picture of him holding a block of cheese, which led to his arrest, guilty plea, and a sentence of 13 years and six months in prison.…

It’s all about domestic efficiency, and if that helps China to become a bigger player then so be it A former governor of the People's Bank of China has given a speech in which he suggested that China's Digital Yuan is not intended to increase China's influence over global financial systems.…

Action comes amid raging second wave, government pressure on social networks to suppress misinformation Police in the Indian capital Delhi have turned up at Twitter's local HQ seeking evidence about a tweet made by a prominent political figure that the micro-blogging service labelled as including "manipulated media".…

Allows limited on-site registration for jabs India has acknowledged the API it created to facilitate COVID-19 vaccination bookings excludes much of its population and started to allow on-site vaccination bookings to some of its populace.…

Prime viewing in the Pacific Rim Skygazers will be treated to a total lunar eclipse on Wednesday, May 26, when the Moon passes through Earth’s shadow and it’ll appear particularly large and reddish in color.…

Automaker didn't even bother defending itself Tesla has been ordered by a Norwegian court to pay more than 30 customers $16,000 each for slashing the battery life and charging abilities of older Tesla Model S vehicles with a software update.…

Bug can also be abused to record audio and video, access files – and iOS, iPadOS updated, too Apple has patched a hole in macOS that has been exploited by malware to secretly take screenshots on victims' Macs.…

Join us to learn how to frustrate extortionists in the 2020s Webcast On the face of it, blunting a ransomware attack should be straightforward if you’ve got a solid data protection plan in place.…

That Apple M1 killer is just right up your sleeve, yeah? For nearly a decade, Microsoft has fought to turn Windows on Arm into a viable platform for day-to-day computing. Success (not to mention anything resembling meaningful market share) has proven elusive. Users (not to mention developers) are few and far between.…

Cockup has since been patched in latest release Mozilla Thunderbird spent the last couple of months saving some users’ OpenPGP keys in plain text – but that’s now been patched, the author of both the bug and the patch fixing it has told The Register.…

Suggests sales of former Huawei sub might resurface Honor, the phone brand formerly owned by Huawei, appears to have secured Google Mobile Services (GMS) licences, paving the way for a meaningful return to the European market.…

ESA's Rosalind Franklin waiting in the wings as engineers fix the parachutes China's Mars rover has taken its first tentative trundlings on the surface of Mars, a week after the vehicle's landing in Utopia Planitia.…

CEO Ebon Upton: 1st-gen HAT uses silicon 'that's in short supply' but 'we're very good at pipelining' Raspberry Pi fans have another way of powering their mini 'puters and attached gizmos thanks to an impending update to the Power over Ethernet (PoE) Hardware Attached on Top (HAT), as the silicon required for its predecessor gets increasingly difficult to come by.…

Apple co-founder's camp denies claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will face a trial next month in an Arizona district court over allegations he stole the idea of a Woz-branded programming boot camp.…

Who needs precedent when you have Priti Patel and a 'contactless corridor' The UK’s home secretary Priti Patel has claimed the UK borders will become “fully digital” by the end of 2025, with a raft of new technology schemes which critics might be tempted to characterise as wishful thinking.…

We're working on it, Spark backer Databricks declares Data lakes are struggling to support more than 10 users when they try to perform the SQL queries that were once seen as only fitting for data warehouse technologies, according to Gartner.…

The unspoken perils of remote working Column It's now over a year since offices were shuttered and phrases like "remote" or "hybrid" working began to be bandied about. And although hands have been wrung over "Zoom Fatigue", few appear to have noted the real threat posed to harmonious home working: birds.…

That's the BackOffice Resource Kit. What did you think we meant? Bork!Bork!Bork! When it comes to bork, Microsoft has always been ahead of the game.…

Which opt-out is the right opt-out? Are they selling data or not? The NHS body responsible for delivering IT strategy has struggled to ensure patients understand that medical data held by their GPs will be copied into a central database to be shared with third parties unless they opt out by 23 June.…

Also: The basic utility of the general purpose OS cannot be sanitised into total safety. Nor should it Column You will have noticed that Apple just pushed MacOS under the wolves, thrown it to the bus and left it hanging out to dry like a post-Brexit fishing net.…

First launch from New Mexico facility goes off without a hitch, ticks regulatory boxes and even does some science On Saturday, Virgin Galactic completed its third spaceflight and the first from its new launch location outside White Sands National Park in New Mexico.…

Guess what I learned at school today, Mummy! Who, Me? Blue flashes and blue language await in this week's Who, Me? where a Reg reader dispenses an unexpected education to a tour group of schoolchildren.…