The Register

Take it from us Earthlings, we know what a species can really do to a planet Astronomers have been offered a cheat sheet on the kinds of things to look out for – from air pollution to energy production – when hunting for signs of intelligent life on faraway exoplanets.…

... and a lot of wrist action Facebook has outlined what it believes will be the future of online interaction – and it’s a device that will sit on your wrist and act as a next-generation mouse.…

In seven flavours, accessible from Windows or macOS, with Active Directory support and USB passthrough Alibaba Cloud has quietly started a private beta of Elastic Desktop Service – a desktop-as-a-service offering.…

Says demand for space is booming and private enterprise loves its liberalisation plans India has decided to boost the budget of its space program by 46 percent.…

Remote code execution, denial of service, API abuse possible. Meanwhile, FBI pegs China for Exchange hacks Security and automation vendor F5 has warned of seven patch-ASAP-grade vulnerabilities in its Big-IP network security and traffic-grooming products, plus another 14 vulns worth fixing.…

Journalism Competition and Preservation Act has been proposed twice already. Will it survive this time? Both chambers of Congress reintroduced a bill on Wednesday that would give American publishers the power to negotiate with tech companies, like Facebook and Google, over the use of news content online.…

Multiple Object Versionless Architecture is as popular now as it was two decades ago Alan Holden, the inventor of the MOVA programming language, doesn't mention it on his resume, which isn't entirely surprising since it never really existed.…

See, regular expressions are hard Websites with domain names containing 't.co' were knackered in Russia today as a result of the Kremlin throttling Twitter.…

Moz urges ISPs told to commit to opt-in data usage – as if one more scolding might make a difference in decades of opt-out In the wake of a T-Mobile US privacy policy change that will automatically share US users' web and mobile app data with marketers, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Society, and others, have published an open letter asking internet service providers to do more to promote privacy, particularly as it applies to the DNS data that reflects online interaction.…

Claims campus will be home to 'Europe's largest mobile technologies engineering team' Apple today announced plans to invest €1bn in a new European Silicon Design Centre in Munich, Germany.…

Life in the 21st century is great A CCTV camera biz which left an admin account username and password exposed on the World Wide Web has, you guessed it, been targeted by hacktivists.…

Say goodbye to icon on Windows 10 Microsoft users are striding into a bright, new, legacy Edge-less future: unless they're using the Surface Hub, HoloLens or Xbox.…

Servers affected include those used by ESA, Villarreal football club, and some misused by malware miscreants Customers of European cloud hosting provider OVH have been told it plans to restart three data centres on its French campus in Strasbourg next week, following a massive fire on site this morning that destroyed one bit barn.…

Plus Brexity energy efficiency labelling standards thrown in The UK government has said it plans introduce rules later this year that would enshrine in law the "right to repair".…

Shades of the Encrochat bust all over again A series of police raids in Belgium have resulted in the apparent shutdown of the Sky ECC encrypted mobile phone network.…

Customers directed to howl into the wind of the Microsoft Store Microsoft has finally confirmed that it is indeed closing down its UserVoice forums, after The Register noted earlier this week that staffers had been merrily shutting some of the crowd-contributed pages.…

Alexa, am I having a heart attack? A smart-home speaker device and machine-learning software can be used to pick up a person's heartbeat, and report the results to doctors to analyze, folks at University of Washington reckon.…

'Most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time' The UK's eye-wateringly expensive Test and Trace system has failed to provide any data showing it is effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19, according to a damning report from MPs.…

French outsourcer will handle software, networking, and infrastructure Atos has been selected to run the UK's National Employment Savings Trust occupational pensions scheme in a contract award estimated to be worth £1.5bn over 18 years.…

'For many ... vendors, the BSD license is very important compared to the GPL' It's not as well known as Linux, but FreeBSD has plenty of hardcore fans. In a wide-ranging chat covering licensing, architectures including RISC-V, and a development model that's free of a "dictator", The Reg spoke to members of the project about new release features and more.…

Bare-faced cheek of Barewire using our trademarks, say Redmond legal eagles A multinational tech support scam was operated out of a rural Surrey cottage for years before its Indian call centre was rumbled and gave the game away to Microsoft, the High Court has heard.…

Plus: Where did their original logo come from? Updated Police have issued a tender to replace their CyberAlarm tool following reporting by The Register and infosec researchers revealing security flaws in the logging software.…

Suggestion to hand out shares in new registry dismissed as a non-starter With an extraordinary vote that will define the future of the UK’s internet registry operator just two weeks away, the battle lines between the company's management and those seeking an overhaul have been drawn.…

There’s always someone to blame for bad infosec, but never a willingness to make meaningful change Column Remember the Cold War? For me, growing up in America meant living under the permanent, intangible threat of sudden vaporisation by thermonuclear attack. It added a piquant pointlessness to everything. Ashes, ashes, all burn down.…

Waymo recreated 72 fatal crashes and it turns out its simulated AI driver isn't a careless, distracted jerk Keen to prove that automated cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, Waymo, the robotaxi biz spun out of Google in 2016, set out to simulate 72 fatal crashes that occurred from 2008 through 2017 in the vicinity of Chandler, Arizona.…

SANS Institute lines up webcast guide to managing your cybersec talent Promo You might think not seeing too much of your cybersecurity colleagues is a good thing – it means everything is going smoothly, doesn’t it? Or it could be that your security team is worrying short-handed. In fact, research by CyberSecurity Ventures predicted 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfulfilled globally this year.…

Doesn’t say which law it’s worried about (but if China is cracking down on inspirational infographics that may not be a bad thing) LinkedIn, Microsoft’s social network for professional interactions, has “temporarily paused” signups for new members in China.…

Tokopedia and Gojek deal reportedly close, as Indonesia courts Tesla and wrestles SpaceX Indonesia’s equivalents to Uber and Amazon.com - Gojek and Tokopedia - appear to be closing in on a merger.…

SBG 2 destroyed. SBG1 damaged. SBG3 at risk. SBG4 safe. Customers told to activate DR plans One of cloud provider OVH’s data centres is on fire and services are severely disrupted.…

Plans to build 100,000 servers for 5G industrial edge cloud play China Telecom has announced it will seek a listing on the Shanghai stock exchange, after the US government banned trading of its scrip on the New York Stock Exchange.…

Tardiness by stakeholders, rather than over-optimistic blockheads, blamed India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority has paused the rollout of a national SMS “scrubbing” service and blamed business for the delay.…

Tim Wu, Lina Khan may be internet mega-corps' worst nightmares Analysis In a sign that President Biden is planning to take an aggressive stance toward Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other giants, he has nominated not one but two anti-Big-Tech advocates to key posts.…

Lone Star state and web biz clash over First Amendment rights Twitter has sued the Attorney General of Texas, accusing him of bullying the biz in retaliation for nuking Donald Trump’s account.…

Windows giant's withdrawal leaves market to Amazon, Apple, Google Microsoft has officially exited the smart-home digital-assistant market: the one, lone smart-speaker with its Cortana service built in – Harman Kardon's Invoke – will no longer be able to use Redmond's service.…

Bugs in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code are the least of it Patch Tuesday A week after Microsoft warned that four zero-day flaws and three others in its Exchange Server were being actively exploited and issued out-of-band remediation, the cloudy Windows biz has delivered software fixes to address 82 other vulnerabilities as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday ritual.…

Cloud biz pays $165m to create full file workflow system Dropbox is buying document tracking company DocSend for $165m, it announced on Tuesday.…

There are caveats but deal perfect for the ten Surface Go users out there Software licensing analysts have spotted a rare and elusive price cut for two editions of Microsoft 365 – that is, if you are looking for frontline worker enterprise versions of the license.…

Titbit for domestic consumption looks darn silly from abroad Opinion The US government might have subtly signalled that it likely won't hack Russia this month – by telling credulous journalists it has a "clandestine" plan to, er, launch an attack against its rival before April.…

For those who find wearing the things so damn difficult Microsoft has added mask detection, in preview form, to Azure Cognitive Services.…

Cryptographic software assurance backed by Google, Red Hat, Purdue U The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.…

Also: SaaS provider completes acquisition of employee feedback platform Peakon The northeastern US state of Maine is threatening to cancel a contract with enterprise SaaS provider Workday and request a $21m refund.…

Sales of €950m in shares already agreed as float day looms The Vodafone Group told the market today it hopes to raise between €2bn and €2.8bn from the planned IPO of its infrastructure business, Vantage Towers.…

They're 'much too big' says Musk Elon Musk's satellite internet constellation biz, Starlink, wants to sell its end-user station devices and services for use in vehicles, judging by a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).…

Servers breached but no data 'compromised', claims org The European Banking Authority (EBA) has confirmed it is another victim on the list of organisations affected by vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange.…

As new best bud NVIDIA releases AI on-ramp bundle that only runs with vSphere VMware has unconverged hyperconverged infrastructure with a new cut of its vSAN virtual storage array.…

Here's what you could have won A bumpy 2020 has hit SAP boss Christian Klein in the pocket, wiping millions of euros from his pay packet.…

And for my next trick... an M1 Macintosh Color Classic? The iMac G5 was once a formidable piece of computer hardware. Improbably thin for the time, it packed a 64-bit Motorola PowerPC 970 processor, and had room for a relatively extravagant 2GB RAM.…

The votes have been cast and counted... and it's a landslide Register debate Last week, we argued over whether or not the media, including El Reg, should stop using the word hacker as a pejorative.…

But still some way to go before standards-based tech can match mainstream products Last year Vodafone bet big on OpenRAN, announcing it would shift a huge portion of its tower estate to the standards-based tech. Now Andrew Dona, the telco's director of network and development, has shed some light on how this will work.…

Takes a 'different approach' to YouTube's Vitess to munch complex transactions in microseconds Swedish startup Logical Clocks is launching a new key-value database as a managed service, based on the MySQL derivative MySQL NDB Cluster.…