The Register

Read on, partner [decent GPU required] The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. We're living the dream now because Rockstar clearly doesn't give a toss about previous coverage and gave us one of the most anticipated PC titles of the year. Cheers!…

You can't leave your hat on Something for the Weekend, Sir? The customs officer likes my smile. He smiles back.…

Yeah, we're gonna need you to bring us his head On Call Welcome back to On Call, The Register's weekly trip down memory lane with those poor buggers who have to deal with whatever lurks on the other end of the phone line.…

Message for Mr Peake: The station called and wants its former resident Brit back ESA bigwigs were cock-a-hoop today as the agency's Ministerial Council passed a bonzer budget, with the UK, Germany, Italy and France splashing the most cash.…

Not 'Music For Extraditions' Acclaimed lift music composer Brian Eno is orchestrating a mass mail-in to Brit home secretary Priti Patel so the great unwashed can tell her: "Don't Extradite Assange."…

AWS SSO? AWS IAM? AWS Cognito? All is explained Just ahead of its big Las Vegas re:Invent knees-up, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has extended its Single Sign-on service to support Azure Active Directory – as used by Microsoft's Office 365.…

Tune in to hear advice from Box and Freeform Dynamics Webcast Let’s be realistic: nobody sets out to create computer systems that get in the way of good business.…

Adtech firm also sent 12k phishing warnings to users of its services Google has said it fired off 12,000 warnings to unlucky users of its GMail, Drive and YouTube services telling them that they’re being phished by state-backed hackers.…

Can't connect? Try a lower rez, or a different HDMI cable Users of the Raspberry Pi 4 mini computer are puzzling over an issue where setting some display resolutions have the side-effect of killing the Wi-Fi connection.…

Jagex Ltd's gross misconduct efforts blasted by judge A RuneScape artist who found a document on an office printer that stated a senior veep's salary and mentioned it to colleagues was wrongly fired by red-faced managers, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled.…

14 days till the General Election Updated Controversial UK tax legislation IR35, coming to a private sector near you from the spring, is the latest tool being used to curry favour and win votes in the upcoming General Election in Britain.…

You can be fast but they're always faster Cloud-'n'-comms biz Datrix has suffered a phishing attack that resulted in some customers' contact details being compromised – though the company reckons it contained the attack within 15 minutes.…

Plus: Chilling details of the AI police state in Xinjiang Roundup Welcome to an early edition of this week's AI news summary, brought forward as some of us are away for Thanksgiving...…

Sixty of them are bad enough, let alone the planned 12,000 Skywatchers in Spain recording meteors being transformed into brilliant streaks of light by atmospheric compression are a bit miffed – as their view was rudely interrupted by a slew of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.…

Plus more from the world of infosec Roundup Here's a summary of recent infosec news beyond what we've already covered – earlier than usual because some of us have Thanksgiving to get through in the US. By the way, watch out for hackers taking advantage of IT teams suffering turkey comas.…

How dare you say we can’t underpay women and non-Caucasian staff! Oracle has finally addressed long standing accusations that it discriminates against and underpays women and minorities by... suing the government department that has repeatedly flagged the issue, claiming it has no authority over Larry and his boys.…

From scale to cost, our friends at Intel and Redis will tell you what you need to know Webcast The modern connected business never sleeps. Around the clock, your customers expect constant availability, and an experience that’s blazing fast and responsive.…

But it will earn £50 from it, so that's nice The University of London has lost a Court of Appeal attempt to block a new mobile phone mast that would have served Vodafone's London HQ.…

Is that true, Mummy? The age-old deception that is Christmas has been unravelled for a bunch of tots in Nottinghamshire after an ill-conceived comment by the Mayor of Rushcliffe.…

More than a little Chipzilla off its previous expectations Dell has lopped more than $1bn off its revenue estimates for the current fiscal year on the back of Intel's protracted CPU shortages, continued weakness in the Chinese economy and enterprises tightening their belts.…

Latest preview will also 'crash less'! Hooray! A fresh preview of Microsoft's open-sourced Windows Terminal landed overnight with a couple of standout features to make the app a handy addition to the toolkit of Windows 10 shell-botherers.…

Great and good of pentesting chew the fat with El Reg Ethical hacking is a "redundant term" but to be a "hacker" is no longer a bad thing, according to proponents of the cybersecurity art form known as "penetration testing".…

Spices up your life with change to naming conventions Microsoft crossed the streams last night as both the Fast and Slow Rings of the Windows Insider Program synchronised ahead of the final fit and finish of next year's Windows 10.…

Memories of missiles on the moors of Cumbria Geek's Guide to Britain Of all the monuments to Great Britain's efforts to maintain its pre-war status as a global superpower in the post-war world, the remnants of the Blue Streak intermediate-range ballistic missile project are among the most bathetic.…

My, what beautiful curly braces you have Stob Oh hey, Verity, how's it going? What have you been up to? Busy, busy, busy?…

With the help of what looks like vibrating dinner plates Have you ever wanted to land a drone on your arm as if the gizmo were some sort of metallic bird of prey? Well, if so, you’re in luck. Sort of.…

Is ISOC 'severely harming' its reputation or ushering in a bold new future? Analysis At this year's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin, the opening ceremony, featuring German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was immediately followed by an hour-long session on the “future of internet governance.”…

Never complain about installing a printer again The Irish parliament is under fire for recklessly splashing €808,000 on a gigantic printer that it couldn’t even fit through its doors.…

Meanwhile, VMware had a bumper third quarter HP Inc presented pretty unexciting fourth quarter and end-of-year financial results – and stayed strictly silent about the elephant in the room: the threatened hostile takeover by Xerox.…

Tech giant shocked at non-profitable abuse of info Comment Google is under fire for sacking four staffers it says electronically stalked colleagues working on technology for the US Customs and Border Protection.…

* And by you, we mean slain or injured Amazon warehouse workers Amazon, a gigantic cloud provider with a department store in the basement, is having a crazy news week. Here's a quick summary.…

Execs accused of inflating advert views and sales on fondleslabs, signs installed in medical offices Four execs from a US medical tech upstart have been charged with bilking investors to the tune of more than $1bn.…

Just you wait, we'll do it, we'll force a merger, any moment now – face the fax, pal Xerox has vowed, again, to launch a hostile takeover of HP Inc by sidestepping the board and going directly to shareholders.…

Find out how Kubernetes simplifies DataStax deployments Webcast Growing numbers of enterprises are turning to hybrid and multi-cloud solutions for the advanced capabilities they can bring to IT operations. However, to make the most of these solutions, organisations must be able to handle workloads seamlessly across a range of different providers.…

Market: We're happy with that. (Cue 20% share price boost) Hyperconverged infrastructure purveyor Nutanix posted the biggest quarterly loss in its short history last night – but still got some love from Wall Street, with shares jumping 20 per cent in overnight trading.…

COOK, CUPERTINO: Well, um, things are looking up? 2019 was forecast to be a deflationary year for smartphone makers, and calendar Q3 didn't turn up any surprises – sales shrunk 0.4 per cent globally.…

Back in blacklist: Microsoft not keen on firm's IP addresses UK hosting outfit tsoHost (the artist formerly known as TSO Host) continues to suffer the blacklist blues as email woes have continued to beset the company.…

Coffee machines will listen to you if vendors implement it AWS has unveiled a flurry of updates to its IoT platform, including secure tunnelling, fleet provisioning, Docker containers on edge devices, and Alexa voice support on devices with 50 per cent less power than was previously required.…

$21.75m acre of Gone-with-the-Wind chintz in the Valley While moving house and changing job remain among the most stressful things in life for mere mortals, Bill McDermott is swapping Palm Beach for Silicon Valley weeks after leaving SAP to run ServiceNow.…

Did somebody say strategic diversification? BT's pipe-laying division Openreach is looking to further dilute its reliance on Huawei by issuing a tender seeking an additional infrastructure supplier to help build an FTTP broadband network.…

Customers don't want open-source K8s in production, claims Google Interview Kubernetes (K8s) is everywhere, so how do cloud vendors differentiate their offerings? Google's answer is Anthos, but this is a brand as much as a product.…

Unanimous decision of board to up sticks from Delaware The RISC-V Foundation, which directs the development of an open-source instruction set architecture for CPUs, will incorporate in Switzerland. Currently it is a non-stock corporation in Delaware, USA.…

KSQL gains point-in-time queries, becomes ksqlDB Kafka-flinger Confluent has had another crack at persuading relational holdouts that stream processing isn't all that scary, by way of the SQL-like ksqlDB.…

Soundbar slingers make faulty ear things too Owners of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones are still trying to get the company to either fix or roll back a firmware update that removed noise-cancelling functions from their over-ear gear.…

Flaws are 'far beyond merely inconvenient', writes Janelle Shane Book review Everyday AI has the approximate intelligence of an earthworm, according to Janelle Shane, a research scientist at the University of Colorado but better known as an AI blogger.…

Technically possible but there's no way to check... for now Giant planets up to ten times the mass of the Earth can form around violent supermassive black holes without the need for stars, according to research accepted into The Astrophysical Journal.…

Protests kick off, Vint Cerf tells folks everything's fine One week after the news the non-profit .org internet registry was to be sold to a private equity firm, the board of the organization that has to approve the purchase met in private to discuss the situation.…

Rogue SDKs covertly harvested personal info, it is claimed Twitter and Facebook on Monday claimed some third-party apps quietly collected swathes of personal information from people's accounts without permission.…

Financial numbers fall short of already modest Wall St predictions HPE tried to make the best of a rough quarter and year as the enterprise IT giant turned in lackluster numbers for fiscal 2019.…

Who's a good cyber-boy? Now, please don't kill anyone Vid Massachusetts' bomb squad have put a Boston Dynamics Spot robot through its paces, making the cops the first US force to deploy the four-legged machine in the field.…