The Register

Watch out, Carl's about It was only a matter of time before Carl Icahn got involved in the developing story that is HP and Xerox's marriage. The IT industry's biggest, baddest corporate raider is using his $1.2bn stake in HP to push for nuptials.…

Wait, wait, wait... there is good news: It has a Spotify app. What a winner Analysis Augmented reality hype-merchant Magic Leap has had to whip out its begging cap, sorry, sorry, its once-in-a-lifetime investment chest again for venture capitalists to top up with with millions of dollars.…

GitHub opens beta of handheld tools, unveils Arctic stunt, and other stuff GitHub used the first day of its Universe developer conference to roll out a slew of new projects, including a dedicated mobile app.…

A64FX: Big in Japan, big in the US, UK at this rate Cray has said it will build a family of supercomputers for government research labs and universities. The kicker? The exascale machines will be powered by Arm-compatible microprocessors.…

US government told it must give a reason to snub policy A federal judge in the US state of Washington has struck down a settlement that would allow people to post blueprints and instructions to 3D-print guns, claiming it was unlawful.…

Plans to continue with $35m to back Hub and Desktop. Yes, Kubernetes has truly won Docker has handed the Enterprise portion of its containerization business to Kubernetes cloud outfit Mirantis in a surprise sell-off.…

Make a notebook, fanbois A 16-inch MacBook Pro – with a freshly designed keyboard that isn't trashed by dust and includes a "physical" escape key – has landed, but it won't come cheap, costing the same as a modest family holiday or a second hand car.…

It's happening! Vodafone has replaced 2,600 roles with "600 bots" as part of a "long-lasting structural opportunity to reduce cost", the company revealed in its half-year results earnings call.…

Has it found an investor in £1.5bn venture to build 3 million FTTP connections? TalkTalk has today delayed its financial results due to "advanced negotiations with interested parties regarding its FibreNation business".…

Was UK even really in the running? 'Leccy car baron and space botherer Elon Musk has unveiled a surprising pick of Berlin for the company's European "Gigafactory 4", quickly following up by blabbing to car mag Auto Express that "Brexit had made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK."…

Woman fined £1,500 for tirade over commuter's weird brekkie Eating on the train is no yolk. One woman felt so strongly about it, she's now nursing a £1,500 fine after eggsploding with rage at a fellow commuter for gobbling a hard-boiled pre-chicken on the service from Chelmsford to London Liverpool Street.…

Also: what's in Redis 6 ... and how to compete with free Redis on public cloud Interview "Almost every one of our on-prem customers is shifting to K8s," Redis Labs CTO and co-founder Yiftach Shoolman tells The Register.…

Supermarket says it's innocent and we don't need more than that, ICO told judges The UK's Information Commissioner urged the Court of Appeal to side with Morrisons in the supermarket’s battle to avoid liability for the theft and leaking of nearly 100,000 employees’ payroll details – despite not having read the employees’ legal arguments.…

Or you could try Gitpod... Microsoft is offering cloud-hosted developer environments for those using Visual Studio Code or, in private preview, Visual Studio.…

Case to be heard in full next year A man will appear at Crown court in December to answer charges that he used hacking program Sentry MBA to access and take money from online UK National Lottery gambling accounts.…

Chipzilla, Mozilla, Fastly, and IBM's red-hatted stepchild plot browser-breakout On Tuesday Fastly, Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat teamed up to form the Bytecode Alliance, an industry group intent on making WebAssembly work more consistently and securely outside of web browsers.…

It might be organic life, but more likely chemistry says NASA A new Martian mystery has left scientists baffled. The oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere seems to rise every spring and summer and fall during autumn and winter, and scientists have no idea why.…

Set your developers free to innovate Webcast Skilled developers are a valuable asset – so how do you make the most of their time as constant requests and projects compete for their attention?…

Prosecutors say 29 year-old was mastermind of prolific 'Cardplanet' operation A Russian man was detained at Dulles airport in Washington DC on Monday and charged with running a stolen card trading ring that was responsible for $20m worth of fraud.…

Meanwhile Facebook appears to have shot itself in the foot Up is down and down is up when it comes to one of the most important, and now controversial, US legal protections for internet companies.…

Massachusetts judge reminds America of that little thing called the Fourth Amendment The seizure and search of phones and laptops at the US border is unconstitutional, a judge said Tuesday in a landmark ruling.…

Intel joins the fun with monthly releases from Adobe, SAP Patch Tuesday The November edition of Patch Tuesday has landed with scheduled updates from Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, along with the debut of a new update calendar from Intel.…

Plus Facebook Pay has launched: Why not give them access to your financial data? Facebook’s iPhone app has a new feature – and one that netizens aren't too happy about: it opens the phone’s camera app in the background without your knowledge.…

You know what they say: Timing is... everything Trusted Platform Modules, specialized processors or firmware that protect the cryptographic keys used to secure operating systems, are not entirely trustworthy.…

Take the kids somewhere nice Huawei, America's favourite bogeyman, is to dish out ¥2bn yuan (£219m) as a reward to employees working their arses off on contingency plans to mitigate the anti-China rhetoric coming from the US government.…

Boffins say even latest chips can be twisted into leaking data between processor cores Intel is once again moving to patch its CPU microcode following the revelation of yet another data-leaking side-channel vulnerability.…

Alarm raised over more holes in third-party low-level code Nearly three months after infosec biz Eclypsium highlighted widespread security weaknesses in third-party Windows hardware drivers, you can now add Intel to the list of vendors leaving holes in their all-powerful low-level code.…

It's Dell all the way down with subscription payment models Dell's new PowerOne converged infrastructure platform will be sold under a subscription and via a metered pricing arrangement that it has called Technology on Demand.…

Security suite falls victim to malicious DLLs Three of McAfee's anti-malware tools have been found to contain a vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to bypass its security protections and take control of a PC.…

Next stop, Solon and Elixirr – on top of role as Salesforce chair Former BT chief exec Gavin Patterson is a busy boy. On top of his position as part-time chair of Salesforce, the mullet-sporting, '80s businessman throwback will also be gracing two more companies.…

UK profits also down due to opex shift to IBM's cloud Vodafone reported a loss of €1.9bn (£1.6bn) in its latest half-year results ended 30 September, chalked up mainly to India's decision to change the way it charges telcos for using airwaves.…

This poisoned chalice had better be delicious A 10-digit dollar loss for Q2, hundreds of millions in forecast revenue clipped for the second half of the fiscal year, the ownership of business units being reviewed, and an admission that years of redundancies came home to roost.…

Also: Four RS-25 engines prepare for, at best, a watery grave Roundup While astronomers winced and Musk's rocketeers cheered the deployment of another 60 Starlink satellites into Earth orbit, there was plenty of other action in the rocket-bothering world.…

While hipster urbanites favour ride hailing and shared scooters Sales of greener cars remain proportionately minuscule in the US – even Elon Musk's shiny Tesla brand is failing to get more gas-loving Americans to ditch their petrol monsters in favour of something electric-based.…

Insiders can no longer jump off the testing train On the eve of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft began shifting Slow Ring testers onto 2020's Windows 10.…

'Really very everyday' – report The UK's Labour Party says its campaign site has been the target of "sophisticated and large-scale cyber-attack" and has informed GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre.…

Mass-mail fail followed outfit's appearance at jobs fair BT Security managed to commit the most basic blunder of all after emailing around 150 infosec professionals who attended a jobs fair – using the "cc" field instead of "bcc".…

Backup a minute, folks After weeks of acquisition rumours, Canadian enterprise software pusher OpenText bit the bullet yesterday and swallowed cloud backup and storage service vendor Carbonite for a cool $1.42bn.…

Nor is he called Andrew, but he's still getting messages about Dart Charge Despite El Reg writing about the case of the Ryanair passenger earlier this year who was registered for a flight in error after somebody mistyped his email address, poor old "Not That Gary" has been struck by the same problem again – thanks to someone using a toll bridge in southeast England.…

Chrome Dev Summit also brings resolution of tabs vs. spaces fight, for now At the Chrome Developer Summit on Monday, Google finally settled the tabs vs. spaces debate and celebrated web community diversity, now at risk of becoming a monoculture thanks to Chrome's market dominance.…

Not gonna happen again before 2032 Mercury, the smallest planet in our Solar System, appeared as a tiny black dot on Monday as it crossed the Sun’s surface in between the Earth and its star.…

Software giant promises to extend protections across US Microsoft has said that not only will it embrace a new data privacy law in California, due to come into force in the New Year, but will extend the same protections to everyone in the US.…

Remember the UK DeepMind scandal? No? Updated Google is at it again: storing and analyzing the health data of millions of patients without seeking their consent - and claiming it doesn’t need their consent either.…

Blame the algorithms - it's the new 'dog ate my homework' Apple is being probed by New York’s State Department of Financial Services after angry customers accused the algorithms behind its new credit card, Apple Card, of being sexist against women.…

Admins snoozing on patching despite reports of active attacks The flurry of reports in recent weeks of in-the-wild exploits for the Windows RDP 'BlueKeep' security flaw had little impact among those responsible for patching, it seems.…

Uber PRs missing the days of Travis Kalanick Opinion Two years ago, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was brought in to help the company recover from a long series of ethical and moral lapses. But based on an interview this week, it seems the company’s culture may be rubbing off on him more than he is impacting it.…

Educational institutions main target during September spike Kasperksy researchers have blamed pesky schoolkids for the big September spike in denial-of-service attacks.…

Gather round for this must-watch vid podcast Webcast The Register's storage editor Chris Mellor will interview Qumulo veep Molly Presley in a webcast set to be streamed on 19 November.…

Live from Cape Canaveral: El Reg watches Falcon do its stuff while astronomers worry about the skies The first upgraded batch of Starlink satellites were launched by SpaceX today, marking the fourth reuse of a Falcon 9 booster and the first of a payload fairing.…

Not even data recovery companies A data recovery company is dubiously claiming it has cracked decryption of Dharma ransomware – despite there being no known method of unscrambling its files.…