The Register

The cosmic ballet goes on Astronomers have discovered the first-known “sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system,” after a neural network flagged it up in data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).…

Security eggheads discover their PCs chatting with Kim Jong Un's hackers North Korea's hackers homed in on specific infosec researchers and infected their systems with a backdoor after luring them to a suspicious website, Google revealed on Monday.…

Turns out having coherent API documentation is useful for, well, everyone Google, Microsoft, and friends have pitched in about half a million bucks to create a project seemingly designed to prop up the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Web Docs.…

Meanwhile, staff get unexpected backing from football players Amazon has taken a leaf out of a certain former president's playbook, insisting that mail-in voting will result in a false result. This time, however, it’s a vote by Amazon’s Alabama warehouse staff on whether to unionize.…

The third-party advertising cookie: Barely tolerated anymore. We can rebuild it, internet titan insists, we have the technology. Analysis Google on Monday said it will make some of its Privacy Sandbox proposals available for testing with the release of Chrome 89 in March as part of its effort to rewire the technical infrastructure of online advertising.…

With a little $10bn package proposed to help them on their way President Biden is preparing to assemble a crack US government cybersecurity team, and has pledged $10bn in funding to shore up the defenses of Uncle Sam's computer networks.…

Miscreant fingered server that held docs related to credit applications down under The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has admitted one of its servers was accessed without sanction and may have been digitally pawed by miscreants.…

Upgrades? It's a bit of a Hotpoint The smartphone trade is beginning to resemble the market for white goods with punters increasingly likely to wait until their device is broken before seeking a replacement.…

Some things can wait, even if it is central to the 'economy's recovery' The UK's telecoms regulator has said it will delay the upcoming auction of the 700MHz and 3.6-3.8GHz radio bands as result of difficulties caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.…

Tune in here to find out how to smooth those tricky tenant-to-tenant migrations Webcast Setting yourself up on Microsoft 365 with a tenancy makes perfect business sense – until other business decisions mean you have to move that tenancy to another domain.…

Going low-level with C# and more The Win32 API is being opened up to more languages by Microsoft via the win32metadata project.…

Ain't nobody got time for that Twelve resellers have been awarded places on an NHS hardware contract for northern England in deals worth a total of £504m.…

Police pull out classic 'sophisticated cyber attack' line A 28-year-old has been arrested after allegedly carrying out what police have labelled a "sophisticated cyber attack" on a school.…

No, no, this shocker isn't related to the price of the hardware Apple fanboys will readily admit the iPhone sits close to their heart, such is the level of affection they hold. That said, if they've got a pacemaker or implanted defibrillator, you'd best hope they're speaking figuratively.…

'They're not closing a security hole, they're just requiring that everyone use Chrome' Fedora's maintainer for the open-source Chromium browser package is recommending users consider switching to Firefox following Google's decision to remove functionality and make it exclusive to its proprietary Chrome browser.…

Or maybe it's that no one wants to touch this complex SaaS migration The UK government has delayed the award of contracts worth £115m to power the migration from an on-premises platform for ERP to a cloud-based software-as-a-service model.…

The Department for Education needs to learn its lesson too Column It is not good form to ruin people's online privacy. It is especially bad form if you're in a position of authority when you do this. It goes beyond bad form altogether if you're the Department for Education and you are potentially exposing schoolchildren to online attacks. That is criminal neglect.…

The Natwest ATM of woe says no, bleats a plaintive: Børk! Bork!Bork!Bork! A chill wind from the North greets today's entry in The Register's pantheon of Bork. A hidden (and frozen) cashpoint awaits visitors to Newcastle station.…

What could be wrong when two UPSes commit seppuku? Who, Me? Welcome to an electrifying edition of The Register's regular Who, Me? feature in which a reader rues the day he decided to trust the electrician.…

Plus: GPT-3 seems especially hostile toward Muslims. And Cruise, Microsoft work together on self-driving cars In Brief Google last week locked the work account of the co-lead of its AI ethics unit, Margaret Mitchell, as she investigated the controversial ousting of her colleague Timnit Gebru.…

WARP Drive process automation code said to be 'extremely valuable' Tesla has fired and sued software engineer Alex Khatilov for alleged trade secret theft and breach of contract. The electric automaker claims its former employee copied thousands of files to his personal Dropbox account just days after being hired.…

Plus: SonicWall hacked, Qualcomm security wobble, warrantless cellphone monitoring by US snoops revealed In brief One-time ADT security engineer Telesforo Aviles, 35, pleaded guilty to computer fraud in the US after spying on women through their home surveillance cameras.…

Microscope needed to find tiny punctures in the hull Russian cosmonauts have detected another leak in the International Space Station – and suspect there may be a second – months after they just patched a hole.…

Meanwhile, web giant agrees to cough up euros to French publishers Google threatened to shut down its search service in Australia if the government passes legislation that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers Down Under for reusing their news content.…

Miscreants hit with $31m fines tho only pay what they can afford: $3.7m Three ticket resellers have agreed to settle US government charges that they unlawfully used software bots to obtain music, theater, and sporting event tickets for markup and resale.…

Awa' an bile yer heid, SEPA tells ransomware scum About 4,000 stolen files from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) have been dumped online by frustrated ransomware criminals after the public sector body refused to pay out.…

Medium-sized firm, big revenues, big target Updated A London ad agency that counts Atlantic Records, Suzuki, and Penguin Random House among its clients has had its files dumped online by a ransomware gang, The Register can reveal.…

Proud parent Huawei probably sobbing in the car Honor, the smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, today announced its first handset as an independent company. The Honor View40 is a sub-flagship blower, priced at ¥3,599 (about £400) and aimed initially at the Chinese market.…

Has your password been pwned? MS browser will tell you Microsoft has detailed how the Password Monitor feature in Edge works after it pushed version 88 of the browser into the Stable channel.…

It never really took off (commercially), apparently Alphabet has stuck a pin in its Project Loon broadband project, which sought to use high-altitude balloons to extend connectivity to areas considered hard to reach by traditional telcos.…

HMRC spent £53.2m maintaining creaky tech estate – report An ageing IT estate is responsible for the bulk of the UK tax collector's costs in adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from Parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee.…

'Not us, guv' from all involved – except TiVo, which fixed it while blaming nameless third party NSFW-ish The mystery began when a Reg reader wrote in to say their Xbox Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) was displaying an image of a suggestively posed semi-nude person alongside BBC4 while the channel was off air.…

Project members discuss conflict between principles and pragmatism because of need for non-free drivers A post on the Debian developer list about issues installing the operating system on a laptop sparked a debate about whether Debian's free software principles have become a blocker to adoption.…

You might want to wash the rolling pin first Something for the Weekend, Sir? Three weeks in to 2021 and we’ve run out of the leftovers at last. Things tend to get somewhat overcooked over the traditional holiday period and I’m pleased to see the back of them. They were getting hard to digest.…

Mice do like cheese after all On Call Welcome back to The Register's series of On Call stories from those who have to face the most unpredictable resource in the IT world: the user.…

And also fix up these other holes that can be exploited via HTTP requests, SQL injection, etc Cisco this week emitted patches for four sets of critical-severity security holes in its products along with other fixes.…

Saturn moon's largest liquid sea mapped by radar – and soon, robots? Titan’s largest sea of liquid is estimated to be up to 1,000 feet deep, judging from new radar analysis, making it an ideal location for a future autonomous robotic submarine to explore.…

Financial figures released minutes ahead of schedule after 'hacker' swipes and shares infographic Intel beat Wall Street’s expectations in its latest financial earnings on Thursday amid a rough year in which the semiconductor giant reached out to rival fabs for help in meeting demand for its silicon – and felt the pressure from AMD and others.…

Red Hat and off-prem see growth while revenue, profit down overall IBM on Thursday reported $20.4bn in revenue for its Q4 2020 earnings results, a decline of six per cent, and $73.6bn for the full year, down 4.6 per cent year-on-year.…

Fork that noise, says cloud giant amid licensing drama Amazon Web Services has responded to Elastic adopting more-restrictive software licenses by simply forking the latter's Elasticsearch and Kibana products with an open-source license.…

Deplatformed again, huh? Maybe take the hint A US federal district judge has turned down Parler's request for a preliminary injunction to force Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the social network, which is dominated by hate-and-misinformation-spewing netizens cast out or shooed away from other platforms.…

Net neutrality, internet-for-students advocate awaits Senate confirmation President Joe Biden has made Democrat FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel acting chairwoman of America's communications regulator.…

Boffins develop improved image poisoning technique to preserve privacy A group of computer scientists has released a privacy-focused web application to poison people's online images so they confuse commercial facial recognition systems.…

ASOP effort could help bring GUIs to industrial, IoT, embedded gear Alibaba-owned T-Head Semiconductor says it has ported Android 10 to its own RISC-V chips, highlighting increased momentum for the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) against proprietary alternatives.…

Department for Education says 'we believe this is not widespread' A shipment of laptops supplied to British schoolkids by the Department for Education to help them learn under lockdown came preloaded with malware, The Register can reveal.…

Thorough counter-detection methods laid bare by Redmond The SolarWinds hackers triggered one of their Cobalt Strike implants in the firm's network through a cunning VBScript that was activated by a routine system process, Microsoft has said.…

Tune in this month and learn about the promise of SuperPOD with DDN Webcast We all have problems, so wouldn’t it be great if we could all apply a supercomputer to cracking them?…

Groovy Gorilla 'completely usable' but some of the hardware remains off-limits Things can move fast in the IT world, and Linux on Apple silicon has gone from "ooh look, text on a screen" to something considerably more usable in a matter of days.…

Raising possibility of buildings that flex in earthquakes, and much more Engineers working in Switzerland say they have developed a method of writing data directly into materials, a process that changes the material's physical properties at the same time.…

Also: Survey shows IDE's dominance among .NET Core developers, despite cross-platform options Preview 3 of Visual Studio 2019 16.9, the next big release of Microsoft's Windows IDE, features debugging for Chromium-based WebView, audio cues in tests, and updated C++ support.…