The Register

Second failure in last three missions doesn't inspire confidence The European Space Agency (ESA) and Arianspace have commissioned an inquiry into the failure of a Vega rocket that crashed on Tuesday, destroying a pair of Earth monitoring satellites built by French and Spanish researchers.…

Gather ‘round, Blockheads, so we can explain this thing called a ‘virtual machine’ and why it matters Blockheads are about to get a new appreciation of private clouds and application packaging, after VMware launched a Blockchain product.…

But Red Hat points out its code-base is so big that mastery of inclusivity will take time A new group called the “Inclusive Naming Initiative” has revealed its existence and mission “to help companies and projects remove all harmful and unclear language of any kind and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms.”…

Campaign even targeted branch offices inside China and sought secrets of automotive and engineering companies Broadcom’s security subsidiary Symantec has named a China-linked hacking gang known as “APT 10” and “Cicada” as the probable source of a year-long attack on Japanese interests around the world.…

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do when they run an algorithm for you? The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has banned commercial facial recognition software and launched a review after 25 officers were accused of using it unofficially to try to identify people.…

Great timing because we're all in a rush to travel these days Boeing 737 Max passenger jets are today closer to returning to service in the United States after America's aviation watchdog lifted a 20-month ban albeit with caveats attached.…

Arizona-led fight over battery-gate ends in settlement Apple has agreed to pay $113m to settle a lawsuit with multiple US states that said the tech giant unfairly hobbled the performance of millions of iPhones.…

Secure coding, identity management, patching, configuration controls, what madness is this? Every now and again the US Congress manages to do its job and yesterday was one of those days: the Senate passed a new IoT cybersecurity piece of legislation that the House also approved, and it will now move to the President’s desk.…

You'll have to run x64 version through the Rosetta emulation layer, or give it access to the Mac Bluetooth radio Updated Google's attempt to launch its Arm port of Chrome for Apple Silicon Macs got off to a rocky start after it was forced to pull the browser over stability concerns.…

Magecart variant has changed and you should be alert, warns RiskIQ A new offshoot of the Grelos card-skimming malware - a common Magecart variant - is doing the rounds, according to infosec biz RiskIQ.…

Cupertino's cut will shrink to 15% for small coding shacks from 1 January Apple has overhauled commissions charged to small developers that turn over up to $1m on paid apps and in-app purchases sold via the App Store as the spotlight shines on its policies amid ongoing litigation.…

What could go wrong with NASA's SLS rocket? The Aitken system is finding out Amid NASA's plans to put boots on the Moon by 2024, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is blowing its own trumpet that simulations in preparation for the Artemis mission have been carried out on its Aitken supercomputer.…

We got Brexit, they also got broadband The Northern Ireland Executive has awarded a £165m contract to local infrastructure provider Fibrus Networks to expand gigabit-capable, full-fibre broadband to more than 78,500 rural homes and businesses.…

Another notch towards the SSL-only web Mozilla has released Firefox 83, including up to 15 per cent faster JavaScript and an optional HTTPS-only mode. The company has also found a new home for its Rust-based Servo project, which has been adopted by the Linux Foundation.…

Tech tackles two things: 'Aggregate statistics to improve an application, maintain the privacy of the people' The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) has a plan to allow companies to collect information about how people are using their products while protecting the privacy of those generating the data.…

Hot air? World-beating? Well, billions of the funding had already been committed earlier this year The UK government has launched a £12bn green spending strategy which includes measures to boost flagging nuclear investment and the development of hydrogen as an alternative fuel.…

Is this turnaround plan working or is the COVID-struck biz world improving? Shares in London Stock Exchange-listed Micro Focus are up by almost 30 per cent this morning after sales declines seen across the organisation slowed in the second half of its fiscal '20 ended 31 October.…

Threatens plenty of Zoom sessions in the days ahead... just as well they've updated security in recent weeks There's nothing quite like eating your own dog food, as Test and Trace chief Baroness Dido Harding has learned after being instructed to self-isolate by the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracing app overnight.…

Plus: HPE plugs AMD Epyc chips into NASA lunar-journey super Astronomers have revived a decade-old idea that was abandoned by NASA: a 100-metre-wide liquid-mirror telescope on the Moon to study the stars.…

It might need a new angle since the government already has form for shafting the economy Not a month seemingly goes by without the release of yet another "independent" report commissioned by hard pressed Huawei describing the business's importance to the UK economy.…

There could be up to £4m in it for the winner England's University of Manchester is casting the net for a tech integrator to help with its Oracle Financials upgrade in a project that could be worth £4m to the winning bidder.…

Join Deloitte and OutSystems to learn the nine essential steps Promo When the world kicks into gear post-COVID-19, are you going to be primed to leap into action, or will you be still reaching for the reset button?…

Suspect left a trail of bubbles for agents to follow A man accused of stealing $35m from victims of a convoluted algorithm-based Ponzi scheme was collared by FBI agents after he tried to flee using a submersible scooter in a frigid lake.…

Good thing Rosetta 2's x64-to-ARM64 emulator is all right because you may be using it a lot Mac hardware based on Apple's M1 chip has started showing up on early adopters' doorsteps, and the machines appear to perform well, even when the 64-bit Arm-based devices are emulating x86_64 instructions using Apple's Rosetta 2 emulation layer.…

Daniel Stenberg tells The Reg he's baffled by profile hack The creator of cURL reassured The Reg on Tuesday that he's not a billionaire rocket man giving away Bitcoins, no matter what his Twitter account claimed.…

Why Australia? Because it’s currently running an inquiry into app store monopolies, that's why +Comment Epic Games has had another crack at forcing Apple to let it handle in-game purchases itself, rather than through the App Store, this time by bringing a case in Australia – a nation currently running an inquiry into app store monopolies.…

Black is free on the Inspiron 15. ‘Soft Mint’ is a very expensive option Video If you have a spare £12m (US$16m) to hand, a kind Register reader let us know that Dell has just the laptop for you.…

China has the giant e-tailers, India has the customers, Brazil, Russia and South Africa are aboard The annual BRICS summit – a high-level meeting between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has resolved to explore development e-commerce consumer protections, both for their own citizens and possibly for the rest of the world.…

Terminated by presidential tweet that piled on the baseless election-rigging allegations CISA director sought to counter President Donald Trump tonight fired the boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the very organisation his administration formed with the aim of shoring up America's computer networks from hackers.…

In latest court bout, snooper biz seems to ask: Are you sure you want to open this can of worms? Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has taken a leaf out of Hollywood in an attempt to avoid any legal repercussions from making and selling tools that hack WhatsApp users' phones.…

Phone calls are so 1970s says Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Debt collectors will be allowed to chase people over their social media accounts under new rules approved by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).…

Downtime infuriates customers – guess they'll have to just swallow it Nest is down - again.…

Intel, AMD, Qualcomm are all on board Microsoft has joined hands with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm to release a new security chip called Pluton, which Redmond reckons will delete "entire vectors of attack" from the infosec landscape.…

So make sure you've updated since July, fandroids A crafty person could have slurped every single cookie from a Firefox-using Android device by tricking a user to look at a specially crafted HTML file.…

SnoSQL for Snowflake? Flurry of tech releases follow $33bn IPO Enjoying an avalanche of interest since its $33bn IPO, cloud-based data warehouse slinger Snowflake is promising support for unstructured data, ETL within its data cloud, and partners in its data market.…

'Yeah, that's how we roll,' an exec may have said at some point Smartphone brand OPPO has shown off its first "rollable" concept phone – though at this stage it isn't clear if this will go into full blown production.…

900-ton receiver platform threatens to plummet into dish below The remaining cables supporting a 900-ton platform hanging over America’s largest radio telescope are struggling to take the load, threatening the 1,000-ft wide reflector dish.…

Stateful L4 and L7 protection coming ... eventually VMware has revealed that it has firewall vendors in its sights by announcing that the security appliances will be virtualised to run on SmartNICs under its ‘Project Monterey’ plan to relieve CPUs from the chore of running network functions.…

Mudge work to be done after high-profile Bitcoin scam earlier this year Twitter has hired legendary hacker Peiter "Mudge" Zatko as head of security.…

Flippin' Dell! All major vendors lifted by pandemic purchasing frenzy... except one Chromebooks, tablets, and ultraslim notebooks dominated global growth of PC shipments into retailers and distributors in Q3 as demand for desktops melted away, according to the latest stats from Canalys.…

Come to think of it, has anyone checked in with the Queen lately? It's one of the industry's worst-kept secrets that media orgs write obituaries for prominent figures ahead of time, and premature publication can seem like a fate worse than death for a humiliated newsroom.…

Egregor gang publishes stolen data snippet but did anyone receive their extortion note? Ransomware criminals who targeted Edinburgh Woollen Mill are congratulating themselves on infiltrating the business and publishing their usual extortion demands – unaware the company has crashed into administration.…

Complaint was 'inaccurate' and tried to 'deceive' arbitrator, declares UK domain name registry Peli, makers of heavy plastic boxes, has been labelled a reverse domain name hijacker by Nominet after wrongly claiming ownership of a disputed website name.…

Watch as we effortlessly segue from BSODs to hovertrains Bork!Bork!Bork! It is tech mirroring life in today's edition of Bork as the text-based BSOD of yore is replaced by… the Sad Face of 2020.…

Veep needles British government: Without us, you'll 'widen the north-south digital divide' Analysis Huawei isn’t waiting for Donald Trump to concede, or, in fact, even leave the White House, before flexing its muscles again.…

Japanese Astronaut Soichi Noguchi bringing soft toy into space was only surprise as Crew-1 docked Crew-1, the first ever four-passenger flight to the International Space Station (ISS) and also the first time NASA has formally used a commercial craft to carry astronauts, has docked safely.…

Big Sur highlights shortcomings in OCSP comms, APIs Analysis Apple plans to revise the way it checks the trustworthiness of Mac applications when they're run – after server problems last week during the launch of macOS Big Sur prevented people's desktop apps from starting.…

Top speakers, new courses, all live online Promo If you work in cybersecurity you’ll know that come December, it’s time to kick back, take stock… and prepare for whatever devilish tricks the hacker community is planning to pull over Christmas and into 2021. And this year and next can be expected to be particularly challenging, with cyber criminals looking to take advantage of a chaotic 2020, whether it’s by targeting the security gaps opened up as your workforce has gone remote or ripping the headlines for enticing spear phishing material.…

Consortium of dealers and resellers buys 70-million-a-year handset-maker Huawei has sold its low-end Honor handset business and all-but admitted the deal was necessary due to US technology export restrictions.…

US giant breaks privacy law by generating per-user 'digital license plate' without permission – claim Privacy activist Max Schrems is back, and this time he has filed complaints against Apple for privacy violations over a cookie it places in iPhones for some advertisers.…