The Register

Former NASA test engineer steps into the hot seat as acting head NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has left the US space agency with none of the drama associated with certain other American government handovers.…

The most expensive 119 words he's ever going to write A man who branded a Leicester law firm as "another scam solicitor" on review website Trustpilot has been ordered to pay it £28,500 in libel damages and legal costs.…

So are ya open source or aren't ya? Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon has attacked AWS for what he claims is unacceptable use of the open-source Elasticsearch product and trademark.…

And the possible impact of erased DNA and fingerprint data on live police investigations? Nope, doesn't know that either UK leader Boris Johnson has admitted he does not know how many live legal cases "will be frustrated" by the loss of 400,000+ records on the Police National Computer and cannot say when the data will be reinstated.…

And 3nm mid-to-high-end silicon to follow, claims analyst house Ahead of Intel publishing its latest quarterly financial results on Thursday, let's have a quick reminder of who is actually making chip manufacturer Intel's chips these days.…

Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ board for hobbyists and power users alike The Raspberry Pi team has announced its latest bit of hardware – the $4 microcontroller-class Raspberry Pi Pico.…

As Amazon tells the President: Vaccinate our staff, and we'll help you distribute it to everyone else It’s day one of President Biden's administration, prompting the question: what can we expect when it comes to technology over the next four years?…

Offer to challenge rules a 'scam', too, we're told The maker of a disallowed iOS app called Coronavirus Reporter has sued Apple claiming the iPhone overlord's refusal to approve the software violates America's antitrust law.…

A last gasp for the era of alternate facts Analysis Ajit Pai has left his position as head of the FCC – America's communications regulator – marking the end of an extraordinary four years where telecoms policy was dragged into the era of alternate facts. With sad inevitability, Pai has a list of his accomplishments in a similar fashion.…

Know-your-client demand may just be ignored by incoming Biden admin On Tuesday, during his last full day as US President, Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to curtail cyber attacks by directing the government to come up with rules requiring cloud service providers to better identify foreign customers.…

'The employment will be maintained, so there is no need to worry,' says CEO LG Electronics is reportedly considering leaving the smartphone business this year, according to a leaked internal memo issued by CEO Kwon Bong-seok.…

'First of many new programs,' says biz, but it is no substitute for free CentOS Red Hat, which is killing CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, will extend its developer subscription to allow free production use of RHEL for up to 16 systems.…

We must put long-underused spectrum to its best use, says outgoing chairman The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected a petition seeking to block Ligado Networks from deploying its LightSquared nationwide 5G network.…

As recommended by Peter Thiel On his last day in office, US president Donald Trump pardoned 73 people and commuted the sentences of 70 others – including Anthony Levandowski who admitted stealing trade secrets from Waymo while a self-driving car researcher.…

Rapid reuse in sight, as are yet another batch of Starlink satellites SpaceX has landed an individual Falcon 9 booster for a record eighth time after pushing the envelope on winds above the waiting drone ship.…

Let’s think about what data management should look like in the future – tune in here next week Webcast What’s your tech infrastructure going to look like in the next few months or years? You know, once we get past the current situation and find time to start innovating again. All of which may come sooner than you think.…

Storage cost saver combines IBM tape, Atempo software and OVH data centres OVHcloud has introduced tape-storage-as-a-service, based on IBM technology, in response to European data sovereignty and localisation requirements.…

O2 regained lost ground, while EE continued to assert its dominance The second half of 2020 brought improved 5G availability in the UK with London seeing some of the biggest gains, according to research by RootMetrics.…

Points finger at privilege escalation via application rights in Azure AD, which Microsoft says is as designed Security company Malwarebytes suspects a breach of its Office 365 and Azure tenancies is by the same attacker behind the SolarWinds hack, but reckons flaws in Azure Active Directory security are also to blame.…

Nearly every division enjoyed double or triple-digit growth for Q3 '21 The pandemic has been kind to Logitech, whose profits have almost quadrupled from what they were a year ago.…

Also: Qualifying Starliner and Blue Origin gets ready for humans In brief After an initial failure in 2020, the Virgin Galactic spinout reached orbit on its second try, with the LauncherOne rocket deploying its payloads to a 500km orbit.…

Element Matrix Services adds to the messaging interoperability toolbox Element Matrix Services is adding a bridge between hipster chat platform Slack and the open-source world of Matrix messaging.…

Scrutiny system worked OK until firm was forced off western chip tech US sanctions on Huawei got the Chinese firm kicked out of Britain, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has told Parliament – adding that he didn't feel under pressure to change the body's own verdict on keeping Huawei in UK mobile networks.…

A confession from ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer. Also: WPA fun in the Registry The product activation inflicted on Windows by Microsoft has few fans, but one of its creators stepped up over the weekend to explain and defend the maligned technology.…

Azure wins on Ultra Disk storage but it's expensive, says Cockroach Labs Distributed SQL database biz Cockroach Labs has analysed public cloud performance and concluded that Google Cloud Platform wins on throughput, although AWS is ahead on CPU performance and network latency.…

Surprisingly fixable... with a bulging toolbox AirPods are as close as you can get to a swearword in the repair world, known for being almost impossible to service thanks to their densely packed circuitry and closed design. Mercifully, that isn't the case when it comes to Apple's hugely expensive AirPods Max headphones.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

These things could be more common than first thought Astronomers have discovered the two largest-known radio galaxies to date. At a whopping 62 times the size of our own Milky Way, they are believed to be the largest single objects yet found in the universe.…

Expect it in handsets from Motorola, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 870, a 5G-capable system-on-chip designed for high-ish-end Android smartphones coming out at the end by March.…

Get your updates when you can for gear from scores of manufacturers Seven vulnerabilities have been found in a popular DNS caching proxy and DHCP server known as dnsmasq, raising the possibility of widespread online attacks on networking devices.…

Nation's IT ministry wants what Brussels is having The Indian government has sent a fierce letter to Facebook over its decision to update the privacy rules around its WhatsApp chat service, and asked the antisocial media giant to put a halt to the plans.…

Microsoft-owned code silo admits 'significant errors of judgment and procedure' GitHub has apologized for what it called “significant errors of judgment and procedure” in the firing of a Jewish employee for warning colleagues of neo-Nazis at the Capitol during its ransacking by pro-Trump rioters this month.…

Manifest v3 plus JavaScript timer throttling, vuln fixes, FTP killed off, etc Google on Tuesday announced the stable channel release of Chrome 88, which includes support for an extension platform revision known as Manifest v3.…

Instructions for spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems Any organizations that used the backdoored SolarWinds network-monitoring software should take another look at their logs for signs of intrusion in light of new guidance and tooling.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

'If this scenario occurred during a flight, the rocket would have continued to fly' After the weekend's shorter-than-hoped-for test firing of the core stage of NASA's monstrous Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, engineers have confirmed the hardware remains in "excellent condition" and blamed "test parameters that were intentionally conservative."…

No longer a corpo behemoth holdout Citrix has confirmed plans to buy Wrike, a project management and team-based collaboration tool, for $2.25bn.…

Peer-to-peer protocol promises availability and resilience, but awaits proof of speed and resource thrift Brave Software on Tuesday plans to release an update of its Brave browser that implements support for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol for storing and sharing data over a distributed network.…

Stop sniggering at the back! Today's lesson: Actually getting Teams working – aye, Scotland? How many poor underlings are trapped in Redmond's locker? Over 200 million, apparently. With BettFest 2021 firing up the virtual halls, Microsoft is trumpeting the number of devices it has in the world of education along with the penetration of its Teams platform.…

Redmond wants to improve key database library, but then why not just use Dapper? Microsoft's next major version of its Entity Framework (EF) database library for .NET will have long-term support and attempt to match rival Dapper for performance – an attempt, said senior program manager Jeremy Likness, that "will likely not be fully achieved."…

Key doc hasn't been updated since 2018, warn politicos and trade union The UK's Information Commissioner's Office needs to update its Code of Employment Practices to tackle workplace spying by bosses, the Prospect trade union and the Labour Party have said.…

Glue you! Well not anymore. Early signs are positive ahead of launch, but it's not without issues Preliminary teardowns suggest the Samsung Galaxy S21 is easier to fix than its predecessors, sidestepping some of the more dubious design decisions that previously frustrated third-party repair shops.…

BT-owned infrastructure firm workers in dispute over pay and terms It’s hard to pull solidarity out of the bag when everyone’s having a tough January but that’s what the General Secretary for the Communication Workers Union has asked the wider org to do for a small band of Openreach project engineers poised to vote on strike action.…

DMs at dawn Porting a workable Linux to Apple's new silicon is a modern-day Holy Grail for some. Sadly, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for those undertaking the quest.…

Back when AI meant William Daniels behind the dashboard Fans of 1980s memorabilia, rejoice! You too can wow your neighbours with your very own KITT, as owned by Knight Rider actor David Hasselhoff.…

Another unfortunate UAV episode for Sussex cops Updated A police drone operator managed to switch his craft off mid-flight, dropping it squarely into a pond while attempting to search for a missing person.…

Nice work if you can get it BT has been awarded a £20m contract extension, without competition, on a project that has already ballooned in value by 138 per cent.…

Burglary took place 3 months before biz discovered unauthorised entry Updated Anyvan, the European online marketplace that lets users buy delivery, transport or removal services from a network of providers, has confirmed it was the victim of a digital burglary that involved the theft of customers' personal data.…

Open source users warn adoption of copyleft licence could make use of Elasticsearch, Kibana a business risk Elastic, whose products include Elasticsearch and Kibana, has adopted a new licence called SSPL (Server Side Public License), as used by MongoDB. The aim is "to restrict cloud service providers from offering our software as a service," but others warn this could make the products risky to use unless a paid-for licence is adopted.…

Which is exactly what you should do Scotland's environmental watchdog has confirmed it is dealing with an "ongoing ransomware attack" likely masterminded by international "serious and organised" criminals during the last week of 2020.…