The Register

The aging structure is too hazardous to repair, engineers say The Arecibo Observatory, America’s largest radio telescope, is to be blown up after the National Science Foundation decided recent damage has left it too dangerous to repair.…

Proposed legislation calls for research to detect synthetic shams online On Wednesday, proposed US legislation to fund defenses against realistic computer-generated media known as deepfakes was approved by the US Senate and the bill now awaits consideration in the US House of Representatives.…

Enhanced network security for AWS virtual private cloud – while Microsoft previews Azure Firewall Premium AWS has announced Network Firewall, a new service drawing on the open-source Suricata project.…

Also: Skyrora aims for 2023 for its XL, ISS gets ready for Nauka, and HALO moves forward In Brief British rocketeer Skyrora has been testing the third-stage engine for its Skyrora XL rocket with launch planned for 2023.…

What time is it? It’s Hammerspace live demo time Promo Using Kubernetes across on-prem and the cloud is a tantalizing idea, but it’s sometimes difficult to put your finger on exactly where data is supposed to live while you’re doing this, and how you should serve it up wherever it is needed.…

Trying to get that one weird app working on new Mac silicon? Anyone pondering how to get Intel-based Windows apps onto shiny new Apple M1 devices have been thrown a lifebelt by CodeWeavers.…

'There are no American vendors for the network equipment that fuels our wireless economy' The US House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Utilizing Strategic Allied Telecommunications Act of 2020, which earmarks $750m in grants to support the domestic development of OpenRAN.…

Creaky old law holds back global competitiveness, says group A majority of British infosec professionals worry about accidentally breaking the UK's antiquated Computer Misuse Act, according to an industry campaign group that hopes to reform the law.…

Time Lord tapped to introduce youngsters to hardware and coding The BBC has created a Doctor Who-themed miniature computer, powered by a SiFive RISC-V system-on-chip, to help teach children how to program.…

These things cost over $3m new Ah, kids. Who'd have them, right? Well, for many the biological imperative proves strong and this is why we can't have nice things. However, some people – like Dallas TX-based real estate billionaire Tim Gillean – can afford to have both nice things and children.…

Expandability traded for performance Apple last week set the cat among Intel's pigeons with the launch of its first PCs incorporating silicon designed in-house.…

Amnesty period ends, time to control those 'runaway processes' or pay up Container crew Docker has completed rolling out new pull limits for non-paying users, but claimed that only 1.5 per cent of users are affected.…

Ad biz is serious about making others disclose information collection Hot on the heels of Apple slapping privacy "nutrition labels" on app listing pages in its App Store, Google says it plans to require similar privacy disclosures from those offering Chrome extensions in its Chrome Web Store.…

One framework to rule them all? Or yet another one to add to the confusion? Microsoft has released Preview 3 of WinUI 3, its next-generation framework for Windows desktop applications.…

Yes, our current girth would welcome some age-appropriate Pokémon GO Updated UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey has awarded a contract to develop an augmented-reality game it hopes will bring some 21st-century tech to the great British outdoors.…

'Like any good family, you're going to have fights,' says dev relations bloke The team behind the NoSQL database DataStax, which is built on Apache Cassandra, has emitted a distribution designed specifically for Kubernetes and supports stateful workloads – and it's called K8ssandra.…

Posts sharp Q3 data centre growth and nice gaming numbers but has nothing to say about Arm Nvidia believes another wave of growth lies ahead of it as microservices create demand for faster data centre networks and therefore a need to offload security and networking chores from hard-pressed CPUs.…

DKIM 'makes us all more vulnerable to extortion, blackmail,' argues Green Matthew Green, associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US, wants Google and other email providers to make it possible for people to deny they've written old email messages.…

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.…