The Register

'u ok m8?' A fast radio burst, a mysterious type of powerful electromagnetic energy poorly understood by scientists, has been spotted in our own galaxy for the first time. It's been traced to a magnetar, an exotic form of neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field.…

Promises mid-2022 opening of full three-AZ region in central Indian city AWS has announced a new region in India, its second in the nation.…

Six-day outage predicted as rebuild commences from untouched backups Brazil’s Superior Tribunal de Justiça has temporarily shut down after a suspected ransomware attack.…

Cops used the opportunity to figure out remote access traps A tech support scammer making random phone calls in the hope of finding a victim called the cybercrime squad of an Australian police force, which used the happy accident to document the scam and inform the public what to watch out for.…

Plus or minus a load of caveats San Francisco will tax businesses slightly more if a chief executive earns orders of magnitude more than their rank-and-file employees after residents voted in favor of the rule.…

Trio of bugs reported by Google Project Zero, plenty of other flaws addressed Apple on Thursday issued security updates for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS that address three holes reported by Google's Project Zero bug hunters among exploitable flaws found by others. Installing the latest software for your iPhone, iPad and so on will address these programming blunders.…

'Individual X' said to have surrendered the digital dosh The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a legal request to formally take control of more than $1bn in Bitcoin (BTC) generated from the sales of illicit goods at Silk Road.…

Still, it'll make using the platform from home marginally less excruciating There was great excitement followed by great disappointment in the collaboration world this week as Microsoft appeared to confirm multiple account support for Teams before slapping on the inevitable gotcha.…

DevOps tool's maintainer says he's 'very happy with the results' The core maintainer of popular DevOps tool Jenkins has said GitHub's new code-scanning tool helped identify seven previously unknown vulnerabilities in plugins on the platform.…

Successful recovery would make it the first and only reusable orbital-class small launch system Rocket Lab's next mission has been named "Return to Sender" as the company confirmed plans to arrest the descent of its Electron booster via parachutes.…

Convert a jumble of documents into neatly structured data - if you are lucky Google Cloud Platform is previewing Document AI, a new service for automatic extraction of data from documents, such as key/value pairs in forms, with a choice of parsers and an option to use a custom model.…

Aerial ammo deliveries – always handy when you're storming a beach Rise of the Machines The British military's push towards autonomous war machines continued as the Royal Marines tested various items of robot battlefield equipment during a recent exercise in Cyprus.…

ISP reckons it can hit national coverage by end of next year Virgin Media added 125,000 premises to its network during the third quarter of 2020, a period for which the Liberty Global-owned telecoms giant posted weaker profits and marginal revenue growth.…

That was still dwarfed by clods using 'password' itself, though Britons began using the word "vision" in their passwords after prime ministerial advisor Dominic Cummings was caught travelling across the country from his parents' farm in Durham to Barnard Castle "to test" his eyesight, according to research from Pen Test Partners (PTP).…

Cloudy CRM monster's veep merry-go-round keeps spinning SaaS-y CRM vendor Salesforce has hired Accenture high-flyer Zahra Bahrololoumi as exec veep and CEO of its UK and Ireland biz.…

Not sure if we should be honoured or offended, but the Series S is a huge step up from its predecessor Review With Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo hitting the UK this week, global coronavirus cases assuring us the only way is up, and Christmas cancelled, there's never been a better time to sit your bum down, swot up on that "hygge" thing, and learn what it means to stay at home. For real this time. But there's another reason to take on the mantle of social distancing champ 2020 this month – the arrival of Sony and Microsoft's new games consoles.…

Third of customers stalling upgrades, says UK and Ireland user group data A third of SAP users have hit the brakes on migrations to S/4HANA, the German vendor's in-memory database-powered ERP system, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and related economic disruption.…

Pretty standard stuff, says analyst UK telco TalkTalk has asked regulators for an extension on its takeover negotations as it mulls a £1.1bn offer from Toscafund Asset Management.…

We're trying, insists beleaguered Information Commissioner's Office Scofflaws have failed to pay nearly £2m in fines handed out by the UK Information Commissioner's Office over the past 18 months, according to new research.…

And good luck – you're gonna need it A local authority in England's East Midlands has appointed HCL as the lead integrator for its SAP S/4HANA upgrade in a contract worth £1.5m.…

Copyright and trademark infringements alleged by Redmond's legal eagles Microsoft has flung numerous accusations at a reseller based in Florida in the US ranging from copyright infringement to the use of some decidedly iffy licence codes.…

A most uneXPected visitor: Windows cling-on spotted by Reg reader Discovery crew member Bork!Bork!Bork! What is the name of that thing that keeps clinging on even when everyone seems to agree that the time for it to go has long past? Today, Bork brings you the return of Windows XP.…

Security quiz site created by advisors includes inadvertent bonus round A website created for global consultancy Deloitte to quiz people on knowledge of hacking tactics has proven itself vulnerable to hacking.…

Nat Friedman says they'll make it harder to impersonate unsigned commits GitHub's CEO has denied that the site's source code was posted to GitHub.…

So it's been seized, along with a bunch of other sites, with Cloudflare accounts providing critical evidence On US presidential election day, 3 November, the nation's Federal Bureau of Investigation acted to seize 27 domains it says Iran used to conduct disinformation campaigns.…

Just don't think about winter In a bold headhunting effort, the Finnish capital city of Helsinki is offering a sabbatical in the Suomi state for Silicon Valleyites.…

Details vague, but ambitions cover 5G, security of comms infrastructure and sharing R&D India has signalled it will sign up to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom, covering "cooperation in the field of Telecommunications/Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)."…

Strong-arms Q4 and the year as China fuels 5G sales Qualcomm has hinted at future compute-centric products for the network edge and even the data centre.…

Sophos reckons Chinese gangs are behind attack it's charmingly chosen to name ‘KillSomeOne’ Security vendor Sophos has suggested Chinese purveyors of advanced persistent threats (APTs) are behind a recent wave of attacks on non-governmental organisations and other commercial entities in Myanmar.…

Choo choo! Mind the incoming 'A-train' orbital spacecraft A proposed constellation of 243 satellites, designed to beam internet connectivity to smartphones and under consideration by America's comms watchdog, will triple the existing risk of a potential collision with ten Earth science spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, NASA warned.…

James Baugh, David Harville hit with several new counts Two senior eBay executives who have refused to join their colleagues and plead guilty to charges of cyberstalking have been hit with a string of fresh charges.…

And bad news for Facebook, Google after Golden State favors online privacy measures Californians have overturned lawmakers in two critical ballot measures covering the gig economy and online privacy, with broader implications for the whole country.…

Desktop and Android versions both at risk Patch Google Chrome with the latest updates – if you don't, you're vulnerable to a zero-day that is actively being exploited, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned.…

Thanks for the memory An industry-wide supply glut of NAND and DRAM forced prices down over the summer leading to a steep decline in operating profit at SK Hynix, the South Korea memory maker reported today.…

Rules loosened by regulator, concerns raised they favor the rich The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given a big boost to companies seeking crowdfunded investment – think Kickstarter but securities rather than physical stuff you buy. Organizations are now exempt from various regulatory requirements if they raise at most $5m, up from the previous cap of $1m.…

NCRFRILS had never been disclosed publicly – until court case A protester accused of punching a police officer was arrested after he was identified by facial-recognition software that has not been publicly disclosed before: the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System (NCRFRILS).…

That's going to smooth relations between Larry and Jeff Cloud computing superpower AWS has secured the services of Oracle veteran Rich Geraffo as veep for its Americas sales team amid the ongoing market tussle with Big Red.…

Suit pushes Uncle Sam to release documents comms giant alleges were suppressed due to 'policy objectives' Embattled Chinese telecoms outfit Huawei has filed suit against the US government over allegations it is "stonewalling" legitimate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.…

Savage judge condemns crim's behaviour as 'utterly stupid' An Essex IT worker has walked free from court after screwing with the British Business Bank's systems in revenge for not getting a payrise.…

News aggregator says it's 'way more complicated and much harder to parse' The BBC website, the sixth most popular in the UK, has mostly migrated from bit barns to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with around half the site now rendered on AWS Lambda, a serverless platform.…

It has been Biden its time Voters in Massachusetts have approved a ballot measure that is widely being interpreted as a major win for the right-to-repair movement.…

Orbital lab emerges from teens to an uncertain future. How very 2020 The world's space agencies (at least those involved in the International Space Station) popped the Champagne corks this week to celebrate 20 years of continuous human occupation of the orbiting laboratory.…

Gartner's finest – a former vulture – draws clouds over eyebrow-raising connectivity plan A company working with a hydrogen-powered 5G drone maker claims to have built an airborne 5G base station antenna "unlike anything ever seen before" – and that just 60 of them could replace Britain's terrestrial 5G networks.…

Hip to be square and aimed at the Euro crowd Review First impressions are important, and the X51 5G is Vivo's inaugural device for the crowded European smartphone market.…

Oh sorry, did you expect this headline to work out differently? There are less than two months to go before the UK departs its 40-year relationship with the EU and it is still working on the IT systems needed to make the new arrangement work.…

Get ready for Energy Star stickers on your robo-butlers, maybe? Training OpenAI’s giant GPT-3 text-generating model is akin to driving a car to the Moon and back, computer scientists reckon.…

But first, he gets a judicial review and chance to extend eight-year legal saga New Zealand’s highest court has ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States of America to face charges of copyright infringement.…

Critical Acrobat, Reader flaws evidently couldn't wait until next week Adobe on Tuesday published updated versions of its Acrobat and Reader software to fix fourteen flaws, four of which have been designated "critical." These updates should be installed as soon as possible to close off their vulnerabilities.…

And it’ll be in proper SSDs, not cheap NAND muck that drives infotainment systems today, say analysts Passenger cars on sale in 2025 will ship with a terabyte of storage, according to analyst firm Counterpoint, and fully autonomous cabs might need 11TB of capacity.…

Taking a strategic stake in the biz probably helped and shows how big tech is buying into Asia Microsoft has taken a “strategic stake” in Indonesian e-tailer Bukalapak and will run the service in its Azure cloud.…