The Register

That time a PA put the 'ass' into 'asset tag' On Call How's your Friday shaping up? Come join us for another dive into the piranha-infested waters of what we at The Register like to call On Call.…

Our practical no-hype conference on AI development Event Whether it’s fraudsters or system crashes that keep you awake at night, join us at the MCubed conference to find out how machine learning and AI can tackle both problems.…

What could possibly go wrong? Video The Russian national space agency has strapped a hefty humanoid robot weighing 160kg (353lb) to a rocket and launched it to the International Space Station.…

Meanwhile, Salesforce sees profits fall Imaginary computer specialist VMware boosted its security and cloud software lineup today when it confirmed Thursday the purchases of Carbon Black and Pivotal Software in deals totaling around $4.8bn.…

Wall Street miffed at flat Q3 earnings as printer boss set to take over in November HP Inc on Thursday reported sales of $14.6bn for its fiscal Q3 2019 financial results, up 0.1 per cent from the year-ago quarter and just shy of the $14.61bn average anticipated by Wall Street analysts.…

Security bod may be invited back into vuln reward program, Half-Life 3 still ain't happening Games giant Valve is attempting to make nice with the infosec bod who disclosed zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities in Steam after the corporation refused to pay out bug bounties for the flaws.…

Disclaimer: No advertisers were harmed in making this project On Thursday, Google reminded everyone who might have forgotten that "privacy is paramount to us" and announced an initiative called "Privacy Sandbox" that proposes paving over a few privacy pitfalls without suffocating its ad business.…

Resigns – or punished for telling the truth? Wake up, sheeple! Ten days after releasing a corporate press release that raved about the deep state, men in black, and confirmed his love affair with a now-jailed Russian spy, the CEO of Overstock has quit – in similarly colorful fashion.…

Could a simple automated scan have picked up open-source nasty? Hmm Android spyware – open-source spyware, no less – has found its way onto the Google Play store, according to researchers from ESET.…

US sends up another GPS III spacecraft while Blighty ponders the Brexit Satellite United Launch Alliance's last Delta IV Medium+ rocket has left the launch pad to put another GPS satellite in orbit.…

Look at the troubles facing legacy vendors. We're not immune either Pure Storage has clipped forecasts for its current fiscal year due to fears over the slowdown in corporate spending that is gripping other infrastructure outfits and a sharp decline in NAND prices.…

Repairability score tumbles – good luck swapping that battery Samsung's latest and greatest Note10+ smartphone has been prodded and probed by the teardown twiddlers at iFixit. The verdict isn't great: repairing it could be worse but it could also be a whole lot better too.…

Email issues dog the company formerly known as 1&1 Ionos, the hosting company formerly known as 1&1, has found itself on Microsoft's naughty list as emails from its servers won't reach Outlook.com accounts.…

Learn about all hyperconvergence, multi cloud, and more Promo Nutanix invites you to its summertime Cloud Shack – an eight-part series of videos on hot topics such as hyperconvergence, business application management, storage, virtualization, networking, and multi-cloud deployments.…

Blighty not even on track for legally binding 2023-2032 levels Electronic cars will not help the UK government meet its carbon emissions target, with MPs warning people will have to ditch their cars entirely.…

You can make your own joke about foxes and hen houses... The Linux Foundation has signed up the likes of Microsoft and Google for its Confidential Computing Consortium, a group with the laudable goal of securing sensitive data.…

An offer you can refuse? Google has come up with a neat idea to promote its serverless container service, Cloud Run, by asking developers to incorporate a "Run on Google Cloud" button into their git repositories.…

Mere threat of time on naughty step has ISP redrafting An advert for TalkTalk broadband has been taken down for promoting incorrect speeds, The Register can confirm.…

El Reg speaks to small-sat upstart in Edinburgh Interview With two launches of the SkyLark Nano under its belt, Skyrora aim to go orbital in the coming years - assuming UK Parliament keeps up. The Register had a chat with the Brit rocketeer at its Edinburgh HQ to learn more.…

It has been foretold! IT prophesier Gartner has performed its ritual reading of market omens to foretell next year's global 5G network infrastructure revenue. The hype wizards reckon that in 2020 the market will hit $4.2bn, an 89 per cent increase from 2019 revenue of $2.2bn.…

Google's little-known Auto Update Expiration D-Day leaves users bereft of auto software refreshes and more – here's how to check yours It is unlikely to be printed on the box, but every Chromebook has an "Auto Update Expiration (AUE) Date" after which the operating system is unsupported by Google.…

It's not about the money, it's about the identifiers Analysis Facebook's proposed digital currency Libra, and its accompanying digital wallet Calibra, should be scrutinized not only by financial regulators – as lawmakers in the US and Europe have already started to do – but by national entities concerned with law, public safety and defense.…

Book now: Serverless Computing London early-bird ticket offer ends soon Event When you're getting to grips with new technology, there’s nothing like learning from experts who’ve done it before. And when those folks hail from some of the most well-known companies in the world, all the better.…

EoP bug now free for the world to see after bounty was rejected A security bod angry at Valve's handling of bug reports has released a zero-day vulnerability affecting the games giant's flagship Steam app.…

Plus UCS and other gear need updates Cisco has emitted a fresh round of software updates to address security holes in its network switches and controllers.…

Computing giant labeled 'ungenerous' for fighting lawsuit Apple has lost its bid to dismiss a former employee's lawsuit over claims he invented services like Find My iPhone and Passbook but was not included on patents subsequently filed by the tech giant.…

* Terms and conditions apply. Offer not valid outside Kazakhstan. Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up payments On Wednesday, Google, Apple, and Mozilla said their web browsers will block the Kazakhstan root Certificate Authority (CA) certificate – following reports that ISPs in the country have required customers to install a government-issued certificate that enables online spying.…

Feds claim John Pierre Dupont created fundraising websites supposedly for Beto O'Rourke, others, then nicked the dosh A man facing criminal charges for bilking US voters out of $250,000 by accepting donations for politicians, including Beto O'Rourke, is on the run.…

Better to be aggressive and safe than sorry IT admins could go a long way towards protecting their users from malware and other dodgy stuff on the internet if they ban access to any web domain less than a month old.…

Supermarket biz wants them torn out at Musk firm's expense American supermarket chain Walmart is suing Tesla over claims that solar panels supplied by Elon Musk's company keep setting its shops on fire.…

60-mile Virginia roadtrip thankfully ended peacefully A US Army officer who "borrowed" an armoured vehicle to go on a joyride has been cleared of wrongdoing by a military court – by "reason of insanity".…

Now, about those parachutes... While ESA continues to grapple with balky parachutes ahead of the ExoMars 2020 mission, the cameras for the Rosalind Franklin rover have been fitted to the British-built trundlebot.…

Portable Linux with fully open-source hardware in the CutiePi A team of Taiwanese engineers is planning to release an eight-inch tablet based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+.…

Doors on the Edge Insider Bounty Program flung open Having finally pushed out the first Beta preview of its Chromium-based browser, Microsoft has launched a bounty programme aimed at getting researchers to kick the tyres on its latest and greatest.…

So much for Beto O'Rourke's cow-related capers The youthful doings of US presidential wannabe Beto O'Rourke are in sharp decline, according to threat intel biz Recorded Future, which reckons folk have fallen out of love with hacktivism.…

Where is Microsoft and what have you done with them? Microsoft emitted a fresh preview of command-line darling PowerShell 7 last night, highlighting some additional slurping – and how to shut it off.…

'Project Marble' focuses on quality ahead of big features Google has released Android Studio 3.5, codenamed Project Marble, saying that the team has worked for eight months on product quality ahead of big new features.…

Weak pound and China trade war make Blighty attractive proposition – research Foreign investors poured $6.7bn (£5.5bn) into the UK tech sector in the first seven months of the year, more than the whole of 2018.…

Hoddesdon bit barn outage blamed as customer emails falter, corporate sites go dark Updated Hosting-cum-cloud-slinger Claranet had a very, very bad start to Wednesday as customer sites toppled over and email services stuttered to a halt due to an issue at one of the company's server estates.…

Mountain of digital detritus 'not sustainable' – survey Brits are stockpiling an estimated 40 million old phones and laptops instead of recycling their digital detritus, which contain elements that could run out in the near future.…

If you want to train neural networks quickly, keep packing in the transistors Hot Chips The machine-learning world is obsessed with training AI models as quickly as possible and if the hardware community is to keep up, future chips will need to have more memory.…

Keep your media player, like other apps, up to date: 13 security flaws fixed VideoLAN has issued an update to address a baker's dozen of CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its widely used VLC player software.…

Biggest recruiters for techies remain AWS, NHS and BSkyB Group IT job postings in the UK are being battered by Brexit and the lingering uncertainty of leaving the EU without a Withdrawal Agreement on 31 October.…

Thief swipes Reg vulture's computer from under his fingers in cafe – here's what happened next Comment There were two fleeting moments of confusion: first when he grabbed my laptop from under my fingers and took off racing out the coffee shop; and second, when it became clear that the license plate wasn't real.…

Scale Computing is here to drill through all the buzz Webcast As organisations see their volume of data growing at an ever-faster rate, many find themselves struggling to manage this avalanche of information, not just securely but without incurring exorbitant costs.…

Russian bank-hacking ring continues its global expansion The rapidly growing hacking crew dubbed Silence, has – in less than three years – gone from ransacking small regional banks in Eastern Europe to stealing millions from some of the largest international banks.…

...Knowing they just cannot duck Git: Repos to be deleted when support ends The announcement this week that BitBucket is dropping support for Mercurial is another nail in the coffin for the software.…

Forget Mars, Jupiter’s moon could be where life’s at NASA has confirmed its Europa Clipper spacecraft will head off to the Jovian moon in search of signs of life and a landing zone for future exploration.…

Developer account cracked due to credential reuse, source tampered with and released to hundreds of programmers An old version of a Ruby software package called rest-client that was modified and released about a week ago has been removed from the Ruby Gems repository – because it was found to be deliberately leaking victims' credentials to a remote server.…

FCC delivers postmortem after blunder cripples US fiber links A handful of bad network packets triggered a massive chain reaction that crippled the entire network of US telco CenturyLink for roughly a day and a half.…