The Register

There may be carbon, water, clay, perhaps even platinum, gold in them hills NASA has stowed away its first ever sample of asteroid regolith, collected by its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from space rock Bennu, and is working on bringing the material home for 2023.…

Chocolate Factory spills beans on make-me-admin flaw Google's Project Zero bug-hunting team has disclosed a Windows kernel flaw that's being actively exploited by miscreants to gain administrator access on compromised machines.…

I'd take back that bork that hurt you, or drink tea.... Bork!Bork!Bork! While Marty McFly's Delorean remains the stuff of fiction, the power of Bork could allow you to experience 2013 while avoiding the disappointing cup of coffee that is 2020.…

Not without Apple's proprietary System Configuration app anyway Right-to-repair campaigners have discovered that Apple's iPhone 12 rejects replacement camera modules in the absence of a proprietary software tool.…

Yep, it's the artists occasionally known as APT28 The US government, in full pre-presidential election high alert, has issued a warning about an evolved strain of backdoor malware from a Russian offensive cyber unit.…

Sadly, the space opera franchise's first proper starfighter game in yonks just isn't that good The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. It's time to lock S-foils in attack position because we're checking out Squadrons, EA's attempt at a dedicated Star Wars space combat game, and the first in the genre to grace the galaxy far, far away for a long time.…

Analyst figures add insult to injury for embattled comms biz Huawei's godawful 2020 continues to worsen, with the Chinese smartphone maker suffering a double-digit drop in shipment volumes globally, according to analysts' preliminary Q3 sales estimates.…

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street needs help managing thousands of laptops, PCs and tablets The Bank of England has said it is looking for an IT supplier to support its extensive personal computer estate in a contract which is set to be worth around £46.5m.…

An unsightly stain among otherwise solid Apple results – considering the sh*t show that is 2020 Apple's iPhone sales shrunk for the second fiscal year in a row due to the delayed launch of its next-generation blower – the only blemish on an otherwise solid set of profit & loss accounts filed in the middle of a pandemic.…

UK watchdog's mooted £99m penalty comes in at just £18.4m Your name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, date of birth, and sex are worth just £0.05 in the eyes of the UK Information Commissioner's Office, which has fined Marriott £18.4m after 339 million people's data was stolen from the hotel chain.…

Employers seek software engineers, support, new grads, and more Job Alert We've got a bunch of interesting roles to get your teeth stuck into this week.…

And the 'acceptable company name' charset is hardcoded... in legislation Companies House has blocked someone who registered a new biz with a name that contained the right characters arranged in the right order to trigger a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against users of the service's API.…

Systems, networks staffers face round 2 as round 1 crew packs their cables BT workers in the Technology division are keen on taking industrial action to oppose the multi-year and multi-billion pound cost cutting programme that CEO Philip Jansen inherited and has continued to run.…

'X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed' Red Hat's Adam Jackson, project owner for the X.Org graphical and windowing system still widely used on Linux, said the project has been abandoned "to the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running."…

Also: ESA looks to the Moon, RocketLab launches another 10 sats, and SpaceX probably thinks that's cute In brief NASA has stuck a pin in 14 November (15 Nov for those running on GMT) for the launch of the first crew rotation mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to be launched from US soil.…

CyberStart America challenge aims to find talented network defenders Starting on Friday, US high school students can register to participate in CyberStart America, an online puzzle-solving game designed to identify cybersecurity talent and qualify participants for an opportunity to compete in the National Cyber Scholarship Competition next year.…

From pasta to teleporting robots: something to chew on Something for the Weekend, Sir? Did you enjoy World Pasta Day? It was last Sunday. Me, I made a big bowl of it and tucked in along with my mates Mark Arony and Al Dente.…

IT idiocy by government is as old as IT itself On Call Thundering IT incompetence by government is hardly new. While the antics of the present UK administration may have gone beyond satire, round out your week with an On Call reminder that things never really change.…

Pandemic makes for huge growth, but one customer remains elusive: Facebook plans $23bn new infrastructure spend Amazon Web Services remains the king of the clouds, at least when measured by revenue, according to analyst outfit Canalys.…

Snacks will ID themselves using RFID and an app will tell punters when there's cheap chow to be chomped Japan will conduct a test of sandwiches and other snacks that discount themselves as they age.…

Tickles the Azure Hybrid Benefit so that RHEL and SUSE users get the same deal as Windows buyers The fine folk at Licensing School have noticed a new-ish example of Microsoft’s ongoing ardour for Linux: a BYO licensing scheme that makes it easier to bring Red Hat and SUSE deals to Azure.…

'We are proud people choose Google Search not because they have to, but because it's convenient,' states CEO Google’s search and advertising business has bounced back, parent biz Alphabet said on Thursday as it revealed reported healthy revenues amid the coronavirus pandemic.…

State of local software industry also revealed: 7 million workers, $36bn of exports The Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party has declared the nation will become the world’s top innovator in coming years and says it wants to be entirely self-sustaining in tech within 15 years.…

Bezos predicts a very Merry Christmas Amazon on Thursday reported $96.1bn in revenue for its third quarter of 2020, a 37 per cent increase year-on-year that demonstrated its continued resistance to pandemic-induced economic malaise.…

Stark warning from SANS' Johannes Ullrich - RCE's gonna GET 'ya Last week Oracle released one of its mammoth quarterly patch dumps - with 402 fixes. Well, it turns out that if you missed one and you're running WebLogic 10.3.6.0.0, 12.1.3.0.0, 12.2.1.3.0, 12.2.1.4.0 and 14.1.1.0.0, you've probably already been tagged by hackers.…

Big money in American politics proves chum in the water for online sharks As America counts down to the November 3 elections, things are tense for political campaigns. There's a lot of money flying around and the online criminals have sensed blood in the water.…

'Facebook You Owe Us' wants to run a not-quite-class-action-style lawsuit A campaign to sue Facebook over lax privacy policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to slurp almost a million people's personal data from the social networking website hopes to become a representative action in the High Court, its instigators said today.…

It's all about timing, apparently The NHS has updated its COVID-19 app for England and Wales*, meaning it now uses the latest version of the contact tracing API co-developed by Google and Apple.…

And infosec firms say it's only got worse over this year Ryuk ransomware is being aggressively deployed to target US healthcare institutions, government cyber organisations in the US have warned.…

Don't suppose that factored into the '10 Reasons to be Excited About Workday at McGill!' Montreal's McGill University has left 150 temporary workers unpaid as it struggles to iron out technical problems and user training following the introduction of a new Workday HR and payroll system.…

Let us show you how to outsmart them Webcast If you think cybercriminals and hackers are without a shred of empathy or human understanding, you’d be wrong.…

Makes several consumer-industry appointments It must be a Sliding Doors moment for ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott - the former SAP boss is now plying his trade at a born-in-the-cloud biz that isn't facing the same troubles as his previous legacy tech employer.…

Plus 8GB RAM, USB, gigabit Ethernet, mini-ITX form, etc... and competition from Microchip SiFive will today unveil its latest developer board, which edges the startup closer to offering what you might consider a fully-fledged RISC-V desktop PC.…

Scheme to roll out across firm's device portfolio in coming months Motorola will push ThinkShield onto the business end of its smartphone portfolio, as an extension of the security and management programme on Lenovo's laptop and desktop line.…

Why not just use Visual Studio Code, which has 5 times as many extensions and is designed for cloud? Microsoft is creating a new extensibility model for Visual Studio, its Windows IDE for coding everything from desktop applications to cloud-hosted microservices.…

If you don't want to wait for new stock or splash out on the RTX 30 series, consider AMD's RX 6000s AMD showed off three new graphics processor units for PC gamers on Wednesday, claiming its chips offered better performance than the ones in Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 30 line.…

And for my next trick... behold! Digital transformation! The UK government has launched a tender for a £2bn IT services framework contract after the expected value rose to four times the initial estimated price.…

'I'm just not excited at the prospect of a new crop of unknown unknowns' Changes to the way string comparisons work in the soon-to-be-released .NET 5.0 may break existing code on Windows.…

Companies are a bigger threat than governments – because they're less regulated Interview Cyber Privacy: Who Has Your Data and Why You Should Care is the title of a new book from April Falcon Doss, formerly associate general counsel for intelligence law at the US National Security Agency. Doss spoke to The Register about her concerns with pervasive data collection and its potential for harm.…

Security, that's what, for those of you who like your clouds very isolated AWS has introduced a new variant of its EC2 IaaS service that offers no external network connectivity, no persistent storage, and no user access – not even a root user or an admin user on the instance can access or SSH into the instance.…

Huawei stockpiling components helps too, but server memory sales go soft Samsung Electronics has revealed 50 percent growth thanks to a surge in smartphone sales.…

Challenges jury verdict immediately and offers to pay one percent of damages French services outfit Atos has been ordered to pay $855m for pinching a rival’s trade secrets.…

Kaspersky’s License Management Portal helps MSPs and resellers get tech to users fast Promo Cyber-criminals never sleep, so neither should your customers’ security teams or your own managed service operations.…

Kind-of digital currency can shift US Dollars or the Cambodian Riel Cambodia has launched a blockchain-powered peer-to-peer payment system and it’s hoped the scheme reduces use of cash and helps to control the novel coronavirus.…

Smacks down Information Commission by pointing to policy and data revealing the app has probably helped quite a lot India’s Central Information Commission has warned the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that it could face penalties under the Right to Information Act after it was found to have been “evasive” in its response to a request for information about the Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app.…

Scheme to encourage hiring pricey brainiacs instead of cheap footsloggers The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.…

Senator Wyden puts surveillance nerve-center on blast It's said the NSA drew up a report on what it learned after a foreign government exploited a weak encryption scheme, championed by the US spying agency, in Juniper firewall software.…

Former cop admits conspiracy to tamper with witnesses, too The Feds have secured another guilty plea in the eBay cyberstalking case where former employees of the online auction house targeted and harassed a couple who were critical of the company in their ecommerce newsletter.…

With few exceptions, the questioning was a national embarrassment Comment This morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing with the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter to discuss making changes to a critical piece of US legislation that provides online platforms, used by billions of people, legal protections from the content those people post.…

Next release will block third-party trackers posing as first-party resources The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies.…