The Register

Agency's 'nauts to ride in US commercial crew capsules 'going forward' ESA handed out contracts last week, with the usual suspects scooping up awards aimed at lunar exploration and beyond. The Register spoke to David Parker, ESA’s director of Human and Robotic Exploration, about the Moon, Mars and when Tim Peake would fly again.…

Whatever you do, don’t run vCenter 7.0U1 on HyperFlex. Just don’t go there unless you want horrible pain. Is that a clear enough warning? Cisco has issued an odd warning to users of its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure products, telling them a VMware programming blunder can leave their hardware in an “unrecoverable” state.…

Plus $2.3bn of restructuring coming due to NewCo split, cloud humming along, Red Hat roaring IBM has posted another quarter of falling sales, and decided not to forecast what will happen over its next 90-day financial reporting period.…

Ethos-U65 sounds like an industrial techno band from the 1990s but, well, it isn't Arm this week launched its Ethos-U65 AI accelerator for running workloads on edge devices and other gear.…

We'll help you manage risk while chasing your RDBMS dreams Webcast There was a time when open source was still – no matter how many decades it had driven software projects – regarded as the playground of hippies and utopians. Bold and brave, yet thrown together, inconsistent and unsecured when compared to more established products.…

Wait until the ‘we need backdoors’ crowd hears about this Toshiba has said it is ready to start selling a commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) product, and will eventually move to offer QKD as-a-service.…

Deal sees $7bn paid now, $2bn in 2025 when Intel hands over key IP and FAB workers Intel has agreed to sell its NAND to South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix for $9bn.…

App promises to curb behaviour but this might be about control than morals Pakistan has allowed TikTok to resume operations within its borders.…

Surreal tales from the Midwest It’s been three years since Wisconsin approved more than $3bn in incentives to bring Foxconn to the US state.…

And 5G hype goes out of this world NASA has hired Nokia to build a 4G network on the Moon, paying the telecoms manufacturer $14.1m to set up a communications system that will give astronauts voice, data, triangulation, and video-on-demand.…

Is this another case of one rule for the Chocolate Factory and one for everyone else? Updated Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature, allowing the ads giant to potentially track you even when you've told it not to.…

While the UK says Russia probed 2020 Games systems, too Six men have been named as Russian military hackers and accused of spreading malware, disrupting the Olympics in retaliation for Russia's doping ban, and meddling with elections as well as probes into Novichok poisonings.…

A few downsides: no voice, for starters Open-source mobe biz FreedomFi celebrated the start of this year's Open Infrastructure Summit by opening the doors to a public beta of its FreedomFi Gateway for those keen on building their own LTE or 5G networks.…

After 10 years of OpenStack, 'a lot has changed and we are changing with it' The OpenStack Foundation, home to the open source project for running a self-hosted cloud, is to become the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), with what it describes as an expanded mission, scope and community.…

Find out to knock out those data silos in our upcoming show Webcast There’s many trendy and forward-looking ways to make DevOps processes easier, and while most people have heard of Kubernetes – an effective, open sourced system for orchestrating data containers – there’s various approaches and techniques to make it run as smoothly as possible.…

Also: Teams goes native on Arm and Calculator pops up in Canonical's snap store In Brief Windows Insiders on the bleeding edge Windows 10 dev release channel that hoped to twiddle a knob or switch in the latest Windows 10X iteration had to settle for a drop-down menu for the refresh rate of a given display.…

Plod 'involvement' could deter testing, says doctors' union As if things were not going badly enough for the UK's COVID-19 test-and-trace service, it now seems police will be able to access some test data, prompting fears the disclosure could deter people who should have tests from coming forward.…

Plus: A warning to SharePoint operators In brief Just days after issuing fixes for scores of bugs in its products for this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has issued two more patches for security holes that can be exploited by maliciously crafted files to run malware on victims' computers.…

Farewell to the old form factor, hello to extra HDMI and speedier silicon The Raspberry Pi team has stuck with tradition by following its Pi 4 a year or so later with the Compute Module 4. Those expecting another DDR2 SODIMM sized board are, however, in for a shock.…

Chips will power $34m machine doing Square Kilometre Array work and more Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has bet on unannounced AMD EPYC silicon to power a new 50-petaFLOP supercomputer.…

Pricey Data Center editions remain but customers complain that 'this is insane' Atlassian is ending server licence sales and requiring customers to migrate either to its cloud services or to expensive Data Center editions.…

Tax doesn't have to be taxing, except when it does A survey of independent contractors shows only 45 per cent plan to stay with their chosen mode of employment after the introduction of the IR35 tax legislation in the UK private sector come April 2021.…

Criminal court sets trial date as High Court continues pondering civil suit judgment Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch will fight the US government's attempt to extradite him over HP's $11bn purchase of Autonomy Corporation in February next year.…

The Great Unicorn Prayer of security services: Stay secure, but - ya know - give us backdoors In a move as predictable as it is wearisome, a bunch of government security agencies have got together and demanded we let them have our data. This latest spooky manifestation is a collection of the Five Eyes - the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - and for some reason Japan and India. Let’s call this coalition of the chilling, JIANUSCUK.…

To survive a war, you gotta become war. Yes, that's a real quote from the movie. Quality While Sylvester Stallone may or may not be done with the Rambo franchise after decades of portraying the eponymous character, its arcade incarnation endures, if a little borked.…

So much for showcasing Redmond's Chocolate Factory alternative Microsoft’s flagship 2020 game Flight Simulator was supposed to showcase Bing Maps and Azure’s streaming capabilities. There’s just one small problem: gamers are overwriting Bing’s in-game 3D photogrammetry with entire cities ripped from Google Earth.…

Fine, try this one: Hmm mmm egregious web monopoly mmm-mmm hmm radicalizing video algorithms mm In brief You can recall a song’s melody clearly in your mind though the name of it completely slips your tongue. What do you do? Well, now you can hum it directly into your smartphone and Google will try its best to detect what tune it is.…

You thought that presentation would be dull as styrofoam flavoured water when... Who, Me? In these times of remote working, we're all a bit more cautious about what might be on our shared screen or lurking on the shelves behind us. Some things never change, as today's Who, Me? makes plain.…

Maybe clouds. Maybe banks. Probably not you, until they matter to developers +COMMENT VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is unsure who will use the recently announced cut of the company's ESXi hypervisor for SmartNICs with Arm CPUs.…

Better-than-before code to make Office more accessible Microsoft has built a machine-learning model that automatically captions images in documents and emails so that the descriptions can be dictated by software for visually impaired users. It's claimed to be twice as good as the automatic captioning code the Windows giant already uses in its products.…

XFS timestamp tweak extends Unix time for a few centuries The forthcoming Linux 5.10 looks like it will include further fixes for the Year 2038 problem, aka Y2K38.…

Includes the usual stuff about not selling weapons, adds wording about tech, data, and reciprocity China has passed new export control laws that give it the power to impose tit for tat export bans.…

Already has QKD in space. Next: ban-busting qubit-crunchers? Chinese premier Xi Jinping has told the nation to hurry up and do whatever it takes to commercialise quantum technology.…

Selfies of rallies can score fines or land you in the slammer Thailand calls on telcos and ISPs to censor information about protests Selfies can score fines or land you in the slammer Thailand has called on the nation’s telcos and internet service providers to censor communication about a wave of protests sweeping the country and made it an offence to take a selfie at protest events.…

US space agency has a mole – and that's a good thing, finally NASA’s off-again, on-again Mars digger nicknamed the mole is finally buried in the planet’s soil and will take readings beneath the surface next year.…

Developer wishes cloud giant gave more thought to not stepping on toes On Thursday, Amazon Web Services launched CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension for recording browser interactions that it copied from the Headless Recorder project created by developer Tim Nolet.…

And the Chocolate Factory isn't the only one bragging about ML with little evidence of its success Distinguished doctors have publicly criticized Google and others for making grand claims about AI research and then not sharing the source code and models to let others replicate and verify the experiments.…

CEO charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, etc The US Justice Department on Thursday charged billionaire software tycoon Robert Brockman with tax evasion, wire fraud, money laundering, and other offenses.…

And some 800,000 installations facing the internet, patches are available A critical vulnerability in a SonicWall enterprise VPN firewall can be exploited to crash the device or remotely execute code on it, reverse engineers said this week.…

Come on Sammy, you've got form here so don't make the same mistakes again Samsung has wasted no time in poking fun at Apple’s decision not to bundle a power adapter with its latest iPhone.…

From VisiCalc to Google Sheets, none of them are a database Break out the bunting and crack out the Excel-based party puns. Tomorrow is Spreadsheet day, and it's time to party like it's 00/01/1900.…

Large existing install base that's pondering move to cloud will be reluctant to ditch 'existing investments' opines analyst Oracle has brought out a new Exadata Cloud Service based on the Exadata X8M platform, bringing its high-end persistent memory feature to the cloud. Well, Oracle’s cloud at least.…

Will the hardest workers want to go back to the offce for a break? How’s your work life balance? For some people the lines between the daily grind and their personal time has blurred, and they are putting more hours into the job than before the pandemic forced offices to close.…

The look on their wickle faces as they scream: 'Mum, what the heck is Linux?' The COVID-19 pandemic has turned laptops — particularly those deemed "cheap and cheerful" — into a desperately sought-after commodity as education and work moves to the home.…

History tells us tech companies just get bigger, even after being broken up or battered Column Thriving amidst the pervasive chaos of 2020, the world’s largest technology companies - the FAANGs*, as we’ve come to know them - have managed to grow larger, richer and more powerful.…

German biz: You won't need an RPA tool, or not as often. FIGHT, FIGHT!!! The co-CEO at German process mining biz Celonis has talked up its leap into the world of automation by rolling out its own platform, as well as splashing the cash - reportedly a hair over $100m - on automation and integration outfit Integromat.…

Tough luck, bumpkins! Broadband speed gap misery to widen, says report The UK government's strategy for deploying full-fibre broadband shows signs of repeating the errors of previous broadband infrastructure programmes, which failed to extend comprehensive access to rural areas, a report from the National Audit Office has claimed [PDF].…

Airline was saving domain admin creds and card details alike in plaintext British Airways is to pay a £20m data protection fine after its 2018 Magecart hack – even though the Information Commissioner’s Office discovered the airline had been saving credit card details in plain text since 2015.…

Bork, bork, bork on the Autobahn Bork!Bork!Bork! News reaches The Register that even those paragons of efficiency and rule-following, the Germans, are not immune to the curse of Bork.…

How can it be OK when nobody knows what to prepare for, ask IT players Canalys Forum 2020 - updated The IT supply chain remains in the dark over how to plan for Brexit with mere months to go before the UK potentially exits the European Union without a trade agreement, according to one of Britain’s biggest IT distributors.…