The Register

Forty minutes of picture peering slashed to just five seconds NASA says its new crater-hunting AI system has found its first evidence of a previously unseen meteorite strike on Mars, needing just five seconds to clock the potential crash site compared to 40 minutes a human would normally take.…

Playing tug o' war with a 1970s IBM mainframe On Call Is it October? Already? It feels like we still haven't moved on from March. Put such discomfiture to one side in favour of a Friday treat – a tale of brute force and ignorance from those that are forever On Call.…

Kids are being horrible about photo filters, so developers are being asked to help protect mental health Google has revealed it has adopted “value-neutral” language in the interests of improving both selfies and mental health.…

Learn how to get it right with El Reg and Echoworx (...Echoworx) (...Echoworx) Webcast The idea of the paperless office has been with us since, probably, the invention of paper. But like the 15-hour working week and the flying-car commute, it always seems to be just over the rainbow of practicality.…

Properly FOSS version of XenServer promises at least five years of support for next release, maybe more XCP-ng, the crowdfunded effort to deliver an open-source version of XenServer, has matured to the point at which it will offer the world a version with long-term support.…

Big blow to big whistleblower The US government's Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden's Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future related earnings.…

He masterminded $7m scam from halfway house, Feds claim A convicted fraudster was out on parole when he allegedly conned victims into giving him millions of dollars to place surefire sports bets on their behalf using special software that didn't actually exist.…

Fujtisu kit on the floor tho bourse takes the blame for day-long dead zone Tokyo’s Stock Exchange (TSE) went offline for most of Thursday, its longest-ever outage and a very unwelcome one as it is the world’s third-largest bourse, when measured by market capitalisation.…

Earlier ban on H-1B, H-2B, J and L passes ruled an overstep of presidential power, middle-finger to Congress President Trump's proclamation in June that barred companies and other organizations from bringing in foreign workers into the US under various visas like the H-1B has been temporarily, partially blocked.…

'We are on a mission to create as much understanding about algorithms as possible' The City of Helsinki, Finland, and the City of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, have introduced online AI registries that offer a glimpse into the workings of the algorithms and machine-learning systems used for municipal governance.…

The same lot who bought off crooks in May but kept quiet till July +Comment Blackbaud, the cloud CRM provider whose execs bought off ransomware crooks in exchange for a pinky promise that stolen data would not be misused, has now confessed that customers' bank account information may have been taken from its servers by the criminals.…

Rewarding pointless patches with free swag leads to 'DDoS' against projects Updated Hosting biz Digital Ocean kicked off its seventh Hacktoberfest on Thursday – and managed to seriously annoy the very developers the event aims to celebrate.…

You may need to look elsewhere if you want more bang for your buck As well as the updated and costly Surface Pro X, Microsoft has unveiled a cheaper way for users to dip a toe into its hardware waters with the Surface Laptop Go.…

Users fear hack – really the 'processing infrastructure was running behind' Amazon-owned smart home appliance maker Ring has won the world record for biggest game of "ding dong ditch" after a software glitch broadcast erroneous doorbell chimes to countless users yesterday.…

... which Deloitte helped build Salesforce has teamed up with sprawling consultancy Deloitte to peddle COVID-19 contact-tracing software to UK local authorities.…

Online grocer shrugs: We'll see when we actually receive the papers Updated AutoStore, a Norwegian manufacturer of robotic warehouse storage and retrieval systems, says it is suing UK online retailer and tech outfit Ocado.…

This is what you wanted, right? The UK will take a multibillion-pound blow to productivity and economic prosperity should the 5G rollout be held up further, a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) claims.…

'We've made a deliberate attempt to build something that can share source code across all these environments' Interview Google's cross-platform app development framework Flutter marked another quarterly release on Thursday with the debut of Flutter 1.22. The Register had the opportunity to speak with Tim Sneath, product lead at Flutter, about the project's state and ambitions.…

Upgrade will soon come up against Apple's take on the post-Intel world A year after the release of its fan-serving Surface Pro X, Microsoft and new pal Qualcomm have given the Arm-powered fondleslab's chippery a good buffing.…

£5m pot opened to biz and academics who fancy projects with foreign flavour The UK Space Agency has opened a new lunch fund designed foster to "international space collaborations".…

Last year telcos scrambled to plug 'critical user-facing vulns' in network kit UK.gov security researchers examining Huawei source code have so far verified just eight firmware binaries out of more than 60 used across Britain's mobile phone networks, according to the GCHQ-backed agency's annual report.…

Brit firm Bamboo scores cash that can convert to equity. Yup, the government could become a server vendor! The UK's Coronavirus Future Fund has made a biggish bet on Arm server vendor Bamboo.…

Better improve its coverage then Mobile network O2, notable for its occasional outages, has opened the UK's first commercial lab for connected, driverless cars.…

Sounds a bit like what Salesforce denies it worked on Online supermarket Ocado Group has chosen Oracle Fusion Cloud as its main ERP system to help it grow into international markets.…

That's the second Redmondian outage this week Updated Microsoft's Exchange Online service fell over in the early hours of this morning.…

Meet the panel who’ll allocate the $200K prize fund to European winners Promo Huawei’s AppsUp developer contest is now in full swing with a deadline of October 8, 2020, to get your app submitted in hope of taking home a slice of a $1m prize fund.…

Apropos of nothing, what's French for 'Get me the hell away from Nvidia'? The mid-range smartphone world is enjoying a period of sustained growth, as price-sensitive customers swerve expensive flagships and pick something more modest. Hoping to exploit this market is chip designer MediaTek, which will bring its 5G-capable Dimensity 800 silicon to Europe following its Chinese introduction earlier this year.…

NHS Digital: 'Matter of public health importance to encourage people to download the app' Exclusive The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has confirmed it is investigating grumbles about heavy-handed marketing emails and texts promoting the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracing app in England.…

Under 3 minutes? Not today Bork!Bork!Bork! A return to the hue of blue today, with a cautionary tale of keeping your keys safe and sound when Windows is around.…

Yep, plugs. The things that pick up electrickery from the wall Smart plugs could set your house on fire and let hackers gaze upon your private data, according to consumer champion company Which?…

Buyers aren't super-keen to jump through geopolitical hoops VMworld The US-China trade war has made more trouble for VMware's business in Asia than the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Duncan Hewett, Virtzilla's senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ).…

Brit financial watchdogs foxed by not guilty verdict A Russian ex-banker has been found not guilty of destroying potential evidence after he deleted a copy of WhatsApp from his phone before handing it over to police.…

And then mentions China 18 times and calls for dedicated agency to regulate international data links One of the four commissioners of America's communications regulator has called for more scrutiny of submarine cables between the Land of the Free and "adversary countries".…

You, over there, rustle up a warp drive while we're finding a new galactic pad Video If you’re tired of sitting in your PJs in front of the computer screen all day indoors, and need a new purpose to get you through the COVID-19 virus pandemic, consider helping NASA look for previously unseen exoplanets.…

Consumer tech security rating scheme to launch next week, will be offered to rest of world The assistant chief executive of Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, Brigadier General Gaurav Keerthi, says the island nation now considers providing a secure environment to citizens and businesses the equivalent of providing fresh water and sewerage services, and will next week improve digital hygiene with a voluntary scheme that will rate the security consumer broadband gateways.…

And not just any citizens, but folks stranded overseas and in dire need of assistance Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has just exposed personal details of over 1,000 citizens in an email.…

We've switched to back-up offline procedures, says Universal Health Services Universal Health Services, which operates over 400 hospitals and healthcare facilities in the US, Puerto Rico, and the UK, said on Monday that its IT network was offline due to an unspecified cybersecurity issue.…

Multi-platform not cross-platform, says company – enough to increase interest in the language? Apple has open-sourced Swift System, a library designed to improve the experience of calling the operating system API from Swift on supported platforms, including a new Linux implementation.…

Think your old tools can’t cut it? Here’s the proof Promo Incident response and detection is a critical part of your security operation – it’s hard to defend against what you can’t see, particularly when your attack surface now extends from on-prem and into the cloud.…

Blames market volatility caused by pandemic and US controls over Huawei Kioxia, the flash and SSD fabrication artist formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corp, has called off its initial public offering due next month, citing stock market volatility and the coronavirus outbreak.…

Shaky start out of the gates and still some issues, but at least it's here England and Wales finally have a contact-tracing app. Released last Thursday, NHS COVID-19 allows public health authorities to identify potential disease carriers and stem the spread of coronavirus. But in the days since its release, some bugs have showed up.…

Leading to AU$540m in late invoice payments Invoices worth AU$540m were paid late after a finance and supply chain system built on SAP S/4HANA went live at Australia's Queensland Health.…

Unexpected item in bagging area? AWS has introduced Cost Anomaly Detection, a new feature now in beta driven by machine learning that pledges to notify admins of "unexpected or unusual spend".…

'I didn't expect this kind of work from Apple.' Sorry, did you see Catalina? Apple is apparently so skint that it has had to resort to freebie versions of machine-based translation services for its Dutch legalese.…

Length of operator's licence or related conditions yet to be determined Uber has won an appeal against Transport for London's decision not to renew the ride-hailing app biz's licence for the English capital, ending a three-year tussle between the pair.…

Also, Brazilian teen spots odd Instagram bug and nets $25K In Brief Foreign-backed disinformation campaigns will spread fake news about the results of the upcoming US election in an effort to sow doubt and outrage among the American public.…

Ever seen a Trello board you thought you shouldn't? If you're in UK or US, you're not alone Around 40 per cent of staff in British and American corporations have access to sensitive data that they don't need to complete their jobs, according to recent research.…

Starts trying to make fetch happen... build your own models to parse corporate content Ignite Microsoft's SharePoint Syntex is a new feature of SharePoint online that promises to extract metadata from documents automatically, making it easier to find and categorise information.…

Coffee giant brews UK customers a double shot of cock-up Starbucks' UK rewards card app went down for a prolonged period earlier this week, and a bunch of caffeine fiends are still reporting problems.…

Contesting decision of General Court that Irish set-up was kosher European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager is set to fight to have Apple's tax benefit in Ireland ruled as state aid.…