The Register

No diggity, NoSQL Open-source NoSQL in-memory database Redis is the most popular database in the world if, that is, your world is solely within Amazon Web Services.…

And both lived to tell the tale With a breath of some much-needed good news, The Register is obliged to point out that it's nice to see Florida Man* upending the stereotype of "world's worst superhero" by actually doing something heroic.…

Bug? iFixit muses in teardown of Cupertino's top-tier mobe The iPhone 12 Pro Max represents the top end of Apple's latest smartphone lineup. This is a tier that historically has differentiated itself not just by its price, but also by its camera, which Cupertino insists can produce shots that rival those taken on professional kit.…

Do they byte? In Brief Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida is now guarded by robotic canines that will patrol the area before popping back to their kennels for a recharge.…

Procurement services? Not any more. Exchequer services? No thanks. IT Services? Reduced Updated Capita, the outsourcing provider held dear to the hearts of Reg readers everywhere, is seeing million of pounds lopped off the value of its contract with a gaggle of small councils in the middle of England.…

Companies House filing for year ended 31 January 2020 shows strong growth Dell Corp UK has reported a double-digit revenue bounce on the back of purchasing a couple of organisations from elsewhere in the group and selling a healthy amount of hardware, support, and software maintenance.…

Cyber House Party charity event scheduled for 17 December – just bring your dosh and (maybe) some ear plugs Locked up indoors with nothing to do as the evenings draw closer? If lighthearted chats about cyber security are your thing, followed up by some banging dance tunes, then we have just the event – all in the name of charity, of course.…

Bring-your-own-key may no longer be enough for EU data protection body The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has issued guidance that calls into question recommendations to cloud services providers in responding to the Schrems II ruling, which struck down the Privacy Shield arrangement for moving data from the EU to the US.…

Remember the days when 'we made it up as we went along'? Who, Me? DNS (or the Devil's Naming Service as we've heard it called) takes centre stage in this week's tale from the Who, Me? vaults: a warning of the terrors of the forgotten typo.…

Image Manipulation Program spawned GTK, which begat GNOME The General Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has turned 25.…

Plus: A new web app from Google to generate AI monsters Drones and machine learning algorithms are helping beachgoers get live updates to alert them whenever sharks are in the water.…

No incident response plan? We can help you there… Promo You know the symptoms – a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, tingling in the fingers, blood thumping in the temples as time slows to a crawl. Realizing you’re facing a full-on cyber attack can feel horribly visceral, even if the attackers are virtual.…

Do you see what I TSMC? The USA and Taiwan have emerged from their first "Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue" with an agreement that co-operation around semiconductors is their top priority.…

Declaration puts a handbrake on global digital currencies, includes usual 'let's use the internet and AI to make the world a better place' stuff Chinese president Xi Jinping appears to have offered the world the QR code-powered system used to determine movement rights inside his nation during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

LTS release 5.10 is currently unruly and looks like colliding with the holiday season Linus Torvalds has expressed some worries about progress of version 5.10 of the Linux kernel.…

Stop doomscrolling through Blursday and take a Workation Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has made “unmute” one of its words of the year for 2020.…

No data leaked, says football club Manchester United is working with infosec pros to “minimize the ongoing IT disruption” that it says was caused by an assault on its tech systems.…

Red trousers and a Porsche or respectable middle age for Windows? What do Cristiano Ronaldo, Bruno Mars and Windows have in common? They're all 35 years old. It is three and a half decades since Microsoft Windows 1.0 was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.…

Human contractors battling COVID-19 stress and psychological trauma Facebook’s AI algorithms aren’t effective enough to automatically screen for violent images or child abuse, leaving the job to human moderators who are complaining about having to come into an office to screen harmful content during the coronavirus pandemic.…

Humans live in the real world, machines don't, study finds AI-powered machines may be able to generate text that is grammatically correct and very human-like, but when it comes to common sense they’re still lagging severely behind us meatbags.…

Patch if you can: Fix available Updated IBM Power9 processors, intended for data centers and mainframes, are potentially vulnerable to abuse of their speculative execution capability. The security shortcoming could allow a local user to access privileged information.…

Safety first, politics second Software updates alone are not enough to make the controversial Boeing 737 Max safe enough for EU-regulated skies, the political bloc’s aviation safety regulator has decreed.…

Huge performance jump from disk Dell Technologies has unveiled its first all-flash object storage appliance - as good an indication as any that flash object storage has hit the mainstream.…

RCS throws the dice Analysis Google is rolling out end-to-end encryption in the unloved and unwanted Android Rich Communication Services, as part of a renewed hope people might use messaging services controlled by the Chocolate Factory.…

Skype? We've heard of it Microsoft has previewed some more consumer-friendly features in its Slack-for-suits platform, Teams.…

Thou shalt not devise thine own cursed metrics, we decree Reg Standards Bureau A bizarre American website has come up with a new way of measuring pressure by referring to the weight of elephants delivered through the area of a ballet shoe. Frankly we're baffled.…

Legal saga that began with dodgy prosecution ends in vindication Updated The Home Office cannot order Ofcom to ignore its legal duties even when a government minister wants to shut something down because of unspecified "national security" concerns, the Court of Appeal has said, ruling that ministers acted outside their legal powers when banning GSM gateways.…

Plus: Lots of dead space in the new Mac Mini The first teardowns of the MacBook Pro and Air reveal few surprises. iFixit got its hands on the inaugural Apple Silicon machines and tenderly disassembled them, with the results largely affirming what we learned during this month's keynote.…

Electron celebrates a parachute party and is successfully recovered Rocket Lab has joined SpaceX in a very exclusive club of orbital booster recovery-capable companies after it parachuted an Electron first stage back to Earth.…

COVID-19 could slow customer wins, warns analyst Cloud HR and finance application biz Workday is bouncing along happily amid a global pandemic as it outstripped market expectations and posted an 18 per cent annual increase in revenue for Q3 of its fiscal 2021.…

The last time we saw one of these was in February. Things haven't gone well since then Bork!Bork!Bork! Software licensing is the bane of IT pros. Some spend hours poring over byzantine rules and regulations while others throw in the towel and roll things themselves. Then there are those that simply ignore the pleas for a production licence.…

Tech hipsters? On our doorstep? The Silicon what? The National Cyber Security Centre picked its London HQ building not because it was the best or most cost-efficient location – but because the agency "prioritised image over cost", a Parliamentary committee has said.…

Doesn't mean it's terrible, you just have to manage your expectations Review With a price tag of £329, OnePlus's latest 5G phone is also its cheapest. From the polished design to the solid day-to-day performance, there's some things to rave about with the Nord N10. And yet we're not going to do that. Not yet.…

The system's playing up again. Infamy! Infamy! Something for the Weekend, Sir? No, I didn't get it wrong. I had a… er, computer glitch. There, everyone will believe that.…

In steps our hero: Have you tried turning it off and on again? On Call It's Friday! Come board the On Call bus to a time when Program Manager was king and Windows was a mere teenager.…

Combined Ministry of Defence and GCHQ team has worked since April to 'transform cyber capabilities' The United Kingdom has announced £16.5 billion ($22bn) of new defence spending, some of which has gone towards a newly revealed National Cyber Force and some earmarked to create a Space Command and agency dedicated to AI.…

Spear-phishers love the executive suite. Here’s how to stop them getting in Webcast If you’ve ever wondered what the CEO does all day, you’re not the only one. Cyber-attackers give the matter a lot of thought, which is why a well-crafted spear-phishing attack can be so hard to defend against.…

Driver and security guard tied up and 48 pallets stacked with Cupertino kit stolen Northamptonshire Police in the UK have warned locals to be on the lookout for suspiciously well-priced Apple products after a literal highway robbery saw 48 pallets loaded with Cupertino kit stolen.…

WebAssembly-powered sandbox promised to be safer than the notorious plugin The Internet Archive says it's found a way to preserve content created with Adobe's notoriously insecure Flash tool without risking user safety.…

And hints at new local data governance push Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on the nation's technology industry to start designing products for the world, and for youth to create new digital defences.…

ESXi, Cloud Foundation, and desktop hypervisor users should get patching VMware has revealed and repaired the flaws in its hypervisor discovered at China’s Tianfu Cup white hat hacking competition.…

Devs can make unauthorised changes, data integrity is a work in progress, security is not there yet ... and there's just nine months to go In 2016 Australia’s online census crashed and burned after legitimate attempts to complete the survey were mistaken for a DDOS attack, the routers funneling traffic failed and disaster recovery plans did likewise.…

Developer in Turkey accused of using 30,000 accounts to nab Instagram files Facebook on Thursday sued Ensar Sahinturk, a software developer based in Istanbul, Turkey, who is alleged to have built a network of sites that scrape data from Instagram to create Insta-clones.…

Also bans devs from scraping the site for facial recognition fodder YouTube has started rolling out adverts on all videos uploaded on its content-sharing platform, and won’t give creators any ad revenue until they get popular enough.…

The aging structure is too hazardous to repair, engineers say The Arecibo Observatory, America’s largest radio telescope, is to be blown up after the National Science Foundation decided recent damage has left it too dangerous to repair.…

Proposed legislation calls for research to detect synthetic shams online On Wednesday, proposed US legislation to fund defenses against realistic computer-generated media known as deepfakes was approved by the US Senate and the bill now awaits consideration in the US House of Representatives.…

Enhanced network security for AWS virtual private cloud – while Microsoft previews Azure Firewall Premium AWS has announced Network Firewall, a new service drawing on the open-source Suricata project.…

Also: Skyrora aims for 2023 for its XL, ISS gets ready for Nauka, and HALO moves forward In Brief British rocketeer Skyrora has been testing the third-stage engine for its Skyrora XL rocket with launch planned for 2023.…

What time is it? It’s Hammerspace live demo time Promo Using Kubernetes across on-prem and the cloud is a tantalizing idea, but it’s sometimes difficult to put your finger on exactly where data is supposed to live while you’re doing this, and how you should serve it up wherever it is needed.…

Trying to get that one weird app working on new Mac silicon? Anyone pondering how to get Intel-based Windows apps onto shiny new Apple M1 devices have been thrown a lifebelt by CodeWeavers.…