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Hand-over to happen on the lunar surface. Legally speaking Got a Moon rocket handy? NASA is looking for proposals from the private sector for scraping bits off the surface of the Moon.…

Databases, info pipelines, software... 'that is where the fight of 20 years will be won' The nation to dominate modern warfare with AI will not have necessarily built the most deadly killer robot or algorithm – it’ll be the one that has the best infrastructure to support and quickly deploy new technologies in the battlefield, according to US military experts.…

Protectionist public policy prompts fresh focus on infosec fears Chinese drone maker DJI has commissioned yet another security audit with FTI Consulting that's given it a clean bill of health, as the US government reportedly prepares to ban its remote controlled aircraft from American skies.…

Here’s an ebook just for you, courtesy of Rapid7 Promo When you’re running security, it can be hard not to feel you’re slogging away in the trenches, saving your organisation on a daily basis, but getting precious little in the way of recognition and even less in terms of budget.…

Ladling out custom brew to its devices Android 11 is coming to Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro smartphones, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has confirmed.…

Hayabusa's heading home, but 8K's going to Mars The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) are planning to pop a "Super Hi-Vision Camera" with 4K and 8K capabilities onboard JAXA's 2024 mission to Mars.…

Homegrown system – previously a 'lightweight' OS for IoT – punted onto smartphones After years of speculation, Huawei has confirmed it will release the homegrown Harmony operating system for smartphones, theoretically posing a direct challenge to the enduring Android and iOS duopoly.…

Swansea-based CPS Advisory hit dial 106,987 times in 80 days, says ICO Britain’s data watchdog says it has snared Swansea-based business CPS Advisory for making more than 100,000 “unauthorised direct marketing calls” to people about their pensions, and subsequently fined the company £130,000.…

Games dev pleads with users to set up a password before they get locked out Epic Games, which is currently in a tit-for-tat litigation spat with Apple regarding the in-app payment system on iOS, has warned its users that they will lose the ability to log into an Epic Games account via "Sign in with Apple" from tomorrow: 11 September.…

The pubs may be problematic, but the bork is bountiful at Tennent's Bork!Bork!Bork! While we may now be allowed to visit a pub and enjoy a cooling beer, 2020 has not been kind to the hospitality industry, as evidenced by a screen of purest blue stuck on the side of a Tennent's brewery.…

Project leader Jonathan Carter explains problems facing this key Linux distro Debian Project Leader (DPL) Jonathan Carter has described the key problems in the Debian community as not a lack of funds, but rather a shortage of developers.…

Anti-social network asked to stop piping Irish uncles' mutterings to America Facebook has been reportedly asked to stop sending data from Ireland to the US, on orders from the EU.…

That’s the price and specs difference between the full XBOX X and its new smaller XBOX S sibling Microsoft has announced a new cut-down and teeny-weeny XBOX.…

Something that doesn't involve viruses, politics and wildfires Speckles of dirt kicked up from Bennu’s surface can stay suspended in space and sometimes they even orbit the asteroid, only to come crashing back down onto its equator, giving it its spinning-top or diamond-like shape.…

The taste of failure ... You fool. You absolute fool. Do you think you’re special? Do you think you’re hot? Your mind is a foggy Louisiana swamp. You’ve got all the focus of the 2019 Labour manifesto. And that is why you ... always ...lose. Fortunately, laptop brand Razr has the cure for what ails you.…

Indian Customs delays and security suspicions behind odd purchasing preference Some server-buyers are asking Lenovo to provide product made in Mexico, rather than made in China.…

Insists your kit there is safe because the isolation you'd expect from a rack-renter has worked Equinix has warned customers it has been infected with ransomware.…

Diamonds are forever, scholarly articles not so much, it seems Academics studying the longevity of online scholarship say that 176 digital open-access journals have vanished from the internet over the past two decades.…

‘Anti-China elements viciously attacked’ with links to racy personal service provider and propaganda China’s UK embassy has lashed out after the Twitter account of its ambassador Liu Xiaoming was apparently hacked.…

'Particularly students in high school and college classes' Researchers have published the first detailed look into what makes people troll Zoom calls and other video-conferencing meetings – and found the vast majority are inside jobs, and unique per-person access codes could end the practice.…

Since we can't build a planet Scientists have trained a neural network on a supercomputer to simulate how hydrogen turns into a metal, an experiment impossible to reproduce physically on Earth.…

Not for all patches, not ASAP, not all at once, not for production workloads and maybe not worth it yet? Microsoft has started a preview of automatic guest VM patching on Azure.…

Silently side-step software safeguards Video Boffins in America, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have devised a Spectre-style attack on modern processors that can defeat defenses that are supposed to stop malicious software from hijacking a computer's operating system. The end result is exploit code able to bypass a crucial protection mechanism and take over a device to hand over root access.…

Regional video streaming companies added to list of entities required to pay Digital Services Tax Indonesia has again extended the list of companies it will require to gather the nation’s digital services tax.…

Three Republicans take stab at 'objective reasonableness' Analysis With studied ignorance, yet another piece of proposed legislation targeting social media, and invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has emerged this week.…

There is no good money after bad if you’re the person receiving it Comment In an extraordinary piece of advocacy, the CEO of AT&T has not only highlighted the persistent problem of broadband provision in the US but also offered a solution: giving billions of taxpayer dollars to his company to fund its rollout.…

OpenExpress does away with intellectual property licensing burdens Electrical engineering boffins from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have released NVMe controller technology called OpenExpress to help academic researchers develop faster storage devices without rapidly depleting their budgets.…

The incentive? $89.5m to build a 'cloud-based common infrastructure' for existing ERP systems Not many companies would be willing to walk into a house haunted by one of the world’s biggest ERP disasters, but Accenture is happy to give it a go for a thick wodge of greenbacks.…

Distributed state in the browser made easy but there are snags for real-world use Microsoft has published the code for its Fluid Framework on Github - the framework is a Typescript library for real-time collaborative web applications.…

Telcos wary of new tech spend anyway, say analysts New research from analyst house Assembly suggests the UK faces a £18.2bn hit to its economy as a result of the decision to ban Huawei from the nation’s network. It’s a stark figure, vastly surpassing the one provided by the British govenrment, which estimated the cost to carriers at the £2bn mark.…

Must be Larry trash talking again SAP's chief bean counter Luka Mucic has belatedly rubbished claims by arch rival Oracle that it is poaching some of the German software maker's largest customers.…

Last one standing after Boeing's 2019 bail Northrop Grumman has won an eye-watering $13.3bn deal to update the US's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system.…

New names for old recipes Register Debate Welcome back to the inaugural Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion was proposed, for and against arguments were published on Monday, another round of arguments today, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

US extradition attempt for ex-WikiLeaker now being heard by London beak Julian Assange has been told to hold his tongue and not interrupt court proceedings by a judge as he contests US attempts to extradite him from Britain to stand trial over his WikiLeaks website.…

Take your pick, folks! Latest Magic Birfurcation has some strong caveats, but little is likely to change There's some interesting criticism in Gartner's latest "Magic Quadrant" report on Cloud Infrastructure and Platform services, which covers just seven providers, the only vendors which it considers qualify for the description "hyperscale cloud providers."…

Korean official quoted as saying 'all (domestic) semiconductors' cannot be supplied Huawei’s rotten year looks to be getting worse amid reports in South Korean paper Chosun Ibo that Samsung and SK Hynix will turn off the component tap to the firm from next week, due to pressure from the US government.…

Where's our Zoom miracle, cry investors. Growth for hipster chat platform expected to slow as 2020 grinds on Slack reported 49 per cent revenue growth for its Q2 ended July 31, but its stock nonetheless suffered a pounding in after-hours trading.…

'High risk of disruption' means Big Blue makes gov bods 'appy' for next 3 years IBM has grabbed a £25.25m contract extension from the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions without outside competition, to keep the government ministry’s ageing application estate up and running.…

Six years of No gets heard - but only because of legal jeopardy UK domain registrar Fasthosts has finally promised to stop pushing unwanted .uk domains onto its customers, six years after the scheme was first launched.…

Apple crowd included - as NFC can now be used for something other than Apple Pay Security token biz Yubico has a new key out today, its latest-generation two-factor encryption (2FA) authentication unit, the Yubico 5C NFC, which includes support for PCs and mobile devices using USB-C, as well as a built-in NFC radio.…

Authenticated business: 'No, there's a good reason for this call. Honest. Don't hang u-' Ad slinger Google is rolling out Verified Calls on its Phone App in the hope that its clients might stop you from ignoring calls from numbers you don't recognise.…

How many of you lot need help from an app to cook a steak? IFA 2020 This year’s instalment of Berlin's Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) conference was… different.…

Just don't expect to go mad fondling all those toys Retro computing fans rejoice! The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) has reopened its doors at Bletchley Park.…

Our Register Debates continue in which we spar over hot topics and YOU decide which side is right – by reader vote Register Debate Welcome back to the inaugural Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion was proposed, for and against arguments were published on Monday, another round of arguments today, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

Needs software to join up new 'joined up' system NHS England, the organisation responsible for the management of the country's National Health Service - and the UK’s largest employer - has offered £30m in a tender for HR and staff rostering systems.…

Fixes aplenty for vector graphic editor fans Users accustomed to lengthy waits between releases will be surprised to find open-source vector graphic outfit, Inkscape, has squeezed out version 1.0.1 of its editor mere months after the version 1.0 milestone was achieved.…

Survey was huge, but we can do better - So don't go all '2020 sure is the year for feeling alone' on us, OK? The latest survey searching for signs of alien civilizations radiating from over ten million distant Suns and six known exoplanets in space has thrown up a big fat nothing.…

Founder Dheeraj Pandey shares next five-year roadmap with The Register, predicts tech détente with China EXIT INTERVIEW Nutanix will almost certainly hire its new CEO from outside the company, says retiring CEO Dheeraj Pandey.…

IP addresses and domain names must be kept out of content battles, says RIPE and CENTR Europe’s two largest internet network infrastructure organizations have warned lawmakers not to lump the core network in with online platforms and apps when it comes to content regulations.…

Reminder: Top-tier clouds promise they’re really good at keeping power on all the time IBM’s Sydney cloud data centre lost power in “multiple racks” today.…