The Register

Ahem, hey, any chance LOHAN can hitch a ride? NASA wants to lift a 2.5-metre-long, reusable far-infrared telescope into Earth’s stratosphere using a massive high-altitude balloon in 2023 to check out the heavens more economically.…

Plus: US govt sounds the alarm on industrial equipment attacks In Brief Cisco this week emitted fixes for potentially serious vulnerabilities, one of which is already being exploited in the wild.…

ProtoVPN IP range fingrered as source of destructive attacks Poorly secured databases are being wiped and vandalized by the thousands in a seemingly automated attack.…

'Supported' Windows Server customers cut off from their subdomains Updated Microsoft's Windows Server Essentials' Remote Web Access service, which lets customers set up web access to their on-premises server through a .remotewebaccess.com subdomain, became inaccessible on Thursday after an unannounced DNS change.…

So many questions, but it's only the second time such a phenomenon has been observed Astrophysicists have spied an extremely rare type of supernova from an exploding and possibly radioactive white dwarf that emits mysterious flashes of UV light.…

Corning says it'll first appear in an upcoming Samsung device Aluminosilicate wrangler Corning has lifted the lid on its latest generation of its hardy Gorilla Glass.…

Firm to list in Frankfurt, could net €10bn to €20bn Vodafone will IPO its towers business next year, it told the market this morning, with the global telecommunications giant planning a public offering for early next year on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.…

Team suggests grabbing it now The Xen project has popped out a new version, 4.14, of its widely used open-source hypervisor.…

Argh! Dominic Cummings' department! Everybody panic! The UK Cabinet Office is to take control of government data from the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport.…

Create an innovative mobile application or game with AppsUp and you could win big Promo With Huawei mobile phones shifting to their own ecosystem and apps, Huawei Mobile Services, the company, is taking the opportunity to rethink the way app stores work entirely, priming its App Gallery as a destination for a plethora of new apps approached in a different way.…

Do people still use trains? Anyway, wireless antennas on overhead line equipment looks like the solution Staying connected on a train in the UK is almost impossible thanks to excruciatingly slow speeds and frequent blackspots. The government hopes to make these gripes a thing of the past by committing £200,000 to research on new track-side antenna technology.…

That cloudy CRM firm paid ransom doesn't fill anyone with confidence British universities are waking up to last week's ransomware attack on cloud CRM purveyor Blackbaud – though it appears some haven't realised the American software company paid the ransom.…

Met Office has taken a shine to data science UK weather watcher the Met Office is seeking early interest in a framework deal that could be worth up to £30m for IT services and software development supporting a new data platform and data science activities.…

Resupply ship plies space station with food, fuel and fear Hot on the heels of what the US alleged was an in-orbit "satellite killer" trial, Russia demonstrated it can still worry space station inhabitants with an eventful docking of its uncrewed Progress freighter.…

Roadmap, release schedule will tease fancy upcoming features in browser In an effort to woo businesses to its latest take on the browser, Microsoft has unveiled an enterprise roadmap and release schedule for the Beta and Stable channels of Edge.…

Switch on, urges GCHQ-backed public security agency Common cybersecurity threats also apply to Premier League football clubs, according to the National Cyber Security Centre, which said that one club nearly sent £1m to fraudsters after a business email compromise (BEC) attack.…

Be careful about bunking off when you're billing your hours to a government A now-former Raytheon systems engineer will spend the next year and a half behind bars for taking home secret US government blueprints and paperwork, against security procedures, all because he seemingly liked taking Fridays off.…

Great, more $1,500 kit to trash Pholdables remain a vanishingly small niche of the smartphone market, due to their high costs and endemic durability concerns. Nobody, it seems, told Samsung, which just announced an upgraded 5G version of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip.…

He would say that… because he's not an actual supervillain Philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates has denied that his support for coronavirus vaccine research is cover for his plans to dominate the world with 5G-activated mind control microchips.…

New virtual summit covers endpoint management, digital experience monitoring and ITSM — save your seat now Promo COVID-19 has caused the fastest change to the way people work in living memory. Research published this week shows 46 million US knowledge workers have gone from being office-based to home-based. And the thing is, many people who have left the office aren't looking to return full-time. IT knows this, and they must start listening.…

Moscow says offending bird is a mere maintenance drone The USA and UK have alleged that Russia last week trialled an in-orbit satellite-killer weapon.…

When 'works OK on my machine' goes global On Call Welcome to another in The Register's series of stories from those receiving calls for help and slightly passive-aggressive helpdesk tickets. Start your Friday with a helping of On Call.…

Go forth and test code that may never become a product if you dare VMware has announced that its flagship vSphere virtualization suite now offers a continuous beta.…

Q2 revenue and subs surge, annual guidance boosted again Quarterly earnings calls for public companies usually start with the CEO and other officers spending fifteen minutes or more showing slides full of numbers that prove the business is in good shape.…

Slurps quote-to-cash specialist to boost Cloud business unit that's already big with SAP and Oracle Indian services giant Wipro has acquired Salesforce specialist 4C as it eyes expanding its operations in Europe.…

Three collared, one in hiding at San Francisco consulate Four Chinese academic researchers in the United States have been accused of failing to declare on their immigration paperwork their true involvement with China’s People’s Liberation Army.…

CEO Bob Swan suggests his chips may some day be TSMC-flavored Intel on Thursday reported second quarter sales of $19.7bn, up 20 per cent year-over-year, and still investors distanced themselves from its stock, which was down around 10 per cent in after-hours trading following the manufacturer's earnings report.…

Insurer is first biz to be charged in New York for data security negligence after exposing millions of records to the web A California-based insurer that inadvertently left tens of millions of private customer records open to the internet has become the first company to be charged by New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS) for cybersecurity rule violations.…

Want your AI assistant to shout obscenities or hate speech at your child? There's a program for that Amazon claims it reviews the software created by third-party developers for its Alexa voice assistant platform, yet US academics were able to create more than 200 policy-violating Alexa Skills and get them certified.…

Two directors from Google, no other vendors represented. That's vendor-neutral? Google's open source director Chris DiBona has defended the web giant's motives in forming a new foundation to manage open-source trademarks during a Knative community meeting.…

'Most stable' release yet boosts scaling speed, data observability The beta version of Apache Cassandra 4.0, the most significant new release of column-oriented NoSQL database in years according to those involved, hit the downloads centre this week, with the promise of a 5x scaling speed improvement, new observability features and less "unnecessary garbage".…

Tech emphasises interoperability, but here firms will find out if it's ready for the prime time Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has cut the ribbon on a new lab that will allow cellular vendors to test interoperable networking kit.…

Flames contained – but expect slow 'staged restoration' of services Thousands of customers of BT's fixed-line broadband and telephone services are experiencing major disruption in North East England after an exchange in Newcastle caught fire.…

No Connect, Web Shop, call centres or customer support – users are worried Updated Garmin's Connect service has been down for more than seven hours today to the frustration of fitness enthusiasts keen to upload running times or synchronise with other services such as Strava. So, too, is the company's web shop and support forums.…

Waves subside for now as microblogging site faces tough questions Twitter has admitted that the naughty folk who hijacked verified accounts last week read a portion of hacked users' direct messages.…

That's what a sluggish pandemic response and 'world-beating' testing programme gets you The UK is to see technology spending fall by 9.3 per cent in 2020 followed by a more modest 1.1 per cent decline in 2021, according to research by Forrester.…

Yes, it's going to cost a bob or two, but the option's there Marvell will today formally open the doors of its bespoke tailor shop, though rather than cutting and sewing cloth, it's crafting custom 5nm semiconductors.…

Panto season starts early in Redmond Microsoft celebrated the end of its Inspire conference and the release of its financials with a pantomime-like Windows 10 Insider update. At least as far as AMD-based PCs were concerned.…

Qualcomm rival aims SoC at mid-tier next gen 5G mobiles, doesn't appear to support mmWave Taiwanese Qualcomm rival MediaTek has lifted the lid on its latest 7nm-process chip, aimed at the mobile mid-range.…

Bad traffic rules from HQ caused intrusion detection and prevention on gateways to just stop working Ubiquiti got a lesson in never blindly trusting external input this month.…

Retired judges now to take greater part in overseeing council snoopers A very rare thing has happened to British state spying laws: they have been tightened up after parts of the so-called Snoopers' Charter were formally commenced into law.…

'Security Research Device' is for lab use only by those willing to help Cupertino find flaws Apple has announced the existence of a new and very limited-edition iPhone.…

But users are 'always one small event away from frustration' when platforms clash, claims IT support biz Interview At Google's Cloud Next '20 On Air event, the company announced new integration features in G Suite, which VP and GM Javier Soltero says "almost realises what we've been chasing after the whole time which is a more complete collaborative experience."…

No honor among thieves The denizens of online forums dedicated to trading in stolen credit cards have been shown to be wretched hives of scum and villainy.…

And use the experience as a template for new products everywhere WhatsApp's Indian operation will shortly commence tests that make its platform a distribution channel for pensions, insurance and small loans.…

State media posts short vid and says Tianwen-1 is doing just fine so let’s just go with that shall we? China has successfully launched a Mars probe.…

SD-WAN can bump up your network defenses – and our next webcast will show you how Webcast Your organisation is probably deploying apps in the public cloud by now, either because you're following the industry norm of general migration into off-prem environments, or perhaps because you're having to support a dispersed workforce as we enter the "new normal" of a world battling COVID-19.…

Gassy giants make Jupiter look like an absolute tiddler Pic and video Astronomers say they have snapped a multi-planetary system containing a Sun-like star for the first time.…

‘Abort’ is gone, too, and so is ‘segregate’ and ‘kill’ VMware has joined the ranks of companies issuing style guides that remove discriminatory language – though gone further than some of its peers by addressing gendered terms for hardware and virtualization-specific language.…

Decision may help clarify law following landmark Supreme Court decision The privacy and constitutional rights of a suspected armed robber were not infringed when cops trawled records from cellular towers near two robberies and spotted a device using his phone number.…