The Register

Orbital lab emerges from teens to an uncertain future. How very 2020 The world's space agencies (at least those involved in the International Space Station) popped the Champagne corks this week to celebrate 20 years of continuous human occupation of the orbiting laboratory.…

Gartner's finest – a former vulture – draws clouds over eyebrow-raising connectivity plan A company working with a hydrogen-powered 5G drone maker claims to have built an airborne 5G base station antenna "unlike anything ever seen before" – and that just 60 of them could replace Britain's terrestrial 5G networks.…

Hip to be square and aimed at the Euro crowd Review First impressions are important, and the X51 5G is Vivo's inaugural device for the crowded European smartphone market.…

Oh sorry, did you expect this headline to work out differently? There are less than two months to go before the UK departs its 40-year relationship with the EU and it is still working on the IT systems needed to make the new arrangement work.…

Get ready for Energy Star stickers on your robo-butlers, maybe? Training OpenAI’s giant GPT-3 text-generating model is akin to driving a car to the Moon and back, computer scientists reckon.…

But first, he gets a judicial review and chance to extend eight-year legal saga New Zealand’s highest court has ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States of America to face charges of copyright infringement.…

Critical Acrobat, Reader flaws evidently couldn't wait until next week Adobe on Tuesday published updated versions of its Acrobat and Reader software to fix fourteen flaws, four of which have been designated "critical." These updates should be installed as soon as possible to close off their vulnerabilities.…

And it’ll be in proper SSDs, not cheap NAND muck that drives infotainment systems today, say analysts Passenger cars on sale in 2025 will ship with a terabyte of storage, according to analyst firm Counterpoint, and fully autonomous cabs might need 11TB of capacity.…

Taking a strategic stake in the biz probably helped and shows how big tech is buying into Asia Microsoft has taken a “strategic stake” in Indonesian e-tailer Bukalapak and will run the service in its Azure cloud.…

Fixes look to have landed in GitHub well ahead of disclosure SaltStack has officially revealed three bugs in its code – two of them seemingly critical – and told users: “We strongly recommend that you prioritize this update.” But the biz appears to have known about the bugs for months and quietly patched them over the summer.…

That or Jack Ma mouthing off about the nation's financial watchdogs The Chinese government on Tuesday halted Ant Group's $35bn stock-market debut, which would have been the world's largest-ever IPO had it happened. The move is being interpreted as Beijing punishing one of the planet's richest men, Jack Ma, for earlier running his mouth.…

Dodgy JavaScript code downloaded hundreds of times GitHub's NPM on Monday removed a JavaScript library called twilio-npm because it contained malicious code, which has become something of a recurring theme for the open-source JavaScript code registry.…

'Foreign-born scientists, engineers, developers of emerging technology, other highly skilled workers' locked out of America The battle between the tech industry and the Trump administration over work visas continues apace, with no less than 46 tech companies challenging new rules in court, while the US Chamber of Commerce has accused the government of ignoring an injunction against an earlier set of changes.…

Code shack describes issue as 'moderate' security flaw, plans to disable risky commands gradually Google's bug-hunting Project Zero team has posted details of an injection vulnerability in GitHub Actions after refusing a request to postpone disclosure.…

Reach out to your loved ones - but in Great Britain you'll have to use your phone A handy feature in Google's Nest speakers allows users to place calls to mobiles and landlines free of charge without a subscription or dedicated handset. Sadly, that particular benefit is coming to an end in the UK.…

Jamstack, Kubernetes, community contributions, and automatic translation – what could go wrong? Mozilla's MDN JavaScript and web technology reference documentation is migrating to a new GitHub-based platform, codenamed Yari, which is now in beta and taking contributions.…

Small Brit firm pushes back against Zuckerborg sueball Mobile app developers accused by Facebook of deploying “malicious” SDKs to scrape users’ data from the social network have hit back, telling London’s High Court that nearly all their apps were “not capable” of harvesting data from Facebook itself.…

Drag racing in orbit with Rocket Lab Rocket Lab is planning a 30-satellite launch via its 16th Electron launch from New Zealand. The payload will include a statue of Gnome Chompski*, presumably in an attempt to unlock hitherto unknown Half-Life achievements.…

Just One More Thing, eh? Apple has set a date for the next emission of its inevitably overpriced gear. The socially distanced (and likely pre-recorded) affair will be Cupertino's third event in as many months, and is expected to introduce the inaugural cohort of Arm-powered Macs.…

Also: HoloLens 2 Dev Edition out, .NET 5 prepares debut, and PowerToys Mute gets experimental In Brief It is said that Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.…

D'oh! If only they'd seen bug before issuing those 402 other fixes Oracle has released an emergency patch after a security vulnerability was revealed in its WebLogic middleware last week.…

Just don't leave. Plus: Cloud subscription model is 'increasing customer lifetime revenue' SAP CEO Christian Klein has committed to extending customer payment terms and helping partners struggling as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic grips Europe and governments enforce further lockdowns.…

It's really dope. Yep it's an energy-efficient process kicked off by gadolinium-doped cerium dioxide Researchers in Spain have uncovered a new approach to producing hydrogen via water splitting which could help overcome some of the drawbacks to this promising alternative fuel source.…

But annual report doesn't mention China once The National Cyber Security Centre fended off more than 700 cyber attacks directed against the British state over the last year, of which about a quarter were COVID-19 related.…

Plus: Faster on-demand supercomputing. P4d VMs with Nvidia A100 and GPUDirect RDMA AWS will deliver a new public container registry "within weeks" in response to Docker's introduction of pull rate limits for Docker Hub.…

Why? Because it's 2020. Oh OK, the real reason is: More efficient use of on-board cameras Tiny monitoring devices, strapped to birds, used artificial intelligence to work smarter, it is claimed.…

Ex-BAE Systems bod's letter read to Old Bailey A former BAE Systems engineer accused of failing to hand over his device passwords to Merseyside Police vowed not to give them up until a watchdog investigated his allegations that police workers had perverted the course of justice, the Old Bailey heard.…

Oh never mind, the project was 'reset' It was all smiles when the City of Edinburgh Council announced the extension of its managed IT services contract with supplier CGI in September. But talk of smart city services using artificial intelligence and IoT belied a sorry tale of an abandoned Unit4 ERP project which led two suppliers to the courtroom door.…

Air freight costs grounded mobile profits, but PC sales and overall profits keep rising Lenovo has posted interim results for Q2 and the first half of 2020 and revealed that while clouds builders went on a spending spree, the company’s data centre group (DCG) is still making losses.…

No, no, no, you hit it like this *whack* GitHub has warned it may ban users who fork a DMCA'd YouTube download tool on its platform – while at the same time hinting at how netizens can continue distributing the software without drawing fire.…

Officials go with randomly selected words with unintentionally hilarious results. Filthy Python, anyone? Many memorable events get named, whether they're hurricanes, political events, or security incidents like the Morris Worm, which surfaced 32 years ago yesterday.…

Australian antenna upgrade appears to have worked, should be ready to help with imminent Mars landings NASA has successfully communicated with the Voyager 2 probe after an eight-month hiatus.…

11.11 event should be four times bigger than Amazon Prime Day Chinese digital tat bazaar Alibaba is trying to take its multi-billion-dollar “Singles' Day” online shopping frenzy global.…

Yeah, take that, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and everyone else who pays that much anyway The decision by the Trump administration to raise the minimum wage that H-1B visa holders must earn in America before they are eligible to work stateside is going to destroy startup culture, business leaders have warned.…

Harvested usernames, passwords used to drain victims' coffers A Russian programmer has been sentenced to eight years behind bars in America for his part in a massive cybercriminal network that hacked into and drained victims' bank accounts.…

SANS Institute opens up ICS Asia Pacific Summit to all Promo 2020 has been a year of incredible uncertainty and upheaval, which for security professionals inevitably means threats have multiplied right across the enterprise.…

Abuse packet sizes to fool vulnerable application-level gateways Coinciding with Halloween over the weekend, security researcher Samy Kamkar published details of a spooky firewall-busting technique he calls NAT Slipstreaming. It allows a remote attacker to punch through gateway and browser defenses to access services running on computers within a network, depending on the victim's configuration.…

Guess what? It’s going to appeal. Again again. Again. Again Apple has to pay another $502.8m to network security outfit VirnetX for infringing its patents, a court has decided.…

Open-source coders to get 'upgraded' to a trial plan that's not great Travis CI, whose product is a continuous integration tool which can automatically test and deploy applications when new code is merged, has introduced new pricing plans in an effort to strike a better balance between free and paid-for subscriptions.…

console.log("go away and don't come back"); A US federal district court has ruled SAS cannot copyright the ideas behind its analytics software, rendering a senior judicial row over national sovereignty between the UK and America largely irrelevant.…

That's Chromium fixed. But the snap-only problem may reappear for other packages The Linux Mint team has arranged to provide its own Chromium package to users who were previously pointed towards Canonical's Snap Store if they wanted to get the popular browser.…

'The technology works. There's still a lot of development that needs to happen, but it does work' UK network provider Vodafone is proposing to deploy OpenRAN hardware across 2,600 sites in rural Wales and the South West of England - the LTE masts will replace the carrier's existing Huawei estate.…

And it's waving £350m to get it done London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is on the hunt for an IT service oufit to help run its sprawling application estate in a contract that could be worth up to £350m.…

Oh dear Huawei is reportedly aiming to move chip fabrication in-house for its battered telecoms infrastructure business in a move that will allow it to continue trading without falling afoul of ongoing US sanctions.…

Outfit quits browser stats game, and you'll never guess who benefits most from shift to Client Hints NetMarketShare – which has supplied free statistics on browsers, devices, operating system, and search engines for the last 14 years – is ending its reports, with October 2020 being the last month covered.…

Plus: Immigration lawyers for Mountain View breached, SonarQube hack worse than thought, and more In brief Bad news for those who have bought into the Nest Secure home surveillance system – Google has surprised many by halting further deployments.…

Public sector to be treated as one vast buyer of clouds under One Government Value Agreement Exclusive Amazon Web Services is the final of the big three cloud providers to have put pen to paper to sell a range of cloud services to the British government under a pre-defined discount, The Reg can reveal.…

Plus: Watch a self-driving race car drive into a wall, and download the new version of PyTorch In brief Trey Parker and Matt Stone, best known for their cartoon South Park, have created a new comedy deepfake series called Sassy Justice.…

Software, security, distributed systems, process-based engineering... e-voting might not be such a bad idea Column E-voting over the internet is by common consent a bad idea.…

App gap is painful so only true believers should buy it Review The Huawei Mate 40 Pro is a heartbreakingly good phone.…