The Register

Star light, star bright, you're being blocked out by these satellites Updated After complaints from astroboffins, a SpaceX Starlink internet satellite is set to launch tonight with a deployable visor designed to stop sunlight reflecting off its metallic body.…

Electrolux, construction biz fooled into handing over money funneled out of the US to South Africa A fraudster has admitted he tricked two suppliers into paying him more than $500,000 by impersonating staff at a subcontractor and a retail outlet via email.…

Sure, companies will probably just ignore its most important component, but what you gonna do? The final rules for California’s digital privacy law have been published and they are… full of holes.…

12,000 people waiting for hardware, 500 might get it this month. Might Atari is on track to lose by default in a lawsuit brought by the architect of its much-delayed VCS games console over unpaid wages.…

Hyperscalers snap up GPUs for AI inference Sales to hyperscalers now account for half of all Nvidia’s data-center revenues, the graphics giant’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said during a speech at the Bank of America Securities 2020 Global Technology Conference.…

17% growth pre-pandemic now a measly 5% Sales of wearable tech are estimated to slow in 2020 as consumers slam the brakes on non-essential spending. ABI Research is expecting 27 million fewer units sold against earlier forecasts, for a total of 254 million.…

You've not heard this one before but it does sound familiar Google has been sued for billions of dollars in a proposed class action alleging the adtech company identified and tracked users who adopted its browser's incognito mode to avoid such tracking.…

Who's in China and not involved in the deployment of 5G, eh? We are! Xiaomi has formally launched its latest phones for the UK market, the Redmi Note 9 Series, with an interesting dig at fellow corporate citizen Huawei as it bids to become the successor to that company in the West.…

Microsoft already at the trough, IBM and AWS said to be en route Google has joined Microsoft in signing a framework agreement, or Memorandum of Understanding, with the UK government's centralised procurement agency to set discounts on a range of cloud services.…

Closest example yet of substellar object Disk Detective-using researchers have spotted a brown dwarf, plus protoplanetary disk, 332 light years from home.…

All the old lines are getting pretty darn blurred, say security experts at Euro online confab Infosec Europe Does your IT security model take into account things like pacemakers? According to Dr Victoria Baines, speaking at Infosec Europe, "we also perhaps neglect the idea that critical infrastructure might be inside people" as well as merely carried in their pockets.…

Factory closures, surge in remote working and weakened economy all fed into forecasting formula Seven is lucky for some, but maybe not PC and tab makers in 2020 if research house Canalys has got its forecasts right: manufacturers will ship 367.8 million of those boxes, 27.8 million fewer than the prior 12 months, and down - you guessed it - 7 per cent.…

Minimalist distro aims to be the go-to for systemd-free Linux installations The Devuan team has released Beowulf 3.0.0, based on Debian Buster, but with the systemd init system - now standard in Debian - removed.…

Curd is the word as bored Brits search options for cheese and wine nights in With National Cheese Day looming, turophiles have been stocking up, according to a fresh top 10 of searches for the UK's favourite lockdown cheeses.…

And you thought getting from the sofa to the laptop was a challenge Bored of just two dimensions of travel? The third, fourth and fifth are on the way, according to a new report.…

The universe is weird, we want a refund The cores of massive binary neutron stars are crushed under such immense gravitational pressures, the particles inside split apart to create a hot soup of quark matter, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy this month.…

Cowgate calamity befalls Windows-powered signage Bork!Bork!Bork! What to do in Edinburgh when there is no impending Fringe? The answer is obvious, at least to us – go hunting through streets normally thronged with tourists in search of bork.…

Yeah, you and the entire country The government that spaffed £46m on an ineffective "Get Ready For Brexit" campaign is ill-prepared for managing public information about COVID-19 and the UK's departure from the EU at the same time, according to a committee of MPs.…

Consumer boycott clicktivism at a time of border tensions? There was, briefly, a million-download app for that Google has removed an app called "Remove China Apps" from its Android Play Store.…

Same chap who wants to ban F-35 fighter jets from Britain American spy agencies may reduce their "ability to share the most sensitive types of intelligence" with the UK if Huawei continues to be a major presence in British telcos' networks, a US senator warned Parliament.…

Google staff who protested drone AI effort could be quite interested in this An assistant secretary of the United States Air Force appears to have revealed that its forthcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use container-orchestration tool Kubernetes.…

Latest Tor Browser iteration makes the dark web a bit more memorable The Tor Project this week rolled out an update to its browser that attempts to make the anonymity-protecting onion routing scheme more approachable.…

Would you Adam and Eve it? Your words will end up teaching Microsoft AI to speak proper English The BBC has launched a beta version of a Windows-only voice assistant that can only play the broadcaster's content – though it can understand strong British accents, we're told.…

Find out more on optimizing your business – and stop bleeding cash Webcast How costly is poor Office 365 license management? We all suspect we either have too many licenses, or those Office 365 licenses are being underused. Either way, it’s the same problem: we’re wasting money. IT spending will go under the microscope in 2020, and Office 365 costs are a great place to start.…

Let's head that way. Doesn't matter if there's no intelligent life on it – there's none here, either The ASTERIA CubeSat, launched from the International Space Station into low-Earth orbit in 2017, has become the smallest satellite to successfully detect an exoplanet.…

Social network's engineers are so cheesed off they're going to just keep on showing up for work Analysis On Monday, some Facebook employees, sheltering at home amid the persistent coronavirus lockdown, staged a virtual "walkout" to protest the internet giant's refusal to block President Trump's incendiary posts about the protests over the police killing of George Floyd.…

Could this make 2020 the mythical year of the penguin on the desktop? Lenovo has decided to certify all of its workstations for Linux.…

There’s four checkboxes, auditors point out, and you’ve ticked one of them The US Department of Defense (DoD) has been shamed for its appalling IPv6 migration efforts in a formal probe by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).…

Video-conferencing upstart's sales soar 169 per cent mid-pandemic in quarter to May, funnily enough Videoconferencing upstart Zoom zipped past even the most optimistic projections for its fiscal quarter, thanks to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic forcing millions to stay at home.…

Price-fixing scandal case rumbles on and on, and on and on, and on and on Nearly 13 years after the first court papers were submitted, a California class-action lawsuit over CRT monitor and TV pricing drags on.…

The confusion of physical and online protests merge Comment Anyone who has ever been involved in a demo will know its key defining characteristic is confusion. With protests across America over the death of George Floyd, systemic racism, and police brutality moving into another day, the internet has become as much a battleground as the streets.…

Version 20 will ship without any snap packages, snapd daemon The developers of Linux Mint have expressed concern with Canonical's Snap Store and the way it is forced on Ubuntu users who try to install popular packages like the Chromium web browser.…

Astroboffins say Deimos's wonky orbit suggests slow-burning ring-moon cycle Like the gas giants in the outer region of the Solar System, Mars may have been circled by a ring of debris over three billion years ago.…

ThinkReality? We'd prefer to think about anything but reality right now, thanks Lenovo has whipped the covers off its latest take on VR-for-biz in the form of the Android-powered Mirage VR S3 headset with ThinkReality.…

Firm told customers they'd got a new Gmail address A Brit public sector-owned office supplies company shrugged off a ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoins after a staffer opened a phishing email.…

Are you Team Red or Team Blue? HP has refreshed its Omen 15 gaming laptop, and choice is the name of the game here. This effort emphasises customisation, extending to providing an option between Intel and AMD chips.…

Weird icon shapes, functionality tweaks, and notifications shaken up The Android 11 Beta has leaked to some Google Pixel users before its official release, revealing new details about the future of the world's most popular mobile operating system.…

Another option for Kubernetes fans not strictly on Linux Ubuntu daddy Canonical has emitted new MicroK8s installers for Windows and macOS developers using its Multipass technology.…

Chinese firm's loss is Swedish giant's gain Telco infrastructure builder Ericsson has landed a major win after Telefonica Deutschland named the Swedish biz as its 5G core network provider.…

Cisco cancels Live web conference, Google delays Android Beta, SAP boss voices support for Black Lives Matter Tech vendors and execs are sympathising with the ongoing protests across the US, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans, by delaying conferences or launch events.…

Nice R&D efforts. Are we paying attention in Blighty? An all-electric commercial aeroplane made its first test flight, heralding advances in propulsion and battery technology alike.…

AWS engineers given a dressing-down after proposing fix for 'paranoid' tasks Linus Torvalds has removed a patch in the next release of the Linux kernel intended to provide additional opt-in mitigation of attacks against the L1 data (L1D) CPU cache.…

Electrolyte breakthrough preserves charge capacity The world's mobile electronics, from phones to cars, largely run on batteries containing lithium, which is relatively expensive. Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper to make, but they rapidly wear out compared to their Li-ion cousins.…

Compatibility hold slapped on affected kit with fixes in 'upcoming release' It's only the second week of Windows 10's May 2020 Update and things are going... about as well as one might expect. Which, sadly for Microsoft hardware owners, is not ideal.…

We want COTS, industry-standard processes... you know... make yourself replaceable The UK government is calling for service-pushers to help it overhaul central and local government back-office functions, with a view to deals which could be worth up to £100m.…

Blue light at night, shepherd's not right Lab mice don't have much to laugh about but scientists in China have found new ways of making them depressed – and it's not good news for anyone that loves some screen time before shut-eye.…

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you and your friends British people will soon begin receiving random phone calls from so-called "contact tracers" warning them about having been in close proximity with potential coronavirus carriers. One of many problems with this scheme is it's dangerously easy to pose as a government contact tracer.…

China cited as an example to follow, not a rival in plan to lure five global whales India has announced three new plans it hopes will make electronics manufacturing its number one industry.…

Ethical hackers detail how they popped vCloud Director, the tool Virtzilla offers to service providers hosting pods of private clouds Ethical hacking firm Citadelo has explained a bug it discovered which allowed complete takeover of multiple VMware-powered clouds.…

Do you have automation and self-service capabilities in place that aren’t being used? Reader survey While debates continue over how best to lift the coronavirus lockdowns and regain some semblance of normality, IT teams are still very much dealing with the impact of the pandemic.…