The Register

Now that launches and cubesats are cheap, ‘post-mission disposal’ has become more important Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to test a self-destructing satellite in the hope of commercialising the technology so the proliferating fleet of low-orbit kit doesn’t become junk.…

Contact-tracing and building logins hailed as COVID-crimpers, so gov wants more The government of Singapore has decided spending more on technology is a fine way to help its economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, so has increased its tech spending by S$800m (US$575m) for FY 2020.…

Plan for 70% of home-baked chips by 2025 won't be met. And probably not by 2030 either China's aim of satisfying 70 per cent of its own semiconductor with home-baked product by the year 2025 will fall well short of that target according to analyst outfit IC insights.…

Financial contortions will be considered, but not with Lee Jae-yong under arrest A South Korean court has rejected prosecutors' request to arrest Samsung's de facto leader, Lee Jae-yong, in a case surrounding an alleged $3.9bn accounting fraud.…

Fliers v fine-tuned code, who will win? The US Air Force wants to pit an autonomous aircraft against another fighter jet controlled by a human pilot in July 2021.…

Maybe they were just baffled to see people getting around without cars The city of Los Angeles is the target of a lawsuit from civil rights groups angry over its tracking of rental scooter rides.…

'Blacklist' and 'master' keep getting removed from source code Amid the protests over the death of George Floyd, activists in the software community have taken the opportunity to remind people that they're trying to do away with terminology tied to racial oppression.…

Socially isolated officials will be fair game for meddling hackers The social distancing measures brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic will weaken election security in the US, according to a non-profit's security check.…

'PHP is not very exciting and there is not much to it' = the secret of success? Feature On 8th June 1995 programmer Rasmus Lerdorf announced the birth of "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)".…

One-off cost won't derail financial targets Ericsson has warned investors that its Q2 results will be dented by SEK 1bn (around £85.7m) in costs after it wrote down the value of its inventory held in mainland China.…

'High-risk' comms vendor says Blighty will be sorry if it limits firm's involvement Chinese comms bogeyman Huawei has embarked on a UK-wide ad blitz in the wake of reports its telco kit would be ripped out of the country by 2023 to "commemorate 20 years in the British market".…

Customers pulling purse strings didn't help much either, say analysts Disrupted supply chains and falling customer spending caused a bloodbath in the global ethernet switch and router markets in Q1, with Juniper and HPE the only top five players to report any sales progress.…

Ditch your diesel or petrol motor for something more Musk-shaped Updated Mop-haired Brit Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering ways to jumpstart the UK economy, including a scheme to hand £6,000 of taxpayers' cash to every driver who permanently parks their petrol or diesel guzzler and buys an electric car.…

Mauled mum receives the wisdom of Steve Irwin to immobilise frenzied beast Australia has become the gift that keeps giving for quirky news items while western civilisation is on hold. If it's not a house-proud bloke casually telling the prime minister to get off his lawn, it's a homicidal wombat brutally attacking four generations of women.…

You must be Barking and Dagenham, the east London borough The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham is tendering for a new £6.5m ERP system after balking at the £100,000 annual price hike for continuing to run its hosted Oracle E-Business Suite solution.…

A capable bargain-bin blower, just beware the bloatware Hands On The Redmi Note 9 Pro is Xiaomi's latest blower for the UK market. At £250, it occupies a frightfully competitive sector of the smartphone world. Can it compete with similar efforts from Nokia, Samsung, Honor, and Realme?…

IBM says phishing operation could be effort to get upper hand in negotiations Hackers are targeting German companies tasked with replenishing the nation's supply of personal protective equipment.…

Remember when an error message at McDonald's was all we had to worry about? Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork goes back to its roots in today's edition of problematic panels, with a seriously distressed McDonald's order screen from back when we were allowed in such places.…

You should check how long a vendor intends to support the kit, says Which? A report from consumer advocates Which? highlights the shockingly short lifespan of "smart" appliances, with some losing software support after just a few years, despite costing vastly more than "dumb" alternatives.…

Also: Cisco and Apple push out patches It is time once again for El Reg's weekly security roundup. Here's a look at a few of the more interesting stories making the rounds over the past seven days.…

A bit more time on coding could save hours in the mail room Who, Me? Monday is upon us, and with it another confession from a Register reader to make one consider one's own programming choices in the latest entry of our Who, Me? saga.…

Also, you can read the first AI-generated manga comic in English Roundup Welcome to this week's roundup of AI-related news.…

Economy Ministers mark official launch of GAIA-X project The Economy Ministers of Germany and France, Peter Altmaier and Bruno Le Maire, held a media event on Thursday to talk up GAIA-X, an EU data infrastructure initiative aiming to take on Silicon Valley and Chinese behemoths to protect data.…

2002 NN4 will visit us fairly frequently, and always miss - ignore the clickbait An asteroid described as larger than the Empire State Building will whizz past Earth, making its closest approach on 6 June.…

Don't aim for the bottom, go top down In his 1959 address to the American Physical Society at Caltech, physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture titled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," laying out the opportunity ahead to manipulate matter at the atomic scale.…

That's Systems Operating Centre to you. Chuffed with that, says Royal Signals brigadier The British Army has raised a new regiment that will take charge of its in-house security operations centre, a move calculated to make cyber defence a more mainstream part of all things armed and camouflaged.…

Happy 8th (or 9th) 'launch day' birthday, IPv6. Your daddy ain't dead yet IPv4 is here to stay with us for a good few years yet, reckons the the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre's (RIPE NCC) public policy manager, eight years after IPv6 was supposed to replace it.…

Publishing platforms, hosts being targeted by Stealthworker malware Servers are being targeted with a malware attack that uses its infected hosts to brute-force other machines.…

How may I infringe thee? Let me count the ways... A funny thing happened overnight in the world of space and politics as a campaigning video featuring SpaceX's commercial crew launch and promoting US President Donald Trump was abruptly pulled from YouTube.…

Questions linger over involvement of biz linked to Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave campaign UK government has published the contracts it holds with private tech firms and the NHS for the creation of a COVID-19 data store, just days after campaigners fired legal shots over a lack of transparency.…

Celebrating two years of merged activities by hitting the Off button IP blacklist frequenter tsoHost has taken time out from borking emails to let customers know that its recent acquisition, website builder MrSite, is for the chop.…

You perceive more faults, and they may not be faults in the first place A chunk of the UK's broadband users claim their connections worsened in the days following lockdown, according to a YouGov survey of 2,301 adults.…

Pip White among bunch of new EMEA hires at Chocolate Factory offshoot Pip White, senior veep and general manager of industry sales at Salesforce, has been nabbed by Google to head up its Cloud business in the UK and Ireland.…

Don't bother picking that tie for the Zoom session, resellers UK government procurement unit Crown Commercial Service is sizing up the market for new back-office systems for central government in deals that could be worth up to £400m.…

Plenty of competition out there for Big Blue IBM brought its flagship data warehousing product Netezza back from the dead because customers were having trouble migrating to the IBM database DB2, according to an analyst blog published today.…

Places your job ads with us for free or take some time to browse the listings for suitable roles Job Alert The Register has got more jobs for readers to peruse this week as we continue efforts to keep techies in work during these testing times.…

Blur tool brings privacy protection to images, in these troubled times Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, secure comms biz Signal has deployed a blur tool in its messaging and calling app to allow users to obscure faces in app-captured snapshots.…

Mein OS tut weh Bork!Bork!Bork! Willkommen to today's edition of Bork, The Register's glimpse at what digital signage does when it thinks nobody is looking.…

Google's free IDE is high quality but doesn't remove all the annoyances of Android development Google has released Android Studio 4.0, a massive update to its IDE for mobile app development, with features like an upgraded Layout Inspector, and the brand new Build Analyzer and motion editor.…

Utility creator claims OTT security hoops are harmful to indie devs A developer of a Windows utility has protested that "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is hurting independent developers" because of the number of warnings and obstacles placed in front of users who download installers that are not signed or sufficiently well known.…

That escalated quickly Elon Musk has called for Amazon.com to be broken up because it declined to sell a book.…

There's Samsung to be said for having an in-house 5G vendor, right, Korea? A new report has put the UK sixth globally for 5G adoption – behind the usual heavyweights of South Korea and Switzerland, as well as the US, Kuwait, and Qatar.…

All Amazon staff are slackers now as AWS chat backend Chime's in Slack has posted strong growth for the first quarter of FY 2021 and declined to measure its performance by comparing adoption rates with Microsoft Teams.…

The perils of 'bring your child to work' day On Call We have stepped into Friday, and the weekend is only a few short hours away. Take a break from wondering what a trip to the park might do to the "R" number and join us for another adventure of those Register readers cursed with the On Call phone.…

And teases pay-by-credit-card options for its AWS service VMware has extended the supported life of vSphere 6.7 for 11 months.…

Admins told ‘It will not be possible to opt out’ but also promised transition should be painless Google has advised G Suite administrators that its replacement for Google+, “Currents”, will debut on July 6th.…

Fraud allegations regarding health company transaction mean more strife for Lee Jae-yong South Korean prosecutors have requested an arrest warrant for Samsung Group heir, Lee Jae-yong, as part of a investigation into an alleged $3.9bn accounting fraud.…

Leaving more room for false ads bought by local politicians, which it still allows Facebook will hide ads bought by state-owned media outlets from its US-based users, as part of its plan “to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate ahead of the November 2020 election in the US.”…

And we’d do it anywhere else, anytime, says veep Google India has explained why it yanked an app called Remove China Apps from its “Play” digital souk.…

The beloved mole hasn't been able to dig into the Red Planet's regolith for ages NASA’s Insight lander is back in business after the agency reported that its "mole," a digging probe designed to burrow into the martian soil, is now back in action after suffering months of mishaps.…