The Register

May mean humans can travel to and infect alien worlds using cryotanks of reproductive cells Humans may be able to colonize space after all, as a new study shows frozen sperm seems to be unaffected by the effects of microgravity.…

Revealed: Long-running espionage campaign targets phone carriers to snoop on VIPs' location, call records Hackers infiltrated the networks of at least ten cellular telcos around the world, and remained hidden for years, as part of a long-running tightly targeted surveillance operation, The Register has learned. This espionage campaign is still ongoing, it is claimed.…

So claims this Ernst & Young probe report Gerald Cotten, the late Quadriga CEO, created a string of accounts on his Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, each under an alias and containing bogus dollar balances, according to Ernst & Young auditors. He then used those accounts, it's claimed, to buy his customers' cryptocurrency with those digitally conjured dollars that didn't actually exist, and then moved the ill-gotten Bitcoin and Ethereum to his accounts at other cryptocurrency trading sites.…

Accuses both companies of withholding essential information, claims multiple conflicts of interest A cray cray Cray investor is attempting to scupper the supercomputer builder's pending $1.3bn acquisition by HPE, by proposing a class-action lawsuit.…

It's all in a lucrative day's work for Red Mosquito A Scottish managed services provider is running a lucrative sideline in ransomware decryption – however, a sting operation by a security firm appears to show that “decryption” merely means paying off the malware's masterminds.…

Top court undoes snub for provocatively named clothing brand When Erik Brunetti in 2011 first tried to obtain a trademark for his clothing company FUCT, the US Patent and Trademark Office blocked his application.…

Tehran's hackers are 'wiping' infected machines as tensions spike, fresh sanctions approved Hackers operating on behalf of the Iranian government have turned destructive, the US Department of Homeland Security has claimed.…

'Normally you'd filter it out if some small provider said they own the internet' Updated Verizon sent a big chunk of the internet down a black hole this morning – and caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others – after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.…

Insurers and family fling sueballs at Cupertino giant Apple is being sued Stateside over allegations that a faulty iPad battery caused a fire which resulted in a New Jersey man's death.…

Small machines with feeble CPUs are becoming interesting again In an act of technological voodoo, bare metal cloud provider Packet has resurrected the IT trend that was last in the headlines circa 2015 - the microserver.…

A trio of heavy lifters in rocket boffinry Roundup There was European joy, Russian frustration and a bit of a tease from the Falcon Heavy last week. And while the Pi 4 is the new shiny, spare a thought for the computers on the ISS.…

Nope: It was not giving Android a run for its money... Bill Gates has said his biggest management miscalculation was failing to position Microsoft's Windows Phone as the primary rival mobile operating system to Apple's iOS.…

Ghost in the machine conspires to ruin CDN biz's 10th birthday, it seems Updated US network services provider Cloudflare has been celebrating its impending tenth birthday with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*, er, knees-up.…

Pestered folk to 'download my EE app' and 'upgrade your phone' EE, the mobile operator arm of BT, is nursing a six-figure fine for texting more than 2.5 million pain-in-the-ass direct marketing messages to customers without their consent.…

i386 binaries will still run, says Canonical, but it may not be good enough for key apps Updated Canonical's decision to effectively ditch official support for 32-bit x86 in Ubuntu 19.10, codenamed Eoan, means the Steam gaming runtime is likely to run aground on the Linux operating system – and devs say the Wine compatibility layer for running Windows apps will be of little use.…

He who smelt it dealt it? The Mars Curiosity Rover has found unexpectedly high levels of methane on the red planet.…

Also: Azure backup for SQL dinosaurs and Machine Learning hits Windows Update Windows 10 19H2 may still be MIA, but Azure is alive and well in the UAE.…

Your quick guide to what else has been happening in computer security lately Roundup Here's a quick Monday summary of recent infosec news, beyond what we've already reported.…

Fasthosts registers all its customers' .uk domain names – just for safekeeping, you understand Analysis For a £100m windfall that apparently doesn't exist, the release of millions of valuable .uk domain names is stirring a lot of activity in the UK's internet name space.…

50 roles shifted off to India DXC Technology is sending hundreds of security personnel from the America's division down the redundancy chute and offshoring some of those roles to low-cost centres, insiders are telling us.…

It was acceptable in the Eighties Who, Me? Sunday is gone and Monday is here. To ring in the week, please join us in welcoming the latest addition to the shedload of shame that is The Register's Who, Me? column.…

...And more, including dual 4K monitor outputs that you'll need new cables for The Raspberry Pi Foundation has multiplied 3 by 3 and come up with 4: today a new Pi, the Raspberry Pi 4, officially launches with three times the grunt of the previous generation, the Raspberry Pi 3.…

Discount offer expires tonight so hurry, hurry, hurry Event If you want to learn how organisations like Lego, Well pharmacy and Bayer are putting AWS Lambda, Function as a Service (FaaS), and Azure Functions to work, you should join us at Serverless Computing London this coming November.…

Also Waymo is releasing a data set for you self-driving car nerds Roundup If you wanna know what's been happening in AI this week beyond what we've already covered, here's a quick roundup...…

Canary channel will let programmers experience tough new limits on extensions Analysis An early version of Manifest v3 – Google's controversial revision of Chrome's extensions system that will affect ad and content blockers – should appear in about a month.…

Yes, we too would lose our mind over *checks notes* page caches and storage IO Linux kernel chieftain Linus Torvalds owes the swear jar a few quid this week, although by his standards this most recent rant of his is relatively restrained.…

Plus: Chinese supercomputer maker Sugon, related orgs added to trade blacklist Patent attorneys are hopping mad at another effort by US lawmakers to undermine Chinese giant Huawei – this time by excluding it from the American patent system.…

Still said to be worth around $66.9bn in 2019 IDC has clipped 2019 sales forecasts for the infrastructure kit used to power hyperscalers' cloud services – the one area of the market that helped to prop up old world vendors' hardware revenues.…

Eye-opening VP evidence sheds light on state of post-buyout biz Autonomy Trial Autonomy staff were so paranoid under Mike Lynch's leadership that they feared their offices had been bugged, former head of HP Software Robert Youngjohns told London's High Court – adding that JP Morgan's CIO reportedly told him: "Autonomy is a shit show."…

Never mind the robotics and AI bullsh*t Government plans to throw money at automation and AI to develop public services risk "magnifying" problems around data quality residing in its own legacy systems, the National Audit Office has warned.…

IF (DateTime.Now > Spring) { WHILE (Windows != Done) Spring++; } Microsoft enlivened an otherwise deadly dull Windows 10 Insider build by revealing the corporation now defines its own seasons.…

Chief points to strain on global supply chains as earnings miss analyst estimates Welsh chip and wafer maker IQE's shares fell by almost a third this morning when it warned that the impact of the United States' Huawei ban is likely to be worse than expected.…

Dios mío, eso es nuestro buitre! An, er, eagle-eyed Reg reader holidaying in Spain has spotted an uncanny resemblance between this organ's beloved mascot and an equally vulturine logo being used by a peninsular paragliding concern.…

Only the Chinese now to OK $34.5bn slurp With the EU tipped to approve IBM's $34bn slurp of Red Hat next week, the open-source software house started Q1 of fiscal '20 with double-digit hikes in sales and profit, though its top line fell short of analyst estimates.…

More delays ahead for troubled programme The UK Home Office has extended its Emergency Services Network contract with Motorola, intended to shift blue-light services to 4G.…

Cough. I believe you have my stapler People spend an average of two bloody weeks a year just looking for a frigging desk to work at, thanks to hot-desking.…

Are you deploying this storage tech – or is it barely on your radar? We want to hear from you either way, please Reg survey We've all seen more than enough marketing hype in IT by now, and probably more enough to last several lifetimes.…

He then doubled down on spies' 'ghost user' backdoor plan Solving the Huawei 5G security problem is a question of convincing the Chinese to embrace British "fair play", security minister Ben Wallace said yesterday without the slightest hint of irony.…

God money I’ll do anything for you Something for the Weekend, Sir? "People love being sold to."…

Urgh, OK Google, call 9... Can you hear me?! CALL 9...arghgh Digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home may be able to automatically detect when someone is having a heart attack, and call for medical help, one day, according to this latest research.…

'Expect actual number to go to be much less' says firm, as 1k put hand up for voluntary redundancy Exclusive DXC Technology has told UK government and Unite that – in a worst case scenario – more than 2,000 locals could be made redundant in the latest round of expense cuts, which could also include the closure of one site.…

Figuratively, of course On Call As you shut down and wait for Windows or macOS to spend the usual hour installing updates before your weekend can begin, spare a thought for those on the other end of the phone in The Register's weekly On Call column.…

Phone bone grown from shoddy body tone, it's shown Young people are developing "horn-like" bone spurs, it's claimed, and smartphone-induced posture problems are apparently to blame.…

Cluster of rock and ice a sweltering 77K, we're told Astronomers have measured the temperature of one of Uranus’s rings, dubbed Epsilon, for the first time. The result: the cluster of ice and rock is a nippy 77 kelvin.…

If you've dreamed of advancing human obsolescence, your time is at hand Facebook's software can't catch all the vile content uploaded to its servers by its addicts, which is why the multibollion-dollar antisocial network relies on relatively poorly paid contractors, who work in living hell, to cleanse its pages.…

Can't spell SupportAssist without 'ass' and 'u' – other makers may be hit, too Dell's troubleshooting software SupportAssist, bundled with the US tech titan's home and business computers, has a security flaw that can be exploited by malware and rogue logged-in users to gain administrator powers.…

Goodbye Sex.com: Voice.com now #1 at $30m Comment This week saw the greatest sum ever paid for a domain name: Voice.com was sold in an all-cash deal for $30m to a company called Block.one, more than doubling the previous, longstanding record of $13m for Sex.com.…

Apple issues voluntary recall for godforsaken laptops, again Apple has urged its fans to stop using certain MacBook Pro models, and has issued a voluntary recall of the notebooks, after they were found to be prone to battery blazes.…

Patch released after crypto-currency biz sounded alarm The development and release of a critical Firefox security patch this week was, in part, triggered by an attempted cyber-heist of crypto-coin exchange Coinbase.…

Read this for 2 seconds. Pause 8 seconds. Read for 2 seconds. Pause 8 seconds... Video Being an early adopter can be a frustrating experience as kinks are ironed out, bugs are squashed, and interfaces are improved. It comes with the territory. However, there is simply no excuse for what General Electric (GE) has done to users of its smart light bulbs.…