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And other tidbits from the realm of rocketry Roundup NASA's Gateway edged a little closer to reality last week as the agency took another look at the James Webb Space Telescope's launch date and prepared for the arrival of the solid rocket motors for the SLS.…

You've just splashed the cash on a new Surface. Haven't you suffered enough? Lurking within the epic patch dump offloaded on Windows 10 2004 users last night came the news that Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 owners have been waiting for: fixes for glitches.…

So that's an 'F' for University Technical Colleges then? UK.gov's spending watchdog has found the University Technical College (UTC) scheme introduced by David Cameron's coalition government in 2010 lacks student numbers, is deep in deficit and provides a poor education.…

'This is going to be a problem; we are not on top of this' Interview Expiring root certificates will cause devices like smart TVs and refrigerators to fail in the next few years, security researcher Scott Helme has warned.…

Improved metadata management and easier compliance also required The Scottish Police Authority is on the hunt for virtual data warehouse and data lake providers as part of a £6m tender intended to help the public body derive some value from the huge volumes of data it is sat on.…

Destination 'Preinst aborted' Bork!Bork!Bork! Come join your friends at The Register on a train journey to Bork. Or at least one to destination Aborted.…

€400m for starters, after recent ban on 'untrustworthy' suppliers that sounded a lot like it was directed at Huawei The German government has begun a fund to support locally brewed electronics as the country tries to reduce its reliance on imported kit.…

IBM's server revenue grew rather nicely, but Lenovo's in a more-shipments-less-revenue trap Analyst firm IDC has published its assessment of the server and storage markets for 2020’s first quarter and the numbers are nasty.…

Maybe it's time to get it gone GnuTLS, a widely used open source library implementing Transport Layer Security, last week fixed a bug that had been hiding in the code for almost two years that made resumed TLS 1.3 sessions vulnerable to attack.…

$8bn for all things innovative and economically restorative Malaysia has decided to splash cash on tech as part of its post-pandemic economic stimulus plan.…

Are company naming consultants paid by the word? Logowatch Rackspace has changed its name to “Rackspace Technology”.…

The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma A novel adversarial attack that can jam machine-learning systems with dodgy inputs to increase processing time and cause mischief or even physical harm has been mooted.…

Hyperscalers spar in non-compete, NDA spat Amazon has kicked off a legal challenge to prevent a former AWS product marketing veep from taking a senior role at rival Google Cloud.…

Widespread outage rolled for two-plus hours, incident report mentions 'broad network incident that is impacting many cloud services' Updated IBM’s cloud has gone down hard across the world.…

Blame Reg Bot 9000 for any blunders in this story, by the way Microsoft's online news service mixed up a singer from the British girl group Little Mix for another mixed-race member of the pop band in an article about racism – after the Windows giant dumped dozens of human editors for AI software.…

Microsoft, Intel, Adobe, SAP emit fixes in security synchronicity Patch Tuesday Microsoft has given IT admins and folks another busy Patch Tuesday with 129 security vulnerabilities to address.…

Google engineer flags bugs in speculative-execution exploit defenses Linux kernel developers are fixing up a trio of weaknesses in the open-source project – after a Google engineer reported that defenses implemented to stop speculative-execution snooping do not work as intended.…

There'll be 'unintended negative consequences' if we continue like this The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) has delivered a light slapping to the US administration as it urged lawmakers to think a little harder about policies aimed at improving national security.…

'People familiar' have been running their mouths, it seems Apple is reportedly inching closer towards unveiling its first Arm-based Macs, with official confirmation expected to take place at this month's WWDC conference.…

And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that meddling Citizen Lab Canada's Citizen Lab laboratory has uncovered a hacks-for-hire phishing operation targeting anyone from political activists and oligarchs to lawyers and CEOs that hit more than 10,000 email inboxes over seven years.…

Critics worry mass return to House of Commons is unsafe UK Parliament select committees will continue in a "virtual" format until mid-September, House of Commons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has confirmed.…

New features for core product as well as enhancements to Atlas DBaaS Against a backdrop of mounting losses, NoSQL document store database MongoDB has pushed out its 4.4 iteration with a slew of new features that it expects to improve analytics, ease scaling and smooth performance.…

Snake / Ekans nasty fingered Updated Japanese car maker Honda has been hit by ransomware that disrupted its production of vehicles and also affected internal communications, according to reports.…

Sustainable revenue is hard for privacy-focused browser Privacy-focused browser maker Brave has responded to complaints about affiliate links by apologising for a coding error but also stating that adding affiliate links to search queries is standard practice.…

Find the savings and security you need when working remotely Webcast Working remotely using cloud apps – it’s the new normal, and it’s time to revisit data protection. You need to protect your business data when your users aren’t on-prem, and you need confidence you’ve got continuity if the worst happens.…

Plus: When Microsoft found breaking up hard to do, and much more Roundup Welcome to another look at recent happenings in Redmond, starring Visual Studio, Windows 10, Azure bots and that 20 year anniversary of the anti-trust case when Microsoft realised that breaking up was hard to do.…

18- and 9-month terms dished out for contempt of court A group of Lebanese IT distributors have been handed prison sentences for contempt of court after running afoul of Dell and breaching an anti-lawsuit order.…

Vodafone confirms to The Reg: Misled Merseyside chap missed his target A Merseyside man has been sentenced to three years in jail by a beak in Liverpool Crown Court after torching a Vodafone-owned phone mast.…

DARPA seeks a few good hackers Two years ago, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency introduced a hardware security program called System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware, or SSITH.…

Yes, clicks. You can feel it, says Vulture who got his claws on one Review Regular readers will know this correspondent is rather partial to mechanical keyboards. The latest to join my collection is Logitech's G915 TKL, launched by the Swiss peripherals makers just last month.…

How many speeding Brit drivers does contract value equate to? 250,000 based on minmum fine possible IT services outfit Civica has bagged a £25m contract to provide a managed service to support bespoke software and data integration for the UK National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme (NDORS).…

Escaping telemetry might seem attractive, but there are downsides too Open-source Chromium web browser and Visual Studio Code editor not free enough for you? Some developers, wary of the big corporate sponsors behind these projects, have taken the code and removed any branding, tracking and links to services to create independent alternatives.…

Because not everyone has a smartphone and Apple devices remain problematic Singapore will introduce a wearable device to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and the minister responsible won't rule out making it compulsory.…

Atmospheric moon taking a wander Titan, the only known moon in the Solar System with an atmosphere, is drifting away from Saturn at a rate a hundred times faster than previous estimates, according to the latest research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.…

CEO Arvind Krishna tells Congress it’s time to debate law enforcement reform, including access to AI IBM has discontinued its facial recognition or analysis software.…

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.…