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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.…

Web sites and services tied to older versions of OpenSSL and GnuTLS have been dropping like flies On Saturday, at 10:48 UTC, Sectigo's AddTrust legacy root certificate expired, causing a bit of weekend havoc for thousands of websites and services that rely on it for making a secure TLS/SSL connection.…

Internet Society also weighs in with worries about vague definition of 'open' Mozilla has cautioned that the Indian government's plan to develop a national GovTech framework risks "open-washing".…

Maybe hitting Intel's year-old Project Athena spec counts? Fujitsu’s PC unit has announced a new range of laptops it says are "optimized for remote work".…

Just what will happen to all that tasty location and contact data? A bi-partisan group of US senators are preparing a new bill that would ensure privacy protections in coronavirus tracking apps, as legislative interest grows in what contact-tracing will entail.…

Driver braked but it was too late Video A Tesla Model 3 plowed straight into the side of an overturned truck lying across a highway in Taiwan, sparking fears the driver trusted the car's Autopilot a little too much.…

Yeah, we know 'just' is doing a lot of hard work, we're being flippant Security researcher Bhavuk Jain has landed a $100,000 payday after he reported a critical flaw in Apple’s sign-in system that could be exploited to access countless accounts on sites from Dropbox and Spotify to Airbnb.…

And, oh look, Anonymous returns. Completely forgot all about them As US cities saw cops fly off the handle at those protesting police brutality and systemic racism over the weekend, drama inevitably spilled into the electronic world, although in unusual ways.…

Copyright infringement claim 'not in anyone’s interest' responds org Several of the world’s largest publishers have sued the Internet Archive for its “emergency library” of 1.3 million books, claiming the organization is engaging in “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”…

Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces – other IRS that can ruin your day Wireless networking researchers have proposed a way to jam wireless signals without power.…

Integration with Azure suits both sides Microsoft was prominent at the virtual Dockercon event last week as the companies extended their agreement to work together on integration between Docker and the Azure cloud.…

Chinese giant slips out superslim - 7.49mm - flagship and pals Chinese smartphone brand Vivo - one of several from the BBK stable - has lifted the lid on its latest flagship phones, whose gimmick is that they are super-slim, although the focus is on photography.…

Cybercrooks take revenge after planned heist failed The REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware gang has just published what it claimed were files stolen from UK power grid middleman Elexon.…

It's too long a retention period, say digital rights campaigners Privacy rights campaigners are to legally challenge the British government's decision to retain for two decades the data of people that test positive for COVID-19 under the test-and-trace system.…

Windows bod acknowledges project's influence on WinGet Microsoft's Andrew Clinick, a group program manager in the Windows team who is involved with the development of the WinGet package manager, has tried to make good with the open-source community by publishing an acknowledgement of what was borrowed from the existing AppGet project.…

But that's exactly what will happen if you decorate Androids with pretty mountain scene A picturesque Android wallpaper image is exhibiting some unwelcome side effects on most Android phones, effectively "soft-bricking" them until the user manages to perform a factory reset.…

Too bad, Craig. Now, about those court costs? A self-described "blockchain expert" claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin has had his attempt to sue a YouTuber, who made a video rubbishing that claim, laughed out of the UK High Court.…

Also: Rocket Lab reschedules, ESA probe eats comet exhaust, China shares space station plans Roundup As well as that launch and docking, there was plenty to amuse rocket fans last week as China unveiled space station plans, ESA aimed for more bonus science and Rocket Lab named the date. Again.…

First financial TITSUP* of June goes to... Updated UK retail banking giant Lloyds Banking Group's online services have rung in June with a wobble.…

Also: Multi-window Teams, Skype does the Blankety Blank dance, and more Roundup It has been a busy seven days in Redmond. In addition to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update finally being released, we also saw Skype flashing nine tired lockdown faces at once, some Azure database tweaks and more.…

You say fintech, they say findom, let's call the whole thing BOFH Bork!Bork!Bork! There is a cautionary tale in today's edition of finest bork as a digital sign does exactly as instructed, but perhaps not quite as intended.…

Here's hoping the winner does a better job than Sopra Steria The UK Home Office is set to begin talking to tech and outsourcing services suppliers to assess how the Visas and Citizenship (V&C) Directorate can hand over large chunks of its operations to the private sector in deals that could be worth up to £1bn.…

And if you win, we'll make it into a kitemark British companies have been offered access to a £400k pot of cash to design a UK-specific "kitemark" assurance scheme for Internet of Things products.…

There are perks to starting out as online-only, says Gartner Most smartphone vendors unsurprisingly experienced precipitous sales declines in the first quarter of 2020. Most, that is, except Xiaomi, which improbably managed to beat the odds by upping shipments to grab market share.…

Even the aircon worked in the Muskmobile SpaceX and NASA have finished a fine weekend's work after the Crew Dragon capsule successfully made it into orbit and docked at the International Space Station…