The Register

The week in spaaaaaace Roundup A mission to Mercury, a mission to save Apollo and a mission to save face?…

Original Arm operating system relicensed under Apache 2.0 Not to be outdone by the open sourcing of an early version of MS-DOS for Intel chippery, version 5 of RISC OS – arguably the original commercially successful Arm operating system – is going fully open source.…

Seagate ships more units, WD more capacity – it's a wash IDC has sent its analytical read-write heads skipping across the surface of the disk storage market and found Seagate shipped more drives than Western Digital in the third quarter.…

One out of three correct dosages ain't bad, right? Right? Experts hope an artificially intelligent software system will help doctors tackle the deadly menace of sepsis in humans.…

New method could settle the question of how fast the universe is expanding Scientists agree that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, but by exactly how much is still an enigma.…

Days since last TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Users' Pulls) reset to zero Programmers, your snow day is well and truly over: GitHub's website has finally cleared its 24-hour outage, and reckons everything is operating normally again.…

Does he mean some farm boy with just womp rat experience can destroy the whole thing? OpenWorld Oracle reckons it has “fundamentally” rebuilt its cloud architecture to boost security, promising full separation of customer software and cloud control code.…

Just don't let it restart to install updates... The classic “turn it off and turn it back on” strategy has worked once again for NASA, in that it may return the Hubble Space Telescope to active duty.…

And the updated code of conduct is now live, too Woke Linus Torvalds has returned from a four-week exile to once again steer the Linux kernel, the widely used software project he founded nearly 30 years ago.…

Flaw present for the past eight years, easy to exploit, and there are thousands of forks A serious vulnerability in a widely used, and widely forked, jQuery file upload plugin may have been exploited for years by hackers to seize control of websites – and is only now patched.…

Well, application revenues did rise a whopping six per cent, after all OpenWorld Oracle has kicked off the first day of its annual OpenWorld gabfest with a hard sell on applications – the chunk of the business that is, according to the latest figures, struggling the least.…

No sex, please, we're the Chocolate Factory Googlers must clean up their language at work as the ads giant is being anal about references to, ahem, carnal knowledge in internal web links and documents.…

Database creator explains Christian-based rules to El Reg Open-source database SQLite has told its developers it expects them to follow Christ, love chastity, clothe the naked, and not murder, steal, nor sleep with their colleagues' spouses.…

AWS-stewarded net-connected platform has multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities Serious security flaws in FreeRTOS – an operating system kernel used in countless internet-connected devices and embedded electronics – can be potentially exploited over the network to commandeer kit.…

Server maker drags Bloomberg in note to customers, watchdog, still checking its motherboards The computer server maker at the center of a dramatic secret Chinese spy-chip story has again insisted the yarn is wrong, and called the whole thing "technically implausible."…

Server maker drags Bloomberg in note to customers, watchdog, still checking its motherboards The computer server maker at the center of a dramatic secret Chinese spy-chip story has again insisted the yarn is wrong, and called the whole thing "technically implausible."…

The power's in the phone, not the cloud If you've been amazed by Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Assistant, you might think continuous speech recognition is done and dusted – and that there are no mountains left to climb. However, a young British company has developed a radical new approach with spectacular results, based on low-level signal processing.…

Competition regulator: Yeah, no More than a third of British businesses apparently don’t think it’s a crime to set up a price-rigging cartel, according to the Competition and Markets Authority.…

And you know what? The judge agreed with them A British smart meter company that missed a series of VAT payments to the taxman insisted in a Leeds court that a Chinese typhoon and Apple's iPhone 7 delivery schedule was to blame.…

Boop beep boop beep boop, your flight's cancelled Roundup While the drama of the aborted Windows 10 October update continued to unfold last week and excited buyers received their shiny Surface devices, Microsoft kept itself busy flinging out new development tools and battling buggy CPUs.…

Fee offset if Search and Chrome included alongside Play Store, of course Google will charge Android smartphone makers wishing to include its Play Store as much as $40 in Europe, according to documents purportedly seen by The Verge.…

Mounties remind residents to lock their doors O Canada, great northern land of milk in bags, merciless winters, maple syrup and leaving your front door unlocked, at least according to firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore. However, Mounties have warned residents of Nova Scotia against the latter after two women entered a home uninvited – and cleaned it.…

Financial messaging to get a bit more, er, agile Microsoft and money-message flinger SWIFT have announced a proof of concept aimed at demonstrating that Azure could be a good fit for the financial network's infrastructure.…

Can Chinese cloudy crowd check rise of AWS? Alibaba Cloud has launched in the UK, the Chinese cloud purveyor has declared, as it prepares to take on dominant player AWS and the other also-rans.…

Tennis for Two prepares to collect its bus pass The forerunner of today's video games celebrated its 60th birthday last week as the anniversary of William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two rolled around.…

Dirty Den escapes with a slapped wrist Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? The Register's weekly column featuring readers' tales of the things they'd rather forget having done.…

We need your help in understanding how software issues are solved in production environments Reader study Even the best software goes wrong from time to time. So, what exactly happens when it throws a wobbly, especially when it's a key component in a production environment?…

TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Users' Pushes GitHub's website remains broken after a data storage system failed several hours ago.…

TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Users' Pushes GitHub's website remains broken after a data storage system failed hours ago.…

That's how much it costs to license the blueprints (and don't forget the royalties) In 2018, a crack commando CPU was sent to an ASIC by a military court for a crime it didn't commit. This processor core promptly escaped from a maximum-security system-on-chip to the Los Angeles underground.…

Also applications are now open for OpenAI's Scholars programme Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of interesting or useful bits of AI news that happened this week.…

Plus, hackers find a safe haven in West Haven Roundup After we encountered a libssh security blunder, a leaky Tea Party, and a dodgy Redmond sports marketer, another week is in the book.…

El Reg listened to the whole depressing folly so you don't have to Comment Tech vendors: don't worry about Australian law enforcement demanding you decrypt user messages. It's OK, because we're not a communist regime.…

NYC biz boss gets nine months in the clink for profound idiocy A New York business owner will be spending the next nine months behind bars after he was convicted of forging court orders to take down unflattering online reviews.…

WikiLeaks overlord challenges housemate rules in court Housemate from hell Julian Assange is taking his landlord, the government of Ecuador, to court to stop its officials from, allegedly, running roughshod over his human rights.…

So solid crew confirm old idea by spotting tiny waves The Earth’s core is solid, according to a pair of geophysicists who claim to have solved an 80-year-old conundrum concerning the planet's center.…

High-value servers targeted by cyber-weapons dumped online by Shadow Brokers Miscreants are using a trio of NSA hacking tools, leaked last year by the Shadow Brokers, to infect and spy on computer systems used in aerospace, nuclear energy, and other industries.…

Eurocrats reckon that anti-competitiveness from Redmond would be a massive foot-shooting exercise The European Commission has given the thumbs up to Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub.…

But about that loss... Atlassian, the collaboration outfit responsible for inflicting Jira on the world, has announced a jump in revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 and an equally eyewatering jump in losses.…

Your weekly dose of networking Coming off a long string of losses, Ericsson probably hoped to turn in some good news, but at its latest financial results, the company announced the sacking of 50 people in response to a corruption scandal.…

Plus: 7nm LLP, QLC, stacked RDIMMS and brainy drives Among a blizzard of news from Samsung's Tech Data, El Reg has spotted smaller processor nodes, FPGAs added to SSDs, stacked and cubed memory, quad-level cell flash and object-storing SSDs on the way.…

All working now says biz. No, no, no, no, say customers, it is NOT! An unspecified and “unexpected load” on its infrastructure broke the Smart Living Home app for a day, an apologetic Yale Security UK confirmed to customers yesterday - however the smell of failure still lingers today.…

Chipzilla has to go it alone or turn to a partner Micron has announced its intent to buy out Intel's interest in Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT), the pair's flash and 3D XPoint foundry joint venture.…

Zuck and Clegg in Silicon Valley – no, it's not the latest Netflix satire Facebook has hired former British deputy PM Nick Clegg to head up its global affairs – a move that reportedly involved boss Mark Zuckerberg spending months “wooing” the Lib Dem has-been.…

Former Primary Data boss talks to El Reg about Hammerspace +Comment Newcomer on the storage software-as-a-service scene Hammerspace announced the general availability of its eponymous SaaS application this week. This software has been engineered using technology from Primary Data – yes, that Primary Data – applied to hybrid IT and cloud environments, providing a SaaS cloud-control plane.…

Spending watchdog slams transparency and record-keeping on major projects The UK's spending watchdog has said it isn't possible to tell whether the biggest and most risky government projects are doing what they're supposed to because of poor records and incomplete reporting.…

Sightings of Asian stink bug in French capital spike Oh, c'est mal, les punaises diaboliques sont arrivés à Paris! But before you pack the holy water if sojourning in the French capital this winter, you should know a clothes peg might be more suitable.…

Spies' fave data mining biz could go public as early as late 2019 – reports CIA-backed data-mining business Palantir is reportedly in talks with banks to take the company public for a blockbuster sum, and could move as early as next year.…

Case closed month after Apple coughs $14.3bn in 'illegal State Aid' The European Commission has decided to withdraw court action against Ireland over the delayed recovery of €14.3bn worth of back taxes that were ruled as illegal state aid, it has confirmed.…

JAXA and ESA in a tree, going to visit Mercury BepiColombo, the first mission to Mercury for the European Space Agency (ESA), is due to lift off tomorrow morning at 0145 UTC on an Ariane 5 rocket.…