The Register

Death from a-bug. Dr Strange-bug. Top Bug. We could do this all day... Computer security vulnerabilities are widespread in US military hardware, and the Pentagon is only beginning to understand how to fix them.…

Gadgets taught to identify actions via always-on mics Boffins have devised a way to make eavesdropping smartwatches, computers, mobile devices, and speakers with endearing names like Alexa better aware of what's going on around them.…

'I have no reason to believe at this point that it won't be on schedule' For reals, my dude? NASA boss Jim Bridenstine says he's confident the next Russian Soyuz rocket carrying crew and gear to the International Space Station will launch "on schedule."…

Travel details for thousands of citizens slip into hands of slippery scumbags Someone has reportedly siphoned personal information on 30,000 or more US Department of Defense workers.…

Status: TITSUP – Total Inability To Support Users' Packets Updated Virgin Media, one of the UK's largest broadband and TV cable providers, is suffering an outage right now. If you can't access the internet or watch the telly, then it's not just you. It's quite a few of you.…

Undervalues tracker stock by $11bn, quips: 'Peace better than war but I still enjoy a good fight' Michael Dell could be about to lock horns again with Carl Icahn - the activist investor is opposed to Dell Technologies going public via VMware because he claims the move will rip off existing stockholders.…

Hive, HP Inc sign up to refreshed code of practice GCHQ has managed to convince HP Inc and Centrica Hive to take its side in a relatively rare public intervention on the state of consumer IoT security.…

Like a Psion without the keys Samsung has been granted a patent (PDF) for a foldable mobile device, giving important clues as to how it’s approaching the market with the new technology.…

Chip rivals lock lips to make customers happy Intel on Monday joined hands with Arm, its occasional rival, in an attempt to make the notoriously dismal state of Internet-of-Things security less so.…

Plucky Brit land speed record chaser fails to find £25m down the back of the sofa, calls in Administrators Twenty-one years to the day since Wing Commander Andy Green cracked the land-speed record with ThrustSSC, the UK outfit attempting to go one better with Bloodhound has entered administration.…

Another old world vendor to rely on hyperscale beasties... in this instance, Azure Fujitsu has taken the K5 platform for a long walk off a short pier, sending the hybrid cloud service to a watery grave - to stretch the metaphor - just a year and a half after its UK launch.…

But you're only in the pink if you're in China Microsoft’s chief product officer, Panos Panay, took to Twitter today to insist that the Surface line was positively in the pink. In China, at any rate.…

Also: Juniper and the gang plus AI network research tools Roundup German internet exchange operator DE-CIX has again attempted to block the country's spy agency from tapping its network – this time by filing a constitutional complaint.…

Probably because Microsoft has accidentally disabled your audio Somebody got a little trigger happy with the big red Windows Update button last week as a broken Intel audio driver was unleashed on users “by mistake”.…

'To team up with Amazon is like to team up with the devil' Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Pity the poor resellers, because Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Business business is coming for their business, and they'll play ball with him at their own peril, so an analyst claims.…

Techie gets away with it by saying 'I Love You' Who, Me? Just like clockwork, another weekend is over and Monday is here again. To lighten the load, El Reg is offering you the latest instalment of Who, Me?, our weekly sysadmin confessional column.…

And more than one place… Events Serverless computing might be the way of the future, but to some it can also look suspiciously like a whole new crop of walled gardens.…

Digital government? Not sure how it is for you, but it's been great for us You may not have many functional digital government services to use here in the UK – but if you did, they would be the prettiest in the world.…

Your two-minute guide to this week in machine-learning world Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of what's been happening in AI outside of the headlines.…

The Live bookmarks, preview features, that is When Firefox 64 arrives in December, support for RSS, the once celebrated content syndication scheme, and its sibling, Atom, will be missing.…

Also, Flash fakers seek out crypto marks Roundup This week we caught wind of another Facebook blunder, a dodgy Patch Tuesday bundle, and more China trouble.…

A pulse-racing tale of biotech bug fixing The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advising health professionals to keep an eye on some of the equipment they use to monitor pacemakers and other heart implants.…

Aging kit kicks into safe mode, 65,000+ miles away October is shaping up to be a lousy month for NASA. First, the Hubble space telescope went into hibernation. Then a Russian Soyuz rocket failed to get its astronauts and kit up to the orbiting International Space Station. And now the American agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, tens of thousands of miles from Earth, is kaput – temporarily, we hope.…

'Humans are going to be a lot less visible ... will be just one species of intelligent beings' The notion of deploying armed human soldiers on the ground to fight wars will disappear over time, according to one of America's top military scientists.…

Tinder subdomain flaw turns into massive everybody flaw Bug-hunters have told how they uncovered a significant security flaw that affected the likes of Tinder, Yelp, Shopify, and Western Union – and potentially hundreds of millions of folks using these sites and apps.…

Good news: 20m feared pwned are safe. Bad news: That's still 30m profiles snooped... Facebook users can relax and get back to interacting with quality content and authentic individuals on the social network.…

Wait.... this wasn't in the script In a US Senate hearing that went little reported this month, America's antitrust chiefs warned that Europe's tough General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had benefited the companies it was designed to tame.…

A lovely bit of open-source interop for the weekend Language interoperability efforts are underway at Microsoft in the form of the open-source xlang, which builds on the approach taken with WinRT.…

Message for the fu-ture-ture-ture Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Microsoft is still going to ditch or spin off the Surface line in 2019, insists the analyst who first made the prediction a year ago, despite the line-up's annual refresh this month.…

Come with me if you want to be ripped off Twenty years ago, the internet was promised to level the playing field allowing small fry to compete with the bigger, entrenched players. But online digital markets have tended towards monopoly, or a small number of dominant firms.…

Bigwigs report lots of progress in the cash-flinging department The UK's Department of Health and Social Care released a progress update this week on the hesitant efforts to deal with shonky NHS IT.…

Try being useful to customers Interview Samsung has responded to a saturated market – and the mortal threat of Huawei – by ramping up its mid-range phones and promising much more rapid repairs.…

Oh, and we need A3 sales skillz Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Spending $550m on Apogee was as much a defensive measure to stop rivals buying the print services dealer as it was to beef up its place in the copier market, HP Inc chief Dion Weisler has said.…

RPI or CPI? A percentage point really can make all the difference Can UK telco giant BT move its pension scheme increases off the RPI inflation measure and onto CPI? Earlier this year the High Court said no, but now the telco and 300,000 of its pensioners are awaiting the Court of Appeal’s verdict on this thorny question.…

Is it Project Fear? Tech trade doesn't seem to think so Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Product shortages, additional price hikes and a recession could become a reality if the UK crashes out of the European Union without any sort of trade agreement in place. This was the message that came loud and clear at this week's Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona.…

How does a complimentary ticket sound? Events We have a limited number of complimentary tickets for Serverless Computing London next month to give away, so if you want to get up to speed on Serverless, FaaS and related technologies with us get in touch quick.…

Faulty fluoroscopes and malfunctioning monitors make for an On Call two-fer On Call It’s Friday at long last and that means it’s time for On Call, our regular trip down readers’ memory lanes.…

So says Alex... Graham... Dan... Something for the Weekend, Sir? My name is McLeod. Graham McLeod. If you're looking me up in a list, you'll find me under M as "McLeod, Graham".…

Preaching network-as-software, bidding farewell to the CLI Juniper Networks has taken the wraps off what will be one of the year's biggest efforts for the biz: the EngNet network software developer toolset and its associated education, technical exchange, APIs, training, and ecosystem.…

'Smart' home tech now only a half-accurate description Yale Security UK says it is working to restore service after some unplanned maintenance turned into a total outage on the smartphone app customers use to control their home alarms.…

Senator calls for real probe into 'Chinese-controlled' outfit The “weirdest acquisition ever” – Broadcom's $19bn proposed takeover of CA Technologies – ran into a rather strange road-bump this week: a fake US military memo passed around American politicians on Capitol Hill.…

SpaceX, Boeing running behind schedule, and don't get me started on SLS Comment Thursday's failed Soyuz launch, carrying kit and astronauts to the International Space Station means NASA is fast running out of options for shipping stuff into orbit. Especially since its homespun solutions aren't living up to their earlier promise.…

Patched server, or working server. Pick one... IBM has withdrawn a patch for a significant security vulnerability in its WebSphere Application Server after the code knackered some systems.…

Auto-updates come with a sting Updated Microsoft on Tuesday posted KB4464330 (Windows 10 1809 Build 17763.55) in an effort to halt the damage done by last week's Windows 10 version 1809 update, but it hasn't quite worked.…

Pinedo avoids serious time after spilling beans to Mueller on account sales A California man who provided bank accounts to Russian online trolls seeking to monkey with America's 2016 elections will spend the next six months or so behind bars.…

Incremental titbits aimed at time-poor techies Google Cloud Next Google has released another handful of networking features for its cloud, including Cloud NAT, which lets devs build cloud-based services that do not have public IP addresses.…

Chaebol charges back against Chinese SIM-only onslaught Hands On Samsung has launched the Galaxy A9 – its most comprehensive offensive against the twin threats of SIM-only subscribers and Chinese giant Huawei. The fightback involves a stronger mid-range, trade-ins, and promises better turnaround for faults and repairs.…

Staff snapped up and IP licensed by iPhone giant Apple has agreed to hand $600m over to Dialog Semiconductor in return for a slice of the chipmaker's business and brains.…

Crouching tiger, hidden APT The UK's National Cyber Security Centre and its western intel pals have today put out a report spotlighting the most commonly wielded hacking utilities.…

New bits from Amsterdam Config management and automation outfit Puppet rolled out a slew of updates to its DevOps toolset in front of a crowd of excitable engineers at its Puppetize Live event in Amsterdam this week, with an eye on security and automation.…