The Register

The previous Saturn V didn't go so well, but you guys will be fine. Trust us Fifty years ago today, the third Apollo crew were strapped into a capsule perched atop the third Saturn V to undertake a journey to the Moon.…

Ofcom proposes shakeup of spectrum bidding process Some technologies lurking under the 5G umbrella promise to reshape the entire communications sector, creating new uses and businesses we can't imagine today. Ofcom showed it was hip to a few of these this week with a radical new way of opening up the airwaves.…

Moral of the story: It's never going to be 'fine' On Call Welcome back to On Call, where you get to take a breather and enjoy tales of tech support adversity from your peers.…

Art software maker snaps up virtualization tool for people who hate Qemu, Oracle VirtualBox that much When Corel CEO Patrick Nichols asked for Parallels for Christmas, we hope he meant the whole company rather than a copy of the desktop virtualization tool. Because that's what he got. The whole thing.…

Export ban compliance turns into geo-location gaffe fest Following changes in the way it figures out where people are located, US-based Slack informed an undisclosed number of individuals this week that they're no longer welcome on the chat app, due to America's export controls and sanctions.…

Just human error, internet giant shrugs after GDPR request went wrong. No sh!t, Sherlock A German man was very confused when he received, at his request, all the information that Amazon possessed on him.…

Courts crack down on Cupertino idiot-tax operation as tech patent war explodes The iPhone has been removed from sale in Germany after a Munich court issued an injunction against Apple amid its ongoing patent fight with Qualcomm.…

Pair on cyber-espionage rap, HPE, IBM and their clients said to be among those hit Two men, linked to the Chinese government, stand accused of hacking cloud giants, aerospace and defense companies, chip designers, US government agencies – including the Navy – and other organizations globally.…

Risk of causing even more embuggerance is high, we repeat: high Comment As the Gatwick drones chaos rolls on, with the airport now set to reopen at 8pm UK time at the earliest*, many people have been asking a simple question: why the hell can't the authorities just shoot down the offending drones?…

Adtech monolith had won previous High Court fight against NT1 Google has settled a legal case brought against it by a convicted criminal who wanted the adtech company to delete embarrassing search results about his criminal past.…

Dell tech (EMC and VMware) utterly dominate with Nutanix following HPE, Cisco, and NetApp are grabbing at the tail end of a fast-growing converged-slash-hyper-converged market that is utterly dominated by Dell's EMC and VMware businesses and HCI specialist Nutanix.…

Dara and pals told to hand over yet another cash wodge for hack it spent $100k covering up Uber has been slapped with a €400,000 fine by the French data protection agency for the hack that exposed the data of 57 million users.…

Almost a third spent on outsourcing digital, legal skills The UK Information Commissioner's Office has spent almost £2.5m on its probe into the use of data analytics for political purposes – but has just two staff from its tech division working on the case.…

Suit claims Facebook misrepresented data-sharing, misled users with confusing privacy settings US capital Washington DC has sued Facebook, slamming the biz for lax oversight, misleading privacy settings and taking two years to 'fess up to mass data harvesting.…

Save now, learn later Events If you’re the forward thinking sort, you’ll be considering what machine learning and artificial intelligence can do for you in the next couple of years - and what it’s all going to cost.…

Sightings continue to be reported as airport cites 'deliberate attempt to disrupt flights' Updated No flights have arrived or left London's Gatwick Airport since just before 21:00 UTC last night after drones were apparently spotted over the airspace.…

Euro court mulls whether site operators should share compliance responsibility with info-slurping giants In a case being considered by the European Court of Justice (CJEU), Advocate General Michal Bobek argued on Wednesday that website operators should share some responsibility with providers of embedded web widgets for ensuring that any data collection complies with legal requirements.…

Windows giant mulls gobbling up network kit maker, according to anon insiders Microsoft is considering buying Mellanox, according to a report on Wednesday by an Israeli financial newspaper.…

No one likes a lying asshole Comment Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and its COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its public relations people, and its engineers have lied. They have lied repeatedly. They have lied exhaustively. They have lied so much they've lost track of their lies, and then lied about them.…

You know that Hub that we forced you to buy? Yeah, we've messed with that one, too Pity the poor users of Logitech's Harmony smart home system: last year they were told the manufacturer was going to brick its Link hub and forced them to buy the latest version. This year, just in time for Christmas, it has effectively bricked that new hub for anyone using it to connect to other devices.…

If 2019 is the year you try AWS Lambda et al, then here are pitfalls to look out for Serverless computing, which does actually involve servers, has been touted as a way to reduce computing costs though its pay-per-use model and to free developers from operational concerns.…

Update Internet Explorer now after Google detects attacks in the wild Microsoft today emitted an emergency security patch for a flaw in Internet Explorer that hackers are exploiting in the wild to hijack computers.…

If there isn't a name by 28 February – ooo, just you wait The US has been told once again to appoint a permanent ombudsperson to oversee the deal governing transatlantic data flows, but this time has been given a deadline.…

Spotted by infosec startup Area 1, according to NYT The New York Times has published what it says are excerpts from hacked EU diplomatic cables that a cybersecurity company apparently made available to reporters.…

Facebook blasted by claims 150+ firms had special access to user data Facebook has found itself the subject of yet more shouty headlines as details of deals that gave more than 150 companies special access to user data were spilled.…

Someone get the Information Commissioner on the line Distracting and nagging text messages help smokers stop smoking, Chinese researchers have found.…

DRAM and NAND output to take a hit as demand slides Chip maker Micron has slammed the brakes on production and expenses entering calendar 2019 in anticipation of falling demand.…

We've got buckets, spades and isolated apps Ever felt a bit sick when Windows whinges about a suspicious application, but you really need to run it? Worry no more, because Windows Sandbox is inbound.…

UK competition bods threaten action against 'loyalty penalty' The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has issued an urgent call for action against mobile providers that rip off loyal customers with high prices even once handsets are paid off.…

Was it Agile's fault? Was it the billing? Sueball rolls on IBM has blamed ex-customer Co-Op Insurance for the crash of a £55m project centring on Agile software development, but admitted the systems it built "would not have" boosted the insurer's top or bottom line anyway.…

CyberArk checks your privileges Promo Back in 2008, San Francisco's IT infrastructure ground to a halt. An engineer called Terry Childs who managed the network had consolidated all the sysadmin credentials giving access to the system's privileged accounts, but after a dispute with the city government he refused to divulge these vital details.…

Policing customers is tough, censoring content would be worse, says lawyer Analysis Cloudflare found itself underfire this month for seemingly allowing officially designated foreign terrorists to use its website protection services. Which, under US law, would be a big no-no.…

Divers claimed biz knew of defective kit, failed to fix it As anyone who has gone scuba diving will understand, it is critical that you know how deep you are, how long you have been diving, the air pressure in your tank, and how much air you have left.…

Another leak, this time it's personal. Plus: Trump launches Space Force, er, Command A server containing personal information, including social security numbers, of current and former NASA workers may have been hacked, and its data stolen, it emerged today.…

Google's doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to everyone in the 1990s, allegedly Analysis In what can only be described as painfully ironic, Microsoft engineers are seemingly convinced that Google is making changes to its websites in order to break rival browsers.…

California traveler wants damages for allegedly being made to open mobe, miss flight A California man is suing the US government for civil rights violations after he was apparently detained and forced to unlock his phone at an American airport.…

Journos, politicos trolled, abused 'once every 30 secs' In March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promised to stem the tide of toxic content that has plagued his antisocial network for years.…

But spare a thought for 'nauts coming home in punctured Soyuz Roundup It's been a packed week to round out the year for rocket fans still giddy from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo sub-orbital jaunt.…

We won't be having a word with local firms until then Germany's top cybersecurity official has said he hasn't seen any evidence for the espionage allegations against Huawei.…

UK mobile networks had better open their wallets Ofcom has revealed plans to offer more of the airwaves to mobile networks, increasing capacity by around 22 per cent overall, and by 62 per cent in the more attractive sub-1GHz portion of the spectrum.…

Bristol firm says it will 'triple' headcount AI chip startup Graphcore has managed to grab $200m from investors, part of which will be used to hire more engineers on the west coast...the west coast of Britain for the absence of doubt.…

We're listening, insists company right before new chief exec takes post BT has belatedly given its shareholders a public pat on the head for not voting down departing chief exec Gavin Patterson's £1.3m bonus.…

Learn about DevOps, Containers, CD/CI and save £100s Events We're announcing the first tranche of speakers for Continuous Lifecycle London 2019 today, meaning you've got just a few hours left to grab our super bargain blind bird tickets.…

Nation becomes the latest to go it alone as EU talks stall France will start levying charges on tech giants from 1 January 2019, making it the latest nation to go it alone on a digital sales tax.…

Robo-ride processor core acts a lot like Intel Hyper-Threading Arm will today announce its Cortex-A65AE processor core aimed at powering self-driving cars and in-vehicle entertainment. Somewhat buried in the bumph we glimpsed ahead of the launch, though, is something very curious.…

Hi! I'm a task scheduler! Nobody really knows what I do until I stop doing it... Another long-in-the-tooth Azure service was put on notice this week.…

A wearable crossed with a mobile? Sounds terrible, but it's lovely Review No phone in 2018 has attracted as much real-world interest, I have found – and it's invariably delight and amazement – as the credit-card sized Palm. By, er, ...Palm.…

It's panto season in this week's Microsoft roundup Roundup As Microsoft's Xmas elves toiled long into the night on Santa's Windows 10 upgrade, the software giant found time to unleash static Azure websites and an unfortunately worded blog in this week's Microsoft round-up.…

Student vending machine project comes to a close It is with great sadness that we must announce the passing of the Ohio Pork Council's bacon vending machine after an all-too-short sojourn at the Meat Sciences Department of Ohio State University.…

For now, it's a business to be in... for everyone but Hitachi IDC numbers show Dell EMC's position at the top of the all-flash array (AFA) market weakened as it grew less than the market as a whole, giving chasing vendors hope – except Hitachi, which managed to fall back despite a growing market.…