The Register

NASA hitches a ride on ESA's red planet trundle wagon A team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center gathered last week to bid farewell to a mass spectrometer as it began its journey to the red planet via an assembly plant in Italy.…

Garmin grabs No.2 smartwatch spot Analysis Whoever predicted that fitness bling-flingers would struggle to survive should take note of the latest numbers on the wearable market from Canalys.…

Only works with HTC's VR headsets and mobes, sadly VR folk who feel they haven't got enough gear strapped to their bodies will be please to know Seagate has developed a strap-on portable drive and battery combo for HTC's Vive Focus virtual reality headset.…

'Forced consent' is no consent, state legal challenges Max Schrems, the thorn in Facebook’s side, has returned to launch the first challenges under the EU’s new data protection laws.…

Can u dig it? If you want to launch a single cubesat, you most certainly will Scottish boffins, along with colleagues in Ukraine, have developed a "self-eating" rocket engine that could affordably fling a cubesat into orbit.…

Going cheap: smartphone startup with big ambitions Andy Rubin's quixotic smartphone startup, Essential Products, has cancelled a handset and is looking for buyers, according to a Bloomberg report – just a month after opening its doors in the UK.…

Keeping innocent mugs on file is unethical – tech committee The UK government's approach to deleting custody images of innocent people – in that it only scraps them on request – is unacceptable and possibly illegal, MPs have said.…

Don't trust consumers with their own data Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hooded eyes are following my keystrokes. Hidden ears are analysing every shuffle.…

Watchdog not happy with Emergency Services Network either Efforts by the UK Home Office to digitise the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) amount to "a masterclass in incompetence," according to a damning report by the government's spending watchdog.…

Because two years wasn't enough time to prepare Users trying to read the NY Daily News, say, or the Chicago Tribune – the third-biggest US daily newspaper – from a location within the EU have been blocked from visiting their websites due to new data protection laws.…

UK data protection watchdog has a 54% cash recovery rate The UK's data protection watchdog has recovered only about half the value of fines doled out to dodgy data controllers, and those handed to spam marketing firms are the most likely to remain unpaid.…

We speak to the ex-Apple hardware guru taking on banks and PayPal Profile Ever wandered into a bank on weekday morning and marvelled at length of the queue? In a supposedly cashless era, it's the sight of a nation of shopkeepers depositing its cash.…

Sirens blared, roads were blocked, and sheepish grins were eventually grinned On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday reader-contributed tales of tech support jobs gone wrong.…

Ultrasonic packets of data to and from your handheld killed Boffins in Austria have developed a defense against acoustic cookies, a form of ad tracking by which smartphones can send and receive data using sounds people can't hear.…

Old components brick NCS 6000 cards after OS upgrade Eight Cisco NCS 6000 line cards need firmware upgrades, after Switchzilla learned they could be bricked by an IOS XR upgrade.…

Because everybody wants better tracking, right? Tufts University boffins believe the combination of 5G and the Internet of Things will make it impossible for networks to track the expected tens of billions of connected devices.…

January's fix for software toolkit had blacklist flaw, now fixed In an update last week, the developers of Electron – the toolkit used to craft widely used apps from Skype and Slack to Atom – shipped a patch to their January patch, and now, an infosec researcher has explained why.…

EFAIL furore not over yet, even though it's easy to fix ProtonMail has weighed into 2018's worst branded-bug PR disaster, EFAIL with a simple statement: “PGP is not broken”.…

nbn™'s Norwegian Blue was dead after all Households hoping to one day access 100 Mbps fixed wireless services on the National Broadband Network got a hard let-down last night, when CEO Bill Morrow said the rollout would not proceed.…

It's to avoid 'erratic vehicle behavior', says taxi app maker One of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a pedestrian crossing the road at night because its emergency braking system was turned off, according to an investigation by the US government's National Transport Safety Board.…

정말 짜증난다! A US court has yet again ruled that Samsung copied Apple's smartphone design patents, and this time the Korean electronics giant is on the hook for $539m.…

He hates unions, journalists, regulators, accountability and, apparently, the color yellow Elon Musk is having a bad week.…

When sunlight hits the comet, gas and dust sublime Scientists have found that the jets of ice and dust wafting from comet 67P are down to the way sunlight beams hits its unique rubber ducky shaped surface.…

Three men charged over 2017 hoax hostage situation that had a tragic end Three men were this week indicted for their alleged roles in a fatal police "swatting" of a home in Kansas, USA.…

The horse is a speck on the horizon – but at least the barn door now has a bolt on it Facebook has rolled out its promised disclosure regime for political and issue advertising, heralding a new age of transparency and civic responsibility. Or so Facebook folks suggest.…

Feds warn admins malware is rather tough to destroy The FBI says it is taking steps to stop the spread of the VPNFilter malware and botnet, warning that it's a national security issue.…

US pair's private chat sent to coworker by AI bug Updated It's time to break out your "Alexa, I Told You So" banners – because a Portland, Oregon, couple received a phone call from one of the husband's employees earlier this month, telling them she had just received a recording of them talking privately in their home.…

Clauses to the left, clauses to right and here we are, stuck in the middle with EU The Galileo "Yo Momma"-style war of words got angrier today with the UK threatening to recover its investment in the EU's space satellite project if the nation is booted out post-Brexit.…

Left patient records, prescriptions in former surgery premises for 18 months Bayswater Medical Centre (BMC) in London is licking its wounds after taking a not insignificant punch to the wallet for discarding highly sensitive medical information in an empty building for a year and a half.…

GDPR is their problem apparently Android app developers have hours left to decide whether to change their business models or leave Google's ad ecosystem because of its stubborn stance on the EU's new Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations, due to come into effect tomorrow.…

Sceptical trailblazer to deliver keynote at our ML and AI fest Events We’re are very excited to announce that Dr Joanna Bryson will be one of our keynote speakers at MCubed.…

Finally, some good Windows 10 news A chink of light has appeared in the wall of Windows 10 update woes in the form of a patch that should address the SSD problems plaguing the OS.…

Assessing applications for comms-snooping apparatus The body formed to audit Britain's spies has asked non-government bods what its team of judicial commissioners should consider when handing out warrants for bulk data-slurping.…

Storage firm's annual sales up for the first time in 3 years NetApp has reported full-year revenues for 2018 of $5.91bn, an increase of 7 per cent over fiscal 2017 and the first annual growth it has seen since 2015.…

Sea Ceptor good – more warships abroad, less so... A Royal Navy frigate is to sail to the Far East while carrying the newly accepted Sea Ceptor anti-missile missile system.…

'Alexa, pray for me' Technology worship has ascended to a higher spiritual plane with the Church of England now offering the faithful daily voice-activated prayers from Amazon's smart home kit, Echo.…

Swings into £79m loss-loss in prelim fy18 results Beleaguered telco TalkTalk has swung to a net loss of £79m in preliminary results for fiscal '18 ended 31 March, and is preparing to saw off its B2B division in a planned £175m sale to Daisy Group.…

And sprinkle those angry YouTube vids with a pinch of salt, please Comment Ubuntu 18.04, launched last month, included a new Welcome application that runs the first time you boot into your new install. The Welcome app does several things, including offering to opt you out of Canonical's new data collection tool.…

But cops' trial of controversial tech will continue London cops will not use controversial and inaccurate facial recognition technology at this year's Notting Hill Carnival – in a departure from the trend over the previous two years.…

Would you like to send all or some telemetry back to the Windows goliath? Microsoft is rolling out an update to Office products to introduce Windows 10-style telemetry data slurping. Or rather the software business has made it very clear to users it is doing so and they cannot opt out.…

Release adds Big Red compatibility, migration service Open-source database biz MariaDB has upped the ante in its war against Oracle, promising enterprise customers better compatibility with – and easier migration from – Big Red.…

EnclaveDB promises protection against malicious admins At the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, Calif., this week, researchers from Imperial College London and Microsoft presented an experimental database engine called EnclaveDB that aims to keep data and database queries secure even when the host system has been compromised.…

And that's just the second surprise. The standards bods also want to call out fake news David “Doc” Searls, co-author of 1999's cyber-utopian document The Cluetrain Manifesto, has persuaded the IEEE to launch one of two new IEEE projects seeking to inject a dose of ethics into the world of tech.…

A soft serve this week for hungry net admins Juniper Networks announced a tie-up with Red Hat integrating Red Hats OpenShift Container Platform and OpenStack Platform into Juniper's Contrail Enterprise Multicloud.…

Smaller feet, more monitoring, better interoperability The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has dropped the latest iteration of its open source management and orchestration (OS MANO, or OSM) environment.…

CIO Dana Deasy, your certificate's from Akamai. Why? As if trying to buy a flying fleet of F-35s wasn't enough, now the Department of Defense is being asked to secure its Websites.…

Pocket fondleslabs using Snapdragon 710s arriving now Following its Centriq server processor implosion, Qualcomm has dusted itself off, and today presented to the world another smartphone processor: the Snapdragon 710.…

Fill the jar and hand over your iPhone, sir Australia is ramping up its use of phone-cracking technology to crack serious criminals: its peak sports anti-doping body has taken a Cellbrite licence.…

Bill gets second reading but faces wrath of robot-loving EFF A law bill that would require AI bots pretending to be humans to identify themselves as such is progressing through California's Congress – but has hit opposition from the Electronic Freedom Foundation.…

Layoffs coming as taxi-app shuts up shop Uber has confirmed that it's shutting down its self-driving car operation in Arizona – without waiting for the conclusion of the official investigation into the death of a pedestrian in the US state in March.…