The Register

Jeez, get a grip, Sol! As the Sun ages and sheds mass, the gravitational pull it exerts on its planets weakens.…

European Commission sysadmin offers us tales of Euro-dunderheads On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed tales of facepalm-worthy failures in the field of tech support.…

Wine Is Not an Emulator Windows-on-POSIX software now handles Windows apps on Android Version 3.0 of Wine Is Not an Emulator – aka WINE – has arrived, and offers all sorts of new emulation-on-Android possibilities.…

Non-profit org mutates into investment firm Special report Nominet, which runs the UK's domain-name registry, has abandoned its own charitable foundation, raising questions about the organization's direction and accountability.…

Only tits in this drama were the two kids in trouble Video Australian politicians are claiming a world first after a drone saved two teenagers from drowning in heavy surf.…

Apple font code on iOS, macOS knackered by texted link A specially crafted webpage will knacker Apple's Messages and Safari software on iOS and macOS, allowing miscreants to spread merry mischief by texting fans a link to the dastardly HTML.…

Pesky phishing pages using international domain names just won't go away It's been known for a long while that people can use similar-looking non-Roman characters to create internet addresses that look similar to real ones.…

Airbus says it’ll keep building the behemoth of the skies into the 2030s Three days after warning the A380 might not have a future, Airbus says it will likely keep making the plane into the 2030s.…

India can hit all of China now. Or Moscow, Athens, USA’s Indian Ocean navy base ... India has successfully tested a surface-to-surface ballistic missile.…

Meanwhile, Bruce Perens wants his legal bills footed Open Source Security, Inc., the maker of the Grsecurity Linux kernel patches, suffered a setback last month when San Francisco magistrate judge Laurel Beeler granted a motion by defendant Bruce Perens to dismiss the company's defamation claim, with the proviso that the tossed legal challenge could be amended.…

Big Blue exits five-year skid, shares fall on uncertain future For 22 quarters in a row, IBM's sales have been shrinking. But not any more. In the final three months of 2017, Big Blue's revenues grew 3.5 per cent compared to year-ago quarter, the first such rise in about six years.…

Devs toil away unifying product suites ahead of May rebrand launch Exclusive Citrix will try to reinvent itself with integrated cloudy products – and ditch some of its long-standing brands in favor of a naming scheme without the Xen badge it has nurtured for years.…

iGiant up next in the Meltdown-Spectre-sueball-a-palooza Add Apple to the list of companies facing a legal backlash in the US over the Spectre and Meltdown CPU security fiasco.…

Deloitte trying to figure out who to pay first – or maybe who to pay at all Contractors left out of pocket by the collapse of alleged tax-skimming scammers Plutus Payroll have been asked to provide copious details of their employment history by receiver Deloitte, which appears to have few details of claimants’ status or relationship to Plutus and its associated companies.…

Electronics tutor's taunts come back to haunt him An electronics technician pleaded guilty on Wednesday to orchestrating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on a former employer and other organizations – and to unlawfully possessing a firearm as a former felon.…

Bezos narrows down search for new base to 20 cities, mostly on East Coast Amazon has trimmed its list of potential cities where it wants to build its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The Bezos Bunch says it has narrowed down a list of 238 proposals to 19 US cities and one in Canada.…

Forex head alleged to have manipulated market in 'front-running' scheme The former head of foreign currency exchanges at Barclays New York has been charged in the US with devising and executing a "scheme to defraud HP of money and property", according to an indictment entered yesterday.…

Faces up to AWS, Google with future per-second billing plan Faced with a customer base being lured away by cheaper cloud compute services at its competitors, DigitalOcean has cut prices and increased RAM and SSD storage for its users.…

UK.gov pays £15,500 in damages after failed fact-check An asylum seeker has won £15,500 from the UK’s Home Office after it blabbed confidential information about his persecution in his home country - to authorities in the state.…

Kent bloke 'threatened' privacy watchdog that he'd release more A man from Kent, England, has been prosecuted under the UK's Data Protection Act for leaking sensitive police information on Twitter.…

Hundreds of gigabytes already slurped, say EFF and Lookout An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and security biz Lookout has uncovered Dark Caracal, a surveillance-toolkit-for-hire that has been used to suck huge amounts of data from Android mobiles and Windows desktop PCs around the world.…

Advanced surveillance system puts mobile first for stealing data An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and security firm Lookout have uncovered Dark Caracal, a highly advanced spying platform sucking huge amounts of data from mobiles and desktops around the world.…

Naturally we demanded proof – and we got it Interview What's it like to fly an F-35 fighter jet? We interviewed the chief British test pilot on a uniquely British flying technique – and then had a play with a full cockpit simulator to find out for ourselves.…

CEO thanks execs for service... more than most get Exclusive DXC Technologies is splitting with exec veep and general manager Mike Nefkens - previously the boss for HPE Enterprise Services before the spin merger with CSC - amid a massive shake-down of the exec line-up.…

It lands today Google has confirmed plans to issue a patch for Chromecast and Google Home aimed at resolving a traffic flooding problem that was swamping home networks.…

A smartphone that plucks at your heartstrings, not always in a good way A top-end smartphone isn’t just for Christmas: it’s for 18 months, maybe two years, two-and-a-half at a push. So here at The Reg, we let the stardust settle around Apple's iPhone X launch before putting the product to test in the field for longer than an afternoon. Fanboi squeals written up just after you peel away the cellophane are no use to anyone.…

Hat trick! A third Oracle enterprise package has been patched against a crypto-mining exploit.…

Web chat? On the phone? Online? That'll be UK IT's Mr Nasty you are talking to Despite ditching other tech suppliers in a consolidation push, Marks & Spencers – purveyor of middle-class dreams – has extended a customer support agreement with everyone's fave outsourcing titan, Capita, for £70m.…

Tory council candidate moots an even more robotic PM – for the 'more personable touch' A local Tory candidate has suggested the party creates a chatbot to up its digital cred and boost engagement with voters. Its name? Theresa Maybot.…

Dev team quits, suggests NHS used them to get better deal with Microsoft The small team behind an ambitious NHoS Linux project are calling it a day, citing receipt of a trademark infringement warning from the Department of Health's (DoH) "brand police" as the "final straw".…

Hey, Reg can entertain children. IP freely, anyone, IP freely? How do you get seven-year-olds interested in intellectual property? Anyway, indeed, why would you want to? No matter, the Intellectual Property Office has launched a cartoon answering the question no one has ever asked.…

When Britain’s future hung in the balance in 1940, a covert army of men, women and children set to work in network of sheds, garages and bus depots across Britain building desperately needed Supermarine Spitfires for the RAF’s war effort.…

Billions of pounds are lost annually to lies. As we become more digital and more connected through web, devices and social the reach of liars and the consequences of their actions assume bigger and more personal proportions - compromised bank accounts, stolen personal data and lost intellectual property.…

It’s the end of the road for the internal combustion engine, right? Volvo will only make electric and hybrid vehicles after 2019 while Britain, France, Germany and others have pledged to stop the sale of and petrol vehicles during the next 20 years.…

All that stands between you and zero g is skill and a rubber duck Anyone who has grown up watching the antics of Apollo astronauts aboard Skylab or the acrobatics of Shuttle and ISS crews has likely dreamed of experiencing weightlessness. Ideally in a way that doesn't involve either a sickening drop in an elevator or alarming turbulence over the Atlantic.…

Potential Reg Standards Soviet entry? Let's take a closer look A strong contender has emerged for an addition to The Register Standards Soviet's list of officially approved weights and measures: the Routemaster Fleet.…

Researchers claim flaws remain more than two years later New InnoTab child learning devices still have the same security flaw first found by researchers at Pen Test Partners two years ago.…

Only a venture capitalist could say something like that – but that’s what Chambers is now Former Cisco CEO John Chambers has launched his very own venture capital firm.…

If an API or feature needs the web, it needs HTTPS under Mozilla's new plan Mozilla has decided to further locking down the Internet with the announcement that developers can only access new Firefox features from what it calls “secure contexts”.…

Microcode mitigation triggers system wobbles, penguinistas warn Techies are scratching their heads after Red Hat pulled a CPU microcode update that was supposed to mitigate variant two of the Spectre design flaw in Intel and AMD processors.…

Court sentencing tool under the microscope Software that predicts how likely a criminal will reoffend – and is used by the courts to mete out punishments – is about as smart as a layperson off the street.…

And sent them mostly to South Korea, naturally North Korea's black hats launched at least six extensive malware campaigns mostly against South Korean targets during 2017.…

Beer money channels that made under $100 a year are also out of the Partner Program YouTube’s changed its rules to exclude low-traffic channels from its Partner Program, the scheme that sees it share ad revenue with video-makers.…

Some confessions, but 'watch this space' is the more common reaction - when there is one Vendors of industrial systems have joined the long list of vendors responding responses to the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities.…

Says probe doesn't impact wireless lines, leaving about a gazillion other products in play Broadcom has confirmed it's under investigation by the United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over antitrust issues, but doesn't believe that's going to affect its business.…

Switchzilla has fixes for appliances, voice portal, Nexus switch OS Cisco admins, it's your weekly patch notice.…

BTC plunge, er, sorry, market correction leaves faithful shaken but not deterred Amid a cryptocurrency price correction that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop by half from its mid-December peak, UK-based cyber-cash lending and exchange biz BitConnect said it is shutting down.…

It's an image-recognition thing Google today tore the covers off something called Cloud AutoML, a new service that's part of its "mission to democratize AI."…

Triumphant Trump touts terrific tax tactic Apple announced today it will start to repatriate back to America some of the massive profits it accumulated outside the USA – and will use the cash to Make America Great Again.…

Oh, yeah, and learning new tricks and protecting stuff, sure Ethical hacking to find security flaws appears to pay better, albeit less regularly, than general software engineering.…