The Register

British sprogs have a million pretend pals, says survey

A survey of 1,000 parents has found that pre-school kids who spend more than an hour gazing at screens every day are less likely to have an imaginary friend.…

He also developed one of the first ever flight simulators

The computer scientist who created the first visual flight simulator, gave us the compsci concept of endianness and whose pioneering work blazed a trail for modern VOIP services has died at the age of 81.…

You say mode, they say policy, S call the whole thing off

Windows Insiders were seeing double last night as Microsoft once again pushed out not one but two builds of October's Windows 10.…

Also: Rocket Lab launches eighth Electron, good and bad news for China

Round Up While India arrived in lunar orbit this morning, bickering over who would lead NASA's next lander flared up, Rocket Lab notched another success and a Chinese satellite appeared to falter.…

Amazon, Apple and Facebook also to face scrutiny – report

Several individual US state attorney generals are considering antitrust action against Google and other technology giants, according to The New York Times.…

Taking the PC maker's road warrior out on the, er, road

Hands on Lenovo's latest ThinkPad X390 arrived at Vulture Central and was promptly taken out on the road to assess how the business darling took to its new togs.…

Plus, Cerebras hypes up AI-focused '400,000-core die the size of an iPad'

Hot Chips At the Hot Chips symposium in Silicon Valley on Monday, IBM and Intel each revealed a few more details about some upcoming processors of theirs.…

File under: 'Breaking' news

iPhone hackers have discovered Apple's most recent iOS update, 12.4, released in July, accidentally reopened a code-execution vulnerability that was previously patched – a vulnerability that can be abused to jail-break iThings.…

Officials suspect a coordinated extortion campaign

Twenty-three towns in Texas have been targeted with ransomware in what appears to be a coordinated attack.…

Order banning any further infringement stays, as does Big Red's legal bill

The quantum legal battle between Oracle and Rimini Street continues, with an appeals judge this month confirming Rimini can't claw back the $28.5m it was forced to cough up to foot Oracle's lawyer bills. And, yes, Rimini is still banned from ripping off Oracle's intellectual property.…

Dell-EMC storage blunder leaves Canucks fuming for four days

Dealing with email is possibly the most tedious daily exercise that the modern digital world has forced on us. But 13 million customers of Canadian ISP Telus have discovered that not having that problem is more of a burden.…

Flawed code traced to home build system, vulnerability can be attacked in certain configs

Updated The maintainers of Webmin – an open-source application for system-administration tasks on Unix-flavored systems – have released Webmin version 1.930 and the related Usermin version 1.780 to patch a vulnerability that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution in certain configurations.…

Baffling bug forces folks to use Safari, IE, etc

A bizarre outage left unlucky Chrome users unable to sign into Google services, from Gmail to Google Docs to even Chromebooks, earlier today.…

I want to get Huawei, I want to fry Huawei, yeah, yeah, yeah

Uncle Sam today granted another "extension" to Huawei, allowing the Chinese equipment manufacturer to continue to buy and use American electronic components and software despite being on an "entity list" of banned recipients of US tech.…

Write once, optimise everywhere amirite?

Microsoft has snapped up London-based jClarity in an effort to bump up the performance of Java workloads on Azure.…

Hop from 4.12 to 4.14 fixes 'a boatload of bugs'. Hooray!

In contrast to the frenetic pace of updates now typical in the software industry, the team behind Xfce, a lightweight desktop for Linux, have released version 4.14 nearly four-and-a-half years since the last stable release, 4.12.…

Sanitised browser history sparked another investigation

One of the crew who hacked TalkTalk has been ordered to hand over £400,000 after seizing control of a high-profile Instagram account following a hack on Aussie telco Telstra.…

For the love of Windows, please leave that poor text editor alone

Roundup It's the summer holidays. A good time to do things while nobody's watching. Except The Register, of course. Aside from sneaking Notepad into the store, last week Microsoft gave Insiders a new 2020 Windows 10 build, added features back into Skype, rounded out Azure's persistent disk storage and prepared a Typescript update.…

Is the platform's abuse policy unfair to genuine developers?

Developer Patrick Godeau has claimed his business is under threat after his Google Play Publisher account was terminated without a specific reason given.…

Spec design flaw stiffs security of gizmos

Roundup Let's run through all the bits and bytes of security news beyond what we've already covered. Also, don't forget our articles from this year's Black Hat, DEF CON, and BSides Las Vegas conferences in the American desert.…