Perl 6 should soon be known as Raku, now that Perl creator Larry Wall has given his blessing to the name change.

UpdatedThe Facebook-backed Libra crypto-currency project was dealt a crushing blow Friday when eBay, Stripe, and others yanked their support.

CommentAmid Apple's attempt to fend off criticism for its removal, restoration, and re-removal of an app used by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, the company is also facing particularly voluble criticism from users of its latest desktop operating system, macOS Catalina.

A vicar has said there's no room for ghosts in the UK's "most haunted village" of Prestbury, Gloucestershire – unless it's one of the Holy variety.

BT's pipe laying subsidiary Openreach has published a list of proposals it claims will help Britain gain full fibre by the mid-2020s.

Ambitious plans to digitise Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service via a £1bn modernisation programme should be slowed down even further, MPs heard this week.

Cisco has suffered an odd series of outages that briefly KO'd its website and corporate blogs.

Businesses heading for the Windows 7 escape hatch and US retailers panic-buying ahead of the next round of trade tariffs helped PC shipments rise globally in Q3 at the fastest rate in seven-and-a-half years.

The internet is filled with trolls spewing hate speech, but machine learning algorithms can’t help us clean up the mess.

SAP's chief executive Bill McDermott will not renew his employment contract at the German database software maker.

Something for the Weekend, Sir?I've got myself stuck in a ring. Yes, again. Medical assistance may be required.

The British government should make it a crime to disable geofencing and electronic conspicuity on one’s drone, according to MPs from a parliamentary committee looking at future drone regulation.

On CallFriday is that special time of the week when clocks seem to slow to a crawl and software giants drop their buggiest code. It is also the time when The Register pokes a talon into the sack marked "On Call".

PromoCisco is inviting the world’s IT leaders to join its Networking.Next Virtual Event on 24 October, offering up a panel of experts who will examine the diverse trends of today, that are shaping tomorrow’s network.

Several months after Microsoft crowed about how its Teams group chat app has reached 13 million daily active users, rival Slack has fired back with figures of its own.

Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary are under fire from some of their own employees over service contracts with America's controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Apple has once again taken down an iOS app aimed at helping Hong Kong protesters avoid police crackdowns in the troubled city.

A Japanese man indicted on Tuesday for allegedly attacking a 21-year-old woman last month appears to have found where his victim lived by analyzing geographic details in an eye reflection captured in one of her social media photos.

Adobe has reversed course on its decision to withhold refund payments from customers in Venezuela.

Malware authors behind the Finfisher spyware suite, well beloved by dictators, have sent legal threats intended to silence a German news blog that reported them to criminal prosecutors over allegedly illegal malware exports.

Two faithful Windows 10 versions are to be led out behind the barn by a sad-faced Microsoft engineer.

A Dutch vBulletin forum for sex workers and their clients has reportedly been hacked using that infamous RCE vuln, baring the privates (and data) of a quarter of a million people.

British telcos and academics have told a Parliamentary enquiry the UK needs to get on with allowing Huawei equipment into the heart of its future 5G networks.

Step forward, Hull: first city in Blighty to claim the title of full-fibre connectivity.

ESTECThe European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, Netherlands, opened its doors to the public last weekend, and The Register braved the rain to grill top brass on spaceships, partnerships and the "B" word.

"We want GitLab monitoring to be a complete replacement for DataDog," GitLab's director of product, Eric Brinkman, said yesterday. And he didn't stop there, referring to a whole swathe of "tools that GitLab can replace" at the firm's Commit event in London.

Liverpool is the most gobby verbal region in the UK, according to Ofcom – something prime minister Boris Johnson would no doubt have confirmed had he visited the city today.*

If humans are to go beyond the Moon, they must rely less on ground control and more on AI systems to perform operations such as flying, and conduct scientific experiments more autonomously, according to a NASA paper [PDF] out this week.

Puppetize PDXDevOps darling Puppet took to the stage at the company's Portland Puppetize PDX shindig yesterday to whip the covers off Project Nebula, before giving us a sneak peek at an updated Puppet Forge and a preview of Puppet Enterprise 2019.2.

A former BAE Systems defence contractor has appeared in court accused of leaking "highly sensitive" secrets to foreign governments.

WebcastIf your strategy depends on using data to disrupt the market, then unstoppable data growth, a change of business strategy, or a fast-moving competitive landscape, are likely to present challenges.

The European Union has published a risk assessment of next-generation 5G mobile networks and concluded that everyone needs to think differently about security, given fundamental changes in how the new networks will operate.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is warning admins to patch a set of months-old security bugs that have recently come under active attack.

The author of popular macOS open source terminal emulator iTerm2 has rushed out a new version (v3.3.6) because prior iterations have a security flaw that could allow an attacker to execute commands on a computer using the application.

A man from Singapore has been indicted in the US for impersonating a game developer in order to steal time on cloud compute systems and mine cryptocurrency.

China and Russia will sign a joint treaty aimed to tackling “illegal internet content” later this month, the Russian telecoms regulator has announced.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three pioneers in the field of lithium ion batteries, which form the power storage unit of most modern technology.

Back in 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen found an /etc/passwd file among a file dump from the BSD 3 source tree that included the passwords used by various computer science pioneers, including Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Steve Bourne, and Bill Joy.

International Launch Services (ILS) sent up a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome this morning with a payload containing the first commercial spacecraft designed to service and extend the life of satellites in orbit.

These truly are strange times. BT is plotting a return to the High Street, unleashing hundreds of tech troubleshooters onto the unsuspecting public - and onshoring all of its call centres to Britain quicker than scheduled.

Hyperconverged playa Nutanix opened its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen with a triple announcement: an HPE GreenLake deal, its software pre-installed on HPE servers, and integration with ServiceNow for automated incident-handling.

A second Airbus Zephyr high altitude pseudo-satellite (HAPS) drone, built for the UK's Ministry of Defence, has crashed in Australia while on a test flight.

What Larry snatcheth away with one hand, he giveth with another. Oracle is hiring a couple of thousand infrastructure services sales bods and has promised to swing open its data centre doors to more cloud regions.

Microsoft squeezed out a fresh build of Windows 10 last night, and finally released the much-anticipated Calls feature to eager Windows Insiders.

Aria Technology Ltd, the company that used to run e-tailer Aria PC, is headed for the Court of Appeal in a third attempt to overturn a £750,000 VAT fraud ruling.

Linux veteran SUSE has decided to kill off development of its OpenStack Cloud product line and cease sales to focus on its investments in application delivery.

ESTECApollo astronauts Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart spoke at ESA's 2019 ESTEC shindig in the Dutch beach town of Noordwijk over the weekend, and The Register was fortunate enough to chat with the pair.

Microsoft and Pivotal have used the latter's SpringOne shindig in Austin, Texas, to show off Azure Spring Cloud, which is now available in private preview.

TalkTalk has been slapped down by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after emailing lies to its customers as part of a hard-sell tactic for expensive fibre broadband.

HP is overturning a print sales model that helped it amass billions in profits over the decades but is now challenged by rival supplies makers luring customers with cheaper ink and toner cartridges.

The US government has blacklisted 28 Chinese companies, including some of the world’s most valuable AI startups, for being complicit in China’s effort to brutally crack down on its Uyghur Muslim population.

EventOur Serverless Computing Conference kicks off in just four weeks – and there’s still time to snap up tickets for both our conference and workshops.

Twitter says it was just an accident that caused the microblogging giant to let advertisers use private information to better target their marketing materials at users.

The FBI routinely misused a database, gathered by the NSA with the specific purpose of searching for foreign intelligence threats, by searching it for everything from vetting to spying on relatives.

Patch TuesdayOctober brings a relatively light patch load for admins and users, thanks to Adobe's decision to sit out this month's update bonanza.

WebcastStop press: there are miscreants out there, and they are looking to break into your computer systems and steal your data. But you knew that, right?

Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of how the early universe evolved after the Big Bang and finding the first exoplanet orbiting a faraway star.

US games company Blizzard has caused a storm of protest for suspending a professional gamer after he made comments in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Just one per cent of all Indicator of Attack (IOA) warnings are actually caused by network attacks.

TechConMicroprocessor designer Arm will allow chipmakers licensing its blueprints to, in certain circumstances, alter the holiest of holy scriptures: its CPU instruction set.

BT's budget broadband pusher Plusnet is about to give customers something else to complain about, having just announced a price hike before Christmas.

A "virtual" solution to the Irish border problem arising from Brexit relies on data that has not yet been amassed and technology yet to be available, MPs heard today.

Windows Insiders celebrated five years of the programme with the sudden ejection of its boss, Dona Sarkar, to cloudy pastures new.

Apple fanbois were all a-quiver this morning as macOS Catalina made its presence felt by breaking chunks of Adobe's software.

Google has announced forthcoming changes to the Chrome web browser that will prevent image, audio and video content from loading if they are served over HTTP.

Spanish towerco Cellnex Telecom is set to buy Arqiva's telecoms subdivision for £2bn in a deal it claims will make it the largest independent operator of wireless infrastructure in Blighty.

A minister has said that future Internet of Things and data regulation will take into account "decisions that we need to be aware we are making" when handing personal data over to tech companies.

Deepfakes - counterfeit content generated by AI algorithms - are on the rise, staining the internet with doctored pornography, fake videos of political leaders, and bot accounts.

The European Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA) has slammed calls for Facebook to drop its end-to-end encryption plans.

Special reportThe architect of Atari’s much-delayed retro console, the Atari VCS, has quit the project, claiming he hasn't been paid in six months. The departure could put the entire affair in doubt.

On Sunday, David Fullerton, CTO of Stack Overflow, issued an apology over how management had handled interaction with the Stack Exchange Q&A community during discussions about a code of conduct change and other grievances.

WebcastPublic, private, hybrid, multi... how do you build a full-stack cloud solution that takes advantage of all available resources?

Astronomers have discovered 20 new moons orbiting Saturn, meaning the gas giant now has a total of 82 satellites, overtaking Jupiter which has 79 currently identified.

Add Australia to the ranks of countries agreeing to honor US search warrants under America's CLOUD Act.

Apple has taken the opportunity of its official macOS Catalina release on Monday to close more than a dozen security holes in the desktop operating system.

Apple is under fire for kowtowing to Beijing and removing references to Taiwan in the localized versions of iOS 13 for Hong Kong and Macau in China.

On Monday, a group of maintainers of the GNU Project, the free operating system created by Richard Stallman, questioned Stallman's leadership and emitted a joint statement for rethinking how the project should be managed going forward.

US defence firm Raytheon is punting a security suite that apparently promises to harden military aircraft against "cyber anomalies".

Screwdriver wielding nihilists at iFixit have dismantled the revised Galaxy Fold, declaring that despite Sammy implementing "durability quick fixes" it proposed in a previous teardown, the device remains "alarmingly fragile".

Vodafone is testing radio technology in Britain as it seeks to cut the cost of building 4G and 5G networks and at the same time dilute the dominance of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia.

Windows 10 users have been complaining since the weekend that VMware Workstation no longer runs after a cumulative Windows 10 Update prevents it from starting.

With 10-platter conventionally recorded disk drives touting capacities of up to 20TB by 2021, the arrival of HAMR and MAMR drives could slip back to 2022.

RoundupHow's your World Space Week shaping up? Baked a rocket cake or two? No? Nevermind. Take some time out to catch up with this week's roundup of space stuff.

UpdatedA small UK software biz has complained of "eerily Orwellian" treatment from Google after its wares were suddenly suspended and then banned from the Play store, with no meaningful discussion possible.

BT's duct-off broadband arm Openreach is trialling "a range of new tools and techniques" to deploy full-fibre in 13 rural locations - in what it says is a first response to £5bn of promised government funds.

RoundupAmid all the excited spurtings over Microsoft's shiny new hardware, the Redmond gnomes continued their toiling. Here's a roundup of some other interesting things that happened last week in the Microsoft world.

Boffins at NASA's JPL and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have come up with a plan to save the stricken Mars InSight probe.

InterviewThough HPE's Spaceborne Computer is still fresh from its jaunt to the International Space Station, veep and CTO for HPC and AI Dr Eng Lim Goh is pondering a return visit and outfitting missions to Mars with the company's kit.

Hands OnThe problem with notebooks (and even those shiny new Surfaces at Microsoft's event last week) is that the screen is usually too small to be completely productive. The Register got hold of Lenovo's ThinkVision M14 to see if two screens are really better than one.

InterviewA year after its controversial switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL), and with new products livening up the summer, MongoDB remains unrepentant.

Who, Me?As the weekend departs like a first-class flight to Paris, and Monday turns up with the all the glamour of a Ryanair into Stansted, it is time once again to console ourselves with another tale of reader misdeeds in The Register's Who, Me? column.

Ongoing uncertainty about whether the UK will exit the European Union on October 31 – Halloween – has created some time-bending problems for owners of .eu domains.