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The United States wants to send robotic explorers to the moon as soon as next year as a preparatory step toward sending astronauts back there for the first time since 1972, a NASA official said on Monday. From a report: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning a series of lunar missions beginning next year aimed at developing the capacity for a return to the moon, said Cheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration Directorate. NASA will work with private companies, which have not yet been chosen, on the missions, Warner said in a phone interview. U.S. President Donald Trump in December signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. Last month he ordered the government to review regulations on commercial space flights.

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Claims years-in-dev tech doubles speed

Toshiba has claimed its new consumer NVMe SSD blasts the performance cobwebs off SATA SSDs.…

The World Health Organization has announced "gaming disorder" as a new mental health condition included in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases, released Monday. From a report: "I'm not creating a precedent," said Dr. Vladimir Poznyak, a member of WHO's Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, which proposed the new diagnosis to WHO's decision-making body, the World Health Assembly. Instead, he said, WHO has followed "the trends, the developments, which have taken place in populations and in the professional field." However, not all psychologists agree that gaming disorder is worthy of inclusion in the International Classification of Diseases, known as the ICD. A diagnosis standard, the ICD defines the universe of diseases, disorders, injuries and other related health conditions. Researchers use it to count deaths, diseases, injuries and symptoms, and doctors and other medical practitioners use it to diagnose disease and other conditions. In many cases, health care companies and insurers use the ICD as a basis for reimbursement. Poznyak said the expectation is that the classification of gaming disorder means health professionals and systems will be more "alerted to the existence of this condition" while boosting the possibility that "people who suffer from these conditions can get appropriate help."

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Family members can seek damages

The British Home Office's bid to reduce the number of potential claimants from a 2013 data breach that exposed the personal details of thousands of asylum seekers has been knocked back by the Court of Appeal.…

An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.18 development is going strong with recent 4.18-rc1 release. This kernel cycle has dropped 107,210 lines of code so far but Linux 4.18 is adding many new features. The kernel is coming in lighter as a result of the LustreFS code being removed and other code cleanups. On the feature front, Phoronix reports, "ew AMDGPU support improvements, mainlining of the V3D DRM driver, initial open-source work on NVIDIA Volta GV100 hardware, merging of the Valve Steam Controller kernel driver, merging of the BPFILTER framework, ARM Spectre mitigation work, Speck file-system encryption support, removal of the Lustre file-system, the exciting restartable sequences system call was merged, the new DM writecache target, and much more."

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Committee calls for more public spending – but not with outsourcer

A Parliamentary committee has called for Capita to be stripped of its military recruiting IT contract unless its performance improves, as part of a wider call for UK defence spending to increase.…

Apple's macOS surreptitiously creates and caches thumbnails for images and other file types stored on password-protected / encrypted containers (hard drives, partitions), according to macOS security experts Wojciech Regula and Patrick Wardle. From a report: The problem is that these cached thumbnails are stored on non-encrypted hard drives, in a known location and can be easily retrieved by malware or forensics tools, revealing some of the content stored on encrypted containers. On macOS, these thumbnails are created by Finder and QuickLook. Finder is the default macOS file explorer app, similar to Windows Explorer. Whenever a user navigates to a new folder, Finder automatically loads icons for the files located in those folders. For images, these icons are gradually replaced by thumbnails that show a preview of the image at a small scale.

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Will run national security, energy workloads

HPE is building the world's largest Arm-based supercomputer, Astra – 2.5 petaFLOPS from 2,592 HPE Apollo 70s – for Sandia National Labs in the US, where it will run advanced modeling and simulation workloads in areas including national security and energy.…

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission's (ACIC) biometrics project, which adds facial recognition to a national crime database, is being discontinued following reports of delays and budget blowouts. From a report: This announcement comes after the project was suspended earlier this month and NEC Australia staff were escorted out of the building by security on Monday June 4. [...] ACIC contracted the NEC for the $52 million Biometric Identification Services project with the view of replacing the fingerprint identification system that is currently in place. The aim of the project, which was supposed to run until 2021, was to include palm print, foot prints and facial recognition to aid in police investigations. The Australian government stated that it wanted to provide Australians with a single digital identity by 2025.

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Farewell, dear app, we hardly knew ye (which might have been the problem)

Users of the Windows Phone incarnation of the popular collaborative messaging platform Slack have been advised to look elsewhere.…

Extends cloudy deals with IBM, Microsoft and Google

Data management firm Hortonworks has enabled containerisation in the latest release of its Data Platform, while announcing a set of extended cloud deals with Microsoft, Google and IBM.…

Wake up, little snoozy

Some Pixel 2 owners are still waiting for a fix for dead screens six months after the issue was first reported.…

The week's good, bad and weird from Redmond

E3 aside, the team at Redmond were busy last week with a smattering of the good, the bad and the frankly odd.…

L0pht luminary Chris Wysopal talks to The Reg

Interview It has been 20 years since Chris Wysopal (AKA Weld Pond) and his colleagues at the Boston-based L0pht* hacker collective famously testified before the US Senate that the internet was hopelessly insecure.…

Evidence sought on software 'defeat device'

Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler has been arrested in Germany over the software-enabled Dieselgate emissions scandal, according to reports.…

How does that work?

Chinese brands have been eyeing Western markets for some time, but in the UK customer inertia means many punters stick with what they know.…

Since streetlights disturb bats' internal sensors and rhythms and affect their feeding patterns, inner compasses, and general nocturnal behaviors, the Dutch town of Zuidhoek-Nieuwkoop is taking action. The town is using special streetlights that emit a red color and use a wavelength that doesn't interfere with a bat's internal compass and lets them feed undisturbed. The Next Web reports: The lights [developed by Signify and the University of Wageningen and other NGO's active in conservation], being both beneficial for bats and humans alike, are also proving to be extremely energy saving, and is therefore also a big plus for the environment and the town's carbon footprint. The lights are connected LED lights that can be controlled remotely. This means that if there is one particular neighborhood in need of more or less light, this can be adjusted as needed. Zuidhoek-Nieuwkoop, due to their specific natural surroundings, is keen on being a sustainable town. The town and its surrounding area are part of the nature-protection network Natura 2000, which protects breeding and nesting areas for rare and threatened species all over Europe.

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How Shamoon and Stuxnet et al ran riot

BSides Industrial control systems could be exposed not just to remote hackers, but to local attacks and physical manipulation as well.…

Hey, friend. It's not your fault

The DevOps community is focused on this thing called "culture". By this, I always take them to mean the processes, norms, and HR policy that an organization has in place.…

This week among the lucky parents, GridGain, Memblaze and Western Digital. Well done

Storage companies big and small are always announcing something or other big and small, whether that's sick new tech, astonishing customer numbers or an incremental update to software that is going to totally revolutionise the way you stash data.…