Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Iran is offline and has been for three days after the government responded to widespread protests by killing the internet.…
Posted on 19 November 2019 | 1:12 am
US telcos will be able to continue doing business with Huawei for the time being.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 11:22 pm
The US Army has is building a new 248-strong robot regiment to help defuse or detonate explosives and has just spent $109m on the new hardware, which bears an unfortunate similarity to the beloved cartoon character WALL-E.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 10:21 pm
Microsoft says it will be making a data protection deal it struck with the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security into a global policy for its cloud services.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 8:18 pm
Multinational police agency Interpol is due to say that tech companies deploying strong encryption helps paedophiles – unless they build backdoors for police workers.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 5:30 pm
The MacBook keyboard nightmare is over – Apple's latest attempt reverts back to something remarkably similar to the key design it was using up until 2016. The one that worked.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 5:00 pm
Intel is removing drivers and BIOS for its old desktop boards so anyone running an old Pentium-based PC has four days to get hold of anything they might need.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 4:24 pm
A Briton once suspected of hacking Pippa Middleton's iCloud account – although he was cleared after a police probe in 2016 – now faces deportation to America.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 3:42 pm
Roundup Last week SpaceX proved its Crew Dragon abort engines can work, ISS 'nauts embarked on an EVA to fix their particle physics detector, and Searching for Skylab got a director's cut of sorts.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 3:10 pm
Firmware updates to Bose TV soundbars don't seem to have fixed the problems for everyone and have even managed to add some new issues.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 1:45 pm
A former Unix sysadmin has been elected the new president of Sri Lanka, giving hope to all those IT workers who fear they are trapped in a role where the smallest of decisions can have catastrophic consequences if it goes wrong.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 1:02 pm
UK accounting software biz Sage is flogging its payments arm to US firm Elavon for £230m, the latest asset offload of its "non-core" businesses in favour of those with a cloudier flavour.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 12:06 pm
Auditors minced no words in their assessment (PDF) of NASA's Commercial Crew providers: overdue, overbudget and overpaid.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 11:29 am
Bloodhound LSR hit 628mph (1,010kph) in high-speed testing over the weekend, as fast as its current rocket will propel it.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 11:01 am
Roundup As Microsoft luxuriated in the Ignite afterglow, the hardworking Reg gnomes deep within the Windows mines managed to unearth a nugget or two of news you may have missed.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 10:03 am
A Capita accountant who turned down a £10,000 bung to leave the firm only to be sacked anyway has lost her appeal against a rejected Employment Tribunal case.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 9:15 am
Who, Me? Bid farewell to the weekend and a cheery hello to the week with another seepage from The Register's confessional in the form of our Who, Me? column.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 8:15 am
It's time for another Register security roundup of the week's smaller stories you may have missed.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 7:01 am
Roundup Here's this week's collection of AI-related news that we found interesting. Read on to find out more about a new chip coming to Microsoft Azure and how Twitter hopes to deal with deepfakes.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 6:01 am
HP’s board has spurned the advances of Xerox, saying the $33.5bn opening bid “significantly undervalues” the business.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 12:02 am
SC19 Intel today confirmed the identity of the GPU-based math-accelerator chip it will offer to supercomputer builders.…
Posted on 18 November 2019 | 12:00 am
At the second annual Cultured Meat Symposium in San Francisco on Friday, donuts featured prominently on the breakfast menu and lunch involved only plant-based options. Attendees the day before had the opportunity to sample mechanically prepared beef burgers, courtesy of robo-restaurateur Creator, but lab-fabbed meat didn't make an appearance. Give it about five years – that was a guestimate from one attendee.…
Posted on 16 November 2019 | 10:03 am
Claims that 5G offers “better security” for IoT may not ring true – with the technology remaining vulnerable to SIM-jacking attacks within private Industry 4.0-style deployments, according to infosec biz Trend Micro.…
Posted on 16 November 2019 | 12:21 am
A team of researchers have built a terahertz laser that might one day see through clothes, book covers, and even skin, using laughing gas, according to a paper in Science.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 10:38 pm
The US Supreme Court has agreed to once and for all decide the copyright case between Oracle and Google after nine years of legal wrangling.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 9:09 pm
A US court has sentenced the operator of a massive DDoS service to 13 months in prison.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 7:40 pm
The US State Department has until 1 December to get its paperwork in order and show how it wishes to proceed in attempting to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch to face charges.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 7:00 pm
Some 14 years after it was founded and with no external funding taken in during that time, 1Password has finally succumbed to the charms - and $200m in cash - of venture cap biz Accel.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 6:00 pm
The ill-conceived and costly error of doubling down on the crypto-market is almost a distant memory for Nvidia as the GPU maker reported results that indicate an upward turn in fortunes.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 5:00 pm
An experimental feature silently rolled out to the stable Chrome release on Tuesday caused chaos for IT admins this week after users complained of facing white, featureless tabs on Google's massively popular browser.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 4:00 pm
Google's Cloud Run service, which lets you run containers on Kubernetes (K8s) using a serverless model, has hit general availability, and El Reg has taken it for quick spin.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 3:15 pm
TalkTalk has yet to find a buyer for its infrastructure investment vehicle Fibre Nation, the business revealed in its results for the half year to 30 September.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 2:30 pm
NSFW In what is certainly a crowded field, step forward the Doncaster Free Press and take a bow for the best local news headline of 2019: "Doncaster traffic bollard used by man for sex 'killed' in road smash".…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 1:45 pm
Amazon is headed for court to contest the surprise decision to hand Microsoft the $10bn US Department of Defense JEDI IT supply contract.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 1:00 pm
The good geeks of iFixit have ripped open Huawei's first Google-free handset, the Mate 30 Pro, to find a serious battery powering the big screen and sophisticated camera setup.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 12:23 pm
Something for the Weekend, Sir? Help, I forgot my keys! [rummage] Oh yes, of course – ah don' need no stinkin' keys, my front door locks smartly.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 11:30 am
The High Court of Justice in London yesterday dismissed another attempt by an unnamed man, who refuses to identify himself to the UK courts, to take his Right To Be Forgotten legal action to the Court of Appeal.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 10:30 am
Labour will today pledge to give the good folk of Britain free broadband by 2030 by part-nationalising BT - if the political party gets elected.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 9:35 am
The privacy-focused Brave web browser has reached version 1.0, available now for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 9:15 am
On Call Hit reset on the working week for Friday has arrived and with it another entry in The Register's long list of on-call shenanigans.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 8:10 am
In a bizarre experiment, researchers recorded the brain activity of mice staring at images and used the data to help make computer vision models more robust against adversarial attacks.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 7:01 am
Common behaviors shared across all families of ransomware are helping security vendors better spot and isolate attacks.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 6:01 am
The explosion from North Korea’s sixth nuclear test in 2017 was seventeen times more powerful than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945, according to a paper published in Geophysical Journal International.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 5:01 am
US federal authorities on Wednesday announced the arrests of 11 people from a group of 14 indicted for tricking Apple into accepting about almost 10,000 fake iPhones and iPads and replacing them with genuine iDevices.…
Posted on 15 November 2019 | 12:20 am
A bipartisan bill making its way through the US Senate asks that federal law enforcement get a court order before any use of facial recognition tech.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 10:21 pm
GitHub, Microsoft's cloud version control service and gripe forum, has joined with a handful of like-minded partners to form GitHub Security Lab (GSL) to better find bugs in open source software.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 10:02 pm
Two men from Massachusetts have been arrested and charged with 11 criminal counts stemming from a string of account takeovers and cryptocurrency thefts.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 8:52 pm
NASA's Office of the Inspector General has emitted a report (PDF) yesterday that made for difficult reading for agency bigwigs, as the bean counters made clear the challenges presented by the agency's headlong rush to the Moon.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 7:37 pm
The first official build of Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser has arrived a week after the Arm-based Surface Pro X began shipping to eager fans.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 5:07 pm
Part 1 It is half a century since NASA's second crack at landing a crew on the Moon had a shocking encounter on the way to orbit.…
Posted on 14 November 2019 | 4:18 pm