The Register

Perceptics confirms intrusion and theft, stays quiet on details Exclusive The maker of vehicle license plate readers used extensively by the US government and cities to identify and track citizens and immigrants has been hacked. Its internal files were pilfered, and are presently being offered for free on the dark web to download.…

Warning: It's creepy AF – and your pic is next Video AI code can breathe life into portrait paintings, photos of dead celebrities, and your Facebook selfies, transforming single still images into moving and talking heads.…

Social ad biz details effort to cleanse community Analysis Just as the US Environmental Protection Agency allows up to 9 mg of rodent waste per kilogram of wheat and 0.15 μg/m of lead in the air over three months, Facebook expects toxic content will always be a part of its service.…

Prosecutors try to paint a line between journos and internet dump lord in case with significant free speech implications Julian Assange has been formally accused by the US government of breaking the Espionage Act 18 times, expanding the legal case against him and raising significant free speech issues.…

Privacy slip allegations dog US cellular network giants... while FCC twiddles its thumbs A bounty hunter was able to get the live location of a number of different individuals from American cellphone networks through a single phone call, it is claimed.…

Part-timers needed The British Army's psyops unit 77 Brigade is still falling short of recruiting targets, despite cyber skills being bigged up repeatedly by the military and government.…

Looking for flash, private cloud and public cloud data services to bump up revenues NetApp reported quarterly revenues that were weaker than expected last night – reduced by feeble sales across flash arrays, OEM and EMEA.…

Pre-tax profits up 459% but 'geopolitical uncertainties' aren't lost on PC maker Despite growing political tensions engulfing some Chinese tech firms, Lenovo managed to get back in the black after peddling higher-spec PCs and cutting losses in its data centre and smartphone lines. But the tech giant has warned that things might just be set to change.…

NATO's getting in on the action too British ministers are stepping up their rhetoric on cyber warfare, with £22m to be splurged on embiggening an "offensive hacking" unit as Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt vowed to retaliate against Russian cyber-attacks.…

Source code, pipelines and boiling frogs Interview While many cloudy companies aim for four nines of uptime, it was four ones for GitLab today as the source shack celebrated the release of version 11.11 with a chat with The Register.…

Haul included employee passports, driving licences, bank statements and more The third-party mailbox used by Computacenter employees and contractors to deposit data for security clearance applications has been hacked and used in phishing scams.…

Addressing the pro-horticulture/anti-nerdiculture bias Stob When the BBC announced a rejig at Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, Stob hoped for a much more radical change of format than a mere replacement head composter.…

Matched funds for open source developers, plus new features for enterprise accounts GitHub has acquired Dependabot, a tool that helps developers avoid introducing security issues via bugs in open-source libraries.…

What on Earth are you playing at, Microsoft? Column The future often arrives looking like an expensive toy. From the first microcomputer to the latest self-piloting drone, these "toys" hide a larger truth: they're the canvas upon which our imagination plays, as we dream up braver, bolder visions. We think physically, with our bodies, and our toys help us get our hands around what we think.…

It’s not just a hosted version of the database, says the CEO Datastax Accelerate DataStax, the business built around the Apache Cassandra open source database, is creating a new system-as-a-cloud service using the platform.…

You probably won't ever get to go to space – but your name can NASA is giving you the chance to send your name off into space.…

When the agenda goes up, the tickets do too... Event Whether your serverless ambitions are AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud focused, you should really join us at Serverless Computing London in November.…

No word if a trip through Manchester was scarier than atmospheric reentry Having spent the last 20 months being lugged around the UK, the Soyuz capsule used to ferry British Astronaut Tim Peake safely back to Earth is returning to London's Science Museum.…

No cybersecurity rules means networks are destined to be balkanized Analysis Chinese telecom giant Huawei – the most prominent target of the Trump administration's decision to declare a national emergency to protect American IT infrastructure by banning technology provided by foreign adversaries – on Monday received a reprieve that allows it to do business with US suppliers.…

Long story short: Models are ineffective, racist, dumb... Analysis AI experts, lawyers, and law enforcement urged US Congress to regulate the use of facial recognition technology during a hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Wednesday.…

Meanwhile, privacy advocates run screaming from news, trip, end up in hospital Comcast is working on a health device complete with motion sensors that will keep tabs on elderly or disabled people in their own homes.…

Safari tech ready to be ignored by online ad giants like all other privacy proposals Apple's WebKit team, which develops the plumbing beneath the iGiant's Safari browser, has proposed a way that online ads can be measured while maintaining the privacy of those browsing the internet.…

Snapdragon giant 'strangled competition' and forced others to pay unfair fees Qualcomm abused its monopoly on critical chip patents for decades, a US federal judge in California said on Wednesday in a decision with radical implications for the cellphone market.…

Never say never as reseller veteran returns to reselling land with reseller buy Phil Doye, the former majority owner of Kelway who sold the business to CDW for $431m, is dipping into his cash pile to slurp public sector reseller SBL.…

It's so confident, 2019 models are on the free repair scheme Apple has such confidence in the new MacBook Pro's reimagined butterfly mechanism that the laptop qualifies from day one for inclusion in its expansive keyboard repair scheme.…

Doubleclick complaint alleges Chocolate Factory's data handling breaches GDPR Updated Ireland's Data Protection Commission has launched a formal investigation into adtech giant Google over alleged breaches of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), potentially costing the company £1.12bn.…

Don't mind me, I'm just the thing you run your business on KubeCon Europe While customers gawped at the shiny bauble of Windows 10, Microsoft trotted out the 1903 version of its workhorse big brother, Windows Server.…

War crimes trial takes a fresh twist The US Air Force has opened an investigation into a "malware" infection – which it is blaming on lawyers employed by the US Navy who are working on a war crimes case.…

NSA services switched on next Thursday. No not THAT NSA UK mobile firm EE unveiled a lineup of launch devices this morning for when it flicks the switch on 5G services in six British cities, with one notable absence: Huawei.…

Leaked staff memo reveals immediate halt to co-operation Updated Brit chip designer Arm has now severed its links with Huawei in accordance with US sanctions, depriving the Chinese smartphone maker of a crucial supplier.…

Elusive critter loves mashed potato, not so keen on scallops Compelling evidence for the existence of UK cryptid "the badger" has been recorded in the south-coast town of Gosport – and it appears to have a penchant for ice lollies.…

Docker: Hey, remember us? We've got Windows Server containers too! Kubecon Europe The ongoing game of tit-for-tat feature updates among the Big Three cloud players continued this week, with Google confirming support for Windows Server Containers at Kubecon.…

Might be some delayed gratification there, friends Pure Storage sales for its first fiscal 2020 quarter grew 28 per cent on last year, but losses were deeper than expected as those sought after large enterprise wins eluded an expanded salesforce.…

Because all developers are special, afterall KubeCon Europe Darling of the OpenStack world Mirantis has continued its march into Kubernetes with a Bring Your Own Distribution support.…

Dodgy numbers, new kit verses old... neither side comes out well The machine-learning-performance beef between Intel and Nvidia has stepped up a notch, with the GPU giant calling out Chipzilla for spreading misleading benchmark results.…

EU experts claim US tech giants use funding carrot to influence findings Comment Facebook and Google used grants and other funding to academics and journalistic organizations to pressure a group of experts in Europe to water down proposals on fake news, it was claimed yesterday.…

KaaS and carry, friend? KubeCon Europe At the Linux Foundation's KubeCon this week cloudy services biz Mirantis gave some sneaky previews of its upcoming Kuberentes-as-a-Service product, a technology aimed at self-managing and provisioning multi-cloud clusters.…

DARPA eggheads want brain-machine interfaces that work at the speed of soldiers' thoughts. No further comment... DARPA, the US military's boffinry nerve center, is trying to fulfill the science-fiction dream of developing non-surgical brain-machine interfaces so soldiers can comfortably control weapon systems with their minds.…

Cash for horizontal launchers and PowerPoint slides The UK Space Agency has flung open the doors on a mighty £2m fund aimed imbuing Blighty with spaceflight capabilities.…

Vulnerability can be exploited to turn users into system stars, no patch available yet A bug-hunter who previously disclosed Windows security flaws has publicly revealed another zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft's latest operating systems.…

The May 2019 update is out and it's optional, for a while Microsoft on Tuesday released Windows 10, version 1903, aka the May 2019 Update, without forcing it on folks.…

Biz app login details encrypted at rest, though, ad giant insists Google admitted Tuesday its paid-for G Suite of cloudy apps aimed at businesses stored some user passwords in plaintext albeit in an encrypted form.…

Sorry state of documentation baffles programmers as iGiant launches new MacBook Pros, promises better keyboards Apple developers are becoming increasingly vocal about their displeasure with the state of the iGiant's programmer documentation, which they depend upon to craft iOS and macOS software.…

Persistence pays off for online super-souk, but not for South American states Analysis It's taken seven years but online mega-mall Amazon will finally get its hands on the .amazon top-level domain name.…

Touts 'vast improvements' in performance with 1.0 release The shadow of Microsoft loomed large over Kubecon with the version 1.0 release of its serverless container tech, Virtual Kubelet.…

Microsoft pushing standard for new containery hotness Microsoft took to the stage at Kubecon in Barcelona today to push its take on the proliferation of mesh technologies that have sprung up around the container-happy tech.…

Memo warns of regime having access to American data – remind you of anything? A US government agency has claimed drones pose a threat to national security in an echo of its wider campaign against all things Chinese.…

Scottish Virgin Media users also down and out after lunch Updated UK mobile operator EE has been struggling to get its VoLTE services back on their feet, after a seven-hour flood of angry complaints from customers unable to place voice calls over the 4G network.…

Plus: Fujitsu and Veeam hook up, cloudy IBM upgrade, Iguazio on Azure, and more Storage roundup It's a garage sale of storage info this morning, including faster IBM object storage, Rubrik hiring a Google veteran, Nakivo backup supporting Nutanix AHV systems and much, much more.…

How do open-source projects play nicely? They get off Twitter Something odd happened at Kubecon 2019. Rather than snipe at each other from the safety of Twitter, two very similar open-source projects opted to pool their ideas into one: OpenTelemetry.…