The Register

Of course the ticket's real: it says 'Pan Am' at the top, doesn't it? Something for the Weekend, Sir? My mother won a ticket to the Moon.…

Makes you proud to be British The Ministry of Defence has slipped £10m of British taxpayers' money into Serco's back pocket to settle a legal challenge over the award of a £525m Fire and Rescue services contract to rival outsourcer Capita.…

Watchdog casts doubt on testbeds and trials scheme The UK's £217m 5G testbed trials have already hit a major speed bump due to a lack of available equipment, according to an official report.…

How our sysadmin learned to fear vSphere On Call Welcome to Friday. The weekend is almost upon us so put down that bacon sarnie and pick up today's On Call, The Register's weekly column of tales from the tipping point.…

Yak app still cleaning up after four-year-old cyber-break-in Slack says a 2015 database theft is to blame for a large-scale reset of stolen passwords.…

Get your early-bird tickets for talks ranging from technical deep-dives to advice on ethics and the law Event Your early experiments in machine learning or AI can be tough. Getting them to work in production will be tougher still.…

93% of onanistic orgs tracking you despite battened-down browsing Google, Facebook, and, surprisingly, Oracle are among the top ten third-party companies that frequently track your personal sexual interests every time you watch porn, according to new research.…

15 months of wrangling and Orlando couldn't even begin testing AI cloud tech for population surveillance Orlando cops have given up using Amazon’s controversial cloud-based facial recognition to monitor CCTV cameras dotted around the Florida city – after a nightmare year of technical breakdowns.…

Record revenue reaches Redmond, the result of a booming as-a-service business Microsoft on Thursday reported record revenue for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2019 and for its full fiscal year, predictably pushing its stock higher in after-hours trading.…

Martha Blackburn's bill is everything wrong with 2019 in 13 pages Comment A bi-partisan law bill that promises to give internet users far greater control over their privacy made another appearance in US Congress on Thursday.…

Ukrainian civil war a bonanza for dodgy malware hosting firms A growing crop of so-called bulletproof hosting companies are using the ongoing civil war in Ukraine to host Magecart malware without fear of the police coming knocking.…

Co-founder and chief data officer at NPM Inc, moves on Laurie Voss, the co-founder and chief data officer of widely used JavaScript package registry NPM Inc, today announced in a blog post that he left the company on July 1.…

You can monitor your child – and their bowels - 24 hours a day! Which is… great? What's that unpleasant whiff? No, it's not little Johnny's sticky bowel movement but the new "smart diaper" containing his special effort.…

'Empowering' if you've got $$$ Microsoft introduced new licensing plans for its PowerApps platform at the Inspire partner conference this week to accommodate the increasing capabilities available.…

'Alamo Mission LLC' to splash $600m on city of Red Oak Google has identified a parcel of land for its second bit barn in Ellis County, Texas, even though the first one is still months away from completion.…

Device numbers growing, but manufacturers are using fewer/cheaper chips per device With average prices for semiconductor components going down dramatically in 2019, especially DRAM and NAND, major chipmakers have been forced to reduce their production output. As a result, the silicon market is expected to shrink by 12 per cent year-on-year.…

Bosses stick up for suspect, claim he's being framed for pinching 5m folks' data A 20-year-old infosec bod has been arrested in Bulgaria after most of the country's population had their personal and financial details stolen.…

8% cloud biz growth in 12 months. Where is Red Hat when you need it? IBM notched up its fourth straight quarter of revenue decline as the areas it deems strategic – hybrid cloud, AI and blockchain – couldn't paper over cracks in the legacy operations of big iron and outsourcing.…

Plus: Delivery on 9 more projects at 'major risk' A raft of major government IT projects are in serious trouble, including flagship programmes such as HMRC's Making Tax Digital and its Customs Declaration Service.…

Latest call to halt creepy tech likely to fall on deaf ears Updated The UK government should slap a "moratorium on the current use of facial recognition technology, with "no further trials" until there is legal framework in place, a Parliamentary committee has warned today.…

Too late for chip flinger, but a win for the EU taxpayer The European Commission has issued American chip maker Qualcomm with a hefty €242m fine for anti-competitive practices.…

Kioku (memory) + axia (value) = $$$ Logowatch Toshiba Memory Corporation has emerged, reborn, from the depths of the strategy boutique, as Kioxia.…

'Defending democracy' initiative to resist nation-state attacks Microsoft has demonstrated its ElectionGuard electronic vote system at the Aspen Security Forum under way in Colorado and warned that nearly 10,000 of its customers have been targeted by nation-state attacks.…

Click your mouse three times... there's no place like a back door to your machine - ESET An old-school shadowy malware group believed to operate out of China has been targeting diplomats with what infosec researchers say is a previously undocumented backdoor.…

*Digital identity crisis intensifies* Exclusive The UK government's troubled £154m digital identity project Verify is to be flagged red by Whitehall's major projects watchdog, meaning delivery looks unachievable - according to sources.…

We ask top boffins if the plan is good enough for skull drilling Analysis Silicon Valley bad boy Elon Musk's grand plan to build brain-machine interfaces to "achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence" is obviously more science fiction than fact at the moment.…

Redmond engineer hints at taking super-lang for a spin Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is waxing lyrical about the risks inherent in C and C++ coding, arguing it may be time to dump "unsafe legacy languages" and shift to more modern, safer ones.…

MPs hear how financial services are trying to improve stability in wake of TSB's meltdown Shifting financial services to the public cloud risks creating an over-reliance on the "dominant" service providers, banking heads told MPs yesterday during an inquiry into IT outages in the sector.…

Accused bloke cuffed after plod swoop on home A 20-year-old man from the Netherlands accused of building and selling Office macro malware was arrested Wednesday.…

130,000 have already downloaded creepware Seven new stalkerware apps have been spotted for sale on the Android Play Store, despite Google's policy against the invasive monitoring tools.…

Instead of enriching Google, try making a market for click work Analysis Internet companies depend on free labor. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google rely upon content creators who give their work away for the sake of platform participation or perhaps naive altruism.…

All-day event covers every angle, from workloads to security – register today Promo Every day the cloud continues to transform organisations, industries and the world around us.…

Bad news for AWS and Microsoft, who are vying for US govt's winner-takes-all IT super-contract The Pentagon's $10bn JEDI mega-cloud contract may be put on hold once again, this time because President Trump has ordered a probe into the massive single-vendor deal.…

Software testing just ain't that special, sniff immigration bods Software engineers have long been treated, in Silicon Valley at least, as special, worthy of massive salaries, and deserving of cozy work conditions and top-of-the-range benefits.…

Judge green-lights $113m from Samsung, Sony, and others – but $34m in legal fees?! A long-running legal battle over the alleged price-fixing of lithium-ion batteries involving Samsung, Sony, LG, Hitachi, and NEC, has finally been settled [PDF] for $113m.…

'No safeguards' on QA accounts, and suddenly this guy gets a Tesla and $1.6m home, say prosecutors A former Microsoft software engineer was arrested on Tuesday and charged with mail fraud for allegedly attempting to steal $10m in digital currency from his former employee, US prosecutors said today.…

In a cloud war, the US telco opts for the Swiss model, stays neutral AT&T has announced “strategic alliances” with both IBM and Microsoft, as it looks to capitalize on cloud computing without getting its hands dirty.…

JavaScript obfuscation finds its way into finance phishery A JavaScript-based phishing campaign mainly targeting British finance and accounting workers has been uncovered by Mimecast.…

Here's Gartner with your latest dose of tech doom 'n' gloom 2019 could mark the steepest decline in the history of smartphone shipments as customers cling to their handsets for longer.…

Sod the law on compo payouts, says Vos, you still did wrong One of Britain's most senior judges has warned Google over its attempts to squeeze out of a £3bn data protection lawsuit by claiming some people might have consented to the adtech monolith's lawbreaking.…

FinCEN has recovered more than $500m to date While you're sweating to make an honest crust, email scammers are counting at least $301m in untaxed takings every month in the US alone, according to research by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.…

On same day Germany forces firm's Ts&Cs revamp The European Commission has inserted a probe into Amazon to ascertain if the giant digital souk breaches EU competition regulations by exploiting "sensitive" data from third-party sellers who use its marketplace.…

Enterprise features including support for hated ancient browser ready to evaluate Microsoft had to consider businesses' addiction to Internet Explorer 11 in its roadmap for Edge Enterprise, the business aspect of its new web browser based on Google's Chromium project.…

Hey, that's a real use case, you at the back, stop your sniggering Mobile connectivity provider Vodafone has expanded its 5G network to another eight British towns and cities.…

From the man who brought us the garden bridge and water cannons Analysis Likely future UK prime minister Boris Johnson has pledged to bring full fibre to all homes by 2025, a claim that telecoms experts have widely dismissed.…

A key proposal for Go 1.14 – adding a built-in try keyword – has been declined The Go language will not be adding a "try" keyword in the next major version, despite this being a major part of what was proposed for version 1.14.…

Pssst. You don't need to manually code it, neural networks will do it for you AI algorithms can help you automatically fly a drone of your design, according to new research that will be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics later this month.…

Home Office lacks plan, skills, budget control or achievable deadlines, says watchdog The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has delivered another damning report on the UK Home Office's bungling attempts to procure a replacement communications network for the emergency services.…

There's a bit more to it than leaning down and fumbling for reset switch, though Icarus – the ambitious project to track hundreds of thousands of animals from space – has hit an unexpected delay after a specialised computer installed on board the International Space Station (ISS) refused to work as intended.…

Even businesses' attempts to destroy Windows 7 with firehose of cash fail to reverse sales droop The bad news bus kept on rolling in calendar Q2 as consumer PCs sold to retailers continued their decline. Business customers’ enthusiasm for pricier hardware did, however, keep tech wholesalers revenues afloat.…