The Register

Planned obsolescence strikes again Sonos is doubling down on its previously disclosed inclination to drop support for older products that aren't profitable to support.…

Convenient timing for this story to emerge Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt its iCloud backups two years ago after being pressured by the FBI, it is claimed.…

Deal will crank telco's reach up to 8 million premises in UK Goldman Sachs-backed telco CityFibre has snapped up TalkTalk's fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network for £200m, two months after the deal was delayed during the general election.…

Nothing to see here, insists browser-maker Opera has responded to accusations that it offers predatory short-term loans to some of the world's most disadvantaged communities to shore up its financial results.…

Nastygram to DNS overseer follows long, flawed and drawn-out process Eight South American governments have vowed to make life difficult for DNS overseer ICANN after it gave the .amazon top-level domain to the US tech giant headed by Jeff Bezos.…

'Clerical error' causes major screw-up... misery loves company at UK's largest 'leccy retailer Just because you want something badly doesn't mean you can will it to happen. This is what Dixons found out today when it was forced to re-issue a trading statement, with the first one saying sales had grown. (Spoiler: they hadn't.)…

Just don't mention software giant's carbon-producing customers, 'cos that doesn't matter, right? The World Economic Forum is pinning a sustainability badge on its 2020 conference, which, according to one estimate, will produce 18,090 metric tonnes of CO in private air travel alone.…

Redmond's own security tools could be abused by hard-to-block file-scrambling software nasties The encryption technology Microsoft uses to protect Windows file systems can be exploited by ransomware.…

We get it. You are a skilled dentist. Sorry, 'were' Since Marty McFly swooped into pop culture on a hoverboard in 1985, the wheelless wonders have cemented their position as a litmus test for living in "The Future™" alongside other sci-fi paraphernalia like lightsabers, jetpacks and flying cars.…

Project author Nikolay Kim also given some community support after 'unsafe shitstorm' The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community - although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.…

Suitable attire, seeing that it's dead Microsoft has given Windows 7 users a parting gift with its last update as some holdouts are reporting existing desktop wallpaper being replaced by a sombre black screen – presumably in mourning for the veteran OS.…

Also: ISS batteries changed, Virgin's fleet grows, Rocket Lab makes nod to crap sitcom, and more Roundup Welcome back to The Register's weekly roundup of stories from the world of rockets and orbital shenanigans.…

UK internet costs shamed by European colleagues, but at least it's not Eritrea After a third trip to thrash the router this morning, Brits might not be too surprised to learn that they're being ripped off for broadband compared to their pals across the Channel.…

Coder apologizes and says desire to be ranked #1 'compromised my judgment' Special report A Google-backed competition to develop machine-learning software to help abandoned animals find loving homes turned ugly – when it was revealed the winning team cheated.…

Smartphone shipments slightly up, personal computers to resume historical trends What goes up must come down, or so it seems for the PC market.…

'Being able to acquire oxygen would obviously be hugely useful for future settlers' Scientists at the European Space Agency are trying to extract oxygen from something very close to lunar soil.…

Look what you made me Analysis The Swift programming language has suffered some setbacks in its quest for ubiquity since Apple released it under an open-source license in 2015.…

Privacy's dead but, hey, we've got nanoparticles spinning at 300 billion RPM. So that's cool The fastest spinning object on Earth – a pair of nanoparticles – can complete over five billion revolutions per second in the laboratory, according to a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday.…

'Ethos Capital, ISOC, and PIR have failed to provide clear and transparent information' Analysis A quick hypothetical for you: if your organization received a letter from six senior politicians urging you not to move forward with a controversial decision, and you looked out your windows to see dozens of protesters insisting on the same, would you……

Literally: As much as 10% of employees at server-hosting biz laid off in 'non-cost-cutting' move DigitalOcean last week axed an undisclosed number of employees.…

Grimes' boyfriend's biz says it's under financial attack Tesla is rubbishing complaints of a possible software-related gremlin causing its line of electric cars to suddenly speed up.…

Finding sparks debate over bug disclosure – and how to secure a local gateway's web control panel Netgear left in its router firmware key ingredients needed to intercept and tamper with secure connections to its equipment's web-based admin interfaces.…

SD-WAN WANOP will have to wait a few days, though Citrix has rushed out official fixes for the well-publicised vuln in some of its server products after miscreants were seen deploying their own custom patches that left a backdoor open for later exploitation.…

Mobile phone for sale. One careless owner Butterfingered London councils have managed to lose nearly 1,300 laptops, mobiles and tablets, according to figures obtained by Freedom of Information requests.…

Two Germans, a Nigerian, and a Dutchman walk into a bar. What happens next? A lawsuit, of course Game developer Ubisoft has lodged a claim against the owners of a website that allegedly sells DDoS attacks against the servers of its best-selling game, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (R6S).…

AWS and Google data warehousing stuff considered, then ignored Online photo print and gift service Photobox is quitting Amazon's Redshift data warehouse to hitch its wagon to competing cloud-native systems from Snowflake.…

Also: pitching Windows gear at students, while Windows Terminal and TypeScript ring in the new Round Up It was out with the old and in with the new for Microsoft last week - as it hammered another nail into Windows 7's coffin, the Redmond gnomes were busy toiling on things they hope won't die anytime soon.…

Login management service sulks in days-long TITSUP* for some Updated Password manager LastPass appears to have had a big night out on Friday, to the point where the service needed a lengthy lie down over the weekend. In fact, for some users it is still horizontal.…

France, Germany and Austria house the most offenders – survey EU regulators have slapped businesses with an estimated €114m (£97.29m) in fines for data leakage or crappy practices since GDPR was introduced in May 2018, although bigger numbers are expected in future penalties.…

NHS working with cops and ICO to determine if patients must be told A Stoke-on-Trent hospital administrator has avoided prison after hacking his NHS trust and helping himself to almost 9,000 heart scan images.…

Mere months until 'nauts get a ticket to ride? SpaceX looks set to shove a pair of astronauts into its Crew Dragon capsule following a successful demonstration of abort systems over the weekend.…

Traditional IT titans take backseat behind cloud giants Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise has warned that the industry-wide 18-month-plus shortage of certain Intel Xeon server-class processors may continue all the way through 2020.…

Things can only get better, unless someone misplaces the source Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me? The Register's open-all-hours confessional for readers who really need to get that one dastardly deed off their chest.…

Plus other 'fun' news from the world of AI Roundup Here's a roundup of news beyond what we've covered already in the world of machine-learning.…

Investigators ask Chocolate Factory to help them connect the geographic dots At 1030 on April 27, 2019, four unidentified individuals attempted to rob a Brinks armored truck parked outside of Michaels, an art supply and home decor store at the Point Loomis Shopping Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To find out who they are, local authorities plan to ask Google.…

Plus, WeLeakInfo? Not anymore! Roundup Welcome to another Reg roundup of security news.…

Jetliner's return to the skies likely to be delayed by more tech glitches Boeing today said another software flaw has been spotted in its star-crossed 737 Max.…

Euro Commission also wants to loosen purse strings for AI investment while tightening reins The European Commission is weighing whether to ban facial recognition systems in public areas for up to five years, according to a draft report on artificial intelligence policy in the European Union.…

Congratulations, you've won a secret backdoor Hackers exploiting the high-profile Citrix CVE-2019-19781 flaw to compromise VPN gateways are now patching the servers to keep others out.…

I missed my Self Assessment filing deadline because.... a rundown of the worst excuses Brits’ favourite government department, Her Majesty’s Revenues & Customs, has released a listicle of the most bizarre excuses people have given for missing the Self Assessment tax returns deadline, along with the weirdest biz expense claims…

Bloc to make not-quite-universal connector universal within its bounds The EU plans to force manufacturers to use a common connector – the happily symmetrical USB-C – for all mobes, fondleslabs, e-readers and similar electronic tat.…

One Irishman and one Dutchman both nicked Two men have been arrested after Britain’s National Crime Agency and its international pals claimed the takedown of breached credentials-reselling website WeLeakInfo.…

Microsoft releases a Windows 10 Fast Ring refresh and previews new calc toys While 45 years of carbon emissions from Microsoft were being scrutinised by execs last night, the Windows Insider team made an emission of its own, in the form of a fresh Windows 10 build.…

Snafu-ridden maintenance software behemoth to be replaced The US military is dumping its Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) in favour of ODIN as it tries to break with the complex past of its ailing F-35 fighter jet maintenance IT suite.…

Plans to cancel out emissions from power consumption since 1975. No word on warming through excessive corporate hot air though Microsoft has set itself the goal of being "carbon-negative" by 2030, nailing its colours to a so-called "moonshot" for worldwide removal and reduction of carbon.…

There's an app for that, and it's utter pants Something for the Weekend, Sir? Sitting in my tin can far away from home, I marvel that I got here at all.…

State of Wasm: 'Better support for high-level languages', plus interesting cross-platform news Interview WebAssembly will not magically speed up your web application and may be as significant running in environments other than web browsers as it is within them, a co-designer of the language told The Register.…

New perspective on FBI, Interpol demands for backdoors Vid Police Scotland to roll out encryption bypass technology, as one publication reported this week, causing some Register readers to silently mouth: what the hell?…

It's getting hot in here, so open all your doors On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's regular foray into the increasingly unreliable memories of those who have to pick up the phone when everything is on fire.…

Guess we can't escape our future Terminator overlords Artificial intelligence with frickin' lasers beams attached can see objects hidden around corners, according to a study published in the journal Optica on Thursday.…