The Register

Making sense of Microsoft's dev tool family Hands On Microsoft this week opened the gates on Visual Studio for Mac 2019 8.3, a flexible development environment for .NET, and The Reg can give you the lowdown on some of the new features.…

Some people just like to take the p*ss Something for the Weekend, Sir? Excuse me while I have another slash. Aaaaaah, that's better.…

The Reg fingers a pair of €5k sluggers from the land of clogs Oculus may be bringing hand tracking to the Quest, its standalone virtual reality (VR) platform, but haptic feedback is really where things are at.…

That time when a professional turned out to be somewhat amateur On Call Friday! At last! And with Friday comes the promise of the weekend and the reality of The Register's weekly dip into the big bag of On Call experiences.…

Microsoft gazes forlornly at the halcyon days of 2018, before that release happened Ad slingers AdDuplex celebrated the impending release of Windows 10 19H2 by reporting that, yup, the 10 May 2019 Update is quietly doing the business for Microsoft.…

Back to the drawing board folks A gas giant orbiting a tiny red dwarf star thirty light years away has left astronomers baffled because it's not supposed to exist, according to a study published in Science on Thursday.…

You gotta fight for your right to paaaartake in a legal process to inform folks of snoop orders When it comes to valiant defenders of the people from American spies there are many names that spring to mind. Microsoft is perhaps not typically one of them – though Redmond, if you had forgotten, is still battling the US government in a fight over cloud subscriber privacy.…

Profile info on 5 million users, including ordering history, hashed passwords, plus driver records, exposed to miscreants Gig-economy delivery app maker DoorDash is so, so sorry this Thursday after hackers gained access to nearly five million of its customer accounts.…

DEF CON dossier reveals: You are not as secure as you imagine The Unites States' electronic ballot boxes are as vulnerable as ever to physical tampering by hackers. So says this year's DEF CON Voting Village Report, which summarizes the findings of infosec experts who picked apart the various vote-casting computer systems in use today by cities and counties around the country.…

Finally, something actually exciting happening with this mobile broadband tech For over a year, savvy journalists and policymakers have been refusing to swallow the hype around 5G, aka ultra-fast mobile broadband, pointing out some unwelcome realities about the technology.…

And, crucially, how you can thwart these next-gen miscreants and protect your org Webcast We all know there are miscreants out there looking to break into our computer systems and steal our data – we even know how it's done.…

'Me encanta América... huh, so you're a terrorist?!' Google recommends that anyone using its translation technology add a disclaimer that translated text may not be accurate.…

President facing impeachment probe, Brexit off the rails... but more importantly, your Dunkies account was potentially pwned The US state of New York is suing food chain Dunkin Donuts for what is says is an illegal lapse in computer security.…

New, faster protocol becomes a reality The latest iteration of the ubiquitous HTTP internet protocol - version 3 - has hit the web.…

San Francisco copper learns the hard way A police chase came to an untimely end this week when the officer in pursuit realised his Tesla S was about to run out of juice.…

'We understand the concerns' says Dropbox (not enough to change how it works, though) A security engineer has complained that a feature of Dropbox Paper, a document collaboration tool, leaks email addresses by design.…

Chaos merchant's failure-as-a-service tests system resilience Chaos-engineering company Gremlin has launched Scenarios – "templates of real-world outages" that make it easier to wreck your applications.…

Analyst looks for signs of hope while mobiles follow PCs down the crapper If you give any credence to the forecasts Gartner publishes on a quarterly basis and have more than a passing interest in computer sales, the latest update might have made you spit out your vodka cornflakes this morning.…

Will the last cosmonaut to launch please turn out the lights Russia bade farewell to the old "Gagarin's Start" yesterday as the last Soyuz-FG to be launched from the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan headed to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Now is a very good time to patch your estate Cisco has doled out yet more security updates for its IOS and IOS XE network operating systems, which, we are obliged to remind you, is its scheduled six-monthly patch run and not the usual "oh bugger" state of affairs.…

Someone's popular! One of the teens behind the 2015 hack on UK telco TalkTalk has been indicted in the US over a huge cryptocurrency heist.…

Gaun yersel! England's capital ranks last among the 10 largest cities in the UK for mobile network quality, according to crowdsourced mobile data researcher Tutela.…

US antitrust probe seems to hope the Chocolate Factory's best buddy will snitch Oracle's Washington policy and lobby boss has claimed that Big Red has been talking to federal investigators about its dealings with Google.…

'I am so proud of all that we have achieved in my two years' HMRC's chief digital information officer, Jacky Wright, is returning to Microsoft after two years in the role.…

Plus: 144-layer NAND coming in 2020... and a consumer-level QLC flash drive Intel has dropped the veil on its gen 2 Optane technology, code-named Barlow Pass, although the details are still light, and revealed it is developing 144-layer QLC (4bits/cell) NAND technology.…

By hiding most of the emails you get Analysis Feeling overwhelmed by the number of unread emails in your inbox? Frustrated that you had to trawl through 1,000 Slack messages before finding the one you were looking for? Unable to find the latest version of the presentation your team has to give tomorrow?…

Another ex-customer struggles to get hacked account killed off Months after The Register first wrote about TalkTalk failing to close a former customer's email address, the firm is still using the General Data Protection Regulation as an excuse for dragging its heels.…

It's not a joke, it's a programming language tuned for distributed systems At the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis, Missouri, earlier this month, Paul Chiusano, founder of Unison Computing, gave the audience a tour of Unison, an emerging programming language designed for building distributed systems.…

Book your ticket now to get a real-world intro to machine learning and analytics Event MCubed, our machine-learning conference, kicks off in London next week, and we really want you to join us for three days of practical AI and analytics.…

The 12nm Hanguang 800 chip has 17 billion transistors Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce conglomerate, revealed its first cloud AI accelerator chip on stage at its Aspara Conference held in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday.…

Three becoming one Pic Astronomers have spied a rare cosmic curiosity: three supermassive black holes appear to be on the brink of merging with one another after a gigantic galaxy collision took place, a billion light years away.…

Cyber-terrorists, your game is through, 'cause now you have to answer to: America, fsck yeah! The US Congress has, near enough, approved a law bill to create a new set of dedicated cyber-security teams within the Department of Homeland Security.…

You have a new message, please pay to see it. Oh, it's from Klick4_n00dz_9000 America's trade watchdog claims the owner of Match.com, Tinder, and other dating sites, shafted its lonely-hearts by allowing obviously bogus bot profiles to feign interest in the singletons.…

Fresh code gives file systems a /var-sectomy – see inside for a manual fix On Tuesday, Google halted deployment of a Chrome update that damaged the file system on some macOS computers and rendered them unable to boot up as normal.…

File storage company launches new Spaces service Dropbox now longer wants to be just a cloud storage service but the provider of “a calmer and more focused working environment” its CEO announced this morning.…

Security biz that probed 2016 DNC hack makes an odd cameo in revealed transcript A garbled remark by President Donald Trump in a just-released phone-call transcript with the Ukrainian head of state has focused attention on cloudy security shop CrowdStrike.…

Linux darling faces the lawyers over Shotwell shenanigans The GNOME Foundation, maker of the eponymous Linux desktop, has been hit with a sueball over how its Shotwell photo manager, er, manages photos.…

People who signed off the type rating course weren't qualified, claims whistleblower A whistleblower has claimed America's Federal Aviation Administration misled investigators checking whether FAA personnel were fully qualified to sign off Boeing 737 Max training standards.…

But he forgot about the Streisand effect, tsk-tsk A four-month-old video has been dredged up and given a massive publicity boost thanks to legal threats sent by Australian would-be politician Clive Palmer to YouTube comedian Jordan Shanks.…

Command line new and shiny mere months from 'feature complete' Those brave souls previewing Microsoft's new Windows Terminal were given a treat last night, as the team emitted an update to its latest take on command line shenanigans.…

Make room! For a fee... Microsoft has finally begun rolling out the updates it promised OneDrive users back in June in the form of the Personal Vault and desperately needed additional storage.…

Half of government grant to infosec training biz suspended as MPs demand probe Infosec training biz Hacker House has been catapulted to Parliamentary prominence after reports that co-founder Jennifer Arcuri secured UK government funding because of her personal relationship with now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.…

Hurry up – nearly beer o' clock Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax collector, has issued a winding-up order against tech services outfit Getronics over unpaid VAT, an issue the company said will be "resolved today".…

Guys, just pick up the phone and change! Following an Ofcom review of broadband pricing, a bunch of British ISPs have promised to allow loyal customers access to better deals once their contracts end.…

Don't worry, DCMS is about to publish 'yet another strategy' The UK government's ageing IT systems make "extracting data expensive and sometimes impossible" – yet there is no central repository that lists creaking kit in need of replacement, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has found.…

There's an 'undeclared war' going on A US lobbying group is calling for open standards as a solution to the supposed security threat posed by Huawei.…

Want a peek at what's coming in Red Hat? Step this way CentOS has told devs that they can now get stuck into Stream, a new Linux distro it built with code planned for the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).…

Jeez, this building lark is hard... Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset, southwest England, will cost about £2bn more to build than previous estimates and will miss its deadline for completion.…

UK's top mobile network 'fully cooperating' with investigation The UK's communications regulator has launched an investigation into mobile network EE after an outage earlier this year may have left some customers unable to access the emergency services.…

A K9 to tide you over until hoverboards come out Shambling military-grade mechanical monstrosity maker Boston Dynamics has officially launched its dog-like robot, Spot.…