The Register

Stop asking difficult questions and stick to the script, pal Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hmm, we seem to be having a problem with this page at the moment. You might like to try again later.…

How much do I trust Mozilla with my data? You just can't keep a good idea down. At least that's what Mozilla will be hoping as it resurrects its Firefox Test Pilot programme once again.…

A magical journey into the brave new world of Start Menus and Recycle Bins On Call As the weekend looms, spare a thought for those unfortunates forced to, you know, deal with actual users. Perhaps buy one a beer after spending a moment with our regular On Call column.…

Gain the skills you need to fend off miscreants this October in the UK capital Promo The internet is full of powerful, fast-changing hacking tools and malicious actors who know how to use them. That makes the regular training events held by IT security specialist SANS Institute an essential destination for technology professionals keen to sharpen their defensive skills and protect their organisation against today’s ever-more ingenious attackers.…

'We've never seen it eat so much in over 20 years!' Video The behemoth black hole lurking at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is hungrier than it's ever been, and is currently feasting on the largest meal that has ever been observed in almost a quarter of a century.…

Blokes left in legal limbo amid electronic records audit Updated Two men hired to assess a court record system's computer security were arrested Wednesday – after they were caught physically sneaking into a courthouse.…

Bug-hunter says Cupertino won't even pay $1 reward for security hole Video Apple's very latest version of iOS appears to have the same sort of lock-screen bypass that plagued previous versions of the iThing firmware.…

But Trump Administration seemingly unbothered After months of speculation about who exactly was behind a series of eavesdropping fake cell towers in Washington DC, it appears the answer is Israel.…

Digital dosh scorned as a threat to national sovereignty On Thursday Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency has received a Gallic dismissal courtesy of France's finance minister.…

Five nabbed over conspiracy to commit a public nuisance Five people have been arrested by the Metropolitan Police for threatening to fly drones around London’s Heathrow airport this Friday to protest climate change.…

The amber DNA in Jurassic Park? That's you, that is Stamping your footprints on the Moon's surface remains an impossible bucket-list ambition for practically all of us over the age of two. But for $99 you might still be able to leave a DNA footprint there.…

Thanks to social media, that's at least more transparent now... Some 42 per cent of Brit MPs reckon social media has damaged their policy-making processes, which is in turn having a negative affect on members of the public.…

Will it be enough to boost Big Blue's cloud? CF Summit IBM has demonstrated Cloud Foundry running on Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes (K8s) container platform, at an event in the Netherlands.…

Trials might be done before SpaceX's Starship hop NASA's enormous mobile launcher is back at Pad 39B after worried engineers stashed it in the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to ride out Hurricane Dorian.…

Deloitte, PA Consulting, PwC et al making a killing from crisis "Excessive secrecy" surrounds departmental spending on Brexit consultants, though 96 per cent of the £97m spaffed to date has gone to just six firms, according to the UK government's spending watchdog.…

BT clears throat, gestures wildly at its new full-fibre targets BT's Openreach is pausing its hybrid G.fast fibre investment as it mulls the product's future in light of its recent conversion to full fibre.…

New shiny for Fast Ringers. Oh, and Cortana Microsoft has updated the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 to support Arm64 devices for the wafer-thin slice of Windows Insiders using the things.…

Multicloud, Spring framework, and how K8s will become a universal API for infrastructure Interview Pivotal's current alpha release of the Pivotal Application Service (PAS) for Kubernetes has a dependency on VMware, but that will be removed in the final release, senior veep of products Ian Andrews told The Reg.…

What Mark Shuttleworth would have wanted? Updated As eagle-eyed readers may have noted, Vulture Central UK is on the move. Our migratory path has led us to London's Grays Inn Road and, well, you can see what was waiting for us.…

Yes, turns out people still use this voucher biz – who knew? We have a new twist on the "researchers find unprotected public-facing cloud-hosted database" story, as one recently uncovered archive turned out to be at the heart of a years-long fraud operation.…

Go on, we're listening The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee has called on UK government to publish its long-overdue plans for upping investment in research and development.…

Plus: Baidu's 92% growth closes gap on AWS Despite all the talk among Western tech vendors of an economic slowdown in the Middle Kingdon, spending on cloud infrastructure services in China is comfortably outpacing that of the global average.…

From thwarting phishing to boosting infosec awareness, we've got it covered Webcast Security professionals like you have a tough job.…

UK govt releases contingency doc and everything thing is [fine/a living nightmare] (delete as appropriate) Analysis Cloud providers, social media platforms, and e-commerce companies are going to be hit hard in the event of a no-deal Brexit, according to official UK government correspondence.…

Red Dwarf solar system too far away for a jaunt on Starbug Scientists have detected water vapor wafting from the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting around its star within the habitable zone for the first time, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy.…

Board member Salvino to lead CSC-HPE-Enterprise-Services mutant starting Thursday Beleaguered IT outsourcing specialist DXC will open business Thursday minus the only CEO it has, to date, ever known, as Mike Lawrie is stepping down effective immediately.…

Also-CEO Safra Catz will take over share his responsibilities with some guy who co-founded the biz On Wednesday, Oracle said co-CEO Mark Hurd will take a leave of absence to deal with undisclosed health issues, an announcement that coincided with the publication of the tech titan's fiscal 2020 Q1 numbers.…

AI'm Lovin' It McDonald’s has wolfed down Apprente, an AI startup focused on voice recognition, seemingly in a bid to replace its Drive Thru human servers with computers.…

One step forward, er, one step back. Nobody gets too far like that Microsoft's build 18362.356 (KB4515384​​​​​) for its Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) rolled out on Tuesday with security improvements for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, networking tech and input devices – and a CPU usage fix that, for some, has broken desktop search.…

Rules may blow up bug bounty upstarts, too Analysis The California Senate has passed a new gig-economy law that may force app companies like Uber and Lyft to treat certain workers as employees rather than independent contractors.…

Manufacturing rises by double digits ahead of December D-Day Notebook original design manufacturers ramped production in Q2 as the big brands upped their orders to swerve a US imposed trade tariff that, from December, will directly hit mobile PCs exported from China to America.…

Totally sane John McAfee up there with Walder Frey, says cybersecurity celeb list Despite billing himself as "the world's most famous hacker", Kevin Mitnick isn't the infosec personality your grandma is most interested in learning more about.…

Self-regulation has failed, says NSPCC The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is calling on the British government to force social media companies to use AI to detect suspicious grooming behaviour.…

Engineers nervously check their personal ride-sharing ratings A number of Uber employees found their rating a little lower than they thought as the company laid off 435 staffers this week.…

At least that's what the org would have you believe CF Summit "The Kubernetes community is reaching out and asking for our help on the developer experience," claimed Cloud Foundry exec director Abby Kearns at the outfit's Netherlands-based Euro Summit.…

Ahoy me maties, now we must find another mast to climb The UK's largest internet service providers must block access to websites that enable people to pirate Nintendo Switch games, the High Court has ruled.…

Storage types pretty excited about getting at arrays over Ethernet via NVMe-oF Western Digital has swallowed Kazan Networks to get a taste of its sweet NVMe over Fabrics Ethernet connectivity kit.…

Take note, mobe makers Amsterdam-based Fairphone describes its devices as sustainable. iFixit took its selection of tools to one and found that, hey, you can make phones that are at once not rubbish and also repairable.…

It's ripe up your street In the UK, there are a number of things you can do about potholes: a) report it to the council; b) call the local newspaper, which will photograph you squatting angrily by the hole while you squawk "it's an accident waiting to happen!"; or c) nothing.…

iOS 13, macOS Catalina and calling C code in Mountain View's bundle of joy Flutter, Google's crack at a platform for mobile, desktop and web apps, has hit version 1.9 as the company targets Apple's upcoming iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. Its Dart language also got a tickle.…

Top beancounter 'never said anything', court hears Autonomy Trial A top Deloitte auditor "never said anything" at meetings of Autonomy's internal audit committee, its chairman – a one-time CEO of the Prudential insurance group – has testified to London's High Court.…

Manufacturers seem not to care – some routers still awaiting patches DSL modems and Wi-Fi routers from D-Link and Comba have been found to be leaving owners' passwords out in the open.…

From Spaceborne to Aitken and on to the Moon Interview Not content with stashing an Apollo-based supercomputer aboard the ISS, HPE will also be slinging the petaFLOPS for NASA's Ames Research Center.…

Prototype tries to offer help, advice to people uncomfortable discussing abuse with others Academics in the Netherlands have built a prototype machine-learning-powered Telegram chatbot that attempts to listen to victims of sexual harassment and assault, and offer them advice and help.…

Frictionless machine learning? Yes, it's possible – we can't wait to show you how Event We’ll be opening the doors at MCubed, our three-day dive into machine learning and analytics, in just a couple of weeks – and if you haven’t snapped up your place yet, our latest speaker additions may just tip the balance.…

Japanese cargo spaceship launch scrubbed after premature deflagration The launch of a cargo spacecraft packed with supplies for the International Space Station was cancelled after a fire erupted on or near the launch pad at Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Tuesday.…

Alleged whaling crooks cuffed in global crime crackdown US prosecutors say 281 suspected criminal hackers around the world have been arrested as part of a massive takedown operation against so-called business email compromise operations. That's the type of caper in which crooks hijack executives' email accounts, or impersonate the staffers, to trick colleagues into wiring funds to fraudsters' accounts.…

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, privacy is sharing On Tuesday, fifty-one CEOs of major data-using companies urged US lawmakers to pass a national data privacy law, insisting that they're committed to protecting consumer privacy.…

Flagship smartmobe aimed squarely at the selfie generation As is traditional at this time of year, Apple on Tuesday showed off the shiny iThings it wants you to buy over the coming year. After sitting through the big launch, here's your humble Register vulture's complete rundown of what's new from Cook & Co.…

Microsoft joins Adobe and SAP in cleaning up security bugs, two of which are under active attack Patch Tuesday Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP today delivered a load of security updates for this month's Patch Tuesday.…