The Register

How's that Boris Johnson impression working out for you? On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's weekly dive into the mailbag of woe from those faced with recalcitrant users or, occasionally, an overly helpful operator.…

Insane in the brain Video Tiny brain cells grown in a petri dish can be induced to emit electrical waves similar to the ones coming from humans, scientists have discovered for the first time.…

First Gim, er, Glimpse – now our web vultures' favorite coding lingo Earlier this month, Elizabeth Mattijsen, a Dutch software developer and contributor to the open-source Perl programming language, opened an issue in the GitHub Perl 6 repository seeking to rename the project because having "Perl" in the name is "confusing and irritating."…

Chinese mobe maker says screw you, we'll build our own Google has confirmed that Huawei’s new smartphone, the Mate 30, will not include some of the world’s most popular apps - Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail - as a result of US sanctions, .…

Payouts extended to anything with more than 100m installs Google is expanding its Android bug-bounty program to cover not just holes in the web giant's apps but also vulnerabilities in third-party software – as long as they have more than 100 million installs.…

The clock is ticking to find replacement, he's off by Xmas Chris Beard announced today he will be stepping down as CEO of Mozilla at the end of this year.…

Planned obsolescence and big profits be damned, we're going to let you fix your kit On Thursday, Apple introduced a program that will allow independent computer repair shops access to the same resources available to Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASP), a significant policy shift that could help level a market the company has been deterring unauthorized battery replacements and lobbying against right to repair legislation.…

Ex-Amazon techie accused of cyber-looting other storage buckets, mining crypto-coins on hacked servers The ex-Amazon engineer who allegedly stole 100 million Capital One credit applicants' personal details from AWS cloud buckets has been formally accused of swiping data from 30 other organizations.…

Plus: Intel slips first 10nm Agilex FPGAs to select lucky customers Here are a couple of chip-related news bytes for you.…

Five years' history not enough to get a meaningful human response Canadian developer Mathieu Méa has gone public about his experience with Google's Play team after they abruptly terminated his publisher account at the end of last week.…

Claims loosening BT's price cap will cost businesses £230m Updated Vodafone has lobbed a sueball at UK comms regulator Ofcom for relaxing regulation of BT's wholesale fibre leases - a move it claims could cost British businesses £230m.…

Slowing economy blamed for customers delaying software buys as storm clouds gather The share price of Micro Focus is taking a battering on the London Stock Exchange, plunging 30 per cent this morning after the home of ageing software brands lowered revenue guidance.…

Devises three-point plan to up its privacy game Sorry seems to be the hardest word for some - Apple has finally apologised to customer weeks after it emerged contractors had been asked by the company to listen to recordings of people using the Siri digital assistant.…

'Network censorship will only accelerate the loss of HK to competing cities' The Hong Kong ISP Association (HKISPA) reckons any moves by China to shut off the semi-autonomous territory's uncensored internet connection, African dictator-style, "would immediately and permanently deter international businesses" from staying in the one-time British colony.…

Just months before 'Brexit day' Just months before the omnishambles deal-or-no-deal uncertainty of Britain's exit from the European Union, the government has a cunning plan to help businesses prepare: information packs!…

Live footage of runway and grass verge more compelling than actual flight instruments The latest British Army Watchkeeper drone crash happened because its crew became fixated on live footage from an onboard camera instead of their instruments, a Ministry of Defence report has revealed.…

Bad news for Nimbys and 5G health cranks, good news for 4G The British government has raised the spectre of giant mobile masts looming large over the English countryside in its 5G consultation review paper as a further loosening of planning regulations is considered.…

Claims to have made nearly €800k from ad clicks A Maltese "browser-based gaming" company that claimed to have made nearly €800,000 from ad clicks in one month is suing Google after the ad tech monolith kicked it out of the Adsense program.…

MIT, Analog get into some RISC-y business “Hello, World! I am RV16XNano, made from CNTs.” That’s the friendly message emitted by a RISC-V-based chip made entirely out of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and revealed on Wednesday.…

Tune into expert-led eight-part video series and bag fear gear Promo Nutanix will dispense valuable advice on ways to modernize your data centre in an eight-part series of videos that you can view throughout August, in what the California-based cloud computing software company calls its Cloud Shack.…

Let's hope the sunshield doesn't get ripped off again, eh? The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope has finally been assembled, NASA announced on Wednesday.…

Save the family joules, urge Apple's WebKit developers Apple WebKit engineers Benjamin Poulain and Simon Fraser have offered advice to web developers about how to design power-efficient web pages, to preserve the life of mobile device batteries and give users move time interacting with web content.…

Small governments make up two-thirds of infection victims observed by infosec bods Ransomware criminals have taken a particular shine to US city and state governments, infecting them with file-scrambling extorionware in hope of quick payouts.…

Uncle Sam sued by rights warriors probing claims of silent snooping on suspicious rides The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued [PDF] the US Department of Homeland Security to find out more about a program where, it is claimed, officers secretly stick GPS trackers on vehicles they are suspicious of as they come through the border.…

Of course it's Craig Wright The man who claims to have invented Bitcoin has been ordered by a Florida court to hand over half of his stash of the cyber-money, worth an estimated $5bn, to the estate of his dead business partner.…

Thousands of dollars and new kit up for grabs if you can blow a hole in Zuck's video-conf gear Facebook is opening its Portal videoconferencing hardware to hackers for the first time at the upcoming Pwn2Own Tokyo competition.…

Kills roaming settings, makes HTML copy 'incontrovertible' You can now get a Windows Terminal preview without the roam-tastic settings after 0.4 appeared in the Microsoft Store in Windows 10, replacing version 0.3 which it kicked out just a few weeks ago.…

exFAT heading towards Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition Microsoft has published the technical specification for exFAT, a file system widely used for removable storage devices.…

Competition Commish Margrethe Vestager confirms latest piercing The European Commission is investigating Google for illegally favouring its own job ads service over rivals.…

Programme to shine a light on elections lacks transparency Researchers studying the influence Facebook has on democracy are threatening to quit over a lack of access to the antisocial network's data.…

Release the GIMP: Glimpse project founded to avoid branding that some find offensive Interview Glimpse is a fork of the popular open source image editor, GIMP, created primarily to offer the software under an alternative name.…

Book now – Serverless Computing London early-bird offer expires soon Event If you’re thinking about saving money by going serverless, you should start by going to Serverless Computing London AND some money.…

This will end well UK PM Boris Johnson will attempt to close Parliament in order to push through a no-deal Brexit without interference from pesky voters' representatives in the form of MPs.…

Out of options we are running Oracle is having one last shake of the dice by going back to court to try to force the Pentagon to reconsider kicking it out of the running for the $10bn contract to run cloud services for the US Department of Defense.…

IoT botnets move into the home theater market in search of low-hanging fruit Set-top tuner boxes have become the infection vector in the spread of Internet of Things malware.…

Government dept finally called out... by Britain's ad watchdog. We guess everyone else was busy UK ad watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has told the Home Office to pull a radio advert aimed at encouraging Europeans living in the UK to apply for "settled" status, because it is misleading.…

The second generation 300e for when your little darling simply must have Windows 10 Hands On With a new school term fast approaching, The Register has got its claws on Lenovo's second generation 300e laptop, a device aimed fairly and squarely at students.…

And that's why we flirted with your nemesis Symantec, Brit retailer claims Brit retailer Dixons has lashed back at McAfee's £30m High Court broadside, saying it was entitled to promote rival antivirus (AV) tech from Symantec if McAfee's software wouldn't work on Windows 10S devices.…

What's the worst subject line for an email CC'd to world+dog? Car heating tech biz Webasto's cunning plan to get all its resellers to sign up to say they consented to having their data accessed, as required under GDPR regs, went a bit wrong when the German company accidentally CC'd a large number of people in its UK dealer network.…

Problem is, the scientists don't understand how it's doing it Neural networks can predict your biological age and sex just by analysing the pattern of your heart beats, according to new research published on Tuesday.…

Sharpen your IT negotiation tactics at this year's IT Sourcing, Procurement, Vendor and Asset Management Summit Promo Are you an IT sourcing and procurement leader, finance manager, asset manager or vendor management leader facing the ever steeper challenge of enhancing business performance while also optimising costs?…

Scram CamScanner, says Kaspersky An Android PDF maker with more than 100 million downloads from the official Play Store has been caught silently installing malware on victims' phones.…

Hybrid IT and Intelligent Services are slightly on the low, too, compared to last year HPE announced its fiscal third quarter results for this year on Tuesday, reporting mixed results with an overall dip in sales and growth in gross margins compared to the previous year. However, the enterprise giant couldn't do the biggest job – actually turning a profit.…

A Palestinian living in Lebanon and his friends don’t love America? Bye bye visa An already controversial policy of searching people’s mobile phones and laptops at the US border has returned to the spotlight after a 17-year-old student claimed his visa was revoked in response to social media posts written by other people that appeared on his feeds.…

Reputation matters more than code correctness, boffins claim Git, distributed version control software used by developers to manage source code, includes a command to generate what's known as a pull request, which provides developers with a way to share changes they've made to their copy of a project with the upstream version.…

Former Waymo bigwig in way mo' trouble The former Uber exec at the center of the ride-broker's battle with Google over self-driving car tech has been hit with more than 30 criminal charges.…

A great deal or were consumers Bulldozed by the chip giant? AMD has agreed to pay purchasers of its FX Bulldozer processors a total of $12.1m to settle a four-year false advertising lawsuit.…

'A more ethical, reliable and sustainable phone' – but is anyone buying? Fairphone, whose devices are designed to be sustainable and made in exploitation-free factories, will kick out its third unit in mid-September, priced at €450.00 including VAT.…

Starting a war over stopped trams? Unlikely, says intelligence boffin NATO's secretary-general has once again declared that members of the alliance will respond with force to cyber-attacks, in line with Article 5 of its founding treaty.…