The Register

Nine 'commercial models' to access central database mulled at hush-hush meeting Exclusive Talks to package millions of British medical records into a vast, commercially valuable database that may then be sold on are already underway between NHS England bosses and global giants, documents exclusively obtained by The Register show.…

Gap in browser privacy tech embarrassingly detected by Google Apple on Tuesday updated its Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) system in its WebKit browser engine because it could be tracked.…

House of Representatives OKs Trump plan because it wants federal parents to take time off President Trump’s dream of a special space force have come true just before Christmas, with the US House of Representatives approving the new zero-gravity guardians in a monster military bill on Wednesday.…

Justice Department wins chance to track fitness-tracking purchase The US Department of Justice has beat out the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to become the top dog in an antitrust review of Google’s proposed purchase of fitness tracker Fitbit.…

And in the darkness bind them – to next year's IT budgets Cisco has launched a single chip architecture that it claims will work well in network routing and switching gear, and manage data better than existing processors in both categories.…

Dude, pass the indictment Three men have been arrested and charged with masterminding what prosecutors claimed is a $722m cryptocurrency ponzi scheme.…

Early adopters left out of pocket as winter and Facebook costs kill biz In a savage blow to the notion of nominative determinism, e-scooter startup Unicorn is shutting down after blowing all its money on Facebook ads.…

El Reg checks all the boxes. Dell: 'Hold my beer' Apple's Mac Pro turned up on the company's website this week and, yep, it's eye-wateringly expensive.…

Not cool, Coolest Cooler backers say If you want to hear a tale of woe, you don't need to dust off some Dostoyevsky – just head to Kickstarter, which has no shortage of stiffed punters and failed projects. The latest example in a long line of crowdfunding cockups is the Coolest Cooler, which raised over $13m in 2014 and collapsed earlier this week with 20,000 orders unfulfilled.…

You are the weakest Lynx A salutary warning arrived this week for those seeking to impress at the Christmas disco after a school bus had to be unloaded due to an excessive discharge of body spray.…

Good news? There is no good news File this one under "not everything needs a computer in it". Finnish security house F-Secure today revealed a vulnerability in the KeyWe Smart Lock that could let a sticky-fingered miscreant easily bypass it.…

Hot mic snafu reportedly caught by TV station Updated China's ambassador to Denmark has reportedly threatened to kill off a proposed free trade deal unless the semiautonomous Faroe Islands sign a deal with Huawei for 5G mobile network equipment.…

There is no escape from collaboration Microsoft has plugged the wafer-thin niche of Linux desktop users that want a native app for the company's Slack-for-suits platform, Teams.…

Double-encrypted. That said, if you're worried about over-sharing, what are you doing on Chrome? A new feature in Google's Chrome browser will warn you if your username and password matches a known combination in a security breach every time you type credentials into any website.…

That's quite the appetite you've got there Pirate lord or prodigious porn pumper – how much did YOU download this month? The majority of us will be on unlimited connections and such a question won't matter outside of mobile data.…

Yep that's our old friend Earworn Wearables by another name Wearable tech is seemingly big business, and according to number-cruncher IDC, the market grew by 94.6 per cent year-over-year in Q3 2019.…

Latest Which? study with NCC Group highlights toys it ain't smart to buy It seems to come around quicker every year – the failure of so-called smart toys to meet the most basic of security requirements. Which? has discovered a bunch of sack fillers that dirtbags can use to chat to your kids this Christmas.…

AI really is glorified statistics when it's applied to biology AI algorithms are helping scientists map ten billion cells from the human body in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of how life emerges from the embryo, or how diseases like cancer manifest.…

AWS tech academy, aka Her Maj's Government, trains next gen of Amazonians Amazon Web Services has once more dipped into its public sector employee tech training academy – also known as Her Majesty's government – and made off with another senior head to bulk out its division.…

Sprinkles from extrasolar red giants found here on Earth Everything in the Solar System, from the massive hot burning Sun to the blue ice giant Neptune and all asteroids and bits of dust and rock in between and beyond, are made from dead, leftover stardust.…

Do as we say not as we do, DNS overseer sternly tells Internet Society Three weeks after the Internet Society announced the controversial sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm, the organization that has to sign off on the deal has finally spoken publicly.…

Took you long enough, smirks Microsoft In another sign that investors in augmented reality company Magic Leap had had enough of blue-sky thinking and want to see green paper, it has “launched” a new business-focused product.…

Professional licensing rules collide with common parlance, again Electrical engineer Greg Mills sued the Arizona Board of Technical Registration for fining him thousands of dollars and threatening to close his twelve-year-old electronics business because he called himself an engineer.…

Senate Democrats push for another vote; get rejected again Comment Making it clear that the issue of net neutrality has become an entrenched partisan battle, Democratic Senators used the two-year anniversary of its death on Tuesday to push for a vote that would reverse the decision.…

Feds get extradition for 64 year-old fraud suspect who allegedly netted hundreds of thousands of dollars A 64 year-old man from Nigeria is set to be tried in the US on charges he was the brains behind a string of business email hacks and romance scams.…

End 2019 with a Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, Adobe, SAP and Intel With the year winding to a close and the holiday parties set to kick off, admins will want to check out the December Patch Tuesday load from Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, and SAP and get them installed before downing the first of many egg nogs.…

I don't care if it's mathematically impossible, make it happen nerds! In its latest attempt to come up with a digital encryption scheme that's both secure and not, the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday heard conflicting testimony from industry, academics, and law enforcement about whether encryption can simultaneously protect information and also reveal it on demand.…

Not for the mobe market, more an IoT future for microkernel-based system 2020 probably won’t be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’ll be the year Huawei starts aggressively rolling out its Harmony OS operating system, according to a company spokesperson.…

More stuff that'll get under Arm's skin Updated The RISC-V Summit kicks off in Silicon Valley today, and there were a few interesting announcements this morning.…

I was caught in the middle of a memory attack, and I knew there was no turning back Intel on Tuesday plans to release 11 security advisories, including a microcode firmware update to patch a vulnerability in its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) on recent Core microprocessors that allows a privileged attacker to corrupt SGX enclave computations.…

Now, about the history with the South China Sea... HMS Prince of Wales, second of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, has been commissioned today at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard.…

Oracle DBs particularly vulnerable to fake decryptions, say researchers If you're an Oracle database user and are tempted to pay off a Ryuk ransomware infection to get your files back, for pity's sake, don't. The criminals behind it have broken their own decryptor, meaning nobody will be able to unlock files scrambled by the malicious software.…

Then mercilessly evict it: Out, darned Spot Microsoft has teased Azure Spot Virtual Machines, discounted VMs that can be "evicted any time if Azure needs capacity".…

Debris removal missions to eventually outnumber actual debris? The European Space Agency (ESA) has commissioned a mission to remove an item of debris from orbit as the space around Earth gets progressively more cluttered.…

I'm not crying, there's just a little bit of dust in my eye Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to pay final respects to Microsoft's last foray into the mobile phone market: the Windows Phone.…

Except it looks like all the trusts already have plans Hundreds of thousands of devices managed by the UK's NHS are still running Windows 7. With the end of support looming, is the service about to have another Windows XP moment? Er, probably not.…

*Total Inability To Shuffle money Using Phone The Co-op Bank's app and online services are enjoying an extended lie-in today with multiple customers complaining they're locked out.…

Open-source product now has yet another paid option on top Black Hat Europe Elastic, the biz behind open-source search engine stack Elasticsearch, has launched its own SIEM – a somewhat counterintuitive thing to do, you'd think, until you look at how many others are using Elasticsearch for lucrative security products.…

OS director on staying safe and advantages of Amazon's Nitro hypervisor Interview At the AWS re:Invent conference last week, The Register asked Chris Schlaeger, director of kernel and operating systems, how the cloud giant protects itself and its customers from speculative execution bugs in Intel CPUs.…

Drivers, translators, factory workers, programmers, IT pros... and now animators Boring 2D images can be transformed into corresponding 3D models and back into 2D again automatically by machine-learning-based software, boffins have demonstrated.…

Popular to-do app dies in May. And here’s a worse version... Three months after its former CEO pleaded with Microsoft to sell him back Wunderlist, the software giant has confirmed the worst: it really is killing the popular to-do app.…

Got a Sammy telly older than a few years? No iAuntie for you this Christmas, we fear Owners of some Samsung smart TVs are finding themselves unable to watch BBC iPlayer on their gear after support for scores of models was suddenly dropped.…

We've read enough sci-fi to know how this turns out Scientists in China are laying claim to the first ever pig-monkey chimeras to be born in what they hope will be a breakthrough for biomedicine, not just fuel for your nightmares.…

Lawyer attempted to argue theft of domain name at gunpoint was too stupid to be true An internet frat boy has been sent down for 14 years in America for trying to steal a domain name.…

Dude was distracted by his dog when flash motor pranged police, officers say A man driving a Tesla Model 3 on autopilot mode rammed into the back of two police cars and another vehicle parked on the side of a highway in Connecticut, USA, on Saturday. No one was injured in the crash.…

CEO accused of breaching contract with Cupertino, fires back in court Apple is suing the former chief architect of its iPhone and iPad microprocessors, who in February quit to co-found a data-center chip design biz.…

They also want a ban on interfering with their cookies Amid the final rulemaking before the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is scheduled to take effect next year, five ad industry groups have asked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to remove a requirement that businesses honor the privacy choices internet users make through browser settings, extensions, or other controls.…

'Blatant and sustained effort' to deny AWS Pentagon IT mega-contract, cloud giant claims Amazon has officially accused President Donald Trump of pressuring the Pentagon not to award it a $10bn cloud contract because he hates its CEO Jeff Bezos.…

And thus the age of the Glasshole passes into history Google Glass Explorer Edition was an ambitious but ultimately doomed look at a possible next frontier of human-computer interaction. Almost seven years after its initial release, Mountain View is finally putting it to pasture with one last update.…

Let's strap these bricks together and maybe we'll make a boat Xerox is taking the gloves off to launch a hostile takeover bid for HP Ink, er, Inc – by courting its shareholders with a 33-page document explaining why the pair will be a corporate match made in heaven for investors.…