The Register

Needed: 10 brave Brits to volunteer to become ex-Big Bluers. Worst might be over, people IBM has fired the starting gun on voluntary redundancies for UK staff working in the Technology Support Services (TSS) unit of the Global Technology Services division (GTS). The number it is looking for? Ten.…

I can absolutely do that for you, Dave The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This time we head into low Earth orbit for a space whodunnit with Observation. But first let us fondly bask in the nostalgic glow of classic adventure games – the primordial goop to which Observation clearly owes its lineage. Oh, and E3 was a thing that happened.…

You'd be lucky if it survives until next Thursday Something for the Weekend, Sir? There is a graveyard in my office.…

All for the want of a drop of lubricant On Call Distract yourself from the come-hither finger of a Friday trip to the pub ahead of the weekend with a trolley-based tale from the On Call vaults.…

See Google, there are other ways to run browser content blockers smartly Software engineers working on the Brave browser have rewritten the browser's ad blocking engine in Rust and seen massive speed increases as a result.…

Saves time, only a little accuracy lost, unexpectedly understands dark matter Neural networks can build 3D simulations of the universe in milliseconds, compared to days or weeks when using traditional supercomputing methods, according to new research.…

Join us at Minds Mastering Machines: We have a score of tickets to give away Event If you’re a charity or a non-profit doing something amazing and think you could do even more with a crash-course in machine learning, artificial intelligence, or advanced analytics, we want to hear from you.…

Development paused after AI experts sounded alarm. Amazon et al take note, eh? Axon, the largest supplier of body cameras to America's cops, will not add facial-recognition technology to its gear anytime soon, it announced Thursday.…

They managed to scrape by with the lowest possible passing grade: D- Washington DC has been hit with yet another discouraging assessment of the Uncle Sam's IT management and security practices.…

Our 'X-ray specs' software can be misused? And everyone wants it? Oh no, who'd have thought, say creators A machine-learning-powered perv super-tool that automagically removed clothes from women in photos to make them appear naked has been torn offline by its makers.…

Do my Ive's deceive me? No, Sir Jony exits Cupertino, which will be among his first clients British Essex boy made good Sir Jony Ive will step down from his role as Apple's chief designer.…

... Are ... are we the baddies? Hackers from the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have been accused of breaking into systems at Yandex, dubbed Russia's Google.…

Plus: Barristers spar amid reading comprehension test Autonomy Trial Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch oversaw the launch of what was purported to be a new product line in order to fraudulently pad its revenues, HPE’s lawyers have alleged.…

Windows giant cheered on by Linux Foundation as it seeks membership of private security-focused message board Microsoft's transformation into a fully paid-up member of the Linux love-train continued this week as the Windows giant sought to join the exclusive club that is the official linux-distros mailing list.…

May 2019 Update cautiously nibbles the toes of its predecessors Microsoft's Windows nightmare looks to be coming to an end as usage figures for The Update of The Damned began to tail off last month.…

Chocolate Factory play catch up to AWS and Microsoft... again Deep Learning Containers (DLC) has entered beta stage, according to Google's Cloud Platform team.…

He's only in charge of fitting them into UK airspace British drone fliers are either “clueless, careless or criminal”, according to none other than National Air Traffic Service's (NATS) head of unmanned traffic management.…

Paul Wiles: 'Clear and publicly accepted rules' needed for common data platform The Ministry of Defence has been searching the police national fingerprint database without a “clearly defined lawful basis,” the UK's biometrics commissioner has said.…

Warns deployment will go up spout if UK.gov pulls plug on controversial supplier Huawei has the most advanced tech for 5G deployment, Three's director of network strategy has said - ahead of the government's pending review into the controversial supplier's UK telecoms footprint.…

This is fine. 100 others have... fsck, I've hit a ditch Updated "You are not a lemming," said a traffic anchor of not one, not two, but reportedly about 100 people who came a cropper after following Google Maps' directions onto a muddy dirt road to avoid a road snarlup on the way to Denver Airport at the weekend.…

'We are NOT okay with it' says Architecture Lead StackOverflow, a popular resource for developers looking for code to copy and paste solutions to tricky programming issues, has been found to be serving an ad complete with JavaScript code intended to track users regardless of their privacy choices.…

UK state pension age-extender no longer forced to make ends meet on his own £1.8m pension pot Exclusive Former permanent secretary at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, Robert Devereux, is to join software giant Salesforce.…

Decommissioning to carry on while commercial interests sniff around Scottish satellite fanciers The tortured tale of the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station took another turn in recent weeks as a proposal to rescue the venerable institution suffered a setback.…

All is well in Westminster, honest Comment A group of tinfoil-hatted wackos have held a public meeting to talk about the dangers of “electromagnetic fields” and demand 5G mobile network rollouts are halted. Unfortunately for the Great British Public, those moonhowlers are elected Members of Parliament.…

Not-quite-Iranian file-wiping malware emerges as Tehran blamed for rise in cyber-attacks Not content to be the focus of the geopolitical news cycle, Iran now also finds itself in the middle of two major developments in the security world.…

More than 1 in 2 products have serious flaws, some potentially backdoors, we're told Huawei, the Chinese manufacturing giant targeted by the Trump administration as a national security threat, has some of the least secure networking products in the industry, according to Finite State.…

Join govt-backed Tech Nation’s programme for folks with big practical plans for machine-learning systems Promo Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future, with countries around the world investing heavily to compete in initiatives that apply machine-learning to solving real-world problems.…

Uncle Sam needs to step in and audit machine-learning systems, House committee told US House reps on Wednesday grilled a panel of experts on the various impacts artificial intelligence are likely to have on society, privacy, ethics, and so forth, and what can be done about it, if anything.…

Sim uncovers code-triggered hardware failure that pitches jetliner nose down Yet another deadly and baffling safety flaw has been uncovered in Boeing's 737 Max line of airplanes.…

Oh no Xi didn't! Fresh details emerge on mega-hack Fresh details have emerged revealing just how deeply Chinese government hackers plundered HPE, IBM, DXC, Fujitsu, Tata, and others, stealing corporate secrets and rifling through their customers' networks.…

Too much data slurped in October, months after snoops vowed not to do that Analysis The NSA illegally gathered a trove of American citizens' phone and text message records just four months after it promised it had taken steps to literally not do that again.…

SEV code cracked to leak secret keys Updated Microchip slinger AMD has issued a firmware patch to fix the encryption in its Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology (SEV), used to defend the memory of Linux KVM virtual machines running on its Epyc processors.…

Ex-chief exec enters witness box, points finger at beancounters Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch, former CEO of Autonomy, today told a court, “I was not involved in the vast majority of transactions,” that HP claims added up to a $5bn fraud it uncovered after buying the company from Lynch and then-CFO Sushovan Hussain.…

Far away, my Office is calling... Outlook alerts do chime The Welsh, it seems, just cannot get enough of Microsoft as 100,000 NHS staff across the country are set to receive a bucketload of the company's productivity wares.…

5 men, 1 woman nabbed European cops have cuffed six people for typosquatting – in this case spoofing a well known cryptocurrency exchange – and allegedly making off with €24m worth of Bitcoin tokens.…

Don't worry, Fujitsu is on the case A digital or "smart" solution to the Irish border problem is possible in the next three years if Europe agrees to a Brexit transition period, the "Alternative Arrangements Commission" Technical Panel has told MPs.…

Casts an eye over biz's agreements with 7 of its main customers Updated The European Commission is rolling up its sleeves and once again donning its tight plastic gloves, as it begins another probe into a chip designer – this time Silicon Valley-based Broadcom.…

Thanks in large part to a counter-phishing product. Doh! The criminals behind the Wipro phishing attack from earlier this year also targeted Western Union, Expedia, Rackspace and a whole host of other big companies, according to threat intel outfit RiskIQ.…

Oh alright then, we'll take your money – if we must Microsoft finally joined the likes of Google and Apple and admitted that, yes, users might want more storage while also upping the security on its file shack.…

Cough... Yep, profits down 78% in our car crash Q3 financials... cough Micron has begun to supply a "subset" of DRAM to Huawei in the past fortnight after discovering those products are not covered by the sanctions that prevent Chinese firms buying components from US suppliers.…

Ahem, correlation DOES NOT imply causation. Obviously... Analysis If you live in a city where people are more likely to make racist remarks on Twitter, there's apparently a high chance that there are increased rates of racially motivated hate crimes, too.…

Tsk, tsk... look at you getting accustomed to double digits, chides analyst The three pillars of tech infrastructure - servers, storage and networking - are selling like lukewarm cakes as sectoral heat dissipates.…

Previous price cap of £180 per visit reduced to, er, exactly zero DXC Technology's UK staffers have had their wings clipped by the imposition of some stringent belt tightening - all travel must now be authorised before personnel can visit other sites, including customers.…

Plastic-fantastic Moon shenanigans for Reg hack Hands On One of the more delightful side effects of the current obsession with Apollo 11 at 50 has been the arrival of nerd-pleasing Lego. Today, an injured Vulture had a crack at building his own very Lunar Module.…

We talk real-world examples with OSIsoft, Axens, MOL Group Sponsored webcast While many organisations are still gazing in marvel at the inelegantly named Internet of Things, the technology world has been making big strides in the area of routinely handling data from thousands of pieces of equipment.…

Present in more than 1 in 10 top websites (and yes, greed covers them all) Dark patterns – user interfaces designed to deviously manipulate people into doing things – have become common enough on websites and in apps that almost two dozen providers have sprung up to supply behavior persuasion as a service.…

Tally ho, you can call me Buckyballs, what what Astrophysicists have found the single largest molecule yet floating in the interstellar medium, the soup of matter and radiation that floods space in between all of the universe’s objects.…

Now for deep-diving Congress hearings... LMAO JK JK they will do nothing A US Senate probe has once again outlined the woeful state of computer and information security within Uncle Sam's civil service.…

Funnily enough, she was keen to slash infrastructure investment red-tape A telecoms CEO and one-time adviser to FCC boss Ajit Pai will spend as much as the next half-decade behind bars after being convicted of wire fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft.…

Now gimme that 4K HD live stream of kittens Analysis The weather forecasters responsible for letting millions knowing about weather patterns, including hurricanes and tornadoes, have warned yet again that plans to auction off radio spectrum for 5G mobile networks could have a dangerous impact on their efforts.…