The Register

Not great, not terrible – but downright diabolical The absolute state of 2019 is that millions of vapid young people, followed by millions more vapid young people, make serious bank just by virtue of being really, really, really ridiculously good looking and posting about it online.…

SQL support and Release 4 arrives in cloudy open source service Feeling a bit poorly? Good news! Microsoft has added SQL to its FHIR Server for Azure, so your symptoms can now be flung even further.…

They've got us on the list Huawei has suspended the launch of the latest Matebook laptop ahead of sanctions being imposed by the US government that will block it from dealing with American suppliers.…

A stitch in time saves 6.5 Microsoft crossed its fingers and started rolling out an update to Azure Service Fabric over its cloudy platform yesterday.…

Call for industry giants to get zoned in on SMR, ZNS drives Western Digital is launching an open initiative called Zoned Storage to convince industry to develop standards and software for emerging types of high-capacity drives – thus feathering its own nest.…

Connect with developments in the operational technology world 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.…

Think different? In Europe, they definitely are: Huawei, the lads! It isn’t just in China that Apple’s feeling the burn of shrinking iPhone sales. The reassuringly expensive mobe maker is, we're told, shipping millions fewer handsets in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, too.…

Good – if you're eye-deep in Amazon's cloud, that is Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added key features to the console and API for its source code repository, CodeCommit.…

'Text editing' system for speeches to change meanings emerges along with CEO-goading art attack Video Once again, artificially intelligent software has been demonstrated automatically editing videos of talking heads to make them say things they haven’t actually uttered. And it's getting better at it. Today, it's altering footage of boffins, and Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian, but next it could be you. Probably not.…

Bad news: Might actually be 1,000 years. And not even that devastating Our Sun may be middle-aged but it still has the energy to expel superflares, a rare rush of energy, every few thousands of years that could destroy Earth’s spacecraft and electronics, scientists warned.…

Kaspersky fingers pro-G filters for letting cyber-muck through Spammers are abusing the preferential treatment Google affords its own apps to score free passes through Gmail's spam filters, it was claimed this week.…

Boffins blast boards to boost bits Bit boffins from Australia, Austria, and the US have expanded upon the Rowhammer memory attack technique to create more dangerous variation called RAMBleed that can expose confidential system memory.…

And Google drops a zero-day on Windows after deadline miss Patch Tuesday Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, and SAP have all emitted their latest Patch Tuesday batch of security fixes. Users and admins are encouraged to test and install the updates as soon as humanly possible.…

In Cupertino, no one can hear, er, see your screen Apple's "geniuses" spent two weeks and an estimated $10,000 in warranty costs fixing a MacBook Pro screen fault that was resolved with a single button press or three.…

State attorneys general unimpressed by FCC boss's rationale Ten state attorneys general, including New York and California, are suing in an effort to stop the merger of T-Mobile US and Sprint.…

Automattic's premium hosting service goes TITSUP: Total Inability To Serve Usual Pages Updated News websites and other top sites have fallen over, or reverted to 2002-era my-first-blog themes, after their hosting platform, WordPress.com's premium VIP Go service, broke down today.…

My God, it's full of... really dense metal? Eggheads in Texas have discovered a huge, dense mass lurking beneath an enormous crater on the Moon.…

Chipzilla smacks lips with eyes fixed on the cloud biz Intel is acquiring custom network chip maker Barefoot Networks in a broadside that just might rattle arch-rival Broadcom.…

EMEA and UK teams to colocate in Uxbridge, local MP shakes fist at stalled Brexit Canon is to shutter its Reigate office in deepest Surrey in favour of the unbridled glamour of Uxbridge.…

Also, decoding the Donald and opening up BEAM Roundup Presidential frothing over NASA's direction was swiftly wiped from the walls last week while ESA continued quietly progressing towards new rockets and vehicles.…

'Time to grow up,' says geek behind breach database Troy Hunt, inventor and operator of the popular security website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), is putting the service up for sale.…

Russian bloke's heroics rewrite survival guides the world over If you go down to the woods today, do it somewhere nice like the Forest of Dean* and definitely not Siberia, where a 30-year-old bloke only escaped with his life because he bit the tongue off the bear mauling him.…

Rights groups slam UK.gov's customer due diligence plans The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and UK Open Rights Group have responded to an HM Treasury consultation on money laundering legislation, in particular to the suggestion that publishing open-source software should be subject to customer due diligence requirements.…

Taxpayers taken for 'mugs' as UK.gov contract awards surface Updated AWS has been accused of treating the British public like "mugs" after it emerged HMRC splashed £11m with the cloud giant last year, more than six times the amount it received in corporation tax from the US firm.…

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system is not happy. Not happy at all Hundred of flights were cancelled and aircraft grounded stateside over the weekend due to a mystery GPS glitch.…

Learn the secret of two-pizza teams and other aids to creating an agile environment Promo Amazon Web Services has launched a series of videos to provide an insider’s view of how the cloud can help businesses stay one step ahead of their competitors.…

And using browser privacy extensions may just make matters worse Boffins from Graz University of Technology in Austria have devised an automated system for browser profiling using two new side channel attacks that can help expose information about software and hardware to fingerprint browsers and improve the effectiveness of exploits.…

Bottle-counting machine-learning software demoed at Business Applications Summit Microsoft has crafted a thing called AI Builder, a visual tool to inject some degree of artificial intelligence into programs created using the tech giant's low-code application builder PowerApps.…

'If we were put under any pressure by any country that we felt was wrong, we would prefer to close the business' The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday asked experts whether Huawei poses a threat to national security. It was a question the answers to which exposed the many problems with trying to ban a manufacturer that’s been a part of the country’s telecommunications landscape for nearly two decades.…

Browser will remain gratis, optional $$-per-month services to be offered later this year Mozilla is planning to launch a suite of paid-for subscription services to complement its free and open-source Firefox browser in October.…

That story we broke in May? It is still true – and perhaps even worse than first thought The US Customs and Border Patrol today said hackers broke into one of its bungling technology subcontractors – and made off with images of people and their vehicle license plates as they passed through America's land border.…

America's highest court agrees to mull over whether lawsuit can proceed The US Supreme Court will dig into an Intel retirement plan that one unhappy former staffer says wrongly invested in risky funds and led to big losses in his savings.…

Wondering why your inbox was so clear? Bad news… Symantec is working to restore its Email Security.cloud service following a major slowdown that has lasted throughout the US morning and into the afternoon.…

BGP leaks are common but don’t usually take hours to fix... Comment Yet another large interweb routing blunder has prompted internet engineers to stress the need for additional security at the network's foundational layer, and again raised eyebrows at the behavior of China Telecom.…

Welsh scumbag sent down after trying to blackmail Brit ISP's then-CEO A Welsh man who hacked British ISP TalkTalk in 2015 and siphoned off subscribers' personal data has been sent down for four years.…

Suffer no more interruptions and downtime: Book a demo session today – and check out the research Sponsored From offices and hospitals to factories, hotels and universities, all say more wireless devices than ever are joining their networks.…

It is acronym Monday as WCF and WF get OSS projects Microsoft has reiterated its position that "if it ain't Core you should code with it no more" by distributing a list of what is in and out of its open-source take on .NET.…

Because nobody really likes spreadsheets Salesforce is buying data visualisation specialist Tableau for $15.7bn as it looks to up its analytics game.…

Mark Curran can't wait to join 'interesting' IT meltdown bank TSB, the bank that put the "down" into "meltdown", has appointed Mark Curran as director of Technology Transformation.…

Beautiful machines will get a second lease of life British industrial computing specialist Captec has acquired the assets and intellectual property of London-based Aleutia – a maker of tiny, fanless PCs that's been quietly sinking into obscurity.…

Azure Kubernetes Service reaches China, and did we mention Flight Simulator? Roundup Last week as always saw some new Windows, new toys in Azure and, more importantly, the teasing of a new Flight Simulator.…

GTS to shoulder third of cuts, with UK and DACH hit hardest The Global Technology Services division at IBM will bear the brunt of the latest round of bloodletting in Europe, according to a letter from the organisation that helps impacted employees navigate redundancy.…

Microsoft gets nervous, dumps burden of consent on users Microsoft has begun rolling out an update to the Photos app in Windows 10 that prompts you to confirm "all appropriate consents from the people in your photos and videos", in order to use facial recog to find snaps of your friends and loved ones.…

Plus, Citrix catches sueball after employee data hacked Roundup It wasn't just fake CIA agents, database mega-hacks and Bing flings in the security world last week. Here are a few tidbits beyond what you've read in El Reg.…

Your rapid-fire guide to machine-learning bits and bytes Roundup It's been a busy seven days in the world of AI, what with Facebook purloining a database of 3D objects to use in its AI projects, and boffins writing software to produce machine-learning models tiny enough to operate inside microcontrollers. But here's a round-up of news nuggets beyond what we've already covered.…

Don't call McKinsey! El Reg can save you $$s by asking our best resource: readers DXC Technology exec veep and GM of the Build division Ed Ho says the organisation has yet to "define its brand" more than two years after the new corporate entity lurched into being.…

It isn't only birds that like nesting Who, Me? Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of Monday. What better way to start your week than combining it with the latest confession of wrongdoing from The Register readership in the form of our weekly Who, Me? column.…

Kaspersky warns of fake 'dirty agent' scam circulating Fraudsters are posing as CIA investigators gone rogue in emails to marks, offering to take bribes to drop bogus investigations into the recipients and claims of online pedophilia, according to Kaspersky.…

Encrypting web queries makes it more difficult to block underage sexual abuse images Analysis Since last year, organizations like Cloudflare, Google and Mozilla have been working to encrypt DNS queries by implementing a protocol called DNS over HTTPS, one of a handful of related web specs that aim to close privacy gaps that can expose network requests to potential scrutiny.…

That three-year anniversary party took a dark turn Samsung has killed off its Joyent public cloud – its unsuccessful answer to Amazon and Google's public cloud services – almost three years to the day after it acquired the biz.…