The Register

Obscure legal doc catapulted to prominence by Home Sec UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid has announced an Espionage Bill, charging ahead with new laws intended to criminalise any British copycats of Edward Snowden – and allowing a future crackdown on Huawei.…

Yes, the one with the critical security fixes Brit security software slinger Sophos has advised its customers to uninstall Microsoft's most recent Patch Tuesday run – the same patches that protect servers against the latest Intel cockups.…

Turning off trim control software in training wouldn't give realistic results – report Boeing has admitted that pilot training simulators for the controversial 737 Max did not accurately reproduce what happened if the infamous MCAS system went gaga.…

Court rules regulator should cough for 'wrongful' increase Vodafone, O2, Three and EE have won a case against Ofcom claiming that the UK comms regulator's increase in spectrum fees was unfair.…

FPGAs bring sweet relief to overworked CPUs Open-source storage enthusiasts at SoftIron have trotted out a low-cost hardware accelerator designed to take over from the CPU on erasure coding duties.…

Let's lift again, like we did last summer, let's shift again, like we did last year From the department of "and about time too" comes news that Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports Windows Server containers, in preview form at least.…

Swedes' EAW could be a starter or a main Sweden's deputy director of public prosecution Eva-Marie Persson has asked a district court for a detention order for Julian Assange on suspicion of rape.…

China adds to Beidou constellation while India preps radar-imaging satellite Roundup While SpaceX twiddled its thumbs and NASA salivated at the prospect of a return to the Moon, last week China put another satellite into space and the New Horizons gang published its first batch of findings.…

UK head honcho swap follows European shakeup Following a substantive restructure across EMEA, NetApp has hired Chris Greenwood - its now former director of north east Europe, Russia and Turkey - to head up operations in the UK and Ireland.…

Plus: Azure galore, and Your Phone app can now munch through mobile data Roundup Monday is here once again, an excuse to take a look at the news from Redmond that you might have missed in the past seven days.…

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then... Analysis The technology industry has numerous terms for sneaky software, including malware, adware, spyware, ransomware, and the ever adorable PUPs – potentially unwanted programs. But there isn't always a clear difference between malware and less threatening descriptors.…

The spiritual successor to the Windows GUI Microsoft has made numerous updates to its Azure Portal, partly to accommodate new features announced at its Build developer conference, and partly in an attempt to improve the user interface.…

Plus: AI-generated whisky – I'm sorry Dave, I can't drink that Roundup Let's get you up to speed on the latest AI news, beyond what we've already covered lately.…

Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face Updated Google will pull Play Store and other services from future shipments of Huawei mobile phones.…

It was the nerd, with the wallpaper, in the .ini file Who, Me? With the copious behind of the weekend waddling off into the sunset, and only the leaner pickings of the working week to look forward, welcome to our weekly dose of Monday prevarication: Who, Me?…

Ah yes, maybe generative adversarial models can be useful after all Spinning up dark matter simulations is computationally expensive so a team of cosmologists are turning to AI models instead.…

Chinese sex company wants to (wire)tap that... A class-action lawsuit against a Chinese sex toy company accused of storing intimate data from its internet-connected dildo can move ahead, a California judge has decided.…

...And more from the world of infosec this week Roundup Here's a quick catch-up of all things infosec beyond what we've already reported this week.…

Charlie Brown and Snoopy go to the Moon Part One Today marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 10, the mission that would do pretty much everything except land on the Moon.…

Plug pulled on instances as engineers scramble to protect customer info Updated Unlucky Salesforce customers have been unable to reach the service since 0956 PDT (1656 UTC) on Friday, thanks to a ham-handed database deployment.…

Explosives activated by wireless networking signals discovered amid election Terrorists have been caught strapping Wi-Fi-activated backup triggers to bombs in Indonesia, police claimed this week.…

Don't worry, it'll shut itself down if someone hits it hard enough French tech services biz Atos has squeezed out its first edgy server box to be deployed outside of the data centre.…

Six-week investigation delay shrank payment by 13% A $1.2m shipment of livestock feed went awry when "hackers" intercepted and tweaked emails with payment details, eventually costing the cheeky buyers an extra $161,000 after exchange rates moved during the legal fallout.…

Also: Accidental explosion in TypeScript type-checking de-borked in version 3.5 Microsoft kept up the cadence of its Visual Studio Code emissions with a shrivelled April update due to the altogether more exciting arrival of Remote Development.…

Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla on board, says chair Intel's Web Standards tech lead, Anssi Kostiainen, has said the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Machine Learning for the Web Community Group now has "all major browsers – Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla – on board along with the broader AI & web ecosystem."…

We read this week's Huawei happenings and filleted it so you don't have to Roundup Huawei has been kicked by a US national emergency proclamation hitting "foreign" gear, spent some cash in France, claimed it's worth billions to Britain and was described as "a potential security risk" by a former head of MI6. And that's just the last five days.…

The term, we believe, is 'rekt': GPU giant loses nearly $1bn in sales, profits fall 68% It might be a new financial year for Nvidia but familiar problems still dog the GPU specialist: the channel remains filled with too much stock and some hyperscale cloud providers aren't opening their wallets.…

Substantial losses weren't much fun, now we'll wait till deal is done HPE is buying supercomputing veteran Cray Inc for $1.3bn after a multi-year squeeze in the supers sector that culminated in "substantial loss" for the HPC-flinger at the start of 2019.…

As most chip suppliers take a hit on sales Having been humiliated by Samsung in 2017, Intel has reclaimed its customary place as the world's largest semiconductor supplier.…

'Baby by myself the stain grows more obvious...' An Oracle AI bot has spewed out an alleged song based on dozens of Eurovision entries.…

Hardly practical but the headroom is there Micron's Ballistix Elite brand of DDR4 memory has been overclocked by almost 60 per cent using liquid nitrogen cooling.…

Also: Repeated reboots to get a Windows 10 update installed? Just like the (not so) old days What do Windows 10 and SpaceX's Starlink launch have in common? One needs updating and might explode without warning. The other is an operating system.…

Plus: Battery software updated following vehicle fires CEO Elon Musk is to embark on a comprehensive expenses review at Tesla, according to Reuters.…

Biz will do almost anything for money (as long as it is cloud-related) Dell Technologies' cloudy division Virtustream has expanded its range of professional and managed services with the launch of xStreamCare.…

Risky business: Azure cloud rains bills Hundreds of Microsoft customers awoke yesterday to find hundreds of Azure invoices of other customers in their inbox. Each customer was emailed not only their own invoice, but scores of bills intended for others.…

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies... Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am undergoing the lie detector test and it is not going well. I should have guessed something was up when they affixed the wires: temples and wrists are OK but it seems a little unnecessary to route what suspiciously looks like an AC mains cable to my groin.…

How to avoid the Icarus effect – and what we mean by that Sponsored webcast Attacks and outages happen, in the cloud as anywhere else. Back in the day, when we used on-premises solutions like Exchange we would surround ourselves with an ecosystem of technologies to mitigate risk, so why should cloud-based solutions be any different?…

Do the thing ASAP, you know how it works by now Among a bumper crop of 57 security issues Cisco divulged on Wednesday was a fix for a trio of vulns, one critical, in networks management tool Prime Infrastructure.…

DON'T ASK ME STUPID QUESTIONS, JUST GET YOUR ASS OUT THERE On Call It's Friday, and so it must be time to remember the days when standby tech support staff were blessed with nerves of steel in today's On Call.…

Singing competition stunned by suspicious spree of SMSes The winner of a Russian talent show for children has been stripped of her crown following confirmation that software was used to swing a public vote in her favor.…

And how it could be you being impersonated next Video Here’s another our your regular reminder that AI software can be creepy.…

If orange is the new black, she's back in black After seven days of freedom, US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is back behind bars for refusing to testify before a secret federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.…

Flash automaker insists victim 'immediately removed his hands from the wheel' In a preliminary report issued on Thursday, the US National Transportation Safety Board on said that a Tesla 3 crash on March 1 in Delray Beach, Florida, occurred while the vehicle's Autopilot system was active.…

The failure to shift to IPv6 is now literally a criminal matter A fella who allegedly conned his way into pocketing 750,000 IPv4 addresses has not only lost them, but now faces a lengthy stretch behind bars in America, if convicted.…

Most exciting Enid Blyton book yet – Five accused of international fraud? Ten people have been accused of masterminded the theft of roughly $100m from bank accounts using the Goznym malware. Five have been arrested, charged, and are facing prosecution, and five have been indicted and remain at large. An eleventh person linked to the software nasty is awaiting sentencing after admitting his crimes.…

DoS cyber-attacks are not just for websites, they may also be for aircraft ILS Video Aircraft instrument landing systems (ILS) are susceptible to radio signal spoofing using off-the-shelf equipment, boffins have found, calling into question the adequacy of aviation cybersecurity.…

Beijing slams Trump's 'abuse of export control measures', vows to take some sort of action China today signaled that it’s in no mood to roll over and play nice in the ongoing trade war with America, promising instead to "fight to the end."…

Well, it is the nation that brought us Nineteen Eighty-Four Video A man was pulled to one side, grilled, and fined by cops after he hid his face from a facial-recognition system being tested on the streets of south east England.…

Plan to force everyone onto Assistant stalled after customers say: Mess with the Nest, die like the rest Google has backtracked somewhat on a plan to kill off the popular Works with Nest smart home program after customer fury.…

$450 massive capacity micro flash card could go in a drone or a snapper too As of today, you can now buy a 1TB micro flash card to store massive amounts of pictures and videos on your camera or mobile phone – though it'll set you back a not inconsiderable $449.…