The Register

A month late for April Fool’s Day Norwegian fishermen are being harassed by an apparently Russian-trained Beluga whale.…

It's about privacy, not competition, sniffs Jesus-phone maker Apple has smacked back at app developers moaning that their parental control apps were chucked off the App Store.…

Don’t be touching the DNS Updated Sky Broadband has rolled out a firmware update which is bricking users’ broadband hubs if they are not set to use the ISP's default choice of domain name server.…

Big hot machines for large customers, cheaper boxes for small biz French hosting and web services slinger OVH has squeezed out shiny new bare metal machines in its European data centres.…

BS's cloud software to manage Dell switch hardware The newly public Dell EMC is to OEM Big Switch Networks software and wrap it up in Dell's own Ready Stack converged systems.…

Home of CRN UK, Computing and others warn remaining readers to update their freakin' passwords Updated UK events and publishing outfit Incisive Media today urged subscribers to change their account passwords after it found an open port on a server had left it exposed to a buffer overflow or another remotely exploitable vuln.…

Plus: Azure Kubernetes world and Army cash for services Roundup While last week the Microsoft headlines were all about bonzer financial results, storage problems and, er, Microsoft Paint, other things were afoot in Redmond.…

Oh yeah? You’re busier than Bill fricking Gates?? Melinda Gates has written a book looking at gender inequality around the world through her experiences with the Gates Foundation, within the US and her own marriage.…

Hipsters rejoice as shares prepped for debut on New York Stock Exchange Slack - the collaboration software provider for hipsters - has filed to sell its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).…

Ooooh, and lets not forget Manx Moon Stamps 'cos everyone loves an anniversary Round-up SpaceX's next ISS-bound launch was delayed, a new asteroid crater was made and some stamps for Apollo nostalgia fiends landed. El Reg has collated the past week's event in space for your delectation.…

What's Japanese for annus horribilis? 悪い年? Not a literal translation but you get the point 2019 is not looking to be a vintage year for Fujitsu, what with spending millions bidding for a mega-outsourcing contract it failed to win, shuttering offices in 19 countries in EMEA and now a redundancy programme causing trouble.…

Join the institute this June to up your cyber game Promo High-profile cases of successful attacks on critical industrial control systems show the growing importance of protecting your organization or facing a turbulent future. Malware delivered by ever more creative methods can find its way to plant floors, encrypting critical files or wiping them altogether.…

GCHQ offshoot shares infosec hair-raisers CyberUK 2019 If your hair isn't already grey enough, GCHQ staff have revealed a handful of infosec incidents that, in their words, "surprised us".…

Techie swiftly looks for a new job – but takes the 'embellishments' off his CV Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? your weekly shot in the arm with other readers' ugly tales of lost jobs and near-misses.…

Also, Mozilla looks at how healthy the internet really is Roundup Let's start the week with some bits and bytes of machine-learning news.…

TurboTax and H&R Block find robots.txt to hide in plain sight Updated The United States' tax-filing software industry actively prevents search engines from discovering their free-filing versions, it has been discovered, adding further criticism to an industry that drives Americans toward unnecessary paid-for products.…

Six incident reports prompt wall wart withdrawal Apple has issued a voluntary recall of some of AC wall adapters and travel adapter kits designed for the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore out of concern customers could get a jolt.…

Virtual currency exchange's response probably tells you all you need to know The price of Bitcoin has dropped seven per cent after New York's Attorney General accused leading exchange Bitfinex of trying to hide $850m in missing funds.…

That’s a lot of servers Northern Virginia – the bit barn capital of the world, the beating heart of our digital universe – has become the first regional market to reach 1,000MW of wholesale colocation capacity, according to real estate specialist CBRE.…

Storage requirements embiggened in Redmond's upcoming OS emission Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10's voracious appetite for storage remains undiminished in the upcoming May 2019 Update (1903).…

Scientists get ready to rewrite the cosmological rulebook Hubble boffins have confirmed that the universe is expanding about 9 per cent faster than expected thanks to new measurements taken by the venerable space telescope.…

Hopes to berry woes of slow Q1 '19 Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim has said the company will be "focused on delivering a return to growth later this year" amid shrinking revenues and weak product demand for its first quarter of fiscal 2019.…

Developing nanophotonic disk read-write heads Seagate is to help pump £57.4m ($74m) into its plant at Springtown in Derry, Northern Ireland, to get its next-gen disk heads dealing with smaller bits.…

A subtle rebranding exercise might be needed A chap who runs a B&B an actual stone's throw from the US-Canada border has been ordered to put up a sign warning guests not to cross as a bail condition.…

An unexpected extended Easter break Bewildered customers of A2 Hosting have endured a multi-day outage this week as the company battled to clear some pesky malware from its fleet of Windows Servers.…

Word of self-braking supermarket product pram reaches Vulture Central Finally a solution has surfaced to compensate for parents that simply refuse to say no to their little darlings: a self-braking supermarket trolley.…

Er, do you have your original password written down somewhere? Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have been propositioned at midnight at a hotel door. "What's your room number?"…

Firm explains but security folk not appy with clarifications Weird things are afoot with NordVPN's app and the traffic it generates - Reg readers have spotted it contacting strange domains in the same way compromised machines talk to botnets' command-and-control servers.…

As solid as ever, but not such a bargain any more Review Perhaps it's an English thing about being fair to the underdog, but I quite warmed to Huawei's "ordinary" P series model last year, while its attention-seeking big brother P20 Pro hoovered up all the attention.…

Bruce v Sheila: Episode Two On Call It's that time again: Friday morning, and your weekly dose of On Call, where we gather round to share a laugh at someone else's expense.…

The domain name system is going to get more expensive and probably less competitive The internet is about to get a whole lot more expensive.…

And before Half-Life 3 arrives The hunt for dark matter has been fruitless so far, but scientists searching for the elusive particle have discovered another rarity: the radioactive decay of xenon-124.…

And 10nm still on for Xmas 2019, sometime 2020, depending on CPU model Intel's CEO Bob Swan told Wall St on Thursday he had "the best job in the world," though it can't have felt like it as he announced his first full quarter's financial figures as the official head honcho.…

Ignoring privacy laws, storing plain text passwords, slurping millions of contact details come back to bite web giant Here's a triple Thursday whammy: Facebook has been accused of breaking Canada’s privacy laws, and is being investigated in the US and Ireland for seemingly mishandling people's private data.…

An attack of conscience or have the super-snoops got something better now? The NSA's mass-logging of people's phone calls and text messages, at home and abroad – a surveillance program introduced after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks – is set to end as it's no longer worth the hassle.…

Modest expectations for next quarter, though, as web souk works toward one-day delivery Cloud cash-cow and stuff-shifter Amazon on Thursday reported $59.7bn in revenue for its Q1 2019, up 17 per cent from a year ago and about what financial analysts expected.…

Let's cut the crap, El Reg style Comment We thought the hype over next-generation mobile broadband networks couldn't get much thicker, but we were wrong. So let's just jump into the five biggest lies about 5G.…

Password resets reset Microsoft has finally decided to get rid of password expiration policies in Windows because forcing people to reset their passwords periodically harms security.…

Troves of deleted data lingers on disks... according to this 'ere study, anyway You would think that, with computers dominating every aspect of our lives, people would be aware that storage devices can retain information even after clicking "Empty Recycle Bin".…

But is it enough to combat the Microsoft juggernaut? Hipster-friendly chat app Slack frantically wants to turns itself into a development environment to fend off the Microsoft juggernaut.…

Chip flinger slams brakes on production as it waits for demand to pick up Oversupply in the memory market has savaged SK Hynix's first-quarter 2019 results, but the Korean chip flinger hopes for an improvement after June.…

FPGAs + NICs = profit FPGA daddy Xilinx is buying California-based silicon design startup Solarflare Communications to improve its networking credentials.…

Kids, you're all right The American education system has always been the envy of Brit schoolkids – if only because it's easy to glower across the pond at their freedom to wear whatever they want from the prickly tomb of Teflon uniforms.…

Largest shareholders for LSE-listed biz give thumbs-up to proposed sale KCOM, the Hull-based telco that still has a monopoly fibre network in the city, has agreed to go private in a £504m deal agreed with the USSL, one of the UK's largest pension funds.…

Chromium base should ease porting pains substantially Microsoft may be closer to its first Mac browser in 14 years.…

You mean they already do? Pull the other one Cyber UK 2019 Ever-exciting Cabinet Office minister David Lidington has put his name to a new infosec response testing tool developed by the NCSC, called (wait for it) Exercise in a Box.…

Contender hopes to one day become the preferred Node.js Package Manager The recent management change and layoffs at JavaScript accessory outfit NPM Inc prompted several former employees to speculate that the company's alleged union-busting push toward profitability may well spur the creation of competition.…

Find out at Continuous Lifecycle London next month Events It's one thing using the latest tools and methodologies to build from the ground up - quite another to use them alongside your legacy software setup.…

Welcome to Ox Horn, such a perfect town. Here we have some rules, let us lay them down The Register paid a visit to Huawei's HQ in Dongguan, China, to find Europe in miniature along with a "5G" hotel that was, er, pretty much what we expected.…

We're messy, expensive, lazy, difficult – and entirely necessary Column Somewhere in the second hour of sorting through a handful of travel reservations that had been added to my calendar, I started to suspect I'd been lied to – by a computer.…