The Register

Misogynists sniping at Caltech's Kate Bouman get an earful In response to the scientific community's celebration of the publication on Wednesday of the first picture of a black hole, internet trolls painted an even darker portrait of misogyny through an effort to discredit the female postdoctoral researcher, Katie Bouman, who led the development of the imaging algorithm.…

Issues grovelling apology, promises to fix 'weak links' in management China's largest stock photo flinger has been forced to backtrack after it tried to put its own price tags on images of the first black hole and the Chinese flag.…

You’ve got to aim for the head The US government is terrible at managing data centres: five years after the Federal Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) mandated the closure or consolidation of thousands of inefficient server farms, the federal agencies are nowhere close to meeting its goals.…

High potential of cutting off the nose to spite the face The Russian State Duma, the lower house of parliament, has voted to approve the controversial bill that would give politicians powers to isolate the country from the internet.…

Romanian duo catch 21 felony convictions for selling details of hacked machines on darknet Two Romanian nationals face the prospect of years in a US prison after being convicted for their roles in a malware-based financial fraud ring.…

Big Blue insists it's only for good ol' fashioned research IBM shared its controversial Diversity in Faces dataset, used to train facial recognition systems, with companies and universities directly linked to militaries and law enforcement across the world.…

Officer, um, we were just explaining how viewing terrorist content online's an offence New laws came into force today that make it an offence in the UK to view terrorist material online just once.…

ICO says case involving 34.4 million records 'unprecedented' Updated The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined commercial pregnancy and parenting club Bounty some £400,000 for illegally sharing personal details of more than 14 million people.…

The day has a 'y' in it – must be time for an outage TalkTalk's email service clearly had a big night out on Thursday and has spent Friday morning lying down in a darkened room.…

Authority barged in after disposal caught on camera, ordered chap to pay costs of almost £3k Boatnotes Justice has finally been served for abandoned boats everywhere as a Kentish man was found guilty of callously ditching his vessel in a residential area.…

America tries to keep the pressure on Chinese biz A US official has repeated his country's threats against its allies over Huawei – stating that the US's goal is a process that leads "inevitably to the banning" of the Chinese company's products.…

Internet Archive perplexed and annoyed over idiotic demands French internet cops have demanded that the Internet Archive remove more than 550 instances of "terrorist propaganda" from its site.…

One month till we open the doors at Continuous Lifecycle The world might be in turmoil, but if you want to learn how to turn chaos into an advantage, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle in just over a month’s time.…

Get students in creative mood and ride on the Vomit Comet beckons Hey kids – fancy chucking paper planes at the supply teacher while your real one hops on a micro-gravity aircraft? You'll need to think about something interesting to bring aboard Zero-G's ageing Boeing 727 to get your mentor airborne and, briefly, floating.…

Wait, what do you mean 'helium disk drives aren't interesting'? The black hole image released yesterday needed over a thousand helium-filled disk drives to record it.…

Some things are better left without a video greeting Something for the Weekend, Sir? How did Ernest Hemingway get his scar?…

The first rule of China Club is don't blame China Netherlands-based ASML, which makes semiconductor manufacturing equipment, on Thursday insisted that it had not been the target of Chinese espionage, despite the fact that six former employees with Chinese names breached their contracts by sharing trade secrets with a competitor linked to the Chinese government.…

Techie learns the hard way there's more than one way to interpret 'make a copy' On Call Another week over, another On Call – and this one is going to provide you with a real belly-laugh.…

One step forward, one step back in space news The first attempt by a private company to land a probe on the Moon's surface ended in failure on Thursday when the vehicle crashed minutes before landing.…

Passwords, personal information can be sussed out by attackers during handshakes Researchers have detailed a set of side-channel and downgrade attacks that potentially allow an attacker to compromise Wi-Fi networks equipped with WPA3 protections.…

Lawyer for Joshua Schulte unhappy about agency review The lawyer for former CIA employee Joshua Schulte is unhappy the spy agency is allowed to review communications with her client before she receives it and has accused the agency of trying to intimidate her.…

Telemetry Interface blamed for exposed gRPC passwords Juniper Networks has issued an update after finding hardcoded credentials had been left in some of its datacenter switches.…

Sorry song fails to quell online discontent, rumors swirl of competition ahead JavaScript library manager NPM on Wednesday apologized for its handling of a contentious round of recent layoffs.…

Autonomy helped Capax Discovery repay its own contracts, he added Autonomy trial The boss of an HPE-affiliated reseller asked a barrister "what is this exactly?" when shown a copy of his own witness statement in London's High Court. Capax Discovery CEO John Baiocco then said he was "pretty sure" his HPE-funded lawyer had written it for him.…

The Lives of Others: Siri, Google and Cortana edition Sneezes and homophones – words that sound like other words – are tripping smart speakers into allowing strangers to hear recordings of your private conversations.…

Go hybrid or go home Networking overlord Cisco has punted its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) platform into AWS-hosted public cloud.…

Getting serious at last Analysis Samsung has shown a muscular response to the mortal threat of cheap Chinese rivals and long phone replacement cycles by packing its mid-tier phones with the exotic novelties of much pricier flagships.…

Possible 'ethical violations' found but no conflict of interest Oracle and IBM are out of the running for the Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract after a departmental probe found no evidence a conflict of interest had affected the deal.…

As Brit judge finds him guilty of breaching his bail conditions One-time Aussie cupboard-dweller Julian Assange has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion by the US government.…

Sophos, Avast users left wailing as update borks older OSes A bunch of PCs running the wares of Sophos or Avast have been freezing or failing to start following the installation of patches emitted by Microsoft on 9 April.…

Samsung's still king and memory still hottest item, despite unstable pricing Sales growth at the world's chipmakers stalled in 2018 following protracted struggles with DRAM oversupply.…

Insiders play 'Where's 19H2?' and every day is an Edge day Fast Ringers keen to extricate themselves from the Windows Insider programme have missed their chance for a quieter life as Microsoft booted them into the 2020s with build 18875.…

Homo luzonensis spotted underneath layers and layers of clay in a Filipino cave A team of archeologists has pieced together bone fragments to reveal what is, apparently, a new species of human.…

Judge can't believe IBM, with its Watson AI, needs help finding out about its own documents The judge hearing an age discrimination claim against IBM in Texas on Wednesday issued a withering denial of the company's motion to unmask the source of internal documents at the center of plaintiff Jonathan Langley's case.…

Down in EMEA, US, Latin America, APAC. Aw bless... Top 3 vendors profited from small fry's pain, though The Intel CPU supply constraints came home to roost in calendar Q1 as global PC sales shrank: only the top three largest manufacturers reported any growth after they muscled to source as many chips as they could.…

All 11 fingers* cuffed as Ecuador strips WikiLeaks founder of political Assange, er asylum Julian Assange has been arrested by London cops at the Ecuadorian Embassy after the nation revoked the asylum it had given him for near on seven years.…

Retrofitting Apple pricing to a bygone era A piece of UK computing history is going on the auction block this month in the form of a plug-in package for a Ferranti Pegasus Computer.…

Chipzilla kicks out firmware patches for Spoiler, three others Intel has posted another round of firmware updates with fixes for four CVE-listed vulnerabilities.…

Turning data into insight Sponsored webcast The volume of data many organisations have to deal with today is vast, and it can prive troublesome to interpret. Traditional analytics approaches can be piecemeal, restrictive, non-economical and inflexible.…

New bill grants the FTC powers to investigate companies US senators introduced a bill on Wednesday that will allow the Federal Trade Commission to inspect if corporations are using algorithms that are biased, discriminatory, and insecure.…

Norks trigger Uncle Sam's alarm with attack variant The Lazarus Group hacking operation, thought to be controlled by the North Korean government, has a new malware toy to pitch at potential targets and the US is getting worried about it.…

News only spoiled by fact it was a complete waste of time US lawmakers approved a net neutrality bill on Wednesday that would repeal the repeal of rules that would force ISPs to treat all internet content equally.…

Google Cloud product deluge spans security, analytics and AI People with suitably modern Android phones can now use their handsets as a hardware security key to safeguard both their Google Accounts and Google Cloud accounts.…

That's almost a hundred BEEEELLION dollarydoos Semiconductor sales by Chinese manufacturers are said to have reached ¥653.2bn in 2018 – that's about $97.3bn, or around 20 per cent of global semiconductor revenue for the year ($476.7bn).…

Fresh round of targeted operations unearthed Kaspersky Lab has revealed a pair of attacks targeting governments and political groups in Asia and the Middle East.…

Funny, that An American company is to build a series of undersea cables linking Australia to China after the Aussie government put its foot down and kicked Huawei off the contract.…

Presidential 2020 ad nicks Dark Knight Rises soundtrack A video for President Trump's 2020 re-election campaign has been pulled offline for copyright infringement.…

Almost as much as 4th biggest mobe maker made in 2018 Xiaomi's founder and CEO has received 636.6 million company shares valued at more than £735m – not far off the adjusted net profit figure the fast-rising Chinese mobe maker banked for 2018.…

Nah, it's just an old photo, claims spokesborg Salesforce's towering glass phallus in San Francisco has been omitted from the Oracle Park calendar on sale at the first SF Giants baseball game under the stadium's new Big Red moniker.…

But adds just one new module, and even that is more of a transplant The latest OpenStack release is out in the wilds. Codenamed Stein, the platform update is said to allow for much faster Kubernetes deployments, new IP and bandwidth management features, and introduces a software module focused on cloud resource management – Placement.…