The Register

Not a 'rogue engineer,' nor was the harvested wireless network data 'fragmented, despite Google denials' Google has offered to pay out $13m to settle a class-action lawsuit over the infamous "Wi-Spy" incident – when its Street View cars were caught slurping data from unsecured Wi-Fi access points between 1 January 2007 and 25 May 2010, when they got caught.…

In a nutshell: Plz don't shaft us The United Kingdom, incorporating Kingston*, has a new prime minister. That prime minister is Boris Johnson, and tech industry mouthpieces are falling over themselves to tell us what they think of him and his policies.…

Chris Kraft set the rules for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle Obit Chris Kraft, who created the concept of NASA's Mission Control, died yesterday aged 95.…

Must have been the cyber security course's day off Lancaster University - which offers a GCHQ-accredited degree in security - has been struck by a "sophisticated and malicious phishing attack" that resulted in the leak of around 12,500 wannabe students' personal data.…

Christmas come early for Sydney rozzers No one will ever say that police have an easy job, but sometimes, just sometimes, circumstances do half the work for them.…

The software itself is from SAP though IBM will help Aussie warfighters keep track of their bullets, after winning a Au$95.5m ($67m/£54m) contract to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the Australian Department of Defence.…

Report claims forces trawl through data 'indiscriminately' Privacy rights groups have slammed UK police's "indiscriminate" grabbing of crime victims' data.…

Only fools rush into mobile payments and cryptocurrencies Feature On the first of July I walked up the main drag of Japan's eighth-century capital, Nara. As a mid-sized Japanese city, there are combini – convenience stores – every block or so. First among these is 7-Eleven, with over 20,000 outlets spread across its islands.…

Report suggests outsourced project management, new committee and more A report from right-wing think tank Freer has estimated failed government projects in the last few years have created delays totalling 34 years and wasted an eye-watering £7.5bn.…

Snap up an early-bird MCubed ticket today, save £££s, attend almost 40 top talks and workshops Event If you’ve missed the deadline for our MCubed early bird ticket offer, don’t despair: we’ve extended it to July 31.…

The EU goes to war against refrigerants – so the German upstart designed a system that uses tap water An unusual data centre cooling system that dispenses with expensive, environment-damaging refrigerants in favour of tap water is now available in the UK.…

Uh-oh, the more sizeable opponent Andromeda is next The Milky Way was formed after it engulfed a dwarf galaxy known as Gaia-Enceledus 10 billion years ago, astroboffins have suggested.…

20 WebKit flaws among latest batch of bug fixes On Monday Apple released a fresh round of security fixes for a load of its operating systems and applications.…

Logical step for the biz that wants to own its supply chain Apple and Intel are apparently in “advanced talks” over buying up the remains of Chipzilla’s defunct 5G modem business.…

US senator dismisses cop-out, suggests jail time for execs Data-spaffing consumer credit biz Equifax is offering a package of roughly $700m in order to kill off lawsuits regarding its 2017 super-cyber-heist.…

But does complain there are too few suppliers, cybersecurity not a priority The British government has once again deferred an already postponed decision _ this time about whether or not to ban Huawei equipment from 5G networks in the UK.…

Is that 'Googley' enough for you? Google has settled out of court with 227 people, who had accused the web giant of age discrimination, for $11m. After all the legal fees are deducted, each person will, on average, get a payout of a little over $35,000.…

Brad's big bucks banish bothersome Budapest bung Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government to settle charges one of its European subsidiaries was bribing officials from 2013-2015.…

Taking the reins after Nils Brauckmann retires in August German open-source haus SUSE has appointed former SAP executive Melissa Di Donato as CEO.…

Here's the real score on what's happening with information in business today Analysis We keep hearing data is the new oil. It’s one of those annoying axioms that holds a germ of truth, and is repeated by every marketing executive who’s read a business periodical this year.…

Ours too, though OpenAI says GPT-2 model won't be released Microsoft has plowed $1bn into OpenAI, a San-Francisco-company that is working on artificial general intelligence (AGI).…

Didn't see the slide in the PC market? Smartphones? Missed the hyperscale cloud builders? The laws of botched supply and demand forecasting are coming home to roost for the semiconductor industry in 2019 with DRAM average sales price set to fall 42.1 per cent.…

With former Easynet CEO in charge of the board Brit ISP Onecom has bagged a £100m cash injection from private equity outfit Lloyds Development Capital (LDC) and asset manager Ares Capital.…

Plucky mini-comp idling at concerning temperatures Some early adopters of the Raspberry Pi 4, released on 24 June, are running into heat issues, especially with the official Pi 4 case making no provision for a heatsink or fan.…

It's also the 'largest workplace transformation programmes the UK has ever seen' Sixteen minutes: the amount of time it takes for the world to generate 60.8 million Google searches or a BT worker shimmying along to a new shiny HQ in central London.…

Except when talking about Katie Hopkins, possibly... Uncle Bulgaria, elder of the Womble tribe who make their homes on Wimbledon Common, has spoken out against usage of the word "cockwomble", saying his species "would never approve of any use of profane language", particularly not "in our name".…

Better iterators, generators... Semicolons? Who needs 'em? Microsoft's TypeScript 3.6 beta, pushed out just before the weekend, is "intended to be feature complete", according to program manager Daniel Rosenwasser.…

It is but WAF-er thin... – report Network overlord Cisco is reportedly planning to purchase Signal Sciences, a frequent cybersecurity collaborator and member of the Cisco Security Technical Alliance.…

Hutchison's underdog won't, even if handset paid off Telecoms regulator Ofcom is pushing mobile companies to make clearer to customers when their bundled and split contracts end, as many are left on high tariffs even when they've paid off their handsets.…

Qualcomm, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Broadcom and Intel said to be invited White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow is reportedly meeting Silicon Valley bigwigs today to discuss the placement of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei on the US trade ban Entity List.…

OpenAI's GPT-2 language model has been tweaked to help you code faster Talk about working smarter, not harder. A computer-science student has got the right idea, by building an intriguing code-completion tool that uses deep-learning software to finish lines of source.…

Sprint Education plugged digit-diddling URL snafu quickly An education sector marketing firm has committed a data breach – ironically, because it mass-mailed people asking them to update their GDPR communications preferences.…

Zoinks! There's a crime to be solved Who, Me? Like the unwanted early morning return of last night's spiced food, Monday is here once again. Take your mind off it with an unsolved mystery courtesy of The Register's weekly Who, Me? column.…

Tune in today to hear from Sumo Logic on real-time monitoring and app stack troubleshooting Sponsored webcast It is not unusual for organisations to amass such large volumes of data that they struggle to examine it for real-time operational insights that will help them resolve issues and grow their business.…

Watching us, watching you Roundup Hello, welcome to this week’s roundup of news in the ever encroaching world of AI and machine learning. We’ll be talking about everyone’s favorite topic at the moment: facial recognition.…

A summary of computer security news for you, delivered rapid-fire-style Roundup Let's catch up with all the recent infosec news beyond what we've already covered.…

Your periodic reminder that there was maybe a reason so many people voted to leave The European Commission has, yet again, changed its position on who can have a .eu domain after Brexit.…

What a waste of time and money that was Creative Content UK, the organization that terrified British internet users by requiring ISPs to send out emails with accusations of copyright infringement, has decided to drop this questionable practice.…

Phishing led to shopping spree with victims' credit cards A man from the US state of Georgia who pleaded guilty in March to breaking into the Apple iCloud accounts of sports and entertainment figures was sentenced on Thursday to three years and one month in federal prison – and ordered to pay almost $700,000 in restitution.…

Internet testers went down to Georgia and found a fraud Comment American internet users are, seemingly, getting a quarter of the internet speed they are paying for.…

Contractor Martin sentenced for squirreling away 50TB of hush-hush files, exploits An ex-NSA contractor who admitted stashing some 50TB of secret US government documents and exploit code at his home was today sentenced to nine years behind bars.…

One hit by robo-ride, another injured in US, Austrian trials Two driverless vehicle trials were temporarily halted this week after self-driving mini-buses encountered obstacles – or think they did – resulting in minor injuries to a rider and a pedestrian.…

Defence ministry gets with the Apollo vibes Roundup As the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon mission, the UK's Ministry of Defence has gone a bit wacky – not only does it have fresh space plans, but it also wants to strap laser zappers to stuff too.…

America. Fsck yeah US firm Throwflame is selling – you guessed it – a flamethrower attachment for drones.…

'Aliens' The French army has said it is looking to recruit four or five sci-fi writers and futurologists to staff a "Red Team" that predicts future threats and how to disrupt or defend against them.…

After report claimed its sales pitches boasted of doing that Israeli spyware firm NSO Group has denied it developed malware that can steal user data from cloud services run by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.…

Look, we're all of out ideas! Fresh out of ideas on how to crack the problem of digital identity, the UK government has put out a consultation asking what the hell it should do next.…

Appeal from competitor who fought Apple application fails to stop project Recently established data centre developer Echelon has received permission to build a massive bit barn campus in County Wicklow, Ireland.…

Fined £80,000 under Data Protection Act – could have been a lot more under new EU rules A London estate agent has been fined £80,000 for losing thousands of clients' personal data when it was handed over to a third party.…

Virty GPU upstart joins the fold Crusty old VMware is attempting to keep up with the youngsters by acquiring Bitfusion, a startup that claims to enable machine learning on any VM via the magic of network-attached GPUs.…