The Register

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.…

Planner5D wants lots of Zuck's bucks as compensation Facebook used a purloined database of 3D objects for its AI projects, according to a Lithuanian company that spent years and millions of dollars compiling the dataset.…

$22,500 a day to breath, eat and exercise, $50 per GB for data, $11,250 to pee and sleep NASA on Friday said it is opening the International Space Station for commercial business, a policy change expected to lead to employees of private companies working aboard the ISS as early as next year, with tourists to follow.…

Turns out people are not that great at tracking thousands of variables American upstart Databricks, established by the original authors of the Apache Spark framework, reckons its open-source machine-learning management engine MLflow is ready for prime time.…

German cartel office had warned of Big Blue's dominant position if tie-up went ahead The proposed buy of T-Systems' mainframe unit by IBM has withered amid competition concerns from the German cartel office.…

If you want to use offline files then you need to, er, stay online Microsoft Office users, eagerly upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the company's productivity suite, have found that the venerable Offline Files function has gone, er, offline.…

Scam warning slipped into Blighty's favourite greasefest Today is National Fish and Chip* Day, and tech giant Microsoft has wasted no time wading in with the police to school the UK about phishing scams.…

Cisco-botherer grows its Spline Switch-making Cisco nemesis Arista Networks has unveiled its first campus leaf switches and first Wi-Fi 6 access points, aimed at offices at the edge of the network.…

Pavel Durov heads into the desert of his soul for inspiration It's coming up to 1pm, you haven't eaten a morsel in seven hours, and you've been smashing your head against the same work problem for the last two. What do you do?…

Only the essentials: liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and... cargo pants, maybe? In a move that will strike fear into the hearts of those poor souls charged with stuffing tat into boxes, the possibility of sticking an Amazon fulfilment centre on the Moon was mooted in a fireside chat with Jeff Bezos.…

Cinia, MegaFon expect to start work in the fourth quarter Finnish network operator Cinia and Russian mobile giant MegaFon are planning to lay a telecommunications cable across the Arctic Sea.…

What could your business do with machine learning? Events If you want to get on top of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science this autumn, here’s a tip - save £100s by grabbing a blind bird ticket for our AI-focused MCubed conference before our offer expires on Monday.…

A rinky tinky tinky

That feel when 'beating heart' of your project returns a 404 Game designer Jason Rohrer has had a bad week, discovering that his 23 code repositories representing 15 years of development and community contributions were wiped from GitHub.…

Number One, send in another Away Team On Call Friday is upon us once again, and as the week disappears into the rear-view mirror we have another tale from those princes and princesses of the pager in our regular On Call column.…

What a wild ride, eh Komodo? Blockchain biz Komodo this week said it had used a vulnerability discovered by JavaScript package biz NPM to take control of some older Agama cryptocurrency wallets to prevent hackers from doing the same.…

Cloud, Global Technology Services, Watson Health said to be shedding hundreds of roles Updated IBM is once again understood to be warning some staff they face the chop in a number of its divisions.…

Municipal broadband half the price of Comcast, AT&T etc The city of Ammon in Idaho is now offering internet access for free.…

Pair said to have tried to take non-profit's Mississippi simulation blueprints Two professors at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, have been indicted for an alleged plan to steal computer trade secrets from their former employer, a technical services non-profit called the Water Institute of the Gulf, and to commit computer fraud.…

Quest gets the dreaded sternly worded letter from Washington DC As healthcare companies come forward to confirm hackers would have been able to access millions of patients' personal information from a compromised American Medical Collections Agency (AMCA) database, US senators are demanding answers.…

Business IT giant that services Apple, Cisco, and others, exposed 264GB of info IT gear distributor Tech Data is the latest company to expose an insecure database, jam packed with personal and sensitive information, to the public internet for anyone to rifle through.…

Fit and finish, spit and polish, and Zorin Connect make the leap from 12 to 15 While Microsoft may be shoehorning the Linux kernel into Windows 10, veteran Linux flinger Zorin has applied some buffing to its Windows-like distro with a version 15 release.…

Customers get to pay for it! America's communications watchdog has finally acted to limit the billions of robocalls that cellphone owners receive each year.…

Still no official Linux version? GitHub Desktop 2.0 is here and brings with it new features including stashing and rebasing.…

'Things have to be proven,' intones Mr Justice Hildyard Autonomy Trial A High Court judge rebuked Meg Whitman today for stating as a fact that former Autonomy chief exec Mike Lynch committed fraud.…

First buy under new broom Thomas Kurian as Chocolate Factory tries to make up ground on AWS and Microsoft Google is spending a whopping $2.6bn on data analytics and machine learning specialist Looker.…

Might also use Lake Michigan water for cooling Digital Crossroads, the company converting an old coal-fired power station near Chicago into a giant colocation data centre, will use server heat to help agricultural efforts at the nearby Purdue Uni Northwest.…

And only if it doesn't cost too much Brit comms regulator Ofcom has revealed that the universal broadband service – previously known as the universal service obligation – will come into effect in March 2020.…

More toys for everyone's favourite source-code editor Microsoft has continued its rapid-fire releases by booting out another Visual Studio Code update with extra Remote Development goodness.…

Because we haven't a clue The chief exec at Ofcom is swapping life battling telcos – or doing their bidding, depending on your perspective – for an altogether more lucrative role as the chairman of John Lewis Partnership.…

What did you think we meant? Not content entwining with Oracle, Microsoft has added another third-party database tech to Azure – this time to the Government incarnation of its cloudy platform.…

Leave your lappy in the bag at every UK terminal from 2022 Heathrow Airport is spending £50m on computed tomography (CT) scanners, which should mean travellers no longer have to remove liquids and laptops from their carry-on bags during security checks.…

Too many caveats to make this a slick option in most cases AWS has confirmed the arrival of Windows Containers on its Elastic Container Service (ECS) – but with caveats that show limitations versus the more commonly used Linux-based containers.…

When Huawei sneezes, memory makers get a cold The ongoing trade dispute between the world's largest economies is exacerbating the problems with DRAM supply to the point that memory printing might become a loss-making activity.…

Pesky public cloud rivals didn't help either as share price crashes 30% Fiscal '20 hasn't started well for Cloudera as enterprise customers paused spending due to roadmap uncertainty over the Hortonworks merger and held off for the coming of the Cloud Data Platform (CDP).…

Hackers cheese free slices after logins from other websites deliver the goods Pizza Hut has warned members of its loyalty scheme "Hut Rewards" not to re-use passwords after hackers managed to access some customer accounts.…

Hi! It looks like you're planning a night out! Would you like a taxi with that? re:MARS At Amazon's AI event in Las Vegas this week, the company introduced Alexa Conversations, a new way to code skills that support more natural conversation and participate in multi-topic interactions.…

Whitepaper sings upcoming power tech's praises The European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) has published a whitepaper extolling the virtues of li-ion batteries - a tech that is still veiwed with suspicion by some bit barn operators.…

While Arm founder slams US tantrum tactics from the big orange baby Huawei has signed a contract to develop Russian 5G networks for mobile provider MTS over the next two years.…

We know it's controversial – but don't rule out paying the ransom to unscramble your biz files, experts suggest As ransomware infections continue, conventional wisdom on how to respond to threats is going out the window.…

HP customers: If your spinoff can put a computer into space, why can't I have my Reverb? While HP may be struggling to meet demand for its new idiot visors, HPE's Spaceborne Computer has returned to Earth after 615 days onboard the International Space Station.…

Even mouse support. Kind of WWDC Apple announced iPadOS at its WWDC event in San Jose, giving the tablet its own dedicated operating system for the first time.…