The Register

But... but British Gas customers are making cost savings, though The British government is "sugar coating" its smart meter project and pretending that "everything will turn out alright in the end", according to Parliament's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee (BEIS).…

Worse to come as market doldrums deepen An abrupt quarter-on-quarter revenue cliff drop affected all the main flash vendors, except Intel, which saw revenues rise despite falling prices.…

If you like that then you'll just LOVE our 365 range Microsoft has updated the My Office app and would like to remind users that there's a free, online version of the suite.…

Breakaway MPs accused of making off with info The UK's Labour Party has been forced to lock down access to membership databases and campaign tools over concerns the info was being sucked up by breakaway MPs, in a possible breach of data protection laws.…

It's patching time again for Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Updated Oops! Microsoft has published an advisory on a bug in its Internet Information Services (IIS) product that allows a malicious HTTP/2 request to send CPU usage to 100 per cent.…

Innovation? In my smartphone market? It's more likely than you think Some day in the future you'll have a piece of material you can fold neatly away in your pocket, a canvas that just happens to be a communication and information device. Until that day, "foldable" phones will be transitional things, reminding us how far short we fall of the ideal.…

Just one week to save a bundle with our early bird tickets Events If you're gearing up supercharge your software development and deployment operations, whether by adopting DevOps, getting serious about containers, or adding serverless into the mix, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle London in May.…

Also makes vendor-luring pledge to take its fair share of risk The UK government has outlined a series of safety nets designed to prevent another Carillion disaster in what it is calling an "Outsourcing Playbook".…

Great recruiting tool there, folks A crafty joker seized control of the British Army's "influence and outreach" Twitter account – and labelled the military unit "fun sponges" when they tried to get it back.…

Chinese upstarts fill in the gaps The two biggest brands in the West are the two biggest losers as the smartphone slump continues, analyst Gartner has found.…

Hilarity ensues Big companies love to have social media "influencers" touting their wares – time-rich millennials who have turned product placement into a moderately lucrative lifestyle, often thanks to an agency.…

Where would madam like madam's Kubernetes? Cloud? On-premises? Both? Google's hybrid Cloud Services Platform (CSP) emerged blinking into the light today, in beta form at least.…

All rocks can produce water if irradiated in the right way Thirsty astronauts living on the Moon may be able to extract water from the barren body, thanks to the power of the solar wind, according to NASA.…

Software framework teases shortcut to GDPR compliance Computer science boffins from Harvard and MIT have developed a software framework for building web services that respect privacy, provided app developers don't mind a minor performance hit.…

Some tips on how to avoid miscreants deceiving your code Adversarial attacks that trick one machine-learning model can potentially be used to fool other so-called artificially intelligent systems, according to a new study.…

Patches available now spread across more than a dozen advisories Cisco emitted on Wednesday a bunch of security updates that, your support contract willing, you should test and roll out to installations as soon as possible.…

Or Acid Burn? Or Lord Nikon? Weak IT security may end in disaster at sea... one day Poorly maintained IT systems on container ships are leaving the vessels open to cyber-attack and catastrophe, it is claimed.…

Besides it's a security issue. Or is that just American insecurity? Analysis 5G mobile networks have been held out as the future of not just mobile communications but also smart cities, the internet of things, rural broadband access, and countless other future innovations.…

PUT, PATCH, POST, PWNED! Website admins are today urged to update their Drupal installations following the disclosure of a potentially serious vulnerability in the web publishing software. And when we say potentially serious, we mean, someone can potentially hack and hijack your site via this flaw.…

Lawyers gotta lawyer A black critical-facilities engineer at Facebook claims his boss repeatedly called him a "lazy n*****" and described other African-Americans at the tech giant "monkeys and chimpanzees."…

Bet all two of you who paid to activate your copy are feeling a little cheesed off at this 14-year-old undetected flaw CheckPoint infosec eggheads are today laying claim to discovering a Windows archiving security flaw that appears to have been lingering since 2005, if not earlier.…

Worried devs list Manifest v3 problems they need tweaked Makers of ad blockers, content filters, and privacy extensions for Google's Chrome browser have drawn up a list of desired technical fixes to undo the anticipated damage from pending browser platform changes.…

Owners having a connection 'mare in the Internet of Trainers Buyers of Nike's eye-wateringly expensive Adapt trainers appear to be having difficulties with the accompanying app.…

Another cock and balls story An Australian pilot has earned his coveted Register wings by telling the world how boring flying can be through the medium of flight trackers.…

Not secure enough for UK.gov use either Huawei has not showed British government overseers a “credible plan” for dealing with security shortcomings flagged in a report issued last year, the technical director of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said.…

Marketing biz decides 'GD PR' was getting it noticed in all the wrong ways Almost a year after the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect, the European Union's stricter privacy law has claimed another victim.…

First-ever pure-64-bit-only Armv8-A SMT server processor brains may lure chip designers If your humble Reg hack had a dollar for every Arm server processor pre-launch, launch, and car-crash failure he's witnessed, he'd be able to treat himself to a round of San Francisco's finest avocado on toast and a quad-espresso latte this morning. In other words, about 15 bucks.…

Whoops! Oh gosh +Comment Google has apologised for not telling Nest smart home kit owners there was a microphone in their gear.…

Nefarious activity of cyber villains continues, but don't fret: AccountGuard will save you American tech giant Microsoft revealed this morning it has detected a wave of attacks against European democratic institutions as miscreants continue malware insertion attempts.…

ERP biz reportedly ringfencing jobs of machine learning and analytics types German ERP biz SAP’s €950m restructuring, which will see 4,400 staffers given the boot, will hit Germany and the US hardest – but those in areas like machine learning reportedly won’t be in the firing line.…

Staff told: 'Do not come to work tomorrow. Do not attempt to re-enter the store for any reason' Updated Apple's community of third party sellers shrunk slightly this week when retail chain Solutions Inc shuttered stores and called in an administrative receiver FRP Advisory.…

Not exactly... But we might be seeing a toe twitching Text messaging volumes have been in decline for the past decade as smartphones, bundled data plans and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi allowed people to bypass telco charges and use OTT (over-the-top) messaging apps like WhatsApp.…

Aloogle? Goolooma? Take your pick Google has hoovered up data pipeline pusher Alooma for an undisclosed amount as the ad slinger continues its efforts to clamber up the cloud charts.…

Nigerian and Brit augmented boffinry could save billions Rejoice, Brexit Galileo worriers! Your hand-wringing is at an end thanks to research by Brighton-based Professor Chris Chatwin and Dr Lasisi S Lawal of Nigeria's Obasanjo Space Center. Kind of.…

Because it'll be fiiiiine... probably Hands On Hot on the heels of Oppo, Chinese phone maker AGM is the second newcomer to launch in the UK in 2019 hoping to turn a niche into a much more mainstream habitat.…

NHSX: UK.gov's new tech, data and digital quango The UK government has plans for another health quango that will not only oversee data, digital and tech procurement but have an "open door" policy with the IT industry.…

Procurement heads fail to finalise specs for replacement deal, extend current agreement with DXC Technology The Ministry of Defence is set to prolong the British armed forces' payroll, HR, and pensions admin contract with DXC Technology by half a year – because the military's procurement team has run out of time to find a replacement.…

The alternative being memorizing a bunch of really long unique passphrases A bunch of infosec bods are taking some of the most popular password managers to task after an audit revealed some mildly annoying, non-world-ending security shortcomings.…

J0207 is estimated to be a mere three-billion years old and just 145 light years away Pic An amateur astronomer has discovered the oldest-known white dwarf star, sitting 145 light years away from Earth in the Capricornus constellation.…

As ICO goes on fact-finding missions over 'concerns' about security, transparency Privacy warriors have filed fresh evidence in their ongoing battle against real-time web ad exchange systems, which campaigners claim trample over Europe's data protection laws.…

15 gallons of uranium ore left in the visitors' center for 18 years Grand Canyon visitors may have been exposed to tiny amounts of bonus radiation from buckets of uranium ore bafflingly placed in the National Park’s museum for nearly 20 years.…

Oracle's legal warship drops out of warp, on impulse power for now A fierce legal battle over the Pentagon's $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud IT deal was put on ice by a judge Tuesday – after the Department of Defense (DoD) vowed to probe itself regarding the contract.…

Fresh harassment allegations hit biz that insists diversity numbers are trade secret Oracle, facing US government charges that it discriminated against women by paying them less than male colleagues, has been sued yet again for gender and age discrimination by a former sales rep.…

Meanwhile: Commissioner celebrates forcing ISP to remove abusive content ban A bipartisan group of US senators are trying to force the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to face up to the reality that its statistics for broadband speeds across America aren't worth squat.…

Sm... ck m... glitch up: Coprocess... has nasty... USB ...oun... outp... rruption... roblem Audio professionals are complaining that the T2 security coprocessor in new Apple Mac models causes annoying audible glitches when using USB-connected recording gear.…

Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb code can't handle much, but hey, it now runs in a browser In preparation for next month's 30th anniversary of the proposal that gave us the world wide web, boffins at the behest of CERN have recreated the world's first web browser, and made it accessible as a modern web page.…

Europeans can't find any evidence of Chinese spying German is expected to snub US pressure to cut Huawei out of its next-generation 5G networks, rejecting claims that the Chinese manufacturer is a security risk.…

ReRAM seeks artificial help Crossbar, developer of Resistive RAM (ReRAM) chips, is setting up an AI consortium to help counter, er, resistance to the technology, speed up its adoption, and hopefully outrun Intel's Optane.…

Go on, flash storage bandits – spill your guts Pure Storage will introduce a shiny new backup box - dubbed ObjectEngine - from as early as next month to pinch sales from veterans including EMC-owned sectoral kingpin Data Domain.…

Bounty bonanza balloons and beguiles Social code storage biz GitHub, now a ward of Microsoft, on Tuesday divulged plans to make itself more attractive to hackers by flashing larger sums of cash and offering better indemnity.…