The Register

Chap slapped with harassment warning, sacked from UK mobile network A staffer at BT Group's EE has been accused of using his employee access to peek at his ex's account details and change her phone number to spy on her texts.…

'Normally you'd have reams of documentation... all they have is one page' The UK taxman has been slammed for a lack of transparency over the assessment of its tool to check contractors' tax status amid claims it has not retained full records of testing.…

Not a euphemism. I really did this Something for the Weekend, Sir? I spent this week on the floor.…

Bug appears to hate tunes released this year A bug has music lovers with a Google Play subscription stumped – devices won't cast music from 2019 to connected speakers.…

Also: Well done, Squirrels, you've got your Commercial Astronaut badge Roundup Over the past two Earth days, NASA released pics of China's Moon lander, SpaceX saw a Falcon delay to its Crew Dragon and the UK failed to name the ExoMars rover Rover McRoverface.…

If someone asks for their data, you give it to them, scolds ICO A Buckinghamshire housing developer has been forced to pay up £1,500 after ignoring a person's request for information the company held on them.…

'Never assume soon means less than lifetime of Universe... in software' On Call It's the end of the working week - for most of us. Time to kick back, brew a morning cuppa and delve into this week's On Call, our weekly readers' column of tech traumas.…

Astroboffins haven't seen anything quite like it Astronomers are scratching their heads after discovering a protostellar disk around a young star containing a whopping amount of salts.…

Let us copy your snippets, or say goodbye to revenue Google is warning publishers that online visitor traffic – which drives ad revenue – could plummet as much as 45 per cent if the contentious Copyright Directive being considered by European lawmakers goes forward.…

David Pecker picked a pic of billionaire's pickled pecker Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos today published an extraordinary open letter claiming National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc (AMI) is trying to blackmail him by threatening to leak purloined pics of the billionaire's "semi-erect manhood."…

Privacy advocates stunned that explicit rules ignored, blame head of FCC Analysis US lawmakers have again called for an investigation into cell networks after it emerged that they have been selling specially protected user location data intended only for emergency services.…

Something something dark, billowing cloud computing: Massive multi-hour outage across US, and it's still down Wells Fargo customers have been unable to access their online bank accounts for more than seven hours today – after smoke knackered one of its data centers.…

Patch your iThings – there are at least two holes being exploited right now in the wild Apple on Wednesday removed the vestigial "Do Not Track" (DNT) privacy technology from Preview Release 75 of its macOS Safari browser, and buried the corpse without ceremony. DNT is also missing from mobile Safari 12.1 in the soon-to-be released iOS 12.2.…

How do you solve a problem like compliance? Microsoft has continued to buff its open-source halo by signing up to the OpenChain Project, which is aimed at simplifying the plethora of licences floating around the open-source community.…

Big Red claims Labor Dept has 'secret pact' with private plaintiff's lawyers Oracle has accused the US Department of Labor (DoL) of bringing new claims into a pay discrimination suit because it knows its original case against the Silicon Valley corp will fail, and of "coordinating" with the lawyers for plaintiffs in a civil case.…

Change reversed while forum probes how many affected Parent gabfest platform Mumsnet has reported a data security breach that it claimed happened amid a "software change" en route to migrating services to the cloud.…

There's life in the old Silicon Glen yet Though Texas Instruments has finally pulled out of its wafer fabrication plant in Greenock, Scotland, all is not lost for the 300 folk employed there – fellow US firm Diodes Inc has stepped in with a £50m buyout offer.…

Holster the chainsaw, Big Blue kit designed to know if tree's a crowd for overhead cables Not satisfied with trimming headcount, IBM has turned its gaze to chopping trees that might interfere with power lines.…

As for the Big 4 UK mobile firms, there's a first mover disadvantage The UK's Ministry of Fun* has introduced draft legislation enabling UK operators to charge roaming fees for calls and data inside the EU, should the UK crash out of the EU (and the larger EEA) next month.…

Rail fails to keep up with 4G As well as the traditional New Year's price hikes, UK rail commuters face an additional humiliation – data speeds aren't increasing as fast as they might.…

Eye-pleasing graphics to match eye-watering pricing Well-heeled Brits can now slide their sticky fingers over the screen of Microsoft's flagship deskslab, the Surface Studio 2.…

Marks & Sparks marketeers decide straight-up innuendo's what you want for Valentine's Dependable British pants*-seller Marks & Spencer is desperately seeking social media virality as it faces plummeting sales figures, and has decided the best way is to tread the thoroughly British route of innuendo.…

Get with the times, Grandad! Microsoft has decided to demonstrate the worth of its flagship Office 365 subscription by pitting it against its flagship Office 2019 product in a bizzaro productivity face-off.…

Social Network will appeal – for the people of Germany Germany's competition watchdog has imposed "far-reaching" restrictions on Facebook's data slurping and sharing – a decision that the Social Network unsurprisingly plans to appeal.…

No payment info, but users' names, locations, email addies etc all 'lost' Trakt, the makers of an app that monitors users' TV programme and movie viewing habits, has 'fessed up to falling victim to a PHP exploit more than four years ago that resulted in data leakage.…

Mug hoarder identified at Vulture Central Shortages at hipster hangout WeWork have left its occupants without their afternoon brews after an "ongoing UK/Ireland-wide mug deficit" was announced.…

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain Chrome developers are trying ease the browser's demands on CPU resources.…

What's next? Arithme-ticks? The common honeybee is clever enough to do simple arithmetic, according to research published on Wednesday.…

Kepler 107c is way too beefy for its own good Astronomers believe they may have uncovered the first tantalizing evidence of two exoplanets that have smashed into one another, according to new research.…

Popular glue coding language sticks to everything The Python programming language is now used more for data science than web development, according to a new survey.…

Cupertino's tight-wads called out by fella who found password, private key leak Vid The bloke who found a password-spaffing bug in macOS says he won't divulge details on the flaw to Apple until the tech titan agrees to properly compensate vulnerability researchers.…

O(1)? More like O(h) n(O)! Proto-boffins' info leaks out An errant email leaked academic information on every student at the Cal Poly Pomona College of Science, in California.…

Malicious Bluetooth signals, too, it looks like Google has emitted security fixes for Android that should be installed, should you get the chance, as they can be potentially exploited to hijack devices.…

If anyone's seen Ed Sweeney recently, please let us know Updated You may not have heard of the Heard and McDonald Islands – it's one of the most remote places on the planet just north of Antarctica – but thanks to one of the quirks of the internet you are able to own a piece of it. Or at least you were.…

Secret-keeping screw-ups bedevil amorous appliances Hewing to its pubic public service mission, Mozilla has published a privacy and security evaluation of sex toys and other connected goods in preparation for Valentine's Day next week.…

OK, you, yes, you: You need to read this the most Nest has urged its customers to not reuse passwords between their smart home gizmos and other websites and services.…

Malicious acts would 'destroy' us, exec insists Huawei has admitted "room for improvement" in its product design processes in an open letter to the UK Parliament – but strongly refuted allegations of spying.…

Microsoft turns the screws on those living in the past The Bad News Bus has paid a visit to enterprises still prevaricating over what to do about their fleet of Windows 7 PCs as the end of support inches closer.…

Using Police Property Act 1897 to get PCs, storage devices back, representing himself in court Lauri Love, the Brit who beat US attempts to extradite him over accusations of hacking, is suing the National Crime Agency (NCA) to get back computing gear seized in 2013 as part of the case against him.…

If yer name's not on Azure's list, you ain't coming in Microsoft has said it is killing off Azure Party Clusters, the software giant’s free trial for Service Fabric workloads, so engineers can concentrate on stopping the rest of the stack from toppling.…

It's all voluntary, the human overseer could be miles away. What could go wrong? Experts have said the UK's guidelines for testing self-driving cars, published today by the Department for Transport, could put lives at risk.…

Thank heavens it doesn't need to be, er, renegotiated ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) The UK government spent £45,637 printing copies of the 600-page Withdrawal Agreement it now has to renegotiate – but did our political masters get their money's worth? Trust El Reg's readers to do the maths.…

Force will run 1 more full-day rollout after snow stopped play London cops' use of facial recognition tech last week resulted in only one person being charged, while another was handed a £90 on-the-spot fine after trying to avoid the cams.…

Deirdre O'Brien to take reins from Angela Ahrendts Apple has entrusted consumer sales as well as the horcrux that contains its "soul" to company veteran Deirdre O'Brien, who adds the retail and online division to a job sheet that already included heading up global HR.…

More talks, workshops added as clock ticks on early bird tickets Events We've announced another tranche of speakers and workshops for Continuous Lifecycle London, giving you even more reasons to snap up our early bird tickets before they disappear at the end of the month.…

Me n tha bois gona smuggle loads 2nite lol #catchmeifucan In the UK's quest to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, Fujitsu has reportedly pitched an artificial intelligence-driven process that analyses drivers' journeys and even social media posts.…

How many people are on your cloud platform again? It earns how much? Oh right, you're not saying Analysis So much for the "Big Tech backlash". The "surveillance" model of data slurping used by behavioural ad giants Google and Facebook has never been under such focus as it is today. And they've never made as much money.…

Brussels court (no, not that one) comes up trumps for US biz Viasat, US arch-rival of British satellite comms biz Inmarsat, has claimed victory in a Belgian court during a bitter continent-wide legal row over the proposed EU Aviation Network for in-flight phone signal.…

10% off £3k! Great! Wait, now it's £3,300? No, £4k. What? As if Dixons Carphone didn't have bigger fish to fry, the UK's ads watchdog has given the company a stern talking to over a misleading promotion for an exceedingly pricey Samsung fridge.…

Researchers claim Iconary will slowly teach machines sense What’s the latest game artificially intelligent software can play, you ask? Well, it’s Pictionary.…