The Register

Customer ordered £260 plonk from same year – bargain! Buying an entire bottle of house red at a restaurant is often enough to make wallets scream with terror, but one fortunate diner at Hawksmoor in Manchester saved a corking £4,240 when they were served the wrong Bordeaux last night.…

It looks like you're trying to build a full-stack web app in Visual Studio Code. Would you like some help with that? Microsoft has flung out an early toolset aimed at getting full-stack web applications up and running faster for Visual Studio Code users.…

Switchzilla takes slow boat from Middle Kingdom amid Prez Trump's latest hike Cisco has said US president Donald Trump's latest trade tariff hike on Chinese imports barely forced it to up its own prices because it had shifted some production outside the Middle Kingdom in anticipation of the policy.…

Ad goliath's latest has struck all the right compromises Hands on Let's get this over with straight away: if you want a new smartphone but don't want to pay an increasingly stupid price tag, then get the Google Pixel 3a. It's $399 or £399, and it does everything you want and does it really well.…

Bolt on some backup, et voila Analysis Datrium has relaunched its DVX product as Automatrix, a multicloud data platform with compute and five data services.…

A vulture removes his anorak and straps on a Rift for BBC's nerd goggles attempt Updated Doctor Who fans, faced with waiting until 2020 before the blue police box appears on their screens once more, were thrown a virtual reality bone by the BBC today.…

Helpful videos, ebooks, whitepapers and more now online to help you get onto the world's top cloud platform Sponsored Cloud computing brings a host of benefits, from the ability to respond quickly to market dynamics to scalability and flexible cost structures. Little wonder that it is becoming an increasingly attractive option for enterprises of all sizes.…

Software lobbed up into the clouds without having to recompile a line, apparently Swiss software upstart LzLabs says its first customer has successfully kicked the mainframe habit and moved all of its big iron applications into the cloud – without having to rewrite or recompile any code.…

.NET Framework? Mono? Xamarin? .NET Core? Blazor? Java interop? Interview "There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more," Microsoft's Richard Lander promised on the announcement of .NET 5.0 at the Build 2019 developer conference.…

Audio perception enhances visual cues, boffins explain to El Reg Programmers trying to teach AI bots how to play video games may be missing one vital component in their models: sound.…

Dead-tree devotees who recently signed up may want to check their statements The Magecart credit-card-skimming malware that is the bane of internet shoppers has been spotted again, this time on the Forbes magazine subscription website.…

Fail Huawei, fail Huawei, fail Huawei: Executive order targets IT, telecom systems President Donald J. Trump today declared yet another national emergency in the US – this one over the threat of unidentified foreign adversaries exploiting vulnerabilities in IT and telecom systems and services.…

Low wages and job insecurity, with an added hint of dehumanizing social control Uber drivers, who have been vocal about low wages and lack of benefits, may soon be less so, at least for those booking its more expensive Uber Black and Uber Black SUV rides.…

Make your app answer all the easy questions, like, 'Where can I download Chrome?' Microsoft has open sourced a machine-learning algorithm that powers part of its web search engine Bing.…

Amazing how fast Pai and his team can move when motivated On Wednesday morning, after years of actively ignoring demands that phone companies be made to block robocalls by default, the head of America's telecoms regulator had a sudden change of heart.…

A pairing problem makes an account compromise possible, although improbable Google is offering free replacements of its Titan Security Keys, used for two-factor authentication, after learning the widgets' Bluetooth connections could be compromised by nearby hackers.…

Cert authority Sectigo funds Lets Encrypt transparency log Let’s Encrypt has wheeled out a new certificate transparency log called Oak, which is funded for a year by the certificates arm of Sectigo (formerly known as Comodo).…

You have a year – Ofcom Bad luck, ISPs and networks – Brit comms regulator Ofcom has made good on its threat to make firms inform punters about better broadband, mobile, pay TV and home phone deals before their contracts expire.…

Get it? Lengths. Users now have 240 extra characters to play with Doubtless with an eye on the current furore surrounding security and authentication, Microsoft has tweaked its Azure Active Directory policies to allow, er, longer passwords.…

It all went a bit Pete Tong for the Peeping Toms Britain's Supreme Court said today that rulings from a secretive UK spy tribunal can now be appealed against after a legal challenge from pressure group Privacy International.…

Third version since 2016 Earlier this week, Huawei teased the launch of a new database product, featuring machine learning and compatible with Arm-based processors.…

UK.gov-backed scheme confirms deal with Indian outfit Tata to end 2023 Outsourcing giants must be rubbing their hands with glee after the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) Corporation issued a tender for a £1.5bn contract to build the tech to run pension admin services.…

Auditors poked around for a week after too many Peeping Toms had a trawl Home Secretary Sajid Javid has confessed to Parliament that MI5 bungled the security of "certain technology environments used to store and analyse data," including that of ordinary Britons spied on by the agency.…

London cops claim he's got his databases mixed up A financial IT worker is suing London's Metropolitan Police for £1m after claiming the force recorded an identity fraudster's criminal conviction against his name.…

There’s more than one way to store and process your data Sponsored webcast While many organisations like the speed, efficiency and cost benefits of the public cloud, some like to keep a few things to themselves by keeping their own in-house IT systems.…

Adjustments to HTTP/2 Prioritization allow faster delivery of web resources Cloudflare figures it has fixed the web, at least insofar as speedy page loading on its network is concerned.…

Hot tip for Reg readers: There are Easter eggs to be found The UK's Ordnance Survey has followed up the Mars map with a little something to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in its own, distinctive cartographic style.…

If there's another use for the tech, venture capitalists aren't particularly interested Huge expectations for blockchain have been created by large suppliers such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and SAP, institutions such as The World Economic Forum, some government officials and many market research companies.…

Also: 60 Starlink sats shoehorned in a Falcon 9 fairing, bound for orbital shenanigans Roundup Pull up a chair and tuck into a sachet of dried astro-nosh with a round-up of space news you might have missed.…

The only winning move is not to play, as a wise computer said The use of fully automated AI systems in military battles is inevitable unless there are strict regulations in place from international treaties, eggheads have opined.…

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero When a star dies, destroying so much around it, it’s the small, dense rocky planets that are the objects most likely to be left standing while the heavy, gassy planets crumble and perish.…

Plus plenty of other fixes from Redmond and Adobe – and special guest star Citrix Patch Tuesday It’s that time of the month again, and Microsoft has released a bumper bundle of security fixes for Patch Tuesday, including one for out-of-support operating systems Windows XP and Server 2003.…

Not great for US importers who have to pick up the bill, good news for Taiwan and Vietnam The ongoing trade war between two of the world’s largest economies is starting to seemingly affect electronics production – with US output growing slightly faster than it did a year ago, and production in China slowing down.…

First major US city to restrict, scrutinize future Big Brother technology San Francisco has become the first major city in America, if not the world, to effectively ban facial recognition technology and other forms of state surveillance.…

Plug pulled on SMT tech as software makers put security ahead of performance Analysis In conjunction with Intel's coordinated disclosure today about a family of security vulnerabilities discovered in millions of its processors, Google has turned off Hyper-Threading in Chrome OS to fully protect its users.…

Unhappy taxpayers want refunds of a different kind, lodge lawsuits across Cali Updated Intuit, the biz behind America's most popular tax-filing software, was sued this week for seemingly hiding a free version of its product from search engines.…

You thought the memory glut was almost over? Think again Analysis Chinese NAND flinger Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) will be mass-producing 64-layer 3D NAND flash chips by the end of the year and price competition could get ugly in 2020.…

Intel CPUs dating back a decade are vulnerable to latest cousin of Spectre Intel on Tuesday plans to release a set of processor microcode fixes, in conjunction with operating system and hypervisor patches from vendors like Microsoft and those distributing Linux and BSD code, to address a novel set of side-channel attacks that allow microarchitecture data sampling (MDS).…

Fast filer swallows $31m A $31.7m funding round has been closed by scale-out filesystem flogger WekaIO, positioning it for possible acquisition by a storage industry player.…

Meet Murphy & Browne: Not a crap cop show, but the pair to represent 63k poor employees Less than 0.6 per cent of Capita's workforce applied for the two non-exec director roles that afford the lucky winners – if that's the right term – a seat on the board and possibly an executive biscuit budget.…

Swiss bankers to get new neighbours in colocation agreement IT services peddler and data centre operator DXC Technology is buying a 285,000 square foot (26,477m) data centre in Clifton, New Jersey, previously owned by the US division of investment bank Credit Suisse.…

British provider's calls, text and data all grind to a halt Virgin Mobile has been having a miserable Tuesday as customers found their handsets reduced to lumps of shiny plastic by a network-wide outage.…

Shareholders left counting cost of 40% annual payout squeeze. CEO says balance sheet needed some love after 5G spectrum auction overheads Vodafone investors are crying rivers this morning after the telco slashed a FY19 dividend payout to beef up its balance sheet. The disposal of operations in India contributed to steep losses.…

Just a downpayment, says administrator Jim Bridenstine US President Donald Trump has put at least some money where his mouth is and requested an additional $1.6bn to land US astronauts on the Moon by 2024.…

One-month stay of execution won't sweeten $10m in fines Former Autonomy chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain has been sentenced to five years in a US prison for fraud over the 2011 sale of the British software company to Hewlett Packard.…

Cloudy accounting service takes an extended morning tea break Updated Accounting software giant Sage has been having a few irritating interruptions this morning as users encountered difficulty counting beans with the company's services.…

'Wouldn't it be ironic if all paths used by open-source developers lead to Microsoft?' Anyone still worry about the Microsoft monopoly? Executive director of the Eclipse Foundation Mike Milinkovich does.…

SANS brings three immersive training events to London Promo IT security training specialist SANS Institute is bringing three major training events to London this summer and autumn, each offering a bumper programme of intensive courses designed to arm security professionals with the skills they need to defend against data breaches and malicious attacks.…

In space no one can hear you complete form P6719 in triplicate for astro-mandarins Japanese space agency JAXA has been given the all clear from eggheads to attempt a landing on Mars' largest moon, drill into it, and bring a sample back to Earth without an Andromeda Strain incident.…

Cloud giant's structure, staff practices revealed Deep dive Companies inside and out of Silicon Valley have found their own ways to rapidly develop and deploy features and functionality.…