The Register

40% of exports to France won't be a problem, right? With a mere 58 days remaining until Brexit, the UK government has published a cheerful insight into the "size and health" of Blighty's space industry.…

Forget Skype for Business, we have Jira and Confluence integration Microsoft has given its collaborative platform, Teams, some Atlassian affection this week while dropping another subtle hint to Skype for Business users that it is time to stop putting off that migration.…

Ethernet and InfiniBand kit would be tempting for Chipzilla Intel has offered up to $6bn to buy Israeli InfiniBand and Ethernet networking manufacturer Mellanox, according to local reports.…

Snow joke, we really want to know if they'll land in the UK Apple has refused to tell The Reg whether the premium iPhone price cuts that CEO Tim Cook promised for punters outside of the US will reach the UK, citing inclement weather as an impediment to comms. A local price cut seems unlikely.…

Route to Ireland via UK will be surveyed, says local ministry Iceland has made public its plans to build a fourth undersea internet cable to Europe. While one Icelandic news outlet reported that this was because of "security reasons", the truth appears a bit more mundane.…

April still on top as Microsoft's difficult October update slowly trickles onto PCs With the next release of Windows 10 edging closer, users continue to steer clear of Microsoft's October 2018 update.…

Judge dismisses Big Red's 2016 copyright claim Oracle's copyright battle with HPE over operating system software has been kicked out of court.…

So far, it's just sounds you hear – it can't read your mind or anything... yet AI algorithms can help scientists process brain waves and convert them directly into speech, according to new research.…

Continuous Lifecycle early bird ticket offer ends in weeks Events Whether you’re just piloting your first DevOps projects, want to scale things up, or are ready to leap into Kubernetes or Serverless, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle London, 2019.…

Consumers pinch pennies while Brit biz tries to get the budget spent before you-know-what Tech analyst IDC said Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) PC market shipments slid in calendar Q4 due to shortages of a certain processor and turbulent politics.…

'Suspend all action' against IT man's suspension as fresh inquiry starts, UN patent body urged The legal brief of Wei Lei, the UN patent body's CIO – temporarily suspended amid a probe into an allegation of misconduct – is claiming that Geneva's Public Prosecutor has opened its own investigation into the case.…

We have 'unparalleled arrangements' don't you know While the US was preparing criminal charges against Huawei and its exec, British government spokespeople were telling Parliament they are quite happy with the UK's "unparalleled arrangements" for finding backdoors in Huawei source code.…

Calling all IT pros – tell El Reg the true cost of those application platforms Reader Survey You’ve heard the rhetoric that deploying applications to the cloud, rather than running them on-premises, will always cheaper. If you’re an experienced IT pro, though, you’ll know that such generalisations don’t always reflect reality.…

Internet giants hand in their homework – here's a summary Tasked with detailing their defenses against disinformation, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter, and ad biz trade groups on Tuesday turned in their homework to European Commission.…

Boffinry on a shoestring finds icy chunk that's just 1.3km across A plucky group of low-budget astronomers has pulled off quite a coup by spotting the smallest object yet in the Kuiper Belt, the donut of icy objects swirling around in the outer Solar System.…

CEO: 7nm will give bright future despite graphics downturn AMD stock edged upward in after-hours trading merely for meeting investor expectations, because it could have been much worse given Nvidia's recently trimmed guidance and TSMC's manufacturing troubles.…

Cook and co get a boost after topping their own low bar Apple managed to turn what was expected to be a terrible quarter into merely a not-so-great one as the Cupertino phone-flinger barely topped its own recently lowered estimates.…

Expect trolls, cyber attacks, and even deep fakes in next election Attacks intended to sway the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election are probably already underway, according to the nation's head of intelligence.…

Not so much crying wolf as taking wolf out for all-expenses paid dinner Analysis Facebook has cut off independent reviewers of political ads that run on its platform, citing security concerns. That's a claim the reviewers have rejected.…

Startups getting squeezed as market settles into maturity Exclusive Hyper-converged infrastructure startup Maxta is closing its doors – after being unable to obtain funding and make progress in the face of a solidifying HCI market.…

Total Inability To Support Users' Passwords Updated The day of week ends in "day" so, of course, Microsoft's Office 365 has fallen over, and Azure portal is having a wobble, too.…

Banks, folks can sue – but businesses have to show harm A US judge has given the go-ahead for a set of consolidated lawsuits against credit agency Equifax regarding its 2017 mega-hack.…

Claims it redesigned around VirnetX IP. That obviously worked well then... Apple has filed its fifth appeal against a half-billion award, claiming that it redesigned its FaceTime system to avoid infringing VirnetX's network security patents.…

Meanwhile, one in five polled coders complain they were denied US work visas JavaScript, arguably the most polarizing programming language at the moment, also happens to be the most popular among developers, at least for a fairly large group of coders.…

$35m for attorney fees? Judge Lucy says Koh, hell no! A US court has nixed Yahoo!'s attempt to settle a class-action lawsuit over the 2013 megahack, saying it's fatally flawed.…

Staff 'given the chance' to retire early, overall headcount won't fall SAP is embarking on a €950m restructuring project to update internal skills, move on some of the old guard, and "simplify" the org chart.…

Affected customers will be able to view their bills. Rejoice! Plusnet customers suffering from the "White Screen of Death" need fret no more as the Brit broadband pusher has told The Register that its member orifice will be fine and dandy by the end of today.…

Optane in the membrane caching, FPGA card for added v4.0 grunt Cisco has added performance features to its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), with all-NVMe systems, Optane SSD caching and FPGA acceleration. It has also extended HyperFlex out to ROBO* sites with central management.…

I'll eat my hat if leaving is not a success. Also my pants. And those socks look tasty too As the UK continues to fret over dire warnings of supermarket shelves emptying as a side effect of Brexit, North Korea has a solution for the alleged impending crisis.…

If hackers and nerds played together nicely, security would benefit, reckons compsci boffin Academics and grey-hat bug-hunters are a lot more alike than they care to admit.…

Firefox maker sets out dodgy practices the browser will block The Mozilla Foundation has announced its intent to reduce the ability of websites and other online services to track users of its Firefox browser around the internet.…

Plan to integrate platforms raises regulators' hackles Facebook has been warned it can only borg its three messaging platforms in the European Union if it meets data protection rules. There are widespread concerns about the plan's impact.…

Plus: Chinese buyers may turn on firm, warns analyst Never mind the car crash financials that Apple is expected to file tonight, an estimated glut of iPhones taking up warehouse space in the tech channel could point to worse things to come this year.…

From one little pill to impersonating a cat-owning site admin Long read “How do you eat an elephant? Nibble at it, nibble at it, a lot of little bites.” That was how Special Agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan infiltrated notorious dark web market the Silk Road and helped unmask site operator Dread Pirate Roberts, aka Ross Ulbricht.…

India and China keep chucking out satellites Roundup As NASA continued to listen for its stricken Mars rover and SpaceX moved closer to a first crewed launch from US soil, rocket fans had plenty to occupy them last week.…

'We don't allow lead paint ... There should be some uses of information we just don't abide' Monday, January 28, was Data Privacy Day and you won't get another for a year.…

It doesn't help that we try to give kids grown-up protections, like memorizing long passphrases Usenix Engima Protecting students' privacy – from securing their personal information to safeguarding their schoolwork – is a challenge for schools and software developers, apparently.…

And spy through your video camera if they hit the power button You might want to disable FaceTime on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac until Apple patches this bonkers bug.…

Chinese telco box maker also accused of stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile USA Huawei and its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou were charged with fraud on Monday by US prosecutors over their alleged sanction-busting dealings with an Iranian subsidiary.…

Only veteran 'nauts should think about going to Mars, judging by this research Floating silently among the stars may sound idyllic, but the longer you stay in space, the worse it is for your immune system, according to this latest research.…

We're like a building contractor, explains Cupertino. More like vampires, thinks rest of world Apple is like a building contractor you hire to redo your kitchen, the tech giant has argued in an attempt to explain why it shouldn't have to pay customers for slowing down their iPhones.…

It's not up there with looming food, medicine shortages, but it's still rather annoying An already iffy plan to deal with .eu domain ownership when the UK crashes out of the European Union has taken a turn for the worst.…

Supplier's substandard sauce will hit processor manufacturing Taiwan-based chip maker TSMC said on Monday that its chip production has been adversely affected by a bad batch of chemicals at a manufacturing facility that provides components for other chip makers.…

Advocacy groups: Force 'em to 'disgorge' data slurped up from Instagram, WhatsApp America's Federal Trade Commission has resumed work today, including its probe into Facebook, and is being urged by advocacy groups to hand the organisation a $2bn fine and break up the social networking empire.…

Flash storage embiggened, CPU clock speed less so The Rasperry Pi Foundation has updated its Compute Module with better thermals, an updated application processor and bucketloads of flash memory (in Pi terms, at least).…

Good news if you're in London or Salford (or Glasgow or Manchester) BT Openreach has declared it is installing yet more full-fibre broadband connections around the country. In an ingenious move, the infraco is putting these into the most media-heavy spots in the nation: London and Salford.…

Cloud backup bod Backblaze: Failure rates fell for high-cap spinners Just 139 out of 10,000 12TB Seagate drives fail a year, and Western Digital's HGST brand has an even better rate of 51 in 10,000, according to cloud backup service provider Backblaze, which has 104,778 drives spinning in its data centre.…