The Register

Creepycams are fine. Public just needs to trust us... I mean them, I mean private firms Opposition MPs have debated whether automated facial recognition technology should be used at all in the UK, after a pressure group mounted legal challenges against police use of face-scanning equipment.…

Investigation reveals shelves creaking under the weight of printed-out missives On Call All hail On Call, the beacon of light at the end of the long week's tunnel. Here, readers share their tech support triumphs and woes, from the infuriating to the fascinating, for your reading pleasure.…

Aluminium manufacturer accused of running 19-year supply quality scam Scientists at NASA have accused one of their metal suppliers of lying about the strength of its aluminium in a 19-year scam that caused $700m in satellites, rockets, and other parts to go up in smoke.…

Cognitive Services to assist fleshbags with tedious decision-making duties Build Ahead of next week's Build, Microsoft's annual developer shindig, the US tech giant is continuing its efforts to show it knows how to play nicely with others – as it preps a slew of updates to its Azure Cognitive Services.…

More consumer-friendly legislation killed by Golden State's politics Analysis A Californian law that would give people the right to fix their own electronic devices has been pulled by its author less than two months after it was first proposed.…

Technical term for today's three-hour outage is TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Users' Packets For at least the past hour or two, Microsoft's Azure cloud has been up and down globally due to a DNS configuration mishap.…

Got $3,500 to spare? No? How about $99 a month instead? Microsoft has unveiled a slew of technologies aimed getting its wares on the Edge, with a titchy SQL database and the developer edition of its Mixed Reality headset, HoloLens 2.…

Maybe it should be called World Password Shaming Day this year because, apparently, you suck If there's anything worse than having to constantly come up with and enter passwords, it's the idiotic way in which we all do it.…

Burning through the Amazon billions with rockets Jeff Bezos' rocket outfit, Blue Origin, was cock-a-hoop today as its New Shepard booster lofted a record 38 payloads to the edge of space, bringing the company closer to the day when it will strap actual humans into the thing.…

Calling all the ASIC snitches... A Mellanox shareholder is attempting to scupper Nvidia's efforts to buy the chipmaker for $6.9bn.…

Colo giant racks up the dollar bills by renting space to big 'n bulky cloud slingers The dark Satantic mills of the internet belched out more cash than they ever have for chunky data centre landlord Equinix in its calendar Q1.…

Help us form a more practical view Reader study Early responses to our latest survey tell us that a lot of readers are fed up with all of the sensationalist marketing and news coverage around AI.…

Alex Holmes, deputy director of cyber security at DCMS, joins Liam Maxwell at cloud giant Exclusive Amazon Web Services has hired Alex Holmes, the deputy director of cyber security at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - another senior British IT government figure to move to the cloud biz.…

Good afternoon, is this Amazon? I believe the yarn we ordered has dissolved into some sort of powder Australian police say an elderly duo called them after unwittingly taking in what cops described as a 20kg (44lb) shipment of methamphetamine from the delivery person.…

Case will be heard over May and June Julian Asssange unsurprisingly told a judge today that he did not “wish to surrender myself” to a US extradition request.…

Blind bird ticket offer ending soon We’re thrilled to announce that Facebook’s Sebastian Riedel will be delivering a keynote at Minds Mastering Machines (MCubed), our three day delve into artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics this autumn.…

Naval 'leccy storage tech looks remarkably familiar Updated The Royal Navy and the US Navy have been testing a system of "lightweight" energy storage flywheels as part of a larger project to bolt laser cannon onto warships.…

Hardly reassuring on any level Back in March, remote desktop specialist Citrix admitted hackers had romped through its core systems, and had purloined internal business documents. Now we're finding out the intrusion was much worse than first thought.…

'We look forward...to continuing to support them as a customer' Qualcomm’s future is looking pretty rosy as its expected to pocket more than $4bn in extra revenue for its next quarter, after settling with Apple in a legal battle over chip patents.…

Better ban this gear from non-US core networks, right? Right on cue, Cisco on Wednesday patched a security vulnerability in some of its network switches that can be exploited by miscreants to commandeer the IT equipment and spy on people.…

Apophis will be inside satellite belt, visible to the naked eye from our home world, sweet release not imminent... An asteroid bigger than the size of three football fields is hurtling towards Earth – and will pass so close to our planet, it'll be visible to the naked eye and may pass through the band of human satellites in geostationary orbit.…

While customers apparently make savings from consolidated services? Analysis Database giant and cloud-dream believer Oracle on Wednesday invited members of the media to its Redwood Shores headquarters in California because, as global comms SVP Bob Winslow put it, "We need you to tell our story."…

Duo also ask for two-year delay in celeb-studded ICO trial Two men accused of running a cryptocurrency scam have asked for the entire case to be thrown out – because prosecutors may have accidentally obtained and read Slack conversations the duo had with their lawyers.…

'Member when Microsoft tried this in 2017? It didn’t go well... Dell World Microsoft and VMware appear to have buried the hatchet, with the virtualization juggernaut's entire software stack now officially supported on Redmond's Azure.…

Latest development in long-running lawsuit over electronic device slurping Civil rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have pushed this week for a US judge to declare the search of mobile phones at America's borders to be unconstitutional.…

Oh no, sorry that was another quarter in a different year - top and bottom lines wobble amid corp procurement slowdown It isn’t a great time to be selling HDDs or flash drives, just ask Western Digital and Seagate. The pair posted less than flattering numbers for third quarter of their fiscal ’19 that were caused by floppy demand in corporate land.…

Denies wrongdoing, replaced by one-time junior MoD minister Penny Mordaunt Updated Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has been sacked from the British government after apparently leaking the news that Blighty isn’t completely banning Huawei from its 5G networks.…

Dumpster, dumpster, burning bright / Data back-ups not alright? The great A2 Hosting Windows TITSUP* has entered its second week as the company continues to struggle to recover from a security breach that forced its System Operations team to shut down all its Windows services.…

Premium mobe makers suffer as sales shrivel Apple and Samsung are licking their wounds after reporting a double-digit drop in global smartphone sales for calendar Q1, as the sector plunged to the lowest volumes shipped in half a decade.…

That ought to help MPLS meet with a little, er, accident Cloudy networking startup Aryaka is set to expand its ops after netting $50m in its latest funding round, led by Goldman Sachs – the single largest investment in the company to date.…

Sing it with us: Thhhhaaat makes you lager than life... Shit hoppened for the Heart & Seoul karaoke lounge in Utah after the US state's alcohol control authority yesterday rejected its application to serve beer.…

He'll only spend 22 weeks in the chokey... but that's just the start of his legal woes Former WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange has been sentenced to 11 months in prison after jumping bail and fleeing into Ecuador's London embassy for more than seven years.…

CLL doors open in two weeks Events We'll be opening the doors to Continuous Lifecycle London in just two weeks' time, so if you want to join us for the best in DevOps, CI/CD, Containers and Serverless, the clock is ticking.…

There's insecure and then there's insecure NordVPN has been told to stop misleading world+dog with claims in telly ads that public Wi-Fi is inherently insecure.…

Blockbuster quarter, eh, Tim? Apple crowed over its best three months ever for its services biz, including things like Apple TV and Apple Pay, in its reported results for Q2 ended March 30. Overall, however, Apple had a 5 per cent decrease in revenue from the previous year’s Q2.…

More flash squeezed into HyperDrive Density+ boxes Open-source storage enthusiasts at SoftIron are touting a hybrid storage array that combines a bunch of HDDs and SSDs with Arm64-compatible Seattle system-on-chips from AMD and free Ceph software.…

ISS power problems keep Dragon on the ground for a few more days The 17th SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station has been delayed to no earlier than 3 May as ground controllers work on a plan to deal with a power problem onboard the orbiting lab.…

Big Red rushes out software patch as ransomware scumbags move in IT admins overseeing Oracle's WebLogic Server installations need to get patching immediately: miscreants are exploiting what was a zero-day vulnerability in the software to pump ransomware into networks.…

Roadmap laid out for 7nm 'Rome' Epyc, Navi GPUs Chip second-fiddle AMD, a day away from its 50th anniversary, delivered better-than-expected Q1 2019 earnings on Tuesday, lifting its share price about four per cent in after-hours trading to $28.66 apiece.…

Nabbed in Thailand, extradited... and now formally charged A Russian citizen has been charged with defrauding US taxpayers out of at least $1.5m through a series of tax-return hacks.…

Same day Zuckerberg declares with a straight face at F8 event: 'The future is private' Microsoft has vowed to put an end to lengthy and confusing privacy controls and "give customers increased transparency and control over their data."…

Upstart enlists CapGemini to manage Docker Enterprise Container popularizer Docker on Tuesday opened its DockerCon 19 conference in San Francisco with an amiable video of Docker employees stumbling over obtuse platform lingo.…

'Many companies pay us for our work, and we do not publish data and help them to eliminate vulnerabilities' A service provider hired by the likes of Oracle, SAP, BT, and many others, to manage their IT systems has been hacked – and its client data held to ransom.…

For the diner that wants to chow down on ML and analytics data but can't stomach Tesla Volta V100 costs Google has become the first bringer of clouds to sell server instances equipped with Nvidia’s Tesla T4 GPUs in general availability.…

Misty water-coloured, er, smartphone biz didn't help either ... The roller-coaster nature of semiconductor demand caught Samsung napping in calendar Q1 (PDF) resulting in a 60 per cent dive in profits, the lowest haul since the fiery Galaxy Note 7 debacle of 2017.…

We all want to see hard proof of deliberate espionage. This is absolutely not it A claimed deliberate spying "backdoor" in Huawei routers used in the core of Vodafone Italy's 3G network was, in fact, a Telnet-based remote debug interface.…

It's all perfectly safe Has your hiking holiday in Kazakhstan fallen through? Not to worry. The UN has greenlit the opening of trails along the heavily, heavily fortified border that divides South and North Korea.…

Say it with us now: Despiiiiite Brexit Equinix has opened a £90m colocation facility in godforsaken Slough – its ninth around Greater London and 12th in the UK.…

AWS Outposts on horizon as infra giants look to cram their hardware in YOUR bit barn Amazon Web Services bulked up in 2018, jugging down a protein shake of $2.3bn in cloudy infrastructure services revenues – equalling Google's total haul for the 12 months.…

If it's Boeing, I'm not going Boeing has once again been shaken by its 737 Max saga, this time after it was revealed that safety features for the controversial airliner were inactive – which was not what the airlines flying the craft had been led to believe.…