The Register

Ignoring privacy laws, storing plain text passwords, slurping millions of contact details come back to bite web giant Here's a triple Thursday whammy: Facebook has been accused of breaking Canada’s privacy laws, and is being investigated in the US and Ireland for seemingly mishandling people's private data.…

An attack of conscience or have the super-snoops got something better now? The NSA's mass-logging of people's phone calls and text messages, at home and abroad – a surveillance program introduced after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks – is set to end as it's no longer worth the hassle.…

Modest expectations for next quarter, though, as web souk works toward one-day delivery Cloud cash-cow and stuff-shifter Amazon on Thursday reported $59.7bn in revenue for its Q1 2019, up 17 per cent from a year ago and about what financial analysts expected.…

Let's cut the crap, El Reg style Comment We thought the hype over next-generation mobile broadband networks couldn't get much thicker, but we were wrong. So let's just jump into the five biggest lies about 5G.…

Password resets reset Microsoft has finally decided to get rid of password expiration policies in Windows because forcing people to reset their passwords periodically harms security.…

Troves of deleted data lingers on disks... according to this 'ere study, anyway You would think that, with computers dominating every aspect of our lives, people would be aware that storage devices can retain information even after clicking "Empty Recycle Bin".…

But is it enough to combat the Microsoft juggernaut? Hipster-friendly chat app Slack frantically wants to turns itself into a development environment to fend off the Microsoft juggernaut.…

Chip flinger slams brakes on production as it waits for demand to pick up Oversupply in the memory market has savaged SK Hynix's first-quarter 2019 results, but the Korean chip flinger hopes for an improvement after June.…

FPGAs + NICs = profit FPGA daddy Xilinx is buying California-based silicon design startup Solarflare Communications to improve its networking credentials.…

Kids, you're all right The American education system has always been the envy of Brit schoolkids – if only because it's easy to glower across the pond at their freedom to wear whatever they want from the prickly tomb of Teflon uniforms.…

Largest shareholders for LSE-listed biz give thumbs-up to proposed sale KCOM, the Hull-based telco that still has a monopoly fibre network in the city, has agreed to go private in a £504m deal agreed with the USSL, one of the UK's largest pension funds.…

Chromium base should ease porting pains substantially Microsoft may be closer to its first Mac browser in 14 years.…

You mean they already do? Pull the other one Cyber UK 2019 Ever-exciting Cabinet Office minister David Lidington has put his name to a new infosec response testing tool developed by the NCSC, called (wait for it) Exercise in a Box.…

Contender hopes to one day become the preferred Node.js Package Manager The recent management change and layoffs at JavaScript accessory outfit NPM Inc prompted several former employees to speculate that the company's alleged union-busting push toward profitability may well spur the creation of competition.…

Find out at Continuous Lifecycle London next month Events It's one thing using the latest tools and methodologies to build from the ground up - quite another to use them alongside your legacy software setup.…

Welcome to Ox Horn, such a perfect town. Here we have some rules, let us lay them down The Register paid a visit to Huawei's HQ in Dongguan, China, to find Europe in miniature along with a "5G" hotel that was, er, pretty much what we expected.…

We're messy, expensive, lazy, difficult – and entirely necessary Column Somewhere in the second hour of sorting through a handful of travel reservations that had been added to my calendar, I started to suspect I'd been lied to – by a computer.…

'The best way to do this is a partnership between the robot and a surgeon' AI-trained autonomous robots have helped surgeons perform heart surgery on live pigs, according to research published in Science Robotics.…

Plenty of CPU goodness to spread around in the first big 2019 update Emulation fans, rejoice! Version 4 of open-source emulator QEMU has dropped with features aplenty and, sadly, one or two omissions.…

Plus: PC slowdown, chip shortages? Shut yer mouth – we've got loadsamoney Microsoft announced healthy revenues for its third-quarter financial results on Wednesday, citing a growing demand in Microsoft 365 and its cloud services.…

Time for those geniuses to earn that job title Apple is speeding up repairs of defective laptop keyboards that have left MacBook users angry, frustrated, and firing off lawsuits.…

From the creators of Apache Spark, comes a new tale of friendship and imagination American startup Databricks, established by the original authors of the Apache Spark framework, has launched an open source project designed to solve the reliability issues plaguing data swamps – those huge (cess)pools of raw corporate data that are supposed to deliver value from analytics.…

Net income halved as antisocial network preps for big slap Facebook's financial figures for its first quarter of 2019, published Wednesday, had an interesting twist.…

Unsealed warrant in Massachusetts adds to growing privacy debate Analysis A US judge gave the cops permission to force people's fingers onto seized iPhones to see who could unlock them, a newly unsealed search warrant has revealed.…

Two weeks and no sign of a proper solution, Avast and McAfee affected, too Updated Unlucky Sophos antivirus users face a dilemma: either uninstall the software, or install April's Windows security fixes. That's because having both in place at the same time will bork their machines.…

Container biz cuddles with chip whiz in quest for kismet Container wunderkind Docker and chip architecture scribblers Arm on Wednesday said they are working together to help make containerized apps comfortable on Arm hardware.…

Plans to hire 15k heads in R&D and production, taking on TSMC in contract manufacturing Samsung Electronics will plough Won133tn (£116bn, $155bn) over the next 11 years to develop its logic chip business and boost manufacturing lines to produce those non-memory processors to order for other corporations.…

Aging awful art app to remain in May 2019 OS upgrade after its, wait for it, wait for it... brush with death For anyone upset about the fate of doomed art application Microsoft Paint, bundled with Windows for as long as we can remember, here's something to set your mind at easel.…

Huawei was just the beginning While some governments obsess about Huawei, the impending launch of 5G is giving lesser-known Chinese upstarts a hope of cracking elusive Western smartphone markets – as Oppo demonstrated today in Zurich.…

Venture with a vengeance US-based start-up investor Clear Ventures has set up a second fund to bankroll businesses that deal with the ridiculously nebulous notion of the fourth industrial revolution.…

Mind the gap You'd think a forensic teardown of the first commercially available foldable smartphone – the Samsung Galaxy Fold – may be less challenging than most, given the device's propensity to do it itself.…

If we all chip in, we can help secure old Blighty Cyber UK 2019 "We're talking about how to design telecoms systems properly for the long term," National Cyber Security Centre CEO Ciaran Martin told press at UK.gov's infosec event in Glasgow today. "That is a bigger and sometimes different issue from the Chinese."…

Qualtrics slurp and restructure aren't making any money yet SAP's cloud biz is ballooning, but aggressive restructuring efforts and charges related to the recent $8bn buy of Qualtrics have resulted in an operating loss of €136m for Q1 of its fiscal 2019.…

GCHQ U-turns, wants Joe Public onside as well as industry Cyber UK 2019 GCHQ's director-general has called for more public trust in the controversial British spy agency.…

If you ever wanted to write an extension for Microsoft's long-dead media hub, you can One of the original managers of the Microsoft's ill-fated Windows Media Center has made the SDK available on GitHub.…

UK Lords cite 'irresponsible rhetoric' and communication as factors. Sound familiar? Never mind the climate, things are looking decidedly dicey on the nuke front, according to the UK's House of Lords.…

Commander-in-chief whined about waning e-peen – report When the "leader of the free world" hauled Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey into the White House for a meeting yesterday, you would be forgiven for thinking they'd attempt to address the issues that have bedevilled social media of late – bots, disinformation, unsolicited DMs, Nazis...…

Now Samsung wants its samples back Analysis So. Gartner was right to be cautious about the foldable phone after all. Samsung has postponed the 3 May launch of the Galaxy Fold handset, and now Reuters reports that the Korean giant wants all the samples back.…

Database biz shifted its assets to another biz mid-trial In January last year, after four years of litigation, a former Oracle sales rep in Qatar won a lawsuit against the database giant to collect unpaid sales commission.…

USBs and SD cards can result in a drive-letter switcheroo Fans of the underused and little-known technology mostly referred to as "external storage" have found themselves blocked from installing the Windows 10 May 2019 Update.…

But only on the edge, Chinese giant not trusted in the core Britain will allow Huawei infrastructure kit on 5G mobile networks, according to reports, but not into the core of those networks, which is where UK spies fear Chinese backdoors exists.…

Astroboffins rejoice over tiny rumblings underground Video NASA’s InSight lander has detected seismic waves on Mars for the first time and the space agency is letting everyone else listen in too.…

Quick summary as your morning coffee brews Roundup You're busy. We're busy... looking busy. Here's a quick catch up on this week's chip news for you.…

Teen loses driving permit, gets wrongly linked to spate of thefts A teenager is suing Apple in the US for $1bn, claiming he was misidentified as a thief by a mysterious facial-recognition system in the iGiant's stores.…

Rental firm fuming after consultancy 'never delivered a functional site or mobile app' Car rental giant Hertz is suing over a website redesign from hell.…

Meanwhile, the only pro-privacy proposal gets quietly pulled Analysis The right for Californians to control the private data that tech companies hold on them may be undermined today at a critical committee hearing in Sacramento.…

TLS 1.3, speedups, reduced memory overhead, and more Node.js, the popular JavaScript runtime that relies on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, hit version 12 on Tuesday, bringing with a handful of potentially useful features and capabilities.…

Yes, converged infrastructure model is still a thing Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed the dark pact under which the two collaborated on converged infrastructure (CI) products for a decade.…

Is it a nerd? Is it a control plane? No, it's... SuperSSD Israeli NVMe/TCP pioneer Lightbits finally showed up to the all-flash array market today with an Ethernet-attached SSD appliance – the imaginatively named SuperSSD.…

NASA schedules walloped, Cynus launches, and Owen Garriott's final voyage Roundup It has been an eventful past seven days in space what with SpaceX making a big cloud o' orange smoke, Cygnus docking, and veteran astronaut Owen Garriott taking his final journey into the black.…