The Register

Data regulator notches up another successful prosecution SCL Elections Ltd, stablemate of scandal-hit Cambridge Analytica, has been fined a total of £21,000 after pleading guilty to not complying with an Information Commissioner's Office enforcement notice.…

Includes a £3m discount. Excludes VAT and delivery Apple's pricing woes do not seem to have worried PC giant Dell, as the flinger of Windows – and occasionally Linux-powered silicon – appears to have unleashed another multimillion-pound laptop on the world.…

Of course! It's the public's fault it doesn't look like Amazon coughs up enough – we need to better understand corporation tax Things would be lot simpler for Amazon if people had a better understanding of corporation tax and didn't think online tracking was so sinister, according to the UK director of public policy for the £634bn online marketplace giant.…

Kepler's successor, TESS, turns up its first three exoplanets The space telescope launched last year as the successor to NASA's long-running and very successful Kepler turned in three exoplanets in its first three months of observations.…

Noticed a missing bollard? Mappy partnership may help Britain's Ordnance Survey is beginning to provide businesses with real-time information for the first time – almost.…

2018 a cracker for spaceflight. Ignoring Galileo Roundup 2018 was a tremendous year for spaceflight as commercial providers inched closer to carrying passengers and legacy launchers delivered more than a little drama.…

As in, big enough Lenovo has given its Carbon and Yoga business flagships a makeover – but you won't be able to use one in anger until June.…

Breathe easier knowing you've tested your software properly A Google cyrptoboffin is close to releasing a tool that will hopefully make all of us more secure online.…

Two-year-old bird in safe mode An Earth-imaging satellite that generated $85m in revenue last year for Maxar Technologies' Digital Globe business went TITSUP: a total inability to snap usual photographs.…

More suggestive assistant than robo-doc, boffins say Artificial intelligence can potentially identify someone's genetic disorders by inspecting a picture of their face, according to a paper published in Nature Medicine this week.…

Trusty command interpreter gains some new toys and a jolly good buffing In news that will set the hearts of shell fans all a quiver, Bash 5.0 was released this week, replete with a truckload of fixes along with a few new features.…

Don't miss ISS's Star Spores: Return of the Fungi Space isn’t, for now, turning bacteria on the International Space Station into nasty superbugs hellbent on infecting astronauts, according to a study published on Tuesday.…

11 patches ship on Patch Tuesday While you were sighing your way through Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, enterprise vendor SAP slid 11 security advisories under your door.…

Hyper-V, DHCP, Word, and more. Plus, bonus shock: Adobe spares Flash in January patch dump Patch Tuesday Microsoft has released the first Patch Tuesday bundle of the year, patching up 49 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities and issuing two advisories.…

Owners claim security vulns have damaged resale price A class-action lawsuit claiming Fiat-Chrysler knew about, but failed to fix, significant cybersecurity holes in its cars will go to trial in America later this year.…

Well, we all have to start somewhere: Rentable Q machine has just 20 qubits IBM today claimed it will shortly sell the world's first commercial quantum computer – or, more accurately, calculation time on it.…

Alleged sighting of annoying flying gizmo torments second UK air travel nerve-center London Heathrow Airport temporarily halted departing flights this evening after a drone was apparently spotted hovering in the area.…

Rights warrior ticked off after yet another report of whereabouts being flogged to dodgy geezers US Senator Ron Wyden is renewing his calls for legislation banning the sale of people's private cellphone location information after yet another report of phone carriers doing exactly that.…

Western Digital's CES lineup a tad more composed Seagate and Western Digital has of course announced new mobile HDDs, SSDs and data protection facilities at the CES gadgetfest in Las Vegas – and some of Seagate's are clad in a "tactile, textile industrial design". Oo er.…

Your move, Microsoft and Google Amazon has taken an axe to the pricing of its containers-for-dummies service Fargate with costs for the on-demand engine dropping by up to 50 per cent.…

Mandatory registration and on-the-spot fines for fliers New British drone laws being introduced in the wake of the London Gatwick airport drone fiasco will give police greater powers – but would not have stopped the chaos that shut the airport down for days during peak holiday season.…

That's 2.91 Brontosauruses to you As if Brexit chaos wasn't enough to bring us down after the festive season's indulgence, South West Water has brought word of a new fatberg in town.…

MPs told long negotiations, lack of know-how hinders SME spending UK government spending risks slipping back into the bad old days of legacy lock-in, MPs have been warned.…

Chaebol warns operating profit to fall 29% Smartphones are experiencing their first ever recession, and Samsung is feeling the pain too.…

New and tested training courses cover every angle Promo As data thieves and hackers become more numerous, more inventive and more destructive, learning to protect themselves against cybercrime is ever higher on the list of companies' priorities.…

Case not linked to international spying, reckon sources. Hmmm German police said a 20-year-old German man had "confessed" to leaks in connection what the country's media is calling "the Hacker Attack", a years-long data exfiltration campaign against politicians and other public figures.…

Buying a new PC in 2019? You may have a bit less disk space than you were expecting Microsoft has announced that it is formalising the arrangement whereby Windows 10 inexplicably swipes a chunk of disk space for its own purposes in the form of Reserved Storage.…

Nine-platter beast serves up high-capacity spinning rust Toshiba has promised January sample shipments for its MG08 helium-filled disk drive, which inflates current disk recording technology to a record 16TB capacity.…

It stands for 10 gigabits per second connections, so at least it means something CES 2019 America's cable cabal has used CES to fire up interest in 10Gbps access networks, and in a snipe at the mobile 5G market, the Internet & Television Association (NCTA) has applied to trademark "10G" with the tagline "The Next Great Leap for Broadband".…

Common Platform Programme to 'reuse' the 'legacy' prosecutors' case wrangling system Exclusive Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service has halted one of the core workstreams of its £280m Common Platform Programme, putting three years' of development work on ice in favour of keeping an "end-of-life legacy system" in use.…

Plus: SpaceX gets back to some Falcon work Roundup In the week that New Horizons snapped its snowman, China took its rover out for a spin on the lunar surface and SpaceX fired up another Falcon 9.…

And he did it without swearing... folks with broken programs may act otherwise The Linux kernel will be tweaked to mitigate data-stealing attacks that exploit system page caches.…

Old tweets betray sensitive data under new tools Analysis Researchers have demonstrated yet again that location metadata from Twitter posts can be used to infer private information like users' home addresses, workplaces, and sensitive locations they've visited.…

Software performance tweaks have opposite effect Microsoft has taken down its latest update for Office 2010 following reports the tweak was causing some versions of Excel to crash.…

Your handy guide to processor-related bits and bytes Roundup To coincide with CES 2019 kicking off, here's some chip-related news bytes, from consumer-grade up to enterprise level, to nibble on, getting to the core – OK, enough puns.…

More moron-crime than serious cyber-crime, your data is safe The operator of an Australian emergency warning service has denied that user information was breached after someone accessed its system to post “you've been hacked” messages.…

Will there be a deal or no deal? The first of three major trials this spring involving Qualcomm has opened in Silicon Valley, with phone makers chipping in... no pun intended.…

Judge quashes hopes of big comm tech payday WiLAN has been told by a US judge it can either walk away with $10m in patent-infringement damages from Apple – somewhat lower than the $145m set by a jury – or go to trial again to set the figure.…

Job numbers, coverage ... is there anything US telco giant hasn't been accused of inflating? AT&T has rolled out a new branding for its LTE mobile broadband network, calling the current-gen system 5G, or 5G.…

Tax-funded bureaucrats can't cut off people just because they disagree with them In what may prove to be a significant precedent, a US appeals court has ruled that Facebook represents a public forum and the First Amendment on freedom of expression applies.…

She'll make you live her crazy life, but she'll take away your pain like a bullet to your wallet A newly spotted piece of hybrid malware steals copies of victims' files and then encrypts said data, demanding a ransom to unscramble it.…

Brexit just gets better British citizens with a .eu domain should buy a dotcom replacement and lawyer up, the UK government has formally advised.…

First Redmond takes over code hotel, now it's telling us: You will, er, won't pay for this GitHub, the code storage and developer data gold mine acquired by Microsoft last year, has lowered the price it charges for private repositories from $7 per month to zero.…

Even filing a patent didn't save Terry Keebaugh from the old tin tack An award-winning former IBM saleswoman who tried to patent a system that slurped fired graybeards’ mainframe knowledge before they departed is now suing IBM for age discrimination – and squarely blames CEO Ginny Rometty for Big Blue’s “morally bankrupt” actions.…

Almost half the team to be reassigned before closure Taiwanese chip-maker UMC, under legal siege from the US Department of Justice, has reportedly pared down its DRAM project team by nearly one half, signalling victory for rival Micron.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before NHS England has once again pledged to improve the state of digital services to benefit patients and staff in its Long Term Plan, with a fully digital secondary care and access to digital consultations promised by 2024.…

Alles ist gut DXC Technology has negotiated terms to buy fellow New York Stock Exchange-listed tech services and consulting group Luxoft for $2bn.…

Slow, small and quick, or big and speedy? SSDs for mini-NAS, thin laptops and gamers Seagate has tossed three SSDs into the CES arena, looking to please small NAS users, thin laptoppers and gamers.…

Fancy that – dumb is the new smart CES 2019 The most eye-catching debuts at CES 2019 are more analogue than digital, and dumber rather than smarter.…

Torvalds has run out of fingers and toes, so version 5.0 RC1 is here Penguinistas, take heed. The kernel of your beloved OS has rung in the new year with a brand spanking new version number because... Linus felt like it.…