The Register

Article 13 reasons why... (Why, what did you think we meant?) The UK, the Republic of Ireland, France and Germany were among the 19 nations that today gave the thumbs-up to the EU's Copyright Directive, meaning it should get pushed through the day after tomorrow.…

Cityfibre loses judicial review against ad regulator Broadband infrastructure slinger Cityfibre has lost a judicial review against the UK's Advertising Standards Authority after the regulator decided that the term "fibre broadband" could include connections that used a mix of fibre and copper cables.…

Report scolds maker Thales for poorly understood software A British Army Watchkeeper drone stalled itself and crashed into the sea on a bad weather flight test, military investigators have said – though most of the wreckage was never found.…

Social media hits back at suggestion women are too shy to get a smear test Women are today flooding UK health secretary Matt Hancock's social media presences with pictures of flowers that look a little like female genitalia to protest the suggestion they are "shrinking violets" when it comes to getting smear tests.…

... or this is a massive, massive coincidence. What's a Zuckerberg? We're Siculus! A legal entity called Siculus Inc plans to build a data centre covering 1 million square foot (c 92,900m) next door to Facebook's 2.5 million square feet (c 232,257m) infrastructure campus in Altoona, Iowa.…

After all, it has had a lot of practice in scam payouts UK bank TSB has committed to refund any customer that ends up out of pocket to fraud as it makes a feature of the measure it had to introduce last year when hundreds were ripped off during its IT meltdown.…

Find out at Continuous Lifecycle London next month Events It’s all very well hearing the theories behind DevOps, Containers, Continuous Delivery and more, but nothing beats talking to someone who’s actually put them to work in a real organisation.…

Also: Azure goes big in Britain, Bletchley Park to teach tech and Skype shares some more Roundup As the twin horsemen of the PC apocalypse, the Windows 10 May 2019 Update and Chromium Edge, saddled up to charge at users (in preview form), there were a few other emissions last week from Microsoft.…

Machines win two matches in row to thrash the reigning champions in a match best out of three OpenAI’s video game playing bots OpenAI Five thrashed team OG, the reigning human champions of Dota 2, on Saturday in matches that were live-streamed from San Francisco.…

Wait until you see the real thing, folks... A leading industry figure has dismissed 5G "launches" in Korea and the United States as "LTE with new shoes".…

Lockable doors on the server room? Those are for losers Who, Me? Hilarious mishaps! Get your hilarious mishaps! That's right, it's the delectable Who, Me? come again to tickle your tech error taste buds.…

Also massive policy body cam org Axon is pursuing facial recog after all Roundup Another week has passed in the AI world, with military shenanigans, US government regulation and new chips from Qualcomm. Here's the best of the rest.…

Plus, Minnesota and North Carolina cities hit by hackers As April hits its stride, we saw a week of Wi-Fi bugs, Assange's public eviction and King's College warnings.…

Lawsuit accuses database biz of racial discrimination A former Oracle NetSuite account executive has sued the database giant claiming that he was discriminated against because he was Hispanic.…

Polystream says the future of hi-def gameplay is distributed We're doing gaming all wrong, says the CEO of UK-based Polystream, Bruce Grove, and that includes Google new cloud-based games service Stadia that was announced last month.…

NASA Twin Study explores space and Earth poop in twins Spending your days floating in space may give you a nice break from Earth, but be warned, your body might not fully recover when you decide to come back down.…

Multiple providers leaving storage cookies up for grabs The US-Cert is raising alarms following the disclosure of a serious vulnerability in multiple VPN services.…

Privacy activist CthulhuSec outed as head of illegal bazaar For years, it was assumed he had escaped the Feds. But on Friday at Liverpool Crown Court, 24-year-old university dropout Thomas White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering and possessing child abuse images and was sentenced to 5 years and 4 months in prison.…

Also in letter to shareholders, Cargo Jeff admits Echo is a bit creepy: 'A black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen...' Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has used his annual shareholders letter to throw shade at legacy database rivals, saying that while no one asked for AWS, businesses were sick of lock-in and punitive licensing deals.…

Misogynists sniping at Caltech's Kate Bouman get an earful In response to the scientific community's celebration of the publication on Wednesday of the first picture of a black hole, internet trolls painted an even darker portrait of misogyny through an effort to discredit the female postdoctoral researcher, Katie Bouman, who led the development of the imaging algorithm.…

Issues grovelling apology, promises to fix 'weak links' in management China's largest stock photo flinger has been forced to backtrack after it tried to put its own price tags on images of the first black hole and the Chinese flag.…

You’ve got to aim for the head The US government is terrible at managing data centres: five years after the Federal Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) mandated the closure or consolidation of thousands of inefficient server farms, the federal agencies are nowhere close to meeting its goals.…

High potential of cutting off the nose to spite the face The Russian State Duma, the lower house of parliament, has voted to approve the controversial bill that would give politicians powers to isolate the country from the internet.…

Romanian duo catch 21 felony convictions for selling details of hacked machines on darknet Two Romanian nationals face the prospect of years in a US prison after being convicted for their roles in a malware-based financial fraud ring.…

Big Blue insists it's only for good ol' fashioned research IBM shared its controversial Diversity in Faces dataset, used to train facial recognition systems, with companies and universities directly linked to militaries and law enforcement across the world.…

Officer, um, we were just explaining how viewing terrorist content online's an offence New laws came into force today that make it an offence in the UK to view terrorist material online just once.…

ICO says case involving 34.4 million records 'unprecedented' Updated The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined commercial pregnancy and parenting club Bounty some £400,000 for illegally sharing personal details of more than 14 million people.…

The day has a 'y' in it – must be time for an outage TalkTalk's email service clearly had a big night out on Thursday and has spent Friday morning lying down in a darkened room.…

Authority barged in after disposal caught on camera, ordered chap to pay costs of almost £3k Boatnotes Justice has finally been served for abandoned boats everywhere as a Kentish man was found guilty of callously ditching his vessel in a residential area.…

America tries to keep the pressure on Chinese biz A US official has repeated his country's threats against its allies over Huawei – stating that the US's goal is a process that leads "inevitably to the banning" of the Chinese company's products.…

Internet Archive perplexed and annoyed over idiotic demands French internet cops have demanded that the Internet Archive remove more than 550 instances of "terrorist propaganda" from its site.…

One month till we open the doors at Continuous Lifecycle The world might be in turmoil, but if you want to learn how to turn chaos into an advantage, you should be joining us at Continuous Lifecycle in just over a month’s time.…

Get students in creative mood and ride on the Vomit Comet beckons Hey kids – fancy chucking paper planes at the supply teacher while your real one hops on a micro-gravity aircraft? You'll need to think about something interesting to bring aboard Zero-G's ageing Boeing 727 to get your mentor airborne and, briefly, floating.…

Wait, what do you mean 'helium disk drives aren't interesting'? The black hole image released yesterday needed over a thousand helium-filled disk drives to record it.…

Some things are better left without a video greeting Something for the Weekend, Sir? How did Ernest Hemingway get his scar?…

The first rule of China Club is don't blame China Netherlands-based ASML, which makes semiconductor manufacturing equipment, on Thursday insisted that it had not been the target of Chinese espionage, despite the fact that six former employees with Chinese names breached their contracts by sharing trade secrets with a competitor linked to the Chinese government.…

Techie learns the hard way there's more than one way to interpret 'make a copy' On Call Another week over, another On Call – and this one is going to provide you with a real belly-laugh.…

One step forward, one step back in space news The first attempt by a private company to land a probe on the Moon's surface ended in failure on Thursday when the vehicle crashed minutes before landing.…

Passwords, personal information can be sussed out by attackers during handshakes Researchers have detailed a set of side-channel and downgrade attacks that potentially allow an attacker to compromise Wi-Fi networks equipped with WPA3 protections.…

Lawyer for Joshua Schulte unhappy about agency review The lawyer for former CIA employee Joshua Schulte is unhappy the spy agency is allowed to review communications with her client before she receives it and has accused the agency of trying to intimidate her.…

Telemetry Interface blamed for exposed gRPC passwords Juniper Networks has issued an update after finding hardcoded credentials had been left in some of its datacenter switches.…

Sorry song fails to quell online discontent, rumors swirl of competition ahead JavaScript library manager NPM on Wednesday apologized for its handling of a contentious round of recent layoffs.…

Autonomy helped Capax Discovery repay its own contracts, he added Autonomy trial The boss of an HPE-affiliated reseller asked a barrister "what is this exactly?" when shown a copy of his own witness statement in London's High Court. Capax Discovery CEO John Baiocco then said he was "pretty sure" his HPE-funded lawyer had written it for him.…

The Lives of Others: Siri, Google and Cortana edition Sneezes and homophones – words that sound like other words – are tripping smart speakers into allowing strangers to hear recordings of your private conversations.…

Go hybrid or go home Networking overlord Cisco has punted its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) platform into AWS-hosted public cloud.…

Getting serious at last Analysis Samsung has shown a muscular response to the mortal threat of cheap Chinese rivals and long phone replacement cycles by packing its mid-tier phones with the exotic novelties of much pricier flagships.…

Possible 'ethical violations' found but no conflict of interest Oracle and IBM are out of the running for the Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract after a departmental probe found no evidence a conflict of interest had affected the deal.…

As Brit judge finds him guilty of breaching his bail conditions One-time Aussie cupboard-dweller Julian Assange has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion by the US government.…

Sophos, Avast users left wailing as update borks older OSes A bunch of PCs running the wares of Sophos or Avast have been freezing or failing to start following the installation of patches emitted by Microsoft on 9 April.…

Samsung's still king and memory still hottest item, despite unstable pricing Sales growth at the world's chipmakers stalled in 2018 following protracted struggles with DRAM oversupply.…