The Register

Licensing red-tape violate First Amendment, says court in battle over timing algorithm Oregon's regulations stopping people in the US state from referring to themselves as engineers are unconstitutional, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.…

Doesn't sound very long, but it could have big implications for quantum computing Physicists have formed qubits – quantum bits – from graphene for the first time, according to research published in Nature Nanotechnology.…

El Reg namechecked as lawyers claim investors 'misled' El Reg's revelations of layoffs at DXC Technologies over the last year were mentioned as US lawyers attempt to launch a class-action lawsuit against the slash-happy tech biz.…

Tripartite monopoly cuts bit output production growth as China-US trade war threatens The three DRAM suppliers are scaling back production growth as memory demand falters with no sign of recovery.…

Ten intensive courses promise to cover every angle Promo As new and ever more inventive threats keep crowding over the IT horizon, the security professional is under constant pressure to stay ahead of the cybercriminals.…

Sprinkle some 'crying toddler' in there for maximum horror You have to hand it to the passerby who called the cops after hearing a chap yelling "why don't you die?" along with the cries of a toddler.…

We'll have a better idea when fresh 2014 MU69 snaps look less like Minecraft NASA's teenage New Horizons probe has successfully passed within 2,200 miles of 2014 MU69, some four billion miles from the Sun, three years after taking a close look at Pluto and nearly 13 years after launch.…

At last! The pretender to the throne swipes the crown The party poppers have gone off in Redmond, not to usher in 2019, but to celebrate another market share-watcher declaring that yes, Windows 10 has finally crept past Windows 7.…

ARPANET handler helped lay foundations of the internet Obit One of the internet's founding fathers, ARPANET packet-switching pioneer Larry Roberts, has died aged 81.…

New year, new CVE Happy New Year! Oh, and if you include GNU's wget utility in software you write, pull down the new version released on Boxing Day and push out updates to your users.…

Plus: Your vulture clocked the Northern Lights from the Arctic Circle Boatnotes What's it like aboard a warship? Aside from the glamorous bits when Russian jets are whizzing past and there's lots to do? El Reg not only went aboard HMS Enterprise to find out – we scored a trip to the Arctic Circle courtesy of the Royal Navy.…

UK's exit from the EU and ePrivacy regs: contingency planning and confusion At the dawn of 2018, GDPR was a dead cert. The four letters were on everyone's lips and, with a helpful nudge from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, set the privacy world aflame.…

Yesterday's sci-fi has become today's crappy kit, apart from space colonies and AI Feature Welcome to 2019, the year in which Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film masterpiece Blade Runner is set. And as predicted in this loose adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick story, we have flying cars.…

Happy New Year from the Who, Me? Vultures Who, Me? Happy New Year! Because you'll all be feeling delicate, El Reg thought we’d ease your pain with some of our other readers' more technical errors – distraction is the best cure for embarrassment, we're sure.…

Yes, while half-sauced yourself... Post-Pub Neckfiller The late and much-missed Lester Haines wrote a series called Post-Pub Nosh Neckfiller, high calorie food you can cook when drunk, or hungover. These veered into sophisticated recipes hard to rustle up when sober, let alone drunk - like home made polenta Eggs Benny with home made hollandaise sauce.…

'I was given a promotion for slacking off' Who, Me? It's New Year's Eve and for many of you this will mean celebrating – but for some the prospect of manning the support lines or working overtime looms.…

The best of readers' tech trouble one-liners On Call Over the months, On Call and Who, Me? – El Reg's weekly columns of tech support cock-ups – stack up quite a few submissions that are too short to whip into a single piece.…

Remains of the year laid bare as we flay July to December Where were we? Ah yes... it was the summer of GitHub committers' discontent – as many looked on in horror as Redmond swallowed it for $7.5bn in June. But things were about to heat up further...…

From fried chips to stuffed elections, a look back at the year that was The 2018 calendar year saw an interesting mix of both technical and strategic questions, as engineers were met with new problems and execs were forced to cope with stark new realities.…

...And reveals rather too much to the staffer in the room On Call Everyone has had an embarrassing moment, when you wish the floor would just swallow you up. Perhaps yours was at the office Christmas party. But at On Call we like to go one better.…

It won't, not without its tentacles stuck into all manner of nicotine alternatives Comment The world just might not be ready for a major tobacco company unveiling a campaign to get all its customers to quit smoking. "Staggering hypocrisy," cried Cancer Research UK responding to Philip Morris International's four-page ad in the UK's Daily Mirror in October. "If Philip Morris really want to help people stop smoking, the best thing they could do is stop making cigarettes. But that's not going to happen."…

Data protection has never had a higher profile If dictionaries awarded an acronym of the year as well as a word, we'd put our money on it being GDPR.…

Compiling lists of dodgy browsing is all fun and games until the audit team comes along Who, Me? As your Vultures are off fighting over the remains of the Christmas dinner, we've lined up a feast of a different nature: a bonus instalment of Who, Me?…

The Vulture picks over the remnants of January to June It seems a lifetime (or two Windows 10 releases) ago, but 2018 started with Microsoft, and other software vendors, staring down the twin barrels of Spectre and Meltdown.…

We won't need security experts when there's no security left Something for the Weekend, Sir? I want to be your backdoor man. Or so asserted Robert Plant at the end of Whole Lotta Love. Hey ho.…

It is 50 years since Apollo 8 took the first humans to the moon Fifty years ago today, Apollo 8 carried the first humans into orbit around the Moon, ushering in a short-lived period of crewed lunar exploration.…

And no one will ever know... until now, that is Who, Me? Ho ho ho! It may be Christmas Eve but Who, Me? stops for no festive season.…

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight... Walking in a storage wonderland Roundup 2018 wasn't too shabby for storage as the three-pronged attack of IoT edge, AI and multi-cloud defeated notions of the public cloud eating on-premises storage. Revenues also rose, capacities increased and latencies dived to boot.…

Some last-minute wrapping of security-related tips from this week Roundup If you're reading this while on-call for IT support, network security, or what have you, then we salute you. If you're reading this to avoid Christmas present wrapping or hobnobbing with awkward relatives, or similar, then, well, let us shake your hand.…

It was The Reg wot won it? Logitech has backed down from screwing over its smart home Harmony Hub loyalists after an outpouring of anger from customers.…

Yes, apparently, that can actually happen The CEO of a Silicon Valley startup has been jailed for three years, and fined $1.5m, for defrauding investors in his gift-card app business.…

No phones for the sans-culottes? It's an interesting strategy Comment People participating in the so-called gilets jaunes* populist protests in France looted an Apple Store in Bordeaux earlier this month – taking care to snaffle the high-tech bling before trashing the place.…

O2 presses on with Chinese supplier Mobile network operators have reportedly said that tearing up their contracts with Huawei would set Britain's 5G back "by nine months to a year" – so they're ploughing on despite pressure.…

Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo together shipped more in 2018 Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo collectively shipped more servers this year than either Dell or HPE, according to research outfit DRAMeXchange.…

Hands off our 'leccy cars The EU yesterday escalated its complaint to the World Trade Organization that China "forces" Western companies to surrender valuable intellectual property (IP) as part of doing business there.…

Let them eat cache Dell EMC wants us to understand that it's going to provide PowerMax with its idea of storage-class memory (SCM), and that means more than a fast cache.…

Grab your pitchfork, the Breunion Boys are headed for a pub near you If UK MPs hoped to get through Christmas recess without mention of the "B" word, they're shit out of luck because a Dutch boyband has dropped the hottest and only pro-EU earworm of the year.…

Strange tale leaves 120k bods displaced during Xmas rush London Gatwick Airport has reopened after closing for more than a day due to a seemingly deliberate drone disruption ploy – but police still haven't caught the perpetrators.…

The previous Saturn V didn't go so well, but you guys will be fine. Trust us Fifty years ago today, the third Apollo crew were strapped into a capsule perched atop the third Saturn V to undertake a journey to the Moon.…

Ofcom proposes shakeup of spectrum bidding process Some technologies lurking under the 5G umbrella promise to reshape the entire communications sector, creating new uses and businesses we can't imagine today. Ofcom showed it was hip to a few of these this week with a radical new way of opening up the airwaves.…

Moral of the story: It's never going to be 'fine' On Call Welcome back to On Call, where you get to take a breather and enjoy tales of tech support adversity from your peers.…

Art software maker snaps up virtualization tool for people who hate Qemu, Oracle VirtualBox that much When Corel CEO Patrick Nichols asked for Parallels for Christmas, we hope he meant the whole company rather than a copy of the desktop virtualization tool. Because that's what he got. The whole thing.…

Export ban compliance turns into geo-location gaffe fest Following changes in the way it figures out where people are located, US-based Slack informed an undisclosed number of individuals this week that they're no longer welcome on the chat app, due to America's export controls and sanctions.…

Just human error, internet giant shrugs after GDPR request went wrong. No sh!t, Sherlock A German man was very confused when he received, at his request, all the information that Amazon possessed on him.…

Courts crack down on Cupertino idiot-tax operation as tech patent war explodes The iPhone has been removed from sale in Germany after a Munich court issued an injunction against Apple amid its ongoing patent fight with Qualcomm.…

Pair on cyber-espionage rap, HPE, IBM and their clients said to be among those hit Two men, linked to the Chinese government, stand accused of hacking cloud giants, aerospace and defense companies, chip designers, US government agencies – including the Navy – and other organizations globally.…

Risk of causing even more embuggerance is high, we repeat: high Comment As the Gatwick drones chaos rolls on, with the airport now set to reopen at 8pm UK time at the earliest*, many people have been asking a simple question: why the hell can't the authorities just shoot down the offending drones?…

Adtech monolith had won previous High Court fight against NT1 Google has settled a legal case brought against it by a convicted criminal who wanted the adtech company to delete embarrassing search results about his criminal past.…

Dell tech (EMC and VMware) utterly dominate with Nutanix following HPE, Cisco, and NetApp are grabbing at the tail end of a fast-growing converged-slash-hyper-converged market that is utterly dominated by Dell's EMC and VMware businesses and HCI specialist Nutanix.…

Dara and pals told to hand over yet another cash wodge for hack it spent $100k covering up Uber has been slapped with a €400,000 fine by the French data protection agency for the hack that exposed the data of 57 million users.…