The Register

Vodafone blesses Birmingham New Street station with amazing network tech of far-flung future Vodafone has proclaimed Birmingham New Street as the UK's first railway station to have 5G connectivity. There's just one minor problem – the lack of actual 5G devices necessary to use it.…

Body plans to stick data experts on cancer, mental health teams The NHS has named the overlord of its digital health quango and talked up plans to put data specialists on cancer and mental health policy teams as tech support.…

Microsoft's latest update for its ageing OS due to hit Soon™ The Windows 10 May 2019 Update is inbound, but not before it has spent a bit more time in the hands of testers excluded from the disastrous October 2018 Update.…

Vaccination GOOD. Spread of easily preventable illness BAD An oddly specific health warning has confirmed a case of measles in the Canadian capital of Ottawa – and patient zero is believed to have merrily sauntered through the offices of, er, antivirus maker Trend Micro.…

Hackers are raising their game. You need to do the same Promo Organisations can no longer afford to sit back and hope their security measures will protect them from determined and inventive adversaries who know how to get around most of today’s security and monitoring tools.…

No way you're never gonna shake me... Ooh darlin' cause you'll always be my baby Something for the Weekend, Sir? I fell in and out of love yesterday. It was a wild, stormy relationship that could never last, and it's only now by relating to you the sequence of events that I will feel ready to move on with my life.…

Hello everyone. We brought dip Quantum, like IBM Storwize, will be using a classic 2U, 24-bay chassis for its excursion into end-to-end NVMe array land, The Reg can reveal.…

Cops £145k fine for blabbing deets on 200 people Newham Council has been fined £145,000 after an employee sent out a mass email containing an unredacted version of the police database that ranks people's likelihood of gang-related violence.…

Radio enthusiasts argue signals must travel in the open, for the sake of national security Some people have been using ham radio frequencies for communication that's encrypted or difficult to decipher and others argue that's a threat to national security and a violation of the spirit and rules of amateur radio. Really, it's a fight over whether the amateur radio spectrum remains a hobbyist space or develops as a medium for data traffic.…

Another day, another user failing to figure out basic IT kit On Call The weekend is nearly upon us again, and there's just Friday between you and some cold, cold beers. Let's ease the transition with On Call, in which readers regale us with tales of well-solved tech conundrums.…

We talk to specialist chipmakers about binning the BUS and secrecy It seems the answer to every problem these days is artificial intelligence. Want to reduce traffic congestion? You need AI. Cut down on fake news? AI. Understand your business better? AI. Create next-generation sliced bread? AI.…

Solid small satellite where a year lasts for just two hours Astronomers have discovered an object that orbits dangerously close to its parent white dwarf star. It should have been crushed to death by the dying star’s gravitational pull, but has miraculously stayed intact somehow.…

Proposed bill would bring immediate sanctions for tampering with democracy The US Senate is mulling a bill that would call for sanctions on any country caught trying to hack or influence American elections.…

Pharmaceutical brand says no data lost in Winnti outbreak German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer says it has been hit by malware, possibly from China, but that none of its intellectual property has been accessed.…

Bigots, racists and haters rejoice! You are going to get bias out of the box Facebook has been taking a lot of stick over discrimination on its platform but a new paper suggests that the problems with the platform could go deeper.…

Addictive social media should be banned says man who just launched a his and hers Instagram account Opinion The game Fortnite should be banned, according to Britain's own Prince Harry, because it's "addictive" and "irresponsible."…

Top tech uni also dumps Huawei, refuses money from China, Russia, and Saudis The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says it will no longer work with ZTE or Huawei as part of a larger ban on doing business that have been accused of nefarious behavior.…

Plus, it’s now actually two hypervisors in one Open source hypervisor Xen has reached version 4.12, bringing major improvements in resource footprint and security, and revamped x86 architecture support.…

Toying with UI, burstin' bubbles Google has added some cosmetic changes to the second beta of this year's version of Android to go with the plumbing it introduced in the first beta.…

'Shadowy' data-sharing deals undermine public trust, says pressure group Frontline public sector workers have been urged to fight against backroom data-sharing deals as campaigners warn the British government wants to build a massive data set for automating immigration checks.…

Picking up slack from doomed Accenture IT contract i6 Outsourcing badass Capita has gulped down a tasty £13.2m morsel dished out by the Scottish Police Authority: namely, the deal for Police Scotland's Core Operational Solution (COS).…

Promised prelim investigation should be out this week Ethiopia's transport minister has said the national carrier's pilots were following published Boeing procedures immediately before the fatal crash of a 737 Max 8 in March, citing an unpublished government report.…

Software giant's Brit limb reaps pre-tax earnings of £137.5m Microsoft's UK operation has published its annual report for the year ending June 2018, which showed the company cracking the £2bn barrier in turnover but, er, paying a bit less tax than last year.…

And if it ain't that, it's hacked-off students firing out DDoSes British university admin folk are alarmingly easy to phish, according to an academic support body which claims a 100 per cent success rate "within two hours".…

Meanwhile, PlusNet and BT pay women more than blokes The UK arms of Civica, Huawei and Siemens all paid women about 40 per cent less than men in 2018-19, according to data submitted to the government.…

Analysts predict solid-state array revenue to overtake spinning rust and hybrid All-flash storage arrays are very fast, but their limited capacity and prohibitive cost has meant that, historically, they were not very popular in enterprise data centres. According to analysts, this is about to change.…

Tell your dad not to open the 'HMRC' Word doc promising a yuge refund As the tax year rolls over into 2019/20, cybercrims have started belching out phishing emails and tax-themed malware, according to infosec researchers.…

Trust th'wife to out them to cops You have in your possession a bulletproof vest, a firearm, and some beer. As the brews weave their magic, of course you have to make sure the armour works. Right?…

Tell the boss you're not slacking off – it's vital threat intelligence research A government survey of British businesses has praised those who read El Reg to keep up to date with security news – while claiming to have revealed that fewer firms have spotted cyber attacks against them over the past 12 months, when compared to last year.…

Ministry of Fun review likely to recommend happy shopping Huawei is girding itself for the results of a UK government review that could recommend telcos buy network equipment from different vendors.…

Schools told not to use it 'until further notice' Schools using Capita's information management system have been warned that there is an "incident" with its Spring release – just months after it 'fessed up to an issue with the same data-transfer mechanism in a previous release.…

Domestic hosts and servers are being used for major attacks, finds Bromium A collection of servers found in the US are responsible for some of the nation's biggest malware and phishing attacks.…

Brain-scanning boffins find no signals to differentiate real and spoofed speakers Human brains appear to be better at detecting fake images than fake voices, a distinction that bodes ill for security as voice spoofing technology becomes more effective and more accessible.…

A quick flash can light up the observable universe The photons streaming from mysterious gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic form of electromagnetic energy in the universe, break out from relativistic jets shooting out from dying supernova stars, according to the latest research.…

NASA and co confirm that Starliner won't be carrying crew until the end of the year Boeing's passenger spacecraft for deliveries to the International Space Station (ISS), already lagging behind SpaceX, has been delayed yet again.…

I see you're using adaptive algorithms. Step this way for some regulation please The US Food and Drug Administration has proposed a framework on how it might regulate medical devices that rely on AI and machine learning algorithms.…

Laid-off litigant must reveal source of damning document in age discrimination row IBM has demanded to the name of the person who leaked an internal document that appeared to show the company was deliberately targeting and firing older workers.…

App devs fail to lock down their databases, yet again The details of millions of Facebook accounts have been left ripe for harvesting thanks to a pair of careless developers.…

Rogue 'worker' processes can sneak in with elevated privileges at startup Apache HTTP Server has been given a patch to address a potentially serious elevation of privilege vulnerability.…

More research dosh and more legal immigrants please! The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has asked the government for “bold federal policies” that would enable it to maintain its grip on the world’s chip supply.…

Intel double-whammy: kit festooned with new Xeons Fujitsu has refreshed its entire x86 server portfolio, adding support for Optane DC persistent (aka non-volatile) memory from Intel, officially launched last night.…

But handle with care to dodge dominance of Google, Microsoft Schools have been told to increase their use of tech to ease the burden on teachers, better prepare their students for the world of work and bring kit into the 21st Century.…

Prospect cheers as members vote against telco's People Framework Members of the Prospect trade union at BT have voted overwhelmingly to reject the telco's so-called People Framework proposals to overhaul the pay and grading structure.…

Dell/VMware and Nutanix dominate, HPE best of the rest Number crunchers at IDC told the world this morning that international converged systems market revenue grew 14.8 per cent year-on-year to reach $4.15bn in the final quarter of 2018.…

19-year-old also accused of breaching sex offence order, money laundering The teenager who hacked TalkTalk three years ago has been hauled before court charged with computer misuse offences after allegedly amassing a Bitcoin fortune worth more than £300,000.…

US spy agency plans to award multibillion-dollar deal in 2021 The CIA is reportedly planning to award a multibillion-dollar contract to extend its cloud services for the intelligence community to more than one vendor by summer 2021.…

Increase in tax payout comes as UK.gov threatens digital sales tax on revenues Google's UK business paid £65.3m tax into the British government's coffers in its 2018 financial year, almost 40 per cent more than in the previous 12 months.…

MCubed call for papers extended Events We’ve extended call for papers for our MCubed conference to April 15, meaning you've still got time to tell us how you've made AI and machine learning work in your organisation.…

Gulps down firm for undisclosed number of kronor All-flash array supplier Pure Storage has bought Compuverde, a Swedish scale-out filer software business, giving it an entrée into the classic file storage market.…

Expanding its vendor-agnostic support service in the UK Data centre maintenance giant Park Place Technologies has gobbled MCSA Group, a British IT services business headquartered in High Wycombe.…