The Register

Needs manpower, bags of time, full knowledge of target Analysis A group of infosec researchers have uncovered neat ways to track a phone's location via 4G or 5G. However, the mechanics of the surveillance, while fascinating, are difficult to pull off for all but the most determined foe.…

Businesses as well as ordinary punters hit by viral nasties Antisocial media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube aren't merely inciting hatred, enabling discrimination, driving content moderators to the brink, and showing kids how to commit suicide. They're also making cybercrime more practical and profitable, at the expense of law-abiding internet users.…

And it makes you look silly MWC Hands On There are a couple of reasons why air gesture interfaces haven't taken off – they make you look silly, and they're hard for phone makers to get right.…

Yep, they look at that data, and the fix is in the hands of another company Windows Insiders chief Dona Sarkar has taken to Twitter to explain what's taking the Slow Ring version of Windows 10 so long: It's all about the gamers, apparently.…

Just one tier of cheap deduped accelerated flash Startup VAST Data lifted the lid on its secret storage sauce today, revealing cheap, exabyte-level scale out flash arrays sped by Optane SSDs – which it hopes will persuade users to load up their on-premises spinning rust in the 'barrow and wheel it to the tip.…

UK.gov agency dangles £120k salary to rid itself of legacy tech The UK's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is on the lookout for a new CTO to pick up the reins of its modernisatiom agenda.…

Billionaire investor says he was burnt by IBM – but is 'amazed' at Amazon's rise Warren Buffett has told the world he was behind Berkshire Hathaway's decision to ditch its £2.1bn Oracle stake – just a quarter after buying it – because he felt he didn't understand where cloud computing is headed.…

Regulator says 'inaccurate' claims go against 2018 settlement Elon Musk should be held in contempt of court, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has told a New York federal court after Tesla's mouthy CEO tweeted about the number of cars the company will roll out this year.…

It looks like you want to increase your lethality. Do you want some help with that? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to employees' concerns over the company's decision to flog its HoloLens tech to the US military.…

This one gets everything right MWC Hands On Five years ago, LG, Sony and HTC roamed the Earth like all-conquering warlords. But then the engines of the Chinese manufacturing economy cranked up, and thanks to the gift of Android that Google gave them, Huawei and OnePlus stole much of their thunder. And market share.…

Direct-to-memory attacks now account for 57 per cent of hacks, apparently A company's internal network, once compromised, is now more likely to be ransacked by automated scripts than a piece of malware.…

Reg sees reports on IT chief investigation Exclusive The UN's patent body has finally fired chief information officer and one-time whistleblower Wei Lei after claiming a probe found evidence of criminal misconduct, a point still contested by the ex-staffer.…

NAND great. It's going to get worse this quarter DRAM supplier revenues plunged in the final quarter of 2018, as have those of NAND suppliers, with both quantity shipped and prices paid dropping, industry analyst DRAMeXChange said.…

Firm 'sought to abuse privileges limited liability offers' – insolvency bod A Leicester-based IT supplier has been closed down after it carried on the work of two companies that courts said had traded in an improper manner.…

Infosec bods spot IBM SoftLayer not wiping down BMC flash memory after use Cloud providers renting out bare-metal servers must make sure they scrub every last byte of writable storage on their boxes between deployments, infosec outfit Eclypsium has urged. Otherwise, malicious customers could stash malware in motherboard flash memory that activates when the next user of a machine powers it up.…

Tech giants under fire? Hold my beer, says Big Blue as it spins up race slur recruitment websites Exclusive IBM has apologized after its recruitment webpages asked applicants whether their ethnicity was, among other options, the racial slurs Yellow and Mulatto.…

Networks may be late, but handsets are here MWC Analysis 5G may buck the trend set by the first three generations of digital cellular technology, and actually offer punters a broad range of mobiles when the networks go live. This time it's the networks that may be buggy and late, not the handsets.…

Just 90 seconds, it's claimed, provided a) you have 512 Nvidia V100 GPUs and b) er, no need for accuracy The shortest time for training a neural network using the popular ImageNet dataset has been slashed again, it is claimed, from the previously held record of four minutes to just one and a half.…

Hint: It's something to do with a new California law Analysis After years of fighting to prevent any form of legislation that would safeguard Americans' online privacy, this week Congress will have two hearings on the topic during which the tech industry will outline its newfound love for laws covering its business.…

Lawsuits fly as sandwich shop chain grills ex-programmers, system analyst If you were to list the top five reasons why sandwich shop chain Panera has been so successful, with over 2,000 bakeries across the US and Canada, it's unlikely that its IT team would make the cut.…

CEO of embattled biz tells The Reg: 'Docker Enterprise continues to be our main focus' Exclusive Docker has been unable to contain itself.…

Red scare reaches new heights as intel committee urges further crackdown on network-connected gear Equipment made by Chinese electronics giant Huawei could be torn out of America's electrical grid, if US senators get their way.…

Microsoft: 20 billion connected devices by 2020. Voda, Arm: How about 1 trillion by 2035? While HoloLens 2 took center stage at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft sneaked out some intriguing Azure Internet-of-Things news aimed at dealing with connectivity challenges in remote areas.…

Times are strange when spies talk about infosec and economics colliding The world must "understand the opportunities and threats from China's technological offer", GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said today as he observed that there are "no clear norms or behaviours" for state-on-state cyber-squabbling.…

Microsoft: don't mention the 'C' word, but you can have it at a discount if you're in the military MWC Sometimes you have to feel for Microsoft. Even though it failed to keep a lid on HoloLens 2 leaks, the arrival of the Azure Kinect was a surprise. Unless you’d sat through the keynote at last year’s Build, of course.…

If you lose, get your cheque book out, High Court judge rules amid two-year legal battle A millionaire barrister who started a crowdfunded lawsuit against taxi app maker Uber over a £1 VAT receipt has lost his attempt to stop Uber claiming legal costs against him.…

ICO slams 'neither confirm nor deny' tactics as unlawful The UK's data watchdog has reportedly asked two government departments and a Kent Brexit planning group to rethink advice given to local councils on how to handle Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.…

Plus: Up close and personal with Ultima Thule and Fregat saves the day Roundup Scientists sharpened their view of Ultima Thule last week, while three more space Virgins popped their commercial astro cherries aboard SpaceShipTwo and Elon Musk revealed the fate he has in store for last week's Falcon 9.…

Cloud-to-cloud interoperability with Microsoft, more vendors to come MWC Germany's big name in back-office tech announced a suite of IoT capabilities in its SAP Leonardo toolkit at Euro mobility gabfest Mobile World Congress.…

Plus, hackers say your Facebook account is worth roughly a tall coffee Roundup Last week, the security world saw Adobe take a do-over, Cisco clean up some bugs and the NCC head out to space.…

From California state regs to Europe's GDPR: It's all just a 'veneer of protection' Much-lauded privacy laws risk being undermined as compliance is outsourced to tech vendors and "toothless trainings, audits and paper trails" are confused for genuine protections, a New York Law School professor has said.…

Pick a card, any card: Micron's or SanDisk's ... but it'll cost you £££ MWC Micron and WD's SanDisk both dropped the veil on massive memory cards for your mobile at Barcelona's phone confab this morning: specifically, the little beggars are stuffed with a terabyte of storage.…

Three aboard Boeing freighter killed after mystery plummet Three people were killed when an Amazon Prime Air-branded cargo flight crashed near Houston, Texas, on Saturday afternoon.…

New kit runs a bit faster, costs less MWC Huawei's impressive business laptops are now a bit more affordable. The burgeoning PC giant is bringing MateBook X features to a new lower-priced range announced on Sunday at Mobile World Congress.…

Plus: Windows Mixed Reality sulks in kitchen while HoloLens 2 hogs limelight Roundup While the Microsoft team were setting up shop at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress (and frantically plugging HoloLens 2 leaks), things continued apace back in Redmond.…

Five shiny lenses at a sensible price MWC HMD Global's Nokia business has been puttering about with Android for a couple of years now, respectably rather than spectacularly, trading largely on the goodwill of the brand. The Nokia 9 PureView, unveiled on Sunday in Barcelona, tries to change that, recapturing some of the premium market.…

Big speakers, big venue….small prices Events Our early bird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle finishes this week, so if you want save £100s AND learn from some of the finest in DevOps, Containers, Continuous Delivery and Serverless, the time to act is now.…

This may be proof that ET doesn't need the same DNA chemicals we need Scientists say they have crafted a semi-synthetic DNA and RNA molecular system that is able to usefully store genetic information. It's hoped that alien lifeforms exist out there with similar exotic biological structures.…

But at around £2,000, you might want to wait MWC Huawei's foldable phone made its debut at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, and it's the most impressive attempt yet at creating a new consumer device category: the phone that becomes a tablet.…

Also, DeepMind published new code to help train agents play football Roundup It's Monday. It's a new week. The coffee's on. The hangover's over. Let's brighten your morning with some developments from the world of machine learning.…

We'd like to Azure you, mixed reality has a business application MWC With mixed reality in danger or becoming the cold fusion of technology hypes (i.e. it never arrives), Microsoft has reminded everyone it has built up a significant body of practical know-how at MWC this week.…

Ah yes, that cheque, just make it out to a Mr Stonking C*ck Who, Me? Good Monday morning, dear Reg readers. If you were faced with doing overtime this weekend, rather than going out for beers, this episode of Who, Me? might be right up your street.…

Processor designer says he's right about one thing: The need for end-to-end dev platforms Linux kernel king Linus Torvalds this week dismissed cross-platform efforts to support his contention that Arm-compatible processors will never dominate the server market.…

Contrarian command-in-chief tweets, world scratches head Comment President Donald Trump appears to have undermined an increasingly aggressive push by the US government and telcos to pressure the world to shun Chinese equipment in next-generation 5G networks.…

Nothing like a little reminder of who's really in charge The chairman of a US Senate committee mulling privacy protections will be thrown a reelection fundraiser by, er, the privacy-trampling telecoms industry literally the day before a key hearing.…

Hard drives not included, for obvious reasons Fancy owning a piece of Silicon Valley history? Hundreds of PCs, notebooks, and monitors used by infamous biotech cluster-fuck-up Theranos are set to be sold off following the $10bn-peak-valued biz's collapse.…

Profitable secure SIM firm in the bag by March, Thales hopes French defence tech conglomerate Thales has flogged off its hardware security module biz nCipher Security, a sale demanded by competition regulators over Thales' buyout of Gemalto.…

Confusion not severe enough to stop $60m Series E round Redis Labs has jettisoned the Commons Clause software licence introduced last year for its Redis Modules, saying the earlier change had left some users "confused."…

Asteroid bits collected. Next step, to hadouken a crater Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has successfully collected a sample from the surface of asteroid Ryugu following a careful descent last night.…

Speak up and you might recover some of that £513k People who paid for one of the infamous ZX Spectrum Vega+ handheld game consoles are being urged to register themselves as creditors of the company before a liquidator is appointed.…