The Register

Aw heck. Put away the party poppers. The storage is soldered to the board The once humble Mac Mini has received the iFixit treatment following its long overdue 2018 refresh, and the verdict? The dinky box might just be the most repairable machine in the whole line-up.…

Plus: Burned by licence issues? ReactOS promises a retro world with no activation servers Windows 10 Autumnwatch continued this week as licences got tossed on the bonfire and then hastily retrieved while Santa’s elves wondered what to install on their Arm laptops.…

Electronic fingerprints put in verifiable ledger Seagate and IBM are using IBM's blockchain tech to verify a disk drive's authenticity using its electronic fingerprint.…

Everything within reach on oversized phones Samsung has embarked on a tasteful overhaul of how its phones look and work.…

Oh, and IETF standards got sloshed this week Roundup Cisco admins, you thought your week was over, right? Sorry: if you have kit that runs Adaptive Security Appliance software or the Firepower Extensible Operating System, there's one more item on the task list: updating your certificate.…

Physicians call for increased use of tech for outpatients in England The pressures the NHS in England and Wales is under, with creaking IT systems that aren't fit for purpose but which are facing the increasing tightening of purse-strings, have been laid bare in two reports.…

And the chairman is Not Happy At All about that The times, they are a-changin’ at flailing ZX Spectrum reboot biz Retro Computers Ltd as two of the firm’s original directors have rejoined it – with a furious chairman insisting this is “illegal”.…

Strengthen your defences against marauding data thieves Promo The internet is full of powerful hacking tools and the cyber criminals are devising ever more ingenious ways of using them. Keeping abreast of their latest tactics and techniques is more vital than ever for those defending their organisations against ever-present threats.…

Net metrics collectors ping performance pain points in a multi-cloud world Sending packets from Singapore to Mumbai over AWS? Fetch a coffee, the latency is horrible – according to cloud performance data released yesterday.…

'Size isn't everything, it's how you decorate it' Yeah, yeah, "It's November, I don't want to hear the C word until the 24th of December" and so on – tell that to the denizens of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, who have been left feeling cold after the arguably premature erection of the town's Christmas tree.…

Fear not, Apple fanbois, they're also running Macintosh Boatnotes The Royal Navy is running Windows ME – and XP, and even an early version of Apple Macintosh. But all is not as alarmingly obsolete as it may appear.…

Particularly when those projects overrun and overspend Slicing police funding to inject cash into national programmes – a big chunk of which is funnelled into tech – might not be an effective use of public cash, and some projects face a cliff edge when funding runs out.…

Infosec's cool uncle says to hell with the carrot Any sort of lasting security standard in IoT devices may only happen if governments start doling out stiff penalties.…

Together, let us help the wolves regulate the sheep Sir Tim Berners-Lee is doing the dirty work of giant internet companies, according to critics who want to see governments lay down effective regulation – and not what they regard as a wishy-washy "Magna Carta".…

But no more Bradford Exchange collector plates, I beg you Something for the Weekend, Sir? Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Internal hard drives with dust, fluff and shit on. Bundles of CAT5 all tangled like string. These are some of my least favourite things.…

Father of Jenkins, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, talks Sun, software and secret sauce Interview The father of popular code pipeline Jenkins has big plans for its future while admitting that it owes its existence to his habit of introducing bugs to code.…

Wins biz the contract, and earns bottle of wine to boot On Call Have you got that Friday feeling? Well, you should, because it's just hours away from the weekend and we've got another great Reg reader story in this week's On Call.…

Our gentle introduction to mixing on- and off-prem kit Backgrounder Where once it was public, now hybrid cloud is the future – and by hybrid, we mean a mix of public and private. Virtualised, elastic, and on-demand resources hosted by someone else combined with on-premises infrastructure.…

Beijing Institute of Technology launches a new programme to further defense interests A top Chinese university has recruited a select group of whizkids straight from high school to develop new AI weapons.…

Luckily no one else spotted flaw before we did, say infosec bods who reported vuln Chinese drone giant DJI has fixed a critical security hole that left its customer account data and quadcopter videos potentially up for grabs.…

I liked it so much, I bought the company – and fired 40 per cent, 2,000, of its US staff Broadcom has confirmed to The Register that staff have been axed in its just-acquired CA Technologies business, though declined to reveal numbers.…

IBM's latest tape drives make 2EB-plus library feasible Spectra Logic's TFinity ExaScale tape library can store more than 2EB of compressed data, 2,000 petabytes-plus, using IBM's latest TS1160 tape drives and JE cartridges, double what it could store before.…

Everything little thing Xi does is magic, everything Xi do just turns me intrusion alarms on Three years after the governments of America and China agreed not to hack corporations in each other's countries, experts say Beijing is now back to its old ways.…

Brace for cost, job cutting in the aftermath Network infrastructure giant CommScope has decided to buy some growth, shelling out US$7.4bn (£5.67bn) for broadband and video gear slinger Arris International.…

Don't mess with second-hand tome peddlers Amazon has backed down from a growing dispute with secondhand booksellers, in an almost unprecedented act of reasonable behavior from the online behemoth.…

Mega-hacks nudge Congress to consider privacy standard The rash of high-profile IT security breaches, data thefts, and other hacks that have erupted over the last year or so may push US legislators to consider laws similar to Europe's privacy-protecting GDPR.…

Net neutrality probe finds it's not the end of the world, though Analysis US cellphone networks are all throttling video to some extent, providing lower-quality stream to their customers, and some are purposefully undermining Skype as an alternative to their services.…

Meanwhile, SpaceX forges ahead with BFR, pretty chill A third Soyuz was successfully launched yesterday, effectively clearing the way for crewed operations to resume, while the results of the US midterms may have unfortunate consequences for NASA.…

CEO apologizes following mass walkout by Googlers, then bungles justification for censored Chinese search Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday announced internal policy changes in an attempt to address employee demands. This comes after thousands of Googlers walked out last week over executives' handling of sex pests and sexual assault within the ad giant.…

Watchdog tells manufacturers to reveal what they slurp on tots Connected toy makers should make clear what data they slurp up, the UK's Office of the Children's Commissioner has said in a report warning of the long-term impact of amassing data on kids.…

Full teardown necessary should butterfly keyboard need service The team at iFixit took a screwdriver set to Apple's refreshed MacBook Air and found it a step in the right direction for repairability.…

Mixing up on-premises and cloudy containers Networking giant Cisco has opened the corporate kimono to reveal tech that manages its on-premises Kubernetes environment and AWS's cloudy version in a single product.…

How much? They won't say – but they now have a board seat The Abu Dhabi government has taken a minority stake in alternative Brit broadband bods Hyperoptic through its state-run investment firm.…

They're heeeeeeeeeeeeere The most disruptive – if you pardon the cliché – newcomer to the UK phone market in years has finally launched. Xiaomi's first three devices will be sold by Argos, Currys, John Lewis, operator Three, Carphone and Amazon from tomorrow, the firm said.…

Version 2.1 of Docker Enterprise brings Windows App Migration Program Docker on Thursday plans to introduce a Windows Server Application Migration program with the release of Docker Enterprise 2.1.…

Oh, and Gartner publishes spending prognosis for life after the EU Systems integrator CGI has warned that British customers are starting to put their tech purchases on ice as the Brexit looms into view, but that doesn't mean it won't be able to exploit the situation.…

Software-defined, hybrid cloud components, sold as-a-service that's delivered on-prem? WTF? VMware and Lenovo intend to run beta tests of Project Dimension from next month – think of it as VMware's infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that runs on a customer's data centre on-premises and at edge locations.…

Microsoft co-founder's gift from beyond the grave The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has added new features to its academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, to make it easier for professionals and plebs to understand and advance research.…

Critical bugs patched in switches, messaging, analytics Cisco this week patched critical vulnerabilities in its switches, Stealthwatch, and Unity voice messaging system. Oh, and 'fessed up that it accidentally shipped software that included in-house-developed exploit code for attacking Linux systems via the Dirty COW flaw.…

Brexitary Dominic Raab bullish about adequacy – because everything's going sooo well Brexit secretary Dominic Raab has claimed businesses need to do "very little" to ensure data flows after March – despite official advice that they should start drafting new contracts in case of no deal Brexit.…

*squints* Well, it's flexible. It's a, er, thing. It's... New products are traditionally developed in darkness – but rarely launched in darkness too. Samsung yesterday turned the auditorium lights way down before "revealing" its first Foldable Thing. This Foldable Thing was brandished in a Samsung executive's hand – some distance from spectators. And you couldn't get any nearer.…

It's all so unProfessional Updated Microsoft's activation servers appear to be on the blink this morning – some Windows 10 users woke up to find their Pro systems have, er, gone Home.…

The future's... made of ... virtual insanity Hutchison's Three UK has detailed an ambitious network and IT overhaul as it paves the ground for 5G.…

Austin Thompson, 23, cops to $95,000 worth of damage The man accused over DDoS-bombing several online games hosts in 2013 and 2014 has entered a guilty plea under a deal with US authorities.…

It looks like you're trying to run a rail service. Do you want some help with that? Window admins rejoice! It isn’t just you that can’t get Office 2010 to uninstall silently. The mighty brains behind the UK railways have had just as much trouble.…

MP falls for PC support scam While fraudsters traditionally prey on the gullible and feeble-minded, their wicked ways have ensnared British Labour MP Diane Abbott.…

'Lesser-known' names escape public scrutiny, claims Privacy International Privacy International (PI) has filed complaints of "systematic infringements" of data protection law by seven info-sucking companies that it says find it too easy to fly under the radar.…

Look out for traffic to and from these IP addresses and ports Once again, a hundred thousand or more home routers have been press-ganged into a spam-spewing botnet, this time via Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).…

FAB, Lady Penelope NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has kept its cool, successfully surviving sweltering temperatures to reach its first close encounter with the Sun, coming within 15 million miles of the solar surface.…

The good news? Nobody appears to have lost any Bitcoin, says Gate.io This week's hijacking of StatCounter's JavaScript to swipe Bitcoins from a crypto-coin exchange was the result of a web cache poisoning attack, apparently.…