The Register

It works for now because the forgeries are quite easy to spot The rise of AI systems that can generate fake images and videos has spurred researchers in the US to develop a technique to sniff out these cyber-shams, also known as deepfakes.…

Kernel release candidate adds support for two Chinese CPU families... will these be the final new CPU archs? The new, improved, and chilled-out Linus Torvalds emitted the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.20 over the weekend.…

Hundreds gone from Switchzilla's Customers Experience division Exclusive Cisco has confirmed to The Register that it has launched a round of layoffs, slashing its Customer EXperience team, after some affected staff got in touch with us.…

Switchzilla's Customer Experience division experiences brunt of HR's 'limited restructuring' Exclusive Cisco has confirmed to The Register it launched a round of layoffs on Monday, effectively slashing its Customer Experience (CX) team, after insiders alerted us to the cuts.…

Beam would light up planets, lead furious ETs back to Earth Space agencies and private citizens spend millions of dollars and countless hours hunting for signs of extraterrestrial life. Yet, there may be an easier way to find intelligent civilizations, according to a pair of researchers from MIT in the US.…

No spittin', no cussin', either, Cali judge rules America's trade watchdog's case against network device maker D-Link will go ahead next January – after a district judge rebuked the two sides for wasting money drawing up and filing demands for summary judgments.…

Caucasian employees allege pattern of unfair treatment at Indian IT consultancy giant India-based IT outsourcing biz Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will finally face trial over claims that the company discriminated against workers at US facilities who were not from South Asia.…

And Apple fixes Watch-killing security patch of its own Google today pushed out the November edition of its monthly Android security updates, giving carriers and device makers a fresh set of patches to install. Fingers cross the patches are rolled out to you ASAP.…

Why can't we all go back to being nice to each other, like in the Usenet and IRC days, er, wait... Comment The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is warning about the death of the web again, and urging people to come together to make the internet all nice and lovely.…

Security experts frantically facepalming at stupid design Fundamental flaws in the encryption system used by popular solid-state drives (SSDs) can be exploited by miscreants to easily decrypt data, once they've got their hands on the equipment.…

Enough with the abusive ads, says ad-dependent biz After the failure of last year's abusive web ad clampdown, Google will next month cut off revenue for websites that flout its rules against malicious adverts.…

Enough with the abusive ads, says ad-dependent biz After the failure of last year's abusive web ad clampdown, Google will next month cut off revenue for websites that flout its rules against malicious adverts.…

Even America's top court is bored of 'open internet' legal shenanigans The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge to the net neutrality rules that were introduced in 2015, and which have since been rescinded.…

Home of McAfee and SonicWall slurps app security testing biz from Broadcom Thomas Bravo – private equity owner of McAfee and Barracuda Networks – has slurped cloudy application security testing biz Veracode Software, a division of Broadcom, for $950m in cash.…

Home of McAfee and SonicWall slurps app security testing biz from Broadcom Thoma Bravo – private equity owner of McAfee and Barracuda Networks – has slurped cloudy application security testing biz Veracode Software, a division of Broadcom, for $950m in cash.…

Whether you Periphery Under Cell or Core Over Periphery, it all means smaller chips SK Hynix has finished work on a 512 Gbit, 96-layer, 3D NAND chip with 1Tbit, and 3bits/cell (TLC) and 4bits/cell (QLC) coming later.…

Eleven areas will require people to prove identity in advance or on the day The government is to expand its controversial voter ID trials in next year’s local elections.…

Is Emmental? Probably a bit One Swiss chap hopes to get his rock and rollright by playing music to cheese to see if that makes it taste better.…

3.5 million fewer units shipped worldwide on Q3 Fewer and fewer people want to fondle a new slab these days with just 36.4 million units shipped worldwide during Q3.…

Don't want to consent? Law would allow firms to charge for access to products, services Company bosses could be thrown in jail for up to 20 years if they aren't straight with US regulators about privacy violations under a law drafted by senator Ron Wyden.…

Son of Gemini Planet Computers, creator of the Gemini PDA, has pulled the covers off its next-generation device – the Cosmo Communicator.…

Quantum boffinry, SS7 acquisition, Arista results Roundup Nokia this week announced an SDN-based open optical transport management suite of products for optical transport management, WaveSuite.…

Do you have a service, Heart, or is that web blackout all there is today? Webs will wobble and frequently fall down, but it is the way that cloud or hosting providers manage this that sets them apart. On this Monday morning, Heart Internet isn't distinguishing itself from the great and good in a positive way.…

Raise your security expertise to a new level Promo Information security training specialist SANS promises that its fourth European Security Awareness Summit will be its biggest yet.…

Everyone loves a manic pixel dream swirl Deep learning has become the go-to "AI" technique for image recognition and classification. It has reached a stage where a programmer doesn't even have to create their own models, thanks to a large number available off the shelf, pre-trained and ready for download.…

Jason Zander on cloud native, Red Hat, and figuring out open source Interview A curious feature of Microsoft's cloud platform is that it has two fundamentally different platforms for microservices. One is based on the homegrown Service Fabric, while the other is orchestrated by the Google-originated Kubernetes, available on Azure through the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Both are open source.…

Fire! Fire! Oh, er, maybe not... Who, Me? Welcome to the latest instalment of Who, Me?, our weekly confessional column in which Reg readers share their tales of historic face-palms.…

You broke it, you pay for it, one way or another Comment Trust the hybrid cloud, service providers tell us – they are, apparently, the experts. But when outages occur, and when data or virtual instances are lost or become unavailable, the impact is profound.…

The AP does not stand for 'AMD P**-off' In brief Intel will today talk up two new Xeon processor family members: Cascade Lake Advanced Performance (AP), and the E-2100.…

RCL chief David Levy is member of ACE2018 committee David Levy, one of the players in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ scandal in the UK, has reappeared in the news – in connection with a gaming and design tech conference that invited notorious alt-right firebrand Steve Bannon to be its keynote speaker.…

Make sure you're spending your hard-earned cash on the 'right' IT security Comment One of the unpleasant developments of the last decade has been the speed with which IT security threats, once aimed mainly at large enterprises, have spread to SMBs – small and medium businesses.…

OpenAI builds curious bots and Nvidia's on the lookout for fresh ML talent Roundup Hello, here’s this week's dose of AI news. Google has promised to throw more money at AI research that benefits society, OpenAI developed a new technique to get bots to be more curious, and Nvidia has launched its own AI Research Residency Program.…

Plus, SystemD gets system de-bugged, again Roundup This week there were Hacked Home Hubs, buggered BBC Bits, and PortSmash privilege punch-ups.…

Here's our Top Ten pick of the best of Brits Poll This week the Bank of England said it was going to put a famous boffin on a new polymer £50 note, and has decided to ask the public who it should be.…

Chipzilla joins strangely controversial movement to encourage civility, inclusion Chip maker Intel has embraced guidelines to make its open-source software projects more open-minded and inviting.…

First it was the Kepler telescope, and now Dawnie has kicked the bucket too NASA’s Dawn space probe, our visitor to the Solar System’s protoplanets Vesta and Ceres, is cold and dead.…

Uncle Sam's snoops got sloppy with online chat, it seems Iran apparently infiltrated the communications network of CIA agents who allowed their secret websites, used to exchange messages with informants, to be crawled by Google.…

Malware already on machines can exploit SMT using side-channel techniques to snatch private info Brainiacs in Cuba and Finland have found a new side-channel vulnerability in Intel x64 processors that could allow an attacker to sniff out cryptographic keys and other privileged information.…

Freeze on renewal, base costs lifted so we all pay a bit more The planet's 138 million dot-com addresses are going to get significantly more expensive to renew over the next decade thanks to a contract signed between dot-com operator Verisign and the US government.…

Registrar apologies as punters wait for spam tsunami Domain name registrar EasyDNS has 'fessed up to accidentally leaking cloaked contact details for about 1,500 domain owners in Whois query results for just over 24 hours.…

Microsoft hammers the final nail into 7's coffin It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Skype Classic née 7, which tottered into the sunset on 1 November 2018.…

Phone makers banking more revenue – but for how long? The smartphone biz is now in a slump, according to two number-crunching outfits.…

Suffice to say, it's not quite Tupac or Freddie Mercury Higher education has become a commercial market as students paying extortionate tuition fees demand more bang for their buck – so Imperial College London has decided to throw some holograms at them.…

China is 'remaking the world in its techno-dystopian image' Internet freedoms have taken a nose dive for the eighth year running, according to a report warning that authoritarian countries and populist leaders are exporting harmful attitudes and ideas around the world.…

So we're ok to launch a crew in December, right? Er, guys? The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has completed its investigation into October’s Soyuz mishap in record time, pointing the finger of blame at problems during assembly.…

100TB by 2025/26? Bring it on Seagate has set a course to deliver a 48TB disk drive in 2023 using its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, doubling areal density every 30 months, meaning 100TB could be possible by 2025/26.…

Just 11.52% on pretax profit. Virtualization juggernaut doing well in the distie stakes Trendy social media firms and ad slingers often come under attack for hiring beanies to minimise their tax contribution, something they see as sensible commercial practice. VMware UK may fall into that bracket too.…

Thanks, Apple. Seriously Well, that didn't take long. Owners of new iPhones can now download an app and stick some data and minutes on the second SIM that Apple has thoughtfully included, allowing cheap calls and roaming data that your main SIM provider might not include.…

Will arrival of Hare accelerate tortoise-like performance? With its year-end results looming, Sage Group has confirmed the ascension of chief bean-counter, Steve Hare, to the lofty heights of chief executive officer.…

Carl takes his chances in Delaware chancery In a move that probably caught nobody by surprise, corporate raider Carl Icahn has launched a lawsuit to block Dell's proposed purchase of V-class shares – stock known by the ticker DVMT.…