The Register

A dubious slider and a bargain midranger. Forgotten the chocolates? We'll warn you now: Danger! BBK Electronics brings its Oppo phones to Blighty today, meaning all three Chinese phone giants are now officially competing for Brits' affections.…

Big Red is red, underpaid staffers are blue. No angry counter-claims can stop that being true The Department of Labor has hit back at Oracle's "inflammatory" accusations that it set up a "secret" pact with plaintiffs in a civil case, saying the company is trying to deflect from serious issues of bias.…

Cheap Google mobes this year, at least according to Nikkei Long-rumoured cheaper Google phones will make their debut this year, according to Nikkei, which claims to have an idea of how much (or how little) they'll cost.…

Roses are red, gave Violet pick 'n' mix. She didn't like the milk bottles. Now back to ethics The UK's advisory body for biometrics and forensics ethics has had another chunk of oversight added to its already laden basket – instructing the Home Office on ethical issues in large, complex data sets.…

CLL 19 early bird tickets disappear in two weeks If you want to accelerate your software development and deployment operation, and stay within budget, get your skates on to grab a handful of tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London before our early bird offer expires in two weeks.…

Urgh, you're infuriating! Three years ago, internet memelords united under the clarion call "Dicks out for Harambe". The 17-year-old gorilla was shot and killed on 29 May 2016 after snatching a toddler at Cincinnati Zoo.…

Anti-antivirus root-rooting weirdness just gets deeper Taiwanese NAS maker QNAP has admitted its devices are affected by mysterious malware that alters hosts files on infected boxen following The Register's report.…

Battery could be improved, we charge Long Term Test Clearing out the attic recently, I was astonished to discover an ancient bit of PC kit that had failed to be recycled with family, friends, eBay, the vicar, or a random homeless person. This was a rarity: a laptop with a desktop class Intel chip: the Thinkpad A31, from Big Blue itself, around 2002.…

Get an update, or risk giving a dodgy user or malware an upgrade Canonical has issued an update for Ubuntu to address a security vulnerability that can be exploited by malware and rogue users to gain root access.…

Switchzilla shakes off economic worries, turns tidy profit Little news is good news for networking giant Cisco.…

Prosecutors accuse Monica Witt of helping Tehran target her former colleagues US prosecutors on Wednesday announced the indictment of a former US counterintelligence agent on charges of helping Iran conduct cyberattacks on her former colleagues.…

Amazing what you can achieve on unforgiving dust world over 15 years with a 20MHz RISC CPU and a bunch of probes NASA’s beloved Mars rover, Opportunity, has been officially laid to rest more than seven months after it was engulfed by a gigantic dust storm and fell silent.…

Federal court shoots down attempt to reveal Feds' decryption demands A US federal judge has refused to unseal court paperwork that would show how the FBI tried to force Facebook to snoop on calls made through its instant-messaging app.…

Board of directors sued for 'failing to protect investors' Two Oracle shareholders on Tuesday sued the database giant and its board of directors for allegedly misleading investors about the potential of its cloud business.…

Redmond opens up the .NET Core 3.0 big box of preview toys Microsoft emitted an Azure Pipelines app for Slack today while also reminding devs of the tweaks made to breakpoints in the upcoming combo of Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Core 3.0.…

We won't just suddenly break our evidence rules for HP, says Blighty's High Court A British judge has rejected the FBI's request for legal documents submitted to London's High Court by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's lawyers just weeks before his civil lawsuit is heard in Britain.…

US financial watchdog, prosecutors overdose on irony The top boss of Apple's insider trading compliance program has been accused of insider trading by the feds.…

Hapless bank goes into lockdown mode, vanishes from the internet Malta's Bank of Valetta (BOV) has pulled the plug on its entire internet access, including shutting down cashpoints and branch offices, after detecting a "cyber intrusion" by crims that tried to steal nearly €13m.…

Low-power ultra-narrowband network for your street, ma'am? Who at one time hasn't wanted to install a low-power ultra-narrowband radio network in embedded objects all over the neighbourhood? Perhaps you wanted to keep an eye on the local badgers? Well, badgers look out: it's now become easier to do so.…

We can't see the Arm in having a little tinker Enthusiasts with time and hardware on their hands have a few extra options for the weekend. One committed group of Linux fans has got Ubuntu working on a Windows Arm laptop, while Pi fans have made it easier to bring full Windows 10 to the diminutive computer.…

Heal thyself Fancy that. Days after Apple suspended Facebook and Google for abusing Apple's enterprise developer privileges, Apple has been found to be permitting dozens of dubious apps to misuse its enterprise certificates.…

Trusts to choose between secure email providers (not just Accenture's NHSmail) The NHS, in England at least, will email patients directly rather than rely on snail mail, and organisations will be free to look beyond Accenture's NHSmail to send e-missives, under proposals from health secretary Matt Hancock.…

It's about fighting fires, not starting them, right defence bods? The British military has commissioned a hackathon to develop drone swarms – while claiming that it's definitely not about developing dual-use military tech.…

iFixit pays tribute to 'beacon of light' for the fixers of the world Obit John Haynes, creator of the Haynes Manual and at least partly responsible for the skinned knuckles of enthusiastic amateur car repairers around the world, has tightened his last bolt and headed off to the great workshop in the sky aged 80.…

US states mull 'work verification' laws, shaped by work verification biz Special report Anyone working on a substantial contract with the US state of New Jersey could soon be required to install software that captures the screen and tracks keystrokes – to verify all hours billed are legit.…

Oh snap. UK netizens better hope they don't have twitchy mouse-click finger It will be an offence to view terrorist material online just once – and could incur a prison sentence of up to 15 years – under new UK laws.…

Hole puncher, hole puncher... where's headphone jack? Leave out the notch, add hole for snap flash... With Huawei breathing down its neck, Samsung had planned to unveil its flagship just ahead of Mobile World Congress, the firm's usual stage for its launch.…

The theme tune is still like a sonic screwdriver to the eardrum It seems the Chinese authorities were wise to be concerned about the rise of Peppa Pig, as reports have surfaced of American poppets adopting the squeaky English accent of the petite cartoon porker.…

Plain language questions, automated data prep promised in first release of 2019 Natural-language loving data visualisation firm Tableau has emitted its latest release, which includes a plain language question tool, developed after its 2017 slurpage of startup ClearGraph.…

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Don't ask these models Analysis Neural networks trained for image recognition tend to identify objects based on their texture rather than shape, more so than humans, according to this latest research.…

Hefty load from Microsoft, Adobe, with special guest star Cisco Patch Tuesday Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up to give users and sysadmins plenty of work to do this week.…

Public safety versus profit A law proposed in Texas would make it illegal for mobile networks in the US state to throttle internet connectivity during an emergency.…

Class action lawsuit over component sparks legal fight Cisco is fighting its own side's lawyers to get a bigger share of a component price-fixing payout, in the latest unedifying class-action legal battle in tech land.…

Nav gadgets will be Gah, Properly Screwed if you don't or can't update firmware Older satnavs and such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover.…

The 'VF' now stands for 'virtually f*cked' A hacker wiped every server and backup of VFEmail this week in a "catastrophic" attack, according to the webmail service.…

In Putin's Russia, internet logs off from you Russia is reportedly preparing to turn its internet into a nationwide intranet to thwart hacking attacks and similar aggression from the West.…

Oh, bother! Users can't bear the thought of censorship Condé-Nast-stablemate forum Reddit has slurped another $300m in a round of funding led by Chinese giant Tencent.…

An Arts Council for news? A UK government-backed review has decided against a punitive tax on Google and Facebook – but called for competition authorities to investigate their core business. It also wants a new news quango.…

UK Police Forces on Microsoft's platform have some new toys in their arsenal Britain's criminals must be quaking in their boots after hearing the news that tools to help UK plod solve crimes have been added to Microsoft's Azure cloud.…

Steve Hilton claims his boss fired him without just cause to avoid $20m severance payday A former DXC Technology exec veep sacked last summer refuses to go quietly: Steve Hilton has accused his ex-boss, CEO Mike Lawrie, of having a "toxic" management style that he claimed involved "verbally abusing" underlings.…

Document skirts around 'the fundamental issues involved' The UK government's 27-page blueprint to use biometrics "in no way did justice to the fundamental issues involved" in cops' increasing use of the tech, the chair of the Commons science committee has said.…

UK's Huawei handlers are proud of themselves The Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) has a giant banner hanging outside declaring its purpose to the world.…

90 days without a refuel The Ordnance Survey reckons it has succeeded where Google and Facebook failed, with the launch of a solar-powered drone fleet that will hover permanently high above Blighty.…

Imag-I-Nation Technologies (no, not that one) fesses up to breach affecting thousands A company that develops and supports software for consumer reports and background checks has admitted to exposing thousands of people's information to an unknown hacker.…

We bid farewell to the best kind of 16-bit hustler... Obit Dr Bernard L Peuto, the architect of the Zilog Z-8000 chip, has died.…

Complexity of project no excuse to do nothing, chides review The UK's National Health Service has been warned to plan tech investments carefully, address data governance and quality concerns, and boost staff training to ensure IT benefits rather than harms patients.…

...He's just a poor backup of a workload running virtually ♪ If you're wondering whether it's possible to protect vSphere virtual machines with no on-premises agents, arrays, appliances or software – and friend, who isn't? – here's something potentially for you.…

Huge hole hints at home world taking a pounding Pics, video Scientists believe they may have found a second meteorite impact crater lurking under ice sheets on Greenland.…

Ah, wait, the other kind of artificial President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday kickstarting the American AI Initiative, a strategic plan to keep the nation ahead of its competitors in artificial intelligence.…

Handy for smuggling expensive zero-days onto targets and executing them Updated Security researchers have found that Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) don't live up to their name. In fact, we're told, they can be used to hide pieces of nasty malware that can silently masquerade as normal applications.…