The Register

All our Five Eyes mates have shown them the door The British government has been asked to confirm that national telecommunications infrastructure is secure amid growing concerns about Chinese supplier Huawei.…

Cost-cutting effort to see sites close, staffers shifted Vodafone is rationalising real estate in the UK to cut costs and – in its words – "unite teams", with the lion's share of its Technology heads to be based at Newbury HQ. Redundancies seem inevitable as staff will be asked to relocate, in some cases, hundreds of miles.…

Incompetence or malice? Pick one The Ministry of Justice has said a data centre outage was responsible for the widespread collapse of the UK's civil and criminal court IT infrastructure over the past few days.…

Urges it to chuck Big Red's request to depose former Pentagon staffers, too Oracle's lawsuit over the Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract is cherry-picked "spin", AWS has said in a submission (PDF) aiming to stop Big Red accessing internal documents and deposing two former government staffers.…

We're just a humble reseller, eller, eller, eh, eh, eh Amid talk of Brexit uncertainty, Computacenter has issued a pre-close trading update that showed the sales dials for calendar '18 pointing upwards. And it was boring old tech reselling that helped it get there.…

Pretty f***ing metal tbh Christians enjoy reminding the heathens, atheists and sinners who share this world that they're all going to Hell. Whether it's by peppering conversation with Bible quotes or just a little smug smile, we know what they're thinking.…

While others fidget awkwardly, silicon slinger hits 'pay equity' Intel took time out from its hardware woes to buff its inclusivity halo and announce it had reached gender "pay equity" globally.…

Also reckons Russian hackers go quiet over the Christmas holidays FIC2019 According to Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the eponymous antivirus company, black-hat hackers are increasingly likely to speak Portuguese and Spanish as well as the traditional English, Russian and Chinese.…

Nope, never. We think buying nothing cost us AU$34m, but nobody's sure How much IT can you buy for AU$34m (£18m, $24m)? None at all, if you're the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission in the market for a biometric system.…

Looks like the final act in the grubby Vega+ saga Just as readers thought the saga of dodgy Sinclair reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd had ended, the High Court has ruled that its current and former directors owe £38,000 in legal costs to two of its founders.…

3,000 sites on list In one of its first major wins in the enterprise market, NBN Co** has confirmed it will pull fibre to Woolworths' properties in support of a Telstra contract with the supermarket giant.…

Lessons from LHC – the world’s largest scientific machine Reg Lectures The Higgs Boson particle was first predicted by scientists in 1964 but it wasn't until 2012 that the existence of this fundamental of physics could finally be proven. That was thanks to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).…

Mark Hurd eyes up half the world's app market Analysis All too aware database sales alone won't sustain it, Oracle's execs are seeking to push Big Red as a one-stop shop for cloudy apps.…

Chronicles of Delphi scribe podcasts, er, scribbles her musings

Dev fears sub-domain abuse – Plus, unofficial patches for trio of Windows zero-days Microsoft has been accused of ignoring an IT security risk that could be exploited to create legit-looking malware-laden webpages that sport seemingly trusted Azure and Office 365 domain names. Alternatively, the domains potentially could be used to stealthily leak stolen data from networks.…

FTC case continues as chipmaker starts defense Analysis Qualcomm has launched its rebuttal of antitrust charges by claiming it's just too damn good at its job.…

Plus: Potential meteoroid snapped crashing into surface during total lunar eclipse Pic Within the next six years, the European Space Agency hopes to drill into the Moon and extract oxygen and water, paving the way for folks to eventually live on the rocky satellite.…

Lucrative govt IT contracts at risk in discrim legal battle The US Department of Labor has doubled-down on Oracle, accusing the IT giant of “stark patterns of discrimination” against women and minorities since 2013.…

Anyone still at their posts, please stop these address takeovers... please, helloo? Anyone there? America's Homeland Security has urged US government departments and federal agencies to shore up their DNS control panels after hackers successfully stormed the barricades.…

Talk about Jersey Whirl... Flying gizmos disrupt ops this evening It seems the UK's latest pain-in-the-ass craze has made its way stateside again, as alleged sightings of rogue drones brought Newark Liberty International Airport to a halt Tuesday.…

Pay no attention to Watson's lackluster performance – look, the share price is up! IBM on Tuesday delivered its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue, and its shares still surged in after-hours trading.…

Open the door, get on the floor – not so fast if you've an iPhone 4 Apple has emitted a handful of software patches to address security vulnerabilities in iOS, macOS, and various peripherals.…

Egghead faces criminal rap after Beijing tells of banned experiment Babies were genetically engineered in test tubes using the CRISPR DNA-editing tool as part of an illegal experiment led by disgraced scientist He Jiankui, the Chinese government confirmed this week.…

How many ad blocks could an ad slinger block if an ad slinger could block blocks? Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers.…

Disable redirects before applying update The Debian Project has patched a security flaw in its software manager Apt that can be exploited by network snoops to execute commands as root on victims' boxes as they update or install packages.…

Chip giant can't shake off US class-action lawsuit over Bulldozer advertising A class-action lawsuit against AMD claiming false advertising over its "eight core" FX processors has been given the go-ahead by a California judge.…

At least we hope so – 'cos here are some 'infinite' cloudy backup repositories Veeam has added a Cloud element to its Availability Suite, tiering off old data to object storage in AWS and Azure or on-premises.…

Parly-vous cyber-security? No plan to surrender, military bug bounty coming FIC2019 France’s defence secretary Florence Parly today declared “Cyber war has begun.”…

Pursuit of ever skinnier laptops blamed as some post-2016 displays start failing Apple's Macbook Pro has yet another "fatal flaw" in the form of a flex cable fingered as being the root of a host of display problems.…

You can make your own Yank joke here NSFW links Recent statistics indicate that not is only the US government shutdown lengthening, so too is the amount of time spent in the Washington DC area on, ahem, adult pursuits.…

Pragmatic chap looks at reality of international relations FIC2019 A French diplomat has suggested that future global regulation of cyberspace could exempt spying from regulation "as long as some specific sectors are preserved".…

Look, the platform is dead. Will you just move on already? Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to honour the memory of yet another Windows mobile technology. The rabidly unpopular Microsoft Wallet for the much beloved Windows Phone is for the chop.…

White House to nominate former DocuSign boss The US may have finally complied with the European Commission's repeated requests to name a permanent Privacy Shield ombudsperson, The Register understands.…

Budget airline cancelled 400 flights, stranding 82,000 customers including a Vulture* The boss of Squeezyjet Easyjet is "disappointed" by the time it took London's Gatwick Airport to overcome the drone crisis that led to multiple flight cancellations and cost the budget airliner £15m.…

Juliet Bauer's article praised GP app biz Livi – but didn't mention she was joining them in April Departing NHS England digital exec Juliet Bauer has been slammed for writing a "puff piece" that praised her new employer, app biz Livi, without mentioning she would start work there in a matter of months.…

Boffins reckon they can predict what you'll say based on your friends' activity online The phenomenon of "prescient Facebook advertising", so beloved of conspiracy theorists who think social networks listen to your microphone, might instead simply be evidence of how good Facebook's algorithms have become.…

Ubuntu here, there, everywhere Canonical unleashed Ubuntu Core 18 on the public today following a beta of the locked-down Linux in December.…

Windows is updating your play-by-play, this may take a while Microsoft's Surface tablet got an unexpected workout during the recent NFL playoff between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs when a frustrated coach flung the fondleslab onto the field.…

Oh, and this visitor book. How about a £60 cardboard bin? There is, it seems, no deterring the General Data Protection Regulation snake-oil sellers, who will happily stick "GDPR compliant" onto whatever they have to hand – including shredders, bins and visitor books.…

Things are, er, looking up though: activist investor Elliott Management is reportedly sniffing around retailer Distressed retailer Dixons Carphone – reportedly the object of activist investor Elliot Management's affections – today confirmed a 7 per cent tumble in mobile phone sales over the festive period.…

Families playing in gardens targeted with new powers Families living near airports whose children fly toy helicopters in their gardens could be fined up to £2,500 under new government plans that, er, flew under the radar during the ongoing Brexit chaos.…

Founder warns that 'mediocre employees' may have to go French parliament is reportedly mulling a ban on Huawei kit being used in next-generation telco networks, potentially heaping further pressure on the Chinese headquartered giant.…

Don't need full-fat GUI? WSL doesn't cut it? Canonical has just the ticket Windows 10 developers have been gifted yet another way of running Linux on their desktop in the form of Canonical's Multipass.…

End-of-life followed 2018 fake Website certificate drama If you're still using TLS-SNI, stop: a year after a slip-up allowed miscreants to claim Let's Encrypt certificates for domains they didn't own, the free certificate authority has announced the final sunset of the protocol involved.…

Also: Is that an aerospike in your pocket or are bells more your thing? Roundup An expendable Delta IV Heavy finally took off at the weekend while reusability darlings SpaceX and Blue Origin both continued to suffer slippages. Meanwhile, New Horizons still has plenty of gas in the tank.…

Software, Strategic Imperatives found wanting IBM revenues are expected to shrink for its Q4 of calendar '18 and into 2019 amid worries the mainframe refresh wave has crested and strategic bets still aren't yet big enough to offset declines in legacy tech.…

Entry-level AIRI equivalent Pure Storage and Cisco have linked arms to build a converged FlashStack system for AI, a kind of AIRI microMINI but one that will run at half the speed.…

Lot fetched almost £66k before being deleted A cheeky eBay seller sought to cash in on the love Great Britain bears for everyone's favourite dithering racist royal by attempting to auction debris from the crash Prince Philip was involved in last week.…

CNIL brands ad personalisation consent invalid, slams lack of transparency Google has been fined a mammoth €50m by the French data protection watchdog for GDPR violations in a victory for Max Schrems' privacy group NOYB.…

Bruno le Maire confident despite 'hesitant' nations The French finance minister has said he expects the European Union to agree on a digital services tax by March – a year after the bloc's initial proposal.…