The Register

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.…

Are these the stats you were looking for? Reverse ferret by tech research giant Reverse ferret. Months after Gartner researchers confirmed a pitifully low proportion of CIOs were actually unleashing AI into the wild, the latest survey paints an entirely different picture.…

Department's response? We might have made a typo Fujitsu has accused the Foreign Office of being unable to count after mandarins awarded a £350m IT outsourcing contract to incumbent rival Vodafone.…

Bringing a 'tangible, next-level competitive boost' apparently... Western Digital has remodelled its M.2 SN720 mobile and edge device gumstick SSDs into a faster SN750 gamers' drive with a heatsink option.…

Move over One-Click shopping, Click to Pray is here Pope Francis of the Catholic Church has launched the "Click to Pray" app, designed to connect the faithful via smartphones and fondleslabs.…

Women allegedly paid 13% less in bonuses, 33% less in stock value Oracle is under fire for allegedly paying women staffers $13,000 less on average than their male counterparts.…

Get a deep discount on deep learning Events If you’ve got a problem and you suspect part of the answer might come in the form of AI, machine learning or data science, you should really join us at MCubed 2019.…

Plus: Retail services win for Azure and 365, new toy for XAML UWP devs, and more Roundup Culling Cortana, poking Phone users and feeding the UWP XAML developers – it's all in a week's work for Microsoft.…

The iPhone time machine takes us back 36 years... to the Apple Lisa Feature Dearly beloved, please join us in taking a moment to remember the Apple Lisa, a 36-year-old experiment in seeing just how much Apple could charge for hardware.…

Junior staffers, cold fingers get blamed for missed payments in taxman's annual attempt at humour It's well known that the UK's taxman would like a bit more dosh to fill its coffers – but it doesn't want to come across as a humourless leech.…

Techie's speed test ends up bringing sales reps' work to a screeching halt Monday morning has rolled round once again, which can only mean one thing – Who, Me?…

The question now is: Will it move forward or not? Analysis The future of a critical change in European copyright law is under doubt after negotiations designed to clarify wording have left all sides frustrated.…

Climate change is going to make Monday mornings much, much, much more of a grind Coffee plants, the source of the warm brown elixir powering millions of people worldwide using the magic of caffeine, are, it is claimed, at risk of extinction.…

Well, computers programmed by AI-wielding bio-boffins The human genome is hiding secrets that point to a mystery ancestor alongside our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans, according to AI software.…

The week's other stories in AI Roundup Hello, here’s a very quick roundup of some of the interesting AI announcements from this week. Read on if you like robots and GPUs.…

Plus, Safari security foiled by… a finger swipe? Roundup This week we wrangled with alleged Russian election meddling, hundreds of millions of username-password combos spilled online, Oracle mega-patches, and claims of RICO swap-gangs.…

Killer jailed for life after fitness kit data tips off plod Avid runner and hitman Mark Fellows was this week found guilty of murder after being grassed up by his Garmin watch.…

Microsoft to hang up support on 10 December Microsoft has formally set the end date for support of its all-but-forgotten Windows 10 Mobile platform.…

Big Blue brands claim 'outlandish' in non-denial denial A former senior executive at IBM has claimed she was ordered to lie to the US government about just how many older workers Big Blue was laying off.…

Identical sisters with same genetic makeup get different results from test kits Updated Mail-order genetic testing kits, which are all the rage right now, have been put through their paces by identical twins, and the results are a little baffling.…

Лучшая защита – нападение? Russian hackers attempted to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee (DNC) just after the US midterm elections last year, according to a new court filing.…

Anti-censorship demo reaches Chocolate Factory's London HQ A small handful of protesters turned up outside Google’s London HQ today to protest against the ad company’s censored search engine, developed as part of an unholy bargain to gain access to the Chinese market.…

UK and Nordics each get their own boss Privately owned shape-shifting Veritas has removed its northern European head Jason Tooley and split the role in two, externally hiring one person to run the UK and one to oversee the Nordics.…

Aussie Jira flinger celebrates a bonzer quarter Atlassian, home of Jira, Trello and Bitbucket, has rounded out calendar 2018 with over $1bn in revenues as it continues to persuade customers that the cloud is really where they’d like to be.…

NAND revenues and disk drive topline downbound until mid-year - Wells Fargo The slump in Western Digital's SSD and disk drive sales is forecast to deepen for the current and next quarters, according to analysts.…

Apple and others also in firing line as complaints filed Streaming services aren't complying with EU data protection law - namely the General Data Protection Regulation's right of access - according to a fresh suite of complaints aimed at the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.…

No customer data visible but hell's bells, Redmond, what have you borked now? Exclusive Alarmed Microsoft support partners can currently view support tickets submitted from all over the world, in what appears to be a very wide-ranging blunder by the Redmond-based biz.…

Up to 750 staff transferring to Big Blue. Good luck people... you might need it Exclusive Vodafone is offloading its cloud and hosting unit to IBM in a $550m eight-year outsourcing deal that will include up to 750 staff packing their bags as they're sent off to new employer Big Blue, sources say.…

Friday morning is an ideal time for transfers to have a glitch, agree customers Lloyds and Halifax bank customers have been warned not to make repeat transactions as the group grapples with a technical glitch with Faster Payments.…

PING, PING, PING … it's your networking roundup for the week Roundup To cure some persistent security, implementation, and performance problems in the Domain Name System, the lords of the DNS have proclaimed older implementations as end of life.…

75,000 lawyers subject to potential fortnight of faffery Updated Barristers and court prosecutors have been left scratching their heads this morning after Egress Technologies' CJSM email system went down – with the firm saying it could take up to a fortnight to fully restore it.…

We'll know for sure when Huawei reveals a shoe-shaped smartphone Something for the Weekend, Sir? The name's McLeod. Alessandro McLeod. I am a spy for the secret services.…

'Net greybeard Douglas Comer talks SDN with El Reg Interview Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the landscape of networking, but along the way it has created its own problems. Doug Comer of Purdue University thinks disaggregating SDN controllers like the Open Source Network Operating System (ONOS) could be a way forward.…

Did this story make you angry? Y/N On Call Roll up, roll up, to On Call, your weekly instalment of fellow readers’ tech triumphs and frustrations.…

Why can't robots just learn to do things without being told? Vid Robots normally need to be programmed in order to get them to perform a particular task, but they can be coaxed into writing the instructions themselves with the help of machine learning, according to research published in Science.…

Azure DevOps Services invites hackers to test its limits There's more money to be made from bug hunting in Microsoft code after Redmond announced its 10th active bug hunting reward scheme, the Azure DevOps Bounty Program.…

Bet you were expecting a rude ring pun here? Well, not today Saturn’s characteristic rings may only be as old as 100 million years, and thus formed during a time when dinosaurs still roamed on Earth.…

Out of 284 flaws, 33 are rated critical. Big Red admins have big patches ahead Oracle admins, here's your first critical patch advisory for 2019, and it's a doozy: a total of 284 vulnerabilities patched across Big Red's product range, and 33 of them are rated “critical”.…

Open-source CMS gets a pair of critical fixes Drupal has issued a pair of updates to address two security vulnerabilities in its online publishing platform. The vulns are a little esoteric, and will not affect most sites, but it's good to patch just in case you later add functionality that can be exploited.…

Cock-up went unnoticed for two Olympics, one World Cup, an EU referendum, and a US presidential election Twitter has fessed up to a flaw in its Android app that, for more than four years, was making twits' private tweets public. The programming blunder has been fixed.…

Amazing how a big cash payout focuses the mind A Vermont state employee drove 6,000 miles in six weeks to prove that the cellular coverage maps from the US government suck – and was wildly successful.…

Not so fast, there, Ajit... Updated America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, has asked the courts to postpone an appeal against its net neutrality repeal out of "an abundance of caution" due to the partial US government shutdown.…

'The Server Side Public License v1 does not meet standards' MongoDB justified its decision last October to shift the free version of its NoSQL database software, MongoDB Community Server, from the open-source GNU Affero General Public License to the not-quite-so-open Server Side Public License (SSPL) by arguing that cloud providers sell open-source software as a service without giving back.…

Set to update automatically? Say hello to my little friend… Select Windows 10 devices are now automatically downloading Microsoft’s troubled 1809 update, according to the support page for the operating system.…

No more Chinese tech vendor grants for at least three to six months, compsci students told Oxford University is reportedly suspending all research grants and donations from Chinese tech giant Huawei, according to a Chinese newspaper.…

Redmond to throw cash at the problem, hopes some might stick to affordable homes Microsoft has revealed it is to spank the best part of $500m on attempting to deal with the lack of affordable housing in the Seattle area.…

Mark Hurd confesses: I didn't take my passport – but usually that's not an issue Forget cyber security or emergency hamburgers – the real impact of the US government shutdown is only just beginning.…

Prof Maureen Baker told tribunal info security and clinical safety are two separate things The founders of medical symptom-checker app Your.MD knew that a number of key medical information databases were "open to anyone who knows the URL", emails seen by a London tribunal have revealed.…

'They used to be seen as the good guys, and Oracle was the bad guy'. So that means... everyone is the bad guy now? Open-source vendors that haven't already switched to less permissive licences will do so this year as the move to the cloud threatens their business models, a senior Oracle exec has said.…