The Register

US Outlanders need upgrade, no word on other countries yet Japanese auto maker Mitsubishi has recalled more than 68,000 vehicles in the US affected by two separate software bugs.…

92-year-old Wren tells us about life cracking German codes Interview El Reg had the honour of speaking with a war hero last Friday when the UK's National Museum of Computing fired up its replica Enigma code-breaker to decrypt messages sent from Poland.…

It's back up again – can't work in your undies any more Updated Cisco Webex is currently suffering a seven-hour outage and counting, with biz bods alternately raging at the failure but secretly being glad they don’t have to suffer the indignities of teleconferencing.…

HMRC urged to adjust plans after losing case against one of its own former freelancers HMRC should rethink its "aggressive" approach to IR35 tax reforms as it looks to extend them to the private sector, tax insurance provider Qdos Contractor has warned.…

Microsoft claims issue confined to older kit Three months on, users continue to report that Microsoft's BitLocker disk encryption technology turns itself off during security updates.…

Migrating dusty mission-critical systems 101 Analysis Legacy systems have been sitting in server rooms for decades, gradually growing more complex in design, more expensive to operate, less understandable to administrators, and more indispensable to their owners.…

Machine learning finds reality a whole different ball game All the biggest labs leading AI research will have you believe that their fancy game-playing software bots will one day be applicable to the real world. The skills from playing Go, Poker or Dota 2 will be transferable to algorithms designing new drugs, controlling robots, teaching computers how to negotiate – you name it.…

Who watches the watchers? Anybody who has the login If you run Cisco's video surveillance kit, hop over to Switchzilla's support site and download the latest version of its management software.…

Yippee, it's a double whammy of Red Planet research In a double dose of Martian research, scientists believe that the planet once had the right environmental conditions to support life underground and its moons may have been born from an ancient collision.…

Windows maker talks up AI and cloud stuff for Ignite show, while knifing passwords Ignite At its Ignite conference in the US on Monday, Microsoft pitched Cortana as a corporate worker, as the software and cloud biz pushes companies to interact with technology via voice.…

The price rises Chuck Robbins warned us about are coming In September, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins warned that America's trade war with China would drive up price tags on technology. Now, The Register has learned those fears have seemingly manifested: Switchzilla has unexpectedly increased its prices.…

Wardle claims to topple privacy protections in new OS – which comes with security fixes Apple has posted the annual full overhaul of the Mac operating system, this time focusing on a redesign of the look and feel of the interface.…

Cloud lineup gets security overhaul with 2FA and new monitoring tools Ignite Microsoft is beefing up the security in its cloud services lineup with a handful of unveilings today at this year's Ignite conference.…

Customers locked out after registrar switches off dot-com CRM biz Zoho left millions of customers fuming on Monday when it briefly lost control of its critical Zoho.com domain name, bringing its services to a grinding halt.…

AggregateIQ faces massive fine for allegedly exploiting people's private info from Facebook The first ever violation notice of Europe's new data privacy laws has been issued – and has landed on a Canadian data analytics firm that campaigned for Brexit.…

Endless series of beheadings and horrible images take mental toll, US lawsuit claims Updated A Facebook contractor hired to keep the social network free of beheadings, rape, torture and the like has sued the tech giant and its contracting firm, Pro Unlimited – for allegedly failing to protect workers from the psychological trauma arising from exposure to disturbing content.…

Still great pals with Citrix, but users will find the Windows 7 offer enticing Ignite With Windows Virtual Desktop, Microsoft is offering corporate Window 7 users yet another migration path to Windows 10; this time via Azure.…

Challenge accepted? You can download /e/ now /e/, a Google-free fork of Android, reached a milestone this month with its initial ROM release. It's available for download, so you can kick the tires, with nightly builds delivered via OTA (over the air) updates.…

S version set for Q2 '19 debut, but full tiling pleasure on the X delayed Ignite Microsoft has lifted a page from its gaming playbook and split its Surface Hub 2 product into two lines: the 2S and 2X.…

Outsiders realised uni was hacked before uni did A single account compromise at an unnamed "major university" in the UK led to a large-scale phishing attack against third parties, according to data protection outfit Barracuda Networks.…

Lower latency, better availability and Cassandra. What's not to like? Maybe the price Ignite Microsoft today launched a wave of new features to lure punters onto its globally distributed database service, Cosmos DB.…

Investor roadshow delayed as Mick D considers alternative plan Dell Technologies is reportedly pondering whether to hold a bog standard IPO to get the group back onto the stock markets, instead of a previous convoluted plan involving shenanigans with shares in VMware.…

CEST tool gets it wrong – for its own creators A self-employed contractor has scooped thousands of pounds from HM Revenue and Customs after the British tax body used its controversial CEST online tool to wrongly determine her tax status.…

Chrome gets a bit less shiny with auto sign-in Google's Chrome lost more of its shine over the weekend as the normally calm and reasoned world of Twitter erupted in indignation after users realised the search giant was automatically signing them into its browser.…

Which gets you the best deal? We did the arithmetic By popular opinion, Apple's most accomplished product of 2018 – and maybe even in years – has been its Watch Series 4. But wait, if you live in the UK, there are some things you should know about well before you pull out your wallet.…

Treasury Committee infuriated at latest TITSUPs* The influential Treasury Committee has demanded that banking execs at RBS Group and Barclays must explain why customers were again unable to access online services at the tail end of last week.…

Give the punters what they want until they can hardly stand or afford it UKIP screwed its members at the weekend by doubling the price of branded condoms for sale at the party's conference as supplies started to run dry.…

'Twas the night before Ignite and the October 2018 Update is stirring As much of the Microsoft world packed up and headed for Ignite, new builds and a surprising resurrection filled a busy week in Redmond.…

Hello Moto: Cops, ambulance, fire to get data services next year, voice to follow The Home Office has overhauled its plans to replace the UK's emergency services radio infrastructure with a 4G network, extending the lifespan of the existing network by three years and offering users early access to some services.…

They just take a battering ram to the gates The bots spewing out malicious login attempts by the bucketload appear to have cranked it up a notch.…

Listen up, it's the weekly network roundup Juniper Networks this week pulled the covers off the latest in its Contrail range, a carrier edge product called Contrail Edge Cloud.…

A minute's malfunction? Mere millions Who, Me? Good Monday morning, Reg readers, and welcome once more to Who, Me? – our regular trip down memory lane for those with something to get off their chest.…

Your dose of machine-learning medicine Roundup Good morning – here's some machine-learning bits and bytes to kick start your week. If this sort of tech is right up your street, then perhaps check out our AI conference, M, in London, England. OK, on with the show...…

There is no such thing as a gratis lunch, after all Analysis Nothing super-fuels a security sales pitch like the sort of threat it’s hard to ignore.…

Plus: Gov pay sites take a dive, and more Roundup When we weren't dealing with malware bricked-breweries, poorly-wiped servers or litigious vendors, we had a number of other security headaches to keep busy with.…

Federal price cap will undercut existing agreements, says just about every big city in America A plan to impose a federal price cap and one-size-fits-all model for the rollout of next-generation mobile networks has been met with fury by US cities.…

We've all got a little, er, Richardinsonia in our animal family tree, it appears Video A fossil of the earliest known animal on Earth has been discovered in cliffs along the White Sea on the northwest coast of Russia.…

Internet outrage mobile insists year-long API bug would have been super-hard to exploit Twitter is in full damage control mode after disclosing that it may have inappropriately exposed some unlucky twits' private tweets and direct messages to strangers.…

Fiends use vulns to lure victims into tech support scams Website admins are urged to update their WordPress installations as soon as possible to the latest version following a rash of attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities in the web publishing software.…

But then again, it doesn't actually exist, so... Analysis Amid the enormous bundle of digital-assistant devices and technology Amazon super-hyped this week, one particular component has the potential to change the future of the smart home market.…

Who wouldn't like a Honolulu holiday? Legacy Windows admins, that's who Microsoft has released Windows Admin Center 1809 and its SDK, with a variety of tweaks and enhancements to Redmond’s latest take on managing a Windows environment.…

Stung punters seek compo for 'security feature' update HP Inc customers in the US have asked a California court to sign off on a $1.5m settlement over a firmware update that bricked printers using third-party ink cartridges.…

Battery has a weird shape, power is down but hey, it has a hidden Notch! The screwdriver fiddlers at iFixit have inflicted their usual brand of affection upon Apple’s pricey new phones and found a battery of a most unusual shape.…

Slices, dices and merges people, ops into Shoreditch enclave Hewlett Packard Enterprise UK is grouping its disparate cloud businesses, scrapping the brands of services outfits it has bought and moving the whole thing to a hipster village in East London.…

Plus: The Reg chats to wartime Bombe operator Ruth Bourne The Bombe team at The National Museum Of Computing (TNMOC) has succeeded in breaking an Enigma-encrypted message in a live Poland-to-England demo.…

Trouble ferments after hackers lock system and Arran with it Staff at Arran Brewery were locked out of its computer systems this week following a ransomware attack.…

Plus: New passive aggressive 'Quiet Mode' Microsoft has tweaked the presence model of its chat platform, Skype, in an effort to calm users still shrieking about lost features in the version 8 "upgrade".…

Safety first, folks. *Go on. Insert your joke about defending our borders below* The UK Independence Party is flogging multi-packs of rubber johnnies bearing the mug of former leader Nigel Farage. It is also unloading single packs for those more realistic about their chances of bedding someone this weekend or beyond.…

Deal puts pressure on competitors Adobe has forked out $4.75bn for cloudy software-as-a-service biz Marketo, in one of the largest marketing tech buys to date.…

Worst Crystal Maze Challenge ever Imagine you’ve just returned to work from a lengthy sabbatical and found, among the thousands of increasingly shrill and unanswered emails in your mailbox, one telling you that you are now the proud product owner of a bunch of Windows OS apps. What would you do?…