The Register

RUSI: How about some codes of practice, transparency, for starters? The use of machine learning algorithms by UK police forces is unregulated, with little research or evidence that new systems work, a report has said.…

Mindlessly self-indulgent app developers have a laugh at our expense Something for the Weekend, Sir? I can't get it up. Give me a few moments and I'll try again. Yes, I have tried rubbing it but thanks for the suggestion. What's that? I'm grasping it too firmly? Or I'm flashing in the wrong direction? Tell you what, I'll keep fiddling with it while you satisfy one of your other customers.…

Robot is 'responsive' but for some reason it can't transmit science data Since last weekend, an as-yet-undiagnosed glitch in the Mars Curiosity Rover has baffled boffins at NASA.…

Biz decides it's cheaper to bring in minimum wage jockey than fix database On-Call Friday has rolled around, regular as clockwork, and we celebrate the end of the week in the time-honoured way: On-Call, our regular column for techies to vent about frustrations from days gone by.…

British banking public biffed again just a day after Barclays blunder Online and mobile banking services from NatWest and its subsidiaries Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank crashed at around 5am this morning and remain down.…

New boats, decommissioning old ones, skills shortage... The Ministry of Defence has too many bigshots and not enough grunts – or cash – to reliably keep Britain’s nuclear deterrent hiding beneath the ocean waves, according to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.…

DevOps World | Jenkins World makes its European debut Promo A survey by analyst firm Forrester found last year that half of its developer respondents had already rolled out DevOps practices, and a further 27 percent plan to do so.…

Reach for the lasers, with all eight arms! Humans and octopuses may have drastically different brains, but both react in a surprisingly similar way when under the effects of the drug MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy.…

Second time lucky for Japan after first try proved a bust The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has landed a pair of tiny drum-like hopping robots on the surface of asteroid Ryugu.…

Infosec bod claims he glimpsed sensitive personal info left on unwiped servers Servers that once belonged to defunct Canadian gadget retailer NCIX turned up on the second-hand market without being wiped – and their customer data sold overseas – it is claimed.…

Mediocre malware operator 'fesses up to DC infection A Romanian woman has admitted running a ransomware operation from infected Washington DC's CCTV systems just days before President Trump was sworn into office in the US capital.…

Don't click on the link, people – well, people using the database on a vulnerable installation The Zero Day Initiative has gone public with an unpatched remote-code execution bug in Microsoft's Jet database engine, after giving Redmond 120 days to fix it. The Windows giant did not address the security blunder in time, so now everyone knows about the flaw, and no official patch is available.…

Don't click on the link, people – well, people using the database on a vulnerable installation The Zero Day Initiative has gone public with an unpatched remote-code execution bug in Microsoft's Jet database engine, after giving Redmond 120 days to fix it. The Windows giant did not address the security blunder in time, so now everyone knows about the flaw, and no official patch is available.…

Gunman dead and now named by cops, one worker in critical condition, two serious Cops have named the programmer who went on a gun rampage at WTS Paradigm – a US maker of enterprise resource planning software – this week. He shot four colleagues, leaving one in a critical condition.…

China tit-for-tat tariff tiff a terrible thing, warns FCC Commissioner Comment President Donald Trump's trade war with China may come with a serious cost to America's next-generation cellular networks, a federal regulator has warned.…

Class-action lawsuit over iOS 6 snafu allowed to move ahead Apple is accused of deliberately shafting people who didn't upgrade their iPhones and iOS, in a class action lawsuit over its FaceTime video-conferencing software.…

Alleges CrowdStrike, Symantec, ESET, Anti-Malware Testing Standards Org collusion NSS Labs has thrown a hand grenade into the always fractious but slightly obscure world of security product testing – by suing multiple vendors as well as an industry standards organisation.…

Janitor nabbed over child porn images, facility re-opens On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico was evacuated and sealed off without explanation, sparking wild conspiracy theories as to why.…

Janitor probed over child sex abuse image allegations, facility reopens On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico, USA, was evacuated and sealed off without explanation, sparking wild conspiracy theories as to why.…

If the networked kit needs to work for 10 years, you need to think policy Comment Cybersecurity has become an increasing priority in operations technology thanks to the growing appetite for the industrial internet of things.…

As Finnish DB biz bags fellow MySQL drop-in firm Clustrix Platform-as-a-service pusher ServiceNow is backing MySQL upstart MariaDB, injecting cash into its coffers and staffers onto its board, partly to protect its own investment as a customer of the database biz.…

We're secure, says bank A pair of IT workers have criticised banks within the Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) for sub-standard security. The group denies anything is amiss, maintaining it follows industry best practice on cyber-security.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before... The UK’s post-Brexit customs arrangements have today come under even greater pressure, as peers warned the tech doesn’t exist to back up the plans.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before... The UK’s post-Brexit customs arrangements have today come under even greater pressure, as peers warned the tech doesn’t exist to back up the plans.…

Fresh fruit, fresh batteries stuck on Japanese launchpad as HTV-7 hopes to catch a break International Space Station astronauts looking forward to feasting on some fresh food have a little longer to wait as Japan’s cargo ship has suffered yet another launch delay.…

Includes vineyard, a separate guest house and Chipzilla history A California home once owned by Intel founder Robert Noyce where the dining room served as Chipzilla’s boardroom in its early days is up for sale.…

Our Serverless Computing early bird offer finishes in 36 hours If you’re not already using AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or FaaS it’s highly likely they’ll be appearing on your project schedule soon.…

Waiting in line for hours and fancy some avocado on toast? Pathetic! The most shameless press release of the week award goes to Deliveroo for trying to share the limelight with Apple by offering to bike food to fanbois queuing for the latest iPhones released tomorrow.…

Middle Kingdom calls for international AI arm linkage Alibaba has created a subsidiary to design and build silicon for artificial intelligence.…

Extended Security Maintenance is here to save the day again (for a price) Ubuntu-slinger Canonical has assured us that 14.04 LTS users need not fear the impending end of life of the OS next year, and confirmed it will keep security fixes flowing a little while longer.…

Not yet an investigation, Margrethe Vestager says The European Commission is asking whether Amazon's role as a platform that merchants can use to sell products and its role as the merchants' competitor raises antitrust concerns.…

Take last year's funding. Multiply it by 5. DevOps ain't cheap Code repository and DevOps outfit, GitLab, has tipped into the $1bn club thanks to a $100m injection of funding from ICONIQ Capital.…

Happy anniversary, readers, from the original Git it girl Stob It's 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its pearl Perl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example:…

Staff tell El Reg to expect another wave of deck chair rearranging Exclusive The exit of three senior executives at the top of Fujitsu's Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (EMEIA) management stack has unsettled the workforce who are braced for yet more restructuring.…

When Irish-made drives are migrating Exclusive Dell EMC is terminating the contract it had with electronics manufacturer Celestica to take production in-house at its Cork-based facility in Ireland, with hundreds of jobs said to be at risk.…

And you're doing it in real time, yes? Is that a no? Comment It's exasperating how each high-profile computer security breach reveals similar patterns of failure, no matter the organization involved.…

Probation, comm service for poachers turned gamekeepers The three brains behind the Mirai malware, which infects and pressgangs Internet-of-Things devices into a botnet army, have avoided jail.…

Cancer, brain damage, a bad back ... it's all for a good cause A year-long round trip to Mars could give you more than half the maximum radiation dose recommended for an astronaut's entire career, according to data collected by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.…

Fresh from British Airways hack, Magecart strikes again Netizens buying stuff from Newegg had their bank card details skimmed by hackers who, for a whole month, stashed the Magecart toolkit on the dot-com's payment pages.…

International hunt for American bod after he skips flight home Cody Wilson, notorious for publishing 3D-printed gun designs online, is believed to be holed up in Taiwan after US cops suspected him of sexually assaulting an underage teenager.…

Learn everything you need to know about company deployment Promo Although Windows 10 has been on the scene since 2015, users were at first reluctant to abandon their familiar and usable Windows 7 for the attractions of the bigger and better operating system.…

UK watchdog demands max penalty after security snafu The UK's privacy watchdog wants to fine Equifax £500,000 ($660,000) after hackers siphoned off 15 million Brits' info from the credit-score agency's databases.…

Consumer groups beg to differ Big cable companies have told the federal government that "now's not the time" to talk about US internet speeds; despite a new program that will pay them billions of dollars to expand broadband access across the country, and a new proposal that put even more money in their pockets.…

Consumer groups beg to differ Big cable companies have told the federal government that "now's not the time" to talk about US internet speeds; despite a new program that will pay them billions of dollars to expand broadband access across the country, and a new proposal that put even more money in their pockets.…

EU-funded gizmo clings to trash like a face hugger Video Scientists have managed to capture a small floating human-made satellite using a net deployed from a spacecraft orbiting the Earth for the first time.…

Probably cost a pretty PENNE to run that physics simulation Good luck sinking your teeth into nuclear pasta. For one it’ll be tricky to get a hold of since it’s the stuff lodged inside neutron stars. Additionally, it may also be the universe’s strongest material.…

One-size-fits-all pricing in America will expand, not narrow, digital divide The latest effort by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to expand 5G networks across the United States is little more than a cash giveaway to large telcos and will grow, rather than close, the digital divide.…

Better update if you leave your laptop unattended in public... Telco EE's Mini Wi-Fi modem needs to be updated with a recently issued patch.…

Your video guide to locking down systems – and then fire questions our way Promo On September 26 at 10:00 PT / 11:00 MT / 13:00 ET / 18:00 BST we're broadcasting live with an exploration of insider threats to enterprises and other organizations.…

NoSQL database biz promises to 'keep it simple' for enterprises after real-time analytics NoSQL database biz Couchbase has promised administrators its latest release will allow them to ditch the laborious extract, transform and load (ETL) process, and analyse info directly from the database.…