The Register

And if traffic is slow, that's just another efficiency saving New research anticipates congestion problems as owners of self-driving cars allow their steeds to prowl the streets instead of forking out for parking charges.…

UK biz sells to non-UK one that exploits sh!tty exchange rate France Télécom's Orange has bought Brit-based infosec managed services provider SecureData to beef up its defences against the dark arts in the UK.…

Commish also promises audit for the firms' data protection practices The Leave.EU campaign and Brexiteer Arron banks' insurance biz Eldon have been fined a total of £120,000 for dodging direct marketing rules.…

IPCO report also lets us recognise Britain's Creepiest Council 2017 Police employees who make typos in warrants to use Snooper’s Charter spy powers are still getting innocent people arrested, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s delayed annual report has revealed.…

Sweeping menace: Winged rats are targeting Brit city's children now – this must stop Nikola Tesla obsessively fed them, the Queen keeps hundreds at Sandringham, and Charles Darwin was enthralled by what they could teach us about natural selection. But for most of us, they're little more than rats with wings. And now one has only gone and shat on a three-month-old's face.…

IT meltdown cost TSB £330m and 80,000 customers IT meltdown bank TSB has reported a £105.4m statutory loss this year, a whopping 165 per cent drop from 2017's profit of £162.7m.…

UK data watchdog's plan to stay on top of Internet of S*'%t The UK's Information Commissioner's Office is on the hunt for organisations that are using personal data in "innovative" products, to help the data protection watchdog understand how to regulate it.…

Logins, IP address, personal data and the kitchen sink at risk Home improvement website Houzz has urged users to reset their passwords after an "unauthorised third party" made off with a file containing customer data.…

Gizmo deafens eavesdroppers, and you can build one yourself Project Alias is a homebrew gizmo that aims to deafen Alexa and Google Home until a user is good and ready for the creepy little cylinders to pay attention.…

Employers won't provide proper comms and insist it's YOUR fault Something for the Weekend, Sir? As I make my way home after a busy day, I often enjoy a knee-trembler by the church wall.…

999, what is your emergency?... Oh sh- On Call The weekend is approaching, dear readers, but before we get there, our weekly column of tech support drama beckons.…

Four of eight lawsuits brought by Qualy against iGiant booted out of German court Apple has won a modest victory in its ongoing global legal war with Qualcomm: four of eight patent lawsuits lodged in Germany by Qualy against Apple were dismissed on Thursday.…

Shock after accelerometers hacked, in the old-school sense, and rock density probed Brainiacs have today revealed how they rejigged instruments aboard NASA’s Martian rover Curiosity to measure changes in the Red Planet's gravity over its surface.…

You have been warned... Tech giants abuse dev program, iPhone maker eventually undoes ban Analysis After briefly punishing Facebook and Google for violating the rules of its enterprise developer program, Apple has relented. Cupertino is in the process of restoring the digital certificates used by Facebook and Google to sign and distribute in-house iOS apps internally to employees, after revoking them within the past 24 hours.…

Revenue growth appears to be slowing, though... Shares down in after-hours Amazon closed out 2018 with a bang, well, a $72.4bn fourth quarter, according to figures released Thursday.…

Never mind these scandals, says social media giant. We're the good guys! Analysis Weathering the blowback from two other missteps this week, Facebook found time on Thursday to provide yet another update on the removal of propagandists from its platform, this time from Iran.…

Yes, let's distract killer neural networks with boredom-killing toys Vid Here’s a robot you could take down the pub with you. It won’t bore you to death with politics and sport, nor add to your round, though it will kill time playing Jenga with you.…

Jizhong Chen accused of copying work drive, snapping pics of highly secretive project A second Apple engineer has been arrested by the Feds for allegedly stealing copies of the tech giant's self-driving car blueprints.…

Swan's throng. Chipzilla's only Swan and done it. And Swan more for luck, etc etc Intel on Thursday filled its vacant CEO slot with the appointment of Robert Swan, who has been moonlighting as interim CEO over the past seven months while simultaneously serving as CFO.…

Networker still mum on Intel slurp rumours though Hot on the heels of Intel's reported acquisitive interest, Ethernet and InfiniBand networker Mellanox has closed out its final quarter of 2018 with an Ethernet-boosted bottom line.…

JSON writing gets snappier while Remond nails its colours to the IoT mast Microsoft has kicked out a second preview of .NET Core 3 and naturally we fired up the IDE to see what has changed.…

Privacy advocates: You're not road builders, you're the traffic authority A war of words – in the form of automotive analogies – has erupted between privacy advocates and the Interactive Advertising Bureau over a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaint filed over ad exchanges.…

Techies exhausted, customers deflated, management tyred... you can't get better Car servicing chain Kwik-Fit has suffered a malware attack that has caused delays in customers' car repairs.…

It's just one big opportunity to make money Canadian-owned integrator CGI seems to be salivating over the prospect Brexit, irrespective of whether Britain leaves with a no deal – which looks increasingly unlikely – or a so-called softer version.…

Complainant seeks damages for 'lost ability to earn a living' A Texas lawyer is suing Apple over its FaceTime eavesdropping bug, claiming it allowed someone to overhear a meeting with a client.…

Sandbox test environment door left wide open Rubrik has fingered one of its developers after a database packed with customer information was left exposed. Security researcher Oliver Hough spotted the database, which apparently was not protected by a password.…

Advanced composites, Eurofighter... lots of goodies ripe for espionage Comment Airbus has admitted that a "cyber incident" resulted in unidentified people getting their hands on "professional contact and IT identification details" of some Europe-based employees.…

Cams trained on entrance today and tomorrow – so tough luck if that's on your commute route London cops' controversial public trial of facial recognition technology is coming to an end this week in Romford – and campaigners hope it will be the last time the force uses the kit.…

That's what happens when you axe the jobs of your nearest and dearest... BT's exiting chief exec Gavin Patterson is bowing out on a relative high as profits leapt by more than a quarter for the first nine months of this fiscal year, boosted by the cost-cutting programme.…

Says named documents are already covered by the record Oracle's bid to depose two former US government staffers and pull in extra material to support its legal wrangling over the $10bn Pentagon cloud contract has failed.…

Opportunity still maintaining a Martian silence China’s Chang’e 4 lander and rover combo have awoken from their lunar slumbers after a chilly first night on the far side of the Moon.…

Up to 4TB spinners to hold *gasp* more than eight titles Seagate has launched an external disk drive for the PlayStation 4 so gamers can cram more gear into their consoles.…

TechUK wonk warns of hiring freezes, contract renegotiations and general uncertainty The majority of trade group TechUK's smaller members haven't begun preparing for a no-deal Brexit, while others are being forced to renegotiate entire contracts with European partners or put UK hiring on ice, MPs were told this week.…

Iran, spying on foreigners within its borders? Shocked, shocked, we tell you A newly uncovered spyware-slinging operation appears to have been targeting foreign diplomats in Iran for more than three years.…

Capsule8 demos takeover technique to help sysadmins check for vulnerabilities Those who haven't already patched a trio of recent vulnerabilities in the Linux world's SystemD have an added incentive to do so: security biz Capsule8 has published exploit code for the holes.…

This is fine, everything's fine, CEO assures analysts on call. Look, we made $1bn in profit! Despite revealing licensing and chip sales fell by 20 per cent in its latest quarter, shares in Qualcomm managed to hold steady in after-hours trading on Wednesday. They were up a tad over two per cent to $51.40 apiece following a bold outlook for the year.…

So lonely, so lonely without my hacked PCs Analysis Uncle Sam has infiltrated and somewhat knackered what it claims is a North Korea-operated botnet of hijacked Microsoft Windows computers.…

What went well? Services, services, services, services! Microsoft on Wednesday credited a boost in its web services operations in driving a 12 per cent jump in sales.…

FTC calls for end of smartphone modem 'monopoly', Qualy quietly confident of victory Analysis It's been a couple of weeks of contradictory arguments in US trade watchdog the FTC's lawsuit against chip designer Qualcomm. So perhaps it was appropriate that the whole thing ended with a meta-contradiction concerning the nature of the legal system itself.…

Hard evidence that some coding lingo encourage flaws remains elusive Tempting through it may be to believe that certain programming languages promote errors, recent research finds little if any evidence of that.…

Five-minute gap in which transactions for some punters are toast Exclusive The Azure outage of January 29 claimed some unexpected victims in the form of surprise database deletions for unlucky customers.…

Internal FB apps in chaos, lawmaker on warpath Facebook has yet again vowed to "do better" after it was caught secretly bypassing Apple's privacy rules to pay adults and teenagers to install a data-slurping iOS app on their phones.…

Linux distro image seeks USB drive for private liaison. Discretion assured The Linux distro for the security-conscious has been updated with a fresh USB installation method.…

40% of exports to France won't be a problem, right? With a mere 58 days remaining until Brexit, the UK government has published a cheerful insight into the "size and health" of Blighty's space industry.…

Forget Skype for Business, we have Jira and Confluence integration Microsoft has given its collaborative platform, Teams, some Atlassian affection this week while dropping another subtle hint to Skype for Business users that it is time to stop putting off that migration.…

Ethernet and InfiniBand kit would be tempting for Chipzilla Intel has offered up to $6bn to buy Israeli InfiniBand and Ethernet networking manufacturer Mellanox, according to local reports.…

Snow joke, we really want to know if they'll land in the UK Apple has refused to tell The Reg whether the premium iPhone price cuts that CEO Tim Cook promised for punters outside of the US will reach the UK, citing inclement weather as an impediment to comms. A local price cut seems unlikely.…

Route to Ireland via UK will be surveyed, says local ministry Iceland has made public its plans to build a fourth undersea internet cable to Europe. While one Icelandic news outlet reported that this was because of "security reasons", the truth appears a bit more mundane.…

April still on top as Microsoft's difficult October update slowly trickles onto PCs With the next release of Windows 10 edging closer, users continue to steer clear of Microsoft's October 2018 update.…

Judge dismisses Big Red's 2016 copyright claim Oracle's copyright battle with HPE over operating system software has been kicked out of court.…