The Register

El Reg’s AI and Machine Learning conference lands next month Events We’ll be opening the doors at MCubed in just over two weeks time, but there’s still time to grab your space at The Register and Heise’s hype-free exploration of machine learning, AI and data science.…

Cupertino: If you've got any evidence, bring it Qualcomm has attempted to add another accusation to its 2017 lawsuit against Apple – this time claiming to a San Diego court that Cupertino wasn't just careless with proprietary info, but that it stole "vast swathes" of data to pass over to Intel.…

Hides don't-be-creepy switch in browser settings as spectre of GDPR looms Stung by criticism over its creepy cookie hoarding and automatic sign-in in Chrome, Google has pulled a swift U-turn. Kind of.…

Probe shines light on epic Ts&Cs and clever tactics to make users cough up Apps use sneaky tactics to get UK users to hand over more info than they need to – and privacy policies remain long and confusing.…

That sound ... yes, that lack of sound ... it's here Amazon Alexa devices stopped working in the UK and reportedly in parts of continental Europe this morning, with some users still complaining of intermittent outages at the time of writing.…

They know how to test kit for backdoors, apparently Canadian Center for Cyber Security chief Scott Jones has told a parliamentary committee there's no need for the country to cut Chinese comms giant Huawei out of its 5G rollout.…

Adland self-manager taunts world's largest web retailer The Advertising Standards Authority has alleged in an extraordinary statement that Amazon broke EU law by putting food supplements in a section of Amazon.com dedicated to weight loss and slimming items.…

You got to give credit – but critically, only where it is due... Comment Gather round, those who think you could make a go of it in tech retail or are currently working in the sector. Let's hear the tale of all that went wrong – and right – for Maplin Electronics Ltd, a once engaging and highly profitable business that smacked headfirst into a brick wall in 2018.…

Here's the recipe for cooking up your own AMD-Nvidia beast So, you’ve hunkered down and finally completed that online course on machine learning. It took weeks. Now, you have all sorts of ideas running through your mind on developing your own intelligent code and neural networks.…

Our programming language is still number one, insists database goliath Oracle on Tuesday delivered Java 11, in keeping with the six-month release cadence adopted a year ago with Java 9. It is the first "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, intended for Java users who prioritize stability over Zuckerbergian fast movement and breakage.…

The AI Now Institute's report ain't pretty New York University's AI Now Institute, a research hub investigating the wider social impacts of machine learning algorithms, has published a report critiquing how the US government uses the technology.…

It's been a rough September for the digital fun-bucks Monero's developers have emitted their second software bug postmortem examination in a month – this time for a flaw miscreants could have exploited to burn through exchanges' digital cash.…

Oh, and the last shreds of Metallica's credibility disappearing on stage It’s that time of year again: CRM loyalists flood San Francisco for the annual Dreamforce conference hosted by Salesforce – but day one hasn’t exactly gone to plan.…

Bloke sent down after spilling Uncle Sam's cyber-weapons The now-former NSA employee at the heart of the Kaspersky Lab exploit siphoning scandal has been thrown behind bars for five and a half years.…

Jobseekers' files follow internal records leaking online The United Nations has been hit with two damning data leak allegations in as many days.…

So is it goodbye, TCP? CloudFlare has puts its weight behind a new internet protocol that should make mobile browsing faster and more secure.…

Email queries get hash protection via Firefox Monitor Mozilla on Tuesday debuted a service called Firefox Monitor that it has been testing to help people see whether their email addresses have been compromised.…

Mozilla's Firefox Monitor makes a hash of email queries Mozilla on Tuesday debuted a service called Firefox Monitor that it has been testing to help people see whether their email addresses have been compromised.…

Privacy bod says 'remove all' function not living up to its name – netizens stay logged into Chocolate Factory If you tell Google's latest version of Chrome to delete all of its cookies – surprise, you may still end up with Google cookies on your computer.…

But Uncle Sam has already ruled out any actual laws and fines for breaking rules The US government has started the process to create fresh rules to safeguard Americans' online privacy, opening a "request for comments" on its initial proposal.…

StaffHub takes one for the Teams Microsoft rarely misses an opportunity to extoll the virtues of its collaboration platform, Teams, and this month’s Ignite is no exception.…

Experts brief Reg readers on how to keep bad actors at bay Broadcast On 26 September 2018 at 10am PDT, 11am MT, 6pm UK, we'll have a studio full of experts lined up to talk about insider threats and how even the best organisations can suffer from occasional bouts of "bad employee syndrome".…

Snoops cop to shady 'Workings' where data retention rules don't apply MI5 unlawfully tapped Privacy International's communications, and was unable to accurately identify or locate all the information it held on the NGO, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has heard.…

Hackers 'mainlining' vulns into projects – report Use of vulnerable open source components has doubled over the last year despite their role in the high profile Equifax mega-breach.…

Dell EMC's all-flash platform may have finally caught up with NetApp and HPE's XtremIO's X2 v6.2 release has filled the Nimble and SolidFire-shaped holes in its software – even though it has taken several years to do so.…

Office 365 seen lurking in the wings, sharpening an axe What might well be the last non-cloudy version of Microsoft Office has been nudged gently into the light.…

Two chances missed to swerve mainframe drive array bug The April 2018 US tax day outage was due to a faulty IBM disk array and could have been avoided twice – first with a more up-to-date microcode bundle, and second with a secret IBM script.…

Two chances missed to swerve mainframe drive array bug The April 2018 US tax day outage was due to a faulty IBM disk array and could have been avoided twice – first with a more up-to-date microcode bundle, and second with a secret IBM script.…

But no one will take the trouble to decipher them, right? Updated UK aggregator NewsNow has suffered a breach resulting in the leak of users' "encrypted" passwords.…

Can he make it to 12 months without telling anyone his real name? A man who has refused to identify himself to Google or the UK courts but is still trying to drag the ad tech company through a Right To Be Forgotten legal action has had his second attempt to take it to the Court of Appeal denied by a senior British judge.…

Because there ain't no party like a cloud storage party A year after Microsoft reintroduced placeholders for Windows users of OneDrive in the form of "Files On-Demand", Mac users of the cloudy file service are getting the same love.…

Someone should tell mobile industry. Oh, here we go The Czech Republic and Hungary top the world for mobile video performance – even though they don't have the fastest networks.…

Joins growing list of senior civil servants leaving public sector Exclusive Mayank Prakash, chief digital officer and CIO of the Department for Work and Pensions has quit today, The Register can exclusively reveal.…

Except that Eric S Raymond doesn't like codes of conduct Speculation and debate still surround Linus Torvald's decision to step back from Linux kernel development for a while, but the next kernel release candidate landed with far less sturm und drang.…

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.…