The Register

£100m funding for unified IT systems, biometrics, data exploitation The British government has sunk £100m into efforts to link up cops’ IT systems, boost resource-sharing and develop digital forensics.…

Buddy, can you spare a time? When you need parts-per-billion frequency accuracy, “Let's synchronise our watches” doesn't cut it. Take LTE and 5G for example: they need tight synchronisation, both in frequency and phase, and that makes time-signalling an important part of the network.…

If so, then this latest Reg survey is for you Study Dealing with regulated data and applying strict controls to ensure compliance is life as usual in many industries.…

If it's good enough for me... Analysis Intriguing news for anyone who believes that FIDO two-factor authentication keys are the obvious way to stop phishing attacks that not enough people use – Google is launching its own authentication token.…

Secure tunneling tech hopes to move from module to resident The developer of WireGuard has laid the groundwork for pouring his open-source privacy tool directly into the Linux kernel in hope of making secure communications easier to deploy and manage.…

How'd you like those 'robots won't steal your job' headlines now, Reg editors? Muahaha Pedants, imagine how much more relaxed your life would be if artificial intelligence automatically corrected grammar mistake's in online forum and social network posts.…

British civil servants go bonkers with no booze, or too much Here’s a bit of good news: If you like alcohol, then keep drinking, and if you don’t, then you should start drinking. In moderation, of course, unless you want to increase your chances of developing dementia.…

Go on, you know you want to grab these open-source designs and lash them together NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been quietly working on a way to let students and interested hobbyists build a planet-exploring rover that's a scaled-down version of the American agency's six-wheeled 'droids.…

Fortinet to lock the stable door, horse heads for horizon A Kiwi high school has learned the “don't click on the link” lesson the hard way, with a ransomware attack locking down its student's course work.…

Libre Linux for wireless, embedded kit unforks OpenWRT and LEDE The OpenWRT project has emitted version 18.06, and in doing so, puts to rest the damage done by the March 2016 fork that created the competing project LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment).…

Backed by John McAfee so you know it's going to be A+ Pics A crypto-currency wallet heavily promoted as "unhackable" – complete with endorsements from the security industry's loopy old uncle John McAfee and a $350,000 bounty challenge – has, inevitably, been hacked within a week.…

Chocolate Factory kowtows to Middle Kingdom mandarins, according to leaked info Google is said to be preparing to launch a censored version of its search engine in mainland China, restoring a service it launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2010 in response to an attack on its infrastructure.…

Three alleged ringleaders nabbed in EU, indicted in US The FBI has arrested the alleged three leaders of an international crime syndicate that stole huge numbers of credit card numbers – which were subsequently sold on and used to rack up tens of millions of dollars in spending sprees.…

Email addresses, hashed passwords, and other details from mid-2000s era swiped In a Wednesday mea culpa, Reddit – the online chat board that got a little out of hand and became the sixth most-visited website on the internet – has admitted it was raided by hackers unknown.…

But they'll throw in copy of Excel to work out when space'll run out Microsoft is emitting a raft of tweaks to its OneDrive offering this month, but has yet to address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the lack of elephantine storage in the room.…

Hearts bleed for UK.gov's fave outsourcer as revenues, shares dip Capita – the UK government’s top IT and software outsourcer – has reported a 59 per cent fall in pre-tax profits for the first half of 2018.…

Cybercrim either 'hit the jackpot account' or knew which one to target, claims infoseccer British shipping services firm Clarksons has revealed a high profile data breach last year stemmed from a hack on a “single and isolated user account”.…

9-platter capacity drive modified for NAS use Toshiba has developed a high-capacity NAS drive from its 10TB and 14TB helium-filled enterprise capacity spinners.…

Glimmer of hope for Zuck and co to keep pushing data across The Pond The Irish Supreme Court has made the unprecedented decision to hear Facebook’s appeal in its long-running legal battle with privacy activist Max Schrems – and to do so with urgency.…

Not our fault insists email slinger as customers twiddle thumbs Email slinger FastMail took some time out to smell the roses this morning, much to the dismay of its paying users.…

More a 'Droid photo-copier than an iMessage slayer... for now Microsoft gave us a clue yesterday as to the whereabouts of its Your Phone app, demoed to much fanfare during Build 2018 and conspicuously absent ever since.…

E-commerce platform says 'several thousand' A breach at an e-commerce provider exposed the details of more than a million unique accounts on British clothing and accessories websites, infosec experts have confirmed.…

GCHQ: Yeah, but maybe don't make it too secure, ok? The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has dispensed advice aimed at securing Ubuntu installs and followed it up with help for Dixons customers.…

How to juggle two smartly incompatible protocols We can be forgiven for not having weaned ourselves onto IPv6 earlier. It's been around in draft form since late 1998, but was only released as a standard in July 2017 (that'll be RFC 8200). That this has finally happened, though, means we're being told more loudly than ever that we no longer have an excuse. So do we have one? Can we still stick with IPv4 if we want to?…

Kernel broken, so Penguinista-in-Chief reverted 4.18-rc7 Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has taken the rare step of reverting a kernel release candidate – after it went sour.…

And the Leaning Tower of Pisa can pick up BBC World Service The Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has remained an architectural mystery.…

Helps to have 1k GPUs and a relaxed view of accuracy Faster is always better in AI, although it comes at a price. As researchers strive to train their neural networks at breakneck speeds, the accuracy of their software falls.…

Cops will need a warrant to access health history, opt-out period extended to November Australia's peak medical bodies have won some concessions over the privacy of the country's MyHealth Record, and the government says it will extend the opt-out period to mid-November, but it's unlikely to end the hostile debate over the initiative.…

Fat thumb – or government intervention? Good thing you encrypted everything you say... A bunch of Telegram messages went the long way round on Monday: a BGP leak sent people's Telegram chat communications via systems in Iran.…

Volunteers need help: car boots and spare space to save history going back to the 1950s Australian retro computer fans, it's time to mobilise: the shoestring volunteers trying to preserve computer history here are the end of their lease, money, and wits.…

Hardware stalls, services up, and TV push coming – now, let's look at Samsung... Apple continues to display all the characteristics of a money-making machine, with record results for the third quarter of the year.…

Enough with the foot-dragging, mobile processor'n'modem giant rails in patent feud Qualcomm, as part of its patent battle against Apple, claims Intel went back on its word by failing to produce technical documents and code covering how its latest radio frequency components are being used in Apple's 2018 iPhones.…

It's Groundhog Day for the US broadband industry Analysis A report out today into internet access in the United States has concluded – yet again – that the majority of netizens have a hard choice between competition or broadband speed.…

Risk of a flash glut rises as fab output increases Analysis NAND oversupply is becoming a distinct possibility – with an increasing memory supply chasing a market that can’t absorb all the bits and bytes at prices that provide profits for suppliers.…

Risk of a flash memory glut rises with fab output increases Analysis NAND oversupply is becoming a distinct possibility – with an increasing memory supply chasing a market that can’t absorb all the bits and bytes at prices that provide profits for suppliers.…

Version 3.0 improvements in Microsoft's lang also include pumped up tuples Microsoft has rolled out version 3.0 of TypeScript, its open source extension of JavaScript that includes support for static types.…

Yeah, that'll do the trick, Mark Facebook has deleted dozens of pages and accounts that were apparently coordinating to push divisive messages to the American public in the lead-up to this year's US midterm elections.…

Rolling rolling rolling... Stop those contracts rolling.. don't hiiiiide Ofcom has announced plans to require communications providers to tell customers when they are nearing the end of their contract to encourage them to shop around.…

The baffling world of container management keeps inching toward usability Red Hat is celebrating the 1.0 release of Istio, the open source microservices management project, and the arrival of version 3.10 of its OpenShift software container platform.…

5G takes another tentative step to actually being a thing Nokia and T-Mobile have inked a $3.5bn deal to take the US telco into the bright new world of 5G communications.…

Here's a disk-bound query: What's inside the box? Startup Yellowbrick Data has built a turnkey, hyperconverged, all-flash box that it has claimed can replace up to seven disk-based data warehouse racks with less than half a rack and speeds disk-bound query executions.…

SORRY-FOR-FILES.html The enterprise-focused SamSam ransomware has earned its handlers an estimated $5.9m (£4.5m) since it first appeared in the wild in December 2015.…

Firm hoping its all-cloud network and 5G kit will make it rain... Chinese smartphone maker and telecoms flinger Huawei announced its first-half revenues for 2018 today and it's clear the days of blockbuster growth are behind it.…

Close encounters of the civil service kind UK.gov bods have been stripped of access to services for the emerging non-terrestrial standard XTML, beamed in by little grey vendors A51 Technologies, following an El Reg probe.…

£275m credit-check borg must wait for watchdog approval Experian's bid to slurp up fellow credit-check biz ClearScore is to be assessed by the UK's competition watchdog.…

First-quarter loss hardly a surprise, and there's more where that came from Chinese phone and network maker ZTE has outlined the extent of the damage it suffered due to the early 2018 trade ban imposed by the US – a first quarter net loss of ¥5.4bn ($790m, £602m).…

But run it on our EU guinea pigs first, hm? A planned ID scheme for EU citizens after Brexit should be rolled out nationwide, a UK think tank has said, citing the Windrush* scandal as justification.…

Retailer says probe found 10m records hit – but no evidence of fraud Dixons Carphone today admitted that the data breach it discovered last month affected nine times as many people as first believed.…

Microsoft wants everyone to be Fluent in this week's round-up In a week where Outlook went dark, prices crept up and Office Server 2019 emerged, blinking, into the light, here are some tales from Redmond you may have missed.…

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