The Register

But for real, this kit is great for fooling kids into liking STEM There's a scene in Showtime's Billions where a forward-thinking hedge fund manager is interviewing prospective quantitative analysts and gives them a flat-packed cardboard box. The candidates come and go until one finally correctly supposes that the box is impossible to put together, and recognition of this apparently shows the ability to "think outside the box".…

Blockchain might actually prove helpful for a change In an effort to demonstrate there are actual uses for blockchain technology, global professional services biz EY and Microsoft have teamed up to offer companies a way to manage rights and royalties.…

He was young, eager to please and forgot that size matters On-Call Thank the Valar it’s Friday, because that means the weekend beckons and a new instalment of On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support tangles.…

Researchers confirm hardware vulnerable to remote attacks Security researchers say they can back up a mother's claim that her baby monitor had been remotely hacked and used to spy on her family.…

Q1 2019 beat guidance, but FY 19 forecasts were cut and investors bit back Red Hat has posted a fine set of results for the first quarter of its 2019 financial year, but offered reduced guidance for the rest of the year and been punished by investors as a result.…

Which is just what you’d do if you planned to compete with Microsoft, perhaps? Earlier this week we reported that Amazon Web Services appears to be planning the launch of a new end-user computing service that we speculated could be a competitor for Office 365.…

Prepare for audit after inevitable change, says Oracle licensing consultant POLL Oracle’s put a price on Java SE and support: US$25/server/month and $2.50/user/month on the desktop, or less if you buy lots for a long time.…

Telltale elements offer clues to rogue nations' nuke building, detonation on the sly AI can detect signs of nuclear weapons testing banned under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, according to research from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.…

Quebecois poutine the squeeze on cryptocurrency miners One of Canada's largest utilities is planning to make blockchain companies bid for access to electricity.…

Sponsors of US state's proposed law fume as key committee chair guts legislation The lobbying might of Big Cable was on show again this week when a critical net neutrality bill in the California legislature was gutted to remove its most important features.…

Broken page links flummox big iron clients of Big Blue Earlier this month, IBM's attempt to redesign its website broke links to product documentation – and all hell broke loose.…

Spymaster whines about smartphone privacy Israel Cyber Week Facebook – already kicked around the block by politicians in the US and Europe over privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – has come under fire from Israel.…

Malware writers preying on the game-curious with fake apps With online gaming hit Fornite set to make its debut on Android, malware writers are already playing on the game's hype to ensnare victims.…

5-4 decision brings ecommerce in line with physical shops Internet retailers will soon be required to pay state sales tax across the entire United States following a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court.…

Prototyping wrapped up with delivery around 2021 Field trials of Fujitsu's prototype exascale post-K supercomputer CPU have begun.…

Firm disputes findings of taxman and First-Tier tribunal Manchester-based reseller Aria Technology Ltd is appealing against a tax tribunal finding that MD Aria Taheri “knew or ought to have known” that it took part in a VAT carousel fraud.…

Spamming scum fire out phishing frighteners An unusually large wave of phishing emails was spewed out this morning, with recipients warned that all their devices had been infected by WannaCry.…

But it used to use Excel and print-outs, just like us normies All aboard the blockchain hypewagon – Microsoft announced today that it has begun using the technology to deal with royalty and digital rights contracts.…

8TB drive can give 2U diskless servers 576TB capacity Samsung's 8TB next-generation small form factor (NGSFF) NF1 flash card is to be standardised by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association in October.…

We’re about to hit go on agenda... Events The agenda for Serverless Computing London goes live next week, so you don’t have long to grab our super value blind bird tickets for the November event.…

Top chip boss broke rules by having 'consensual relationship' with staffer, probe finds Intel chief exec Brian Krzanich has quit after his “past consensual relationship” with an employee came to light.…

Slight hiccup expected as former phone-maker diversifies BlackBerry is focusing on luring in more channel partners and developers to maintain growth, CEO John Chen told shareholders at the company's AGM.…

Won't say who but we'll point with an elbow. *Cough* Intel *Cough* Micron rode strong demand for DRAM and flash to record revenues and profits for its third fiscal 2018 quarter (PDF), but XPoint chip sales to Intel collapsed.…

Hired to assess migration chaos, Big Blue suggests lack of rigorous go-live criteria Updated A report into the IT meltdown at TSB has suggested the British bank did not carry out rigorous enough testing and that the problems went beyond previously reported middleware issues.…

CEO puts on a happy face Dixons Carphone's annual pre-tax profits have taken a dive, falling 24 per cent to £382m.…

PM pops in to brag about industry wins Israel Cyber Week Israel is planning to develop a "state-level cyber-shield" to improve its resilience against hacking and malware, the country's newly appointed cyberczar said on Wednesday.…

Range extension encroaches on Dell's Isilon territory Scale-out clustered filer Qumulo has introduced a nearline archive product, the K-144T.…

A worthy lesson in nifty programming and embracing standards HTML is the world's most common digital document file format. However, it's not the one everyone turns to when they want to create a precise document that looks, prints and behaves the same on any platform on any device. And it's hardly the format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability.…

Data breach at Flightradar24 scored some email addresses and hashed passwords Aviation professionals enthusiasts have been told to change their passwords after flight-tracking site flightradar24/ warned of a data breach.…

We're so very sorry that we found the MP3. Sad Legendary games company Atari has accused a Register reporter of making stuff up and acting unprofessionally following an interview earlier this year in San Francisco at the launch of its new games console, the Atari VCS.…

VMworld content catalogues are live and we’ve trawled ‘em VMware’s published the content catalogues for its VMworld gabfests in Las Vegas (August) and Barcelona (November) and as usual has leaked a few insights into what it’s working on.…

First America frets about aliens at its borders, now actual alien bodies turning up from space The US government has published a report detailing how to prepare for the danger of impacts from asteroids that stray too close to Earth in the next ten years.…

An easy way to create automated user-interface tests Microsoft has given Windows developers a helping hand by releasing a new UI recorder.…

Microsoft, SAP among app houses to 'validate' Edgeline HPE’s Edgeline family got some love from a bunch of software houses today: they have agreed to validate full-blown versions of their enterprise apps on its hardware.…

The June collection has some lovely fabric patches Get your ticket to the Cisco catwalk, sysadmins, and watch Switchzilla strut 24 FXOS and NX-OS software security advisories.…

Preview release arrives to entice devs who believe cross-platform code is a good idea On Wednesday, Google's cross-platform mobile framework Flutter reached Preview Release 1, a designation that places the code somewhere between buggy beta and less buggy 1.0.…

Fancy website, code emitted – Roku, Google, etc stuff at risk A technique for attacking computer networks, first disclosed more than a decade ago, has resurfaced as a way to manipulate Internet-of-Things gadgets, smart home equipment, and streaming entertainment gizmos.…

Old-school DNS attack messes up routers, streaming boxes An attack technique first disclosed more than a decade ago is resurfacing as a way to manipulate IoT and home network devices.…

Big Blue’s restored its backups and says A-V-as-a-service is serviceable again Updated IBM’s cloud experienced an “unplanned event” that caused its McAfee-as-a-service offering to operate with sub-par performance for nearly a day.…

US bloke gets 20 months for knackering city govt IT A 23-year-old Arizona man was thrown in the cooler this week after he admitted being the not-quite-infamous website-rattling "Bitcoin Baron".…

...from Microsoft, which also just bought upstart Bons.ai Microsoft has thrown open the doors to its AI Lab, a suite of beginner projects to help developers learn machine learning.…

Fixing security issues in the face of standards gaps and vendor silence isn't easy Updated Earlier this year, Jake Archibald, developer advocate for Google Chrome, found a bug affecting Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge and had two very different experiences trying to get the problem fixed.…

Musk blames bad Tripp, drags fella into lawsuit Tesla has sued a bloke it claims was behind an effort to sabotage the electric car maker by leaking its confidential blueprints.…

Sharing's caring, intone government bods Israel Cyber Week The UK's National Cyber Security Center, the information assurance division of GCHQ, may be getting a regulatory function or charging for its services before settling into the role of encouraging better cybersecurity.…

Eight platters serving up 1.5TB each for data-belching surveillance cameras Video surveillance is an insatiable monster, constantly needing more digital storage – and Western Digital is now feeding it 12TB drives.…

Ethics! Principles! But no talk of scrapping federal contract either Microsoft's continued efforts to distance itself from a clumsily worded blog post continued today with the publishing of an email from CEO Satya Nadella.…

Bias-enabling algorithms and smart contract tech no one quite trusts now easier to secure Israel Cyber Week At the Cyber Week security conference in Israel on Tuesday, chip giant Intel plans to discuss how it is addressing threats to the overexposed tech celebrities known as AI and blockchain.…

Storage goes immutable as Redmond plays catch-up Microsoft emitted a preview of immutable storage for Azure Storage Blobs yesterday in an effort to win the hearts and minds of industries weighed down by regulation.…

Claims German biz used ERP to 'lure' them into joint venture Data warehousing biz Teradata has flung a sueball (PDF) at SAP in the District Court for Northern California, alleging the German ERP giant undertook a "decade-long campaign of trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement and antitrust violations".…

No, but not everyone's happy with the changes JURI, European Parliament's legal affairs committee, voted today to approve article 11 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which allows news publishers to seek payment for reuse of snippets of articles, in a narrow 13:12 vote.…