The Register

Scratch the surface and most of us are misanthropic recluses Open plan offices don’t deliver their promised benefits of more face-to-face collaboration and instead make us misanthropic recluses and more likely to use electronic communications tools.…

German name 'n' hosting outfit tells customers told to reset passwords after hacker taunts German hosting company Domainfactory has taken down its forums after someone posted messages alleging to have compromised the company.…

'GitHub Windows Edition' is not a Microsoft atrocity, just wicked fun with skins How many baby boomers does it take to set up GitHub? Just one – but you've got to make it look like a 1990s Windows build.…

Probably wishes it could go back in time and run 2FA, cos lack of it sparked the leak A service named “Timehop” that claims it is “reinventing reminiscing” – in part by linking posts from other social networks – probably wishes it could go back in time and reinvent its own security, because it has just confessed to losing data describing 21 million members and can’t guarantee that the perps didn’t slurp private info from users’ social media accounts.…

'I spent a year hiding in shrubs, and they just … publish their daily runs' +Comment Online investigations outfit Bellingcat has found that fitness tracking kit-maker Polar reveals both the identity and daily activity of its users - including soldiers and spies.…

Twice-annual tweaks is slower than Salesforce and Oracle, faster than other SaaS rivals Microsoft’s announced a new twice-annual release cadence for Dynamics 365, its cloudy CRM/ERP service.…

Good old-fashioned hardware-defined networking growing like topsy Down Under The router market is stagnating worldwide, but nobody's told Australian buyers.…

Your two-minute guide to the week's infosec bits Roundup The week surrounding America's "Huzzah, we kicked out the Brits, and will now spell color any way we like" Day, on July 4, is traditionally one of the slowest periods in the annual business tech news cycle.…

The week in AI Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of some announcements from the world of AI this week.…

So sayeth OWASP chairman Martin Knobloch AppSec EU Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) chairman Martin Knobloch wants security people and businesses to give developers respect and love rather than slating their work.…

Cyber bazaars push back against infringement claims In another sign that corporate America has had enough of patent trolls, this week monster retailers Macy's and OfficeMax accused SpeedTrack in court of creating a "fable" – and asked a judge to kill off its patent infringement claims for good.…

Online retailers push back against cloud storage claim In another sign that corporate America has had enough of patent trolls, this week monster retailers Macy's and OfficeMax accused SpeedTrack Inc in court of creating a "fable" and asked a judge to kill off its patent for good.…

Up, up, and away in my silky eight-legged balloon Video Spiders can detect the Earth’s electric field, and use it to lift off and fly through the air, according to new research.…

I'll keep the smartie I've got, thanks A strong smartphone product range hasn't helped Samsung Electronics buck what is a saturated and exhausted phone market in the developed world.…

Bright spark trash panda wanders into substation – watt happened next is electrifying Folks relying on mains-powered alarm clocks had an excellent excuse for turning up late for work on Friday in Seattle – after a raccoon knocked out power to a chunk of the northwest US city.…

Project axed after iGiant snubs Chipzilla's wireless silicon A new ultra-fast-wireless Intel chip will not make its way into next-generation Apple iPhones, and will be axed, the chipmaker confirmed in a roundabout way.…

Said to have netted only £34... A Japanese man has received a suspended sentence for using the Coinhive cryptominer in a failed attempt to turn an illicit profit.…

If he did, HPE has to prove he deliberately deleted them HPE's assertions that Oracle boss Mark Hurd intentionally deleted emails related to a legal spat over operating system software are "mere speculation," the database giant has told a district court in northern California.…

10nm? Ha, try 7, or even 5 Samsung has said its chip foundry building Arm Cortex-A76-based processors will use 7nm process tech in the second half of the year, with 5nm product expected mid-2019 using the extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography process.…

STS Commercial you're fined: Pay b4 August GET 20% off A Welsh firm has been handed a £60,000 fine for spamming more than 270,000 pay-day loan texts around Christmas 2016.…

Let's hope there aren't any blushes amid the bits and bytes next week Good news for England fans. Advanced artificial intelligences reckon there is a good chance of England beating Sweden to progress to the FIFA World Cup semi-finals this weekend.…

Cool, but streaming doesn't mean screaming Analysis You can't store files in Amazon's public cloud, access them on-premises, and expect local disk access performance.…

You've really Notched it, Cook One day Apple may look back on its great iPhone X adventure and view it as an embarrassing midlife crisis, like running off with the au pair.…

Financial watchdogs threaten more regulation to focus minds on business services, comms Banks were today told to assume there will be problems with systems and to work on their backup plans following a series of failures caused by increasing reliance on technology.…

When intuition lets you down, you're stuck between ROC and a hard place Machine learning is about machines making decisions and, as we have already discussed, we can produce multiple models for any given problem and measure their accuracy. It is intuitively obvious that we would elect to use the most accurate model and most of the time, of course, we do.…

Wizards of Oz nudge tech past proof-of-concept Australian researchers have managed to store information on light-emitting nanocrystals, and they reckon a cubic-centimetre chunk of the stuff could hold a petabyte of data.…

Investment enables maker to push out more models Exclusive Planet Computers, the tiny British outfit reviving Psion-style handheld computing, has told The Reg it has received new investment which enables it to produce further models and fulfil its retail ambitions.…

Amazon CEO is pruning my roses Something for the Weekend, Sir? Jeff Bezos does my gardening.…

Chillout by raising some cold hard cash for vulnerable youngsters It might be high summer now, but if you fancy chilling out with the great and the good of both tech and entertainment, sign up for October’s Byte Night now.…

Creators call for political backing and 'new momentum'... so not a mercy killing then? Politicians have been told to help the UK's flailing Government Digital Service gain new momentum by unpicking Whitehall power structures.…

HP Ink refreshes its schleppable workstation range days after Dell did the same A couple of days back we covered Dell’s new portable workstations and now HP Ink has launched some too.…

All it took was a three-fingered salute and some autoexec.bat action On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register’s attempt to make Fridays tolerable by bringing you fellow readers’ tales of terrifying tech support jobs they somehow survived.…

Clueless DNS overseer sees lazy efforts torn apart – again European data regulators have torn up the latest proposal by internet overseer ICANN over its Whois data service, sending the hapless organization back to the drawing board for a third time.…

And you thought AI couldn't get any more mind-boggling Scientists have built neural networks from DNA molecules that can recognise handwritten numbers, a common task in deep learning, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.…

It's the largest dwarf galaxy to smash into us yet found Around eight to ten billion years ago, a neighbouring dwarf galaxy known as the Sausage galaxy smashed into the Milky Way leaving a smattering of gas, dust, and stars.…

100-seaters are now a duopoly, too, so please don’t mention the trade war Aerospace giant Boeing looks to have addressed a weakness that Airbus exposed last year, by proposing a joint venture with Brazilian plane-maker Embraer.…

Slow virtual server provisioning incident mistakenly given Red Alert status IBM’s cloud is having a bad day.…

Alleged unethical behavior from a grey hat? Who'd a thunk it? A former worker at NSO Group – the Israeli biz infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments nice and nasty – has been charged with stealing his employer's spyware, and trying to sell it for $50m on the black market.…

DARPA-funded white hat emits timeless advice AppSec EU IT admins should focus on the fundamentals of network security, rather than worry about sophisticated state-sponsored zero-day attacks, mobile security expert Georgia Weidman told London's AppSec EU conference on Thursday.…

Big Cable lobbyists abandoned after grassroots campaign California lawmakers promised to introduce the "strongest net neutrality protections in the nation" on Thursday morning, just weeks after a key piece of the legislation was gutted at the committee stage, sparking online fury.…

Big Cable lobbyists abandoned after grassroots campaign Californian lawmakers promised to introduce the "strongest net neutrality protections in the nation" on Thursday morning, just weeks after a key piece of the legislation was gutted in committee, sparking online fury.…

White and black hats tinker with XML .SettingContent-ms files as a method to deliver malware Hackers have been experimenting with a newly discovered technique to commandeer Windows 10 boxes.…

A summer of straightened smug holiday snaps beckons As the US partied and the UK made increasingly desperate “well, we dumped YOU” jokes, the GIMP team celebrated 4 July by emitting a fresh stable build of the arty application with a function aimed at fixing drunken photos.…

60% faster IOPS Analysis NetApp has beaten IBM's biggest, baddest all-flash storage box in an industry-standard benchmark.…

Spending watchdog's report also has barbs for outsourcing and, of course, Brexit UK government bodies collect data "as an afterthought" or when they've been caught off-guard in a grilling, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee's chairwoman Meg Hillier has said.…

Pirates: We saved the internet! The European Parliament has kicked back a vote on proposed copyright law changes until September to allow tempers to cool and the agreed text to be re-examined.…

'Not an issue with our network', say UK2.net techies Updated ISP TalkTalk is no longer on speaking terms with Brit hosting provider UK2.net – as far as networking their customers over the internet is concerned.…

Partial beer for a partial outage? Brit hosting provider UK2.net is no longer on speaking terms with TalkTalk – at least as far as customers of the telco are concerned.…

Redmond filings hint at portable computer for the less flush Microsoft fans hoping to sate their desire for a Surface device without selling a non-vital organ to fund it may have taken a step closer to realising their dreams this week.…

MEPs call for urgent fix The Privacy Shield deal governing transatlantic data flows should be suspended if the US doesn't comply by 1 September, the European Parliament has said.…