The Register

Cops unlikely to be the only grumblers Apple isn't backing down from a move to lock down the iPhone’s data port to increase security for users, even though it means thwarting some of the password-cracking tools used by forensics experts.…

Ron Coughlin will no longer doorstep fanbois outside Apple stores HP Inc exec Ron Coughlin is quitting the dog-eats-dog world of peddling PCs and heading into the more cuddly-sounding - but no doubt competitive - one of speciality pet retailing.…

UK.gov expected to take health workers off immigration limit Campaigners have welcomed reports that the UK government plans to remove doctors and nurses from an immigration cap – which could also make it easier for businesses to recruit IT workers from outside the EU.…

When we put up the schedule, we’ll put up the price Events We’re very close to publishing the agenda for Serverless Computing London, which means you don’t have long left to grab one of our super value blind bird tickets for just £500 plus VAT.…

Plus: Brit driver claims Autopilot almost took car off the road An update to Tesla's Autopilot software earlier this month has caused headaches for drivers of its electric cars – with one user alleging he was almost driven off the road by the robotic assistant.…

Civil servants get cheat sheet for procuring analytics The UK government has released a guide to help civil servants figure out how to use and procure data science tools ethically as public opinion on slurping continues to circle the drain.…

Big Blue's rig with Nvidia grunt looks to be first truly exascale system Comment IBM's 200 petaFLOPS (200,000 trillion calculations per second) Summit supercomputer was unveiled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last Friday and, scaled up, has proven itself capable of exascale computing in some applications.…

Desperate times at Downing Street The UK government has given itself a reassuring cuddle this week, asserting that – even if high-profile projects such as Galileo march overseas – international tech firms still love Blighty.…

Cord-cutters swung the court Analysis Across political divides in the United States there's a common appetite for reining in the country's plutocratic corporate overlords. The country that reveres Mom 'n' Pop businesses is wary when giant businesses combine. But the landmark decision in a US District Court permitting two legacy businesses to merge indicates how hard this is.…

Comets might have seeded the surface over millennia Ceres contains more carbon-based compounds - the chemical building blocks for life - than previously thought, according to a new study.…

Software-defined networks are getting serious, at scale Network function virtualization is moderately obscure stuff, seeing as it is mostly intended for the plumbing of carrier networks. But VMware’s new play in the field with what it reckons a proper, 5G-ready effort, is notable for a couple of reasons.…

Kromtech finds malicious code hiding in enterprise upstart's repositories of software At DockerCon in San Francisco on Wednesday, CEO Steve Singh highlighted security as one of Docker's core principles.…

Machine-learning suite ends its sloppy packaging ways after Debian dev roasts Redmond Microsoft had to emit a hasty update for its R Open analysis tool after developers found the open-source package was not playing nice with some Linux systems.…

We gotta put this in context, cos that's what Microsoft says matters these days Microsoft has revealed a plan for a slow-moving upgrade of its Office suite’s user interface, with three new elements to start appearing at Office.com and in Office apps in coming months.…

And discover it made a magnet that points 'up' How to measure a magnetic field that's very long way away, and is very, very weak. An international group of boffins have announced that they figured out how.…

Defence outfit Thales gets Azure Stack to drop and give it twenty for military use Microsoft’s Azure Stack cloud-in-a-box has been adapted for in-field use by the world’s militaries.…

Pew! Pew! The whole world is connected, and the Internet is super-dangerous Eighteen months after acquiring Internet infrastructure outfit Dyn, Oracle has unveiled some of the smarts it bought in the form of an "Internet Intelligence Map".…

'It's like watching your loved one in a coma' sigh heartbroken NASA boffins Video Time may be up for America's plucky Opportunity rover that has trundled across the surface of Mars for more than 14 years.…

American cable giant offers $65bn for 21st Century Fox With the massive $85bn merger between AT&T and Time Warner set to finalize, a newly-emboldened Comcast is pushing for a media mega-deal of its own.…

It just had to deal with a pesky senator asking questions The US government isn't serious about its own suggestion to take back control of the internet, a Congressional hearing revealed on Wednesday.…

New technique looks for patterns in protostars Scientists have found a trio baby planets using a new technique of spotting unusual gas motion around developing stars.…

Malware on Cores, Xeons may lift computations, mitigations in place or coming Updated A security flaw within Intel Core and Xeon processors can be potentially exploited to swipe sensitive data from the chips' math processing units.…

Malware on Cores, Xeons may lift computations, mitigations in place or coming A security flaw within Intel Core and Xeon processors can be potentially exploited to swipe sensitive data from the chips' math processing units.…

Plan for unification also includes making code easier to use At its annual enthusiasm fest in San Francisco on Wednesday, software container popularizer Docker shifted from technical talk to evangelism with previews of product improvements and the usual Silicon Valley word salad about changing the world.…

And why serial self-promoter John McAfee is a security expert on Russian hacking Senate Democrats are pressing government officials to explain their claims on election tampering and cyberattacks.…

More Brexit fallout as Europe plays hardball with positioning It's official: the UK is going to be booted off the Galileo satellite GPS program as a result of Brexit, despite furious protestations from Britain that it's a special case.…

Add some Nvidia support, and everyone else is on catch-up Cisco and Lenovo have shoved Intel's Optane caching drives in their hyperconverged systems, and Switchzilla has also added Nvidia GPU support to grant AI/ML apps hyperconverged system access.…

Motion passed to eject Russian software from bloc institutions The Kaspersky bad news train just keeps rolling on with Strasbourg Eurocrats having adopted a motion today (A8-0189/2018, en français) that could ban its wares from European Union institutions.…

Case says facial recognition tech breaches right to privacy, free expression A resident of the Cardiff, the Welsh capital, has launched a legal challenge over South Wales Police's use of facial recognition technology in public spaces – the first of its kind in the UK.…

European IT shifts its focus Promo Cloud CRM giant Salesforce recently surveyed 1,005 IT leaders in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK to examine how IT is evolving to meet the needs of an ever more connected customer base. The results of the survey were compiled into a report entitled The State of IT in Europe.…

Law firm's conclusions at odds with UK data watchdog, and critics don't feel any better An audit of the Royal Free NHS Trust and Google DeepMind's controversial app to detect kidney disease has deemed its current use of confidential data from real patients lawful – going so far as to suggest findings from other watchdogs were misplaced.…

That data-management-for-everything software segment's getting crowded As enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid multi-cloud IT strategies, they tend to find themselves mired in a multi-silo data management nightmare. Rubrik has stepped up to claim it can make the fractured mess whole again with its Alta software.…

Sun's exhalations whip up molecules on planets with weak magnetic fields Researchers at the Technische Universität Wien in Austria have found that solar wind can do far more than project lights in the Earth's night sky.…

Why we're not writing about it – just yet Review This space is left intentionally blank. It's where our HTC flagship review would go. So why is it missing?…

The Surface of the future-ture-ture Further evidence that Microsoft wants to broaden the appeal of its boutique Surface hardware has emerged.…

Research shows desire for standalone headsets in the People's Republic New research shows that China leads the world in buying standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets, with people who live there shunning traditional tethered devices for the likes of the HTC Vive Focus.…

Top judges say ISPs – but not webhosts or caches – can pass the buck BT has won a UK Supreme Court battle over who should pay the costs of trademark infringement blocking orders – and it won't be internet service providers.…

Suit will also tackle biz over 'is a former hitman' autofill howler An Australian has won permission to sue Google for defamation over search results that he alleges link him to the country's criminal underworld.…

Over a million records containing 'personal data' also affected Retailer Dixons Carphone has gone public about a hack attack involving 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal data records.…

Probe of dating platform's claims prompts crackdown on online love rat firms An online dating platform has been spanked by the Competitions and Markets Authority as the UK government issued love match websites an etiquette guide for fair play.…

Transmission inbound... Argh! It's frying our systems! El Reg's radio telescopes are trained on the storage galaxy and use super-advanced AI, machine learning and pattern-recognition techniques to tease information out of the noise. [Ed: Bullsh*t, you read the press releases and get sent a few tweets.] Let's see what the industry has to say this week.…

Draft document explains where Redmond thinks its responsibility ends Microsoft’s published a draft “Security Servicing Commitments for Windows” in which it explains the bugs it will and won’t fix.…

Not for spying, not at all... VID AI systems can track the movements of people hidden behind walls by inspecting radio waves reflected off their bodies, according to a new study.…

Plans to target greenfield hyperscalers, skip boring old servers Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon has said the company has no plans to dispose of its Arm-powered server CPU unit.…

Death penalty suggested or naughty, naughty Chinese telco-kit-maker United States senators have mobilised against president Trump's plan to allow ZTE to resume dealings with American companies.…

They sell like hot cakes so why wouldn’t Chipzilla want in? Intel has confirmed it will start to sell discrete GPUs in the year 2020.…

Cloudy concern commences colocation capers Rackspace has entered the colocation business and invited world+dog to put its kit in the company’s data centres.…

What? Remember that Redmond’s added support to 2026 and this makes sense Extended support for Windows Server 2008 R2 ends on January 1st, 2020. But Microsoft’s decided it needs a new support model anyway.…

Upside: the kettle will always be ready. Downside: forget living on the surface Astro-boffins poring over data from Kepler's K2 mission have spotted two new solar systems, one of them sporting three planets roughly the same size as Earth.…

Spook-driven paranoia? No, it's just friendly competition, honest Australia and the Solomon Islands will today ink a contract blocking Huawei from building the island nation's new submarine cable.…