The Register

UK.gov stiffens law after El Reg reveals low fine recovery rate The UK government is planning to make company directors personally liable for nuisance calls – two years after it first promised the powers to the data protection watchdog.…

Standing out from the crowd is getting difficult now Review Like a broken record, with every phone review we publish, some Reg readers insist that their ancient <insert brand here> is perfectly good and there's no need to buy a new one. But take a bow, dear curmudgeons, for you have been proved wise. A lot of people now think so too. The broken record is the hit of 2018.…

We're not saying the last one is connected, but.... Though there has been much handwringing and finger-pointing over what caused the last financial crash, one Reg reader experienced at first hand the type of muppetry that no doubt played a part.…

We're not saying the last one is connected, but.... Though there has been much handwringing and finger-pointing over what caused the last financial crash, one Reg reader experienced at first hand the type of muppetry that no doubt played a part.…

Cyber-insurance gig to be worth $14bn by 2022 Every industry has its collection of shocking stories, but Britain's cyber-insurance sector can always be relied on to top the lot.…

Benchmarks, startup drama, an array with 20 controllers... Argh! Beam me up, Scotty Huawei's flash arrays have done well in a SPEC filer benchmark, Pavilion has brought out an NVMe-oF array with 20, yes 20, controllers, Nutanix is growing, and OEMs are reportedly feeling the DRAM pressure. It's your week in storage.…

In-place upgrades arrive in Server 2019 and Semi-Annual, fonts sacrificed for containers One of the previews is for the Windows Server vNext Long-Term Servicing Channel, aka Windows Server 2019. The other previews the Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel, the version that gets a release every six months but is only supported for 18 months.…

As his company smashes Q1 2019 Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff thinks the USA needs “a national privacy law … that probably looks a lot like GDPR.”…

Chap in Pompeii had his block knocked off by a block of stone as he limped away from volcano Archaeologists have found a headless body in Pompeii and concluded that his skull was removed by a big rock pushed into his path by the pyroclastic flow that presaged the city’s doom.…

Water fun fact of the day! Boffins have, for the first time, managed to separate water into its two isomeric forms to test how they react to stuff, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.…

Imagine one giant virtual GPU at 2PFLOPS GTC Taiwan Nvidia chose its GPU Technology Conference in Taiwan today to unveil the HGX-2: its latest stack of high-end kit to run artificially intelligent software in data centers and the cloud.…

We know you’re busy, Mr Cook, but please reply before we become … unpleasant Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor has written to Apple with a request to remove messaging app Telegram from its App Store. Or else.…

'Joanap' and 'Brambul' harvest info about your systems and send it home US CERT has issued a Technical Alert that says two strains of malware are tools of the North Korean government.…

It turns out they’re the only intelligence agency with cyber-offensive capabilities The Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s signals intelligence agency, may be turned inwards after all.…

404: Sense of humor – or professionalism? – not found npm, the widely used and defiantly lower-case Node.js package manager, on Monday briefly returned an error to users connecting to the registry via proxy who attempted the npm install command.…

And trims its headcount, too HP Inc execs claimed on Tuesday they are staying ahead of the rest of the market with solid sales in both printers and PCs.…

You (actually may not) have a new message waiting for you Facebook has been accused of purposefully misleading netizens into accepting its GDPR-friendly privacy policy – by tricking them with fake notifications.…

Govt tech nightmare caused by bad bosses, poor planning Canada's top auditor has issued a scathing postmortem report on Phoenix: the nation's disastrous attempt to overhaul a key government IT system.…

How's this any different to advertising in a teen mag, asks social network A lawsuit alleging that Amazon.com, Cox Media Group, Cox Communications and T-Mobile US used Facebook ads to discriminate against older jobseekers has been expanded to finger other organizations, including Facebook.…

Time for plan C, says DNS overlord stuck in a privacy bind A fight over private information and the internet's domain name system is heading to a German court, in a proxy battle between European legislators and American intellectual property lawyers.…

在6月15日之前投资特朗普酒店，以避开名单 US President Donald Trump has put a missile, in the form of trade sanctions, back on the launchpad, started fueling it, and programmed its computer to strike Beijing. The countdown clock for liftoff is set for mid-June.…

Not just clouds of steam backup-security biz has to worry about Analysis Seven months ago Barracuda Networks was gobbled up by private equity biz Thoma Bravo because it saw latent possibilities that couldn’t be realized under public ownership.…

In other news, he's sodding off to space soon Richard Branson, figurehead of all things branded Virgin, has opined that our rain-sodden island needs a hyperloop railway system.…

'If you whack governments on privacy it will only drive the vulnerability market' Privacy advocates, journalists and a representative from GCHQ squared off in a debate on surveillance in Cambridge today.…

Ad blocker Ghostery, UK councils, vitamin sellers all in the blabtastic mix Amid the chaos of new European data protection rules coming into force at the end of last week, organisations are apparently struggling to grasp even the most basic of technical challenges, sending out non-blinded emails to their users.…

Come back, Gartner, your mystic mages are all forgiven Accounting house PwC has stuck its fingers in the air and declared that drones will create more than 600,000 jobs in the United Kingdom. They've also said it will add more value to the UK than the entire Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish manufacturing sectors combined.…

It's a Mod 'un world Lenovo's Motorola may soon offer 5G through its Mod phone expansion system, which allows peripherals to clip to the back of Mod-compatible phones using a magnet, according to leaked imagery.…

'We cannot, and will not, share decision-making autonomy with a third country' The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator has poured cold water on the UK's dreams of a special deal on data adequacy* after it leaves the bloc.…

New CEO: 'It's all fixable' Dixons Carphone is to close 92 of its 650 stores following a profit warning this morning which sent shares tumbling 20 per cent.…

Manchester man wins 'substantial' damages A Manchester man has won his case against former employer the Department for Work and Pensions, after a superior shared “highly private” medical information with his colleagues.…

Securing company data just got even harder After years of dire predictions, the problems caused by weak identity management could be about to catch up with businesses across the UK.…

Unmanned surveill-o-plane firm goes under the hood with El Reg Interview "It's just too hard to maintain all of those threads," eye-in-the-sky drone firm Insitu told The Register, explaining its move away from FPGAs to commercial off-the-shelf compute hardware for its AI and machine learning tech.…

If someone asks how you heard about it, tell them you read it at El Reg to save embarrassment Faced with growing state enthusiasm to block its services, one of the world's most popular adult sites has created its own virtual private network (VPN).…

The road to hell is paved with floppy disks and bad anti-virus software Who, me? Welcome again to “Who, me?”, The Register’s confessional column in which readers reveal their mistakes.…

New Gartner Supernatural Square has AWS and Azure on top, IBM and Alibaba lagging and Oracle on an offensive Analyst firm Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has again found that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the most mature clouds, but has omitted more than half of the vendors it covered last year on grounds that customers now demand more than just rented servers and storage.…

SingTel then left them open for a while, because ... well there's no excuse is there? Singaporean broadband users were left vulnerable to attackers after their ISP opened remote access ports on their modems and forgot to close them.…

Bad Vlad won't care, but this puts voting infrastructure on par with DNS and BGP The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) has called for an end to cyber-attacks on electoral infrastructure.…

Big-in-Japan 'bot offers root access through hard-coded password and worse bugs too Softbank's popular anthropomorphic robot, Pepper, has myriad security holes according to research published by Scandinavian researchers earlier this month.…

Everything's fine! A $1.3 billion fine! Winning! On Friday, United States president Donald Trump Tweeted that ZTE will be allowed to sell into America again, subject to board changes, security controls, and a fine.…

Pong paddle goes dark Atari co-founder and co-creator of the legendary Pong, Ted Dabney, has died aged 81 from esophageal cancer.…

Pong paddle goes dark Atari co-founder and co-creator of the legendary Pong, Ted Dabney, has died aged 81 from esophageal cancer.…

Feds trying to catalogue VPNFilter infections The FBI has reminded the world it wants us to reboot our routers to try and help it identify VPNFilter-affected routers.…

How's that 'self-driving' vision coming along, again? Fiat Chrysler America is recalling 4.8 million vehicles in the US to fix a software bug that could lock the vehicle's cruise control.…

Compensation offer after Total Outage Ends Support for Usual Performance The National Australia Bank has been sharply criticised after a seven-hour outage on Saturday that took down its ATMs, EFTPOS, Internet banking, mobile banking services, and call centre operations.…

Some security bites for the long weekend Roundup While this week was dominated by news of a new Spectre variant, the VPNFilter botnet, and TalkTalk's badbad routersrouters, plenty of other stories popped up.…

Some security bites for the long weekend Roundup While this week was dominated by news of a new Spectre variant, the VPNFilter botnet, and TalkTalk's badbad routersrouters, plenty of other stories popped up.…

And more! Roundup Here’s a quick roundup to keep you updated on what’s been happening in AI, beyond what we've already covered, for your long weekend.…

But applications the iGiant removes on its own won't be included In its latest Transparency Report, covering government demands for customer and device data in the second half of 2017, Apple said that it will soon enumerate government app takedown requests.…

And helps cable industry tackle scourge of streaming boxes US airwaves watchdog the FCC has taken a lot of flak in the past year for its determined effort to roll back its own rules on net neutrality – but that issue aside, the federal regulator has its finger on the pulse of America in the internet era.…

Political ad rules come at a bad time for some politicians In its effort to prevent election meddling in America, Facebook has ended up meddling in an election in America.…