The Register

Citizens not keen on having habits tracked are watching closely A spec for online age verification is due to be published on Monday, a decision backers hope will pacify opponents of the smut checks.…

Forced punters to cough extra £40 for pre-configured laptops Currys PC World today apologised for forcing customers to pay an extra £40 for pre-configuration on their laptops that they didn't request – a dodgy practice brought to light by consumer charity Which?…

Streaming monolith starts move into home gear Analysis As Spotify nears an IPO, it is edging towards making home music gear, with a voice-powered speaker the most likely debutant.…

Parallel access filesystem for disks gets new life Case study IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) started out as a parallel access filesystem for disk-based arrays – so some may have expected it to fall over and die in the face of lightning fast access NVMe SSD and NVMe fabric access arrays.…

Pop this in your mouth and say 'Rastapopoulos' Something for the Weekend, Sir? Like to get wet, confides (or asks) the manufacturer in suitably moist English.…

Meet our new roundup of networking news, this week feat. Cisco, Juniper and more This week's network-news-in-five minutes has Palo Alto Networks acquiring a startup, a slew of Cisco switches, Juniper's fabric fetish, network monitoring and more.…

Continuous Lifecycle earlybird offer facing chop at midnight Events We’ll be pulling down the shutters on our earlybird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle London this evening, meaning you’ve got just hours left to save £100s on conference and workshop tickets.…

Come and chillax with us, nontrepreneurs! The taxpayer is helping fund a "Decelerator" for burnt-out startups in Shoreditch to help them "reflect and reprioritise".…

Earth-shattering change to biz? You'll be the judge of that It's hard to believe there once was a more innocent time when if somebody used the phrase "digital transformation" you might think they were being pretentious about making the switch from renting films on DVD delivered in the post to Amazon Prime downloads. But there's still a lot of confusion around the term – even more so when people start to ask organisations that have started down that path whether it has worked.…

$142 billion in kit shipped last year, half from Dell, Cisco and HPE Analyst firm Canalys has claimed 2017 saw record shipments of data centre infrastructure.…

And he couldn’t do that, until tech support showed printers and staplers don’t mix On-Call Why look at that! Friday is upon us, which means it’s time to read this week’s edition of On-Call, our weekly column featuring Register readers’ recollections of tech support jobs gone wrong.…

Britons never, never, never shall be wage slaves. Oh wait Cyber security professionals in Germany earn on average 17 per cent more than their UK counterparts.…

Face it, you're not going to adopt ChromeOS without integrating stuff you already run Google’s beefed up Chrome Enterprise, its US$50-a-year management service for Chrome OS devices.…

Subcutaneous smart card doesn’t cut it in Sydney A self-described “cyborg” who slipped a public transport smartcard under his skin has pled guilty to riding trains without a valid ticket and copped a fine, plus costs.…

Which may be why Google’s changed the name to ‘Wear OS’ LogoWatch LogoWatch Google’s re-branded Android Wear, the cut of Android for wearable devices, as “Wear OS by Google” and added the tag line "make every minute matter".…

How far down does water drip? Water covers most of the Earth’s surface and flows deep beneath it as well. But how deep it travels is unknown.…

And how it works doesn't leak. Gulp! A secretive unlocking tool offered to cops and government agents has some computer security bods worried over its privacy implications.…

Alert adds detail to 'Dragonfly' cyber-attack disclosed last year The US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday issued an alert warning of ongoing cyber-attacks against the West's energy utilities and other critical infrastructure by individuals acting on behalf of the Russian government.…

For those planning an out-of-the-world trip, solar radiation is on the rise Space is getting deadlier. The amount of solar radiation has increased from previous solar cycles, according to new measurements made by a team of researchers.…

In Constantinople it works, not good news for the Turks Encrypted email provider ProtonMail says its service has been blocked in Turkey, but can still be accessed via a VPN, DNS, or Tor.…

Code-sharing websites may be forced to install automatic infringement filters Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as "censorship machines" – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software.…

Top exec talks to El Reg on shifting 130,000 staff Interview Collaboration rather than cost is the reason Airbus has given Microsoft’s old-world Office app bundle the heave ho and is migrating 130,000 staff – the entire workforce – to Google’s G Suite.…

Но все же никакого сговора The US Treasury is freezing the assets of 19 people and five groups from Russia who launched cyber-attacks and interfered with America's elections.…

Meltdown, Spectre-free CPUs coming this year, allegedly Intel has claimed its future processors – shipping as early as the second half of this year – will be free of the security design flaws it totally told you not to fret about.…

App biz flings travel info at capital's transport regulator ahead of licensing decision Much maligned not-a-taxi biz Uber has pledged to hand over travel data to Transport for London.…

To forget, or not to forget? That is the question RTBF trial The man demanding Google deletes search links to interviews he gave about a criminal offence he committed has been accused of giving “demonstrably false” answers in court by Google’s barrister.…

Directory traversal + log injection = I can see your privates A pair of recently patched security vulnerabilities in SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java* could have been combined to hack customer relationship management (CRM) systems.…

Compliance with Home Office data-slurp not cool, say MPs The heads of the Digital arm of the UK's National Health Service have been accused of acting as suppliers, rather than guardians, of the data belonging to patients under their care by handing address information to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.…

What can you do about it for now? Sweet 2FA Email newsletter distribution service MailChimp has promised to act on the abuse of accounts to send (frequently) malware-tainted spam.…

Handouts from March but you're on your own for line rental fees The UK government has unveiled its £67m broadband voucher scheme, flinging £3,000 at SMEs to set up gigabit connections and handing £500 ones to regular folk*. After that users have to stump up the rest in ongoing rental fees.…

Jumped-up asteroid experiencing 'icy activity' There is icy activity on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres, according to researchers studying observations from NASA’s probe, Dawn.…

But will that prevent another burning effigy? BT's Openreach is to hire 3,500 trainee engineers in a bid to support its 'full-fibre' proposals for Britain.…

We can't see alien radio signals because they were snuffed out If we ever detect signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, they are likely already dead, a somewhat downbeat update to the venerable Drake equation suggests.…

Hotspot Shield patched; Zenmate and VPN Shield haven't ... yet? A virtual private network recommendation site decided to call in the white hats and test three products for bugs, and the news wasn't good.…

Airlines want another 4,600 of the single-aisle workhorse that debuted in 1967 Boeing has revealed that the 10,000th 737 rolled off the production line this week.…

Just what the world needs after a year of component shortages PC-and-server-makers spent most of 2017 complaining about profit erosion due to shortages of key components.…

Adds bug bounty class for Meltdown and Spectre attacks on Windows and Azure Microsoft has created a new class of bug bounty specifically for speculative execution bugs like January's Meltdown and Spectre processor CPU design flaws.…

Extraordinary letter to EPO Admin Council blows up management claims An extraordinary letter from nearly 1,000 patent examiners has confirmed what critics of the European Patent Office (EPO) have been saying for some time: patent quality has fallen thanks to a determined push by management to approve more of them.…

If you can’t bring people in, you build bigger offices offshore President Trump’s immigration policies are costing the United States technology jobs, rather than their intended effect of growing them, according to Bill Wagner, the CEO of LogMeIn.…

Meet our new roundup of networking news, this week feat. Cisco, Juniper and more This week's network-news-in-five minutes has Palo Alto Networks acquiring a startup, a slew of Cisco switches, Juniper's fabric fetish, network monitoring and more.…

NASA engineers say shutdown will happen 'within months' NASA has announced the Kepler Space Telescope has almost exhausted its fuel supply.…

Lee forced to serve full term after eight-year hiatus A former Samsung exec is headed to prison after losing his appeal on charges of wire and tax fraud.…

US issues recall for 260,000 batteries after 53 'incidents' The US Consumer Product Safety Division has issued a recall notice for six types of lithium-ion battery packs sold by AmazonBasics.…

The video site neglected to inform Wikipedia that it will be leeching its labor In Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told the audience at the South by Southwest Interactive conference that the social video site plans to defuse conspiracy theory content by pairing it with corrective information culled from Wikipedia – a site editable by more or less anyone.…

But IBM Australia has only a ‘skeleton crew’ on duty, missed deadlines, will move people from other projects for fix Around a third of servers at Transport for New South Wales, the public transport department in Australia’s largest most populous state, need security patches, some dating back to 2007. But IBM, which provides IT services to the agency, doesn’t have enough people dedicated to the the job to get it done in the planned timeframe or in a manner that will let the agency operate as it desires.…

State won't work with those whose conduct is atrocious California is doubling down on its efforts to mandate net neutrality, this time with a bill making its way through the state senate.…

Buffet of 10 organ types to check for reactions Boffins from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Northeastern University, and several bio-oriented companies have developed a chip that can be loaded with cells from up to 10 organs for testing how drugs affect the human body.…

'Next Steve Jobs' humiliated and ruined but avoids jail The woman heralded as "the next Steve Jobs" has been charged with massive fraud, forced to pay a $500,000 fine and been stripped of control of the company she founded.…

Poll says devs wouldn’t write unethical code - probably Stack Overflow’s annual survey has revealed the tools and tech that developers love to hate: Visual Basic 6, IBM Db2 and SharePoint.…

Party leaders would protest but they're currently in prison Facebook has removed the pages of far right group Britain First from its platform along with those of its party's leaders.…