The Register

'Cos the garden was soooo rosy before that Outsourcers are anxious their hard-earned reputations are being besmirched by the recent collapse of Brit multinational construction firm Carillion, so much so their representative organisation is seeking a drastic image rebrand.…

Moomins and Lordi on the board? It's in the national interest! The Finnish government has snapped up 3.3 per cent of Nokia Corporation in a bid to shore up national ownership.…

Final countdown for CLL18 early bird tickets If you want to get up to speed on the key ideas changing software development and deployment AND dive deep on the technologies most important to you, grab your early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London while you can.…

But do they really need to worry? Analysis UK.gov is investing more and more taxpayer cash on Amazon Web Services, with spend through the G-Cloud digital marketplace growing eight fold year-on-year to £16m in 2017.…

Right To Be Forgotten trial continues in London The Right to be Forgotten trial has heard arguments on whether a man who gave interviews to national newspapers about his criminal past should be able to have those reports, among others, deleted from Google Search.…

Unloved by customers, and less and less loved by retailers Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality technology hit the shelves five months ago and the signs aren't good: dropped by retailers and ignored by developers, Redmond could be facing another Windows Mobile moment.…

Open source or Hotel California, there's something for everyone Container orchestration comes in different flavours, but actual effort must be put into identifying the system most palatable.…

And for politicians to regulate before disruption disrupts disruptively London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for social networks and sharing economy platforms to act for social good, rather than profit.…

But first, the big catchup: adding proper mail, scalability, mobility and JavaScript for devs IBM and HCL have outlined their plans for the Notes/Domino portfolio that the former offloaded to the latter last year.…

No 'legitimate users' of modded Blackberries, says FBI An arrest by US authorities last week has brought to light alleged associations between encrypted phone supplier Phantom Secure and international drug trafficking.…

Spat with activist investor continues as companies feud over voting procedures The spat over activist investor Starboard Value's plan to have Mellanox sell itself or do something else to enhance its value has resumed.…

Light and proximity sensors blocked for Firefox 62 Firefox has revealed it will bin more privacy-invasive APIs, deprecating access to the light sensor, device proximity sensor, and user proximity detection.…

Virtzilla's Amazonian cloud is also tooling up for managed services providers VMware has started planning to bring its Amazon Web Services tie-up to Australia and Japan.…

Full-fare payers can travel anonymously, but not concession-card holders The public transport authority in the Australian State of New South Wales has been told to limit the amount of data it collects with its stored value "Opal card", after a decision released by the state's Civil and Administrative Tribunal in February 2018.…

'Great, great company' to 'security risk' in six months The White House crushed Broadcom's bid for Qualcomm, declaring the deal cannot go due to national security concerns.…

Judge Koh trims class-action complaint, but suit will proceed The remains of Yahoo! will be forced to defend the class action complaint filed by customers whose data was exposed in the 2014 megahack.…

One of the 'super-Earth' finds might even have liquid water A team of astronomers have spotted 16 exoplanets, including a ‘super-Earth’ that might hold liquid water, hovering around 12 low mass stars hundreds of light years away from the Solar System.…

ISP cut off our secure mail service, says dev The creator and co-founder of Tutanota is blaming Comcast after his encrypted mail service was briefly taken offline earlier this month.…

United Church of Christ not serene about Sinclair media ownership rule relaxation The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has picked up another foe in its ongoing love-in with Big Cable. But this time it's the Big Guy. Yes, we're talking about Jesus.…

Computer outage leaves Canucks grounded The famed politeness of Canadians was put to the test on Monday after the nation's largest airline suffered a massive computer outage, leaving travelers stranded.…

Boffins shows that sound output devices secretly capture audio Computer speakers and headphones make passable microphones and can be used to receive data via ultrasound and send signals back, making the practice of air gapping sensitivite computer systems less secure.…

Using wearable to get wrong kind of gains get Big House visit A US stock trader has been sentenced to two years in prison for running a pump and dump operation involving wearables vendor Fitbit, albeit one that earned him only a few thousand dollars.…

More posturing from presidential aide The Russian government has again intimated that it is prepared to cut itself off from the global internet, with a presidential aide telling a Russian news network that it is "ready for anything."…

Slacklike turns one Microsoft's Slack competitor Teams hit its first birthday this week, trumpeting some big numbers and a slew of new features.…

Yes, yeesss, give us lots of new things to do, say academics Giant US tech platforms are spreading misinformation and deliberately hiding their algorithms to evade scrutiny, according to a report for the European Commission.…

Report claims vuln-botherers share building with Ministry of State Security China has altered public vulnerability data to conceal the influence of its spy agency in the country's national information security bug reporting process.…

Sorry if this sounds a little… Xenu-phobic The Church of Scientology, founded by sci-fi author L Ron Hubbard, is set to start broadcasting its own TV programmes tonight.…

... even though the sound of it to Qualcomm's quite atrocious Broadcom plans to bring forward its redomiciliation to the US to 3 April in a move that, of course, has nothing to do with Qualcomm's delayed stockholder meeting happening two days later.…

'We need the families' assistance' says AAIB A British government agency has been downloading data from iPads and similar devices used by pilots of crashed aircraft, it has emerged.…

Outsourcer blames HMRC's new PAYE portal Troubled outsourcer Capita accidentally charged 17,000 former miners in the UK tens of thousands of pounds in extra tax, and has blamed the error on a change to HM Revenue & Customs' online PAYE portal.…

Ailing firm's appeal against court verdict binned Ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has had its appeal against a county court judgment in Luton, UK rejected, with the judge telling chairman Dr David Levy that his no-show in the dock over troll fears was unfounded.…

No, it's not a laundry detergent... it's a microservices flinger Nutanix is gobbling Netsil, a startup that develops tech for the discovery, mapping and management of microservices in distributed cloudy spaces.…

But it's underground! Elon Musk's audacious plans are usually met with acclaim, and sometimes even awe – but not this time. Fresh details of The Boring Company's urban transport plans have been lambasted on social media.…

April no longer deadline for compliance Smut gazers today breathed a sigh of collective relief as UK government delayed controversial age verification checks for online porn – because the new regulator set up to oversee them still hasn't issued guidance.…

Oh plus this GREAT idea... 14-and-ups should hand over their data UK Minister of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Matt Hancock said this weekend he wants to social media sites to enforce a cut-off for youngsters on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.…

Assures us his self-driving cars to be 200% safer than puny humans SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk assured the audience at Austin, Texas media 'n' tech megafest South by Southwest last night that his big rocket would fly next year.…

Execs tell earnings call how they will rescue unit Analysis Three top Dell execs told the earnings call that they were taking the fall in storage results seriously, were doing all they could to fix them, and that early signs were encouraging.…

There's a learning curve, but you too can be Mr Worldwide When companies started to build applications at web scale and needed services to scale to millions of requests across the globe, it quickly became apparent that relational databases just didn't work well enough.…

April Fools' Day deadline set HP Inc has terminated a mobile data service that bundled free data with select laptops, tablets and 2-in-1s.…

Social networks have too much power, says web daddy, and their profit motive means they won't act for the good of all Sir Timothy Berners-Lee has used the 29th anniversary of the publication of his proposal for an "information management" system that became the world-wide web to warn his creation is in peril.…

The right to be forgiven will soon be more important than the right to be forgotten A colleague recently excused himself from a meeting because he had to go and judge a robotics contest.…

Don't ask your staff to write scripts at beer O'clock on Friday afternoon Who, me? Welcome to the eighth edition of "Who, me?", the column in which Reg readers confess to moments at which they messed things up but good.…

Attacks tapering, as experts argue over 'kill switch' DDoS attacks taking advantage of ill-advised use of memcached have begun to decline, either because sysadmins are securing the process, or because people are using a potentially-troublesome “kill switch”.…

Rather than face a combined BroadQual, Chipzilla may break out the cheque book Intel is reportedly so discomfited by the prospect of a combined Broadcom and Qualcomm that it will consider buying Broadcom to stop the transaction.…

Researchers unmask trade in code-signing certs There's a flourishing trade in illicit code-signing certificates, and even extended validation certificates can be purchased for a few thousand dollars.…

Faster fibre will help networks cope with the Netflix effect Late last week, CableLabs launched another bandwidth-boosting project, this time designed to sweat more gigabits-per-second out of the optical leg of cable networks.…

Batteries suck, chargers suck, monitoring sucks: surely we can do better than this In February, developer and open source software advocate Eric S Raymond ranted that the Uninterruptible Power Supply market was overdue for open source disruption, and touched so many nerves around the world that the rant has become a project.…

Oh, and an amusing story about an AI medical chatbot Roundup Hello, here’s this week’s AI roundup. There is new code to play around with for those interested in machine learning and space, a model that predicts hilarious search trends for sex site YouPorn, and another funny story about an ostensibly intelligent medical chatbot in New Zealand.…

Bad news: It's only a patent filing and may never actually be made An Apple patent application has surfaced that should give hope to frustrated MacBook owners everywhere.…

And rising car thefts suggest the criminals are taking advantage Cars are getting smarter every year but their increasing computational power isn’t being backed up by good IT security practices – hacking them is child’s play.…