The Register

Look, we're used to dealing with cock-ups The IT challenges posed by Brexit to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are "significantly less complex" than its woeful Common Agricultural Payments system, Defra's permanent secretary has told MPs.…

Limit 'undermines business confidence', groups tell UK.gov Forty industry bodies have called on UK government to rethink its cap on skilled workers' visas, which has been reached for the last three months running.…

Spectrum NAS overlaps with Spectrum Scale, but there are differences Analysis IBM already had a scale-out NAS (filer) when it announced Spectrum NAS last month: Spectrum Scale, which can grow to 16,000-plus nodes. Why does it need another?…

Workload isolation is niche, but they're rather good at it The container is doomed, killed by serverless. Containers are killing Virtual Machines (VM). Nobody uses bare metal servers. Oh, and tape is dead. These, and other clichés, are available for a limited time, printed on a coffee mug of your choice alongside a complimentary moon-on-a-stick for $24.99.…

As hardware goes soft, hardware revenues follow If you watch the fortunes of the big names in switching, you probably won't be surprised to hear that the market is only recording modest growth.…

Locked-down Windows to come to all Windows 10 editions, not just for kids When Microsoft launched Windows 10 S in May 2017, the company pitched it as a stripped-back version of Windows that would both run on hardware cheap enough for students around the world and make life easy for time-poor, cash-strapped school sysadmins.…

Saudi Arabia shows more optimism for AR tech than… well, everyone else Analysis Throwing caution to the wind, the investment arm of Saudi Arabia has sunk $400m into augmented-reality biz Magic Leap.…

New pics make the gas giant's poles look like portals to hell Jupiter has the strangest storm behavior observed to date, with formation patterns that have never been seen elsewhere.…

Dial-a-ride driving sucks less than previously thought The author behind a high-profile study on driver pay for ride-sharing services is revising his numbers to show the services pay more than was reported.…

Two critical vulnerabilities among 20 patches Cisco's security developers have served up a parcel of patches.…

It lets you work on encrypted data without taking it to plaintext and back again IBM has rewritten its C++ homomorphic encryption library and claims it now goes up to 75 times faster.…

They walk and quack like an Exchange but SEC says don’t invest unless they follow rules like an Exchange The United States' Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has again warned investors to be ever-so-careful when considering cryptocurrencies, because so-called “exchanges” for the assets fit all the definitions of a subject—to-regulation exchange other than having signed up for that regulation.…

Viptela and Meraki add WAN-wranglers as Cisco decides wide-area networks need love Cisco’s decided that wide area networks need more automated attention, so has released two complementary WAN analytics products.…

'You guys can build anything if you put your mind to it' is the gist of the argument FBI director Christopher Wray has addressed a cyber-security conference and again called for technologists to innovate their way around strong cryptography.…

The agency that keeps America safe runs un-patched Flash, and worse besides The United States' Department of Homeland Security could do more to keep its IT systems secure, a government report has found.…

Spectrum freed up in law named after telco veteran Analysis A global race to roll out next-generation 5G mobile networks has intensified with the approval of new legislation by the US House of Representatives.…

Zuck's $2bn nerd visor goes dark after dev lets certs expire Oculus says it is working to fix a service outage for its Rift headset caused by an expired certificate.…

VPN app collects all sorts of details Facebook's mobile VPN app, Onavo Protect, has been pushed as a way to protect personal information over public networks. But the app, which the social media giant acquired in 2013, sends users' data back to Facebook, even when the app is turned off.…

Telco promises to pump big bucks into 5G if US signs off on merger Broadcom says it will earmark $1.5bn for funding of 5G wireless broadband networks as part of its proposed acquisition of Qualcomm.…

Chairman and CEO are out Beleaguered array vendor Tintri has had to face reality with its latest falling quarterly sales and widening losses prompting drastic refinancing and restructuring action.…

Best Buy red-faced after earlier denials Best Buy and the FBI have had a longstanding and very cosy relationship that incentivised Geek Squad techies to go hunting for porn on customers PCs, documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act have shown.…

Bug already plugged, get updating Researchers have uncovered a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in all versions of the Exim mail transfer agent.…

We'll take a very long lunch then decide what to do France's national competition regulator has decided that Google and Facebook hold "overwhelming" market power in digital advertising and are considering a formal investigation.…

Are you high? For Wednesday's bollocks du jour comes news that online grocer Ocado is to fling bottles of cannabis oil-infused spring water – made by Croydon-based Love Hemp – at gullible thirsty customers.…

As Virtzilla-on-AWS lands in London and heads for the world VMware's delivered an on-premises-capable version of its Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) that can migrate private clouds to public clouds, and software-defined data centres among any VMware-powered cloud.…

Dolbyfication continues BlackBerry has found another licensee for its Dolby-like licensing initiative, "Secured by BlackBerry", and expanded the venture way beyond smartphones.…

Still on bunger strike A suspected drug dealer's bowels have won out over Essex cops after he was released from custody by resisting the urge to poo for 46 days.…

Matt Hancock once again calls app Britain Minister for fun Matt Hancock, of eponymous app fame, has unveiled a report titled "Culture is Digital" (PDF), aimed at boosting the "ultimate power couple" sectors via "an ambitious framework".…

To boldly go where a Scottish spaceport would really like to Cornwall has thrown its hat in the ring to become the prime location for Human Centred Space businesses by 2030.…

Sales slowdown in Europe and North America leads to write-down Reassuringly expensive plastic brick maker Lego was forced to write down a load of stock in 2017 – a move that rocked its bottom line – as it produced blocks that some customers clearly didn't want to build with.…

Telcos may have breached EU net neutrality rules Gummy mouthed watchdog Ofcom has launched a probe into whether Three and Vodafone breached the EU's net neutrality rules by throttling certain services on their networks.…

Legal eagles knock heads for IP battle Analysis When WhatsApp founder Jan Koum complained that Apple was ripping off his app, the derision from the BlackBerry community was instant.…

Shows where wars of the 21st century will really be fought... The Ministry of Defence has admitted that it spends more on computer services than it does on weapons and ammunition for the Armed Forces.…

Market position evaporating in front of our eyes Analysis Western Digital is letting its acquired market share in enterprise SSDs slip away from a revenue and capacity perspective as rival Micron - now infused with ex-SanDisk execs - keeps on growing like a weed.…

But press regulation risks derailing Data Protection Bill debate, warn observers The UK government's plan to excuse itself from having to hand over information about the data it holds on immigrants has received short shrift from MPs.…

Judge dismisses complaints, Chipzilla wins big A former senior saleswoman at Intel who accused the firm of sex discrimination and wrongful dismissal has lost all of her claims and has been ordered to pay the company £45,000 by the middle of this month.…

No legislation or fines, are you some kind of IdIoT? The makers of connected devices will be expected to build in security measures to prevent cyber threats, under a draft "code of conduct" issued by the UK government today.…

You’re right, there’s no air in space, but there’s enough to squirt about in very low orbits The European Space Agency has hailed the successful test of an air-breathing engine that works in space.…

Borg thinks own Spark voice assistant knows how to behave in the office, but we've seen it and … meh VID Cisco will shortly give the world a voice assistant it believes has a shot at making life uncomfortable for Siri, Cortana and Alexa in the office.…

Except you there in the UK: you've got no chance of catching Tiangong-1 debris If you read the New Zealand Herald, you're (a) probably a Kiwi, and (b) building a bunker because you expect a Chinese space station to drop on your head.…

200 Gbps per wavelength on sub cables, 400 on metro networks, 600 in data centres Two years after it first demonstrated its highest-capacity modulation scheme, Nokia has announced its release as a product.…

Users will be permitted to run them in parallel with NBN connections, but they've been marked for extinction Horror stories about poor installation experiences for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) are everywhere, which might be making businesses reluctant to give up old but reliable services. To get those customers over the line, nbn™, the company building and operating the NBN, has announced it will let business customers keep their ISDN services in parallel with an NBN connection until they're ready to migrate.…

Rival OURSA conf found 14 in five days after only Monica Lewinsky made RSA's agenda Day one of the annual RSA conference in San Francisco on April 17 will have some competition after a group of female infosec professionals decided to hold their own shindig - titled Our Security Advocates or OURSA - to showcase the work of women in the field.…

TensorFlow APIs are being used for object detection Google is working with the US Department of Defense to develop AI algorithms to identify objects in videos taken by drones.…

A swarm is an fleet of 40 drones or more, apparently US warplanners are going to have to deal with an increasing drone threat, both from off-the-shelf hardware today to possibly more intelligent dangers.…

For example: South Carolina, Virginia, North Dakota and Kentucky Legislators in Rhode Island have come up with a novel way to deal with online pornography: require ISPs to block sexual content and then require consumers to pay a $20 "digital access fee" if they want to see smut.…

Hundreds of workers said to be on the chopping block HPE has confirmed plans to outsource its field support business to Unisys.…

Cult of personality meet shameful response The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has finally decided to address the months-long lack of telecoms service in Puerto Rico, one day before its chair visits the storm-ravaged island.…

Can't we just get along? At a sunny California inn with hors d'oeuvres, most definitely At the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma, California, on Tuesday, members of the open source community gathered under a big tent.…

Democracy being what it is, some folks are opposed More than one hundred organizations called on US congress to fast-lane legislation on self-driving cars.…