The Register

Defence secretary compares them to... WW2 Lancasters. Just a sec there, Gav Britain's first permanently based F-35B fighter jets are due to arrive in our green and pleasant land in June.…

Outsourcing badboy staring at £3m compensation payout A botched £330m seven-year NHS contract with Capita to outsource back-office support for 39,000 GPs, dentists and opticians was today savaged by the UK government's spending watchdog over its "potential to seriously harm patients".…

Hickory dickory Docker, the containers ran on the clock... er Asteroid, a Linux-based open-source wearable OS, formally reached a big milestone this week, and it might give Tizen a run for Samsung's money.…

Vows customers will have constant online access, no downtime Analysis This month Dell EMC introduced a new technology and rebranded VMAX array called PowerMax. It's more than a software upgrade, though, meaning that you may need to replace a VMAX with a PowerMax array.…

True lies from SEC designed to educate - hang on, what's the interest rate on this thing? The United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) ongoing efforts to crimp dodgy cryptocurrency dealings has seen it create a fake initial coin offering that, ironically, lures the incredulous with an offer to replace one weird pseudo-currency – loyalty scheme points – with cryptocurrency.…

Brussels wants a ‘full and detailed explanation’ – good luck with that, folks! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will visit Brussels in the next week or two to meet with representatives of the European Parliament including “the leaders of the political groups and the Chair and the Rapporteur of the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.”…

Brussels wants a ‘full and detailed explanation’ – good luck with that, folks! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will visit Brussels in the next week or two to meet with representatives of the European Parliament including “the leaders of the political groups and the Chair and the Rapporteur of the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.”…

Life's suite for hybrid infrastructure running under new RHV update Red Hat’s decided virtual servers ought not to be a standalone silo for much longer, so has created a “Virtualization Suite” that combines Red Hat Virtualization with the CloudForms tool it offers to manage OpenStack and cloud-native applications.…

Python pogrommer may have outed himself on YouTube Already under attack by Russia's telecommunications regulator, a new source of woe has emerged for crypto-chat app Telegram: malware.…

Switchzilla's switches outstripped by code Are you sick of hearing about Cisco's transformation yet? Bad news, then: with its Q3 results in, the company's waving its “we're a software company now” flag so high we may have to drop the “Switchzilla” nickname.…

No deal! No talks! Fake news! China bad! So much winning! United States president Donald Trump has again tried to clarify just what he meant when he Tweeted about protecting jobs at Chinese networking kit-maker ZTE.…

Send enough crafted packets to a NIC to put nasties into RAM, then the fun really starts Hard on the heels of the first network-based Rowhammer attack, some of the boffins involved in discovering Meltdown/Spectre have shown off their own technique for flipping bits using network requests.…

Scan scam? Scram The US Federal government has got its second conviction in the dismantling of a service that helped malware writers get around security software.…

DXC report is in but Tax Office won't say if it will ever see the light of day DXC’s report on the twin outages in HPE 3PAR storage arrays that disrupted web services at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has revealed nothing new about the incidents.…

Switchzilla scrambles out patches for trio of nasty flaws Cisco has issued updates to address a trio of critical vulnerabilities in its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center appliance.…

And seemingly just-about rebuilding it, too nbn™, the company building and operating Australia’s national broadband network (NBN), has revealed a little more about what it's doing to the hybrid fibre-coax networks it uses for some retail customers.…

Republicans at least argue for bipartisan legislation – so sort-of progress? The US Senate has voted to scrap an effort to get rid of net neutrality rules, providing a small but ultimately worthless victory in what has increasingly become a partisan topic in Washington DC.…

See kids, your parents were right - smoking is bad for you A forensics report has reported the first known death from the use of electronic cigarettes after a Florida man was killed when his device exploded and drove itself into his cranium.…

Lawyers want researcher's jailhouse phone transcript removed from case Security researcher Marcus Hutchins has moved to throw out phone transcripts and legal documents related to his hacking and fraud cases.…

Internet address industry given one week to introduce unfinished GDPR policy Thousands of internet registries and registrars will have just one week to overhaul their customer databases to fit with a policy that is still under development, or face ruinous fines.…

Continuous delivery, make way for continuous experimentation If you want a vision of the future of software creation, imagine a boot process spinning up a server, forever.…

Including ZTE? With the threat of Qualcomm litigation receding, Samsung is in talks with ZTE, among others, and ready to license its Exynos phone chips to anyone who wants them. This could lower the costs of high-end mobiles.…

Team hopes to head to South Africa in May 2019 The team behind the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car (SSC) announced plans today to take a crack at the 1,228kmph (763mph) land-speed record at the end of 2019.…

Keep your friends close and your enemas closer… Leaving parties can be an opportunity for more anally retentive colleagues to loosen up and go with the flow. But one woman took that to an extreme by bringing laxative brownies to a send-off bash.…

Calls to scrap 'arbitrary' cap as MPs launch bid to draft reforms Thousands of skilled workers – including IT specialists and engineers – have been refused visas this year due to the British government's much-maligned immigration cap.…

Explore the far frontiers of supercomputing PROMO The annual ISC High Performance conference always draws speakers, exhibitors and researchers from all over the world, and this year’s event promises to be a bumper edition.…

Try fast, frequent and frugal experiments instead At DevOps-focused London conference Continuous Lifecycle* today, Linda Rising challenged the superstition of tech professionals, a group that ought to have some affinity for science.…

Speaks of automation, move into copy data management Veeam customers have been hit by a wave of "hyper-availability" hyperbole.…

Plexxi hoovered up for an undisclosed sum Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to slurp software-defined data fabric networking maker Plexxi for an undisclosed sum.…

'How do I charge my car?' 'No idea, but would you like one of these pills instead?' Owners and fans of Tesla cars seeking support on the company's forums are instead being offered love in all the wrong places.…

Coming to a meeting room near you in 2019 Microsoft confirmed a refresh for its Surface Hub line last night, with new hardware likely to ship sometime in 2019.…

The bloodbath begins Analysis Huawei's decision to cannibalise its own sales with cheaper Primark versions of its own products (branded "Honor") is perhaps the only interesting thing in the phone business right now.…

CEO awaits technical report Updated Manchester-based hosting outfit UKFast has fingered a Cisco switch as the root cause of a service wobble that has caused grief for some customers.…

Puts best face on user biz after miserable results in enterprise Still smarting from last week's dismal annual results, BT today made a raft of announcements for its consumer group, including a converged broadband and mobile network.…

Unmanned fliers' techies chat to El Reg Balancing military and civilian standards for data-crunching and software development for surveillance drones is an interesting challenge, according to unmanned aircraft company Insitu.…

Data Protection Bill ping-pongs as MPs and peers battle over press regulations UK political parties have been urged not to use a "legal loophole" that would allow them to process personal data revealing people's opinions on politics.…

It's our fault the Facebooks and Googles run everything Comment In the same way it has become de rigueur to slag off Facebook for its many privacy sins while billions still dump their data into the service, it's also pretty trendy to pretend that blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions publicly and permanently, offers answers to a new and improved decentralised web that leaves individuals, not Facebook, in charge of their data.…

If you want your fave to survive, you'll need to dig deep If you're new to Linux you'd be forgiven for thinking there are only a half-dozen distributions – names like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux tend to get most of the headlines.…

For all its utility, serverless lacks unicorns and rainbows Continuous Lifecycle "You'll never go hungry if you know AWS," one of the workshop participants at the Continuous Lifecycle* devops-focused conference in London remarked.…

Skylab is 45, Mercury programme turns 55 Two NASA anniversaries rolled around this week, but you would be forgiven for missing them. The first was the 45th anniversary of the launch of the United States' only solo Space Station, Skylab, designed to host astronauts for months at a time.…

Games and alerts lost their voice to feature designed to hush auto-play vids Google has tweaked Chrome 66 to make the new feature that silences auto-playing videos less aggressive.…

Can anyone catch the big three (plus Oracle and IBM?) Amazon Web Services has announced a new and significant marquee customer: Verizon.…

Hand-sized quadrotor packs a neural network A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance.…

Better review for Snaps Store promised anyway after last week's crypto surprise Canonical has responded to last week's discovery that its Snap store carried apps containing embedded crypto-currency miners, by pledging to introduce a “verified developer” program.…

Before it amplifies DDoS attacks Universal Plug 'n' Play, that eternal feast of the black-hat, has been identified as helping to amplify denial-of-service attacks.…

Proof-of-concept fits in a Tweet and can take down all of RH's best bits Red Hat has announced a critical vulnerability in its DHCP client and while it doesn't have a brand name it does have a Tweetable proof-of-concept.…

That sound you can hear is laughter from Oracle HQ Two US senators have asked the nation's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take another look at Google's location harvesting.…

Babbles about subpoenas, corruption, corrupt pyramidal power structures and so much more Security personality John McAfee has “gone underground” in a convoy of armoured cars escorted by people claimed to be former members of the military, to escape what he says is persecution by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)…

Not even Zuckerberg can escape the tax man Facebook has lost its bid to throw out a tax bill on $7bn worth of income it had stashed overseas.…

There was a lot going in the Palm Desert heat Intel Capital If ever there was an analogy for how technology enables man to do extraordinary things, it came on Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon last week at the Intel Capital conference in Palm Desert, California.…