The Register

The Secure Data Act has returned and is lookin' for love US lawmakers from both major political parties came together on Thursday to reintroduce a bill that, if passed, would prohibit the US government from forcing tech product makers to undermine the security of their wares.…

Getting beaten by Deep Blue seems to have had an effect Garry Kasparov, a former Soviet world chess champion and one of the greatest players of all time, has changed his tune about AI since he was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue.…

Florida Man gets one hell of a phone bill for nuisance calls The FCC has upheld a $120m fine levied against a man accused of making 96 million illegal robocalls.…

Human CEO outlines safety policy for other humans Analysis It's hard to know at what point in Amnon Shashua's presentation on autonomous cars that I started fearing for my life. But it began in earnest when others started asking questions and he started answering them.…

Judge's ruling won't be much help to this bloke going through the courts, though A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling that American border agents cannot randomly order deep searches of travelers' electronic devices.…

Judge's ruling won't be much help to this bloke going through the courts, though A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling that American border agents cannot randomly order deep searches of travelers' electronic devices.…

If by 'smart' you mean one who 'gets good grades' Students who get good grades have better passwords than their less academically successful peers, though this finding should be considered alongside several caveats.…

If by 'smart' you mean one who 'gets good grades' Students who get good grades have better passwords than their less academically successful peers, though this finding should be considered alongside several caveats.…

Sub-literate, inept, and mostly right-on Pics US Congress has released more than 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by a pro-Kremlin, so-called troll factory the Internet Research Agency.…

Sub-literate, inept, and um... mostly right-on. US Congress has released the full cache of over 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by a pro-Kremlin group, the Internet Research Agency.…

600p and Pro 6000p devices beset by 'incompatibility issues' The Windows 10 April 2018 Update is not proving to be the smoothest of installations for PCs containing certain Intel SSDs.…

Canadian cops put animal road trips on ice after owners 'forget' to mention their plan Canadian law enforcement is bearing down on a pair of zoo owners whose wild trip to the local Dairy Queen wasn't quite the Kodiak moment they'd hoped for.…

Showing Google and Samsung how it's done Nimble-footed Garmin has nipped ahead of industry's lumbering giants and expanded its own mobile payments offering in the UK to include "challenger bank" Starling.…

Not just public cloud services for public cloud servicer Low-cost Irish airline Ryanair is shuttering the "vast majority" of its data centres and moving the infrastructure to AWS.…

Possibly Gemalto and Telit, judging by this The biggest shipper of Internet of Things cellular modules last year wasn’t one of the usual suspects such as Gemalto or Telit. It was Chinese-headquartered biz Simcom.…

New addition to Copernicus, Sentinel-3B, is alive and well and taking pictures The newly launched Sentinel-3B satellite has snapped its first shots of home, delighting boffins back on Earth.…

Don't worry, regulation still, er, WEEKS away Android developers are scrambling to change their apps after 11th hour privacy instructions from Google left them waiting on an SDK which still isn't ready.…

SDN-based security, automated database cloning and multi-cloud spending control Nutanix has moved into SaaS-based compliance, Acropolis SDN-based security and PaaS-based automated database operations with its new Beam, Flow and Era products.…

Planning process prattle stalled project for years Apple has torn up a blueprint to build a €850m (£742m) data centre in Ireland, blaming delays in the planning process that have stalled the project for almost three years.…

Battery optimisation and some love for Assistant in dev preview Google has made some minor tweaks to the wearable OS it insists is doing just great.…

Punxsutawney Phil, where will Brexit leave UK space? As the imagined strains of Sonny and Cher’s hit "I Got You, Babe"* died down, the UK Parliament’s Exiting the European Union Committee spent a chunk of yesterday morning asking the UK space industry the same old questions.…

.NET Core 3.0 will be a soothing balm, claims veep Julia Liuson Build "We're going to reinvigorate Windows desktop development," claimed Julia Liuson, Microsoft's corporate VP responsible for developer tools and programming languages.…

Alas poor Velostrata! You knew those AWS and Azure workloads well Israeli multi-vendor cloud migration startup Velostrata might not be so agnostic about which data centres it shifts workloads to after agreeing to be gobbled by Google for an undisclosed financial sum.…

Still making it rain for MS Growth in spending on cloud by certain sectors of the UK government looks to be coming to a juddering halt, according to information provided under Freedom of Information (FoI) and open data.…

Idiot's guide to keeping your GDPR nose clean Big data has been branded as - we're throwing up in our mouths as we say this – the "oil" of what has annoyingly become known as the "fourth industrial revolution."* Strip that down, and we're in part talking about the way individuals' data is used to knit new, virtual businesses.…

Plans evacuate HQ out of London after 144 years Former state monopoly BT is to chop 13,000 jobs over the next three years and will shutter its current London HQ under plans to wring out £1.5bn in costs and boost its flagging share price.…

It’ll only have been two-and-a-half years from launch to landing VMware has finally set a date for delivery of a fully-functional HTML5 client for vSphere.…

Latest compute craze turns the tide on system trends Red Hat Summit If you're cynical about artificial intelligence, here's one ray of sunshine for you: it's got engineers around the globe focusing on improving number-crunching and computing performance right down to the silicon level.…

But the XenMobile brand has joined the choir eternal Citrix has used its Synergy conference to pitch itself as a vendor capable of changing the way you and your users work.…

MPs warned that negotiations could take years, better lay the groundwork now There is no doubt that the UK's surveillance regimes will come under scrutiny in negotiations on continued data flows with Europe after Brexit, and the government needs to start preparing for that now, MPs have been told.…

Wombats have all the fun Wombats generally get tagged as #cute in social media images, but on dates things can get, umm, hairy, with boffins reporting bum-biting as a prominent mating behaviour.…

It's old, it's everywhere and it's not likely to be fixed in a hurry The early software-defined networking protocol, OpenFlow, has a vulnerability – but will anyone fix it?…

That's nice and all, but, er, a brain it ain't, no matter what the marketing suggests DeepMind researchers have developed a neural network loosely modeled on mammalian brains to craft an artificially intelligent program capable of navigating through mazes.…

What you need is a switched 'Spline', says Cisco-irritator Arista Networks has decided the campus network is the next place it wants to irritate Cisco.…

It's the anchovy pasta of Linux administration, it seems Red Hat Summit Senior Red Hat techies this week urged Red Hat Enterprise Linux sysadmins to give Systemd a chance if they haven't already taken the software to heart.…

More desktops. More boards. More ‘init freedom’ and a long-ish roadmap Devuan Linux, the Debian fork that offers “init freedom” has announced the first release candidate for its second version.…

China’s going to be super duper happy – not US sanctions against Chinese mobe maker ZTE have forced the company to go into zombie mode as it can’t get the electronic components it needs from American suppliers.…

FSF firebrand rails against purged abort() docs 'satire' Late last month, open-source contributor Raymond Nicholson proposed a change to the manual for glibc, the GNU implementation of the C programming language's standard library, to remove "the abortion joke," which accompanied the explanation of libc's abort() function.…

General Motors CTO chats to El Reg about robo-ride timings After several years of hype about autonomous vehicles – cars that can truly independently drive themselves – the big question has become: when will people other than beta testers get in them?…

First releases will be touch and go. If your hardware can handle it Google IO On Tuesday, Google told developers at its IO conference in Silicon Valley that Linux applications and command lines are coming to Chrome OS, showed off a few demos – and then shut up about it and published an information-light blog post. So, we decided to dig a little during the event today.…

Offers 15TB SSDs and AI-driven operations tools to weary admins Hitachi Vantara has updated its VSP all-flash and hybrid storage arrays and their SVOS operating system, and provided AI-based operations tools to make operating them easier.…

Too little, too late? Qualcomm is shipping samples of its third-generation wearable chip – the first to be built from the "ground up," it claims.…

Mac Notification Center sometimes clones supposedly transient notes Encrypted chat app Signal's disappearing messages may not actually vanish on Apple Macs, thanks to the way the encrypted messaging software interacts with the macOS Notification Center.…

Govt says non-clinical info will only be extracted in, er, loosely defined circumstances The UK government has partially backed down from ordering the NHS to hand over patients' personal details to the Home Office so it can track down illegal immigrants.…

♫ We're so bored with your USP ♫ Smartmobe shipments were down almost 7 per cent year-on-year in Europe during calendar Q1, according to Canalys, as phone fatigue hit mature markets hard.…

Plus: Russia's space head honcho launched out of his job NASA chief Jim Bridenstine has strangely compared previous attempts to return to the Moon to an old Peanuts cartoon.…

Scrolling Twitter more important than phoning home or anywhere else Web browsing ranks as the most important phone use activity, above making calls, a chunky survey by Ofcom has found.…

Swipe right to like then tap, tap, tap away Hands On Early developer builds traditionally require donning a hazmat suit, but as Android enters its middle age, Google wants everyone to come in, wearing Bermuda shorts, and kick the tyres like tourists.…

On-premises boost paired with public cloud blanket extension NetApp has announced a real biggie for storage wonks: support for Fibre Channel-based NVMe-over-Fabrics (FC-NVMe) access to all-flash ONTAP arrays using Brocade gear.…