The Register

Bad news for the FCC because the site has 55 staff and doesn't hand out email addresses SHMOOCON 2018 A new analysis of the comments made on the United States Federal Communications Commission's consultation on the future of net neutrality has shown the whole process of public comments was fatally flawed.…

It’s the visual equivalent of "10 PRINT 'Developer Wanted'" The City of Los Angeles has sparked plenty of chuckles with a job ad for a “Graphics Designer” that shows how desperately a new hire is needed by apparently using Microsoft Paint to illustrate the opportunity.…

And years away from safety It is now almost three weeks since The Register revealed the chip design flaws that Google later confirmed and the world still awaits certainty about what the mistakes mean and what it will take to fix them.…

Satellite carries keys to Graz China has revealed more detail of its much-hyped satellite quantum key distribution network.…

It needs a ninth release candidate, thanks in part to Meltdown and Spectre Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux 4.15 needs a ninth release candidate, making it the first kernel release to need that much work since 2011.…

Chip-maker promises to play nice with others to secure deal Qualcomm's NXP Semiconductor has been cleared by European Commission regulators, which makes it pretty much a done deal.…

Sunday success for local launchers Rocket Labs New Zealand has joined the list of spacefaring nations, courtesy of a US-Kiwi startup called Rocket Lab.…

NIST delays advice and is very, very sorry about 2013 crypto SNAFU ShmooCon 2018 The political maneuvering that has shut much of the US government has delayed the National Institute of Standards and Technology's planned release of guidance about the risks and rewards of blockchain technology.…

BAAAB AABBB AAAAA BAAAA AABAA ABBAB ABBAA BAAAA AABAA AAABB AAABB ABAAA BAABA Shmoocon Among the 400,000 graves at the Arlington National Cemetery – a solemn US military graveyard in Virginia – lies the final resting place of cryptography pioneers William and Elizebeth Friedman.…

Crikey! The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is the latest financial watchdog to haul into court companies in the virtual currency space.…

Election manipulation wasn't as bad as feared – it was worse Twitter says it will warn hundreds of thousands of tweeters who deliberately or inadvertently interacted with Kremlin bots during the 2016 US presidential election.…

US regulator won't pretend that mobile networks are equivalent to landlines Analysis America's favorite government watchdog – the Federal Communications Commission – has backtracked on plans to downgrade the entire country's internet, agreeing to maintain its current definition of what is broadband speed.…

We're not sure why but maybe it will become a thing While commuter buses ferrying Apple and Google employees have been rerouted to avoid being shot at – reportedly with a pellet gun – GM Cruise has had less success keeping one of its self-driving cars out of harm's way.…

There is literally nothing decent in this story Analysis The US Senate reauthorized a controversial NSA spying program on Thursday – and then, because it's 2018 and nothing matters any more, embarked on a partisan battle over a confidential memo that outlines Uncle Sam's alleged abuse of surveillance powers.…

Chinese biz scrambles to tear down injected theft script OnePlus today confirmed thieves siphoned tens of thousands of people's credit card numbers from its online store.…

Revitalises midrange nearline air-filled tech Western Digital Corp's HGST unit has brought out 4 and 6TB nearline platter-reduced disk drives with an 8TB drive on the way.…

But we might still drum up some new regs, so keep it up Tech firms are removing more hate speech faster than before – so now EU lawmakers want them to improve their feedback to users.…

Suppliers, time to consider that SaaS and/or public cloud angle Research outfit 451 has run a survey that should get the pulses of on-premises IT suppliers beating faster.…

White plastic? No Space Grey? Word reaches us of an, er, AI-driven revolution taking place in dentistry but you’ll only be able to get you hands on Colgate’s Smart Electronic E1 Toothbrush from Apple as it is the exclusive sales channel.…

Redmond finds allies in Irish data centre spat Allowing Uncle Sam to seize emails stored in Microsoft's Irish data centre would violate foreign data protection laws and risk setting a damaging precedent, the US Supreme Court has been told.…

UKSA and CNES buddy up on climate science, Mars missions The British and French space agencies have agreed to team up on more missions together.…

Hello children, fancy a chat about muck-raking tech rags? The meltdown in corporate spin at IBM was apparent last week after the flames of publicity were fanned by The Register's report on the firm's proposals to redeploy tens of thousands of Global Technology Services staff.…

Back to drawing board on £14bn pensions deficit Plans by BT to cut its huge pension deficit have been thrown out by the High Court in England. The UK's incumbent telco had wanted to shift the rate used to calculate final salary pension payments.…

Four quarters of growth in a row ain't too shabby Analysis Diving into IBM's fourth-quarter and full-year results show its storage surge has now run a whole year and possibly pushed Dell EMC into a "Refuse to Lose" channel campaign to regain sales momentum.…

Regulator figures show Sky, Tesco users as most content TalkTalk, Post Office and Vodafone were the most-complained-about telecoms service providers between July and September 2017, according to an Ofcom report released today.…

Keys in hands of highly borkable ID gateway The UK government is cracking on with plans for a digital mortgage service to be launched this year, which will allow borrowers to sign mortgage deeds online via the Government Digital Service's deeply flawed Verify identity programme.…

Stuffs portfolio with CI, flash and converged solutions NetApp is setting up a Cloud Infrastructure business unit, giving it FlexPod, SolidFire and StorageGRID, and hiring a cloud services hotshot to run it.…

Just put it under the desk along with all the others Something for the Weekend, Sir? It could get steamy in here. I have stripped off the layers and am now looking to turn up the heat. I’m looking forward to an afternoon of delightful tenderness with plenty of oohs and aahs.…

New event set to infiltrate QEII Promo If you are a cybersecurity practitioner who feels on top of the latest developments in your field, CyberThreat18 may make you want to think again.…

If pizza delivery, coffee joints and banks can do it, so can you I don't begrudge organisations who want us to start calling them "software companies". People are free to do whatever they like with such trivial labels, I guess. But the tick of such labelling has always been an annoyance to me.…

Jeez, get a grip, Sol! As the Sun ages and sheds mass, the gravitational pull it exerts on its planets weakens.…

European Commission sysadmin offers us tales of Euro-dunderheads On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed tales of facepalm-worthy failures in the field of tech support.…

Wine Is Not an Emulator Windows-on-POSIX software now handles Windows apps on Android Version 3.0 of Wine Is Not an Emulator – aka WINE – has arrived, and offers all sorts of new emulation-on-Android possibilities.…

Non-profit org mutates into investment firm Special report Nominet, which runs the UK's domain-name registry, has abandoned its own charitable foundation, raising questions about the organization's direction and accountability.…

Only tits in this drama were the two kids in trouble Video Australian politicians are claiming a world first after a drone saved two teenagers from drowning in heavy surf.…

Apple font code on iOS, macOS knackered by texted link A specially crafted webpage will knacker Apple's Messages and Safari software on iOS and macOS, allowing miscreants to spread merry mischief by texting fans a link to the dastardly HTML.…

Pesky phishing pages using international domain names just won't go away It's been known for a long while that people can use similar-looking non-Roman characters to create internet addresses that look similar to real ones.…

Airbus says it’ll keep building the behemoth of the skies into the 2030s Three days after warning the A380 might not have a future, Airbus says it will likely keep making the plane into the 2030s.…

India can hit all of China now. Or Moscow, Athens, USA’s Indian Ocean navy base ... India has successfully tested a surface-to-surface ballistic missile.…

Meanwhile, Bruce Perens wants his legal bills footed Open Source Security, Inc., the maker of the Grsecurity Linux kernel patches, suffered a setback last month when San Francisco magistrate judge Laurel Beeler granted a motion by defendant Bruce Perens to dismiss the company's defamation claim, with the proviso that the tossed legal challenge could be amended.…

Big Blue exits five-year skid, shares fall on uncertain future For 22 quarters in a row, IBM's sales have been shrinking. But not any more. In the final three months of 2017, Big Blue's revenues grew 3.5 per cent compared to year-ago quarter, the first such rise in about six years.…

Devs toil away unifying product suites ahead of May rebrand launch Exclusive Citrix will try to reinvent itself with integrated cloudy products – and ditch some of its long-standing brands in favor of a naming scheme without the Xen badge it has nurtured for years.…

iGiant up next in the Meltdown-Spectre-sueball-a-palooza Add Apple to the list of companies facing a legal backlash in the US over the Spectre and Meltdown CPU security fiasco.…

Deloitte trying to figure out who to pay first – or maybe who to pay at all Contractors left out of pocket by the collapse of alleged tax-skimming scammers Plutus Payroll have been asked to provide copious details of their employment history by receiver Deloitte, which appears to have few details of claimants’ status or relationship to Plutus and its associated companies.…

Electronics tutor's taunts come back to haunt him An electronics technician pleaded guilty on Wednesday to orchestrating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on a former employer and other organizations – and to unlawfully possessing a firearm as a former felon.…

Bezos narrows down search for new base to 20 cities, mostly on East Coast Amazon has trimmed its list of potential cities where it wants to build its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The Bezos Bunch says it has narrowed down a list of 238 proposals to 19 US cities and one in Canada.…

Forex head alleged to have manipulated market in 'front-running' scheme The former head of foreign currency exchanges at Barclays New York has been charged in the US with devising and executing a "scheme to defraud HP of money and property", according to an indictment entered yesterday.…

Faces up to AWS, Google with future per-second billing plan Faced with a customer base being lured away by cheaper cloud compute services at its competitors, DigitalOcean has cut prices and increased RAM and SSD storage for its users.…

UK.gov pays £15,500 in damages after failed fact-check An asylum seeker has won £15,500 from the UK’s Home Office after it blabbed confidential information about his persecution in his home country - to authorities in the state.…

Kent bloke 'threatened' privacy watchdog that he'd release more A man from Kent, England, has been prosecuted under the UK's Data Protection Act for leaking sensitive police information on Twitter.…