The Register

Thousands of them lie hidden in the dark secretly guzzling gas The Milky Way may be teeming with tens of thousands of black holes lurking at its centre, according to a new study published on Wednesday.…

In Cupertino, MDM stands for 'Managed Device Misery' Mobile device management (MDM) vendor Jamf is warning admins to hold off on installing the iOS 11.3 update on iPhones and iPads until it can fix a bug in its software that was causing devices to become unresponsive.…

You wanted an extension? You got one Our call for papers for MCubed was hit by a flood of excellent proposals over the long weekend, but this was accompanied by a steady stream of requests for extensions, so we’ve decided to push the final deadline back to April 13.…

Peter Madsen's explanation for death of Kim Wall contested A senior Royal Danish Navy officer has disputed Peter Madsen's claim that Swedish journalist Kim Wall's death was caused by exhaust fumes aboard his crowdfunded submarine.…

Maintained for 3 years since Brit supermarket quit the ISP game Brit supermarket giant Tesco is killing off the free email services offered to customers who bought its broadband package.…

I bless the rains down in Tunbridge Wells... England's Commonwealth Games team actually hail from Africa, according to none other than the tournament's organisers.…

No point in Blighty going its own way before tech hits 'market readiness' – minister The British government has declared it is waiting for industry and international regulators to start creating standards for autonomous vehicles.…

AWS bashing and cloud contracts on the menu? Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz was reportedly set to enjoy a slap-up meal with US president mop-haired windbag Donald Trump last night, giving the pair a chance to compare Amazon-bashing notes.…

Just about getting closer to customers, says hard pressed outsourcing biz DXC Technologies has helped pack the bags of another HPE old-timer with global sales honcho Larry Stack said to be leaving of his own volition, although his role will not be replaced.…

Alaskan skies cleared for Astra Space Inc's 12m craft Secretive Californian upstart Astra Space Inc. looks set to conduct the first test flight of its creatively named "Rocket 1" launcher from Alaska's Pacific Spaceport Complex in the next couple of days days.…

Why did this show up before a Thomas The Tank Engine clip? The UK advertising industry's watchdog has censured OnePlus over a horror spoof ad for its OnePlus 5 phone.…

Redmond backs down without actually backing down The four-year court battle between the US government and Microsoft over the release of emails held in the software giant's data centre in Ireland has come to an end – of sorts.…

Like having an AI toddler in your phone Real-world test Huawei's new imaging hardware has caused as much excitement in the smartphone market as anything since Nokia's oversampling champ of 2013, the Lumia 1020. Benchmarker DxOMark puts both the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro comfortably ahead of all rivals, including the Galaxy S9 Plus, Pixel 2 and iPhone X.…

It's hard to see where Microsoft will take the standard if third parties won't go near it Windows has sported different looks across the decades – transparency in XP and 7, and flat design in 8 and 10 – each driven by different guidelines and ideas about pixel placement.…

How movie magic was achieved long before the arrival of CGI Finally, after almost half a century of waiting, you can welcome the mildly homicidal artificial intelligence HAL 9000 into your home. If you want.…

Word-analyzing AI study reveals 'historical social changes' Be careful which words you feed into that machine-learning software you're building, and how.…

5 hours downtime in 17 years is pretty good – but moaning about late planes trumps all EUROCONTROL, the organisation that provides air traffic management for Europe, has apologised for an outage that made a mess of air transport across the continent yesterday.…

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker, wherever you're goin', I'm goin' the other way Intel has offloaded real-time OS-maker Wind River.…

Enter another dimension, not only of sight and sound but of mind … Mozilla has decided the world needs a browser designed for augmented and mixed reality goggles.…

Stop laughing, this is serious: Zuck’s also decided only Europeans deserve GDPR-grade data protection Facebook’s No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Year continues , with The Social Network™ enduring another day of explaining its own errors.…

With the build mostly done, he reckons it’s the right to time to hand over to a new leader nbn™, the company building and operating Australia’s national broadband network (NBN), has announced that CEO Bill Morrow will step down “by year end 2018”.…

NYC Pensions handler calls for shakeup as social network continues to stumble One of Facebook's major investors is calling on the social network to drop CEO Mark Zuckerberg from its board as part of a management shakeup.…

And won’t fix Meltdown nor Spectre for 10 product families covering 230-plus CPUs Intel has issued fresh "microcode revision guidance" that reveals it won’t address the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws in all of its vulnerable processors – in some cases because it's too tricky to remove the Spectre v2 class of vulnerabilities.…

The trade war is on The US government on Tuesday revealed the list of Chinese imports it plans to slap extra tariffs on, under orders from President Trump, amid rising trade tensions between America and China.…

US Homeland Security says it detected 'anomalous' spy kit The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it has detected strange fake cellphone towers – known as IMSI catchers – in America's capital.…

Shooter, enraged by vid biz, kills self as hundreds of staff flee campus Final update A woman armed with a handgun opened fire today at the headquarters of YouTube, shooting three people. She was found dead after turning her gun on herself.…

After eight months of loafing, baguette biz finally rises to security obligations The website for restaurant chain Panera Bread has made the personal information for customers' online accounts available for takeout since August last year, according to security researcher Dylan Houlihan.…

US space agency's Concorde-cutter project is go Vid Supersonic air travel over land has been stymied since the 1960s due to the rather annoying sonic booms generated by speedy airplanes.…

If at first, er, second, ah, third, no, fourth, you fail, sadly, you're probably Redmond Days after Microsoft released its third attempt at a fix for the Meltdown security vulnerability in Intel's modern processors, system administrators say many of their 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 boxes are still unable to be properly patched.…

Change your passw... ugh, what's the point? Hackers have compromised hundreds of e-commerce sites running the popular open-source Magento platform to scrape credit card numbers and install crypto-mining malware.…

Teardown chaps give Apple's edu-slab 2/10 for repairability Teardown show-offs iFixit have found few changes with the latest iPad – but it does have a larger battery than the more expensive "Pro" iPad.…

Forget the old case, DoJ tells Supremes, all hail CLOUD Act The US government has issued Microsoft with a new warrant to get access to emails held on the firm's Irish servers, while asking the Supreme Court to dismiss the existing legal battle.…

Data protection biz hammered for lacklustre performance Updated Under-performing data protection biz Commvault is under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management to make board and operational changes alongside a share buy-back programme.…

Co-incidence much that it’ll run in Azure, and Microsoft just scored better security creds down under? Citrix has extended its cloud to Australia, with a new “Asia-Pacific South” region joining its US-based and EMEA efforts as of April 4th, Sydney time.…

Boffins find smartphones more accurate than humans Research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has shown a smartphone application is superior to traditional physical examination for spotting when it is safe to stick a needle into an artery.…

Pascal Bourguet asked to arrest sales slide in US PC biz Lenovo is parachuting an EMEA exec into its North America computer division that has recorded year-on-year sales declines for the past six consecutive quarters.…

Cupertino faces a Windows 8 moment Comment It's come full circle. Young reporters joining a prestigious tech publication 20 years ago were quietly advised to focus on only three companies in what we then called "Client Computing". Who were they?…

Users fuming... if only they had a consumer champion to turn to Consumer group Which? is to terminate its 20-plus-year-old email service, giving long-standing users two months to switch accounts.…

One firing, two firings, three... Hello? Can you hear me? The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has lost contact with GSAT-6A during a second firing of thrusters to nudge the 2,000kg telecommunications satellite towards an operational orbit.…

Centra Tech raised more than $30m from investors Two men have been arrested on suspicion of spinning a "web of lies" to sell unregistered crypto investments.…

Inexorable tape density, super-fast NVMe drives, and more backup than you can handle DDN is chief among this week's round-up of tasty storage nuggets: it has jumped on the GPU bandwagon and fed Nvidia's DGX-1 souped-up server, claiming it's the fastest data source for said super box.…

Call for software to throw badly behaved biz in fake data tar pits Ad and JavaScript blocking is not enough to thwart privacy invasions by the likes of Facebook: more active countermeasures are needed.…

But Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke's monument could've been a very different beast HAL: Dave, I don't understand why you have to do this to me. I know I've done some bad things, but I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.…

We make sense of the range For some Reg readers there's only One True Laptop, and it's the ThinkPad. Yes, still.…

Redmond claims to be world’s biggest tape user, but wants a faster alternative for AI data Microsoft is working on a new class of disk-based storage appliance for its Azure cloud service, because tape is proving too hard and too slow to use in some situations.…

IBM shafting fifty-somethings shows business-as-usual hasn't been disrupted At a riotous final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland auditorium, The Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Rotten notoriously trolled the crowd with a final line, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” as the band walked offstage after a fifteen-minute set.…

We'll share query data, but only with these really trustworthy researchers Analysis Cloudflare has revealed a deal with regional internet registry APNIC to provide a possibly more privacy-conscious DNS resolver at a prestige network address, 1.1.1.1.…

Cross-platform chat client crueled by death of code underpinnings The Tor project will “sunset” its Messenger, a project launched in 2015 in the hope of improving security for social networks’ messaging services.…

Kernel’s now 450,000 lines lighter after ditching chip architectures nobody used Linus Torvalds has pulled the trigger and released version 4.16 of the Linux kernel, thereby killing off his own suggestion this release might need an extra week to mature.…

Co-location is the interesting part of otherwise vanilla Azure with-extra-security offering Microsoft has flicked the switch on two new data centres for Australian and New Zealand government customers.…