The Register

No buyer found for moribund tat bazaar PwC’s Maplin Electronics’ administration team has laid off another bunch of hapless souls from head office as the protracted - and some might say doomed - search for a buyer to rescue the retailer runs on.…

Novel idea might reduce risk of accidents A bicycle industry chief has suggested that cyclists ought to be equipped with "bicycle to vehicle" beacons so they are more "visible" to autonomous vehicles.…

Are we really doing this? ask politicos The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to build igloos on the Moon with a view to creating an Antarctica-like outpost.…

All in all it's just another brick in the patent wall The Shenzhen Intermediate court has upheld an injunction against Samsung sought by Huawei in an intellectual property dispute.…

Longed-for firmware update borks some home networks. Be careful what you wish for Three weeks after a firmware update to BT’s home mesh networking solution, customers are still complaining that they have to constantly reboot their devices, with some being unable to connect at all.…

SHOCK NEWS: Positive reinforcement gets results Nudge theory – brainchild of Richard Thaler, a professor of behavioural science and economics at the University of Chicago – uses positive reinforcement and indirect suggestion to influence behaviour.…

Two former Violinists are back on the scene, as is SymbolicIO under new name Roundup In a week where we realised that spinning rust has plenty of life left despite the arrival of 100TB SSDs, here are all the minor developments that the Vulture storage desk found interesting but not enough to wax lyrical about. Let's go.…

Turns out performance at all costs has been rather costly Around 2003, a computer security portent that had been cheerlessly simmering away for years suddenly came to the boil.…

Bloated rc7 may or not be a sign of delays Linus Torvalds is pretty sure he’ll release version 4.16 of the Linux kernel next week.…

Source/target mixup proved that mirroring software worked perfectly Who, me? Grab a very small cake and a bunch of candles, dear readers, for today we mark the 10th edition of “Who, me?”, The Register’s confessional for IT pros who broke things badly.…

Holy Hand Grenade proposes update to RFC 8140 but blows back on the court of King Arthur The Internet Engineering Task Force has a long and honourable tradition of April Fool's jokes, but to The Register's knowledge, this is a first: an April 1 document published ahead of time.…

Mark Pesce hailed as Best Columnist Register columnist and futurist Mark Pesce has been named Australia’s best IT columnist.…

Fungus found in the lab makes amino acids we think are alien Festering fungus has become a problem way down in the bowels of NASA, and could lead to false identification of extraterrestrial material.…

Telstra slapped in this week's instalment of 'telco sector brought to heel by regulator' Telstra's latest run-in with Australia's competition regulator has seen the nation's dominant carrier confess to scamming up to 100,000 customers through premium services to which they did not consent.…

Russian pro-propaganda accounts boosted, but posts remain in place so users can delete them or not A group of Russian “troll factory” operators indicted in February were tagged by Tumblr last year.…

$500m/year run rate fuelled by Cloud Foundry subscriptions, but big losses too Dell’s Pivotal Software subsidiary has filed for an initial public offering.…

Zuck takes out full-page ads to apologise as Tim Cook calls for 'well-crafted' privacy laws It was the weekend that had it all: promiscuous permissions dragged Google into the Facebook privacy row, Facebook apologised again while at the same time denying anything's wrong with its Android apps, and Tim Cook was totally not smug when he chimed into the privacy debate.…

Top tip: Switch on the VPN when doing naughty hacking, товарищ! Roundup Here's your easy-to-digest round up of information security news beyond everything we've already covered this week.…

Are we doomed? Roundup It’s been a grim week for AI. The deadly Uber crash and fallout from the scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are a reminder of the ways algorithms can fail, and how they can be used against us.…

Are we doomed? Roundup It’s been a grim week for AI. The deadly Uber crash and fallout from the scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are a reminder of the ways algorithms can fail, and how they can be used against us.…

Deteriorating web prompts browser maker to take a stand Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.…

Deteriorating web prompts browser maker to take a stand Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.…

Kuvee drowns its sorrows, blames Napa fires for demise The spit bucket of idiotic tech ideas has just grown a little lighter with the death of "smart wine" company Kuvee.…

Hipsters will have to go to iTunes now For the first time in seven years, Americans spent more on CDs and records than digital downloads.…

Forward-secrecy protocol comes with the 28th draft A much-needed update to internet security has finally passed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), after four years and 28 drafts.…

Forward-secrecy protocol comes with the 28th draft A much-needed update to internet security has finally passed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), after four years and 28 drafts.…

After weeks of stalling and delays, ICO wastes no time kicking down the doors Cambridge Analytica’s London offices will finally be searched by the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office, following a marathon week of arguing inside and outside court.…

Gang pilfered files from 320 colleges, 47 companies in 22 nations, Uncle Sam claims The US Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury on Friday charged nine Iranians with carrying out a series of internet attacks on more than 300 universities and 47 companies in the US and abroad, as well as federal and state agencies and the United Nations.…

Hookup hangout hangs up Craigslist has axed its personals ad section after US Congress passed an anti-sex-trafficking law.…

Hookup hangout hangs up Online classifieds board Craigslist says it can no longer host a personals section, thanks to the recently passed FOSTA bill.…

Hark, dear reader, the echoes of Enron Comment I've a special reason to remember Enron and the summers of 2000 and 2001. The mighty Enron was being lauded as a pioneer and an innovator. It was a Wall Street darling. IBM and AOL jumped into bed with Enron to create a new retail energy provider. The sun shone, and Californians had plenty of energy capacity.…

Oh. US President Donald Trump's signature. And he's threatening a veto Updated US Congress has approved a $1.3tr budget [PDF] that would see, among other science boosts, NASA's funding surpass $20bn.…

ICO gets search warrant... for firm accused of jamming up railway safety hotline A Scottish company suspected of making 200 million nuisance calls that may have blocked railway safety hotlines has been raided by the Information Commissioner's Office.…

For a while at least... spinning rust is going to stick around Analysis Flash chip bits cost eight times more than spinning rust and SSDs aren't going to get cheap enough to kill off disk entirely.…

Meanwhile, the company accounts are overdue Yet more financial claims are piling up against failing ZX Spectrum Vega Plus firm Retro Computers Ltd, with the company's former web fixer threatening to sue over allegedly unpaid invoices.…

Second quarter results up nearly 60% from last year Micron's latest quarter revenues were up 58 per cent year on year, its CEO told an earnings call full of analysts eager to nibble at the chip-fryer's plate.…

Jobseeker? You may have heard of it... UK data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, whose HQ is a stone's throw from the buzz of Covent Garden in London, England, is on the hunt for a data protection assistant.…

The answer may dismay and confuse you Software is not a good, the Court of Appeal in London, England, has ruled.…

The answer may dismay and confuse you Software is not a good, the Court of Appeal in London, England, has ruled.…

Top Gartner tips: Know what data you hold, be trustworthy Data-hungry organisations have been advised to get a better grip on the data they control and work on building trust.…

Meet the people who've been knee-deep in Agile and CD for years... When it comes to updating your software development and deployment operation, we’ve got some bad news... there’s no single silver bullet that will destroy that monolith you've inherited.…

The Dark Souls* of code-wrangling We all know, and have probably even coded, monolithic applications – software made of big old chunks of code. Supposedly these are giving way to microservices, smaller elements of functionality. But don't get too comfortable because it's time to shake things up again: now we have serverless.…

Zuckerberg, Gutenberg, let's call the whole thing off Something for the Weekend, Sir? Sudden infant wails finally brightened the delivery room late that night, a relief to everyone, not least the mother. After a quick wipe-down and weigh, the baby was swaddled and handed back to the parents to be comforted.…

Firm that found flaw says un-patched RDP clients face lockout Black Hat Asia Microsoft will soon prevent Windows from authenticating un-patched RDP clients to cap a March patch addressed a flaw that can allow lateral movement across a network from a compromised remote desktop protocol session.…

The Naked Gun was far funnier than this mess YouTube has changed its Policies on content featuring firearms to prohibit videos that try to sell guns or offer “instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories”.…

All that effort and they still aren't sure how it works Researchers trying to understand how neural networks work shouldn’t just focus on interpretable neurons, according to new research from DeepMind researchers.…

Dependency scanner turned up FOUR MEEELLION vulns from October to December 2017 Last year, GitHub added security scanning to its dependency graph and flicked the lid off a can absolutely crawling with bugs.…

It turns out that keyboards work best when they’re not under pressure On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday foray into readers’ recollections of tech support jobs that went janky.…

'Reactive Redundancy for Data Destruction Protection' stops the likes of Shamoon and Stonedrill before they hit 'erase' Purdue University researchers reckon they've cracked how to protect data against “disk-wipe” malware.…

GPS systems thrown out of whack by Elon's rocket A SpaceX rocket ripped a humongous hole in Earth’s ionosphere during a launch in California last year and may have impaired GPS satellites.…