The Register

UK advertisers' society has also fired a warning shot The Mozilla Foundation has expressed its discomfort at the Cambridge Analytica revelations by pulling its ads from Facebook.…

The future is finally getting into gear GDC Virtual reality reemerged in the past couple of years as a hot tech topic. However, the unfortunate truth – fiercely ignored by its passionate advocates – is that it hasn't been ready for primetime.…

Chinese researcher also cracked magnetic and sonic payments Black Hat Asia Paying for stuff with your smartphone is downright dangerous according to Zhe Zhou, a pre-tenure associate professor at Fudan University, who yesterday explained how three different payment methods can be cracked at Black Hat Asia in Singapore.…

Radar imaging shows Chinese space station is still intact Video Boffins have refined their estimates of when Chinese space station Tiangong-1 will return to Earth, with the big bird's impact now predicted to happen between March 30 and April 3.…

House OKs crippling email privacy, Senate stalled by Paul For months now, US Congress has mulled new laws to strengthen Feds' powers to access American citizens' private messages and files stored on computers overseas.…

Regulator secured refund/exit deals for 16,000 unhappy customers this week The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's push-back against internet service providers making over overly-optimistic download speed claims on the national broadband network has seen Dodo, iPrimus and Commander agree to refund their customers.…

Good thing we have all those chip fabs and assembly plants stateside US President Donald Trump's planned tariffs on goods imported into America from China could hit the tech industry – and ergo, you the customer – particularly hard.…

Data gone with the wind as attacker goes full Sherman Updated IT systems used by the City of Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, have succumbed to a ransomware attack, cutting off some online city services and potentially putting the personal information of employees and citizens at risk.…

Big Blue's five-year effort to weed out elders detailed after deep-dive investigation IBM for the past five years has been pushing older employees out of the company and replacing them with younger staffers in the US or moving the jobs overseas, it is claimed.…

It's like sleazebag Inception America's trade regulator the FTC has issued a warning over reports of a new data-harvesting operation that is targeting the victims of a previous scam.…

Westminster Abbey is noted atheist's final resting place The ashes of British physics ace Professor Stephen Hawking will be placed in Westminster Abbey after a special service of thanksgiving for his life.…

不好意思，我听不懂 Best Buy will no longer carry Huawei phones in its stores, marking yet another setback for the Chinese smartphone maker's efforts in America.…

A&E Adventures sues Oracle America for breach of contract over point-of-sale shenanigans Oracle has been sued in the US for allegedly engaging in a scheme to force owners of point-of-sale gear to switch to its subscription-based Simphony system in violation of contract and trade laws.…

Finding Robo: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… Researchers at MIT have developed a robotic fish that should allow scientists to spy on intimate fishy moments normally unseen by human eyes.…

It's not all about speed Vodafone is the mobile network with the best ping rate, according to network performance sleuth Tutela.…

Bristol's Dr Asier Marzo on acoustic levitation Levitation and tractor beams are the stuff of science fiction legend. Think Marty McFly’s hoverboard from Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future II in 1989, or any number of Star Trek episodes.…

Space Launch System pad lumbers towards completion NASA's monster rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), took another tentative step towards lift-off yesterday as engineers fitted the last big umbilical arm to its launch tower.…

Plus: who gets priority at unmarked junctions. We know you care about this The UK Autodrive consortium is working on self-parking car technology, it has declared – which puts it head-to-head with German car tech rivals.…

Some foreplay: Dark web, smut monopolies and moral outrage Remember last night when you went online to order pizza and stumbled across those two people humping each others' brains out?…

Big drone, big money, big problems The British Army's massively overdue Watchkeeper drone project has failed to gain a critical air safety certificate – yet the Ministry of Defence still insists it is "a satisfactory use of public resources".…

Oh wait, yes they do The UK data protection watchdog’s well-advertised raid of Cambridge Analytica’s offices is no closer to happening, as the High Court has adjourned the warrant application until tomorrow.…

Like a bat out of parallel... Startup type WekaIO has apparently walked all over IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system with a doubled SPEC SFS2014 benchmark score for its Matrix software running on Supermicro servers.…

After we leave the EU we could cover that in a week with change to spare ... allegedly Britain will spend £345m ($486m) upgrading its F-35B fighter jets to the most recent, combat-ready, version of the aircraft’s operating system.…

Science. Because save the planet 'n' beer 'n' stuff In news to delight eco-friendly hipsters the world over, boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have come up with a way of creating hoppy craft beer without recourse to, er, hops.…

Because when state attacks blow back, the taxpayers who paid to have them developed pay again Black Hat Asia The USA, China and Russia are doing all that they can to avoid development of a treaty that would make it hard for them to conduct cyber-war, but an effort led by the governments of The Netherlands, France and Singapore, together with Microsoft and The Internet Society, is using diplomacy to find another way to stop state-sponsored online warfare.…

Yeah, it's an El Reg listicle. What of it? Poll At some point next month, just in time for Spring, Microsoft will start to emit the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update to everyone's PC.…

The device, the app and the cloud, and your development lifecycle isn’t fit enough to catch up Black Hat Asia Wearable devices – and anything that relies on an app to help with configuration – has at least three attack surfaces and your existing secure development lifecycle probably isn’t going to cope with the complexity that creates.…

Things get surreal in suite 7088 GDC The Ataribox has been renamed the AtariVCS, and it is finally here!…

Talk about telling your code to go screw itself A pair of computer scientists have created a neural network that can self-replicate.…

Auto autos prevented from being blinded by the elements – using the power of statistics MIT brainiacs have come up with some new fangled technology that could help self-driving cars cope with misty mornings.…

ID on a blockchain? Maybe. ID on Bitcoin? Forget it Too many cryptocurrency people are trying to force-fit blockchain technology into identity solutions, when ID needs its own solutions.…

Care for some extra bandwidth? Just turn the knob One thing that's always been promised in telco-land, but rarely delivered, is genuine automation between carrier networks. At the end of last week, Verizon and Colt claimed to crack it with an inter-carrier software-defined-networking (SDN) demo.…

Plus news from F5, Palo Alto and Dell EMC in your networking news capsule ROUNDUP This week's networking news roundup isn't only “what happened at the Open Compute Project summit?” – there's also news from F5, Palo Alto Networks, and Dell EMC.…

Netflix lures bounty-hunters, Dropbox offers vulnerabiliy research safe harbour If you listen carefully, you'll hear the sound of a very small ship coming in: Netflix has joined Bugcrowd, offering bounties of up to US$15,000 for vulnerabilities.…

Proactive fault-finding? Yup. Security alliance? Yup. CX checks? Yup. And an eloquent little licence change, too VMware’s given its end-user computing portfolio a few tweaks, the most interesting of which might just be a licencing change.…

SESTA passes – but could do more harm than good The US Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) with a 97-2 vote.…

The sound of stable door shutting years too late Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has broken his silence about his data gathering and advertising firm's unforeseen role in data gathering and advertising.…

Our intrepid reporter tries to track down mystery tech GDC After months – no, years – of Magic Leap promising to revolutionize the gaming world with its augmented reality technology, this week the company finally launched… sort of.…

AI hardware plans up for grabs Facebook has revealed its updated GPU-powered server design known as Big Basin v2 as part of the Open Compute Project.…

Silicon Valley boffins bag Nobel Prize of computer science The two engineers who further developed and popularized the concept of RISC microprocessors have won the 2017 ACM Turing Award.…

Shortage of tech talent has government pondering end to age, gender restrictions A US government commission has asked the public for its thoughts on possible changes to the military's selective service rules to allow the conscription of technical talent, including those with computer-oriented skills, regardless of sex or age.…

No-name brand software to help push Leonardo toolkit German ERP giant SAP has launched an Application Edition of its Predictive Analytics software – part of its Leonardo toolkit.…

Big Blue claims POWER9 kit with beastly GPUs gives Google Cloud a thrashing Analysis IBM boasts that machine learning is not just quicker on its POWER servers than on TensorFlow in the Google Cloud, it's 46 times quicker.…

Fine for gaming, not so much for modeling, it is claimed Nvidia’s flagship Titan V graphics cards may have hardware gremlins causing them to spit out different answers to repeated complex calculations under certain conditions, according to computer scientists.…

Fast and slow high-cap disk lines coming In 2020 Seagate will introduce its first multi-actuator disk drives using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) tech with 20TB capacities.…

Project hopes to bring dev skills to developing nation A Filipino developer is hoping his handmade Ruby port will help bring coding skills to some of the Philippines's poorest communities.…

Not the only possible theory, say infosec types A British surgeon whose instructions over the internet helped to guide operations in war-torn Aleppo fears his PC was hacked in order to target a makeshift hospital that was subsequently bombed.…

Users will stop trusting you, warns researcher Many high profile UK sites still use Symantec certificates just days before Google will begin the process of dropping support for them with the next and upcoming releases of its Chrome browser.…

Faster GPUs, more FLOPS HPE has updated its Apollo 6500 deep learning server with a threefold performance boost over its precursor by stuffing it with eight Tesla V100 GPUs, which speak to each other via Nvidia's NVlink 2.0 interconnect protocol.…

System may be full of waterworlds, boffins find New research published in Nature Astronomy has poured, er, cold water on hopes that it may be possible to detect life on Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.…