The Register

Big Internet dominates US political pressure splurging For the first time, an internet company has become the largest lobbyist in Washington DC.…

Easy with those exclusives and unfortunate facts, hacks Take it easy with those hard-hitting exclusives and investigations, said the Pope this week, lumping inconvenient quality journalism with fake news and clickbait.…

Bye bye Mister Biker Guy, drove my Chevy to the lefty but the Chevy was awry (allegedly) A motorcyclist is suing General Motors in the US after he was knocked off his motorbike by one of the automaker's self-driving cars.…

Yes, you read that right Vid It is possible for a policy issue to jump the shark?…

No connection... between the blackouts A data centre glitch has left doctors in Wales unable to access their patients’ details – while a similar outage in Manchester, England, has placed severe strain on hospitals’ accident and emergency departments.…

No connection... between the blackouts A data centre glitch in the Welsh NHS has left doctors unable to access their patients’ details while a similar outage in Manchester has placed severe strain on hospitals’ accident and emergency departments.…

Yay! Oh, wait. Aww... Commvault has reported record quarterly revenues but took a dramatic GAAP thrashing due to US tax law changes.…

That's only 2% of Blighty's health service PCs NHS Digital has yet to explain why it has taken months to roll out Microsoft's Enterprise Threat Detection Service (ETDS) to only about two per cent of the UK health service's targeted installed base.…

Dem to be granted access to Twitter profile ‘in an emergency’ Red faces over Hawaii’s false nuke alert got even redder this week, as the governor admitted he knew it was a mistake – but couldn’t alert citizens because he didn't know his Twitter password.…

Forgot your tax return, mon ami? Pas de problem! France has reportedly passed a law to allow hapless citizens the right to make admin screwups in their dealings with the state – and not have those mistakes held against them.…

While Facebook boasts tools to help users 'manage their data' The European Union's incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has still not registered with more than half of small companies and a third of medium-sized firms, according to a UK government survey.…

Polishes off hyperconverged and software-defined support Big Switch Networks has updated its Big Cloud Fabric to support hyperconverged (HCI) and software-defined storage (SDS) products so they don't need to use shonky old proprietary networking hardware.…

Immigrants, and those who employ them, had better be legit Following President Donald Trump's demands for a crackdown on H-1B visas, there has been a radical shift in how US immigration officials handle applications for the program.…

Call for Papers Open Now Events Situation Publishing and Heise Medien are launching Serverless Computing London 2018, a three day conference that will bring together together experts and practitioners in one of the tech world’s hottest new areas.…

My humps, my humps, my humps, my lovely camel humps Twelve cheating camels have been disqualified from a Saudi beauty pageant for having Botox injections to enhance their pouts.…

$30m prize will go unclaimed after repeated extensions Google has pulled its financial backing from the Lunar X wheeze to get a privately funded spacecraft to the Moon after finally conceding that none of the five entrants were likely to make it there.…

Halifax man didn’t pay HMRC but forked out on 2 houses and a wedding The cash-splashing director of a nuisance call biz has been struck off for 12 years after breaking telemarketing rules and trading while insolvent.…

Can't cram crazy TBs in so new 860s bring speed and longevity Samsung's new 860 Pro and Evo SSDs have virtually the same capacity and performance as the 850 line, but with much higher endurance.…

Found to have paid billions to Apple to prevent it buying from rivals Updated The European Commission today slapped a €997m (£872m) fine on Qualcomm for abusing its dominant market position - finding it paid billions to Apple to exclusively use its chips.…

A 'great' deal - as long as you stay with their crummy broadband TalkTalk has started offering customers the option of moving onto O2 when their contracts expire, as part of the beleaguered firm's plans to ditch mobile.…

UK government beancounters aren't happy with the MoJ The Ministry of Justice's system of monitoring criminals with electronic tags has been blasted as a "catastrophic waste of public money" in a damning report by the National Audit Office.…

Machine-learning news and code to pore over Roundup Welcome to El Reg's January roundup of AI-related news beyond all the wonderful and terrible things we've covered separately. Drop us a line if you have any machine-learning news or gossip to share.…

Brit boss off after two years behind the controls The UK president of Canadian outsourcing biz CGI, Steve Thorn, has stepped down to "to pursue different career opportunities" after 25 years with the firm.…

Inhabitable with alien lifeforms, mind you. Grab a phaser A team of scientists have identified two out of the seven planets in the Trappist-1 system as the most likely to be habitable, according to a new study.…

‘LF Networking Fund' is like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, but for SDN The Linux Foundation has decided the time is right for one administrative structure to cover all of its networking efforts, so has created the “LF Networking Fund ” to oversee them all.…

Google bans forced redirects used by Zirconium to infect Macs, PCs with nasties The largest malvertising campaign in 2017 involved 28 fake ad agencies, which were used to generate about one billion ad views across 62 per cent of ad-supported websites, according to publishing security biz Confiant.…

All he has to do is make Tesla the third-most valuable company and vastly increase revenue “Vertically integrated sustainable energy" company Tesla – more on that description later – has revealed a new compensation plan for CEO and founder Elon Musk that will see him work for nothing but could see him earn US$55 billion over the next decade.…

Done in by the weaponisation of optimisation, and now 2017 may be as good as it ever got

Could be the end of the road for Opportunity, too It's highly likely that Mars is going to suffer one of its periodical planet-wide dust storms this year – and NASA is concerned the event could disrupt its operations on the Red Planet.…

Grids were not built to handle big EVs populations all plugging in at once At today's adoption levels, electric vehicles' impact on overall household energy consumption is negligible, but grid planners probably need to look to the future sooner rather than later.…

Replacement robot hand didn't work, so they turned it off, and yes, turned it back on again Apart from a slightly irritating software bug, it seems NASA's first spacewalk for 2018 went smoothly.…

Not a particularly left field suggestion... The official definition of a planet should be updated to include an upper mass limit, so scientists can agree on whether a large newly found celestial body is either a huge planet – or a tiny failed star.…

With a special HNAP exploit just for D-Link kit Security researchers believe the author of the Satori botnet is at it again, this time attacking routers to craft a botnet dubbed "Masuta".…

Devs, check your protocol handling, patch if necessary If you've built a Windows application on Electron, check to see if it's subject to a just-announced remote code execution vulnerability.…

More functions, fewer servers - and Dell is good with this! NIC vendor Netronome and Dell have inked a deal targeting the network function virtualization market.…

French government is going large with open source file server, new tweaks will help File and print services project Samba will fix a slew of bugs that have made it hard for the project to scale in version 4.8, due in March.…

OG open-source darling gets security check-up Mozilla's Firefox has been patched to address more than 30 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities.…

Meanwhile, HomePod inches closer to actually shipping, allegedly Apple has released security patches for iOS and macOS that include, among other things, Meltdown and Spectre fixes. The new versions should be installed as soon as possible.…

Rules, rules, standards, and rules Following a warning from America's financial regulator, the European Commission and the United Nations have weighed in on the issue of crypto currencies.…

Between scrutiny, scams, fees, and hacking, digi-dosh looks less appealing Roundup Payment biz Stripe on Tuesday said it plans to phase out support for Bitcoin payments – citing declining interest among merchants and rising transactions times and fees.…

But recovery on the island still sluggish Analysis America's comms watchdog has finally started reacting to the dire situation in Puerto Rico, months after it was hit by a hurricane.…

Eavesdroppers could be able to peek in on mobile flirts A lack of security protections in Tinder's mobile app is leaving lonely hearts vulnerable to eavesdropping.…

Another 'leccie driver who didn't RTFM Another Tesla driver needs reminding that the flash motor's Autopilot mode doesn't mean you can ignore what's on the road.…

Not good enough for Apple, analyst suggests Apple globally shipped 29 million units of the eye-wateringly expensive iPhone X in the two months after it was launched in late 2017, falling short of consensus estimates from analysts.…

Storage boffins get flash and disk dancing together Research gnomes at IBM Zurich say we should take translation layers off storage devices and run many at the same time on a server to get faster IO.…

Database admin updates body art A database admin liked Brit database tools biz Redgate Software so much that he decided to become a walking billboard and get the company logo tattooed on his arm. Fast forward nine years and his world imploded. Sort of.…

Reckons GDPR will help us challenge algo-driven outcomes Algorithms should not be solely responsible for criminal sentencing, while a change in law may be required to open up public data sets involving health information.…

The bicycle's top left. I'm not an AI... you are. Stop hitting yourself RoTM Facebook has brought us one step closer to a Skynet future made a commitment to computer vision boffinry by open-sourcing its codebase for object detection, Detectron.…

One namespace to rule them all Cloudian's latest version of its object storage software can run native inside AWS, Google and Azure clouds, enabling a single object store namespace across the on-premises and major public cloud worlds.…

Capacity max same with 32- to 64-layer 3D NAND transition Micron is looking to boost its high fidelity cred. The vendor has refreshed its three-model 5100 SATA SSD with a two-variant 5200, increasing reliability from two million to three million hours mean time before failure (MTBF).…