The Register

Just not as sexy as engineering The number of youngsters taking up ICT apprenticeships has fallen by nearly 20 per cent over the last five years, according to the UK's Education and Skills Funding Agency.…

Could Nutanix be gearing up for an acquisition? Acquisition hints at Nutanix, go-to-market changes at Zerto, subscription pricing intro at Violin Systems, new SW release at Delphix – yep, it's another storage roundup.…

Moneymen always ready to say: Icahn tell you what you're doing wrong Activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deacon are linking arms to force Xerox to “explore strategic alternatives” for the business and squeeze out the “old guard” manning the fort should they resist change.…

Moneymen always ready to say: Icahn tell you what you're doing wrong Activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deacon are linking arms to force Xerox to “explore strategic alternatives” for the business and squeeze out the “old guard” manning the fort should they resist change.…

Deal would hand Murdoch too much power – provisional ruling Fox's proposed £11.7bn take over of Sky has been deemed not to be in the public interest, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally ruled today.…

Unsure on-shore: When it comes to staff ratio, you hit it then quit it... right? Right? IBM's Global Technology Services says it is finally edging closer to a proposed target to base 60 per cent of the workforce in offshore locations, one fifth in nearshore and another fifth onshore.…

Is it a game-changer? Definitely What exactly is "serverless"? Like many popular technology terms, the exact definition of serverless is increasingly fluid. Also like many popular technology terms, the fact that the term means different things to different people doesn't sit well in some quarters.…

Exec tells us they're knocking 14% off the price by 2020 Lockheed Martin aims to knock 14 per cent off the cost of Britain's F-35B fighter jets over the next couple of years, the firm's director of business development told The Register.…

Ancient DC-8 will try to figure out if biofuel’s a sick burn for contrails. NOT chemtrails, OK? NASA has started sniffing jet fuel as part of joint experiment with the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt, DLR).…

OneDrive for Business stretches its restoration envelope Microsoft's OneDrive for Business now offers to recover files deleted a month in the past.…

Let us tell you, reply two boffins A new model has traced the origins of high-energy neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gamma rays to powerful jets billowing around supermassive black holes.…

FB VR devs invite you to flick the screen rate Video effects designers who work with C++ code have a new unit of time to work with called a "flick."…

Integral bumps microSD to 512 GB, leaving SanDisk's 400GB offering looking a bit meek Here's a challenge: do you reckon you can fill half-a-terabyte of memory using only a smartphone?…

Sellers sent letters demanding auctions are yanked, conf told Shmoocon Vendor intimidation, default passwords, official state seals for sale. Yes, we're talking about computer-powered election machines.…

Regulator tells lawyers told to get off the fence or face unpleasant fall The Chair of the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission has again taken aim at cryptocurrency speculators, this time warning companies thinking of adding “Blockchain” to their names that his agency is watching them. Closely.…

If an algo ain't ratified by standards groups, it won't be welcome OpenSSL's maintainers have put the squeeze on insecure ciphers, with a raft of changes to how the project's operations.…

Tariff jacks up price for overseas components US President Donald Trump has signed an order to place a 30 per cent tariff on the import of parts used to build solar panels.…

Startup goes silent, scent of burned cash wafts from offices Primary Data, the storage startup offering a metadata-driven abstraction layer, appears to have gone TITSUP – a Total Inability To Sell Us Products.…

Code update hijacking vulnerability was snow joke Blizzard games – played every month by half a billion netizens, apparently – could be hijacked by malicious websites visited by gamers, according to Google's Project Zero team.…

Big Sky state first to pass mandate to bar throttling Montana has become the first US state to lay down its own net neutrality protections.…

Auditor says the right people were elected - probably - despite security & other messes The Australian Electoral Commission's (AEC's) handling of the nation's 2016 election was deeply flawed, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found.…

Here comes the great defender of journalism – and he wants Facebook to pay for news News Corp executive chairman and internationally despised publisher Rupert Murdoch has waded into the fake news debate – and demanded that internet giants pay journalists for their work.…

Patches slammed as 'complete and utter garbage' as Chipzilla U-turns on microcode Intel's fix for Spectre variant 2 – the branch target injection design flaw affecting most of its processor chips – is not to fix it.…

Mr Zuckerberg, are we the baddies? Facebook has admitted it was "far too slow" to recognize that its systems were being used to "spread misinformation and corrode democracy."…

Maiden flight faces delay as Congress squabbles over budgets SpaceX's Falcon Heavy maiden launch, pencilled in for the end of this month, is set to be delayed due to the ongoing US government shutdown.…

Court has been asked to toss out 'mystifying' sueball Iconic lads' mag Playboy is suing oddball internet culture website Boing Boing for linking to an Imgur archive featuring scans of centrefold models from over the years – a move described by the US Electronic Frontier Foundation as "frankly mystifying".…

Cash and trophy up for grabs A biennial award backed by the National Museum of Computing for "achievements in computer conservation or restoration" has opened its nominations.…

Newsflash from Microsoft: Future of learning will be supported by teachers and technology Hold on to your hats, Reg readers - Microsoft has some ground-breaking news to offer you: kids of the future are going to need collaboration, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity skills for work.…

Shares only double in value this time Another company has discovered the secret of how to send shares soaring overnight: simply add "Blockchain" to your name.…

It's up to you but the fluffy stuff is awesome, beams guidance The UK's National Health Service has said that Brits' patient data can be stored in the cloud – and has given US data centres party to Privacy Shield the thumbs-up.…

The rise and rise of flash How close to reality is the all-flash enterprise data centre?…

Speech to think tank will warn of Brit weaknesses in key areas The UK needs to invest in up-to-date army tech, including protection from cyber attacks, the Ministry of Defence's chief of general staff will warn today.…

If you want more public interest journalism, you need a Big Gov IT Project™ Comment As British politicians are urged to target Facebook and Google with a new tax and pour the profits into a scheme for funding public interest journalism, it’s worth taking a close look at the vested interests demanding this course of action.…

It woz Brexit and 'cautious consumers' wot done it Dixons Carphone has slashed full-year profit estimates amid continued downward pressure on mobile phone margins over the Christmas quarter and "more cautious consumer" spending in the UK.…

Developers find out who else is testing HMRC's tools Almost 1,500 software developers registered to use HMRC's sandbox or API platform have had their email addresses blabbed in a mass email.…

Met lab tour throws up issues around storage, encryption and privacy versus security More than 90 per cent of crime has "a digital element," we were told as The Reg was welcomed into London Metropolitan Police's Central Communications Command Centre, near Lambeth Bridge on the Thames.…

Price rises led to fewer shipments but..... PC makers - ones that use middlemen to reach customers - are selling fewer boxes in the UK but generating more cash from them because of post-Brexit vote price rises and demand shifting to higher-end gear.…

Figures are growing but still puny compared to profits Over the next few weeks Facebook, Amazon and Google’s owner Alphabet report full-year results. Inevitably, this will reopen debate on whether big technology companies pay enough tax in countries outside the US bases, something that's been discussed for several years. The difference is that now politicians in several countries are talking about and implementing changes that could mean such companies pay significantly more in future.…

Legal - promise! - but completely mad Christmas lights, that's what ShmooCon The news that Rob Joyce, former head of the NSA's hacking squad and now White House cybersecurity coordinator, was giving a talk at the ShmooCon hacking conference raised hopes he would offer up some juicy insights into the surveillance state or Donald Trump's cyber policies.…

Venerable malware is back for another round of phishing phun Keep your eyes open for yet-another Dridex-based malware attack.…

In 'On-Call' techies blame users for messes. In 'Who, me?' it's all your own fault Who, me? Welcome to the very first edition of “Who, me?” a new Reg column we hope will prove as entertaining as our Friday On-Call tales of tech support gigs gone wrong.…

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.…