The Register

What's really going on in battle to block sale of top-level address Comment The Slovakian internet community is pressuring its government to block the sale of the country's .sk internet registry, asking for it to "be returned to the people of Slovakia."…

We're so sorry, says Brit biz's supremo after website leaked people's personal info UK car insurance and driving school giant The AA has at last admitted it accidentally spilled its customers' personal information all over the web.…

Settle this like the illogical humans you are – vote on which is best Poll A bloke was arrested after a shouting match with a pal over Star Wars versus Star Trek led to blood being spilled.…

Substandard certs, already in partial exile, soon to be shunned completely Google in two months will conclude its prolonged excommunication of misbehaving SSL/TLS certificate authorities WoSign and subsidiary StartCom, a punishment announced last October.…

Theft of trade secrets allegations will be the focus in self-driving car case Waymo has dropped three of the patent claims it had been pursuing against Uber and will instead focus on nailing the taxi app maker for trade secret theft.…

Anti-piracy DRM gets the green light, for now Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, director of the web standards trendsetter W3C, and Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire, has given his blessing to anti-piracy locks on web content.…

Old-skool addresses worth about $400,000 at auction Collapsed retail store RadioShack will auction off its public IPv4 addresses as part of its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings.…

Top US soap-opera joins long list of orgs leaving stuff open on cloud storage World Wrestling Entertainment – the home of America's top costumed pantomime actors – has admitted that it exposed members online for anyone to see.…

Fitness band maker jogs off into the sunset for good Gizmo maker Jawbone is shutting down operations and will liquidate its assets.…

Didn't talk to organizers, don't have any plans yet Hark, ye internet peasants. Google and Facebook today trumpeted that they will join the day of protest against efforts to kill off America's net neutrality rules.…

£8m facility to help government identify and fix weaknesses The UK has kicked off development of an £8m data analytics facility for national infrastructure systems like energy and water.…

Miscreants rake in $1.5m, one annoying mobile pop-up ad at a time... A powerful and fast-spreading Android malware strain dubbed CopyCat has infected 14 million Android devices.…

That sort of lolly could buy you 15 million Soleros Oracle head honcho Mark Hurd has sold 350,000 shares in his company for a cool $17.4m.…

Borough councils hit due to a 'fibre break' A London-wide Virgin Media outage caused by a "fibre break" has left business customers across the UK capital without broadband - including a number of borough councils.…

Part of £700m investment pot that will also go on 'full fibre' The UK government has handed £16m to King's College London and the Universities of Surrey and Bristol to test 5G technology.…

Roving reporter returns from test track in deepest Baden-Württemberg Pictures Autonomous cars, what's not to like? According to their proponents, they will herald an accident, traffic and generally hassle-free age of transportation.…

Lack of patches and enabling local admin rights blamed The huge cyber attack that swept from Ukraine last week is still affecting companies, and several have been hit pretty hard, including the world's largest advertising business, UK-based WPP.…

Quantum dots show promise for fighting bacterial keratitis In early lab experiments on rabbits, eyedrops laced with nanoparticles appear to combat bacterial keratitis, a serious infection of the cornea which can, in severe cases, cause blindness.…

Closes London and NYC offices in pursuit of profits Online audio distribution platform SoundCloud is laying off two in five of its staff and closing several offices to cut its cloth in a crowded market dominated by music streaming giants.…

Will extend IT contracts a bit, but winnow 25-supplier plan The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) is the latest UK government body to beg for "just one more hit" with its system integrators, prolonging its IBM and Capgemini contracts by one year.…

How long have you been having these delusions? Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Tell me about your mother."…

It's snowing at 3AM. Servers are dying by the dozen. So our reader went outside and climbed a ladder to fix things up ON-CALL Why look at that: the calendar says “Friday” which means it's time for another edition of On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we relate readers' recollections of being called out to fix nasty things under nastier circumstances.…

Sixty rare possible candidates eyed from NASA's Kepler probe Astronomers have uncovered a potential treasure trove of hot Jupiters, a rare class of exoplanet, in our galaxy.…

Stuxnet, this ain't Don't panic, but attackers are trying to phish their way into machines in various US power facilities, including nuclear power station operators.…

Who thought SMBv1 was a good idea? Come on, fess up Perhaps noticing the popularity of Samba apps for Android, Google's decided to plant its own flag in the space, and yesterday released its official Android Samba Client.…

Paused awaiting new taxi laws Uber has given in to regulatory pressure in Finland, and is suspending its UberPOP until that country implements limited taxi deregulation next year.…

Broadcom chipsets, who uses those? Oh, practically everyone Google's latest Android security update has landed, and at least one of the bugs it patches is a treat: since it's related to Broadcom chipsets, it will reach far beyond the Android ecosystem.…

When the good guys use backdoors, they're not backdoors, understand? Australia’s federal government has shifted its ground on the encryption debate, and is now working to hem in the debate by constraining the definition of “backdoor”.…

Data from 100,000 workloads analysed to help you tune storage, instead of fighting fires Promo Good storage administrators are hard to find. Not only are skilled professionals in short supply, most organisations prefer multi-talented techies who can do more than just manually managing arrays…

Plus: Waymo? Way no! Levandowski swerves doc demand in trade secrets trial Taxi app turned lawsuit magnet Uber last week was sued by Donna Giacomaro, a resident of Levittown, New York, for text message harassment, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and New York state law.…

Licensing dispute explodes into all-out patent war with Apple Qualcomm is upping the stakes in its legal war against Apple by accusing the Cupertino idiot-tax operation of infringing six patents.…

Tweet a GIF about that, Donald Chinese boffins say they have smashed yet another world fusion record using their EAST contraption – aka the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak.…

White House warns corpos after President's Twitter fight The very public war of words – and GIFs – between the President of the United States and CNN could pose a threat to the $85bn merger between AT&T and Time Warner.…

* And everyone else, too, of course Let's Encrypt plans to begin offering free wildcard certificates in January 2018, a move likely to make web security easier and a bit less costly for many organizations.…

Total Inability To Support Users' Purchases – and the second time in four months A number of banking app startups were forced to shut down their services Thursday after their payment processor fell over for the second time in four months.…

Templated stories sourced from gov databases to push web ads. Welcome to your dystopia Google has today awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK’s Press Association to develop robot reporters that can crank out 30,000 articles a month for local newspapers and bloggers.…

And Intel sighs with relief Virus-fighting tech renegade John McAfee has settled his lawsuit in the US with Intel over his own name.…

Why employ people to flog software when you can just force feed people's computers with code anyway? Microsoft today announced it is dumping 3,000 workers.…

Self-driving project could be a smart move by Redmond Yesterday, China's search engine giant Baidu named Microsoft as a partner on its new open-source autonomous driving platform, Apollo. Technology analysts say the partnership is a smart call by Redmond.…

It's not like you can go to the police, eh? Dark web marketplace AlphaBay has dropped offline, sparking frenzied speculation that its admins may have disappeared for good after pocketing a swag bag of digital currency. The outage may be down to a simple security update, if assurances offered through Reddit are true.…

200GbitE and 400GbitE ASIC-powered switches Just as we're getting used to 40Gbps, Ethernet networking kit-flinger Mellanox makes it 10 times faster with a Spectrum-2 ASIC running at up to 400Gbps.…

Reckitt Benckiser revenues wrecked by comp-wiping nasty The owner of the Dettol brand and Durex condoms could be left millions out of pocket after falling victim to the NotPetya ransomware last week.…

SpectraLogic's LTO-8 pre-purchase programme and 190TB+ cartridge forecast Library vendor SpectraLogic is preparing for upcoming 12TB LTO-8 format tape drives with a pre-purchase programme and a 190-plus TB cartridge on the way.…

They 'can't make people redundant properly despite having loads of practice' Computer Sciences Corp and HP Enterprise Services were old hands at making redundancies, so you'd expect the newly formed entity DXC Technology would also be well versed. Yet some former staff have been left in employment limbo due to a payroll cock-up.…

Geminga! Yet another of astronomy's classic pranks... A new study suggests a dangerous, young neutron star could be attracting planet-forming matter around it as it swims through space.…

Stretch your non-Artificial Intelligence at MCubed The agenda for MCubed is complete, with almost 40 of the smartest brains in machine learning and AI due in London in October to not just talk about the technology, but to show how to use it in real world organisations.…

Saying heck no to rules, man Analysis Tegile has announced the first mainstream multi-tiered flash array in the storage industry. What does it do and how does it do it?…

Most recent public document is from 1955 The campaign group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit to try to force authorities to release the latest details of the Five Eyes surveillance agreement.…

Eight? Really? Analysis Data centre infrastructure management console seller Aptare claims to have 8 or 9 exabytes of storage under management – a larger total than any storage company on the planet.…

I shoulda patched what now? The ransomware problems reported by The Reg over the past few weeks are enough to make you, er, wanna cry. Yet all that's happened is that known issues with Windows machines – desktop and server – have now come to everyone's attention and the bandwidth out of Microsoft's Windows Update servers has likely increased a bit relative to the previous few weeks.…