The Register

No word on what caused the feed to go silent Updated Londoners are straightening their bowed necks, lowering their sunglasses and blinking into the strong sunlight as they attempt to "look" to see if their buses are coming.…

A smartphone should be as fixable as a refrigerator The European Parliament has recommended better consumer product protection, asking that durable products be durable and repairable by independent workshops.…

King Battistelli gets latest reform efforts approved, but his days are numbered The European Patent Office has formally advertised for a new president, marking a cut-off date for its controversial president Benoit Battistelli.…

Society has yet to – and perhaps never will – come to terms with creepy kid love dolls Sex robots may reduce sex crimes, or make them more common. According to "Our Sexual Future With Robots," a report published Wednesday by the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, it could go either way.…

Can science crack the cosmos's inexplicable yet bountiful ion? We think it can Scientists are getting closer to piecing together the chemical reactions that form trihydrogen, one of the most abundant yet mysterious ions floating around in space.…

Default and leaky creds, remote code execution and more In Cisco's weekly security update list, there are three critical bugs affecting its Elastic Services Controller and Ultra Services Framework.…

Turbo-charged solar runaways escape home galaxies, scream through our cosmic backwater Rare hypervelocity stars tearing through the Milky Way galaxy are runaway suns that have escaped neighbouring galaxies, according to research presented at this year’s National Astronomy Meeting in Hull, England.…

BACKRONYM also fixed, so pull the patch The Perl 5 database interface maintainers have issued an important patch for DBD—MySQL: in some configurations it wasn't enforcing encryption.…

Microsoft's decided only NTFS devices are allowed Microsoft has tried to DoS its forum servers, by changing its OneDrive consumer policy to only support cloud backups of NTFS-formatted drives without warning users first.…

Humans still the weakest link South Korean cyber-cops are probing a hacking attack on Bithumb, one of the world's biggest Bitcoin exchanges.…

Boggs sees future prospects go down the pan Another member of the Crackas With Attitude hacking group has been sent down – after breaking into the email accounts of more than 10 US government officials, including the then-director of the CIA.…

Mayor's plan could lead the way for other cities The city of Vancouver, Canada, is pushing a set of reforms to hit back against a housing shortage it blames in part on Airbnb and Expedia.…

Would be the first M-line server processor since 2015's M7 Oracle engineers are seemingly working on a new SPARC processor: the M8.…

Say 'have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?' again. I DARE YOU In a speech at the National Press Club yesterday, Australian Taxation Office commissioner Chris Jordan apologised for the organisation’s repeated IT outages, while the ATO’s online portals hit the canvas again.…

It's not a bug, it's a feature To obtain root privileges on a Linux distribution that utilizes systemd for initialization, start with an invalid user name in the systemd.unit file.…

What's the solution? Analysis Simmering anger over Silicon Valley sexism has exploded, with a slew of women going public with allegations of unwanted sexual advances at the top of the tech industry.…

Users slam attempt to infuse app with social media magic Microsoft last month declared that it had rebuilt its Skype app "from the ground up." Those who use the app have been busy tearing it down.…

Robo-ride car tech will use Drive PX 2 hardware, plus other bits from the conference China's top web portal Baidu kicked off its inaugural developer conference in Beijing today with a flurry of news bits and bytes.…

Lad cuffed after worldwide manhunt leads cops to parents' home in Stockport, UK A British teenager is accused of flogging and supporting malware used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against top multinationals.…

원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다. Samsung is again delayed the Bixby voice assistant in the US because its English not so good with skills.…

Nope, that is fake news, says memory chip maker: 'There was a minor event' Micron Technology has trashed analysts' claims that a malfunction forced the closure of one of its two fabs.…

Vendors upping tags while consumers want better products PCs should become more expensive this year but consumers will continue to buy them, Gartner has read in the tea leaves.…

Also: Docs might be Snapchatting your scans to colleagues DeepMind doesn’t fully understand the complexity of the problems it is trying to address and needs to think through the broader implications of its work, a panel in the UK has said.…

NAO hear this: Wares of ransom, feel the wrath come... audit UK Parliamentary spending watchdogs at the National Audit Office have launched an inquiry into the impact of the recent WannaCrypt ransomware attack on the NHS.…

Paula Long startup fails to reach escape velocity on its own Exclusive Ninety-two million dollars and a pivot or two later, virtualised data guardian DataGravity has been acquired, The Register can reveal.…

Wants to pump fibre to 50 cities by 2020 Small Brit broadband provider CityFibre has splashed £29m on connectivity service Entanet and is seeking to raise £185m in additional funds.…

And staff on chopping block unhappy with internal comms Virgin Media has admitted it "fell short" in delivering broadband speeds ahead of a BBC Watchdog report due to air tonight which found customers in some areas receive 3 per cent of the 200Mbps speed they were originally sold.…

No Bull... no flops... or should that be the other way round? The Atomic Weapons Establishment, which provides warheads for the UK's nuclear weapons, is going to use a Bull supercomputer to simulate Trident nuclear warhead explosions.…

Plus: More Valley douchebaggery, NotPetya, death of backups, and more

It's just preliminary research, don't freak out RoTM In a version of the infamous Trolley Problem, you're sitting in a runaway train on a fatal collision course with five people. You can flip a switch to change tracks, but on the other track you'd still kill one person.…

And think of the children of course... We’re pleased as punch to announce that The Register is the official media partner for Byte Night, the annual sleepout fundraiser for Action for Children, the UK charity which has been caring and sticking up for vulnerable young people for 150 years.…

Plus, bonus ransomware strain found in bottom of source code All the Bitcoins paid by victims of the NotPetya ransomware attack were withdrawn overnight.…

Passengers can bring electronic devices onboard from today Two Middle Eastern airlines have lifted the ban on in-cabin laptops on flights to the US.…

Oh no! Digital darkness forces folk to use cards and ATMs Nationwide Building Society is having a wobbly web Wednesday with customers getting only intermittent access to online and app-based services.…

What size do big things start? Small Machine learning (ML) may well be The Next Big Thing™, but it has yet to register in mainstream enterprise adoption. While breathless prognosticators proclaim 50 per cent of organisations lining up to magically transform themselves in 2017 with ML, more canny observers put the number closer to 15 per cent. And that's being generous.…

See? We do give small businesses a chance for work Small businesses have often moaned that government procurement is just one massive pork barrel, with only the greediest and biggest able to stick their snouts in.…

Three eyes look at the sky Camera designers will get to add a technique borrowed nature to improve how they handle colour, borrowed from the humble honey bee.…

April drift test analysis updated Australian researchers who haven't given up on finding Malaysian Airlines MH 370 have told a conference in Darwin they believe they know where it is likely to be.…

Think of it as your independence day Intel is shedding nearly 140 staff from Internet of Things business lines.…

The right hand? Go on, guess Facebook's lawyers are racking up the billable hours in the USA, with the company winning a lawsuit about tracking and privacy, but still doing battle against the American government over protecting users from government warrants.…

Vulture South talks to Lockstep's Steve Wilson about privacy, identity, and loose APIs Australia's Medicare data leak certainly won't be the last such, so why are so many expressions of digital identity so badly protected?…

Equipment seized to head off new attack, Cyberpolice says There's a new wrinkle to the NotPetya story: authorities in the Ukraine have seized equipment from M.E.Docs, the online accounting firm implicated in spreading the malware.…

Well, that's all right then The fallout from Australia's Medicare card number leak continued yesterday afternoon, with Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge trying unsuccessfully to hose down the flames.…

Ok, we are going to say that 'agility' word Sysadmin blog Data center technologies are constantly evolving, displacing their predecessors. Data center storage, and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) in particular, make for a good example.…

Brit chip designer opens up on annus horribilis Brit chip designer Imagination Technologies has returned to operating profit, in part aided by 350 poor souls – about a fifth of its workforce – that were tossed onto the employment bonfire amid wider cost cutting.…

This week, in crappy online petition land... Few could argue with what the Raspberry Pi has achieved. As well as inspiring countless youngsters into computing, the tiny affordable gadget is beloved by amateur and professional techies alike.…

IoT, AI and car tech driving demand for chips Memory and flash fabber Samsung is boosting production, convinced that high demand for chips is here to stay.…

Fraction required to equal one Katie Hopkins column still unknown Reg Standards Bureau A headline in the venerable New Scientist magazine "Protons are lighter than thought" has prompted El Reg's Standards Bureau to consider the notion of thought as a small unit of mass.…

Motoring org denies sensitive information was exposed Breakdown and car insurance outfit AA has been scolded for its handling of a data breach that spilled customer email addresses and partial credit card numbers.…

This joint venture could be described as strained at best Toshiba has filed a legal motion claiming a court has no right to judge Western Digital Corp's (WDC) attempt to halt its memory business sale, which, Toshiba says, would cause irreparable harm.…