The Register

Why IBM's cancer projects sounds like Expert Systems Mk.2 Analysis "OK, the error rate is terrible, but it's Artificial Intelligence – so it can only improve!"…

Information Commissioner's speech renews issue of transparency Comment "You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it," Tony Blair famously said.…

Lands Preben Fjeld Lenovo confirmed to the UK teamsters this morning at 9am that a new boss is set to parachute into the vacant MD’s hot seat locally in a little under six weeks.…

Intel chippery tech mitigates the most careless of workers Sponsored We can all agree that endpoint security is important – and also that it is a pain to enforce. Because of people. Worker carelessness is the most potent threat to endpoint security, according to US IT decision makers.…

A star performer producing fission-free plasma power Geek's Guide to Britain I’m in a room that, in normal circumstances, is not fit for human habitation. It features a number of big red buttons surrounded by illuminated yellow rings – just in case. “Push button to switch off Jet. Press only in case of extreme emergency,” the signs read, informatively.…

Once switches become just another function to spawn, you'll need to know how they'll fare If you fancy wrapping your mind around the complexities that make virtual switches (vSwitches) hard to benchmark, an IETF informational RFC is worth a read.…

Bacon, lettuce, tomato? No, loads of tasty bytes, layers and topologies Roundup Hungry for storage news? Tuck into this bulging storage sarnie for breakfast.…

Written in Python, it's not perfect – but it's pretty cool The Rubik’s Cube is one of those toys that just won't go away. Solving it is either something you can do in minutes to impress, or find so hard you end up using it as a paperweight.…

Firm that Trump banned from another silicon sale scoops GPU tech outfit cored by Apple British chip designer Imagination Technologies Group has sold itself to China-aligned private equity outfit Canyon Bridge.…

Then Loop – or, at least, a future version of it – may be for you Review It's become a phrase repeatedly so frequently, it almost feels like a cliché: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.…

Particle streams unlikely to come from within the Milky Way The most energetic cosmic rays bombarding Earth originate from outside our Milky Way Galaxy, according to research published just before the weekend.…

Share my car? I'd rather walk, punters tell Australian survey Australian researchers predict that the rise of the autonomous vehicle will make congestion worse.…

Mission plan: retrieve lost votes from deep within black hole of democratic disillusionment Australia's government has committed to starting a space agency, but there are no details about its mission other than a vague commitment to helping industry.…

No prize, because it's too easy: SVR Tracking had an unsecured AWS S3 bucket A US outfit that sells vehicle tracking services has been accused of leaving more than half a million records in a leaky AWS S3 bucket.…

Power outage of software crash, depending on who you listen to Sydney airport was in chaos on the first Monday of the Australian state of New South Wales' spring school holidays, after air traffic controllers had to revert to manual operations.…

Daesh-bags give up on writing their own attack code, copy successful hackers DerbyCon An analysis of the hacking groups allying themselves to Daesh/ISIS has shown that about 18 months ago the religious fanatics stopped trying to develop their own secure communications and hacking tools and instead turned to the criminal underground to find software that actually works.…

Feed antenna collapses, dropping debris onto main dish In the midst of the humanitarian disaster unfolding after Puerto Rico was battered by Hurricane Maria, astronomers working at the Arecibo radio telescope have reported damage that will leave it unable to operate for months.…

If you've got a lazy US$100k to $150k, a piece of history can be yours on Wednesday A replica of Sputnik-1 used to test the real thing's performance goes to auction this week.…

Facebook gives up on share plan that would give Zuck control forever, even if he worked for government Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2017 was “to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year.” He'd already visited 20, so the effort to tick off the other 30 means he's travelled rather a lot in 2017. That Facebook also hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe meant that many have observed his travels look like just the sort of thing a political aspirant would do to lay the foundations for a tilt at elected office. The theory was helped by a 2016 proposal to let Zuckerberg retain control of Facebook even if he stepped away from running the company to work in government.…

Heavy-handed tactics during lead up to independence referendum The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalan's independence.…

Doesn’t stop them trying to put the frighteners, tho DerbyCon Security vendors are inserting language into their products' terms and conditions that attempt to silence critics, folks attending this year's DerbyCon conference were told on Friday.…

Hybrid BSD pact will be replaced by MIT deal for some projects Faced with growing dissatisfaction about licensing requirements for some of its open-source projects, Facebook today said it will move React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license next week.…

...And here's how DerbyCon A sprinkle of code and an understanding of the Windows digital certificate process is all that's needed for a miscreant to sneak malware past Microsoft's application whitelist within a corporate environment.…

See no evil, hear no evil, speak of no evil Analysis No one at Facebook had any idea anyone might use its ad tools to target "Jew haters," said COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier this week.…

Now is a good time to go check your own Amazon settings. It's OK, we'll wait Yet another major company has burned itself by failing to properly secure its cloud storage instances. Yes, it's Verizon.…

Change the name to A-d'oh!-be An absent-minded security staffer just accidentally leaked Adobe's private PGP key onto the internet.…

And who's going to stand up for the Arnold Palmer? In what might well be the most California thing ever, America's golden state has settled a lawsuit against sports drink maker Gatorade for sullying the good name of water.…

And things are looking even worse for the X iFixit’s teardown of the new iPhone 8 confirms that the screen and battery remain relatively replaceable, despite the addition of Qi-compatible wireless charging coils in the unit.…

I don't know which is worse An IoT botnet is making a nuisance of itself online after becoming a conduit for spam distribution.…

Consultation opens on codes of practice for Digital Economy Act The UK government has offered more detail on how public authorities can pass around the data they hold on citizens – a mere five months after the Digital Economy Act passed into law.…

But pen-testers have questioned the figures Security vulnerabilities across the finance sector have increased more than fivefold (418 per cent) in the last four years, according to a study by NCC Group.…

It's getting mighty crowded at MCubed Events In just over a fortnight we'll be gathering some of the brightest minds in AI, ML and data science together – so of course we'd really like to see you there.…

Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours Microsoft has revealed the location of its flagship UK store – just up the road from Apple's flamboyant, tree-lined Regent Street shop.…

What a carve-up! A kebab shop owner who had sliced off a chunk of his takings and hid it from the taxman has been sent down for 30 months.…

Smart contracts language easy to use and create exploits with An Ethereum-backed contest has revealed a few new tricks for disguising malware as the harmless code the network uses to transfer and manipulate funds: digital smart contracts.…

Inside ITP, Safari's third-party cookie zapper Can the world's biggest tech company tame the Wild West of the digital ad industry as its data slurping becomes ever more intrusive? Since Facebook and Google are essentially colluding with behavioural data collection, and Microsoft has given up the fight for user privacy, few companies have Apple's means or incentive. But for Apple, privacy doesn't hit its bottom line, and might even increase it.…

That could mean 40,000 drivers out of work Uber's application for a new licence in the capital has been rejected, in a shock move by Transport for London today which said the firm is not "fit and proper" to hold a licence.…

All part of CEO Whitman's 'long-term ops and financial blueprint' Hewlett Packard Enterprise is about to release the trap door again with 5,000 employees, or almost 10 per cent of its workforce, expected to fall through it.…

Two other big brands, Sky and BT, also in the naughty corner Beleaguered ISP TalkTalk has once again been named worst ISP in a biannual survey of providers by consumer charity Which?…

Revenues are up, but NoSQL firm still burning through cash Oracle-chaser MongoDB has filed to go public, with its accounts revealing it made a net loss of almost $90m in the year ended January 31, 2017.…

The security week in review Roundup As ever, it's been a doozy of a week for cybersecurity, or lack thereof. The Equifax saga just keeps giving, the SEC admitted it was thoroughly pwned, and Slack doesn't bother to sign its Linux versions. We do spoil you so, Reg readers. And that was only yesterday. Here's the rest of the week's shenanigans we didn't get round to.…

Just install the trial software on 1,000 PCs and I'll be on my way Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I'm sorry, who are you again?"…

In 2018 'MAREA' will move ads and Azure from USA to Spain at 160 terabits per second Construction of Microsoft and Facebook's jointly-funded submarine cable has ended.…

Sysadmin hated making it look so easy, but didn't mind being a hero for saving a payroll run On-Call Can you feel it? The weekend's just over the horizon, so it's time for On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tales of literally incredible jobs that produced improbable feats of sysadminnery.…

Company has trove of 2,000 patents and won't enforce any of them if you licence right Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open-source software.…

Surprise – a thumbs up to private info flying over the Pond The much-heralded first review of the EU‑US Privacy Shield Framework that governs the flow of personal information across the Atlantic has concluded – and would you believe it? Representatives of the EU and US think it's doing fine.…

Backup appliance sales go off a cliff, traditional array vendors just aren't growing Sales of purpose-built backup appliances have dropped markedly, with year-on-year dips of 16.2 per cent by revenue and 14.9 per cent by capacity, according to analyst firm IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker for 2017's second quarter.…

Bio-boffins urge Red Planet life search to hunt for weird metal Scientists hoping to discover evidence of life on Mars should search for vanadium, a metallic element, according to a paper published in Astrobiology this month.…

Now that all the unpleasantness is behind us, let us code Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 have arrived.…

The Borg assimilates the infrastructure-as-code message Cisco has announced that UCS Director will ascend into the cloud as part of a new infrastructure management service named “Intersight”.…