The Register

Increasingly 'legalistic' approach goes against intentions for openness, says ombudsman Public bodies are taking an increasingly “legalistic” approach to disclosing information that doesn’t always support transparency, the European Union’s dodgy management watchdog has said.…

Issue 'endemic' across public sector, shriek experts Cops in Manchester, England, have 1,518 PCs running on Microsoft's dusty operating system Windows XP, according to a Freedom of Information response.…

C'mon, you POS... >:( Lloyds Bank has admitted that unspecified technical problems affected the operation of its Cardnet payment system on Tuesday. The UK bank denied suggestions that it had suffered a cyber attack.…

And now has creepy 'entity' sentiment analysis too Google Cloud's Natural Language API has become a bit more, er, insightful: it can now sort content into 700 different categories, such as Health, Hobbies & Leisure and Law & Government.…

That's 1.9 BEEELLION records – and just you wait till GDPR More data records have been lost or stolen during the first half of 2017 (1.9 billion) than all of 2016 (1.37 billion).…

The question is... will Western Dig give the OK? Struggling Toshiba has picked a group led by the investment firm Bain Capital to buy its memory chip business, Reuters reports.…

Spend £50k to get just £3k per year more than non-grads University in the UK has never been more expensive. But at least doing a computer science degree guarantees a nice fat, well-paid job at the end, right? Wrong.…

Vendors Brexploited, but components dearth played part too The average trade price of computers in Britain shot up by almost a third in the past year since the EU referendum, though a weakened pound might not tell the whole story.…

Those are just the ones known to have downloaded outdated versions Thousands of companies may be susceptible to the same type of hack that recently struck Equifax.…

Behold the new SCv3000 arrays, with auto-tiering, all-flash, twin controllers, 1PB raw capacity all in 3U for <$10k Dell EMC has refreshed its cheapest storage appliance by giving us the SCv3000, a successor to the SCv2000.…

Get creative – bringbackfirefly! will not longer cut it, nerds Eggheads have produced a machine-learning system that has studied millions of passwords used by folks online to work out other passphases people are likely to use.…

HDS, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group join forces, promise data-driven IoT fun Hitachi Data Systems is no more: the venerable storage vendor has been subsumed into a new outfit called “Hitachi Vantara” that says it “helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society.”…

Surveillance bots are really just 'a very weird data center' Pics In a modest industrial building in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday, security startup Knightscope unveiled the latest additions to its line of "crime-fighting robots" – the K1, a stationary weapon detector, and the K7, a sensor-laden dune buggy for challenging terrain.…

And then filtering out all the stuff he doesn't need to read Emacs enthusiast Artur Malabarba has put the text editor to work taming Slack.…

Sitting less than one light year apart in spiral galaxy NGC 7674 Scientists have discovered the closest-ever supermassive black hole binary system. It's in the spiral galaxy NGC 7674, and the pair of voids are separated by a distance of less than one light year.…

Larry Ellison also pledges 'Autonomous Database' to cut the cost of – gulp – the people who run databases Oracle chair and chief technology officer has pledged to undercut Amazon Web Services pricing by 50 per cent for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, in part by increasing use of automation.…

Early issues arise with new version of OS X 10.13 Apple's next version of the macOS, High Sierra, aka 10.13, is due for general release next week, and users running the beta have already noticed a pair of issues that could cloud the rollout.…

Bumbling fool not so much Jason Bourne as Johnny English A contractor who tried to sell trade secrets on military communication satellites to the Russians has been sent down for five years. Incredibly, it could have been longer after prosecutors alleged that he was also planning to kill his wife.…

Crunch hearing reveals wide gulf in views, evildoer is Backpage The first Congressional hearing into a proposed law that would make American companies liable for online sex trafficking has lain bare the depths of the disagreement between lawmakers and tech giants.…

Advertising firm sued by taxi app maker Updated Uber has filed suit against one of its advertising partners, alleging it bilked the ride-sharing giant out of "tens of millions" of dollars.…

Passwords, server schematics and encryption keys up for grabs in open file store Updated Media monster Viacom has been caught with its security trousers down. Researchers found a wide-open, public-facing misconfigured AWS S3 bucket containing pretty much everything a hacker would need to take down the company's IT systems.…

Apps are gonna break. Plus of course, Apple always screws up the first iteration Apple's latest iOS version is out today – iOS 11 – but before you rush into updating, you'll want to check that it doesn't destroy any of your favorite apps.…

You want more competition, America? Here's another all-powerful telco monolith Sprint and T‑Mobile US are in talks to create a third major US wireless carrier.…

Also wants to extend consumer protection to cover more broadband services UK telecoms regulator Ofcom is to introduce a series of measures to clamp down on providers' handling of nuisance calls, billing accuracy, general complaints handling and support for vulnerable customers.…

That is IT, stationery, toilet rolls, etc 'give us discounts' says outsourcing biz The procurement team at DXC Technologies might consider giving courses on how not to win friends or influence people after sending suppliers an ultimatum: cough better financial terms or else.…

In case you were wondering what Git, SQL and JS skills will get you, new online tool measures your value Developers may be no more curious about salaries than any other set of workers, but their high degree of variation in terms of education, skillset and experience – not to mention the often ill-defined nature of their work – gives them ample reason to be curious about pay among their peers.…

Joins Three in telling Ofcom: See you in court EE has officially launched its legal challenge against Ofcom's spectrum proposals, a move prompted by Three's judicial review formally submitted earlier this month.…

You want a remedy? Here's our remedy Google appears to have revived an "auction-based fix" to vertical search competition complaints, according to Reuters.…

Starcraft on the blockchain? What a time to be alive Blockchains might be a bit slow today, but one of Ethereum's founders predicts that in "a couple of years" the popular network will have the same transaction capacity scale as Visa.…

Norgrove was right: post-Brexit gross £350m a week? Nope As we all know, there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics". No doubt that line will be pulled out again to bolster the case for British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson against Sir David Norgrove, head of the UK Statistics Authority, who has made it clear he's unimpressed with Boris's use of the stats.…

OEM factory images create 'incorrect registry keys' Microsoft is pointing the finger of blame at HP's factory image for black screens of death appearing after a Windows Update.…

Go on, you're the breach expert Equifax hasn't found time for a houseclean and is making claims of authority and competence about security breaches that, following its own recent high profile breach, come off as pretty cringeworthy.…

Lest we forget Stob These days we hear a lot about luring the young away from happy, fulfilling careers and into the world of programming. The kids have been freed from the tedious yoke of the boring and 'Microsoft-heavy' ITC syllabuses courtesy of popular hero Michael Gove. Now every child receives more Raspberry Pi than rice pudding; double Python periods substitute for double French; and instead of class discussions about Regan, Goneril and Cordelia, they chat for hours with Siri, Alexa and Cortana.…

DeepMind doesn't stoop, you still conquer The world of artificial intelligence changed in early 2014 when Google paid £400m for DeepMind Technologies, a company founded by neuroscientist and polymath Demis Hassabis.…

Cross-border cybersecurity certification scheme planned The European Commission has proposed an expansion in the role of ENISA, the EU's cybersecurity agency.…

It's stylish, but the stylus doesn't add a lot FIRST FONDLE Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 is everything you'd expect in a premium handset, but the stylus doesn't appear to add huge value.…

Boffins find search quality unaffected no matter how much information web giant amasses Data, it has been argued, is the new oil – the fuel for the information economy – but its importance to search engines may be overstated.…

Whither the rapid file transfer app Aspera that Big Blue acquired in 2014? IBM's decided to join AW and Google in the appliances-to-haul-data-into-the-cloud market, by launching an appliance called “IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration”.…

Would you trade your CPU time and electricity bill for pirated content? Bittorrent search engine and mortal enemy of intellectual property lawyers, The Pirate Bay, has upset the one group of people that actually likes it: its users.…

'Tez' targets India, where cash is now a dirty word, will soon hit other emerging economies Google's launched a payments service called “Tez” for India and plans to take it to other nations soon.…

And possibly beyond With little fanfare, Oracle formally tore the wraps off its SPARC M8 data-center-class processors and servers on Monday.…

Screens-on-a-stalk and replaceable HDD and RAM may not a revolution make All-in-one PCs look pretty and make for tidy desks but don't often feature in business settings because bonding a monitor and a computer reduces maintenance options.…

Servers-by-the-second is now a thing, but you pay for the whole first minute! Amazon Web Services has switched on per-second billing for EC2 Instances and elastic block store volumes.…

Youngsters tricked into performing sex acts for pervs Four men have joined their two accomplices behind bars for tricking young girls into performing sex acts online so they could film them.…

Two-factor authentication by SMS? More like SOS Once again, it's been demonstrated that vulnerabilities in cellphone networks can be exploited to intercept one-time two-factor authentication tokens in text messages.…

'Hang on, Trump has done what??!?' Video Six would-be Mars colonists have emerged from eight months of isolation on top of a Hawaiian volcano as part of preparations for an eventual manned mission to the Red Planet.…

Jewelry exec faces up to five years in the clink for SEO backfire It may have seemed like a good idea at the time – treating a judge's takedown order as a Photoshop template that could be modified as needed to demand that Google remove any unwanted information.…

Does someone need to take the handbrake off this thing? Microsoft on Sunday bragged its artificial intelligence technology is behind the, er, success of a massively underperforming Renault Formula One team.…

Quiet hero faded to relative obscurity Obit Stanislav Petrov, one of the unsung heroes of the Cold War without whose guts and intelligence you wouldn't be reading this, has died at the age of 77, his son has confirmed.…

W3C lays out the case for anti-piracy, anti-copying defenses Anti-piracy and anti-copying protections are now formally part of the World Wide Web after an effort to vote down content controls at the WWW's standards body failed.…