The Register

Leave the day job to the machines, and get your proposals in We’ve had a cracking response to our call for papers for M, but more than a few people at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning have been in touch to ask for extensions.…

Charges for 40Mbps packages to be cut by 40 per cent Ofcom could force BT's Openreach to slash the prices it charges rivals for access to its superfast broadband network under plans that could shave millions off consumer bills.…

Tech companies will struggle to take over the road One of BMW's board members threw down the driving glove at the tech industry yesterday, saying that while established car makers were transforming themselves into tech companies, tech companies would struggle to turn themselves into auto manufacturers.…

Under Brexit, service faces five-fold rise in transactions Confidence in HMRC's £70m Customs Declaration Service, a computer system that HMRC itself describes as "business critical", has collapsed, the Treasury Select Committee warned today.…

Your bot looks cute but it's easy to crack Something for the Weekend, Sir? Car horns symphonise accompanied by a chorus of yelling cyclists as I shimmy on foot through oncoming traffic. Strictly, I come dancing on to the tarmac, cavorting between the lanes, prancing out of the way of motorbikes and generally tripping the traffic light fantastic.…

Plus: The strange case of the ghost keyboard that typed random rubbish ON-CALL The sun came up, the world kept turning, another Friday rolled around and so, therefore, did another edition of On-Call, The Register's weekly recount of readers' reminiscences about odd jobs.…

Your fancy ML algo is only a small part of the puzzle Artificial intelligence these days is sold as if it were a magic trick. Data is fed into a neural net – or black box – as a stream of jumbled numbers, and voilà! It comes out the other side completely transformed, like a rabbit pulled from a hat.…

Developers puzzled by binaries' bitcode explosion Apple's iOS 10.3 this week brought with it minor storage space gains, thanks to the debut of the iGiant's revised storage scheme, the Apple File System.…

Browser makers unite to make web design great again With the release of Safari 10.1 this week, four major browsers in the space of a month have implemented support for CSS Grid, an emerging standard for two-dimensional grid layouts in web applications.…

Right? You're keeping backups, right? No? Well, do it now Today, March 31, is supposed to be World Backup Day. Where did that one come from? Isn't every day a backup day?…

US tech giants react to UK Home Secretary Rudd Big Tech has told the UK government it will do more to remove extremist content from their networks, but has refused to offer concessions on encryption.…

And they dare call El Reg The Sun of science and technology – the nerve! Powerful solar wind and radiation have stripped away most of the Martian atmosphere, transforming the planet from one that could have been wet and with the potential to harbor life, to the barren dusty place it is today.…

All of a sudden dedicated instances are looking a lot better than multi-tenancy A group of researchers, one from Microsoft, say they can extract information from an Amazon Web Services virtual machine by probing the cache of a CPU it shares with other cloudy VMs.…

First, find it, which is hard. Second, see if it occludes stars, which is really, really hard Planet 9 will be easier to find if we know what we're looking for, so a French astronomer has set himself the task of trying to wrap the enigma in some parameters.…

Virtzilla says hardly anyone isn't using its Distributed or Standard Switch already VMware's let vSphere users know that it will end support for third-party virtual switches.…

'Very big cut' hits teams in US IBM is once again laying off folks – this time swinging its axing mostly through sales teams in the US.…

Suggested workaround for exploited flaw: Upgrade to a non-EoL operating system Microsoft will not patch a critical security hole recently found and exploited in IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 R2 – the operating system it stopped supporting roughly two years ago.…

And put a sat in orbit without any explosions. Yawn Pics Elon Musk's promised revolution in affordable orbital delivery has begun: today his upstart SpaceX successfully launched a refurbished rocket from Earth, carrying a commercial satellite into orbit, and then landed the rocket's first stage on a sea barge.…

Yeah, not so fast, Comcast, Verizon et al, say US states President Trump has yet to sign off on congressional legislation that allows American ISPs to sell their subscribers' online habits to advertisers – but US states aren't waiting for his signature and are moving to protect their constituents' privacy.…

Just what rules is this upstart putting in place? Analysis A police report appears to support the claim that Uber was not to blame for a recent crash of its self-driving car in Tempe, Arizona.…

Telco lands mega-deal to host first responders' broadband US phone giant AT&T has landed a $6.5bn contract to build a private wireless broadband network for emergency responders.…

Let's go over the pros and cons Hands-on How fast things change: once upon a time (last week), Tor was seen as a tool for the paranoid and the criminal. VPNs were aimed at safeguarding traffic over insecure hotel and conference Wi-Fi networks – or for business.…

That's £768.8m down the drain Financial fraud losses in the UK totalled £768.8m in 2016, up 2 per cent on 2015, according to Financial Fraud Action UK.…

This time it's palm oil instead of a single dead cow Poll First it was vegetarians and vegans complaining about plastic banknotes. Now the Bank of England has managed to upset environmentalists at the WWF – wildlife, not wrestlers – over plans for new plastic £20 notes made using palm oil.…

Meanwhile, wannabe iTunes gift card moguls reportedly fire up their email UK cops have arrested a man they suspect of extortion and Computer Misuse Act offences – and according to reports, "someone in control of the Turkish Crime Family email account" claimed that arrest was to do with $100,000 Apple iTunes gift card debacle.…

Cost works out at about $1m per petabyte Following boastful tweets by American president Donald Trump about job creation, Ford is set to open its very own Michigan data centre for its connected cars.…

'Messy divorce' would help no one UK Prime Minister Theresa May is warning that failure to negotiate an agreement on Britain's exit from the European Union could damage security cooperation. The tough line - contained in Wednesday's historic letter triggering Article 50 - has re-focused minds on the possible security implications of Brexit.…

Sources say department is undergoing a major crackdown The IT contractors who built the UK tax collectors' IR35 tool to determine whether freelancers are in the scope of the new tax clampdown have themselves been ruled within the scope of IR35.…

Office 365 licence required Microsoft has announced a "significant" step in Excel for Office 365 users on PCs.…

Limitless potential, limited places With six all-day workshops on the Continuous Lifecycle London agenda, the big question you face is just how deep do you want to dive.…

Further beefs up to take on the might of Cisco Extreme Networks is to acquire Brocade Communications Systems' data centre, switching, routing, and analytics business for $55m (£44m) - part of a bid to beef up its portfolio and take on Switchzilla – aka Cisco.…

Damn. Can we have our technopanic back, please? Special Report Today's technopanic about robots and AI, largely created by the media, may be overstated.…

Close, but no BIll Gates Amazon chief Jeff Bezos has surpassed clothing tycoon Amancio Ortega and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett to become the world's second-richest person.…

Time will tell if Microsoft's browser is less ez2pwn Security watchers have reacted positively to recently announced improvements to Microsoft's Edge browser, which had earned an unenviable reputation for easy pwnage.…

Tenuous but critical deal to save corporation takes its first steps Accordng to the Nikkei Asian Review, there are ten bidders for Toshiba's memory business.…

We're not saying Larry Ellison has a point, but... Analysis Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy doesn't often tweet, but when he does it's usually to applaud the popularity of AWS's database migration service.…

Code alone won't win the day Open source wasn’t supposed to matter in the cloud. After the Free Software Foundation’s failed attempt to rein in network-delivered software services, some wrung their hands and waited for the open source apocalypse. Instead of imploding, however, open source adoption has exploded, with ever more permissive licenses rising to largely eliminate the need to contribute anything back.…

Looking at all the new features and highlighting the best of 'em HANDS-ON Windows 10 was launched on July 29, 2015, just over 18 months ago, consigning the Windows 8 experiment to history and introducing the idea of "Windows as a service" – or in other words an operating system that (with a few exceptions) updates itself whether you like it or not.…

Pops out second Gen 6 FC switch a year after its first Fibre Channel switcher Brocade has introduced its second 32Gbps (Gen 6) switch called the G610.…

See that? That's cheaper exit bandwidth, that is Cloudy British hosting biz UKFast has dropped its prices for cloudy Openstack hosting, it says, taking a pop at AWS as it does so.…

Veeaming Megsco could be about to do a Data Domain and buy big Hewlett Packard Enterprise is interested in buying Veeam, sources tell us.…

App-makers get a choice: Open up voluntarily or we'll pass laws forcing you to The European Commission will in June push for backdoor access to encryption used by apps, according to EU Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová.…

Russian puzzler soothes brain after traumatic events Playing a game of Tetris in the aftermath of a traumatic event can help alleviate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.…

Security researchers propose old-school gear as a covert command & control conduit Cybercriminals managed to infect a PC in the design department of Contoso Ltd through a cleverly crafted spear-phishing campaign. Now they need a way to communicate with the compromised machine in secret.…

Nokia Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent pack away the sueball gun After years of lobbying by computer science luminaries, Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent (both owned by Nokia) have relented and will allow non-commercial study of the source code for Unix Research Editions 8, 9, and 10.…

Do you really want to leave this malware-serving page? No/No Annoying sites that open hard-to-eradicate “Do you want to leave this site? Are you sure?” dialogues are in Chrome's cross-hairs: the Chrome team has decided JavaScript dialogues offer too much scope for abuse, and is laying out a roadmap to get rid of them.…

Supo: Espionage rising, attacks on infrastructure falling The Finnish Security Intelligence Service Supo is complaining that nation-state-level attackers aren’t even bothering to hide themselves from prying eyes.…

No one else seems to care, sniff politicians US Democrats have written to America's communications watchdog the FCC complaining the mobile industry needs a kick up the backside to fix serious flaws in its networks.…

It's all just for attention at MWC. Buuuuuuurrrrrnnnnnn While the 5G enthusiasts often hit the headlines with visions of AI-driven robots and virtual reality, many operators remain sceptical of the new business models 5G will drive, at least in the short term. Vasyl Latsanych, CMO at Russia's largest telco, MTS, echoed the sentiments Wireless Watch hears from many of its MNO research contacts – that 5G, for now, remains a series of what-ifs, with no clear answers.…

All the more reason to reject new_position_offer.docx Recruiters are known to be a bit of a pain in the ASCII in the tech world – but how about these ones: bogus headhunters attempting to infect GitHub-using software developers.…