The Register

Access Group exec: We'll be buddies if you survive the redundancy scheme Staff at Safe Computing - Britain’s nearest equivalent to Workday - are feeling anything but secure about their livelihoods after reading a proposal by their new owner to axe some jobs.…

Mabe you could pay with Bitcoin. Like at Microsoft. Oh wait* IBM's fortunes are set to change, we're sure of it. After 20 straight quarters of sales decline, the business has launched Blockchain-as-a-Service.…

UCL researcher on the tragedy of the age of data Interview Sure, algorithms are insanely useful, but we need to watch we don't become complacent and unable to question them, University College London's Dr Hannah Fry warned in an interview with The Register.…

Official advice: Don’t touch that phone! BlackBerry has finally acknowledged problems with the much-delayed 10.3.3 update to BlackBerry 10 that users began to receive late last year.…

Kent man faces Wireless Telegraphy Act charges A Kent man has been on bail for seven years over allegations he operated a GSM gateway which allowed consumers to get cheaper calls abroad.…

Second regulator to probe MSP The Financial Conduct Authority is to probe the accounting screw-up at Redcentric that was made public last autumn when the firm admitted to overstating assets and understating net debts by millions of pounds.…

Penny pinching pensioners restricted to 60cm allocation Beijing authorities are forcing desperate defecators to submit to a facial scan before receiving an allotment of toilet paper, sparking a debate over privacy, crowd control and the toxic qualities of Chinese loo roll.…

Wow, who knew? Clients don't like to be associated with jihadis and racists Google has promised a review of its ad policy on YouTube after a backlash from blue-chip advertisers. It follows a series of reports by The Times demonstrating big brand ads running over content that breaches YouTube guidelines, such as jihadist videos and other inflammatory or racist material.…

And all it got in return was a £60k fine Updated Norfolk County Council left files containing sensitive information about children in a cabinet which was dispatched to a second hand shop.…

Jeremy 'easy to work with' Fleming is incoming Jeremy Fleming, the deputy director-general of MI5, is to helm GCHQ following the surprise resignation of Robert Hannigan this January.…

US law, EU law and post-Brexit what'll UK do law Interview You know, we know, everyone knows… the EU's General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect May of next year for every member of the European Union, and that will include the United Kingdom.…

It's a real Peng... win Sysadmin blog Microsoft now runs a bunch of Windows servers on ARM processors. Apparently, these ARM chips are quite good at their jobs and Microsoft might try converting entire categories of workloads over. All around the world the tech press has speculated on whether or not Windows on ARM will be showing up in on-premises datacenters. In doing so, they've completely missed the point.…

Jeff Jones jumps joins #deleteuber movement Uber's president Jeff Jones has joined the #deleteuber movement because he's come to realise the company's values aren't compatible with his own.…

Tactical victory for Battistelli and chair as org falls back on status quo A determined effort to take action against the president of the European Patent Office, Benoit Battistelli, has faltered again thanks to some strategic maneuvering by his defenders.…

Middle Kingdom's biggest property group - Wanda Dalian - buddies up with Big Blue IBM”s found a new way to get its cloud into China – a new deal with the Wanda Internet Technology Group.…

HipChat, Bamboo, and Crowd get fix Atlassian has joined the growing list of vendors to patch its products against the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability.…

But there's no sight of the RemoteApp replacement promised for early 2017 Citrix has taken the wraps off the “XenDesktop Essentials Service for Microsoft Azure”, a product that lets you run virtual Windows 10 desktops from Microsoft's cloud. But the XenApp Express product it and Microsoft said would replace Azure remoteapp remains hidden from view.…

The sky still isn't falling Following the February controversy over whether or not Google's SHA-1 collision broke Git, its community has taken the first small steps towards replacing the ancient hash function.…

Cisco shipped PSUs that like it low and slow, which is bad news for mountainous networks Cisco's let users of its ASR 920 Series Aggregation Services Routers know they've got a fear of heights.…

More than 300 Borg switches carry critical IOS Telnet vuln the CIA knew about before Cisco It looks like Cisco won't be chasing up a partnership with Wikileaks: it's combing the "Vault7" documents itself, and has turned up an IOS / IOS XE bug in more than 300 of its switch models.…

Would you like data on 2.2 MEELLION users with that API query? McDonald's India has 'fessed up that its app spaffed personal data to all and sundry and has urged users to install an update.…

If you want 45 IDs for 45 government services, go ahead says minister Taylor Australia's federal government is sticking with its plans for a federated identity service, but disruption minister Angus Taylor has moved to quell fears of a revived “Australia Card”.…

Chipzilla want us thinking about queue depth and latency, not just raw IOPS Intel has finally revealed an Optane product and told us how fast it will go.…

Super fast but you'll need line-of-sight In five years or so, Wi-Fi access points could carry data at rates 100 times faster than today using infrared light rather than other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.…

And light shed on WikiLeaks' CIA tools handover Updated Friday is usually a good day to bury bad news and there are a number of stories bubbling under before we all head out for the weekend.…

Newsweek writer attacked on Twitter after telly appearance – now FBI, cops collar suspect A man suspected of maliciously tweeting a GIF to a magazine writer that induced an epileptic attack has been collared by the FBI.…

Settlement conveniently avoids deciding whether app-cabbies are employees A federal judge has accepted a proposed $27m settlement to resolve a dispute between ride-sharing service Lyft and more than 200,000 current and former drivers in California.…

An armored station with enough power to destroy an entire... drone Vid Lockheed Martin says it is ready to deliver its most powerful laser weapon yet to the US military. This Death-Star-on-wheels can shoot down drones, missiles, and similar stuff, we're told.…

EC wants language that gives tech giants legal legroom torn down and replaced The European Commission is threatening to fine Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social networks unless they overhaul their terms and conditions to pull out legal escape clauses.…

What would Jesus do? Jump on Tor and blow cryptocurrency on blow, apparently A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy.…

That may not be enough to dethrone Git – but it counts for something Next month, if all goes well, developers working on the open-source Subversion version control system will resolve a "critical bug" that has gone unaddressed for 15 years.…

Hires Flavio Santoni into presidential role Block storage startup Datera is partnering with Accelerite, and has hired Flavio Santoni as a senior exec in a president's role.…

Also, yes, we can handle the CIA, says F-Secure lead researcher Jarno Niemelä Interview The very software that is supposed to protect your security is an under-appreciated threat to privacy because of the massive amount of data many products secretly gather on customers, according to F-Secure's Jarno Niemelä.…

Who needs humans to gaze over the seas anyway? A British firm has won a contract with the EU to supply border control surveillance helicopter drones.…

Small matter of an ongoing personnel shortage, though The National Audit Office has confirmed that F-35 fighter jets should be flying from new British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth by the year 2020, if all goes to plan.…

The giddy storage news whirl whirls on and on and on The cloud and Big Data and Hadoop feature strongly in this week’s round-up of storage news, along with channel news. And, just for a moment, we thought we’d found a new disk drive manufacturer. But no, it was all tosh.…

Live long and (don't) prosper Audacious cybercriminals have created an Star Trek-themed strain of ransomware.…

Needs reassurances they'll be delivered in 'appropriate' way The British government has suspended its ads from YouTube amid concerns the content is appearing against "inappropriate" material.…

State aid considered to keep tech smarts and jobs in Japan The Japanese government is considering providing state-backed aid to Toshiba’s memory business, amounting to near partial nationalisation, to prevent it falling into Chinese or South Korean hands, according to a report.…

Judge Shred UK intelligence agency GCHQ has dismissed US reports - cited by the White House press secretary - that it was involved in running a surveillance operation on Donald Trump before last year's US election as "utterly ridiculous".…

The PC doctor will see (in) you now... Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have taken it all off. Would you like to join me? Loosen those straps and let it all slip onto the floor. You might feel naked and not a little bit exposed but no one is watching, I assure you.…

Why logic is driving graph databases Microsoft arrived on the graph-database scene last month. Three years in the making, Microsoft released Trinity under a typical-by-now-of-Microsoft-boring-trade name of Graph Engine.…

We slap Google-y eyes on the launcher First Look The Google-Facebook duopoly has created a Silicon Valley empire of that stretches from sea to shining sea. With two exceptions: Russia and China. While we think of Russian and Chinese internet companies as exclusively focused on their home territories, this isn’t totally the case.…

Imagine Clippy dishing out sarcastic headlines. Who wouldn't want that? Hands on Microsoft has invested big in its Cognitive Services for programmable artificial intelligence, along with a Bot Framework for using them via a conversational user interface. How easy is it to get started?…

Testing and ongoing checkups NodeSource has offered to clean up Node.JS with a program certifying modules as “safe.”…

Plus: the PC that ate disks and was sated with sticky tape ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's weekly trawl through readers' memories of dealing with dim users or dangerous bosses, often at ridiculous times.…

Probably yes, warns CERT in HTTPS interception advisory Your antivirus and network protection efforts may actually be undermining network security, a new paper and subsequent CERT advisory have warned.…

That's snaps as in uses cameras and brakes as in slows down If you're trying to sell something to the European Space Agency, today could be the day to move in and close the deal because there should be smiles all round after two missions achieved important milestones.…

Image-shrinker can shrink pics by 45 per cent, but is cursed by heavy compute requirements Google's revealed details of a new JPEG encoder it calls “Guetzli” and which it says can shrink images by between 29 and 45 per cent without making them appreciably less pretty.…

Nuke boffins mine recently-declassified films of atmospheric tests for new insights The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has released a recently-declassified collection of films depicting atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted between 1945 and 1962.…