The Register

Trusts may have had corrupted backups... or none at all NHS Digital stopped short of advising health organisations in England not to cough up for the WannaCrypt ransom attack because it couldn't be certain that all hospitals had backed up patient records.…

Streaming service argues it'll result in lower quality work The European Parliament has set content quotas for OTT video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime even higher than the Commission originally wanted. 30 per cent of the services' catalog must be European works, Parliament has decreed.…

Heathrow flights were diverted to avoid errant UAVs A pair of errant drones over East London caused so much airspace disruption that flights to Heathrow had to be diverted for fear of collision, it has emerged.…

People must really love Snake If you blinked, you missed it.…

Thought £400k TalkTalk fine was big? Try €20m Companies are unprepared for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force a year today, and some small businesses "might not even know" a new regime is looming, the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has warned.…

Wang gets the call to arms, stands to attention Exclusive Lenovo UK boss John Harber has quit just 15 months after taking the hot seat, El Reg can confirm.…

Malicious combination of legitimate permissions A distinct class of Android vulnerability has been unearthed by computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.…

Those bloody procurement guys did what? Study You, dear readers, continually tell us in surveys how hard it is to get the investment needed to help you do your jobs effectively. Regardless of the topic – core infrastructure, middleware, management tools, etc – it’s common to hear stories of execs not "getting it", while expecting IT to muddle through as more pressure is piled onto already stretched teams.…

Elementary OS, my dear penguin? With the death of Unity, Canonical will focus more attention on Ubuntu servers, Ubuntu in the cloud and Ubuntu in the so-called Internet of Things.…

The roots of multithreaded rendering software Star Wars New Hope @ 40 In the 40 years since the release of the original Star Wars, special effects have changed beyond recognition.…

'It is happening again' Analysis The final lap nears in Oracle's epic seven year battle with Google over Java. It's reached the Federal Appeals Circuit, where Oracle is confident that three appeals judges with a strong track record of upholding IP will decide in its favour.…

Greg Gianforte loses it on election eve Until Wednesday, Greg Gianforte's life had followed a lovely script: he twice sold software companies for millions, the second time for US$1.5bn when Oracle acquired CRM company RightNow Technologies.…

Boeing to build 'Phantom Express' on heir to Space Shuttle's main engine The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has commissioned Boeing to build a spaceplane capable of ten launches in ten days.…

Anger over Manchester attack may play a part The UK government will push through orders next month to force all communications companies including Google and Facebook to break data encryption.…

16 Psyche mission takes a great leap forward NASA has come up with a cunning plan that will allow it to shave four years of flight time off its mission to the biggest chunk of visible iron in the Solar System, and will use souped-up solar power to get there.…

No, Apple is not practicing to be carrier. This is how you horn in on 5G Apple has filed a request with the United States Federal Communications Commission FCC to run wireless tests in spectrum bands associated with 5G.…

300 GB repo handles 8,421 pulls and 1,760 official builds a day, more once GVFS fix is in Microsoft has adopted Git to manage the vast collection of code that is Windows' source, and has shared performance issues it's had to fix along the way.…

WannaCry? Minister says data is safe, so save your tears for now Hospitals connected to Australian State of Queensland's integrated electronic medical record system (ieMR) are suffering outages attributed to patching against a ransomware attack.…

Former HO and EMC man Joe Eazor gets the job of completing conversion to services company Rackspace has named Joe Eazor as its new CEO, replacing the departing Taylor Rhodes and interim CEO Jeff Cotten.…

Chat forums beyond El Reg just do respectful whimsy, so goodbye 'Imzy' Reddit can be a nasty, nasty place. So nasty that a in 2015 half a dozen Reddit employees – some who said they'd experienced personal abuse or threats of violence from Reddit members - bailed from the company and set their sights on “rethinking the way communities exist on the Internet.”…

Remote code execution in all versions since 3.5.0, so it's patching time! Sysadmins tending Samba need to get patching.…

DeepMind scores another win in marketing its AI AlphaGo yesterday one-upped man as it won the first out of three games against Ke Jie, the world’s number one player in Go.…

Dial-a-ride d-baggery claimed on passenger side too Uber's New York woes are piling up, as the dial-a-ride service has now been sued by riders who believe they were being overcharged.…

Kubernetes cluster cat herding, brought to you by Istio Microservices architecture, in which monolithic apps get broken down into a set of distinct services, goes well with containers and orchestration.…

We take a look inside the campaign to undermine the internet Analysis The FCC has released a revised version of its plans to tear up net neutrality – and unwittingly revealed the extraordinary influence that the cable industry has over the process.…

Voting machine hacking could turn very ugly Organizers at the DEF CON hacking conference in July are planning a mass cracking of US electronic election machines.…

Days of future past Ransomware saw a more than eight-fold (752 per cent) increase as a mode of attack in 2016, according to Trend Micro.…

Lander exercise was 'very close' to a success The Schiaparelli probe suffered a botched landing on the Martian surface as it briefly spun out of control, confusing the computer systems onboard, an official report concluded today.…

Chipzilla says USB standard will be open to the world Intel is pushing its Thunderbolt 3.0 USB port as the defacto input mode for future PCs.…

Call proxy service aims to appeal to businesses with mobile workers Cloud communications service Twilio believes software development doesn't have to play out like Groundhog Day, a film in which a man relives the same day over and over. For developers, that sense of déjà vu is a common experience.…

ZX Spectrum-themed game console firm didn't quite win court order, either ZX Spectrum Vega firm Retro Computers Ltd has had its attempt to force former sales agent Nick Cooper to hand over extra information in the ongoing court battle between the two postponed today by the London County Court.…

Joins Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure to upgrade all-flash arrays HPE has announced new mid-range 3PAR all-flash arrays, fifth generation MSA arrays, Nimble Secondary Flash arrays, and cloud-connected StoreOnce data protection.…

Big Blue's big iron to be loaded with Hitachi's OS software Hitachi has stopped building its own mainframes but will supply IBM z Systems loaded with Hitachi VOS3 operating system software.…

Touchscreens? Who needs 'em? Hands On Huawei this week launched three Intel devices running Windows 10: a slim notebook, a Surface-a-like 2-in-1, and a conventional 15.6" laptop.…

What are they banging on about? Analysis Having acquired Nimble Storage and its hybrid and all-flash arrays, HPE is positioning it as a kind of secondary storage. What does that mean?…

(And everything you've seen) Welcome to 'Closing the Loop' In a move with echoes of the fictional internet giant described in Dave Eggers' The Circle, Google's has begun trawling through billions of personal credit card records, matching them to your browser, location and advertising histories.…

Also, here's why LTE-M gained ground over NB-IoT in Europe Some customers are expecting more than can be realistically delivered with licensed spectrum Internet of Things connectivity technologies, a major European telco has warned.…

Gloom and doom? Consumers still shopping with us, trills CEO Political uncertainty haven’t put punters off purchasing electronic gadgets, Dixons Carphone CEO reported today.…

Partners with state-backed Japanese funds +Comment WDC is partnering with a state-backed Japanese fund and bidding ¥2 trillion ($17.9bn, £13.8bn) to buy Toshiba’s Memory Business.…

Upgrade and they will come The volume of 64-bit malware in the wild remains low even though computers running 64-bit operating systems became ubiquitous years ago.…

Some might say this is fake news. It isn't An American company implausibly named AnalTech – no, really – has been slammed hard enough for a hazardous materials response team to be called out to deal with the smell.…

Shopping as a constant poker game Analysis "AI" could soon be making petrol more expensive at times of peak demand like the start of a bank holiday weekend or the school run.…

At least we'll always have #catsinteslas

Use and abuse of figures If statistics were a human being, it would have been in deep therapy all of its 350-year life. The sessions might go like this:…

Sort of. Leia's a New Hope Star Wars New Hope @ 40 When Lucasfilm recently unveiled its tribute reel to the late Carrie Fisher, one of the most memorable monologues in cinema sat right in its center.…

Test management and debugging at scale become a bit less daunting Facebook on Wednesday plans to introduce a set of open source developer tools to streamline app development testing and bug hunting.…

IPO? Ticked. 1,079% growth in 11 years? Ticked. Lost the tightness? Nah Martin Hellawell, the McDonald's-card-toting CEO at mega reseller Softcat isn't quite sailing off into the sunset just yet, but he is preparing to handover the operation once a successor is found.…

Sure, there are hurdles, but no £18bn hole on the other side like Hinkley Point For the first time ever in April, the UK's data centres and clouds ran on electricity generated without burning coal.…

When two 'innocent' events on the network are anything but IT teams can get away with poor service management, outdated software development methods and outdated apps running on legacy tin, but they might want to think twice before skimping on cybersecurity. If you don't stay on top of this stuff, while you might not be found out today or tomorrow, eventually, your customers’ personal details might just turn up on Pastebin.…

What's a tensor? Glad you asked... HPC blog Last week, Nvidia held its biggest ever GPU Technology Conference (GTC). The big walk-away is that GPUs are rapidly becoming an expected and standard component of computing, table stakes in many cases, across the computing platform. Big deal right there and hence the frothiness of much of the coverage.…