The Register

Where’s the strategy you promised five years ago? The UK Biometrics Commissioner has condemned the Home Office and police forces over their failure to address critical issues surrounding facial recognition.…

And it took the authority seven years to notice A former council IT worker in Scotland has been jailed for five years after abusing his system access privileges to help himself to more than £1m of public money.…

Skip Aheaders get to play Windows Insiders can now drag and drop 3D models into the "real world", as well as enjoy a healthy dose of bug fixes ahead of the fall Creator's Update release.…

Let’s go surfing the waves of AFA automation and orchestration Research Done properly, All-Flash Arrays are a lot more than just extra-fast storage: Reg readers told us in a recent survey that they can also be that rare thing, a transformational technology. Even if you have already invested in AFA technology and obtained good returns simply from the performance boost, there is almost certainly more that could be wrung from it, such as the opportunity to upskill and free up resources for more important tasks than routine admin.…

Teachers need more support to tackle 'chronic shortages' The UK government has been told to tackle teacher shortages in Blighty – and offer more support for those now teaching tougher syllabuses – as GCSE computing results showed little improvement on last year.…

Hot pumps + fuel/air mixture = bang, warn aviation safety folk Airbus has issued an emergency patch to stop its A350 airliners from exploding.…

Punters are putting off handset refreshes as prices rise Pricier smartphones and lower EU roaming charges will dampen Dixons Carphone's bottom line, the retailer's CEO warned today in an unscheduled trading update that sent its share price crashing by 30 per cent.…

For $20 you could have a credit card-slurping landing page bashed out in 10 minutes A new study has lifted the lid on the booming ecosystems of fake websites that underpin phishing scams, revealing a wide variety of prices and products from cheap knock-ups to bespoke fraud services offering concierge-level customer support.…

Users fear fees and audits despite firm's promise not to pursue back-payments SAP has been told that customers are too afraid to strike up a conversation about indirect access, as a survey indicated most users had concerns that opening up to the firm could backfire.…

All about making itself an organisation of the 'future' Change seems to be the one constant at Cisco as it battles to maintain relevance amid the new ways tech is sold and consumed. With this in mind, it is initialising another restructure that has cost three execs their job.…

Shirts will be lost! Interview Some commentators think saying SSDs will kill off disk drives is wrong. Here is an exchange El Reg had with a storage media industry insider who wished to remain anonymous…

Playing the disaggregation game Analysis Dell EMC is supplying network switches to a proof-of-concept research project at BT Labs in Adastral Park, Suffolk.…

But you'd have to start working for them to find out any more At an academic speech tech conference today (Thursday), Apple researchers will present some of the classic building blocks behind the voice generation of the Siri assistant.…

Browser-maker wants to compile global top 100 sites list, promises to protect privacy Mozilla may require users to opt-out of sending telemetry from its Firefox browser because so few have opted in that it's hard for developers to get a good sample of what causes problems.…

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't drive like that Much of the hype surrounding self-driving cars arises from the fact that people are terrible drivers. Automated systems, we're told, can help save lives.…

DevOps and digital transformation expertise seen as desirable investments Software development consultancy ThoughtWorks has been acquired by “funds advised by Apax Partners”, a British venture capital and private equity outfit.…

See, it's not just Grant Shapps who gets it mixed up Four in five Britons has experienced broadband molasses in the past year and most of us are also "bamboozled" by the terms that telcos use to peddle their wares at us, according to a survey.…

New auto rules approaching in the land of Das Auto Germany’s government has answered the car ethics question once and for all: driverless cars should prioritize the protection of human life over the destruction of animals or property.…

Someone sling this at scientists, please, instead of just mining magic internet money The Register doesn't really cover motherboards, but when one comes along with 19 PCIe slots – yup, nineteen, ten plus nine – so it can run 19 GPUs, it's hard not to want to share the news.…

It's the number one problem, according to analyst The number one issue facing cybersecurity firms is a "chronic shortage" of qualified staff.…

'Just like other public clouds, believe us!' It would be mischievous, perhaps, to suggest Google needs some network back for its own purposes – but the Chocolate Factory wants at least some of its cloud customers to shift their data around on the Internet instead of its private network.…

We could cut down on e-mail spoofing, but we don't Big-name companies are still leaving themselves and their customers open to phishing because they haven't implemented the DMARC message validation standard.…

It wasn't me nor the FSB, claims Karim Baratov One of four men accused of carrying out the megahack of 500 million Yahoo! email accounts has pleaded not guilty in a San Francisco district court.…

Still some money to be had in desktops and printers, it seems HP Inc continues to thrive in the PC and printer markets to the tune of double-digit revenue growth.…

Basically: Not you, just 'the usual suspects' The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has narrowly approved an $8.5m Google payout for privacy violations following a lengthy argument over who should receive the money.…

Torso matches Kim Wall's DNA Danish cops have identified the headless torso found in Copenhagen bay as that of Kim Wall – the journalist who went missing after taking a ride in a homemade submarine.…

Redmond's cramming of OS on machines provokes sour krauts Microsoft sparked fury when it aggressively pushed its Windows 10 operating system onto people's PCs – from unexpected downloads to surprise installations.…

Ron Wyden tacks measures onto snoop funding bill Every year, US Congress must pass a new Intelligence Authorization Act to continue funding Uncle Sam's spies for the next 12 months. This year, the act passed, as expected, the committee stage smoothly with only one minor bump in the road: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).…

Totally didn't use that info while totally rewriting its code A day after a security researcher criticized AccuWeather for collecting people's location data – even if its users refused to grant permission to do – the weather forecasting company and its ad tech partner Reveal Mobile denied violating permission settings while also revising the app's info-grabbing code.…

FCC urged to end Big Cable's exclusive deals with flats A group of small ISPs is asking America's broadband watchdog to ban exclusivity deals that lock apartment buildings to a single broadband provider.…

Security researchers using the service found a bunch of flaws Messaging provider Fuze has resolved a trio of vulnerabilities in its TPN Handset Portal.…

But DreamHost's fight is not over: information still demanded The US Department of Justice has eased up in its legal fight against hosting company DreamHost, saying it no longer wants all IP logs associated with a Trump protest site.…

Not that the people wearing it will complain – as long as it keeps 'em alive, right? Pic Elon Musk revealed the first official photo of the SpaceX "spacesuit" today on Instagram.…

Exploit that changes content of messages after delivery found A new attack, dubbed ROPEMAKER, changes the content of emails after their delivery to add malicious URLs and corrupt records.…

BankBot nestled within allegedly 'fun' mobile game Security researchers have uncovered an Android banking malware hiding on Google Play using stealthy new tactics.…

Sluggish Red drives pumped with RAID to get speed up Western Digital has bundled a pair of slow Red drives into a My Book Duo external storage product, using RAID to get the speed up.…

Sub-prime loan firm goes titsup, CEO resigns in disgrace Software bugs and bad data in a new one-platform-to-rule-them-all IT system contributed heavily to British sub-prime loan firm Provident Financial going into near meltdown.…

Pervy 2-for-1 deal condemned by Wanderlust management Bar staff at a nightclub in Paris have hit upon a two-for-one idea to boost custom by promising female patrons that dare to bare their boobs a small, free drink.…

Pair chase deal on flash stakes sale before month's out Toshiba has restarted talks with Western Digital Corporation about buying its flash joint-venture interests after their CEOs met in Tokyo.…

Crooks now operate 'almost exclusively' online There were almost 90,000 cases of identify fraud recorded in the first six months of 2017 – 5 per cent higher than the first half of last year, according to data released today.…

This week we go hard on IoT with special guest Splunk's Hal Rottenberg

Lessons from the NHS's 1.6 million data-records shovel Imagine you’re in charge of technology and data for part of the UK’s chronically cash-squeezed National Health Service. A world-famous technology firm offers you a cool new service, either free or for very little money. All it wants in return is access to the patient data that will make the service work. What are you going to do?…

Ad regulator says kids unlikely to watch Britain's Got Talent Spotify has been cleared of exposing children to sexual and masturbatory innuendos because the Advertising Standards Authority thinks Britain's Got Talent is unlikely to be watched by kids.…

Should you keep your in-house crew? What's your plan... It makes sense to have a solid collection of security expertise within your organisation. And in fact most of us do: security is so core to most of what we do in IT that it’s a standard part of the syllabus for all the courses we do on, say, router configuration or Windows administration.…

HMRC: But we got less than 1,500 complaints about the tech… The UK government has resorted to manually issuing childcare payments, and has paid out £45,000 in compensation, after technical glitches meant parents couldn’t access their accounts on a new childcare benefits website.…

You've got until October 2018 to bail, or pay business rates Code42 Software, operator of the Crashplan cloud backup service, has decided it's had enough of providing its services to consumers.…

Google pulls 500 apps that used the Igexin SDK Mobile developers, listen up: when you pick up that easy-to-use advertising API, make sure it's not snoopware.…

Clients being advised of migration plans from vintage Cumberland Forest bit barn IBM's Australian tentacle is considering the closure of a data centre in 2019, The Register has learned.…