The Register

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.…

Journey into live volcano is a feature, not a bug Google Maps' Street View can now show you the interior of an active volcano, complete with bubbling lava lake.…

Storage cluster lost power and Azure flickered as a result Users of Microsoft's Azure storage service “may have experienced difficulties provisioning new resources or accessing their existing resources “ for over eight hours on Wednesday and Thursday . Azure storage was also tough to provision for a short time on Wednesday night.…

Not even if you've got lots of cash… One of Microsoft's most hated operating systems (Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front) is destined to die in less than a month.…

And SpaceX will be happy While some government departments are facing swinging cuts in President Trump's "America First" proposed budget, NASA appears to have escaped lightly – so far.…

A meltdown week for the Chocolate Factory Google’s bad week continues with an emborkened Android update pushed to some Nexus 6 users.…

And, nope, no patch Security researchers have gone public with details of an exploitable flaw in Ubiquiti's wireless networking gear – after the manufacturer allegedly failed to release firmware patches.…

Court order casts wide net over 50,000 people A US judge has granted cops a search warrant to direct Google to provide personal details about anyone searching for a specific name in the town of Edina, Minnesota.…

Silicon Valley's smartest battle to fix outage Updated The Google Drive app for Windows has crashed and burned – after the tech genius hub pushed out an unfinished and faulty software update.…

Website and Intel Security (McAfee) products excluded from 'Wild West' payouts scheme Intel has launched its first bug bounty program, offering rewards of up to $30,000.…

Watch web giant destroy its own product Video Google Home, the web giant's internet-connected talking personal assistant, has started spamming audio adverts to unsuspecting folk today.…

Lines being drawn after Trump executive order prompts heavy-handed customs response The Canadian privacy commissioner has opened an investigation into the Canadian border police and a recent uptick in phone seizures.…

They're from the government, and they're here to help The National Cyber Security Centre has ineptly tried – and failed – to Rickroll someone taking the piss out of them on Twitter.…

Melts ISE software from hardware, reveals new product tech Analysis Back in January X-IO was back from a restructuring and refinancing and talking about product refreshes after a downturn in 2016.…

Is public cloud focus punishing on-premises biz? Analysis In its third fiscal 2017 quarter a post-NetSuite slurp Oracle saw marginal revenue and profits growth, but with inflated cloud revenues, the Oracle-ites are happy.…

When cloud backups go wrong A barrister has been fined by the UK Information Commissioner's Office after client information was accidentally uploaded to the internet.…

Yes there's still such a thing as a travel agent A hack attack on the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) has exposed the personal details of thousands of consumers and hundreds of tour operators and travel agents.…

HGTTG's Deep Thought shouldn't be used for price-fixing European Commissioner has urged competition enforcers to keep an eye out for cartels that use software “to work more effectively”, in a speech about algorithms and competition today.…

Mongo's wire protocol gets support, and there's a new connector for Spark too Microsoft reeeaally wants MongoDB developers to get onto Azure, and as such has announced support for Mongo's wire protocol for those who've declined offers to migrate to DocumentDB.…

Just, er, eight years later A recently resolved vulnerability in the Linux kernel that had the potential to allow an attacker to gain privilege escalation or cause denial of service went undiscovered for seven years.…

Follows legal separation from Openreach last week Just one week after Ofcom and BT came to an agreement on the future of Openreach, the broadband division has said it is hiring 1,500 engineers.…

Well, it was that or appendage amputation Dublin’s fire brigade - armed with a hand-held angle grinder - were called to the aid of a man that was unable to remove a titanium ring that he’d miraculously slipped over both his meat and two veg.…

Last chance to save on DevOps and Containers bonanza There are less than 36 hours left to grab tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London at our very generous, slightly extended early bird price. Once Friday clicks into Saturday, they revert to full price, and they’ll be staying there.…

Single hybrid array replaces 8 disk boxes A hybrid flash/disk array is replacing several disk arrays at a UK college and shows the way mainstream disk array replacement is heading towards flash for primary data applications.…

Cambridge paper has 'significant factual and analytical errors' retort pair Google’s DeepMind and the Royal Free London NHS deal to use patient data without explicit consent was "inexcusable", an academic paper has concluded in a damning report today.…

Amazon throws AWS credits at Alexa dev fans Amazon is throwing free cloud credits at developers building apps for Alexa hosted on AWS.…

£500,000 pledged by thousands on Indiegogo, yet still no product Investigation Troubled Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ firm Retro Computer Limited has missed multiple product delivery dates amid lawsuits and very public infighting. Perhaps these modern-day shenanigans cast light on why the UK's 1980s game coding scene collapsed. What happened, and how did a straightforward gaming console project go so far off piste?…

You can run, but you can't hide The UK government is gearing up for a massive tax clampdown on private sector contractors, in an extension of its IR35 regime to hundreds of thousands of freelancers outside the public sector.…

If it has Data Protection Act's defects, all bets are off Comment Since 2005, I have tried to use Freedom of Information legislation to find out what is behind the “ongoing” infraction proceedings, commenced by the European Commission against the UK. This is because the UK’s Data Protection Act (DPA) is, according to the Commission, a defective implementation of Directive 95/46/EC.…

Will you please get rid of him, world+dog asks Admin Council Another wave of letters condemning the controversial president of the European Patent Office, Benoit Battistelli, has been sent ahead of a meeting of the organization's Administrative Council this week in Munich.…