The Register

Peeking at the pylons, mes braves? A French drone company reckons it has flown a power line inspection drone remotely for 50km (30 miles) – and controlled the aircraft over a public 3G network.…

Now talks to Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle RMAN Secondary data storage protection and management supplier Rubrik just added a host of extensions to its product to broaden its appeal to Microsoft, Nutanix and Oracle users.…

But what does the department of odds and sods actually do these days? Analysis Damian Green’s appointment as Cabinet Office minister this week makes him the fourth MP to hold the role over the last seven years. He takes the helm from former Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer, who was ousted as an MP in the general election last week.…

Bigly ambitious bill would archive the President's social media dealings A US congressman has written up a bill that calls for the President's social media activity to be archived alongside other official communications.…

People like the idea of privacy but not the effort, research finds Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have found that people say they want privacy but make choices suggesting the opposite, and can be easily manipulated through interface design, reassuring statements, and pizza.…

Anti-terror crackdown, evil tech biz to blame yadda yadda, we're told Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron are planning to issue multi-million pound fines to technology companies that don’t act fast enough to remove material that governments and police forces disapprove of.…

Thomas Cook most impacted with 12 delays A technical "glitch" at Manchester Airport has left hundreds of passengers stranded for hours this morning.…

'If it was unstable and uncertain this time last week, it’s gone up a notch' The outcome of the general election has created greater uncertainty over the impact of Brexit on the telecommunications sector, BT chief exec Gavin Patterson has said.…

Constitutional Court slams brakes on UPC – but why? Europe's effort to create a single patent system has been thrown into confusion following a decision by Germany's constitutional court to halt legislation ratifying it.…

Warms IBM Watson for patient data probe Oracle's cloud has been judged too risky, too expensive and not up to scratch by Specsavers, which is aiming to complete an AWS and Azure combo next year.…

Swing when you're winning In the aftermath of almost every recent election, two types of story get written based on the outcome. One is how the polls "got it wrong", how the forecast – surprise! – failed to match the actual result. The other, usually written by someone with at least basic statistical skills, explains why the polls mostly didn't "get it wrong."…

The dangers, and how to guard against them Broadcast - 11am BST If you haven't had any of your key systems or services brought down by a DDoS attack, you can probably consider yourself lucky.…

IBM and Cisco give their VersaStacks multi-cloud capabilities and a VDI special Hybrid hyperconvergence is the new blue: first NetApp launched its hyperconverged appliances by emphasising their hybrid credentials and now IBM and IBM and Cisco have given their shared hyperconverged VersaStacks the hybrid cloud treatment.…

The internet made information flow on the cheap, but making it anti-fragile will cost plenty I spent the first half of my career coding and while I don't miss the day-in-day-out grind of coding, but do still enjoy the computer-as-infinite-toy. So from time to time I try to spend a few days with my head in the machine, playing, exploring and learning.…

Version 4.0's not out the door but connection wonks have decided to fast track version 5.0 The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has revealed a roadmap for PCI 5.0 to debut in 2019 at 128GB/s. And that's before it finalises PC 4.0 at half that speed.…

Toothless Tiger Moths at Arizona base grounded A quarter of the world's F-35s have been temporarily grounded after starving their pilots of oxygen.…

There can be only one and that'll be LinkedIn's SlideShare Microsoft's decided that Docs.com has to die in December.…

IDC's network tracker finds 100 Gbps and software-defined kit surging, at Cisco's expense Analyst firm IDC reckons the world's Ethernet switch market laid on 3.3 per cent growth year-on-year for the first quarter of 2017, up to US$5.66 billion.…

Cloud can now ID 'hundreds of thousands' of athletes, pollies, actors, struggles with oiled butt At last - a cloud service that will get the unwashed masses excited about cloud: Amazon Web Services has added celebrity-spotting-as-a-service to its cloud.…

And if you don't like it, off to the Ombudsman you go Australia's Department of Communications wants to make it easier for carriers to build radio towers – and with everything on the table from heritage building access to objection procedures, there's likely to be a Battle Royale on the way.…

Change your default user name or Linux.MulDrop.14 will send your Pi down the crypto-mines Anti-virus vendor Dr. Web has found something nasty: malware named “Linux.MulDrop.14” that turns the Raspberry Pi into a cryptocurrency mining machine.…

Alleges Chinese company paid for Sharp's name, then made it a discount brand Sharp wants its name back from Hisense, which is allowed to use Sharp's name in the US but stands accused of making brand-power-erasing knock-off tellies.…

Minerals found in Mars rocks strengthen case for past life-friendly conditions The Martian rock samples dug up by NASA's Curiosity robotic rover show that there is a wide diversity of minerals, allowing scientists to piece together the planet's past.…

Investigatory Powers Act suggested as good model for local crypto workaround The issue of lawful access to encrypted communications featured in Australia's news over the long weekend, but we're none the wiser to what our government has in mind beyond it being based on the UK Investigatory Powers Act.…

We can probably ignore Theresa May, but Angela Merkel wants digital rules The two most powerful women in Europe still have their eyes firmly on internet regulation.…

Phone with no customers latches onto least popular major carrier The much-anticipated Essential Phone has been inked into a deal with Sprint to be the sole endorsed carrier for the handset.…

Now looking for COO, CFO, CMO, general counsel, SVP of business; maybe temp CEO Uber's board has accepted all the recommendations made in a report into sexual harassment – which may include giving its controversial CEO a leave of absence.…

Fooling marks into divulging bank details made £2m a week The jailed kingpin behind a multimillion-pound fraud has admitted attempting to run an almost identical con from behind bars.…

'Optane on a string instead of captive in the box' Analysis An Apeiron Optane array has five times the throughput, more than 6 times the IOPS, and up to 38 times lower latency than an Aperiron flash array.…

This story has: Maths, Google, 'fake' pharma, explicit screenshots... +Comment Our Monday here at The Reg's London offices has been cheered to no end by Google News, which has been spitting out odd pharmaceutical-related "journalism" throughout the day.…

Modular nasty can seize direct control of substation switches and circuit breakers Security researchers have discovered malware capable of disrupting industrial control processes.…

Don't blush, just flush Rather than forcing kids to suffer the embarrassment of composing their own wind sections in the toilets at schools, one solution proposed in northern Europe is to pipe in sweet music to drown out any anal-based arias.…

Someone should inform the marketing team Word of T-Mobile US outages has reached customers, social media, support representatives and The Register – just not the network's marketing team.…

Charge connected to 2016 Munich mass-murder weapon German police have arrested a man they suspect of being the administrator of a dark net website. The site is said to have been used to buy a gun used in a 2016 mass murder.…

Ringleader passes 30 per cent of earnings to their stooges Security researchers have discovered a ransomware variant that targets Macs rather than Windows PCs.…

Ex-Telefonica man will receive full parental leave pay A Capita man working in a Telefonica call centre has won a sex discrimination lawsuit against the outsourcing giant after bosses threatened him with a pay cut if he took paternity leave.…

'We'll send you to Kings Cross... or Coventry, you've got a week to decide' DXC Technology staff who continue to ignore orders to haul their asses 4km (2.5 miles) across London to repopulate shiny offices in Kings Cross will soon be locked out of the building they're reluctant to exit.…

Eat your gruel and we won't go to international arbitration court The Toshiba memory business saga careers on with a consortium including WDC set to raise its bid to ¥2tn or more.…

Yes, the one that lives in your mobile ... Scientists are working on a way of using the internal orientation sensors in smartphones to defend against efforts to trick voice recognition systems.…

Big Blue shoots self in foot... has Theresa considered a career change? A cost-cutting measure at IBM to shift a hybrid cloud lab to a new location has itself been scuppered by a cost-cutting measure, insiders have told The Reg.…

Backups encrypted but key was the same across all UK hubs A recently resolved flaw in Virgin Media wireless home routers gave hackers a means to gain unauthorised administrative-level access to the devices.…

Canadian bank's bête noire spills the beans Staff at Indian outsourcing biz Tata uploaded a huge trove of financial institutions' source code and internal documents to a public GitHub repository, an IT expert has claimed.…

Scientists fork reality, sorta A team of researchers has created the largest virtual model of our universe, complete with billions of galaxies, to probe the effects of dark energy and dark matter.…

...or maybe not. Opinion is divided Updated The mystery of the "Wow!" signal, a radio burst recorded from outer space in the 1970s, may been solved. Or not. Not everyone is convinced.…

Comma.ai software adapted for the Chevy Volt Develop a self-driving car and regulatory trouble may follow, as Uber has discovered. Develop a self-driving car kit and the situation is the same.…

Paging Commissioner Pai: Your 'plan' is less popular than Trumpcare It's a funny thing, but the ability to buy an internet connection and not have the company you buy it from control what you can see and at what speed you can see it is a popular thing in the Land of the Free.…

Avoid blue screens of blazing death, please The days of listening to the captain speaking on a flight may be numbered, according to Boeing.…

1,600 PG&E customers hit by gizmo prang A wayward quadcopter is being blamed for a power outage in Google's back yard this week.…

Coincidentally, a large number of government reps turn up to crackdown confab A proposal to punish African governments for shutting down internet access by refusing to give them any new IP addresses for a year has been shot down.…

Chipzilla sends not-so-subtle threat to ARM crew Intel used the 40th anniversary of its x86 architecture to warn chip rivals to mind their step when emulating its instruction set.…