The Register

Volumes to swell further post Brexit, bean counters predict The quantity of non-EU IT workers coming to the UK to fill local skills gaps swelled to a new high of 36,015 in 2016.…

Scum threaten to leak deets of upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 CD Projekt Red, the Polish developer behind the critically acclaimed Witcher games, yesterday admitted that some of its internal files and concepts for upcoming title Cyberpunk 2077 have been snaffled by hackers and held for ransom.…

What about the rest of us? Microsoft has released a new preview of Windows 10's Fall Creators Update, showing off elements of its new Fluent Design System and introducing a host of new features.…

Boffins claim fluorescent dyes could help detect fake booze Think you know your Bell's from your Balvenie? Your Jim Beam from your Jameson? Well, if a team of German researchers have their way, an artificial tongue might have you licked.…

Trojan deletes root access to dodge detection A powerful Android trojan with novel code injection features that posed as a game was distributed through the Google Play Store before its recent removal.…

So much for the European data fortress? The European Commission is pushing measures that would force tech firms like Facebook and Google to hand over their data to police in different member states.…

Probe into theft of personal info from car repair centres The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has seized computers and phones in its probe into nuisance callers suspected of stealing people's details from car repair centres throughout the UK.…

Three US teams clash in one far-out Robot Wars episode Three citizen teams in the United States will get to fire deep-space satellites from NASA's newest rocket, Space Launch System, as part of the agency's Cube Quest Challenge.…

Hacking attempts come amid diplomatic crisis in the Gulf Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera yesterday said it was being targeted with systematic hacking attempts.…

Getting a grip on AI, and putting it to work The speaker lineup for Mcubed – our three-day dive into machine learning, AI and advanced analytics – is virtually complete, meaning now would be a really good time to snap up a cut-price early-bird ticket.…

So what does this mean for Verify? Oh wait... Minister for the Cabinet Office Ben Gummer, architect of the Conservative Party's manifesto and the man responsible for "digital transformation", has lost his seat in the general election.…

Then again it has been four years coming Microsoft has officially decommissioned the Skype-calling support service SkypeKit, leaving some old VOIP handset users on hold.…

Folk google tiny party that may play kingmaker to Tories The Democratic Union Party's website has crashed as people woke this morning to google the group that may play kingmaker after the Tories fell short of a majority in the UK general election.…

The sun really does shine out of my behind Something for the Weekend, Sir? Nice t-shirt. Where did you get it?…

Sysadmin outsmarts rats with wings, but they manage to have the final turd ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' recollections of odd jobs in odd places at odd times.…

Reasoning is one part of the puzzle to general intelligence Analysis The ability to think logically and to reason is key to intelligence. When this can be replicated in machines, it will no doubt make AI smarter.…

Purple Palace as we know it to close on June 13th Yahoo!'s shareholders have formally approved the sale of the company's operating businesses to Verizon.…

Cracked Labs shines light on surveillance capitalism The data collection industry, fattened on info snippets gleaned from social media and mobile devices, affects people's lives but operates without meaningful scrutiny.…

Noble gas found on 67P by Euro probe Rosetta Scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe mission have found xenon on Comet 67P – a discovery that introduces a link between the cosmic rock and Earth for the first time.…

Version 6.1 awaits your pleasure. Redmond's also upgraded its FreeBSD to v. 11 Microsoft's extended BSD support in Azure.…

Who's the cat who won't cop out when there's danger all about? SoftBank. Damn right Google parent Alphabet has offloaded its robotics businesses SCHAFT and Boston Dynamics to SoftBank.…

Servers soar, PCs pop, debt drops and all agree 'reasonable progress' has been made Dell Technologies has posted its first set of quarterly results and declared “reasonable progress” has been made towards integrating EMC and Dell.…

Huawei's decided to get into Microsoft’s hybrid cloud too UPDATED Services company Avanade is going to sell Microsoft Azure Stack hardware.…

Testimony paints lurid picture (and we’re not talking golden showers) Analysis Former FBI director James Comey today spoke in public for the first time about his relationship with President Donald Trump, and he didn't stint in calling out the Leader of the Free World on being economical with the truth.…

We must have missed the bit where code bugs were extinct The governor of Washington has green-lit the testing of self-driving cars on the US state's public roads, with or without human operators, calling the technology "foolproof."…

Friend, do we have a bizarre legal battle for you Analysis In an extraordinary and expansive lawsuit, former CIA and NSA contractor Dennis Montgomery has teamed up with the lawyer who brought down the NSA's mass surveillance operation – Larry Klayman – to sue all the US intelligence services and their former and current heads personally, as well as former president Barack Obama, for illegal surveillance.…

$7.4m fraud ring traced back to iGiant's database Twenty Apple employees in China have been arrested by cops investigating the lifting and reselling hundreds of thousands of pieces of customers' personal information.…

Situation does not look good for Michelle Carter Prosecutors in the US who want to send 18-year-old Michelle Carter to jail for her boyfriend's suicide have rested their case after three days in court.…

Class-action complaint against Arris Surfboard broadband boxes widens A class-action lawsuit claiming Arris's gigabit Surfboard modems buckle under light pressure is gathering in size and pace – once again putting the spotlight on Intel's much-maligned Puma 6 chips.…

Isn't that, like, 90% of tech upstarts' biz models? In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Isaac Choi, founder and CEO of failed Silicon Valley job search startup WrkRiot, was charged with five counts of wire fraud for allegedly defrauding former employees.…

Call of Cloudera and Hortonworks? MapR Technologies is going for IPO – just not yet, the company’s chief executive Matt Mills has told The Reg.…

€8m bung for V2X efforts Ericsson, the one-time mobe-maker, is leading a coalition tasked by the EU with building a 5G V2X network for connected cars.…

Waaaaaaa... I need to join Prime for 'unlimited storage'? Oh. Just photos Amazon has shuttered the flat fee-based unlimited cloud storage plan for Amazon Drive to all but paid-up members of the premium "Prime" service – who will only be able to store unlimited numbers of photos.…

Comey calls Trump a liar Washington is gearing up for a potentially explosive session, as former FBI director James Comey gives evidence in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee over his dealings with President Donald Trump.…

Legality of mass comms data under court's scrutiny again The commissioners responsible for overseeing the UK's spy agencies have admitted that they have never carried out a formal inspection or audit of the sharing of bulk communications and personal data with industry.…

Shareholders complaints fall on deaf ears, probably Nuns calling for greater transparency over "dark money" lobbying practices, Larry Page being hailed by Eric Schmidt as one of the greatest humans alive today, and extreme gender pay disparity. Yep, it's the Alphabet Annual Meeting of Shareholders!…

Greg's escaped the trunk and is joined by Usermind CEO Michel Feaster

Majority verdict swats aside 'paranoid' man's sueball An avionics technician who claimed he was unlawfully fired from Elon Musk's SpaceX after raising the alarm over alleged safety failures has lost his wrongful dismissal lawsuit.…

Just don't ask him to explain cryptography... "Why is Jeremy Paxman at Infosec?” more than one person wondered, as Newsnight's former rottweiler-in-chief took the stage to deliver the morning's keynote.…

Official bug notice? Sure, but not before I get cred and LOLs More than three-quarters of vulnerabilities are publicly reported online before National Vulnerability Database publication.…

'Tightened' travel, meals, catering policies the new norm A six-month squeeze on staff travel expenses and meal allowances are among the measures Hewlett Packard Enterprise is using to lop up to $300m off its operating costs.…

And it's not just a question of money, either Britain has a long-term health problem: Britons are living longer with conditions that would previously have killed them. This is obviously great for the people concerned, but not for the government, which is on the hook for most of the nation’s healthcare costs.…

Crappy software everywhere means we face a world of pain Governments are poised to intervene over the security of IoT devices, as the industry has so far failed to self-regulate, infosec guru Bruce Schneier has said.…

Amateur spy-watcher plots path to USA 276's fly-by For a little while earlier this month, astronauts on the International Space Station had a spooky companion: a spy satellite that circled just outside the its “danger zone”.…

Prof hits out at looming regulations Analysis Opposition is growing over demands that digital forensics labs comply with ISO 17025 – an international checklist for laboratory testing.…

… until now, when it decided a bit of security is a fine idea Running a virtual machine in the cloud without a firewall sounds a bit nutty, right? Because security.…

Have you seen Arkit? Is someone channeling Oasis? Apple's most significant announcement at its Worldwide Developers Conference was not its vaporware HomePod speaker. Rather it was ARKit, an iOS framework for placing digital graphics into mobile device camera scenes while taxing batteries.…

That's 100,000 years older than the last fossil find Pics It's a double-whammy discovery for fossil enthusiasts this week. Two groups of scientists have reportedly found the world's oldest known remains of Homo sapiens – and a really old mushroom.…

'Stressed fibre optical cabling' crashed 3PAR box, then wide-striped disks went kaput The HPE 3PAR SANs that twice failed at the Australian Taxation Office had warned of outages for months, but HPE decided the arrays were in no danger of major failure. Combined with decisions to place the SANs' recovery software was on the SANs themselves, and HPE's configuration of the SANs for speed, not resilience, the failures proved difficult to recover from even if no data was lost.…

We're fine. You might not be as Turla espionage-ware uses Britney's Instagram for evil The malware scum behind the ongoing Turla campaign have been spotted experimenting with Instagram accounts as a C&C channel.…