The Register

It's time we taught computers what we think of BMW drivers What does a car say about its owner? Uni researchers have managed to accurately estimate income, education, race and voting patterns for US neighborhoods by looking at cars on Google Street View.…

Thousands won't be able to make us cash, upstart moans Uber's lawyers in the UK have argued against rules requiring minicab drivers to pass an English literacy test – because many of its cheap cyber chauffeurs would fail.…

Cloudy with a chance of XSS Cloud management software peddler Zscaler has plugged cross-site scripting holes in the admin portal it provides to customers.…

Invented before the Galaxy Note 7 went down in flames, the case detects heat and then sprays fire-suppressing gas Boeing has sought a patent for a “Fire detection and suppression pack for battery-powered personal computing devices.”…

End-to-end encryption touted Datrium Blanket Encryption combines always-on deduplication, compression and encryption so that data is secure – or so it claims – whether that data is at a host, in flight across a network, or at rest in persistent storage.…

Warnings about leaky Bluetooth Web API all-too-accurate As the world learns of its embarrassingly leaky customer database, internet-connected cuddly toy maker CloudPets is under further scrutiny. This time for not securing its gizmos against remote exploitation via the Bluetooth Web API.…

Websites, apps, expensive IoT cameras and ovens knackered Tuesday's Amazon Web Services mega-outage knocked offline not only websites big and small, by yanking away their backend storage, but also knackered apps and Internet of Things gadgets relying on the technology.…

Apparently the world is ready for hybrid-cloud-database-as-a-service, on subscription Oracle's added a new piece of hardware to its “Oracle Cloud at Customer” offering, in the form of the new Exadata Cloud Machine that runs Oracle databases on-premises with the very same interface as offered in the Exadata Cloud Service.…

Offering contracts that will end soon … but might end sooner HPE's offering some SimpliVity staff the chance to join the ranks of the Living Dead.…

Lemur-2-NATE came down yesterday and there's plenty more where it came from A small satellite burning up in the atmosphere has led to big excitement.…

Don't forget about nerds of color, rev preaches during iGiant's shareholder meeting Reverend Jesse Jackson urged Apple CEO Tim Cook to hire more Black and Latino workers at the company's annual shareholder meeting – just moments after a diversity plan that would tie executive compensation to meeting greater diversity goals was defeated by a 95 per cent No vote.…

An admittedly terrible headline for a terrible company Uber faces yet another antitrust lawsuit brought by cab companies, this time in Boston, Massachusetts.…

Shared state tech support leads to five years of misery The head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has blasted his IT staff, claiming the number of computer outages hitting the force has more than doubled – and that cockups take twice as long to fix.…

Adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to Pi Zero, bumps price from thrifty $5 to slightly less thrifty $10 The Raspberry Pi turned five on Tuesday and the Foundation behind the computer has given us all a present: a new “Pi Zero W” model.…

And still can't say how much money it has recovered, says audit Automating its troubled Centrelink data-matching program has cost the Australian government's Department of Human Services dearly: almost 370 extra staff were needed to implement it.…

Them good ole ISPs are drinking whiskey and rye MWC Ajit Pai – chairman of America's broadband watchdog, the FCC – has outlined his vision of data networks in the United States. And it most definitely does not include net neutrality.…

Heir-apparent slapped with bribery, embezzlement charges Samsung supremo Lee Jae-yong has been formally charged with bribery and embezzlement – sparking the dramatic shut down of the tech giant's top strategic office.…

Everything's fine now. Patch. Keep using them. Move along Password management applications, recommended by many security experts as the only viable way to deal with large sets of passwords that are unique and sufficiently complex, introduce their own set of problems – namely the general fallibility of software.…

'Increased error rates' is the new 'outage', according to Bezos' bit-barn bods Amazon Web Services is scrambling to recover from a cockup at its facility in Virginia, US, that is causing its S3 cloud storage to fail.…

Souless contraptions in the home or at work are a risk – not to humanity Common security flaws in mainstream robotic technologies leave them wide open to attack, infosec researched have warned.…

Big wins push sales to record high as expenses push losses to... record high It was a record-breaking year for finance and HR cloud purveyor Workday for all the right and the wrong reasons: sales reached a new high aided by Oracle’s disruptive buy of NetSuite, but losses soared too.…

Look how good I look underneath my Cloud HALO Object storage house Scality is offering a 100 per cent data availability guarantee. How so?…

The secure, self destructing mobe for heads of state... and big enterprises MWC There’s exclusive and then there’s exclusive. If you need to ask how much the DarkMatter Katim phone costs, you’re not a serious customer. The first handset to come from the UAE-based security company doesn’t have a price.…

Connected device expert on post-Borg IoT Interview Macario Namie, head of IoT strategy at Cisco Jasper, has been working in the connected device space "before it was known as IoT” and was with Jasper for nine years before it was acquired by the networking borg in 2016 for $1.4bn (£1.1bn).…

Indian subcontractor kept transcripts on insecure server A private health firm has been fined £200,000 after fertility patients’ confidential conversations leaked online.…

IronKey flash drive patent was at stake A jury has found that flash-flinger Imation must pay $11m damages to ioengine for patent infringement.…

Exec professes love for 'colocation hubs'... just 'not sure everyone else will' Exclusive IBM is clamping down on its remote workers in Britain, with the Global Technology Services team being centralised in one of a number of as yet unnamed “colocation hubs”.…

Exec professes love for 'colocation hubs'... just 'not sure everyone else will' Exclusive IBM is clamping down on its remote workers in Britain, with the big iron and storage teams being centralised in one of a number of as yet unnamed “colocation hubs”.…

Just two weeks to save £100s on DevOps/Containers extravaganza You’ve got less than two weeks to snag early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London and save yourself a packet on three days of the best in DevOps, Containers, Continuous Delivery and Agile.…

Keep the devs happy, or Microsoft and Google will catch you Amazon Web Services became the 800-pound cloud gorilla by catering to developers. It expects to own the container crown with the exact same strategy, touting convenience and productivity gains to users of its EC2 Container Service (ECS). There are signs, however, that this fight won’t be as simple, and that a cross-cloud container option like Kubernetes could be the spoiler to Amazon’s steady march.…

Of 227 snooping local authorities, only a third cared how it might affect the public More than half of the UK’s local authorities have used body-worn cameras, with only a third of them having considered the privacy impact on the public, according to best practice.…

ARM bought a startup just like this one last week A few days after ARM bought a couple of Internet of Things startups focused on digital signal processing and integrated IoT chip offerings, a Hong Kong-US joint venture has wheeled out something that looks very similar.…

We only do the last few kms, CEO Bill Morrow tells Senate Estimates The chief executive officer of nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has told Senate Estimates that retailers need to pay more attention to their networks in order to avoid disappointing customers.…

Which sounds great! Shame annual sales will be less in 2021 than they were in 2016 More bad news for the PC and tablet market: analyst IDC says the five-year sales slump is set to extend to a decade of decline.…

Moto puts Mods on speed MWC While recent modular phone experiments from Google and LG have crashed and burned, Motorola’s more sober effort is the one that’s paying off.…

Crypto shouldn't hold back cops, sniffs commission The technology industry has hit back at proposed plans by France and Germany to force EU member states to backdoor encryption for the police.…

Talking robots! My word, has science gone too far? MWC Years ago, Sony was one of the first of the old tier-one electronics giants to get fully behind Android. With its multimedia prowess, its amazing R&D pipeline and its refined design aesthetic, Sony should have ruled the roost. But it was outfought by its vulgar South Korean rival Samsung, for that's what the public wanted.…

What's it like – and how did it happen? MWC Bill Clinton was still US President when the last pocket computer that you could touch type on came out. Back then, almost everyone accessed the internet at home on a dialup modem, not broadband, and no phone yet sported a colour screen or a camera. It was a different era.…

Surface Book rival costs north of two grand, certainly ain't a cheap trick MWC Luxury brand Porsche Design has announced, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, its first 2-in-1 computer: a Windows 10 device that will be available in April 2017 for €2,795 or £2,395.…

You always wanted an autonomous T-shirt cannon, right? Here you go Repo Roundup To kick off this week's Repo Roundup, in which we trawl online code repositories so you don't have to, Facebook's emitted a prophecy, and we don't mean Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto: it's a forecasting procedure for R and Python, designed to work with the kind of datasets Facebook slurps.…

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? MWC SanDisk has slapped a price sticker and availability date on its 256GB 3D NAND flash chip that'll be packaged into A1-class microSDXC cards, as well as USB sticks and other formats.…

Allowing unauthenticated OS re-install sure feels like a bug ... Cisco has reiterated that its Smart Install feature is not a bug and not a vulnerability, and to prove it's not, it's built a tool to help sysadmins block it.…

App scrapes content into devices for later viewing, even offline, advances Moz mission to make web accessible Mozilla has acquired Read It Later, Inc. the developer of a web clipping app called “Pocket”.…

Current chief Frank Slootman steps aside in sudden but orderly transition ServiceNow has a new CEO: John Donahoe, formerly CEO of eBay and of Bain & Company, was appointed on Monday after the current holder of the positions, Frank Slootman, decided the time was right to make the transition.…

Voice messages and account info slurped, held to ransom Two million voice recordings of kids and their families were exposed online and repeatedly held to ransom – because the maker of microphone-fitted, internet-connected stuffed toys used an insecure MongoDB installation.…

Get patching – fix available now Bored hacker looking for fun? We couldn't possibly suggest you attack the latest vulnerability in ESET's antivirus software, because it's too basic to offer any challenge at all.…

'Doxing' of Centrelink complainant hurts open government say privacy experts The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is investigating whether it's acceptable for an Australian government department to release personal data when seeking to correct the public record when clients recount their interactions with government agencies.…

Axed workers vow to spend last day kicking up a fuss in the street Dozens of IT workers slated to be laid off from their jobs at the University of California, San Francisco are planning a protest this week.…

Configurable switch on software spotted in latest Insider build A feature in the Windows Insider Preview Build 15042 allows administrators to block the installation of any Win32 application that is not fetched from Microsoft's software marketplace.…

Oral arguments critical of North Carolina law that blocks criminal perverts from social media The US Supreme Court looks set to kill off a North Carolina law that prevents sex offenders from accessing social media sites, for being unconstitutional.…