The Register

No need for ISPs to tell you what info they're slurping up New rules due to take effect next week that would have required your ISP to obtain consent before selling your private details have been killed off by the new chair of the US Federal Communications Commission.…

Comverse CEO Kobi sent down for a record 2.5 years after back-dating stock options The head of a defunct surveillance and communications software company has been given the longest-ever prison sentence for back-dating stock options.…

Teen's shock as Jesus mobe turns into hottest tech Vid Demonstrating yet again that Apple trails Samsung in mobile phone trends, an iPhone 7 Plus owner has reported that her prized possession recently blew up on her.…

Fibre Channel revenues flag as Broadcom acquisition spooks IP network buyers It was a double whammy. Brocade saw hyper-converged infrastructure eat into its SAN networking sales as Broadcom acquisition-caused uncertainty drove IP Networking sales downwards too.…

Something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear A substantial number of Gmail users have been affected by a potential but unconfirmed hack of unknown origin or purpose.…

Can you hearable me? When a technology hype flops, do you think the industry can use it as a learning experience? A time of self-examination? An opportunity to pause and reflect on making the next consumer or business tech hype a bit less stupid?…

Cloud CRM with cloud synchronisation turned OFF A version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 with cloud turned off is coming in the second quarter.…

The new Ferrari of the storage world Analysis Symbolic IO has rewritten the server hardware and operating system rule book with its its computationally defined storage (CDS) and says apps like database queries run 60 times or more faster on its system. If these claims are real then server suppliers like Cisco, Dell, HPE and others are in for a mighty market shock as one IRIS server could replace five or more standard servers.…

We'll have no repeat of 1667, ye lubberly scallywags! The Dutch are preparing to invade English seas with a fleet of 90 vessels after a previous expedition boarded the Royal Navy’s flagship and stole the Royal Coat of Arms from her.…

Windows of volcanic glass The British government has published a transparency report into the use of disruptive and investigatory powers by State actors, which ironically reveals absolutely nothing about the use of said powers.…

'Automated' vehicles – who pays for damage? Insurers would be primarily responsible for paying out damages stemming from accidents caused by "automated vehicles" under new UK legislation laid before the UK parliament.…

The AA-powered, pocket-sized touch daddy The Psion Series 5 has stormed a Reg poll of technologies readers would most like revived.…

Nice one, Sheryl Sometimes it's wise not to boast that you're so rich, a $500m damages award against you is chump change.…

Top bants, guys. Archbishop of Banterbury-tier stuff IBM staffers might not feel there's much to laugh about at the moment, with more swathes of redundancies on the way or the directive to kill off home working, but at least there's still plenty of banter to be had at the firm.…

Let the hype wars commence Hot on the heels of Arqiva revealing plans for a 5G trial with Samsung this morning, Ericsson and BT have also announced a partnership to develop 5G projects.…

Clock is ticking on early bird tickets Events We’re very happy to reveal that Red Hat’s Jen Krieger will be delivering a keynote at Continuous Lifecycle London, our three-day DevOps, Agile, CD and Containers conference this May.…

Put the bamboo down and step back Something for the Weekend, Sir? I came too soon. Normally this is not a problem. Coming early allows me to regather my strength so that I can then go at it, full-on, for the next eight hours.…

Experienced reporter wanted The Register is looking for an experienced reporter to join its lively London news desk.…

Can Nokia and BlackBerry save us from this 'turgid sea of sameness'? Analysis Hold the front page! Nokia's launching a bunch of new phones this weekend, and everyone is very excited.…

'Community' can buy what money can't Open Source Insider Surprisingly, the MXNet Machine Learning project was this month accepted by the Apache Software Foundation as an open-source project.…

Did you mean to type "rm -rf /" or should we be concerned? Dropbox has released the code for the chatbot it uses to question employees about interactions with corporate systems, in the hope that it can help other organizations automate security processes and improve employee awareness of security concerns.…

It all ends in beers after marital bliss and commercial reality collide On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly look at readers' memories of hibs gone bad.…

God, is there nothing artificial intelligence can't master? We all know you love it so much Google has partnered with Jigsaw, an Alphabet incubator, to tackle online trolling with the launch of Perspective, new software that uses machine learning to highlight “toxic comments.”…

This ain't over yet by a long shot - ratification roadmap stretches to 2020 The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has published a draft of what it expected to become the final 5G specification.…

Compute and storage is coming out of the core and into the light Mobile World Congress kicks off next week in Barcelona and, as ever, is two shows in one. Gadget-lovers get to go “squee!” about new handsets and the fun they'll have with them. And in the fun and important part of the conference, telco wonks discuss the plumbing that makes the “squee!” possible.…

Workers told to get on the job while on the job, to boost local population A Swedish municipality may allow its workers to get on the job while on the clock, for an hour each week.…

And grand for everyday use, but the modules just don't excite Hands-on Motorola's modular Android, the Moto Z, offers something genuinely new in the increasingly dull world of smartphones.…

Vulnerabilities in Hangul word processing program exploited The South Korean public sector is once again in the firing line of a sophisticated – and likely government-backed – cyberattack.…

And hidden fees and pricing The FCC has granted pricing and speed reporting exemptions long sought by small US broadband providers.…

Heartbleed-style classic buffer overrun blunder strikes in 2017 Big-name websites leaked people's private session keys and personal information into strangers' browsers, due to a Cloudflare bug uncovered by Google security researchers.…

How could app maker's week get any worse? Glad you asked Alphabet's self-driving car outfit and Google stablemate Waymo is suing Uber, alleging theft of trade secrets and patent infringement.…

And more than half the biz working overseas on the cheap HPE's financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2017 are in, and they don't look good. Profits are flat and the servers, storage and networking divisions have shown double-digit declines in revenue.…

Copyright allegations wreck search rankings Analysis Big corporations are abusing the system for taking down files and links to copyright-infringing content by sending millions of fake links, according to Google.…

'Alexa, am I being murdered?' Police in the US believe an Amazon Echo overheard the murder of a bloke found dead floating in a hot tub. All the cops want is a copy of any audio recorded by the personal assistant, conveniently stored in Amazon's cloud.…

Polymer highway into the head promises easier neurological monitoring MIT brain boffins have developed a tiny fiber that can carry chemical, electrical, and optical signals back and forth between the brain and an external device, offering an improved path for testing brain functions and interactions.…

Michael Thomas' appeal will send shockwaves through IT industry if successful Back in December 2011, Michael Thomas did what many sysadmins secretly dream of doing: he trashed his employer's network and left a note saying he quit.…

Watchdog forces them to drop claims of privacy protections Three US companies have settled with the FTC after they were accused of lying about the security safeguards on their customer information.…

Most argued articles include Pervez Musharraf, Niels Bohr and Schwarzenegger Analysis An investigation into Wikipedia bots has confirmed the automated editing software can be just as pedantic and petty as humans are – often engaging in online spats that can continue for years.…

Tired old algo underpinning online security must die now Google researchers and academics have today demonstrated it is possible – albeit with a lot of computing power – to produce two different documents that have the same SHA-1 hash signature.…

Tired old algo underpinning online security must die now Google researchers and academics have today demonstrated it is possible – albeit with a lot of computing power – to produce two different documents that have the same SHA-1 hash signature.…

Eleventh-hour amendment, but will it stick with government? An eleventh-hour amendment has been added to the UK government's Digital Economy Bill, proposing an increase of the Universal Service Obligation from 10Mbps to 30Mbps.…

How many swallows do you need for a summer? One will do The adoption of prophylactics to protect users against advertising failed to rise in 2016, according to pollsters YouGov.…

Brit firm 'missed the jackpot', says High Court judge The High Court in London, UK, has agreed that a company's former employees who took thousands of confidential files away on USB sticks when they quit the firm were indeed naughty – and ordered them to pay damages of just £1 each.…

And the Oscar for the best story about why you have recovery tests goes to... Exclusive An external review into last October's catastrophic data loss at King's College London has placed the blame squarely at the feet of the IT technical team, which it found neither understood nor followed the university's system for backing up data.…

Creating 'a one-stop shop for digital shared services' French managed file transfer (MFT) company Axway has bought file sync and share supplier Syncplicity.…

I expect to remain with Tesla forever... and ever, and ever Amid larger than expected losses at Tesla, founder Elon Musk promised he would not be diverted by a mission to Mars and intended to stay at the company "forever".…

Google Ventures-backed Storj Labs makes its pitch Startup Storj (pronounced storage oddly enough) has an open source, distributed cloud object storage platform using blockchain technology and end-to-end cryptography across a peer-to-peer network to secure files.…

Blames it on weak pound Sales at Telefónica UK, which owns O2, plunged 12.5 per cent to €6.8bn (£5.7bn) for the firm's full year, mainly due to currency changes.…

But at least TSS staffers won't have to get career advice from Capita this time Exclusive IBM is hoping to lighten monthly payroll costs by, er, dangling minimum statutory redundancy terms in front of UK staff who volunteer to cut short their career at the creaking tech titan.…

Cops probing Mirai telco takedown UK police have arrested a suspect in connection with an attack that infected nearly 1 million Deutsche Telekom routers last November.…