The Register

Phone-flashing fun Analysis To survive in an increasingly mobile-first world, Microsoft needs the kind of regulatory intervention it fought so hard to avoid in the 1990s and 2000s. Only this time, imposed on the dominant mobile OS, Google's Android.…

In other news: Bear claims to have always used indoor facilities for ablutions Oracle has seemingly backed away from a potential acquisition of Accenture, and is now claiming it had "never even considered it".…

Likely not cannibalism issue, as knifemarks not near the meat. Er, OK Archaeologists investigating human bones excavated from the deserted mediaeval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire have suggested that the villagers burned and mutilated corpses to prevent the dead from rising from their graves to terrorise the living.…

'Agile' Common Platform Programme is 'vapourware', say insiders Exclusive Hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on plans to digitise the criminal justice system due to the mismanagement of a key programme that has so far delivered little value to the taxpayer, according to multiple insiders.…

UK chip bods license GPU tech to the fruity firm – for now British chip designer Imagination Technologies is in trouble after Apple told the firm it would no longer be using its intellectual property.…

Scumbags host 92% of it in just 5 countries Europe now hosts majority of child sex abuse images (60 per cent), pushing North America into second place (37 per cent), according to an annual report from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).…

Stars align Download Ubuntu 17.04 beta preview, recently released, and visually speaking you might be a little disappointed.…

Stars align Download Ubuntu 17.04 beta preview, recently released, and visually speaking you might be a little disappointed.…

If you work in any HPC field, don’t miss the Frankfurt conference Promo Catch up with the latest developments in high-performance computing at the five-day 2017 ISC High Performance conference and exhibition in Frankfurt June 18-22.…

Feats of engineering, projections busted - the Caledonian Canal GEEK'S GUIDE TO BRITAIN The Highlands are home to spectacular hills and mountains. You'll also find dotted around some fairly unusual engineering projects that have endeavoured to conquer them.…

'Don't feel too embarrassed to wear fancy dress', biz tells staff Franken-firm DXC Technology, the corporate mash-up between CSC and HPE Enterprise Services that was brought to life today, has urged staff to turn up to work in fancy dress, or at least corporate colours, to celebrate the launch.…

An existential threat to today's big players A new term is popping up among startups: the storage fabric. Depending on who you talk to, the term itself is recycled, but the concepts and implementations definitely are new. Today's storage fabrics are closer to the originally hyped promise of Software Defined Storage (SDS). What remains to be seen is if the arrival is timely enough to matter.…

'News Integrity Initiative' gets US$14m to improve 'news literacy', with help from PR firms and Jimbo Wales Facebook, Mozilla and Craig from Craigslist are among the donors behind a new “News Integrity Initiative” that's given itself the mission “advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world, and to better inform the public conversation.”…

Gun: fail. Flight: fail. Software: fail. Schedule: fail. Budget: fail. Plus 270 more fails Now-retired Dr Michael Gilmore, until recently the Director of Test and Evaluation for the US military, has published his final evaluation of the F-35 program, and it's a treat.…

Form 10-K says Dell's manufacturing methods are losing relevance and sales integration is slow Dell has released its new Form 10-K, the annual warts-and-all disclosure of every possible risk a public company faces, and suggests that slowing PC sales are a risk to its strategy of becoming an infrastructure technology leader.…

Apple told tribunal it wouldn't abide by a ruling against it The four Australian banks that wanted to start their own mobile payments service using the near-field communications chips inside iPhones have been rebuffed, partly because Apple said that even if a ruling went against it the company would not have allowed them access to the chippery.…

Opposition candidate planned to find leaker-in-chief another bolt-hole Julian Assange will sleep easy tonight – assuming he sleeps at all – after Ecuadorian president Lenín Moreno Garcés retained power.…

Candidate Trump promised to make tech companies hire Americans first, but the deadline for action in 2017 has passed Applications for the United States' H-1B visas open tomorrow, as usual. Which isn't what many expected after president Donald Trump made reform of skilled workers visas one of his key campaign promises.…

Stretched 787 stretches its wings and A319neo Euro-hops. Airbus and Boeing have both debuted new commercial jets.…

The rogue forklift is mightier than the keyboard, says Australian report Blackouts in Australia can be caused by snakes, birds, bats, and cats, but precious few by Russian hackers.…

Visit a malicious web page and JavaScript extracts user names Splunk has patched a slip in its JavaScript implementation that leaks user information.…

Standards org confirms RAM will double density, speed, become persistent The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has revealed that a full standard for DDR5 memory will arrive in June 2018, along with a new NVDIMM-P standard to house the memory, connect it to computers and protect the contents of RAM.…

ASA and Firepower kit have death clock. Fix it by rebooting If you're the lucky owner of Cisco Firepower or Adaptive Security Appliance devices, check the version number and see if you need to reboot your kit.…

Firm that claims credit for Trump and Brexit arrives to pitch marketers and pollies The company has repeatedly claimed it helped Donald Trump win the US presidency and got the Brexiters' "Leave" cause over the line has arrived in Australia.…

It'll feel a bit malware-y, but you'll be funding quality journalism without noticing it Readers will be aware that these are tough times for the media. And The Register is no exception: like many other publishers we need to diversify our revenue base.…

Advises developers to move to GitHub Redmond's open source code repository CodePlex is to close on December 15, 2017 and Microsoft is advising users to move their stuff over to GitHub.…

And congregation, caboodle – OK enough with the synonyms already! Did you enjoy the synonyms? Friday’s alphabetically-ordered-by-supplier-name collection of sub-prime storage news starts here:…

Ex-worker claims African-American shoppers were targeted A former Apple Store employee has accused the Cupertino giant's retail arm of racial and religious discrimination.…

W3C not happy President Trump is spoiling for yet another fight and this time, much to the despair of internet experts, it is net neutrality.…

We won't mistreat customers on this, vows company best known for mistreating customers Update US cable giant Comcast is looking to calm public outrage over its newfound ability to sell the browsing histories of its customers.…

Pays high price for 'elphaser' backdoor antics A former IT administrator working at a cowboy boot manufacturer has pled guilty to hacking the servers and cloud accounts of his employer after they fired him and had him removed from the building.…

Best educate yourself about what you can do Improved technologies in the banking sector have failed to stem the rising tide of fraud in the US, according to a study by analytic software firm FICO.…

Less-than-rosy Palmer leaving Zuck's $2bn lawsuit magnet Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is stepping down from his position at parent company Facebook.…

我绝对是中国人 WikiLeaks released the third tranche of its leaked CIA documents trove on Friday, which in this episode focuses on anti-forensics tools.…

Internal blog from worldwide HR exec confirms extent of offshoring Just shy of one-third of IBM's global workforce is now based in India and Bangladesh, a leaked internal blog has indicated.…

Pivots away from direct sales to web download and channel +Comment We heard that storage startup OSNEXUS had laid off its outside sales staff and pre-sales engineering staff on Tuesday.…

Researchers publish intel on US election meddlers Security researchers have published more intel on the tactics of the infamous Russian government-linked hacker crew blamed for compromising the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during last year's US presidential election.…

No need for top hats and red flags says secretary of state A UK minister has reassured the motor industry that buyers of driverless cars will not have to employ a gentleman with a red flag and top hat as he outlined a UK testbed for autonomous vehicles yesterday.…

I'm Guybrush Threepwood, mighty hacker Spreading ransomware has become a point-and-click exercise following the release of a file-scrambling malware interface for unskilled wannabe cybercrooks.…

Cult status is not enough for Mr Money Pants There aren't too many software frameworks that lend their name to industry events but Kubernetes, the open-source container manager, is one.…

Leave the day job to the machines, and get your proposals in We’ve had a cracking response to our call for papers for M, but more than a few people at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning have been in touch to ask for extensions.…

Charges for 40Mbps packages to be cut by 40 per cent Ofcom could force BT's Openreach to slash the prices it charges rivals for access to its superfast broadband network under plans that could shave millions off consumer bills.…

Tech companies will struggle to take over the road One of BMW's board members threw down the driving glove at the tech industry yesterday, saying that while established car makers were transforming themselves into tech companies, tech companies would struggle to turn themselves into auto manufacturers.…

Under Brexit, service faces five-fold rise in transactions Confidence in HMRC's £70m Customs Declaration Service, a computer system that HMRC itself describes as "business critical", has collapsed, the Treasury Select Committee warned today.…

Your bot looks cute but it's easy to crack Something for the Weekend, Sir? Car horns symphonise accompanied by a chorus of yelling cyclists as I shimmy on foot through oncoming traffic. Strictly, I come dancing on to the tarmac, cavorting between the lanes, prancing out of the way of motorbikes and generally tripping the traffic light fantastic.…

Plus: The strange case of the ghost keyboard that typed random rubbish ON-CALL The sun came up, the world kept turning, another Friday rolled around and so, therefore, did another edition of On-Call, The Register's weekly recount of readers' reminiscences about odd jobs.…

Your fancy ML algo is only a small part of the puzzle Artificial intelligence these days is sold as if it were a magic trick. Data is fed into a neural net – or black box – as a stream of jumbled numbers, and voilà! It comes out the other side completely transformed, like a rabbit pulled from a hat.…

Developers puzzled by binaries' bitcode explosion Apple's iOS 10.3 this week brought with it minor storage space gains, thanks to the debut of the iGiant's revised storage scheme, the Apple File System.…

Browser makers unite to make web design great again With the release of Safari 10.1 this week, four major browsers in the space of a month have implemented support for CSS Grid, an emerging standard for two-dimensional grid layouts in web applications.…

Right? You're keeping backups, right? No? Well, do it now Today, March 31, is supposed to be World Backup Day. Where did that one come from? Isn't every day a backup day?…