The Register

Uncle Sam turns up the heat on visa hopefuls US embassies have been told to examine social media accounts of visa applicants who have ever set foot in Islamic-State-controlled areas.…

PM's spokesman and foreign secretary wave warning finger In the wake of a terror attack in the heart of London this week that left five dead, the UK government has turned its ire onto online companies – including Google and Facebook – for not doing enough to remove extremist webpages and other content from their services.…

'Dodgy' unwanted operating system update sparks potential class-action lawsuit Updated Three people in Illinois have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that its Windows 10 update destroyed their data and damaged their computers.…

Think of it as being your own mini-VC without shares Analysis Silicon Valley prides itself on disrupting industries – but it has bitten off more than it can chew by trying to take on an already highly competitive market suffering from major money woes.…

Software nasty can burn through 1.7 million account numbers per hour Cybercrooks are using a bot to automate the process of breaking into and draining online gift card accounts.…

Elastic cloud snaps back Amazon's brand-new UK T2 micro instances reached saturation point on Friday, with users being told the AWS service had run out of local capacity.…

Bicycles into the sunset Brit IT services giant Daisy Group has waved goodbye to former Alternative Networks CEO Mark Quartermaine – just months after it bought the comms and tech integrator, an internal document has confirmed.…

And that's even before all of those techies are farmed out to IBM Lloyds Banking Group is throwing more UK techies overboard ahead of the big outsourcing deal with a “single strategic partner” that El Reg previously revealed was IBM.…

Hosting service's access to .au registry suspended Australian web service firm Enetica has provoked consternation among customers frustrated about a prolonged outage now entering its second day.…

Also confirms earlier operational date for HMS Queen Elizabeth Britain is not buying V-22 Osprey aircraft to fly from its new aircraft carriers, the government has confirmed.…

All the tools you need Until just minutes before we hit publish on this story, Google was using a YouTube channel run by a fan of Hezbollah to promote potentially lethal drones.…

Gotta do something to break even, right? Twitter, the profitless microblogging website, has floated the idea of offering a paid-for version of its Tweetdeck product – and this is going down amongst the site’s users like a cup of lukewarm vomit.…

M call for papers has a week to run Events There are just seven days left until we close the call for papers for M, and we would really love to hear how you’re putting artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to work in business.…

Deathly Hallows Mark ii IBM UK appears to have fired the starting gun on a 2.0 redundancy programme for the Infrastructure Services Delivery division – before the first one has even concluded.…

Watchdog proposes fines for every day repairs, installations and appointments are missed Ofcom has begun consulting on the government's desire to compensate consumers and SMEs when telco companies fail, as set out in the Digital Economy Bill, even though the Bill hasn't reached the Royal Assent stage yet.…

Tweaking business models for greater 404 kerching The DDoS attack business has advanced to the point that running an attack can cost as little as $7 an hour, while the targeted company can end up losing thousands, if not millions of dollars.…

Ever so lone lone lone lone a-lonely Something for the Weekend, Sir? “For heaven’s sake, stop waggling it in my face! Kuh-rist, keep still! Right – you’ve asked for it!”…

Crown Clown Commercial Service The UK government body created to save cash buying common goods and services centrally has so far provided "dismal" savings for the taxpayer, the Committee of Public Accounts said in a report today.…

Please come back freelancers, forget IR35: all is forgiven The government will need to splash £145m per year on 2,000 digital staff - or £244m using contractors - if it is to meet the serious shortfall in skills, according to the National Audit Office.…

'Chittering' under raised floor was the sound of a disaster recovery lesson ON-CALL Ooh! Friday is here! Which means it's time for On-Call, in which Reg acknowledge that misery loves company by sharing stories of jobs gone awry.…

Is this the last waltz for bonkers music game's level makers? Dance Dance Revolution – one of the few computer games that causes players to break into a sweat – has been revamped with the help of artificial intelligence.…

Devs who fail to respond to call for change will count as 'yes' votes for ASL 2.0 Analysis The OpenSSL project, possibly the most widely used open-source cryptographic software, has a license to kill – specifically its own. But its effort to obtain permission to rewrite contributors' rights runs the risk of alienating the community that sustains it.…

From drones to smart warships. Well, sort of Comment Fresh from signing contracts to put artificial intelligence into its warships, the Royal Navy is now running an exercise to demonstrate robotic warfighting tech at work – Ex Information Warrior.…

Bribes on offer as courier's custom printing service needs Adobe's security sinkhole FedEx is offering customers US$5 to enable Adobe Flash in their browsers.…

Groove breakthrough prevents shameful leakage Video A biophysicist has found a way to save precious wine drops from leaking down the side of the bottle after it’s poured into a glass.…

Certs will keep working, but Chrome will be suspicious, soon Google's Chrome development team has posted a stinging criticism of Symantec's certificate-issuance practices, saying it has lost confidence in the company's practices and therefore in the safety of sessions hopefully-secured by Symantec-issued certificates.…

First we'll get non-digital Leia and Han Solo: Young Adult with Chewie and Falcon back-story Disney CEO Bob Iger has told a conference that the company is contemplating “what could be another decade and a half of Star Wars stories.…

Move along, nothing to see here, says NASA. It's just Sol cycling as usual NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has spotted nothing for the last two weeks, which is unusual.…

A land where the minister runs the internet and the media runs a minister Australia this week shelved planned safe harbour reforms to copyright and decided to proceed with laws that would make its attorney-general NetAdmin-in-chief.…

If only we could all open a Luxembourg office, eh? Champagne corks will be popping in Seattle after US taxmen lost their case against American web giant Amazon over the non-payment of taxes on overseas earnings.…

Mawhrin-Skel to ride again? Pic A robot has been spotted on the landing pad of SpaceX's floating barge Of course I still love you, and the rocket biz is refusing to say what it is for.…

And in 2009 – just 8 years ago Startling leaked documents show the CIA could purchase Apple Macs and iPhones, install spyware onto them, and give them to targets.…

Dumb and dumber, or the lightest of light touches? The number-one complaint to US comms watchdog the FCC right now is about robocalls – a remarkable 200,000 complaints from consumers last year alone.…

Crappy Chromium code is the culprit, we're told Microsoft describes Visual Studio Code as a source code editor that's "optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications."…

More than 100 mobes will only take a week to access Vid The inauguration of President Donald Trump in the US capital was marked by protests, with cops collaring more than 200 people on the day. Now court documents reveal the US government's efforts to crack the arrestees' locked phones and slurp their contents.…

Hear that? That's the sound of ringing tills, sorry, freedom The US Senate has voted to kill privacy rules that would have prevented ISPs from selling your browser history, under the fantastic logic that mobile operators aren't under the same restriction.…

Biz-friendly Kubernetes tool gets a little easier to automate CoreOS is extending Tectonic, its enterprise Kubernetes platform, beyond Amazon Web Services and bare metal environments to run on Microsoft Azure and OpenStack cloud infrastructure.…

Only 2.5 per cent of userbase affected Add Android Forums to the growing list of web properties that have suffered a security breach.…

Why the agencies will come crawling back Analysis Several US-based advertisers have now suspended their advertising with YouTube, following over 200 pull-outs in the UK and Europe. Google had run big brand advertising on hate videos including jihadist groups. Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, AT&T are the latest to hit pause, or withdraw ad budgets from YouTube altogether. AT&T is one of the top-five advertisers in the US, the New York Times notes. In 2015 it was the third biggest spender with $3.3bn across all media, according to AdAge.…

95 people at risk so far Call centre staff at Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) are to be axed in the latest expenses purge, company insiders have told us.…

Delay may indicate Internet of Things market is less frantic than thought Vodafone has admitted that the commercial launch of its Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) network in Ireland and the Netherlands has been delayed by a whole season.…

If we can't buy O2, they must give us MOAR SPECTRUM Three has renewed calls on Ofcom to intervene in the UK's mobile spectrum market, warning it could lawyer up unless the regulator curbs the proportion of airwaves owned by Vodafone and BT's EE in the forthcoming auction.…

Got a good Internet of Things problem-solving idea? Try it out with us, says city Brainbox greenhouse Cambridge has rolled out the latest stage of its smart city network, the Intelligent City Platform, which talks to the city’s existing LoRaWAN Internet of Things network.…

And yes, total abstinence isn't good for you Moderate drinking is good for you, a BMJ-published study has found, directly contradicting the advice of the UK government's "Chief Medical Officer", who advised last year there was "no safe level" of drinking. A daily pint reduces risk of a heart attack and angina by a third, a big data study of Brit adults has found, while total abstinence increases the risk by 24 per cent.…

Cheaper or more sophisticated? Cupertino does neither Comment "The iPad is done," writes Europe's shrewdest hardware scribe Volker Weber in the aftermath of Apple's annual revamp of its tablet line.…

Yes, a vest, cardigan and an overcoat The principle of Defence in Depth (“DiD”), says OWASP, is that “layered security mechanisms increase security of the system as a whole”. That is, if one layer of protection is breached, there’s still the opportunity for the attack to be fended off by one or more of the other layers. If anyone’s ever drawn something that looks like an onion on the whiteboard – a load of concentric layers with your infrastructure in the middle – that’s the concept we’re looking at. It’s actually a military term that’s been adopted by security types in the IT industry who want to be tank commanders when they grow up.…

Yahoo! open-source code fling builds a better Google, again Analysis Yahoo! last month married clustered compute to Google’s machine learning.…

MIT's Flexplane: design on the fly without breaking the network An MIT student has created a scheme to shadow packets as they pass through networks, to help take the risk out of experimenting with changes to network configurations.…

Your hefty guide to avoiding the mistakes everyone makes CERT has followed last year's release of its secure C coding standard with a similar set of rules for C++.…

Dump dongles and move to SMS, says tat bazaar, oblivious to deprecation advice Web tat bazaar eBay appears to be suggesting its readers adopt known-to-be-insecure practices when logging on to the service.…