The Register

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.…

2018? No. And we're assuming they'll be back in one piece Two unnamed and presumably very well-heeled people have booked a flight around the Moon using unproven hardware from SpaceX.…

Eugene Kaspersky looks forward to a new darker dawn Apple's Mac operating system may be the safer choice – but only because cybercriminals can't get their hands on people who know how to exploit it.…

TLS 1.3 takes down Chromebooks, PCs Updated The availability of Transport Layer Security protocol version 1.3 was supposed to make network encryption faster and more secure.…

Go to your brother, kill him with your gun. Leave him dying at his wedding, dying in the sun After more than 20 years of service, the US Air Force fly boys have today announced that the MQ-1 Predator drone is going to be phased out within a year.…

Redmond tosses $1.2m to settle suit over leaky receipts Microsoft will cough up $1.2m to settle a class-action lawsuit after its retail stores leaked a little too much information about shoppers' payment cards.…

Retro computing fans mod ancient Texas Instruments machines Feature The retro computing and gaming scene is seeing no shortage of interest these days. Old fans and curious millennials are flocking to take nostalgia trips on the popular consoles of the 1980s.…

ACAS conciliation service talks worked well, then Unionised staff at Fujitsu are downing tools for 24 hours from midnight in protest over cuts to jobs, pay and pensions. It appears the conciliation service ACAS failed to find a common ground that suited all parties.…

Enforcement officers bully their way to catching 28 offenders per week for £15,000 bonus Capita, to whom the BBC has outsourced its licence fee shakedown efforts, has been found to be targeting vulnerable people as part of an aggressive bonus scheme for its collectors.…

Also foresees terrifying 10bn-strong robot army. Hey ho MWC Japanese mega-corp Softbank expects its processor-designer subsidiary ARM to fire out a trillion chips for the Internet of Things over the next two decades, its CEO told Mobile World Congress.…

Also foresees terrifying 10bn-strong robot army. Hey ho MWC Japanese firm Softbank expects its subsidiary ARM to fire out a trillion chips for the Internet of Things over the next two decades, its CEO told Mobile World Congress.…

Hybrid pipes and services for Amazon-sippers Nimble Storage claims Azure and AWS clouds aren't ideal for enterprise transaction apps but says it can fix that by wrapping them inside Nimble Cloud Volumes for a $0.10/GB/month starting price.…

Part of trend by operators desperate to reinvent themselves MWC Frenchie telco Orange is reinventing itself as a bank next month, with plans to offset lacklustre revenue by branching out into the rest of Europe and possibly the UK.…

Plus, an extra 50 'exceptional' folk can get a Tech Nation passport The UK government is considering a five-year post-Brexit visa scheme that would allow more foreign employees – including those in the tech sector – to work in the UK, according to reports.…

Yep, half a million The NHS has been accused of covering up a large data loss involving the loss or mislaying of more than half a million pieces of confidential information.…

Smothers back panel in LEDs ... now do we stand out? MWC Alcatel, a brand of Hong Kong-based TCL Communication, has announced the A5 LED at Mobile World Congress, which it claims is "the world’s first interactive LED-covered smartphone."…

Parents today can't deal with bullying, sex, eating-disorders and the sort, because cyber The government has today announced a “major new drive on internet safety” for which it will enlist the world's largest technology companies in order to make the UK the “safest place in the world for young people to go online.”…

Psion, was a lion, in iron (Reg readers called it) Exclusive The original Psion designers have returned to put the classic British pocket computer in a modern body.…

Trio of Atomic edge boxen to sharpen the Things' bite Dell has developed the Edge Gateway 3000 Series of boxes so IoT customers can do some data analysis at the edge of their IoT network, to make real-time local decisions about the operations of IoT-monitored machinery and reduce bandwidth needs for data transfer to a central site.…

You'll have to wait for Galaxy S8 MWC Samsung's press event at Mobile World Congress was subdued in comparison to recent years, reflecting a difficult year for the company, and the conspicuous absence of the forthcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone.…

Walked past a jail? Expect to become a crime suspect The Prisons and Courts Bill, introduced to Parliament last week, will force mobile networks to deploy fake mobile phone masts around the outside of prisons to snoop on mobile phone users.…

A quick grip of Huawei's latest flagship phones Hands On Another year, another Huawei flagship phone. This time it is the 5.1" P10 (€649) and the 5.5" P10 Plus (from €699), following a similar pattern to the 2016 P9 and P9 Plus.…

Business being split off so stakes can be sold Toshiba confirms its memory business will be separated from the main Toshiba business in preparation for a part or majority stake sale.…

Ubuntu on Win 10 more useful... but does Microsoft really love Linux The Windows 10 Creators Update is set for release shortly, and comes with significant improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, also known as Bash on Windows or Ubuntu on Windows.…

Company says, er, just go by our Twitter comments Mondays are a terrible way to start the week, but spare a thought for HSBC customers whose online business banking is not quite so online.…

Beating data loss Sysadmin Blog Imagine yourself as Donald Trump's sysadmin. Trump's first month as President of the United States of America has been notable for the number of information leaks that have occurred. Trump has called these leaks criminal and seems intent on rooting out whistleblowers. Some poor sysadmin is going to be told to prevent these leaks, but just how possible is that in today's world?…

Don't wait - update now D-Link has resolved an authentication bypass flaw in one of its enterprise switches.…

Is it going to do HCI... who knows? Interview After thinking that stand-alone external storage array vendors might need to get into the hyperconverged market, we received a tip that Nimble Storage was thinking that too. So we asked Nimble's CEO, Suresh Vasudevan, a few exploratory questions.…

IT transformation and Brexit could mean a perfect storm for gov tech Public sector contractors in the UK are starting to down tools across a range of projects ahead of the new tax regime in April, leaving numerous projects hanging in the balance.…

Sales, marketing and product management people relieved of their duties, livelihoods HPE looks to have started writing pink slips for Simplivity people.…

Matter is going to move more freely and cheaply than ever before If a time machine could slingshot us back a quarter of a century to 1992, we’d visit a world in which print and broadcast media chugged along in rude health. Everyone read newspapers, and watched television because, well, what else could you do to stay informed?…

SIGSTINK: User body odor fault Machines don’t have noses – but they can now attempt to identify scents thanks to a nifty new algorithm.…

The bee-autiful game Video The humble bumblebee can be taught how to play soccer, even though its brain is only around the size of a sesame seed.…

ESA wants daredevils to help it test the Small Satellites Mission Service atop a Vega launcher If you've got an application for a small satellite and a stomach for risk, the European Space Agency wants to hear from you. Next year, it's planning a multi-launch demonstration from its Vega spacecraft on a proof-of-concept flight for the Small Satellites Mission Service.…

Intel just doesn't sell this kit yet. Not in the cloud. Not on-premises. Not anywhere Remember when PC or server-makers would breathlessly announce they'd just become the first, the very first, to get their hands on some new silicon and that doing so made them Terribly Clever? And represented enormous advantage to you, because you could buy that silicon right now instead of waiting, well, weeks for someone else to offer it?…

Here's a point release to get a bit excited by, plus updates to VMware and Oracle hypervisors Updates to commercial hypervisors are like buses: none for ages and then two come along at once!…