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Das Auto be the end of it, says car maker as it coughs up billions in fines Volkswagen today pled guilty in a Detroit, Michigan, court to scamming the American public through its "Dieselgate" vehicle emissions test cheating.…

Video success numbers will be scrutinized by outside outfit After successive scandals in which Facebook was found to be diddling its ad numbers, the social network will let a third party vet its stats.…

High turnover in Big Blue staff contributes IBM has been accused of fraud for under-delivering an over-budget IT upgrade to Pennsylvania's unemployment compensation systems.…

Astrophysicists handily crunch travelling aliens numbers just in time for Friday pub chat Astrophysicists think that mysterious short millisecond-long blip of radiation may be distant aliens powering up their sailcraft. Over 20 such FRBs (fast radio bursts) have been detected since 2007.…

Who nodes what'll actually be in it, though Backgrounder SolidFire boss Dave Wright talked with El Reg and discussed the vendor's upcoming hyper-converged system based on its own nodes.…

Scalable agility Promo Infrastructure as a Service can make your computing operations more scalable and agile. It may also be the first step to something larger.…

Startup promises permissioned Blockchain-validated truth database Analysis Startup Gospel Technology is evangelising the use of Blockchain to secure and verify sharable data.…

What on Earth is the 'innovation' field? Exclusive Silicon Valley has pushed back hard against Europe’s copyright reforms in the forthcoming response from the European Parliament’s rapporteur, a full draft of which has been seen by The Register.…

Cattle farmers going through one cartridge evey ten months bullied into buying 2040 of 'em A tribunal has found cold calling salespeople to have illegally bullied a farming couple in Australia into purchasing 2,040 printer ink cartridges.…

His own, that is... Following the heat of a courtroom battle a lawyer defending an alleged arsonist was reportedly forced to flee proceedings temporarily after his own pants* caught fire.…

Early bird tickets finish on Sunday Events It’s just a few days till we pull down the shutters on our Early Bird offer for Continuous Lifecycle London, our three-day spectacular spanning the best in DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery.…

Male bunnies simulating sex acts on him in carnival A Spanish priest who dressed up as Hugh Hefner – flanked by two men in Playboy bunny outfits – as he rode a float at carnival in the Galician town of Cuntis, has been forced to apologise.…

Patch, patch .. attention snatch WikiLeaks has promised to release software code of CIA hacking tools to tech firms.…

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow Something for the Weekend, Sir? My ring smarts.…

Preparing for the Internet of Things Germany's federal government plans to roll out a gigabit internet service across Germany by 2025, through a government and private consortium known as Netzallianz Digitales Deutschland.…

Forget computer vision and AI – why Ocado's on the money Predictions are rife about the millions of repetitive, administrative and operative roles set to be decimated by automation over the coming years.…

Cracks early April Fool's Day joke...but changes really ARE due 1st of next month Exclusive An April Fool's Day joke has come early for Vodafone teleworkers, who are facing a clampdown on their own flexible working conditions from the start of next month.…

Smaller than Optane, but faster and perhaps a bit immortal too Non-volatile memory outfit Everspin's popped some of its Spin Torque MRAM onto a PCIe card in the hope system builders get excited about a new tier of memory. Or is it a new tier of storage?…

'We have listened to criticism of our business,' says chief exec Gavin Patterson Former state monopoly BT has finally agreed to regulator Ofcom's plans for a legal separation of its broadband division Openreach.…

Ad-slinger pushes its very own version of Lambda, opens YouTube and AdWords data hose Google Next '17 Google has rolled out a slew of new additions to its Cloud platform, including public release of the Cloud Functions serverless code set.…

Same worker also thought Excel was a great app for making art ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday foray into a mailbag stuffed full of readers' recollections of being asked to fix things that should never have broken.…

Cybercrime even has its own religion in Ghana Spoofed email and malware hidden in attachments netted crooks in West Africa more than $3bn in three years from businesses.…

Nah, trust us, there is something to this Google-stablemate DeepMind is creating a blockchain-like system to show how sensitive medical data passing through its processors will be used, allowing healthcare professionals to check if data has been tampered with.…

Wild boars in empty towns are nastily radioactive, but sadly remain normal size and lack atomic breath Radioactive wild boars have become a problem in the evacuation zone around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.…

Image archive torn offline after we raise alarm Next Tuesday, US Senators will hold a special hearing into America's ongoing military sex scandal. Archives of compromising snaps of female US Marine Corps fighters are being shared online, and the Senate Armed Services Committee wants answers.…

Special Rapporteur calls for privacy as a right, but also for International Data Warrants The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy has heavily criticised new surveillance laws in France, Germany, the UK and the USA, saying they are “predicated on the … disproportionate though understandable fear that electorates may have in the face of the threat of terrorism” but are informed by “little or no evidence” of their “efficacy or … proportionality”.…

DR upstart's board adds chap with data loss experience: Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman Nutanix users protecting their data with Zerto software need to pay close attention to the latter's recently-released 5.0U2 as it fixes a problem that could cause data corruption.…

Low-profile So.cl was an experiment, not a flop. Promise Microsoft will close So.cl, its very low-key social network, on March 15.…

There's nothing for it but IPv6. And potentially new kit Verizon Wireless will soon stop issuing public static IPv4 addresses to its business customers “due to a shortage of available addresses.”…

Security flaws smash worthless privacy protection Analysis To protect mobile devices from being tracked as they move through Wi-Fi-rich environments, there's a technique known as MAC address randomization. This replaces the number that uniquely identifies a device's wireless hardware with randomly generated values.…

US Senator touts legal tweak to give broadband giants free rein US Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has suggested tweaking the law to permanently prevent America's comms watchdog, the FCC, from limiting what ISPs are allowed to do with your private information.…

Discovers IRC, puts a suit on Hangouts, touts $5k whiteboard and more Google Next '17 Google hopes to further invade the worlds of teleconference and business chat with a set of new offerings.…

It's been a good 20 years. Time to move on? Comment This week, HPE offered to acquire Nimble Storage for around $1.09bn, plus another $200m in share options.…

Make-or-break launch this month for Elon's upstart March is going to be a crunch month for SpaceX: it hopes to, for the first time ever, launch a commercial satellite into orbit using a previously used rocket.…

AT&T's network last night was a fiasco – don't worry though, the FCC is on the case AT&T suffered an America-wide outage of 911 emergency calls Wednesday evening, sparking some degree of panic and a swift response from US comms regulator, the FCC.…

Security experts poke holes in RAND vulnerability study A new study from RAND Corporation concluded that zero-day vulnerabilities – security flaws that developers haven't got around to patching or aren't aware of – have an average life expectancy of 6.9 years.…

But not before they were downloaded 1.5 million times Security researchers have discovered 13 new Instagram credential-stealing apps on Google Play.…

HI! OUR RECORDS INDICATE YOU'VE BEEN IN A RO- *click* A Hampshire company behind millions of nuisance calls regarding road traffic accidents has been fined £270,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office.…

Almaden researchers make breakthrough with Holmium Molecules are so yesterday – IBM boffins at Almaden have cracked atomic storage, magnetising a single atom and storing a bit of data on it.…

To stop scammers fooling people into using the software and handing over their PCs TalkTalk has blocked remote desktop management tool TeamViewer from its network, following a spate of scammers using the software to defraud customers.…

Eau de Humanity, amirite? Hot on the heels-emblazoned-with-Eugene's-face, Kaspersky has only gone and sent El Reg a range of branded toiletries, presumably meaning to imply we could brush up on personal hygiene.…

Code in 40% of financial apps subpar The rush to improve system functionality is leading developers to knock out subpar code, posing a threat the security of major systems around the world, according to an extensive report.…

Home Office stepping up inspections of Tier 2 visa sponsors Exclusive The UK has suspended ZTE from the immigration scheme used by foreign companies to allow foreign nationals to work locally, The Register can exclusively reveal.…

Port problem, captain: Microservices to the event horizon Legacy, or technical debt – call it what you will – has always been a major challenge to techies looking to move forward and never more so than now, as you're being asked to shift data centre software to the cloud.…

HMS Forth, like the bridge The Royal Navy’s newest warship, offshore patrol vessel HMS Forth, has been formally named in a ceremony held in Scotland.…

Audit uncovers rows over what was required, deliverable An audit into Accenture and Police Scotland's disastrous attempts to develop a unified IT system has found that the project collapsed because Accenture underestimated the programme's complexity and the resources needed to develop it, alongside a breakdown in the two parties' relationship.…

Author of The 5G Myth and former Ofcom boss says his piece Government plans to dip its toe in 5G tech with a £16m test hub as part of its "5G strategy" have been welcomed by one of the most vocal critics of the technology as a pragmatic move.…

Aims to hit WD for six with new product for hyperscalers Seagate has announced a 12TB helium-filled data centre disk drive, catching up with WD's Ultrastar H12, and providing both SAS and SATA interfaces.…

Passes 100k mark and the MPs' sanity filter, unusually The BBC TV Licensing fee is set to be debated in Parliament in early May after a public petition passed the 100,000 signature mark.…

On storage-class memory and leaving HP Labs Interview When "retired" HP Labs head Martin Fink surprisingly joined Western Digital as CTO we were interested how this memory-driven computing proponent would affect WD's solid state tech strategy.…