The Register

This is an appalling, disgusting, gut-wrenching abuse of technology NSFW Ever wanted to see Apple CEO Tim Cook shaking his naked tush, or Satya Nadella bare a lot more flesh than he does at Microsoft conferences? Your wait is over, thanks to a nasty application of facial recognition software.…

Who didn't see that one coming? The European Commission has U-turned again on its plans to tear up roaming fees for customers abroad, going back to its original proposal that all charges should be abolished.…

Just make sure your team evolves with the technology Here’s a key benefit of that shiny new hyperconverged box you just bought: it’s supposed to speak the cloud’s language.…

Not so Wunder-ful, eh? Mobile to-do list Wunderlist, bought by Microsoft for a reported $100m-$200m, is down with no immediate prospect of recovery.…

This is the end, beautiful friend, the end Could BlackBerry be any less involved in the phone business that it is today? A year ago it designed its own phones that ran its own, home-grown platform. Today it rebadges other people’s designs and the phones run Android. Actually, yes, it could – see below for details*.…

Might be easier just to get a bunch of plastic surgeons in MI6 is set to hire another 1,000 staffers because of the internet, apparently.…

In the phablet, the silent phablet, the LiOn sleeps tonight Explainer It has been a bad month for Samsung. Following the release of the dual-curved, 5.7 inch-screen, water-resistant Galaxy Note 7 phablet, the number of fires have increased thanks to its reportedly explosive battery.…

Staffer also asks: Why is Richard Branson still in our ads? Exclusive Costs at Virgin Media have so far risen by £7m this year following Brexit, due to increased import costs, the company revealed in a Q&A with staff this week seen by The Register.…

Cloud-based DDoS defences introduce delays Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be painful and debilitating. How can you defend against them? Originally, out-of-band or scrubbing-centre DDoS protection was the only show in town, but another approach, inline mitigation, provides a viable and automatic alternative.…

Hybrid cloud for those who dithered, like Big Red OpenWorld Throughout this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference, the company's message has been fairly simple – the database firm is moving to cloud but can offer buyers either on-prem kit, full public cloud, or anything in-between.…

Haven't hardened? You're still gunna get hacked, says CISO The chief information security officer for global money transfer network SWIFT says banks are still under attack from fraudsters hoping to cash in on identified security gaps to steal millions of dollars.…

Enjoy the light flavor and crisp notes of everything that is wrong with this city With the cost of living in San Francisco soaring higher than ever, some people are stepping forward to find innovative solutions to create affordable housing and assistance programs that would preserve the diversity, culture, and giving spirit that has made San Francisco a world-class city.…

Would-be LTE-U carriers told to take these tests, or just leave off The Wi-Fi Alliance's long-awaited – and controversial – LTE-U Coexistence Test plan has landed.…

Customised CPUs are doing things software just can't do on commodity kit After being pronounced dead this past February - in Nature, no less - Moore’s Law seems to be having a very weird afterlife. Within the space of the last thirty days we've seen:…

The man who gave us our first Robotic Overlords ROTM Victor Scheinman, whose 1960s work in robotics created the “robot factory” we see today, has died in California aged 73.…

Windows Update silently did the deed, added a few security fixes for .Net Framework too Microsoft has quietly excised Windows 10 free upgrade offers from Windows 7 and 8, aka the GWX.exe .…

Chipzilla updates dev environment for Thing connectivity Intel has quietly released Version 2.0 of its IoT Services Orchestration Layer toolkit on the world.…

Analyst says Galaxy Note 7 will fire up the mobile biometrics market ABI Research analyst Marina Lu has picked iris scanning as "one of the safest" means to secure user identities on smartphones.…

310,000 network links: that's how big your Interwebs grew. Mapping them is very useful We know what you're thinking, “when did a label on a diagram rate a news story?” but bear with us: the 'net-boffins at CAIDA have added labels to the vast dataset that maps AS-AS links worldwide.…

The *nix desktop quit being awful in March, and reckons it's on the road to 'good' Gnome's developers have let version 3.22 “GUADEC” (the name of its primary European conference) loose on the world.…

Tells devs: 'errors are a feature, not a bug'. Google has refined the security controls available to enterprise Gmail users by automatically killing OAuth 2.0 tokens for Apps when users change passwords.…

India's decided the Andaman Islands need proper internet India's government has decided to build a submarine cable between the city of Chennai and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.…

Software that detects government tests, where have we heard that before? The idiot box is smarter than it seems: a spat has broken out between America's Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Consumer Technology Association about the energy consumption of televisions.…

Stay in incognito mode to get secure texting Google has launched its new mobile messaging app Allo today in a bid to challenge Facebook's stronghold in instant messaging.…

And yet WhatsApp cost $19bn? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have promised at least $3bn in funding for a medical initiative to cure, prevent or manage all known diseases by the end of the century.…

Flaw allowed hijacking via HTTP snippets Cisco has provided a patch to address a remote hijacking vulnerability in its Cloud Services Platform (CSP).…

World collectively bangs its head against wall Just when you thought discussion over the transition of the internet's technical functions couldn't get any more ridiculous, here comes Donald Trump.…

IANA transition threatens to become focus of dysfunctional Congress The transition of the internet's critical technical functions from the US government to non-profit organization ICANN, planned for next week, remains under threat thanks to an ongoing crusade by Senator Ted Cruz.…

Growing demand for greater oversight of how snoopware is obtained by cops A handful of US cities are banding together in an effort to change the way police acquire and use surveillance technology.…

Cupertino giant told to cough up equivalent of a rounding error on its financial sheets Apple has been found guilty of patent infringement and told to pay $3m in damages.…

Barreleye server offers Power8 alternative to Intel boxes Freshly acquired hosting slinger Rackspace has built a custom-developed server based on IBM’s Power chips and the Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications.…

Unleashes Xiphias gladius – Swordfish to you and me The SNIA has unveiled its v1.0 Swordfish storage management specification to standardise management of storage products and services in cloud-era data centres.…

Project Titan + F1 supercar brains + ??? = profit Updated Apple, the reassuringly expensive maker of iThings, is reportedly trying to convince Formula One racing car firm McLaren's execs to fall into line with a buyout.…

We asked them and they said it's all good, so we're happy The Financial Conduct Authority has said there’s no need to launch a full market study into insurers’ use of big data, despite concerns that insurers' could be using to charge consumers more.…

Flying death spotted in the Cotswolds, boffins move in for the kill A sleepy Cotswold town could be about to witness the genocide of local honey bees following the discovery of invasive predatory giant Asian hornets.…

It's a bug, not a feature – Linux distro vendors are responsible Lenovo has denied deploying BIOS "hacks" to lock Windows 10 installations to its Signature Edition PCs.…

World, meet the Dell EMC Validated System Dell is all about engineered systems, or so its CEO Mickey D said recently, but actions speak louder than words and today the Texan infrastructure baron rolled out a box targeting firms running SAP HANA.…

From mainframe to DevOps in just 40 years... Veteran software outfit CA has hoovered up Israeli testing outfit BlazeMeter to burnish its DevOps and testing credentials.…

HPE asset disposals exercise - to possibly prep for an acquisition? Comment On the day the Dell/EMC acquisition/merger completed, HPE announced it was selling off a load of non-core software assets in a “spin-off” merger with UK’s Micro Focus.…

Flashy NVMe pair up to 1TB – for now.... Samsung has introduced 960 EVO and 960 PRO M.2-format consumer SSDs with an NVMe interface and a promised 2TB capacity.…

Seagate's Kinetic drives get a new twist on ye olde JBOD Frog object storage startup OpenIO is banging on with supporting Seagate’s Kinetic disk drives, and has certified its software on the drives in a Kinetic Plugfest.…

Water got into where water should not have been Weird new warship USS Zumwalt has broken down while on sea trials, three weeks ahead of her formal commissioning ceremony.…

Now only local spy agencies can slurp your data. Hurrah! Microsoft has started to serve up Azure services from a new cloud region in Germany – operated under the supervision of a data trustee – to pitch for European punters with concerns about security and data sovereignty.…

Man flees with family Yet another British family has been forced to flee its habitat after an infestation of Brazilian wandering spiders smuggled itself into their nest on the back of a bunch of supermarket bananas.…

Non-volatile RAMmer enters the most volatile situation of all MRAM startup Everspin has filed for an IPO.…

We're not making this up, it's a real product Someone with far more time and money than sense has developed a “real flame smart candle” that can be controlled over Bluetooth. No, really.…

RCMP conduct internal investigation to see if it could be done A Canadian man accused of smuggling $180,000 of gold out of the Royal mint – allegedly in his anal cavity – is awaiting a court verdict after his defence condemned the government’s case as “appalling” and entirely circumstantial.…

Trimmed down biz 'possible' target for Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, Huawei and private equity The number two at Hewlett Packard Enterprise has brushed off talk the slimmed-down organisation could be vulnerable to a takeover, as the company is again linked with “possible” buyers - this time around Huawei, Lenovo, Oracle, Cisco and, er, Dell.…

Plus: My public radio name is Bianca Hughes-Pavlov

A meat and two meats Rejoice! The eternal dilemma of whether to have a hot dog or a burger has now been answered.…