The Register

Florida ride ends at wrong end of semi-automatic A Florida Uber driver stands accused of threatening a passenger with a semi-automatic handgun after his fare suggested he might blow chow, according to cops.…

Stage set for extra terrestrial faceoff with Prof Brian Cox? A US rapper has embarked on a mammoth tweet fest to correct at least 500 years of misinformation that the world is not flat, slamming amateur and professional astronomers in the process.…

When Cameron promised 'Google Government', is this what he meant? Listicle Today, the UK's tax deal with Google – or rather, corporate parent Alphabet Inc – looks worse than ever. Here's why.…

Time for spiritual, sorry, strategic renewal? Twitter’s top execs - what’s left of them - are expected to go on a retreat today as they look for inspiration on how to pull the microblogging service out what is looking less like a slump and more like a nosedive.…

Phone makers: please take our tat! Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Amazon reportedly wants “deeper integration” with Android to persuade more phone makers to promote Amazon services.…

Scientist and philosopher dies at 88 Obituary Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence, and an inspiration to generations of researchers, has died.…

WD slurps up 100 patents, inks cross-licensing pact WD has bought some storage patents from Big Blue and the two have also signed a cross-licensing deal.…

Site stress site sighted A new coding tool aims to do the same for HTTP response headers as Qualys SSL Labs has done for secure server configurations.…

Arduino-based prototyping board an obvious crowdfunding hit The makers of a diminutive Arduino-based prototyping board have declared their tablet-sized kit "the most funded crowdfunding tech campaign ever from Turkey", after tin-rattling their way to over $60,000 down at Indiegogo.…

Don't worry, no... numbers will be harmed during this action Dixons Carphone Warehouse is shutting 134 shops, a move it insists will have "no impact on colleague numbers".…

You're being followed... on your mobile... in the mall Retailers have been urged to create a standard symbol, similar to the one used to denote the use of CCTV, to inform customers that their location within shopping areas is being tracked through their mobile device.…

Safeguards? Pff, what an old-fashioned notion Police Scotland has been given direct access to Scottish councils' databases of disabled parking badge holders in order to crack down on fraudsters misusing them.…

This just doesn't add up A Load DynamiX six-vendor all-flash array bake-off seems to have involved a short list of just four vendors. Two appear to have gone missing.…

Cyber-sherlock sheds light on studies into counterfeit goods Usenix Enigma A university sleuth investigating online bootleggers has spoken of his research into counterfeit markets – including revealing the moment he accidentally blocked off a chunk of Manhattan to scammers.…

Voyager 2 took sideways look at gas giant's ring system On January 24, 1986, a 721.9kg (1,592lb) hunk of machinery called Voyager 2 skimmed as close as we've ever got to the planet Uranus and gave us our first, and (so far) only, deep look at one of the Solar System's oddest planets.…

Were firewalls up to date? Committee wants to know A bunch of US government departments and agencies – from the military to NASA – are being grilled over their use of backdoored Juniper firewalls.…

Not only did we not infringe, you're (allegedly) breaking the laws yourself, claims biz Arista Networks has countersued Cisco, accusing the network giant of unfair competition practices.…

Worried about privacy, security? McSweeny has an answer FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny supports the idea of giving people access to the source code to stuff to ensure better security and privacy in the era of the internet of things.…

Bonkers bluegrass broadband backbone battle brings bundled bluster, boisterous bickering Yet another US state is weighing up the idea of laying thousands of miles of cable to create its own broadband network.…

End-of-month deadline looms for vital data sharing pact United States and European Commission officials have promised they are doing everything possible to reach agreement over transatlantic data-sharing before a critical deadline at the end of this week.…

Dell-EMC combo to be top dog in 2017 enterprise on-premises spend In its inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Study, 451 Research forecasts public cloud storage spend to double in two years – with NetApp, HPE and IBM falling down the supplier rankings as Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure bulldoze their way in.…

Spinning out disk business ... or shrinking it, maybe Toshiba, recovering from a self-caused $1.3bn accounting scandal, could exit peripheral chip businesses while concentrating on its NAND core – with exit from the disk business a possibility too.…

White House creates new agency for security clearances The US government is creating a new agency to process background checks for federal employees and contractors seeking security clearance.…

Medicine is world's worst industry for data security, it seems Usenix Enigma When it comes to IT security, the medical world is by far the most inept at data security. So say top researchers at the first Usenix Enigma security conference, held this week in San Francisco.…

All you need is that 300 qubit computer in your back drawer Big Data? Check! Machine Learning? Check! Quantum computers? Check! Seth Lloyd, the self-dubbed "Quantum Mechanic", has ticked every box with a new (entirely theoretical) paper announcing a potential solution to problems unfeasible even before "the most powerful modern supercomputers".…

Migrating to CDOT might not be the best option for you. Just saying The Wikibon consultancy, in what amounts to a sustained analytical assault on NetApp’s product strategy, claims NetApp 7-Mode array users shouldn’t update to CDOT (Clustered DataONTAP), its latest FAS array operating system, and should think seriously about moving workloads to other suppliers’ systems.…

Seven days is a long time in cloud Microsoft engineers are struggling to fix a seven-day-old, self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage.…

Impressive camouflage ability baffles boffins Aegean wall lizards have demonstrated the impressive ability to hide from avian predators by camouflaging themselves against rocks "that best match the colour of their backs".…

Now you can only be a 'supporter' with no voting rights The Linux Foundation has quietly amended its bylaws so that individual members, now called "supporters", no longer have the right to elect board members.…

They grow up so fast these days Repository manager GitLab has spat out version 50 of its platform, showing how the release numbers pile up fast these days.…

Does its name rhyme with Threeple's Besmublic of Diner? Security researchers have lifted the lid on an apparently Chinese government-sponsored hacking group which has progressed from targeting activists to setting its sights on foreign government organisations gathering intelligence on the same targets.…

Puts fire under taxman's 'sweetheart' settlement with Alphabet Inc British politicians will tackle Google parent Alphabet Inc and the taxman over an official £130m back tax settlement.…

Just 24 people signed up to poorly advertised scheme Poor advertising and expensiveness have been blamed for the woeful uptake of the government's subsided satellite broadband scheme, with just 24 people having so far signed up.…

Davos talk reveals Middle Kingdom plans to break Western tech hegemony China is making more moves as it tries to set up an indigenous and patent-protected semi-conductor chip capability.…

Is this really the way we want to do our politics now? Comment “Google will shrug off this week's tax woes with a flick of its robotic tail, and politicians and tax campaigners will declare 'success'," or so I predicted here not two years ago. The ad giant would make a symbolic gesture on paying UK corporation tax, and we’d all be told to go home. For once, I’m afraid, I was almost completely correct.…

Hmm, wonder why it chose Emerald Isle location? Facebook is to open its second data centre in Europe, this time in the corporation tax-lite Republic of Ireland.…

Add it to the list, under overcrowding and lateness Commuters in the south east of England, already angry about recent timetable changes and delays, have been further incensed by basic security blunders by rail operator c2c as it tried to placate passenger disquiet with a new compensation form on its website.…

Jack Dorsey shows importance of being earnest Jack Dorsey waved goodbye to five senior Twitter execs over the weekend, and didn’t disappoint avid company-watchers when he issued yet another memo worthy of Oscar Wilde.…

Erle Robotics to develop 'Hardware Robot Operating System' Spanish firm Erle Robotics has secured funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the Robotics Fast Track (RFT) programme.…

Biz slurps £1.7bn, leaves 5.7 million without proper broadband - report BT has dismissed calls by more than 100 MPs to separate broadband arm Openreach as "wrong-headed", in response to a damning report that found that despite the telco having received £1.7bn in subsidies to get Britain online, 5.7 million people still cannot access the internet.…

Cooking the books? Not us! Apple chief executive Tim Cook met European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager in Brussels last week, apparently to discuss the European Commission's investigation into the company's tax affairs.…

'Reset' deadline kicks the problem into the long grass Analysis Universal Credit feels like it has been around since time immemorial. If the programme ever arrives, its implementation will have spanned three Parliaments - outlasting the careers of many MPs.…

'Someone there should be beaten to a pulp with a keyboard' Update Sainsbury's Bank website still relies on insecure cryptography protocols that more security conscious organisations have abandoned as obsolete.…

The two best motorbike Bluetooth headsets Review Riding the twisties on a motorbike is the great escape for some of us; the scent of the air, the rush of wind, the push through the corners, and the sound of the engine.…

That works out at £13m a year Google is to pay £130m to settle a tax dispute with the British Government over how it account for revenues booked in the UK.…

Robots wars, encryption battles, bitcoin skirmishes Sketch It used to be that the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss ski resort of Davos was all about finance and politics.…