The Register

Might review policy, can't change anything The Australian Labor Party, which first conceived what ultimately became Australia's telecommunications data retention legislation and then, from opposition, waved the laws through, is having second third forth thoughts a pang of regret.…

While mobile carriers join telco security smackdown The relationship between the Australian government and the telco sector continues to deteriorate, with more carriers pushing back against Canberra's micro-management of their operations, with both industry regulation and security reforms as ongoing battlegrounds.…

YOU SHALL NOT PARK, say wizardly auto-updating Kindle-tatic screens The Australian city of Sydney has adopted e-ink-equipped parking signs.…

Man-on-Moon exhibit is go for blast off An appeal for half a million dollars to pay for an exhibition to display Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, which he worn on the Moon, surpassed its target today.…

That is to say, their explosive experiments worked Forsaken planes have been used in a series of boffinry experiments this week to test whether a bag lined with bomb-proof material could withstand an explosive blast.…

Crazy hack-my-brakes software flaw faces separate probe Fiat Chrysler faces being slapped with a record fine from regulators after a litany of recalls.…

Plus: 'Whopper Earth 2.0 would feel a lot like home' QuoTW This week brought some embarassed philanderers, Amiga celebrated its 30th birthday and we were given a look at the inner workings of GCHQ.…

Johnny Speight's Till Death Us Do Part is 50 years old Feature It’s 50 years ago this week that writer Johnny Speight leapt to fame with his creation of the bigoted conservative Cockney known as Alf Garnett, the loudmouth star of Speight’s sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.…

The head of Iran's OpenStack community can now meet without fear The eXpat Files Usually for the eXpat Files we talk to folk who have moved to another country. But this week, Vulture Weekend has varied things a little to chat to 28 year-old Roozbeh Shafiee from Tehran, Iran.…

Is it simply that inflation creates Nazis? REALLY? Worstall @ the Weekend A while ago, one of The Register's anonymous cowards posted a question about inflation.…

Rules relaxed last year, now it's open season for foreign manufacturers Videogame giants will soon be able to make and sell consoles in China, after Beijing confirmed plans to lift a ban first instituted in 2000.…

Sorry kids, but it's NOT the sprouting head of a scary ghost It would seem that dead wood has its uses, after all. Scientists have discovered a species of fungi that – in the right conditions – allows strange hair ice to grow on rotten branches of trees.…

Books longest spot ever on Reddit AMA virtual sofa Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking will be, as of Monday, answering questions posted on Reddit for more than a week.…

One unholy mess, but a wobbly dining stodge feast Our call for reader post-pub nosh neckfiller suggestions continues to bear fruit, and for your wobbly dining consideration today we present "biscuits and gravy", courtesy of Robbin Nichol.…

People have to pay if they want to know their rights The State of Georgia in the US is suing the owner of the Public.Resource.org website for publishing the State of Georgia's own laws online.…

Atari offshoot tried to take down Nintendo cartridge racket In 1985, Japanese giant Namco got out its wallet, and bought control of Atari Games – the coin-op arcade games maker that was doing rather well compared to its ailing home console cousin, Atari Corp.…

Desperate times require desperate measures Feature I was recently stuck in a quandary, when, having just moved to Portugal, my trusty MacBook Pro departed this mortal coil. No time to mourn those sweet memories with a deadline fast approaching and replacement to be sought. I’d no intention of buying a new machine with a Portuguese keyboard so I went in search of something secondhand.…

Says they're 'not close competitors' The proposed mega-merger between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent cleared a major hurdle on Friday, with the European Commission having given the deal its blessing.…

Been there, seen it, haven't done it Something for the Weekend, Sir? Déjà vu. I’ve just walked into the offices of a prospective new client for the first time and everything looks familiar, from the faux marble cladding and chromed door handles in the reception to the roughened white wallpaper and very specific shade of blue carpet tiles on the main floor.…

Probe spots nitrogen ice glaciers flowing into craters Pics and vid Pluto's hazy atmosphere has surprised scientists, who released the latest New Horizons update on Friday.…

Yeah, we got free patents, just sign right here... Google is looking to recruit 50 startups to participate in its patent licensing network.…

Cruel 'dwarf' taunts must end Supporters of Pluto's readmission into the Solar System as a full-blown planet got support from NASA's planetary scientists on Friday.…

Top of the pops again among tech giant rivals Moneybags Google has topped the list of tech-giant political lobbyists again, spending $4.62m in the past three months alone in Washington DC and elbowing its way into an enormous range of issues.…

Hungry telco goliath couldn't wait to polish off telly snack The FCC has formally approved AT&T's acquisition of satellite TV giant DirecTV, clearing the way for the nearly $50bn deal to go through.…

Taxi drivers start legal war in the Great White North Uber has been hit with a CAN$400m (US$305m) lawsuit in Canada accusing the upstart of violating taxi laws.…

Watchdog sparks mass recall, sheds light on flaw Fiat Chrysler's bad week just got even worse: the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has recalled 1.4 million of the manufacturer's cars after a dangerous software flaw was revealed just days ago.…

A sorry story of whipped tales, angst and attrition Exclusive + analysis Cisco has confirmed that the Invicta all-flash array line is no more, telling The Register: "As part of product lifecycle management, we withdraw technology from the marketplace when necessary to focus our efforts on what is critical for the future of our customers' business as well as our own."…

More light shined on redact-happy DNS overlord Analysis Staff at domain-name overseer ICANN repeatedly rejected independent expert advice to ensure the .africa top-level domain was won by their preferred applicant – and then tried to hide their influence by censoring the results of an independent inquiry into the affair.…

Le Charteur des Snoopeurs gets go-ahead despite fears France’s constitutional court (Conseil Constitutionnel) has ruled that the new French version of the Patriot Act is legal.…

Blighty holds up, Germany drops 12 per cent to £1.7bn Sales at Vodafone dropped marginally to £10.1bn, revealed the global mobile operator's second quarter results.…

Bloke, 30, gets two years after international task force tracks him to Welsh wilderness A 30-year old man from Aberdovey has been sentenced to two years in prison, thanks to his dark web drug dealing.…

Chocolate Factory hands out over $40,000 in bug bounties to sharp-eyed researchers Google has pushed out a new cross-platform version of Chrome that fixes no less than 43 security bugs.…

Old phone-tap promise not being kept? The Wilson Doctrine, long believed to forbid Blighty's spooks from tapping the phones of British politicians, has been repudiated by a senior lawyer.…

Let's build out the software defined infrastructure Intel has decided the cloud isn’t quite built for the needs of enterprises, and has promised to strike “scores” of collaborations and investments to solidify a Software Defined Infrastructure that will redress the balance.…

But they said sorry before being sent down, so that's OK Three Estonians have been sentenced to a cumulative 11 years for their cybercrime activities which infected more than four million computers with malware across more than 100 countries.…

Oh yeah, and I hacked it again myself, it was easy peasy Wildcard former securityware kingpin John McAfee reckons the Ashley Madison adultery-site hack threatens to "literally destabilise society", and was definitely the work of an individual acting alone.…

Why the hell connect cars to the net anyway? Other vehicles may be at risk from hacking following the Jeep Cherokee incident, according to one of the two researchers who pioneered the spectacular auto exploit.…

Compact living room Core i5 put through its paces Review Acer has produced a number of small form factor systems over recent years, and the Revo One RL85 is the latest incarnation. It's designed very much as a home PC, and comes in an upright enclosure that's about two thirds the size of a shoebox – 106.6mm square and 155mm tall – but still manages to pack a fair bit inside. Not the PSU, though; that's a small external 65 watt unit.…

Boffins startled to make crucial find ... in a museum The world of snake paleontology was rocked to its very foundations this week as bone-bothering boffins announced that the very earliest snakes actually had LEGS.…

It did see ‘solid revenue growth on a constant currency basis’, phew Mainframe maker Unisys plunged yet further into the red for its second quarter in 2015, posting losses of $58.2m (£37.6m), the sixth consecutive quarter the biz has leaked cash.…

It's all about the power, kiddo. You either got it or you ain't HPC blog This year’s crop of student clusterers brought perhaps the most diverse set of equipment ever to grace a cluster competition in the modern era. We have servers with high node counts, low node counts, some with only CPUs, some with more GPUs than CPUs, and even a cluster that uses ARM CPUs.…

Vicious knuckling in midriff bulge for swollen big-boy A hurtling pulsar has smashed through a whirling bulge of matter around its parent star and BLASTED a huge splatter of matter out into the surrounding space at colossal velocity.…

Big Brother software outfit is the toast of Silicon Valley CIA-backed Palantir has raised $450m (£289m) from investors, valuing the biz at $20bn (£13bn).…

Global org's IT Agreement gets zero-tariff and duty-free updates Wealth is now available to all in IT, following the World Trade Organisation's members agreeing to update the Information Technology Agreement, cutting tariffs on $1tn worth of IT products.…

Coming soon, to a court near you, the GEO-BLOCKING blockbuster After an 18-month investigation, the European Commission on Thursday decided to file antitrust charges against US movie studios 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Paramount, NBCUniversal, and Sky TV.…

Accept software development as creative Reg Roundtable It’s an omni-channel world, they say, and the dissolving lines between organisations and their customers, and their suppliers, are countered by the multitude of ways they might be hitting your systems. Systems that might be driven as much by the apparent whims of other departments as traditional IT planning.…

White hats show how flaky, unloved audio broadcast tech is a massive attack vector Car brakes and other critical systems can be hacked via car infotainment systems, security researchers at NCC Group have revealed.…

100 per cent – yup, ALL – contain significant vulns A study by Hewlett Packard (HP) has revealed that a hefty 100 per cent of smartwatches contain significant security vulnerabilities.…

Business networking machine was rife with malicious link bait. Kaspersky researcher Ido Naor says LinkedIn users could be phished thanks to vulnerabilities in its notification system.…

Born in the cloud, only lives on Windows Server 2012, CAS servers kicked out of home Microsoft has revealed the first Preview of Exchange Server 2016.…