The Register

Local regulator says it hasn't approved scheme. Meanwhile, Spain up to similar tricks The Belgian city of Kortrijk in West Flanders is reportedly using data provided by a mobile phone company to count the number of people present in the town and where they come from.…

Wife takes the reins pending investigation Lawrence Jones, founder and boss of Manchester hosting provider UKFast, has stepped down while an internal investigation probes allegations of sexual assault, harassment and bullying made against him.…

Data-fetching scheme seems to be catching on At the GraphQL Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Matt DeBergalis, co-founder and CTO at data plumbing biz Apollo GraphQL, urged companies to appoint a data graph champion to help ease the implementation of GraphQL, a query language for fetching data.…

UK climate change minister sets phasers to 'WTF' The UK government has insisted it is "confident" it will meet the new smart meter rollout date, despite the project now running four years late and £2.5bn over budget.…

Plus: Solution to 250g drone weight limit is 249g drone The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has caved in on its slow-motion disaster of a drone database – by asking flier associations to email it details of their members in a spreadsheet.…

All is forgiven! The Ministry of Justice is to hand over £800m of British taxpayer's dosh to scandal-hit Serco in return for 10 years' worth of outsourced prisoner escort and custody services.…

Don't get too excited, though – we need quintillions of these things Video Scientists have built microscopic primitive robots that can swim in wastewater and remove radioactive uranium, in the hopes that they can one day be used to clean up nuclear spills for humans.…

Snap-happy handset also packs massive 5,170mAh battery Phone launches are usually leakier than an Ikea colander, and the release of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro is no exception.…

Prof tells El Reg it could be on the marketplace after two to three years of testing The dream of charging an electric car in just ten minutes can be achieved in the not too distant future, according to a paper published in the journal Joule on Wednesday.…

How to make friends and influence people, 2019 Edition On Tuesday, Don HO, the developer of Notepad++, a free GPL source code editor and notepad application for Microsoft Windows, released version 7.8.1, prompting a social media firestorm and a distributed denial of service attack.…

Scumbags admit extorting $100k from taxi app biz Two men have confessed they siphoned confidential information from databases hosted in the Amazon cloud, and then demanded payment to delete their copies of the data.…

Lawmakers, ISPs and cable companies all vying to get a piece of the action Analysis It’s amazing how a couple of billion dollars focuses the mind.…

Oher sofwae ikey hi y egession in uggy opeaing syse Twitter says a bug in macOS 10.15.1 aka Catalina stops users of the social network's desktop Mac app from entering certain letters in account password fields.…

It’s almost as if social media giant has ill-considered, naive, spectacularly stupid policies Comment Facebook’s controversial policy to exempt political ads from factual review has taken another dive after the social media giant appeared to state it gets to decide which politicians the policy applies to.…

Go Zuck yourself, fam Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are today busy deleting the personal profiles of employees at NSO Group amid an ongoing legal battle.…

RCEs and all sorts of other vulns plugged, so get installing Apple has released patches for the hated macOS Catalina – but not to fix the operating system's UI failures. These are security updates also affecting iOS and Apple Watches, and include one that prevents a remote attacker from executing code on your iThings.…

It's Donald Trump's favourite company, according to numbercrunchers The disruptive campaign against Huawei might be in full flow in the US and to an extent Europe, but in its homeland of China, the company's smartphone business is swelling to record proportions.…

Two Books, 600 nits – another is first to feature Intel's Lakefield chippery (Soz, Microsoft) Yesterday, at its developer conference, Samsung announced three new laptops: a pair of notebooks certified by Intel's Project Athena programme, the Galaxy Book Flex and Galaxy Book Ion, as well as a machine that uses Intel's new Lakefield chipsets, the Galaxy Book S.…

CEO apologises for ill-considered proposal GitLab has swiftly backtracked on plans to add telemetry services to track usage of its products.…

Antisocial network accepts Cambridge Analytica wrist slap Facebook has ended its appeal against the UK Information Commissioner's Office and will pay the outstanding £500,000 fine for breaches of data protection law relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.…

We need your insights, please – and it'll take just a few minutes Reader survey Do you work in financial services? Are you plugged into conversations about all of the extra unstructured content flying around your organization as a result of everything "going digital?"…

Backlog not helped by spike in applications to dodge fee hike An IT glitch has contributed to a backlog in the number of UK probate applications, with users still reporting huge delays in the processing of their wills and probate grants.…

Just don't ask how many actually use it Atlassian-owned list-maker Trello is in celebratory mood as it trumpets the 50 millionth user registration as well as the advent of more templates, automation and the dead hand of AI.…

Chief Linux maintainer job is all about reading many, many, many emails, and 'saying no' Linux inventor (and chief maintainer) Linus Torvalds says that the kernel is getting more reliable, and he is not anxious about it being used in safety-critical systems.…

Acquisition cracks Europe for US data centre giant US data centre biz Digital Realty is proposing a takeover of Dutch colocation flogger Interxion for an eye-popping $8.4bn.…

Unsurprisingly, commish thought that, in fact, they could do better The European Commission has published its first year of reports from platforms including Google, Microsoft, Twitter and seven European trade associations on how they are countering disinformation.…

>>>FREE STUFF HERE<<< Amazon has been rapped by Britain's advertising watchdog after its baffling online payments page duped customers into signing up for an Prime subscription as they tried to pay for goods.…

The hero that drives 62% uptick in wearables to *squints* $52bn, according to Gartner The wearables market is popping, if you believe the latest report from entrail prodders at Gartner: the sector will might be worth an impressive $52bn by 2020, up from $32bn in 2018.…

Still tickets left, still time to book – check out our line-up of experts and workshops Event Our Serverless Computing London conference opens in a week, which means you’ve got plenty of time to secure your spot.…

ExplicitKeyTrustEvaluator... True, false? Who cares, just accept it anyway Security flaws have been found in the European Union's electronic identity system that could have been exploited by miscreants to impersonate member states' citizens online.…

Strong Ryzen, Epyc performance hampered by slow sales for semi-custom AMD saw strong desktop and server processor sales tempered by a dip in its trade of semi-custom games console chips.…

Please don't forget to HONK deserialize your data safely HONK Fans of Untitled Goose Game should update their copy of the indie smash-hit following the discovery of a bug that can lead to malicious save files hijacking players' systems.…

1,400 folks, including human-rights bods, unlawfully spied on it is claimed Updated Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary on Tuesday sued NSO Group alleging the Israel-based spyware maker unlawfully hacked smartphones using a vulnerability in the popular chat app.…

Pentests, audits, and RAM-only servers part of lockdown plan 2019 has been a bad year for NordVPN on the security front.…

Crawler bots to snub animated content starting this year Google plans to help Adobe's Flash exercise its right to be forgotten – by gradually stripping the animated content from its search index, starting some time later this year.…

A whole new spin on facial recognition Proving that satire is truly dead, the Australian government hopes to use facial recognition technology to check Aussies are over 18 before ogling online smut.…

Well, their version of it won't, they claim Chrome devs have had a little rant about "misinformation", repeating that DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) will be supported but won't necessarily be automatically used in upcoming builds of the browser.…

Join us and Qumulo next month to explore and discuss digital strategy to data practicality Webcast Let’s keep this simple. You’re looking to move to the cloud because you know just how powerful the model can be. You’ve seen what's possible when you harness the wealth of data now available to your applications. You’re looking to deliver on your digital transformation goals, respond to new business opportunities, and disrupt your entire market.…

Redmond hauls management software cloudwards Microsoft has rolled out the cloud-based version of its venerable project management software, Project, along with a new basic subscription option.…

With your hands Workers at Thames Water have shifted a 40-tonne fatberg – slightly more than three double-decker buses – from a sewer in south London.…

Meanwhile, Nicky Morgan hints at imminent decision on Huawei in UK's 5G infrastructure UK mobile operators will be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual turnover if they fail to meet the coverage obligations of the £1bn Shared Rural Network plans, digital secretary Nicky Morgan has claimed.…

Speculative execution bugs will be with us for a very long time Linux kernel dev Greg Kroah-Hartman reckons Intel Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) - also known as hyper-threading - should be disabled for security due to MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) bugs.…

In two months? That was quick Just two months after GlobalFoundries started legal action against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the pair have reached a 10-year patent-sharing agreement.…

The first two letters sent that day were 'L' and 'O' – what should the third have been? It is 50 years today since the first message was sent on the ARPANET, a precursor of the internet as we know it today.…

ZTE also on hit list Ajit Pai, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has devised a two-part scheme to erase Chinese hardware from American telecoms networks.…

No pressure to don sweatband and suddenly start jogging Unlike the seeming majority of wearables (including those from Apple, Fitbit, and Huawei), the resurrected Moto 360 smartwatch isn't targeted at fitness enthusiasts.…

The case certainly rings a bell back in Europe Australia's consumer watchdog is pursuing Google over claims the megacorp has misled people about what data it collects and processes via its mobile operating system, Android.…

Probing contraband mobes to reduce prison crimes The UK Ministry of Justice is setting up a digital forensics lab to probe mobile phones seized from prisoners.…

Happy Halloween, folks! Round Up While the past seven days were light on launches, space fans had plenty to enjoy, with the Air Force's mystery mini Space Shuttle finally returning from space and the James Webb Space Telescope inching closer to blast-off.…

Hauliers thin on the ground, apparently Plans to restore an aged IBM mainframe found in a disused building in Germany are on hold because of struggles to find a way to haul the hardware to the UK.…