The Register

Don’t worry: The PM's only going to let the best boffins in... honest British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced an unlimited immigration program just days after signing Blighty's agreement to withdraw from Europe.…

If printers and nuclear reactors on the internet are fair game, so's the gizmo on your face, we'll concede Enigma You'd think virtual reality's biggest problems right now are breaking into meaningful mainstream adoption, and not making wearers of the headsets look utterly ridiculous. But no, it's possible you are wrong.…

As Chinese cities go into quarantine, investors get nervous over the lockdown of the world's workshop Stocks in a bunch of semiconductor companies dipped by four to five per cent on Monday – after China banned travel in and out of the manufacturing hub of Wuhan to isolate the new coronavirus that has already killed more than eighty people.…

'We all use other people's code' Enigma In a chilly conference room at the San Francisco's Hyatt Regency on Monday, legal and digital security pros convened at USENIX's Enigma conference to hold forth on security, privacy, and related matters.…

Dun-dun-dun, another one bites the dust Google App Maker, which lets people build simple web-based applications using a graphical user interface, will be axed early next year.…

We'll laugh at today's mandated holes in the same way we laugh at those from 25 years ago Enigma More than a quarter century after its introduction, the failed rollout of hardware deliberately backdoored by the NSA is still having an impact on the modern encryption debate.…

They’ve got money, explains American watchdog that just can’t help itself The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is under fire from lawmakers, and one of its own commissioners, for excluding New York State from a $16bn rural broadband fund that is supposed to cover every corner of the US.…

Meanwhile, probe reveals how Avast's 'anonymized' user data can be, er, deanonymized On Saturday, Google temporarily disabled the ability to publish paid Chrome apps, extensions, and themes in the Chrome Web Store due to a surge in fraud.…

It's not you, it's G An issue with Google’s online storage system, Google Drive, booted users out of the web giant’s online word processing and spreadsheets services on Monday morning, US west coast time.…

Hardened cybercrooks must be shaking in their boots A US state that was struck by a ransomware attack last year is now proposing a local law that would ban possession of malicious software.…

Though we might not hear about it straight away Huawei or another way? The British government is expected to decide tomorrow whether to include the Chinese tech giant's kit in the core of the UK's 5G networks at a meeting with the National Security Council.…

Mind you, he was instructed by HPE Autonomy trial HPE's accounting expert told the High Court that making "significant sales of hardware" and burying them in its accounts meant Mike Lynch's Autonomy may have given "the impression" sales growth "was in its core software business".…

Now all safely under BT's wing Smart phonebox firm InLinkUK went bust in December. Now, thanks to a statement of financials issued by administrators Duff & Phelps, we can peer into the troubled firm's accounts.…

Patched vuln was 'in active use', firm reveals Cisco has confessed to a vulnerability in its Webex Meetings Suite sites and Webex Meetings Online sites that allowed an "unauthenticated" attendee sitting on a workstation far, far away to join a "password-protected meeting without providing the meeting password".…

Wallpaper-stripping bug will be fixed Microsoft has quietly admitted that it will be fixing the final Windows 7 patch that left some stretched wallpapers borked.…

Photo subjects fling class-action sueball A class-action lawsuit filed late last week has accused IBM of using photos of millions of people in Illinois without informing them to build a facial-recognition dataset.…

Looks like Lucy might move the ball again There is every chance that Lucy is about to whip the football from Charlie Brown once again as a fresh NASA Authorization Bill was introduced with some significant changes to the infamous 2024 boots-on-Moon goal.…

And more waffle from the World Economic Forum Never one to hide its light under a bushel, Google came out swinging with some seriously inflated technology claims at the World Economic Forum last week.…

You want fries with that BSOD? You know how it is, you're innocently waiting for a bag of hot and delicious greasy goodness when you get unexpectedly slapped around the face with the wet fish of a Blue Screen of Death.…

'Within the next decade we'll either have it or we won't,' prof tells The Reg A new type of memory that could make computers and smartphones far more energy-efficient, if it ever reaches production, has been developed at the UK's University of Lancaster.…

40 million British pounds goes to one brave supplier of replacement Surrey County Council is shopping around for a new £40m ERP platform as the existing SAP system has been running on in-house servers for so long it is in danger of falling over.…

El Reg visits Westcott and the Isle of Wight in search of more of Britain's forgotten rocket centres Geek's Guide to Britain It is difficult to trump the long-defunct Blue Streak missile development and test facility at RAF Spadeadam for a sense of historical ennui and lost opportunity. The sheer number and scale of the remains, their dilapidated nature and isolated location make it a place unique, depressing and awe-inspiring in equal measure.…

Behold the Frankenworkstation Who, Me? As the weekend recedes, be glad you didn't find yourself in need of a fresh change of clothes like the contributor of today's entry into the Who, Me? hall of shame.…

Hey, if it's good enough for AutoCAD... Code corner Like us, you may have heard a lot recent about WebAssembly. Today, freelance software engineer Ben James walks us through its creation, its current state, and the role it will play in the future of cross-platform development.…

Derided app framework ready for broader acceptance Analysis About 150 developers gathered at the headquarters of Slack on Friday to learn about Electron.js, the open-source, cross-platform desktop app framework upon which the IRC-for-hipsters client is built.…

Also, the most detailed brain map yet took 12 years, $40m to build Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's AI roundup of news that's beyond what we've already covered, and it's mostly all about facial recognition.…

Also, Cisco, Citrix emit patches, US army advises using Signal Roundup Here comes a summary of this week's computer security news beyond what we've already covered.…

DNS overseer accepts 35,000-signature petition... and then runs away It was only going to be one rogue member, then it wasn’t happening at all, and then the entire board of DNS overseer ICANN emerged from the organization’s headquarters into Los Angeles, blinking in the bright sun, to accept a 35,000-signature petition from those opposed the sale of the .org registry.…

Virtualization giant hit with massive tech blueprint verdict VMware is set to find itself a little lighter in the wallet after losing a nearly quarter-billion dollar patent-infringement case.…

DirecTV's Spaceway-1 to head off into the void before its batteries detonate AT&T’s satellite telly service DirecTV will push one of its birds beyond its geostationary orbit – before it has a chance to explode into a million pieces.…

Unpopular opinion: Adverts are a bit more distinct with this new style, but OK, internet, you win Updated Google is under fire this week for rolling out a new design for its desktop web search results in which advertisements and normal links look almost the same.…

Pretty much the most exciting thing to come out of Fast Ring Build 19551 Microsoft ended the week with a fresh build of Windows 10 and, slightly worryingly, the killing of a Progressive Web App (PWA) project "due to some technical limitations."…

Can you hear the cloudy cash registers ringing? Atlassian, continued its march into megabucks territory with a 37 per cent year-on-year rise in revenues for the quarter as subscriptions led the way.…

Develop on Windows, deploy to Linux: an increasingly common pattern Microsoft's second preview of Visual Studio 2019 16.5, freshly flung out this week, has better Linux support for C++ developers and also includes a new designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).…

Change your passwords, ye scurvy-free non-landlubbers The Royal Yachting Association (RYA) has told members that "an unauthorised party" may have pilfered a database containing personal information from 2015.…

Punters can still run old and new gear on same network, for now Sonos has said it will continue to support legacy products in an apparent reversal of a statement made earlier this week.…

Here's what Met top brass told the press this morning In depth London's Metropolitan Police is to start routinely deploying facial-recognition tech across the English capital despite legal and public opinion challenges, the force declared this morning.…

'Its life doesn't have to end!' More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.…

From Screw you, Brits... to Up yours, Delors... Perhaps predictably, Apple has hit out against the European Parliament's renewed calls for a common charging standard. Its battle call? "It'll stifle our profits innovation."…

Courtesy of Species360 (not a move by Microsoft into the zoology space) Is your team flinging poo at visitors to your business? There's a cloud for that – as long as those doing the flinging are literal monkeys.…

TUPE or not TUPE? That is the question. Unison calls on lawyers ahead of 30 June D-Day IBMers who provide tech services to ScottishPower have voted "overwhelmingly" for industrial action in a consultative ballot over deepening uncertainty surrounding their jobs.…

And what about my buttocks, eh? Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's that hum in the office. It's getting to me.…

Hadoop slinger's big bet joins list of rivals doing the same thing When Hadoop distributor Cloudera marked a year since it signed off its merger with rival Hortonworks with the appointment of a new CEO, it was hardly a glowing endorsement of the strategy so far.…

Polishing balls for mates is no way to make a living On Call Welcome to an On Call with a difference. Today The Register retells a story familiar to all too many readers: "You know about computers, right?"…

Some engineers are just better than others... at being noticed The idea that some software developers matter more to coding projects than others is controversial, particularly among open source projects were community cohesion and participation can suffer if contributors are not treated fairly.…

'These models should not go into clinical practice at all,' academic tells El Reg A surprising number of peer-reviewed premature-birth-predicting machine-learning systems are nowhere near as accurate as first thought, according to a new study.…

Now 29-year-old faces years in the clink after long battle to bring him to justice A 29-year-old Russian scumbag has admitted masterminding the Cardplanet underworld marketplace as well as a second forum for elite fraudsters.…

What do we want?! $100. When do we want it? As soon as we finish this shift Protesters rallying outside court in Vancouver, Canada, this week in support of embattled Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou turned out to be paid actors – who said they thought they were extras for a film or music video.…

'Closed source' blueprints available for all to gawp at – and potentially exploit Source code, internal user names and passwords, and private keys, for the website and online account systems of Canadian telecoms giant Rogers have been found sitting on the open internet.…

Just don't mention the FPGAs Intel on Thursday reported $20.2bn revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019, a gain of eight per cent year-on-year, and $72bn for the full-year, a two per cent increase.…