The Register

Remember the UK DeepMind scandal? No? Updated Google is at it again: storing and analyzing the health data of millions of patients without seeking their consent - and claiming it doesn’t need their consent either.…

Blame the algorithms - it's the new 'dog ate my homework' Apple is being probed by New York’s State Department of Financial Services after angry customers accused the algorithms behind its new credit card, Apple Card, of being sexist against women.…

Admins snoozing on patching despite reports of active attacks The flurry of reports in recent weeks of in-the-wild exploits for the Windows RDP 'BlueKeep' security flaw had little impact among those responsible for patching, it seems.…

Uber PRs missing the days of Travis Kalanick Opinion Two years ago, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was brought in to help the company recover from a long series of ethical and moral lapses. But based on an interview this week, it seems the company’s culture may be rubbing off on him more than he is impacting it.…

Educational institutions main target during September spike Kasperksy researchers have blamed pesky schoolkids for the big September spike in denial-of-service attacks.…

Gather round for this must-watch vid podcast Webcast The Register's storage editor Chris Mellor will interview Qumulo veep Molly Presley in a webcast set to be streamed on 19 November.…

Live from Cape Canaveral: El Reg watches Falcon do its stuff while astronomers worry about the skies The first upgraded batch of Starlink satellites were launched by SpaceX today, marking the fourth reuse of a Falcon 9 booster and the first of a payload fairing.…

Not even data recovery companies A data recovery company is dubiously claiming it has cracked decryption of Dharma ransomware – despite there being no known method of unscrambling its files.…

Just saying Political parties should extend the rights of the self-employed ahead of the country's general election on 12 December, including scrapping IR35 off-payroll working rules and addressing late payments.…

Budge up, CityFibre Vodafone has inked a deal with BT's Openreach to expand its gigabit broadband network by 500,000 premises – on top of its existing deal with alternative network provider CityFibre for 5 million premises.…

Put it all on the cloud, they said… Microsoft's Azure DevOps is suffering what it describes as "availability degradation" in the UK and Europe and parts of Google's cloud platform are also broken.…

Snooping workers blamed for bunch of data breaches One UK police staffer is disciplined every three days for breaking data protection rules or otherwise misusing IT systems, according to a Freedom of Information request by think tank Parliament Street.…

iGiant paid for Irish educators to attend events abroad – report Apple has reportedly been paying for Irish teachers to attend functions in the US, according to leaked docs.…

Apollo 12 @ 50 is just around the corner, but it wouldn't have happened without Apollo 4 "Our building's shaking here, our building's shaking! Oh it's terrific... the building's shaking! This big blast window is shaking! We're holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go... enter the clouds at 3,000ft! Look at it going... you can see it, you can see it..."…

Plus: New toys for Teams, a fresh Visual Studio Code, and more Roundup Despite it being Ignite week for much of Microsoft, there was still plenty going on in the house that Bill built.…

From a time before: 'This will do something awful. Are you sure? (Y/N)' Who, Me? Welcome back to Who, Me?, The Register's weekly dip into the suspiciously bulging mailbag of reader confessions.…

Plus, rConfig flaw raises alarms Roundup Time for a look at some of the other security stories making the rounds in the past week.…

Also Uber to Waymo - I wish I could quit you! Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's roundup of AI news. Read on for a fun and, frankly worrying, quiz that tests if you can tell if something was made up by an AI text generation model or said by Trump, and more.…

Code hosting company considers risk of pressure to betray customer data too great GitLab's director of global risk and compliance, Candice Ciresi, has resigned from the company, accusing the code hosting biz of engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior.…

Rare sign of criminal justice system actually working for these kinds of cases A man from Virginia has been handed a six year prison sentence for stalking and threatening two ex-girlfriends with revenge porn pictures and video clips.…

Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats not happy with Ajit Pai It’s been 18 months since it emerged that US mobile companies were selling the location data to their tens of millions of users with little or no oversight, and Congress wants to know what the hell the FCC is doing about it.…

It's like thunder, lightning, the way you code me is frightening Machine learning algorithms can predict when and where lightning will strike, according to new research published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.…

Also organizational chaos, secrecy and self-regulation Key details about the failure of Europe’s Galileo satellite system over the summer have started to emerge - and it’s not pretty.…

Boffins build search engine based on feelings expressed about programming interfaces Developers looking for guidance about APIs may wish to try a search engine prototype called Opiner to assess how their peers feel about specific programming interfaces, based on a limited set of data pulled from Stack Overflow.…

Tsinghua Unigroup chairman says American firms could do more to ease trade tensions One of China's largest chipmakers is calling on corporations in the United States to bring more pressure to bear on President Trump to end his trade row with the Middle Kingdom.…

'We're still good pals,' says Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raiberts, chief executive of Boston Dynamics, has admitted tipping a toddler in his quest to probe how humans balance.…

Supreme Court wraps up legal submissions from supermarket and breach victims "Cutting to the chase, it's not a case where the office cleaner finds a thumb drive, picks it up and takes the opportunity to make some use of it," barrister Jonathan Barnes told the Supreme Court as he urged judges to dismiss Morrisons' appeal against liability for its 2014 payroll data breach.…

(Tech adoption x tech capability ) ^ trust, anyone? Ignite Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came as close to a "developers developers developers" dance as he is ever likely to during this year's Ignite.…

Home broadband, mobile data package part of IP-only move BT has launched a new 5G mobile and fixed-line home broadband service, dubbed Halo, in a bid to muscle into the converged market.…

Meet Gordon, a man who knows all about job losses, uncertainty and bankers Where one Hoff once claimed victory for helping to tear down the iron curtain, the real Hoff – Gordon, an exec at DXC – is seeking to erect new barriers with the EU.…

Team chilling over weekend to pick it back up on Monday The Bloodhound land speed team hit 500mph (804kmph) yesterday but had to call off today's target of 550mph (885kmph) after an engine temperature warning.…

All that is needed is an email inbox, say civil servants The UK Home Office insists that a new law forcing it to create a new registration system for potentially millions of deactivated firearms and their owners will need neither a new database nor more public spending.…

And how I got blackmailed by a computerised French lesson Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hello Mister Dabbs, yes? I am calling from Microsoft Windows organisation, yes? I am calling to advise you of a security problem with your Microsoft, yes?"…

It's got another display on the back and everything Are smartphones getting interesting again? For the longest time, handsets occupied the same tedious rectangular form-factor. The sole areas of differentiation were found in the components under the hood.…

If there's anything that gets my backup ... On Call Friday is here! A chance to slope off early, enjoy a few brews and look back on a week of hard work. Unless, of course, you are one of the unfortunate souls destined to be forever at the beck and call of users. Bask in the fact that it's not you as you peruse this latest instalment of On Call.…

Email scans try to spot brain damage before it kills you Machine-learning algorithms might be able to work out if your brain is turning to mush from end-stage liver disease just by reading your emails, according to preliminary experiments.…

Taking a leaf from nature Video Scientists have fashioned an unsinkable type of metal by etching the surface with lasers, creating an unusual “superhydrophobic” layer.…

Reformed JavaScript killer now useful on the command line Google software engineers have delivered Dart 2.6, an update to the open source programming language that provides the ability to create self-contained, native executables for the major desktop operating systems.…

But sure, it's Huawei that's the big security threat Staff were cuffed in a police raid on Thursday at the offices of US surveillance equipment vendor Aventura Technologies. The workers are now facing criminal charges for allegedly passing off Chinese-made gear as stuff built in America, and selling it to Uncle Sam and its military.…

Beak denies wrongdoing in baffling malware probe case A judge in the US state of Georgia is facing hacking charges after she allegedly hired private investigators to look into what she believed was a spyware infection on her office computer.…

Mobile app SDKs sport dodgy crypto defaults, set bad examples – updates available It has been revealed that Adobe's Experience Platform mobile SDKs, used to create apps that interact with the company's cloud services, until recently contained sample configuration files that created insecure default settings.…

You didn't ask for it, we didn't tell you about it, but hey, it clears GDPR so what you gonna do? Ubiquiti Networks is fending off customer complaints after emitting a firmware update that caused its UniFi wireless routers to quietly phone HQ with telemetry.…

Tales from the coal face as experts reflect on what can possibly go wrong on the job Analysis It has been six weeks since Coalfire's Gary Demercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested in Dallas County, Iowa, while performing a paid-for security penetration test at a courthouse. Despite everyone acknowledging there was no foul play, the pair still face criminal charges. They deny any wrongdoing.…

Data analytics helps to boost contributions by 151% GitHub's annual "State of the Octoverse" report shows that Python has overtaken Java as the second-most popular language after JavaScript, based on the primary language of repository contributors.…

A swappable battery would be icing on the cake, though The Surface Pro X is in the hands of US users and the iFixit crew has already ripped into it. The repairability results might please Microsoft's legions of loyalists but give iPad fanbois pause for thought.…

From legacy migrations to data management, the cloud has its perks and pitfalls Webcast You’re counting down the days until you can finally pull the plug on your expensive and inelegant on-premises servers. Like countless businesses before you, you’re embracing the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud.…

Debut adventure of tween occultist goes for $150,000 A first-edition copy of history's most influential takedown of creationism has sold for $564,500 at auction, the highest amount yet for the tome.…

Only 18% of mobile users across world will have access to 5G in next 5 years China will dominate the global 5G market by 2025, along with the US, Japan and Korea, leaving Europe to lag behind, according to a study by global mobile operator data-wranglers at GSMA's Intelligence branch.…

Windows and Office teams shun Xamarin in favour of JavaScript/C++ solution Ignite Microsoft has hinted that cross-platform development framework React Native is a key solution to the problem of writing applications that span both Windows and mobile.…

Supermarket takes appeal to most senior legal eagles Brit supermarket Morrisons is arguing in the Supreme Court that it shouldn't be held vicariously liable for the actions of a rogue employee who stole and leaked the company's payroll.…