The Register

Poor things! Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink The vast majority of technology, media and telecom (TMT) companies want to monetise customer data, but are concerned about regulations such as Europe's GDPR, according to research from law firm Simmons & Simmons.…

Programmers who reoffend risk permanent exile from the fondleslab empire Developers of apps built with the cross-platform Electron framework say that Apple has started rejecting their applications during its Mac App Store review process, and has threatened cancellation of Apple Developer Accounts for repeated rules violations.…

Transform your IT to lighten the load on developers Webcast Skilled developers are a precious asset, so organisations are understandably anxious to make the most of their valuable time in the face of competing requests and projects.…

Microsoft seems a bit hazy on what 'disable' actually means A security hole in Office for Mac can be exploited by miscreants to potentially run malicious code on victims' shiny computers without anyone noticing.…

Probe predicted to outlive Earth on five-billion-year galactic trip NASA's Voyager 2, launched to study the Solar System's outer planets, has had its first readings from interstellar space, collected after travelling more than 11 billion miles over forty years, analyzed by scientists.…

Alexa! Turn off my lights. Alexa! Alexa? Oh FFS FYI: US mega-retailer Best Buy will switch off the "smart" portion of its Insignia-branded smart home gadgets this coming Wednesday, rendering them just plain old dumb gear.…

Legal eagle denies criminally laundering hundreds of millions of dollars The trial of an American lawyer accused of moving hundreds of millions of dollars from a cryptocurrency scheme to offshore accounts kicked off on Monday this week in New York. He denies any wrongdoing.…

Plus summary of everything else announced at Windows titan's Florida shindig Ignite Microsoft has announced Azure Arc, which extends the Azure management portal to embrace services running on-premises or on other clouds.…

As US picks up its game, scumbags seek new targets A malware infection has crippled the IT operations in the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut.…

Will Amazon finally get hold of its internet namesake? Analysis Enough’s enough. That was the message from the US government this weekend at an international meeting where the creation of a new internet space – .amazon – was again the subject of heated debate.…

Register readers confirm unseen hardware took bank cards on a joyride Last week, we spoke to an Amazon customer who was for months plagued by unauthorized purchases from their account. It appeared a fraudster's smart TV had been quietly linked to the victim's profile – a gizmo not visible in the usual account settings and could not be removed by even Amazon's own support team.…

Resistance to DNS-over-HTTPS deserves investigation into info-gobbling habits Mozilla has asked American politicians to probe the data-collecting policies of US broadband giants, claiming the ISPs made false statements to derail DNS-over-HTTPS so that they can continue to snoop on subscribers' internet activities.…

How a close-knit hero-worshiping culture can make reporting abusers difficult – and how help is at hand Cassie was studying for the computer security industry qualification CISSP when the harassment started.…

Did Uncle Sam put you up to this? observers wonder GitLab is considering a ban on hiring any Russian or Chinese support staff in order to improve security.…

Microsoft revamps suite as single application Ignite Microsoft has released a public preview of a new Office for mobile devices, combining Excel, Word and PowerPoint into a single application and adding new features for quick actions such as converting images to text or creating and signing PDFs.…

Has collective amnesia about stance on end-to-end encryption The British government wants your bright ideas for improving the nation's cybersecurity because it wants to "understand the apparent lack of strong commercial rationale for investment" in locking down your shizz.…

Day after termination of Windows 7 support. Plus: First Release Candidate arrives Ignite Less than a year after it emerged that EdgeHTML was for the chop, Microsoft has delivered a Release Candidate of its shiny new Chromium-based browser.…

Join us and fellow tech pros for a morning briefing on November 20 Promo Reading about the impact of voice-powered systems is one thing, but talking through the reality with a roomful of your fellow tech pros is quite another.…

Bumps up engineer total for UK & Ireland to 4k - but is that enough? Sky's broadband and TV arm will hire 1,000 new staff members, half of whom will be engineers.…

HMRC vows to appeal IT contractor Richard Alcock has won an appeal against HMRC after the UK taxman said he owed more than £200,000 in national insurance contributions (NICs) and income tax under off-payroll rules.…

So there Outsourcing giant Infosys has told the Indian National Stock Exchange that whistleblowers have offered no evidence to go with their claims of corruption and false accounting.…

A tricorder for food is possible, but the truth is trickier Column A few hours after a meal, there's sometimes a nasty moment. The stomach does a bit of a churn, and you wonder, 'Oh god, what have I eaten?'…

Plus: Your Phone makes do without Bluetooth, Azure Sphere release date Roundup As Microsoft's Ignite shindig loomed, the gnomes of Redmond took a break from crafting PowerPoints to emit Windows builds and a new icon for Edge.…

Not many actual software companies threaten Linux now Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), says the organisation is "pivoting to focus on" risks from "non-practising entit[ies]" also known as patent trolls.…

Mostly illegible missive claims to come from tiny uninhabited island with its own TLD An Antarctic research station is asking for help after finding a message in a bottle with an indecipherable email address.…

Thank $DEITY for VPNs and, er, Service Pack 3... yeah, that's it. Service Pack 3! Who, Me? Welcome to Who, Me?, your Monday morning palate-cleansing confessional after a weekend of not worrying about the antics of users. Pop on the kettle, grab a digestive and… maybe check your bandwidth?…

Kick off your Monday with machine-learning news Roundup Hello, here’s a short but sweet round up of news from the world of machine learning beyond what we have already covered on El Reg.…

It's about serverless computing, it's in London... it's Serverless Computing London Event Whether you’re deciding which platform to opt for, or want to turbo-charge your existing serverless development efforts, you can find all the answers at Serverless Computing London this week.…

Adversarial T-shirt disguise hoodwinks machine-learning algorithms In a pleasing symmetry, boffins have used machine-learning algorithms to develop a T-shirt design that causes its wearer to evade detection by object-recognition cameras.…

Including Spanish camgirl sites spill info, domain registrars hacked Roundup Let's check out some of the more recent security happenings beyond what we've already covered.…

We've extended the call-for-papers deadline for Continuous Lifecycle London Event We’ve extended the call for papers for Continuous Lifecycle London 2020, meaning you’ve got extra time to nail down your proposals.…

FTC tells Senator staff reports are confidential The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has refused to release an infamous report into Google’s anti-competitive behavior, claiming that staff reports are exempt from America's Freedom of Information Act.…

Purchase another sign of mass consolidation by tech giants Google will pay $2.1bn to acquire Fitbit, the second largest company in the wearables market, inserting itself into a world increasingly dominated by Apple – and continuing the mass consolidation of consumer technology by the Big Three corporations; Amazon being the third party.…

Cold water poured on mystery Cold War death-ray fears Sonic attacks supposedly launched back in 2016 by dastardly Cubans on innocent US diplomats in Havana may well be psychosomatic rather than the result of technology aimed at the embassy.…

Stock crashes by 25%+ on weaker sales outlook The share price for Arista Networks has crashed after the network switch maker warned of a sudden softening to its turnover due to a "cloud titan" customer cutting back on its spending plans.…

Trial ditched because parentals weren't happy – report As if China weren't scary enough already (at least according to US prez Donald Trump), schoolkids in the country have been fitted with head-mounted gizmos to track their attention spans.…

Unfortunately, these things need internet to work The tech behind the £1bn justice system modernisation programme, intended to digitise the process against a backdrop of court closures, has been slammed by British MPs.…

From the broken world of banking to the broken world of govt IT Mark Denney has left the creaking world of banking IT to join the, er, creaking world of government IT – taking the role of interim chief digital and information officer at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.…

Disposable furniture flogger seeks data wranglers Scandi furniture emporium Ikea is seeking privacy specialists to join its office in Malmö, Sweden.…

Professional wireless buds pack interesting features, though iFixit, the Huntingdon Life Sciences of the tech world, has published its long-awaited teardown of the latest Apple earbuds (or, using the terminology of pro tea-leaves readers at Gartner, "earworn wearables").…

Yes, the chips are still down Samsung Electronics profits shrivelled up in the third quarter of 2019 thanks to the ongoing memory market downturn.…

UK.gov handout scrutinised due to boss's friendship with PM A £100,000 government grant to Jennifer Arcuri's infosec training business, Hacker House, has been flagged as "appropriate" following an investigation.…

Sexual assault reports under investigation Greater Manchester Police have confirmed they are investigating two allegations of sexual assault against Lawrence Jones, who stepped down as boss of UKFast yesterday.…

Obsidian nails it The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This time we're heading spacewards again, to The Outer Worlds to be exact, otherwise known as Halcyon, a corporate hellhole colony at the arse-end of the galaxy.…

Two countries separated by a common language The US Air Force (USAF) has declared it is awarding a contract to Raytheon thanks to its pressing need for "full ARSE compatibility", including Windows 10 support, with equipment designed for maintaining fighter jet missiles.…

Look in my eye and say that Something for the Weekend, Sir? Thrilling news: my Libra account is ready! I can barely restrain my excitement.…

In which our hero becomes an accidental expert On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's weekly cautionary tale for those who believe a good deed can ever go unpunished.…

The 'massive unseen companion' is still a mystery Astrophysicists may have discovered the smallest black hole yet – just 3.3 times the mass of our Sun – according to a new paper published in Science.…

Not bad if you have over $3 million to splash out on cloud DeepMind’s AlphaStar AI bot has reached Grandmaster level at StarCraft II, a popular battle strategy computer game, after ranking within the top 0.15 per cent of players in an online league.…

From incident response and forensics to disassemblers and debuggers, it's all covered Promo No matter how thorough your security preparations, chances are that hidden threats already lurk inside your organisation's networks. Even the most advanced security and monitoring tools can’t be solely relied upon on to keep persistent adversaries out of your systems.…