The Register

The giant group of 12 galaxies formed when the universe was just 800 million years old The oldest protocluster of galaxies found to date began clumping together some 13 billion years ago, when the universe was just 6 per cent of its current age.…

El Reg brings you the hall of shame A bank paid a rapacious reseller more than £40 for a two-metre Ethernet cable that cost just 32 pence at trade price or retailed for £4 on a popular online store, in the latest survey of UK margin mugging.…

But that didn't stop them arresting him for being drunk We all like to think that we generally try to do the right thing. However, sometimes doing the right thing is not doing anything at all.…

Ohm my God On Friday Oracle said it had invested $40m in Ampere Computing, a designer of 64-bit Arm server-class processors, run by Renée James, who coincidentally also holds a seat on Oracle's board of directors.…

Coder claims iThings older than two years can be unlocked from Apple's clutches A programmer claims to have found a way to execute arbitrary code on recent-ish iPhones and iPads, paving the way for full-blown tethered jailbreaks.…

Fragrance Direct discovers 'malicious code' that led to leakage of customer data Online merchant fragrancedirect.co.uk has confirmed a miscreant broke into its systems and made off with a raft of customers’ personal data, including payment card details.…

Financial specialist picks up part of Big Blue that eyes up quants' models, trades and more Financial specialist SS&C is buying a bunch of IBM's risk algorithm assets as Big Blue continues to offload areas of the business it deems to be non-core.…

Bigger case means we can use even more glue! Apple's new iPad is a magical machine, able to take a user back to 2016, the year of the iPhone 7. Screwdriver demons iFixit have ripped one apart to find out just how retro the thing really is.…

Reg greybeards (whispered, stage left): We remember Google is celebrating its 21st birthday today – old enough to buy its own celebratory pint in many states in the US.…

Now we're really scared Amazon is drafting proposals for the regulation of facial recognition technology.…

But are landlords going to care about a template agreement? UK mobile networks could be able to shove their kit on more of the capital's rooftops following a draft agreement put together by the Mayor of London's office.…

No new arrests, no idea what happened Sussex Police still have no clue what happened during the Gatwick drone fiasco of Christmas 2018 – though the force now claims witnesses saw two small unmanned craft over the London airport during its 30-hour shutdown.…

No word on rugby fans or armrest-hoggers Japan Airlines is reportedly adding a baby symbol to its online seat booking system, allowing passengers to pick a seat according to possible noise levels.…

But says customers at last chowing through memory stockpile Micron's revenues for its Q4 were dramatically affected by the US trade dispute with China – and Huawei in particular - as well as larger stockpiling and trade uncertainties.…

Cheer up, it might never happen. But it probably will Employee confidence in the UK has fallen for the third consecutive quarter and the number of workers actively looking for new jobs is down 8 per cent as people hunker down for the perceived storms ahead.…

*grumble* Coming over here... hogging our internets *groan* Cisco has begun live trials of its OpenRoaming technology on the Orkney islands off the north coast of Scotland, intended to allow people to move more easily between Wi-Fi hotspots.…

Oh, and there wasn't a refund policy until folk complained The AI hysteria has led to a rash of budding engineers hoping to land a cushy job somewhere in Silicon Valley.…

Ghost ship intrigue in Return of the Obra Dinn, border bureaucracy in Papers, Please The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games. Five months in, the column has left me wondering why I've burned so many of my hard-earned Register tokens on stuffing my rig with powerful hardware. Darkest Dungeon is a 2D, side-scrolling roguelike and Kenshi's graphics are straight out of 2009 – neither take a high-end machine to run and enjoy but, sure, it helps.…

You Steer-ed into some potential trouble there Exclusive A British firm whose mobile apps monitor the mental state of 35,000 British schoolchildren is having to rewrite them after researchers found hardcoded login credentials within.…

Making sense of Microsoft's dev tool family Hands On Microsoft this week opened the gates on Visual Studio for Mac 2019 8.3, a flexible development environment for .NET, and The Reg can give you the lowdown on some of the new features.…

Some people just like to take the p*ss Something for the Weekend, Sir? Excuse me while I have another slash. Aaaaaah, that's better.…

The Reg fingers a pair of €5k sluggers from the land of clogs Oculus may be bringing hand tracking to the Quest, its standalone virtual reality (VR) platform, but haptic feedback is really where things are at.…

That time when a professional turned out to be somewhat amateur On Call Friday! At last! And with Friday comes the promise of the weekend and the reality of The Register's weekly dip into the big bag of On Call experiences.…

Microsoft gazes forlornly at the halcyon days of 2018, before that release happened Ad slingers AdDuplex celebrated the impending release of Windows 10 19H2 by reporting that, yup, the 10 May 2019 Update is quietly doing the business for Microsoft.…

Back to the drawing board folks A gas giant orbiting a tiny red dwarf star thirty light years away has left astronomers baffled because it's not supposed to exist, according to a study published in Science on Thursday.…

You gotta fight for your right to paaaartake in a legal process to inform folks of snoop orders When it comes to valiant defenders of the people from American spies there are many names that spring to mind. Microsoft is perhaps not typically one of them – though Redmond, if you had forgotten, is still battling the US government in a fight over cloud subscriber privacy.…

Profile info on 5 million users, including ordering history, hashed passwords, plus driver records, exposed to miscreants Gig-economy delivery app maker DoorDash is so, so sorry this Thursday after hackers gained access to nearly five million of its customer accounts.…

DEF CON dossier reveals: You are not as secure as you imagine The Unites States' electronic ballot boxes are as vulnerable as ever to physical tampering by hackers. So says this year's DEF CON Voting Village Report, which summarizes the findings of infosec experts who picked apart the various vote-casting computer systems in use today by cities and counties around the country.…

Finally, something actually exciting happening with this mobile broadband tech For over a year, savvy journalists and policymakers have been refusing to swallow the hype around 5G, aka ultra-fast mobile broadband, pointing out some unwelcome realities about the technology.…

And, crucially, how you can thwart these next-gen miscreants and protect your org Webcast We all know there are miscreants out there looking to break into our computer systems and steal our data – we even know how it's done.…

'Me encanta América... huh, so you're a terrorist?!' Google recommends that anyone using its translation technology add a disclaimer that translated text may not be accurate.…

President facing impeachment probe, Brexit off the rails... but more importantly, your Dunkies account was potentially pwned The US state of New York is suing food chain Dunkin Donuts for what is says is an illegal lapse in computer security.…

New, faster protocol becomes a reality The latest iteration of the ubiquitous HTTP internet protocol - version 3 - has hit the web.…

San Francisco copper learns the hard way A police chase came to an untimely end this week when the officer in pursuit realised his Tesla S was about to run out of juice.…

'We understand the concerns' says Dropbox (not enough to change how it works, though) A security engineer has complained that a feature of Dropbox Paper, a document collaboration tool, leaks email addresses by design.…

Chaos merchant's failure-as-a-service tests system resilience Chaos-engineering company Gremlin has launched Scenarios – "templates of real-world outages" that make it easier to wreck your applications.…

Analyst looks for signs of hope while mobiles follow PCs down the crapper If you give any credence to the forecasts Gartner publishes on a quarterly basis and have more than a passing interest in computer sales, the latest update might have made you spit out your vodka cornflakes this morning.…

Will the last cosmonaut to launch please turn out the lights Russia bade farewell to the old "Gagarin's Start" yesterday as the last Soyuz-FG to be launched from the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan headed to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Now is a very good time to patch your estate Cisco has doled out yet more security updates for its IOS and IOS XE network operating systems, which, we are obliged to remind you, is its scheduled six-monthly patch run and not the usual "oh bugger" state of affairs.…

Someone's popular! One of the teens behind the 2015 hack on UK telco TalkTalk has been indicted in the US over a huge cryptocurrency heist.…

Gaun yersel! England's capital ranks last among the 10 largest cities in the UK for mobile network quality, according to crowdsourced mobile data researcher Tutela.…

US antitrust probe seems to hope the Chocolate Factory's best buddy will snitch Oracle's Washington policy and lobby boss has claimed that Big Red has been talking to federal investigators about its dealings with Google.…

'I am so proud of all that we have achieved in my two years' HMRC's chief digital information officer, Jacky Wright, is returning to Microsoft after two years in the role.…

Plus: 144-layer NAND coming in 2020... and a consumer-level QLC flash drive Intel has dropped the veil on its gen 2 Optane technology, code-named Barlow Pass, although the details are still light, and revealed it is developing 144-layer QLC (4bits/cell) NAND technology.…

By hiding most of the emails you get Analysis Feeling overwhelmed by the number of unread emails in your inbox? Frustrated that you had to trawl through 1,000 Slack messages before finding the one you were looking for? Unable to find the latest version of the presentation your team has to give tomorrow?…

Another ex-customer struggles to get hacked account killed off Months after The Register first wrote about TalkTalk failing to close a former customer's email address, the firm is still using the General Data Protection Regulation as an excuse for dragging its heels.…

It's not a joke, it's a programming language tuned for distributed systems At the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis, Missouri, earlier this month, Paul Chiusano, founder of Unison Computing, gave the audience a tour of Unison, an emerging programming language designed for building distributed systems.…

Book your ticket now to get a real-world intro to machine learning and analytics Event MCubed, our machine-learning conference, kicks off in London next week, and we really want you to join us for three days of practical AI and analytics.…

The 12nm Hanguang 800 chip has 17 billion transistors Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce conglomerate, revealed its first cloud AI accelerator chip on stage at its Aspara Conference held in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday.…

Three becoming one Pic Astronomers have spied a rare cosmic curiosity: three supermassive black holes appear to be on the brink of merging with one another after a gigantic galaxy collision took place, a billion light years away.…