The Register

He's only in charge of fitting them into UK airspace British drone fliers are either “clueless, careless or criminal”, according to none other than National Air Traffic Service's (NATS) head of unmanned traffic management.…

Paul Wiles: 'Clear and publicly accepted rules' needed for common data platform The Ministry of Defence has been searching the police national fingerprint database without a “clearly defined lawful basis,” the UK's biometrics commissioner has said.…

Warns deployment will go up spout if UK.gov pulls plug on controversial supplier Huawei has the most advanced tech for 5G deployment, Three's director of network strategy has said - ahead of the government's pending review into the controversial supplier's UK telecoms footprint.…

This is fine. 100 others have... fsck, I've hit a ditch Updated "You are not a lemming," said a traffic anchor of not one, not two, but reportedly about 100 people who came a cropper after following Google Maps' directions onto a muddy dirt road to avoid a road snarlup on the way to Denver Airport at the weekend.…

'We are NOT okay with it' says Architecture Lead StackOverflow, a popular resource for developers looking for code to copy and paste solutions to tricky programming issues, has been found to be serving an ad complete with JavaScript code intended to track users regardless of their privacy choices.…

UK state pension age-extender no longer forced to make ends meet on his own £1.8m pension pot Exclusive Former permanent secretary at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, Robert Devereux, is to join software giant Salesforce.…

Decommissioning to carry on while commercial interests sniff around Scottish satellite fanciers The tortured tale of the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station took another turn in recent weeks as a proposal to rescue the venerable institution suffered a setback.…

All is well in Westminster, honest Comment A group of tinfoil-hatted wackos have held a public meeting to talk about the dangers of “electromagnetic fields” and demand 5G mobile network rollouts are halted. Unfortunately for the Great British Public, those moonhowlers are elected Members of Parliament.…

Not-quite-Iranian file-wiping malware emerges as Tehran blamed for rise in cyber-attacks Not content to be the focus of the geopolitical news cycle, Iran now also finds itself in the middle of two major developments in the security world.…

More than 1 in 2 products have serious flaws, some potentially backdoors, we're told Huawei, the Chinese manufacturing giant targeted by the Trump administration as a national security threat, has some of the least secure networking products in the industry, according to Finite State.…

Join govt-backed Tech Nation’s programme for folks with big practical plans for machine-learning systems Promo Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future, with countries around the world investing heavily to compete in initiatives that apply machine-learning to solving real-world problems.…

Uncle Sam needs to step in and audit machine-learning systems, House committee told US House reps on Wednesday grilled a panel of experts on the various impacts artificial intelligence are likely to have on society, privacy, ethics, and so forth, and what can be done about it, if anything.…

Sim uncovers code-triggered hardware failure that pitches jetliner nose down Yet another deadly and baffling safety flaw has been uncovered in Boeing's 737 Max line of airplanes.…

Oh no Xi didn't! Fresh details emerge on mega-hack Fresh details have emerged revealing just how deeply Chinese government hackers plundered HPE, IBM, DXC, Fujitsu, Tata, and others, stealing corporate secrets and rifling through their customers' networks.…

Too much data slurped in October, months after snoops vowed not to do that Analysis The NSA illegally gathered a trove of American citizens' phone and text message records just four months after it promised it had taken steps to literally not do that again.…

SEV code cracked to leak secret keys Updated Microchip slinger AMD has issued a firmware patch to fix the encryption in its Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology (SEV), used to defend the memory of Linux KVM virtual machines running on its Epyc processors.…

Ex-chief exec enters witness box, points finger at beancounters Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch, former CEO of Autonomy, today told a court, “I was not involved in the vast majority of transactions,” that HP claims added up to a $5bn fraud it uncovered after buying the company from Lynch and then-CFO Sushovan Hussain.…

Far away, my Office is calling... Outlook alerts do chime The Welsh, it seems, just cannot get enough of Microsoft as 100,000 NHS staff across the country are set to receive a bucketload of the company's productivity wares.…

5 men, 1 woman nabbed European cops have cuffed six people for typosquatting – in this case spoofing a well known cryptocurrency exchange – and allegedly making off with €24m worth of Bitcoin tokens.…

Don't worry, Fujitsu is on the case A digital or "smart" solution to the Irish border problem is possible in the next three years if Europe agrees to a Brexit transition period, the "Alternative Arrangements Commission" Technical Panel has told MPs.…

Casts an eye over biz's agreements with 7 of its main customers Updated The European Commission is rolling up its sleeves and once again donning its tight plastic gloves, as it begins another probe into a chip designer – this time Silicon Valley-based Broadcom.…

Thanks in large part to a counter-phishing product. Doh! The criminals behind the Wipro phishing attack from earlier this year also targeted Western Union, Expedia, Rackspace and a whole host of other big companies, according to threat intel outfit RiskIQ.…

Oh alright then, we'll take your money – if we must Microsoft finally joined the likes of Google and Apple and admitted that, yes, users might want more storage while also upping the security on its file shack.…

Cough... Yep, profits down 78% in our car crash Q3 financials... cough Micron has begun to supply a "subset" of DRAM to Huawei in the past fortnight after discovering those products are not covered by the sanctions that prevent Chinese firms buying components from US suppliers.…

Ahem, correlation DOES NOT imply causation. Obviously... Analysis If you live in a city where people are more likely to make racist remarks on Twitter, there's apparently a high chance that there are increased rates of racially motivated hate crimes, too.…

Tsk, tsk... look at you getting accustomed to double digits, chides analyst The three pillars of tech infrastructure - servers, storage and networking - are selling like lukewarm cakes as sectoral heat dissipates.…

Previous price cap of £180 per visit reduced to, er, exactly zero DXC Technology's UK staffers have had their wings clipped by the imposition of some stringent belt tightening - all travel must now be authorised before personnel can visit other sites, including customers.…

Plastic-fantastic Moon shenanigans for Reg hack Hands On One of the more delightful side effects of the current obsession with Apollo 11 at 50 has been the arrival of nerd-pleasing Lego. Today, an injured Vulture had a crack at building his own very Lunar Module.…

We talk real-world examples with OSIsoft, Axens, MOL Group Sponsored webcast While many organisations are still gazing in marvel at the inelegantly named Internet of Things, the technology world has been making big strides in the area of routinely handling data from thousands of pieces of equipment.…

Present in more than 1 in 10 top websites (and yes, greed covers them all) Dark patterns – user interfaces designed to deviously manipulate people into doing things – have become common enough on websites and in apps that almost two dozen providers have sprung up to supply behavior persuasion as a service.…

Tally ho, you can call me Buckyballs, what what Astrophysicists have found the single largest molecule yet floating in the interstellar medium, the soup of matter and radiation that floods space in between all of the universe’s objects.…

Now for deep-diving Congress hearings... LMAO JK JK they will do nothing A US Senate probe has once again outlined the woeful state of computer and information security within Uncle Sam's civil service.…

Funnily enough, she was keen to slash infrastructure investment red-tape A telecoms CEO and one-time adviser to FCC boss Ajit Pai will spend as much as the next half-decade behind bars after being convicted of wire fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft.…

Now gimme that 4K HD live stream of kittens Analysis The weather forecasters responsible for letting millions knowing about weather patterns, including hurricanes and tornadoes, have warned yet again that plans to auction off radio spectrum for 5G mobile networks could have a dangerous impact on their efforts.…

Meanwhile, staff face cuts – and doesnotexist.com may not exist by next year Oracle is sharpening its ax for the Dyn networking biz it acquired in 2016, with plans to slash jobs and switch off services.…

Happy to admit I did a great job, says alleged firefighter-arsonist. Um, nope, says judge A programmer facing up to 10 years in the cooler, and as much as $250,000 in fines, blew his guilty plea deal on Monday – after he tried to avoid admitting full blame for his actions.…

Feds are asking Huawei too much from us, complains shipping giant upset it has to police every package FedEx is suing the US government to escape the burden of policing packages (cough, cough, tech materials) sent abroad (ahem, ahem, China).…

SIEMless pitch, amirite? Amazon Web Services has wheeled out its Security Hub – a SIEM aggregator product – in an effort to snaffle some of the lucrative cloud SIEM market for itself.…

Can I swap out the card? Then fsck the upgrade A dip in the Chinese economy and consumers exploiting lower-priced GPUs to upgrade rather than replace their desktop rigs has led to slowdown in sales of gaming systems.…

Best before end? Who reads those things anyway? Date formatting is one of the many banes of a programmer's existence. Pity, therefore, the Tesco customer presented with a date in the Julian format.…

Complaint claims rival Tanium's hires took deal data with them McAfee is suing former senior salespeople whom it alleges stole company trade secrets when they moved to a rival security vendor.…

Over in proprietary land, musical chairs a thing at Microsoft too as former Windows Insider-in-chief quits To lose one board member may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness, but to lose three?…

Heartbeat rhythms could be the next biometric authentication method Biometric systems could use the unique patterns from a person's ECG reading for biometric sign-ons.…

Handy features in the Store applications, but the underlying infrastructure changes matter more Hands On Microsoft's new terminal app is now available in the Windows Store - so naturally your Vultures took it for a spin.…

Although third time unlucky as the centre stage enjoys an explosive landing SpaceX's Falcon Heavy turned night into day this morning as the monster rocket successfully hauled itself from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A.…

Long delayed Emergency Services Network probably not helping UK police might not agree on how to measure the success of technology used on the beat, but three-quarters of them want better mobile kit - and more of it.…

Even govt rules have knock-on effects, warns Andrew Sullivan Interview Andrew Sullivan, chief exec of the Internet Society, has condemned governments that "interfere in underlying technologies that people are allowed to build," as regulators increasingly target net infrastructure to enforce their visions of how the online world ought to be.…

Meanwhile in the home, it's all Google, Amazon, Apple… Analysis The smart home and internet-of-things market has long suffered from a plethora of protocols and standards: from X10 and ZigBee, to LightwaveRF, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, HomeKit, Weave, and Brillo. This month, however, we may finally have found a winner. Or, at least, a co-winner.…

May mean humans can travel to and infect alien worlds using cryotanks of reproductive cells Humans may be able to colonize space after all, as a new study shows frozen sperm seems to be unaffected by the effects of microgravity.…

Revealed: Long-running espionage campaign targets phone carriers to snoop on VIPs' location, call records Hackers infiltrated the networks of at least ten cellular telcos around the world, and remained hidden for years, as part of a long-running tightly targeted surveillance operation, The Register has learned. This espionage campaign is still ongoing, it is claimed.…