The Register

Automattic's premium hosting service goes TITSUP: Total Inability To Serve Usual Pages Updated News websites and other top sites have fallen over, or reverted to 2002-era my-first-blog themes, after their hosting platform, WordPress.com's premium VIP Go service, broke down today.…

My God, it's full of... really dense metal? Eggheads in Texas have discovered a huge, dense mass lurking beneath an enormous crater on the Moon.…

Chipzilla smacks lips with eyes fixed on the cloud biz Intel is acquiring custom network chip maker Barefoot Networks in a broadside that just might rattle arch-rival Broadcom.…

EMEA and UK teams to colocate in Uxbridge, local MP shakes fist at stalled Brexit Canon is to shutter its Reigate office in deepest Surrey in favour of the unbridled glamour of Uxbridge.…

Also, decoding the Donald and opening up BEAM Roundup Presidential frothing over NASA's direction was swiftly wiped from the walls last week while ESA continued quietly progressing towards new rockets and vehicles.…

'Time to grow up,' says geek behind breach database Troy Hunt, inventor and operator of the popular security website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), is putting the service up for sale.…

Russian bloke's heroics rewrite survival guides the world over If you go down to the woods today, do it somewhere nice like the Forest of Dean* and definitely not Siberia, where a 30-year-old bloke only escaped with his life because he bit the tongue off the bear mauling him.…

Rights groups slam UK.gov's customer due diligence plans The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and UK Open Rights Group have responded to an HM Treasury consultation on money laundering legislation, in particular to the suggestion that publishing open-source software should be subject to customer due diligence requirements.…

Taxpayers taken for 'mugs' as UK.gov contract awards surface Updated AWS has been accused of treating the British public like "mugs" after it emerged HMRC splashed £11m with the cloud giant last year, more than six times the amount it received in corporation tax from the US firm.…

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system is not happy. Not happy at all Hundred of flights were cancelled and aircraft grounded stateside over the weekend due to a mystery GPS glitch.…

Learn the secret of two-pizza teams and other aids to creating an agile environment Promo Amazon Web Services has launched a series of videos to provide an insider’s view of how the cloud can help businesses stay one step ahead of their competitors.…

And using browser privacy extensions may just make matters worse Boffins from Graz University of Technology in Austria have devised an automated system for browser profiling using two new side channel attacks that can help expose information about software and hardware to fingerprint browsers and improve the effectiveness of exploits.…

Bottle-counting machine-learning software demoed at Business Applications Summit Microsoft has crafted a thing called AI Builder, a visual tool to inject some degree of artificial intelligence into programs created using the tech giant's low-code application builder PowerApps.…

'If we were put under any pressure by any country that we felt was wrong, we would prefer to close the business' The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday asked experts whether Huawei poses a threat to national security. It was a question the answers to which exposed the many problems with trying to ban a manufacturer that’s been a part of the country’s telecommunications landscape for nearly two decades.…

Browser will remain gratis, optional $$-per-month services to be offered later this year Mozilla is planning to launch a suite of paid-for subscription services to complement its free and open-source Firefox browser in October.…

That story we broke in May? It is still true – and perhaps even worse than first thought The US Customs and Border Patrol today said hackers broke into one of its bungling technology subcontractors – and made off with images of people and their vehicle license plates as they passed through America's land border.…

America's highest court agrees to mull over whether lawsuit can proceed The US Supreme Court will dig into an Intel retirement plan that one unhappy former staffer says wrongly invested in risky funds and led to big losses in his savings.…

Wondering why your inbox was so clear? Bad news… Symantec is working to restore its Email Security.cloud service following a major slowdown that has lasted throughout the US morning and into the afternoon.…

BGP leaks are common but don’t usually take hours to fix... Comment Yet another large interweb routing blunder has prompted internet engineers to stress the need for additional security at the network's foundational layer, and again raised eyebrows at the behavior of China Telecom.…

Welsh scumbag sent down after trying to blackmail Brit ISP's then-CEO A Welsh man who hacked British ISP TalkTalk in 2015 and siphoned off subscribers' personal data has been sent down for four years.…

Suffer no more interruptions and downtime: Book a demo session today – and check out the research Sponsored From offices and hospitals to factories, hotels and universities, all say more wireless devices than ever are joining their networks.…

It is acronym Monday as WCF and WF get OSS projects Microsoft has reiterated its position that "if it ain't Core you should code with it no more" by distributing a list of what is in and out of its open-source take on .NET.…

Because nobody really likes spreadsheets Salesforce is buying data visualisation specialist Tableau for $15.7bn as it looks to up its analytics game.…

Mark Curran can't wait to join 'interesting' IT meltdown bank TSB, the bank that put the "down" into "meltdown", has appointed Mark Curran as director of Technology Transformation.…

Beautiful machines will get a second lease of life British industrial computing specialist Captec has acquired the assets and intellectual property of London-based Aleutia – a maker of tiny, fanless PCs that's been quietly sinking into obscurity.…

Azure Kubernetes Service reaches China, and did we mention Flight Simulator? Roundup Last week as always saw some new Windows, new toys in Azure and, more importantly, the teasing of a new Flight Simulator.…

GTS to shoulder third of cuts, with UK and DACH hit hardest The Global Technology Services division at IBM will bear the brunt of the latest round of bloodletting in Europe, according to a letter from the organisation that helps impacted employees navigate redundancy.…

Microsoft gets nervous, dumps burden of consent on users Microsoft has begun rolling out an update to the Photos app in Windows 10 that prompts you to confirm "all appropriate consents from the people in your photos and videos", in order to use facial recog to find snaps of your friends and loved ones.…

Plus, Citrix catches sueball after employee data hacked Roundup It wasn't just fake CIA agents, database mega-hacks and Bing flings in the security world last week. Here are a few tidbits beyond what you've read in El Reg.…

Your rapid-fire guide to machine-learning bits and bytes Roundup It's been a busy seven days in the world of AI, what with Facebook purloining a database of 3D objects to use in its AI projects, and boffins writing software to produce machine-learning models tiny enough to operate inside microcontrollers. But here's a round-up of news nuggets beyond what we've already covered.…

Don't call McKinsey! El Reg can save you $$s by asking our best resource: readers DXC Technology exec veep and GM of the Build division Ed Ho says the organisation has yet to "define its brand" more than two years after the new corporate entity lurched into being.…

It isn't only birds that like nesting Who, Me? Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of Monday. What better way to start your week than combining it with the latest confession of wrongdoing from The Register readership in the form of our weekly Who, Me? column.…

Kaspersky warns of fake 'dirty agent' scam circulating Fraudsters are posing as CIA investigators gone rogue in emails to marks, offering to take bribes to drop bogus investigations into the recipients and claims of online pedophilia, according to Kaspersky.…

Encrypting web queries makes it more difficult to block underage sexual abuse images Analysis Since last year, organizations like Cloudflare, Google and Mozilla have been working to encrypt DNS queries by implementing a protocol called DNS over HTTPS, one of a handful of related web specs that aim to close privacy gaps that can expose network requests to potential scrutiny.…

That three-year anniversary party took a dark turn Samsung has killed off its Joyent public cloud – its unsuccessful answer to Amazon and Google's public cloud services – almost three years to the day after it acquired the biz.…

Planner5D wants lots of Zuck's bucks as compensation Facebook used a purloined database of 3D objects for its AI projects, according to a Lithuanian company that spent years and millions of dollars compiling the dataset.…

$22,500 a day to breath, eat and exercise, $50 per GB for data, $11,250 to pee and sleep NASA on Friday said it is opening the International Space Station for commercial business, a policy change expected to lead to employees of private companies working aboard the ISS as early as next year, with tourists to follow.…

Turns out people are not that great at tracking thousands of variables American upstart Databricks, established by the original authors of the Apache Spark framework, reckons its open-source machine-learning management engine MLflow is ready for prime time.…

German cartel office had warned of Big Blue's dominant position if tie-up went ahead The proposed buy of T-Systems' mainframe unit by IBM has withered amid competition concerns from the German cartel office.…

If you want to use offline files then you need to, er, stay online Microsoft Office users, eagerly upgrading to the latest and greatest version of the company's productivity suite, have found that the venerable Offline Files function has gone, er, offline.…

Scam warning slipped into Blighty's favourite greasefest Today is National Fish and Chip* Day, and tech giant Microsoft has wasted no time wading in with the police to school the UK about phishing scams.…

Cisco-botherer grows its Spline Switch-making Cisco nemesis Arista Networks has unveiled its first campus leaf switches and first Wi-Fi 6 access points, aimed at offices at the edge of the network.…

Pavel Durov heads into the desert of his soul for inspiration It's coming up to 1pm, you haven't eaten a morsel in seven hours, and you've been smashing your head against the same work problem for the last two. What do you do?…

Only the essentials: liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and... cargo pants, maybe? In a move that will strike fear into the hearts of those poor souls charged with stuffing tat into boxes, the possibility of sticking an Amazon fulfilment centre on the Moon was mooted in a fireside chat with Jeff Bezos.…

Cinia, MegaFon expect to start work in the fourth quarter Finnish network operator Cinia and Russian mobile giant MegaFon are planning to lay a telecommunications cable across the Arctic Sea.…

What could your business do with machine learning? Events If you want to get on top of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science this autumn, here’s a tip - save £100s by grabbing a blind bird ticket for our AI-focused MCubed conference before our offer expires on Monday.…

A rinky tinky tinky

That feel when 'beating heart' of your project returns a 404 Game designer Jason Rohrer has had a bad week, discovering that his 23 code repositories representing 15 years of development and community contributions were wiped from GitHub.…

Number One, send in another Away Team On Call Friday is upon us once again, and as the week disappears into the rear-view mirror we have another tale from those princes and princesses of the pager in our regular On Call column.…

What a wild ride, eh Komodo? Blockchain biz Komodo this week said it had used a vulnerability discovered by JavaScript package biz NPM to take control of some older Agama cryptocurrency wallets to prevent hackers from doing the same.…