The Register

Engineer reveals departmental porkies, gets told never to leave his desk again Who, Me? Monday has once again reared its head, and with that we welcome you back to Who, Me?, El Reg's weekly column where techies tell us about incidents from days of yore.…

Plus, Diachenko strikes again with Indian data find Roundup Last week, a Symantec boss stepped down, a Chinese hacker was called out, and an AirBnB hidden camera creep was cuffed.…

Nobody likes monopolies Northern Virginia is the most important data centre market on the planet, with more than a gigawatt of colocation capacity, and even more servers hidden in cloud data centres.…

What a d*ck move! Singapore criminalizes unsolicited nude pics A little wood could soon get you the cane (or at least some time behind bars), thanks to a recently-passed law in Singapore that criminalizes sending unwelcome nude photos.…

Bits and bobs from the week's AI news Roundup Hello, this week's AI roundup is short and sweet. If you've been waiting to play with OpenAI's GPT-2 model, here's your chance. Also, Waymo and Lyft are working together to bring self-driving taxis on the road.…

Simple hack turns them into super secret spying tool A GPS tracker used by elderly people and young kids has a security hole that could allow others to track and secretly record their wearers.…

Wow, cool, they look free to use... *checks invoice the next day* ...They most certainly were not free If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There appears to be a bug in the Google Cloud Platform online user interface that may lead engineers into thinking they're renting GPU-accelerated virtual machines for free, when, really, they're not.…

Probe found dangerous levels of lead, cadmium in stuff sold via web souk Amazon on Thursday agreed to pay $700,000 and stop selling toxic children's school supplies and jewelry – after a probe found dangerous levels of lead and cadmium in some of the e-commerce site's wares.…

It's the art of the deal, folks New tariffs imposed today by the US government on Chinese imports will hit the tech industry hard, with everything from semiconductors to networking equipment now taxed at 25 per cent.…

Debut skids off the road as people reluctantly admit they hoped everyone else's stupidity would help them cash out It couldn't have happened to a nastier company.…

GitHub Package Registry provides libraries and other bits and bytes for Java, JavaScript, Ruby, .NET and more GitHub today will introduce the GitHub Package Registry, a service to allow software developers to publish and manage public or private software packages for a variety of programming languages.…

This is your IT on steroids A reinforced IT rack able to accommodate up to 4,500lbs (more than 2 metric tonnes) of hardware – even in transit – has been built by contract manufacturer Sanmina.…

Court filing warns: Welcome to the jungle Aged rockers Guns N' Roses are suing a Colorado brewery which has been flogging Guns N' Rosé beer.…

You know the drill: Patch and stop using C Cisco Talos researchers have uncovered an SQLite use-after-free() vulnerability that could allow an attacker to, in theory, remotely execute code on an affected device.…

CEO Bob Swan sees NAND as a ugly duckling, apparently Analysis Intel has SSDs in its data centre strategy but has not committed to technology investments - and analysts have said they suspect a supply partnership deal is in the offing.…

It's X-ray men: Rise of the machines – as units deploy AI for NHS GPU near-monopoly Nvidia will be working alongside King's College London to put machine learning algorithms to work on NHS datasets.…

Troubled security house keeps up trend of sudden resignations Greg Clark, CEO and president of Symantec, has "stepped down" suddenly and with no permanent replacement lined up, just as his predecessor did.…

Cue shares diving 16% for Santa Clara-based contact centre tech outfit Troubled call centre and telecoms provider Avaya has confirmed it is up for sale following a rollercoaster couple of years and a poor set of results for its latest quarter, Q2 '19.…

Awwigh daahlin', I FINK you'll find Contrary to popular belief, Brits really don't all sound like the Queen or Hollywood villains and according to Big 7 Travel, there are no less than 56 accents recognised within our tiny corner of the world (though there are likely a lot more). So what's the logical next step?…

More like Blue BALLS amirite? lolol I'm 11 At an event in Washington DC, Blue Origin boss Jeff Bezos yesterday showed world+dog the company's Moon lander – Blue Moon – and promised manned missions to the lunar surface by 2024.…

Might be back inside soon Chelsea Manning has been released from prison after 62 days for refusing to testify to an American grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.…

Plus: Barrister's questions 'abuse of process', rages opponent Autonomy Trial While he agreed that Autonomy’s ex-CFO was a "highly ethical person", Stouffer Egan couldn't quite bring himself to tell the High Court that Sushovan Hussain had never fiddled Autonomy's accounts.…

Doors open at Continuous Lifecycle London on Tuesday Events The doors open at Continuous Lifecycle London on Tuesday, and there's still time for you to join us, and 40 of the finest speakers in DevOps, containers, serverless and CI/CD.…

Unnamed security shops said to have lost source code A Russian hacking outfit says it has stolen confidential data from a trio of US antivirus companies.…

It's all about the enterprise, dummy The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 was one of the bigger surprises of Microsoft's developer love-in, Build. The Register had a chat with the team behind Pengwin to find out what the changes mean for devs on the platform.…

Red warning light for blue-light comms A National Audit Office report into the unending nightmare of Home Office attempts to buy a new critical communications network has warned the project is likely to be three years late and £3bn over-budget.…

Can someone have a look at that code again? Something for the Weekend, Sir? This week's [article|column] comes to you fresh from our latest in automated journalism, The RegAIster. We hope [you|they] enjoy [it|them].…

Firm ever so sorry, takes security of info seriously, vows not to do it again etc Insurer Chubb scored a privacy own goal recently when a double-sided printing error on bulk mailers sent to customers about a policy document change contained a stranger's personal details on one side of the sheet.…

Supermarket chain helps Amazon, er, live well for less through AWS AWS Summit London Perceived wisdom in the enterprise tech world is that the future of IT is in hybrid cloud – mixing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud resources – but AWS was still preaching the gospel of total and utter cloudification at its gabfest in London on Wednesday.…

The challenges, the model, and how it can be done Sponsored webcast The jury is back, a consensus has been reached, and the results are in...…

You mean you didn't read the 2,566 word privacy policy? Millions of images stored by Ever, a photo album app, are being used to sneakily train facial recognition systems and the only way you'll find out is if you read through the 2,566-word privacy policy.…

5-minute job? We've heard that old chestnut before On Call Have you got that Friday feeling? El Reg does, mainly because we're bringing you the latest instalment of On Call.…

Existing censorship-resistant S3 paths get a stay of execution Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it intends to change the way its S3 storage service can be referenced in API and web requests. But by doing so, the cloud giant would have eliminated a means of censorship avoidance.…

Fujie charged with killing them softly with his scripts. And by them, we mean, the health insurance giant's computers US prosecutors today formally accused two people of being part of a Chinese hacking crew responsible for one of the biggest cyber-heists in American history.…

I feel the need, the need for a general adversarial network DARPA, the US military research arm, has launched a program to train fighter jets to engage in aerial battle autonomously with the help of AI algorithms.…

David Redl and Mike Platt quit NTIA. Trump Administration craziness to blame The head of the US government department that oversees the internet and telecommunications spectrum unexpectedly resigned on Thursday, along with his Congressional go-between.…

Former salesperson sees termination as part of a deliberate effort to dump elders A former Oracle salesperson has sued the database giant in the US, claiming the company discriminated against him because of his age and a medical disability.…

Soldier's pilfered docs provided basis for robo-aircraft news reports, say US prosecutors A former US Air Force intelligence analyst who fed documents to the press detailing the American military's classified drone programs has been indicted on five criminal charges.…

Meanwhile, Facebook's co-founder goes public with call for end to social media monopoly One thing you can't accuse people of in Washington DC is lacking an appetite for power. But not, it seems, if that power comes with responsibility.…

New reference architecture rolls together containers and VMs Virtualization kingpins Red Hat and VMware have linked arms on a reference architecture that combines their software.…

Secure boot, local CA for your network o' widgets, and more Certificate authority (CA) Sectigo, the artist formerly known as Comodo CA, has bought out security biz Icon Labs.…

Oh and fiscal '19 crappy, fiscal '20 forecasts gloomy too It's been an eventful morning for BT's new CEO: he upped targets to roll out fibre broadband to more Brit homes, talked up cost savings and clipped sales and profit forecasts for the next year.…

Mike Pompeo reaches beyond grave to read Iron Lady's mind in ongoing security spat Margaret Thatcher would not let Huawei build Britain's 5G networks, US foreign secretary Mike Pompeo claimed yesterday as British ministers suggested the rollout may be delayed for security reasons.…

Congratulations, Liverpool and Spurs fans! Wait... never mind Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are off to Madrid for the Champions League final after emphatic wins against Barcelona and Ajax – so of course devotees were ecstatic to find they had won all-expenses-paid VIP tickets to the footie match courtesy of etailer Zavvi.…

When the agenda goes up, so do the tickets... Events If terms like FaaS, Serverless and event-based computing are creeping on to your to-do list, here’s something else to add: grabbing a blind bird ticket for our Serverless Computing Conference while you still can.…

Supernova of allegations turns into black hole for HPE Autonomy Trial Autonomy's former US head of sales made a series of startling admissions in court yesterday which contradicted his witness statement, throwing a curveball into Britain's biggest fraud trial.…

Something something unicorn Silicon Valley-based log management and analytics specialist Sumo Logic – popular among the DevOps crowd – has bagged $110m in its biggest funding round to date, led by Battery Ventures.…

New appliance runs your backup engine of choice .NEXT Nutanix has made a flashy bid for hybrid cloud relevance by enabling its environment to run in AWS and added a Mine appliance to bring backup data into its fold.…

Platform admits failover cluster fell over but they're really sorry and, here, have a credit note Biz automation platform ConnectWise has issued a credit note to disgruntled customers caught up in last week's day-long outage that the firm blamed on a wobble in its "highly resilient" cloud infrastructure.…

Plus: Privacy options abound and Collections attempts to fill Sets' boots Build There were nods to the past and future at Microsoft's Seattle Build event as the company teased upcoming features for its latest crack at a browser that people might want to use.…