The Register

... And they’re not happy Colin McDermott was surprised this week to receive an invoice from the UK’s largest domain name registrar, 123-Reg, auto-billing him £11.99 for a domain name he never ordered.…

Further investigation suggests she may actually have a point While Kenyan politicians discussed possible amendments to safety protocols on commercial flights this week, one delivered an impassioned plea.…

This year's theme was 'habits' and they were baaaaad The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.…

Mine's a pint of oolong, please, love Researchers from the National University of Singapore have found that drinking tea regularly really is good for you, especially your brain. They say they have also discovered why.…

Star-spangled luxury EV trips the light fantastic In the same week that the motoring industry discovered the Tesla Model 3 was the UK's third most popular car purchase, Mercedes-Benz unveiled an electric supercar at the Frankfurt Motor Show with high expectations, and probably no little relief.…

An argument in favor of a single source of truth in your organization Opinion One of the tech industry’s longest running quests is developing the notion of a single source of truth within organizations. That is, no matter who or where you are within a business, when it comes to running the numbers or making a decision, your applications are accessing the same information as everybody else internally. No out of date, duplicated, or otherwise imperfect copies.…

It's like, how much more black could this be and the answer is none. None more black Carbon nanotubes have peculiar properties. Not only do they have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any known substance they can also absorb the most light, making them the blackest material yet.…

Reaches agreement with US government over Labor rights Google has agreed to settle two complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board by former employees who claim the company fired them from engaging in lawfully protected workplace speech.…

Section 230 has legal eagles split over censorship Malwarebytes will have to head back to court to justify a decision to block its rival’s antivirus services after an appeals court threw out the security shop's legal justification.…

The future is automated, says Trend Micro bod Infosec techies should prepare to both fend off AI attacks and welcome the technology into their armoury of tools, reckons Trend Micro's director of cybercrime research.…

D'ya hear that, cybercrooks? $50k up for grabs. Fire, theft, flood – and now cyber attack. Customers of a Californian biz offering payouts of up to $50,000 in case your cat videos get Wannacry’d but experts worry it could make the problem worse.…

Boffins spot a possible follow up to 'Oumuamua ESA scientists are studying an object that has all the hallmarks of being another entity from outside our Solar System, making it the second to be spotted after 2017's cigar-shaped interstellar comet.…

Supplies no longer HP Ink's licence to, er, print money A respected Wall Street analyst has downgraded HP Inc's share rating on the back of worries that its PC division won't be able to sustain the growth numbers it has been banking, which paper over the cracks in the print supplies business.…

Brewed with ice cream ... and no meat at all! Beer o'clock starts at 4pm today at Leeds-based North Brewing Co's tap room where it will be launching a sour beer that "pushes the boundaries of taste, flavour and colour".…

Aye, son, I remember when this was all industrial estates... Capital equipment will outlive the working life of the engineers who service it, self-healing systems will do away with everyday maintenance, and call centres will be replaced by automated dispatch notification.…

Rainbow Nation site was running on Magento Updated GPS and wearables maker Garmin has warned customers in South Africa that their personal info and payment data were pinched after they shopped on the shop.garmin.co.za portal.…

Comms kit vendor in talks with videoconferencing outfit about possible joint venture Troubled telecoms provider Avaya has hit pause on plans to find a buyer amid reports it may enter into a joint venture with videoconferencing provider RingCentral instead.…

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you drink that The Vultures asked, and the always creative Register readership answered. Now we have a name for Microsoft and Mackmyra's new AI-designed whisky blend.…

Users find PCs silenced while Microsoft looks into search fix Microsoft seems unable to catch a break with its Windows 10 updates. No sooner than it acknowledged that its CPU usage fix borked desktop search for some, users complained that the patch has also caused audio issues.…

Now there's a surprise! The £1bn modernisation of UK courts is behind schedule due to delays with its digital programme, the National Audit Office said today.…

Electronics and hot drinks don't mix A Condor flight to Mexico was forced to turn back over the Atlantic after a spilled coffee caused one of its radios to start melting.…

Stop asking difficult questions and stick to the script, pal Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hmm, we seem to be having a problem with this page at the moment. You might like to try again later.…

How much do I trust Mozilla with my data? You just can't keep a good idea down. At least that's what Mozilla will be hoping as it resurrects its Firefox Test Pilot programme once again.…

A magical journey into the brave new world of Start Menus and Recycle Bins On Call As the weekend looms, spare a thought for those unfortunates forced to, you know, deal with actual users. Perhaps buy one a beer after spending a moment with our regular On Call column.…

Gain the skills you need to fend off miscreants this October in the UK capital Promo The internet is full of powerful, fast-changing hacking tools and malicious actors who know how to use them. That makes the regular training events held by IT security specialist SANS Institute an essential destination for technology professionals keen to sharpen their defensive skills and protect their organisation against today’s ever-more ingenious attackers.…

'We've never seen it eat so much in over 20 years!' Video The behemoth black hole lurking at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is hungrier than it's ever been, and is currently feasting on the largest meal that has ever been observed in almost a quarter of a century.…

Blokes left in legal limbo amid electronic records audit Updated Two men hired to assess a court record system's computer security were arrested Wednesday – after they were caught physically sneaking into a courthouse.…

Bug-hunter says Cupertino won't even pay $1 reward for security hole Video Apple's very latest version of iOS appears to have the same sort of lock-screen bypass that plagued previous versions of the iThing firmware.…

But Trump Administration seemingly unbothered After months of speculation about who exactly was behind a series of eavesdropping fake cell towers in Washington DC, it appears the answer is Israel.…

Digital dosh scorned as a threat to national sovereignty On Thursday Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency has received a Gallic dismissal courtesy of France's finance minister.…

Five nabbed over conspiracy to commit a public nuisance Five people have been arrested by the Metropolitan Police for threatening to fly drones around London’s Heathrow airport this Friday to protest climate change.…

The amber DNA in Jurassic Park? That's you, that is Stamping your footprints on the Moon's surface remains an impossible bucket-list ambition for practically all of us over the age of two. But for $99 you might still be able to leave a DNA footprint there.…

Thanks to social media, that's at least more transparent now... Some 42 per cent of Brit MPs reckon social media has damaged their policy-making processes, which is in turn having a negative affect on members of the public.…

Will it be enough to boost Big Blue's cloud? CF Summit IBM has demonstrated Cloud Foundry running on Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes (K8s) container platform, at an event in the Netherlands.…

Trials might be done before SpaceX's Starship hop NASA's enormous mobile launcher is back at Pad 39B after worried engineers stashed it in the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to ride out Hurricane Dorian.…

Deloitte, PA Consulting, PwC et al making a killing from crisis "Excessive secrecy" surrounds departmental spending on Brexit consultants, though 96 per cent of the £97m spaffed to date has gone to just six firms, according to the UK government's spending watchdog.…

BT clears throat, gestures wildly at its new full-fibre targets BT's Openreach is pausing its hybrid G.fast fibre investment as it mulls the product's future in light of its recent conversion to full fibre.…

New shiny for Fast Ringers. Oh, and Cortana Microsoft has updated the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 to support Arm64 devices for the wafer-thin slice of Windows Insiders using the things.…

Multicloud, Spring framework, and how K8s will become a universal API for infrastructure Interview Pivotal's current alpha release of the Pivotal Application Service (PAS) for Kubernetes has a dependency on VMware, but that will be removed in the final release, senior veep of products Ian Andrews told The Reg.…

What Mark Shuttleworth would have wanted? Updated As eagle-eyed readers may have noted, Vulture Central UK is on the move. Our migratory path has led us to London's Grays Inn Road and, well, you can see what was waiting for us.…

Yes, turns out people still use this voucher biz – who knew? We have a new twist on the "researchers find unprotected public-facing cloud-hosted database" story, as one recently uncovered archive turned out to be at the heart of a years-long fraud operation.…

Go on, we're listening The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee has called on UK government to publish its long-overdue plans for upping investment in research and development.…

Plus: Baidu's 92% growth closes gap on AWS Despite all the talk among Western tech vendors of an economic slowdown in the Middle Kingdon, spending on cloud infrastructure services in China is comfortably outpacing that of the global average.…

From thwarting phishing to boosting infosec awareness, we've got it covered Webcast Security professionals like you have a tough job.…

UK govt releases contingency doc and everything thing is [fine/a living nightmare] (delete as appropriate) Analysis Cloud providers, social media platforms, and e-commerce companies are going to be hit hard in the event of a no-deal Brexit, according to official UK government correspondence.…

Red Dwarf solar system too far away for a jaunt on Starbug Scientists have detected water vapor wafting from the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting around its star within the habitable zone for the first time, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy.…

Board member Salvino to lead CSC-HPE-Enterprise-Services mutant starting Thursday Beleaguered IT outsourcing specialist DXC will open business Thursday minus the only CEO it has, to date, ever known, as Mike Lawrie is stepping down effective immediately.…

Also-CEO Safra Catz will take over share his responsibilities with some guy who co-founded the biz On Wednesday, Oracle said co-CEO Mark Hurd will take a leave of absence to deal with undisclosed health issues, an announcement that coincided with the publication of the tech titan's fiscal 2020 Q1 numbers.…

AI'm Lovin' It McDonald’s has wolfed down Apprente, an AI startup focused on voice recognition, seemingly in a bid to replace its Drive Thru human servers with computers.…

One step forward, er, one step back. Nobody gets too far like that Microsoft's build 18362.356 (KB4515384​​​​​) for its Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) rolled out on Tuesday with security improvements for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, networking tech and input devices – and a CPU usage fix that, for some, has broken desktop search.…