The Register

Picking up slack from doomed Accenture IT contract i6 Outsourcing badass Capita has gulped down a tasty £13.2m morsel dished out by the Scottish Police Authority: namely, the deal for Police Scotland's Core Operational Solution (COS).…

Promised prelim investigation should be out this week Ethiopia's transport minister has said the national carrier's pilots were following published Boeing procedures immediately before the fatal crash of a 737 Max 8 in March, citing an unpublished government report.…

Software giant's Brit limb reaps pre-tax earnings of £137.5m Microsoft's UK operation has published its annual report for the year ending June 2018, which showed the company cracking the £2bn barrier in turnover but, er, paying a bit less tax than last year.…

And if it ain't that, it's hacked-off students firing out DDoSes British university admin folk are alarmingly easy to phish, according to an academic support body which claims a 100 per cent success rate "within two hours".…

Meanwhile, PlusNet and BT pay women more than blokes The UK arms of Civica, Huawei and Siemens all paid women about 40 per cent less than men in 2018-19, according to data submitted to the government.…

Analysts predict solid-state array revenue to overtake spinning rust and hybrid All-flash storage arrays are very fast, but their limited capacity and prohibitive cost has meant that, historically, they were not very popular in enterprise data centres. According to analysts, this is about to change.…

Tell your dad not to open the 'HMRC' Word doc promising a yuge refund As the tax year rolls over into 2019/20, cybercrims have started belching out phishing emails and tax-themed malware, according to infosec researchers.…

Trust th'wife to out them to cops You have in your possession a bulletproof vest, a firearm, and some beer. As the brews weave their magic, of course you have to make sure the armour works. Right?…

Tell the boss you're not slacking off – it's vital threat intelligence research A government survey of British businesses has praised those who read El Reg to keep up to date with security news – while claiming to have revealed that fewer firms have spotted cyber attacks against them over the past 12 months, when compared to last year.…

Ministry of Fun review likely to recommend happy shopping Huawei is girding itself for the results of a UK government review that could recommend telcos buy network equipment from different vendors.…

Schools told not to use it 'until further notice' Schools using Capita's information management system have been warned that there is an "incident" with its Spring release – just months after it 'fessed up to an issue with the same data-transfer mechanism in a previous release.…

Domestic hosts and servers are being used for major attacks, finds Bromium A collection of servers found in the US are responsible for some of the nation's biggest malware and phishing attacks.…

Brain-scanning boffins find no signals to differentiate real and spoofed speakers Human brains appear to be better at detecting fake images than fake voices, a distinction that bodes ill for security as voice spoofing technology becomes more effective and more accessible.…

A quick flash can light up the observable universe The photons streaming from mysterious gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic form of electromagnetic energy in the universe, break out from relativistic jets shooting out from dying supernova stars, according to the latest research.…

NASA and co confirm that Starliner won't be carrying crew until the end of the year Boeing's passenger spacecraft for deliveries to the International Space Station (ISS), already lagging behind SpaceX, has been delayed yet again.…

I see you're using adaptive algorithms. Step this way for some regulation please The US Food and Drug Administration has proposed a framework on how it might regulate medical devices that rely on AI and machine learning algorithms.…

Laid-off litigant must reveal source of damning document in age discrimination row IBM has demanded to the name of the person who leaked an internal document that appeared to show the company was deliberately targeting and firing older workers.…

App devs fail to lock down their databases, yet again The details of millions of Facebook accounts have been left ripe for harvesting thanks to a pair of careless developers.…

Rogue 'worker' processes can sneak in with elevated privileges at startup Apache HTTP Server has been given a patch to address a potentially serious elevation of privilege vulnerability.…

More research dosh and more legal immigrants please! The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has asked the government for “bold federal policies” that would enable it to maintain its grip on the world’s chip supply.…

Intel double-whammy: kit festooned with new Xeons Fujitsu has refreshed its entire x86 server portfolio, adding support for Optane DC persistent (aka non-volatile) memory from Intel, officially launched last night.…

But handle with care to dodge dominance of Google, Microsoft Schools have been told to increase their use of tech to ease the burden on teachers, better prepare their students for the world of work and bring kit into the 21st Century.…

Prospect cheers as members vote against telco's People Framework Members of the Prospect trade union at BT have voted overwhelmingly to reject the telco's so-called People Framework proposals to overhaul the pay and grading structure.…

Dell/VMware and Nutanix dominate, HPE best of the rest Number crunchers at IDC told the world this morning that international converged systems market revenue grew 14.8 per cent year-on-year to reach $4.15bn in the final quarter of 2018.…

19-year-old also accused of breaching sex offence order, money laundering The teenager who hacked TalkTalk three years ago has been hauled before court charged with computer misuse offences after allegedly amassing a Bitcoin fortune worth more than £300,000.…

US spy agency plans to award multibillion-dollar deal in 2021 The CIA is reportedly planning to award a multibillion-dollar contract to extend its cloud services for the intelligence community to more than one vendor by summer 2021.…

Increase in tax payout comes as UK.gov threatens digital sales tax on revenues Google's UK business paid £65.3m tax into the British government's coffers in its 2018 financial year, almost 40 per cent more than in the previous 12 months.…

MCubed call for papers extended Events We’ve extended call for papers for our MCubed conference to April 15, meaning you've still got time to tell us how you've made AI and machine learning work in your organisation.…

Gulps down firm for undisclosed number of kronor All-flash array supplier Pure Storage has bought Compuverde, a Swedish scale-out filer software business, giving it an entrée into the classic file storage market.…

Expanding its vendor-agnostic support service in the UK Data centre maintenance giant Park Place Technologies has gobbled MCSA Group, a British IT services business headquartered in High Wycombe.…

Fun fact: We haven't dismantled a single one. Ever Storing Britain's obsolete nuclear submarines has cost the nation £500m – with some 1960s boats having been in storage for longer than they were in service.…

Screwdriver-botherers put the hurt on Apple's little tablet Despite being rated way behind Apple's iPhones in build quality due to copious glue squirted under the componentry, Cupertino's latest fun-sized tablet was praised by teardown gurus iFixit for actually having a headphone jack. Yes, it has come to that.…

That's 15 March btw, when Micro Focus dumped profitable bits SUSECON '19 SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann could scarcely contain his glee as he bounded on stage to deliver his keynote before the thousand or so attendees at this year's SUSECON summit in Nashville, Tennessee.…

Prepare to scale the cookie wall Adtech industry body IAB Europe is facing down another data protection complaint from Brave browser bod Johnny Ryan, this time over the all-encompassing cookie wall stalking its site.…

Smart strategies for ambitious humans Elon Musk dreams of life on Mars, but why stop there? Why not dream really big? What would it take for a group of creatures – not necessarily those living on Earth – to colonise the entire universe?…

Slack motherboard firmware controls leave machines open to deep-rooted malware Gaming PC specialist Razer has been singled out for leaving its motherboards vulnerable to a well-known and critical firmware vulnerability.…

Take your media viewing ideas somewhere else In theory, the open source nature of web technology should allow anyone with the appropriate skills to innovate and implement an alternative browser.…

Sad news: It's probably not down to alien microbes The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft caught a massive whiff of methane from orbit, confirming an earlier gas detection on the Red Planet by America's Curiosity rover.…

Robot rides slow down but keep moving Intel Capital "My greatest fear is that we will hit the winter of AV (autonomous vehicles)," says Jill Sciarappo in response to an unwelcome question at the Intel Capital conference in Arizona – the US state that saw the first self-driving car death last year.…

What do you think I am? A chartered accountant? Autonomy Trial Ex-HP CEO Léo Apotheker had not read any of KPMG's due-diligence reports on Autonomy ahead of his company's $11bn acquisition of the British software maker, he told London’s High Court on Tuesday.…

npm uninstall iarna The cultural turmoil at JavaScript package management outfit NPM Inc, brought on by a leadership change and staff shakeup, has claimed another employee: product manager Rebecca Turner.…

Techie says he was grilled for three hours after refusing to let agents search his devices Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal says he was interrogated for three hours by America's border cops after arriving at San Francisco airport – because he refused to unlock his work laptop and phone.…

She faces two federal charges after apparently getting as far as reception A Chinese woman was caught sneaking into President Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club with a thumb drive of malware, it was claimed yesterday.…

Striding into its third decade, dev suite is now ready to Share It's a big day for Microsoft developers as Visual Studio 2019 for PC and Mac emerged, blinking, into the light of General Availability.…

To view this content, please click on the headline This week AR hype machine Magic Leap will finally – finally! – start selling its headset to the public but you'll need to go to one of three AT&T stores in Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, to buy them. And fork over more than $2,000 to get a pair.…

Airlines will have to wait few more weeks to get new code as engineers need more time Boeing yesterday warned it will take longer than expected to overhaul the anti-stall system in its 737 Max aircraft, the infamous safety mechanism that likely caused two deadly crashes.…

Give me sockets, give me DIMMs, give me Optane, give me all the speed Server slinger Supermicro has dropped the veil on its range of second generation Xeon SP servers with Optane DIMM support – just as Chipzilla itself reveals all the gory details on its latest chippery.…

New entry-level and mid-range bring NVMe fabric acceleration IBM has replaced its entry-level Storwize arrays with faster boxes and introduced an NVMe-oF accelerated mid-range.…

Amazing what some competition can do: Kicking Chipzilla up the data cache In a highly orchestrated global maneuver, Chipzilla today launched, to much of its own fanfare, its second-generation Xeon Scalable Processors for servers – chips previously codenamed Cascade Lake.…

Firm pushes its customers to containers, recoils from Hadoop Users might want containerisation to separate compute and storage for data analytics but few fully understand it, according to MapR, which has launched a set of integrations with Kubernetes.…