The Register

Interactive entertainment tells on itself despite encryption Boffins have found a side channel to observe the choices netizens make when viewing interactive streaming videos.…

It only took three fscking hours of keynote to announce it – where's the GPU optimization for that? GTC 2019 It's that time of year again. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, paraded a range of goodies for GPU nerds, including a forthcoming credit-card sized AI computer board and software updates for its CUDA platform, during his company's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Silicon Valley on Monday.…

Congresscritter seeks $250m for 'defamation, neglience' A US congressman is getting a crash course in the Streisand Effect after filing a lawsuit this week against Twitter and a handful of his harshest critics on the antisocial network.…

Residents claim net-connected, app-controlled system is harassment, surveillance A group of Manhattan residents are suing their landlord for installing a smart lock on their apartment front door, requiring them to use a phone app to get into their homes.…

Time to revisit the idea of patent portfolio as nuclear deterrence? Analysis Qualcomm has won a $31m judgment against Apple in the US after the iGiant infringed three of Qualy's mobile phone battery patents – the latest ruling in a long series of intellectual property spats between the two companies.…

Worst brew than that time El Reg went on a road trip and stopped at a Denny's IBM has issued a security alert over five vulnerabilities in its golden boy Watson analytics system.…

Vast storage savings...er, tragic loss attributed to a data migration gone awry MySpace, the Norma Desmond of social networking platforms, appears to have lost all the music uploaded to the site since its founding in 2003 through 2015, a blunder the company reportedly attributes to a failed server migration.…

Well, that Knights Hill 2018 dream didn't work out, so let's shoot for 2021 instead Intel will, as expected, provide the processors for the US government's exascale-grade Aurora supercomputer, due to be deployed in 2021.…

Get array with you Dell next month will refresh the Unity mid-range storage array line with Skylake Xeon processors and NVMe – the latter as expected after the firm's plan was revealed by The Register back in November last year.…

If you have an LX901, you are at risk of mild embuggerance A German security researcher has revealed that one model of Fujitsu wireless keyboard will accept unauthenticated input, despite the presence of AES-128 encryption.…

And a stylus! But goes without saying that it ain't cheap Apple has tinkered with its iPad line, resurrecting the Air and administering a bit of mouth-to-mouth to the Mini as the company battles tottering sales.…

Fears for vulnerable amid mass migration to online services Almost 4,000 computers have been cut from public libraries in England since 2010, with some 680 internet-connected machines lost in the past year.…

Plus: UK health service sites contain commercial trackers All but three of the European Union member states' government websites are littered with undisclosed adtech trackers from Google and other firms, with many piggy-backing on third-party scripts, according to an analysis of almost 200,000 webpages.…

Whether it's 1.5m or 280k exposed, it's not a great look Researchers working for VPNMentor have accused Chinese e-commerce site Gearbest of storing user information in "completely unsecured" Elasticsearch databases after discovering "1.5 million records" which they were able to access through a browser.…

All future cloud data centres to be designed with 21-inch Open Rack in mind Embattled Chinese electronics giant Huawei said it will design all of its upcoming public cloud data centres around the 21-inch Open Rack standard developed by the Open Compute Project.…

The Phil Collins-approved farmers' market of cloud computing UKCloud today sucked up £25m in funding from Cisco-backed Digital Alpha Advisors for a 10 per cent stake in a business battling to convince buyers to use national rather than multinational cloud bringers.…

Wants court to decide on accusations it failed to properly police pension investments Oracle is fighting back against tens of thousands of former staffers with pension plans who want to take the firm to a jury trial.…

Comarch tells you everything you need to know Promo If you have ever worried about the cost and staffing burden of providing your customers with the increasing amount of IT support they may need at all hours of the day or night, outsourcing your service desk may be the answer you are looking for.…

Plus: Builds, Teams, a bit of Xbox and other things Microsoft fiddled with last week Roundup It has been a bumper week at Microsoft with new builds, bigger meetings and streaming software.…

Let's talk about specs baby, let's talk about real 5G Comment Executive editor Andrew Orlowski was invited to share his thoughts on challenges to the uptake of 5G at a Westminster Forum event on Thursday 14 March. This is what he told the panel.…

Forget the scones and gardens, Cragside house is engineery Geek's Guide to Britain Imagine an ageing magnate in his private retreat, and you might picture English industrialist William – first Baron – Armstrong in the luxurious wood-panelled library of his Northumberland pile: Cragside.…

Turns out he probably wasn't smart enough to automate a Unix system update Who, Me? Monday has once more reared its ugly head, but brings with it the charming face of Who, Me?, El Reg's weekly look at cringeworthy events of readers' pasts.…

Plus: It's time to take AI to school Roundup Hello, here's a quick lowdown on what's been going on in AI beyond what we've already reported lately.…

Plus, BlackBerry wants to be Uncle Sam's go-to security firm, thousands of legal docs pill online, and more Roundup Last week we saw a conservative app exposed, the revelation of Beto's hacker past, and the rise of Slub.…

You have to run GCHQ code? Nice try, spy guys UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ, celebrating its centenary, has released emulators for famed World War II-era cipher machines that can be run within its web-based educational encryption app CodeChef.…

'Politicians are reluctant to disrupt the enormous wealth creation machine technology has turned out to be' RSA Politicians are, by and large, clueless about technology, and it's going to be up to engineers and other techies to rectify that, even if it means turning down big pay packets for a while.…

Because there's nothing that can be done and we have no moral compass Comment An Australian who murdered dozens in New Zealand on Friday livestreamed the deaths on Facebook, spinning a spotlight onto the abject failure of social media to control harmful content.…

'We need guardrails to ensure this technology is implemented responsibly' A pair of US Senators from across the aisle on Thursday introduced a bill to limit how facial recognition technology can be used.…

Commissioners still doing their best to ignore bounty hunter stalking scandal Analysis America's comms regulator has finally pinky-promised to at least consider people's privacy when it looks into how cellphone location data can be made more accurate.…

From O'Dork to O'Rourke: Dem golden boy's past as BBS-dwelling l33t teen revealed Newly minted US presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke says he was a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the most legendary hacking groups in cyber-history.…

Welcome to El Reg: Come for the video game references, stay for the open-source networking news US networking specialist Juniper is setting up its switches to support SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) – an open-source toolkit developed by Microsoft to run the plumbing of its Azure cloud platform.…

CA performing 'extremely well' under new management, says new management. As for wireless semiconductors... CA Technologies made an indelible mark on new parent Broadcom's latest set of quarterly financials – well, it did cost $19bn to buy – as software and not semiconductors accounted for all of the growth.…

Ways not to win in court, no.94: 'threatening dire consequences to national business' if you lose A High Court judge has blasted the Post Office in a long-running case over whether its Horizon IT system was to blame for alleged fraud by subpostmasters.…

Distro designed for Windows Subsystem for Linux gains a snappier moniker as 1.2 looms The team at Whitewater Foundry have waved the rebranding wand at WLinux. Behold – Pengwin.…

Pricey software suite with no real rivals thinks growth will slow Adobe, maker of pricey software for artsy types, is still growing like a weed but last night joined a list of tech titans to forecast a slowdown.…

Revenue and profitability pain gets cost-saving beancounters to cut jobs Western Digital will cut loose more than 300 people as part of its $800m/year cost-saving initiative starting in May.…

Plus: Another mayor defecates on floor at swearing-in ceremony, leaves Democracy, eh? It's all fun and games until your elected mayor allegedly opens fire on the SWAT team come to arrest him, which is precisely what cops accused him of doing in the Floridian city of Port Richey last month. And now the acting mayor has been cuffed too.…

Less hiding behind 'national security' to hush up failures, please Britain's Cabinet Office (CO) hasn’t quite bungled the National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP) but it could certainly be doing things a lot better, the National Audit Office said today.…

Zipline, George and Bungle: It's a Rainbow* of open-sourcing at Redmond Microsoft used the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit to announce the open-sourcing of the company's cloudy compression technology, Project Zipline.…

Hague, Ovchinin, Koch arrived at their new home this morning It was second time lucky for NASA astronaut Nick Hague as he and fellow crew members Aleksey Ovchinin and Christina Koch arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) this morning.…

Comarch offers all-in-one infrastructure monitoring Promo Today's businesses are so heavily dependent on their IT infrastructure that the slightest disruption in service can incur damaging losses.…

Foldable support too Google has released the first official cut of 2019's Android to developers, including a secret "desktop mode" for external displays, and support for pholdables*. Q is the 10th major platform release of the software that dominates the smartphone market (Android has a market share north of 85 per cent**).…

Victor Frankenstein would be impressed Networking software specialist Big Switch has launched a Network Operating System (NOS), cobbled together from freely available open source components.…

That's the sound of the men, working on the blockchain gang The UK's Department of Fun has gone public with plans to get prisoners skilled up for a world of code upon release rather than a life of, er, crime.…

'New technology baffles pissed old hack' (© Private Eye) Something for the Weekend, Sir? I became old this week.…

'He was definitely invoiced' On Call Have you got that Friday feeling? Well if not, there's only one way to get it: reading this week's instalment of On Call, where readers share tech support triumphs and frustrations.…

Yet another legal brouhaha for Chinese giant, this time nothing to do with equipment bans Huawei Technologies USA, the Plano, Texas-based arm of the Chinese telecom giant, was sued in Missouri on Thursday over an alleged phone explosion.…

It may have an asteroid belt, worlds similar to Earth and Neptune – and only 470 light years away If, like us, you're dying to get off this ridiculous little rock, here's some hope* to cling onto.…

It's a match made in heaven for erm, glucunobacter and phosphogypsum Bacteria could help scientists mine rare-earth elements, a critical component in modern electronic devices, from the chemical waste produced from the process of manufacturing fertilizers.…

Federal Trade Commission will turn Fault-finder, Tinker, Customize this summer America's trade watchdog says it will soon mull over and potentially propose rules to protect folks' right to repair their phones, tablets, and PCs, among other things, without voiding warranties or breaking the things.…