The Register

Oh, we'll let regulators know about it next time, promise The UK Ministry of Justice is mooting a rollout of biometric technology in prisons to cut down on visitors bringing in contraband, reporting that a "successful" recent trial had a deterrent effect.…

Beats the other big boys to region, Blobs go Premium, DevOps go on-prem, oh my With Premium Blobs, Azure DevOps Server and a new Africa Azure region, Microsoft has spaffed out cloudy goodness like a Roomba in reverse.…

ManTech was using Lockheed Martin files illicitly, court told An American jury has awarded $1.5m to a former NASA engineer who was fired by his contractor ManTech in retaliation for his blowing the whistle over documents from Lockheed Martin.…

Could errors affect other applications? Dunno. When will new systems be online? Dunno The Home Office is making life-changing decisions using "incorrect data from systems that are not fit for purpose" and has not fixed the "appalling defects" identified during the Windrush scandal, MPs have said.…

Get the forecast right and you'll get a, er, discount Google has squeezed out a plan for what it calls "predictable" cloud storage pricing, locking customers into a year-long payment commitment.…

YEAH! SCIENCE Normally a headline like "The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same" would elicit much rolling of eyes here at Vulture Towers.…

Some police keeping their feet on ground despite pleas from on high Six years after the UK government introduced its "Cloud First" policy, a load of police forces have continued to mostly keep their feet firmly planted on the ground, a survey has revealed.…

Big Red puts name on $3m NSF project: Because academics love a good cloud credit, amirite? Oracle's battle to keep from being left behind by cloudy competitors AWS and Google has taken an academic twist – it has stuck its name to a project assessing how cloud computing can be used for research.…

Networking, storage collab hitting a data centre near you Hitachi Vantara has taken a leaf out of the Cisco-NetApp FlexPod playbook by twinning Cisco servers and networking with its own storage in a converged infrastructure deal.…

'There is no e-sound. It has to be invented' Now that electric cars officially sound as silent as a character from A Quiet Place in slippers walking on eggshell foam behind an office partition lined with blankets, makers of the post-petrol vehicles have been thinking up ways to ensure zombie pedestrians can hear them coming.…

And in Israel, a funny thing happened on the way to the Moon Space roundup Rebooting robots, lunar robot arms and a rocky path to Martian drilling joy. It's last week in Space.…

It'll be big one day. But that day is not tomorrow Analysis If the industry had one job at Mobile World Congress last week, it was to tell the world that 5G – the biggest thing since "electricity or the automobile", according to Qualcomm's CEO* – was almost upon us.…

Around 1,100 local management and grunts to be axed, customers forced to buy kit via resellers Exclusive Fujitsu is axing the entire local workforce in a bunch of regions – including most of Eastern Europe and certain countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Western Europe – with the loss of 1,100 jobs.…

We'd call this blue-sky thinking but the sky is thick with swarms of drones RSA AI algorithms will in the future form and direct swarms of physical and virtual bots that will live among us... according to this chap speaking at 2019's RSA conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.…

Throw another regulation on the barbie, says Australia In an effort to limit potential regulation in Australia, Google filed a reply to a preliminary Oz government report examining the impact of Facebook and Google on the country's media and business landscape.…

Rather than talk about generic threats, go through some examples with people RSA When it comes to getting your users up to speed with cyber-security, the best approach is to give it to them straight. Practicalities over jargon. Specific examples of threats are very persuasive, rather than simply insisting people enable a firewall and malware scanner, check regularly for updates, and avoid clicking on any suspicious attachments and links.…

Cosmic soap operas may explain why weird alien objects end up in our backyard Stars whizzing by planets can wreak havoc by knocking their orbits out of place or kicking them out of their systems entirely, according to a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.…

Reverse-engineering suite now available to download... and maybe run in a VM, eh? RSA The NSA has released its home-grown open-source reverse-engineering suite Ghidra that folks can use to poke around inside applications to hunt down security holes and other bugs.…

Wise Wardle waves wand, whacks wily worms which work without Windows RSA Infosec guru Patrick Wardle has found a novel way to attempt to detect and stop malware and vulnerability exploits on Macs – using Apple's own game engine.…

Education, education, education is key to security RSA Despite multi-factor authentication being on hand to protect online accounts and other logins from hijackings by miscreants for more than a decade now, people still aren't using it. Today, a pair of academics revealed potential reasons why there is limited uptake.…

But really it's just the start of the latest surveillance chess game Special report The NSA may kill off a controversial mass surveillance program of Americans that was exposed by Edward Snowden, according to a Congressional staffer.…

'Technology doesn't comprehend morality: An algorithm can protect data from theft or hold it for ransom' RSA McAfee – the infosec company, not that weird bloke – says rather than worry about ultra-smart AIs causing havoc all by themselves, we should instead focus on stopping the human element: the miscreants with their hands on the levers.…

Just don't lose your hardware keys RSA At 2004's RSA Conference, then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates predicted the death of the password because passwords have problems and people are bad at managing them. And fifteen years on, as RSA USA 2019 gets underway in San Francisco this week, we still have passwords.…

'Espionage and criminal investigations ... almost all of which lead back to Beijing' RSA While Russian hackers, Kremlin-backed or otherwise, grab the headlines, China remains the biggest cyber-security threat to America, FBI director Christopher Wray warned today.…

'If someone like me can't get in to give a keynote, perhaps it's time we rethink where we organize our events' RSA Adi Shamir, the S in the renowned RSA encryption system, didn't take his usual place on the Cryptographers' Panel at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco – because he couldn't get a visa from the US government. And he's not alone.…

Plus: Reagan's model doesn't apply today, says US CSO Huawei execs insisted today that they have no problem with being shut out of certain countries' networks, even as their US CSO gently scorned a famous Ronald Reagan saying that heralded the end of the Cold War.…

HMRC: How about a client-led dispute resolution process? Organisations hiring off-payroll contractors will be responsible for handling disputes over tax status and ultimately liable for missing tax payments once IR35 reforms hit the private sector, HMRC has said.…

Just nothing too recent, OK? Those keen to indulge in a bit of open-source Windows in the form of ReactOS will be delighted to learn that there is a raft of improvements in the latest version.…

One pint of beer please, Mr Barman. I am 18 today, honest! Like teenagers lying about their age to get served in a pub, tech startups are lying about their AI technology or skills to get VC money.…

MPs ask for specifics, get evasive umming and erring British civil servants and ministers have been slammed for a "Sir Humphrey"* performance when grilled by MPs on differences in attitudes to tech across government and progress moving off legacy systems.…

Ohhh, Torvalds! You are a card! Linus Torvalds has squeezed out version 5.0 of the Linux kernel and flung open the merge window for its follow-up, 5.1.…

About as welcome as a what in a spacesuit? It has been 50 years since NASA first shoved astronauts into a spacecraft that could not return to Earth: say hello to Spider.…

Consumer IoT PITA to secure but not impossible, report warns If you live in a smart home you may as well take all the locks off your doors and hang up a sign saying "burglars, free swag here". At least that's the thrust of a report by Trend Micro into the security threats posed by "complex IoT environments".…

Clear! Museum hopes to bring silicon back to life over next few weeks The Saints of Silicon at the Centre for Computing History have got hold of the original build of Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, courtesy of Kate and John Grant.…

Here I stand, infosec in hand... turn my face to the wall Huawei stopped fighting metaphorical fires today to lift the curtain on its Brussels Cyber Security Transparency Centre in a move to position the Chinese company as a driving force for new global security standards.…

♫ We were always being boring A long time has passed since a Nokia executive compared adopting Android to a boy "peeing in his pants" in the snow to keep warm*. Nokia's current custodian, HMD Global, now wants to be Google's spearhead in getting businesses to buy Android en masse by being as faithful as possible to the master.…

Unclear what risks come with flinging it at the private sector The full extent of how far short the UK government's expensive, digital-first identity assurance scheme has fallen was revealed today by a brutal report on Verify by the country's spending watchdog.…

Industry faces down Spectre of performance optimisation Column A year ago this column mourned the death of Moore's Law, the 1965 paper so beloved by both engineers and computer scientists because of ongoing performance benefits seemingly so effortlessly achieved.…

If you own Outdoor Tech's CHIPS, there's a live vuln in your winter sports headset A set of smart speakers intended for ski helmets are a terrible data-leaking pit of badness, according to a Pen Test Partners researcher who innocently bought himself one of the devices.…

'Only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat' Videos Giant asteroids are harder to destroy than previously thought, according to fresh research out this month.…

What are these pesky neural networks really looking at? The controversial study that examined whether or not machine-learning code could determine a person’s sexual orientation just from their face has been retried – and produced eyebrow-raising results.…

Step one: Run malware on your victim's machine. Step two: Mount some storage... Google has publicly disclosed a zero-day flaw in Apple's macOS after the Cupertino mobe-maker failed to fix the security shortcoming within the ad giant's 90-day deadline.…

'Leakage ... is visible in all Intel generations starting from first-gen Core CPUs Further demonstrating the computational risks of looking into the future, boffins have found another way to abuse speculative execution in Intel CPUs to steal secrets and other data from running applications.…

Quick catch-up on machine-learning news Roundup Here's your rapid-fire guide to what's been happening lately in the world of machine learning.…

See, we're totally not screwing over women, insists ad giant Although Google has been repeatedly accused of unfairly paying men much more than women, during its latest salary review it instead found, surprise, surprise, actually a load of fellas were underpaid.…

No, no, it's not an April Fools. Backstory wants to sniff your packets for hackers RSA Google-spawned security outfit Chronicle this week unveiled a service that analyzes telemetry data from customers' networks to detect cyber-attacks lurking among the rivers of packets.…

In the Navy, you can sail the 7 seas! In the Navy, you'll get hacked by the Chinese! RSA Researchers claim to have uncovered a five-year Chinese hacking operation aimed at bolstering Beijing's naval might and trade deals to the detriment of the world's democracies and maritime hardware makers.…

We live in hope – you'll have to wait until 2020 at the earliest USB version 4 is on the way, offering double the fastest possible USB data transfer rate over the previous generation: a satisfying 40Gbps.…

'This isn’t a mistake now, this is clearly an intentional product choice' says ex-CSO Stamos Another week, another Facebook privacy storm.…

We're gonna save America's internet, scream both sides in different ways Analysis An effort in Congress to end the United States' net neutrality nightmare appears to have fallen apart before it began.…