The Register

Concerns about data requests, job role confusion discussed at town hall talking tour – reports The US Department of Labor has insisted it isn't targeting the national tech industry as it presses ahead with its discrimination suit against Oracle.…

Lol, don't worry – if you were – cuz toners still a licence to print spondulix Forget Intel's chip drought: an unforeseen collapse in demand for print supplies in EMEA is the bigger issue keeping HP Inc's management on their toes.…

Un-gadgeting the gadget MWC Analysis Until a week ago, many people were sceptical that foldable smartphones would be anything more than a gimmick. I was probably one of them.…

New flash wine in old drive bottle Micron has rejigged its 1100 SATA SSD with denser NAND to produce the new 1300 model.…

Road rage against the machines Autonomous vehicles have been given the green light – according to HM Government – which confidently expects they'll be pounding Britain's potholed highways by 2021.…

Java meanwhile manages to be both the third-most-loved and second-most-hated programming language The most in-demand software developer role at the moment is blockchain engineer, or so says recruitment biz Hired.…

Where is that elusive super-Earth hiding? There is no sign of the Solar System's hypothetical “Planet Nine” yet – however, astronomers in America aren’t giving up, as they continue to find bits and pieces of evidence for its existence.…

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder diagnosed by code, eventually, maybe, if accuracy improves Machine-learning algorithms can help doctors diagnose children affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, according to fresh research.…

Blocking ads, analytics code gives browser an edge over, well, Edge, Chrome, etc Brave ran some benchmark tests on the Android version of its browser, and – funnily enough – found it to be less power-hungry than a handful of competitors.…

By contrast, Russian hack-treason trial ends with 22-year sentence and accusations of foul play A US judge this week sentenced website hacker Billy Anderson to three months behind bars, refusing his lawyer's request not to put him in jail, in order to "send a message" to others.…

Chipzilla rips sticker off its graphics accelerator, switches off GPU – now you're a security wizard, Harry! RSA Intel is touting a PCIe card packed with SGX tech to plug into servers in time for next week's RSA conference in San Francisco.…

Deduplicating, I keep waiting, still anticipating your PR shove While fending off America's accusations that it backdoors its gear for Beijing, Huawei has upgraded its FusionStorage software to v8.0 in hope of providing all the different storage resources a data centre needs from one silo.…

FTC task force has power to break up tech giants, probe past mergers, or do nothing America's consumer protection watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission, has created a task force to dig into whether the tech industry has engaged in anti-competitive behavior.…

Last week's disclosures are now this week's live attacks Just days after a remote code execution flaw in open-source web publishing software Drupal was made public, researchers have already spotted live exploits in the wild – reinforcing the need for admins to patch and update their sites immediately.…

Happy-clappy club wants to 'democratize' supercomputing Silicon design startup Tachyum has joined the Open Euro High Performance Computing Project (OEUHPC), a consortium that aims to "democratise" supercomputing by building systems along Open Compute Project principles.…

CNIL says firm now collects valid consent, shutters case privacy-watchers hoped would help see off adtech's model The French data protection agency has ended a probe into digital marketing biz Vectaury that was last year hailed as a potentially fatal nail in adtech's coffin.…

Blood hath been shed 'ere now. Take that claim down anon, orders ASA BT has been ticked off for running a campaign claiming to have the UK's "most powerful" broadband, almost two years after it was hauled before the ad industry watchdog over the same issue.…

Unarmed, but let's be real – it's only a matter of time, isn't it? RoTM Boeing has built an autonomous military aeroplane that flies in formation with a manned fighter jet to ward off electronic warfare attacks. Reports say the craft could be modified to carry and use its own weapons.…

Yes it's years out of date but there's no such thing as security through obscurity Cisco's security limb has spotted nefarious people targeting Elasticsearch clusters using relatively ancient vulns to plant malware, cryptocurrency miners and worse – though it does root out some other cybercrims’ dodgy wares, cuckoo-style.…

Kevin Bunsell passed info on rival candidates in job hunt A former senior officer for Nuneaton and Bedworth District Council has been fined for sharing data on rival candidates for a council admin job with his partner.…

Fails, obviously It turns out there's a whole subreddit dedicated to whining about the US phenomenon of homeowners associations (or HOAs), and no gripe better encapsulates their draconian pettiness than the woman who reported being fined $100 for the tenuously dick-shaped outline her car left in melting frost.…

How about only using face-scan tech if it, er, actually works, is the only option, eh? Cops should only use facial recognition tech if it is proven to be effective at identifying people, can be used without bias and is the only method available, a UK government advisory group has said.…

No, nothing to do with software theft or blockchain. Four-star admiral helped rescue Captain Phillips from the, er, Big Blue Embattled IBM has called on a military veteran to help provide some “leadership skills” as the corporation continues to shape-shift from a legacy tech vendor to one fit for the new world.…

We kick the wares in Barcelona MWC So what's really happening with 5G? And is it proper 5G?…

Update of the Damned on 20% of boxen, ad flinger suggests Windows 10 1809 continued its sinister seep from beneath the basement door last month as usage crested the 20 per cent mark.…

TypeScript tooling tweaks too, you lucky people The Azure Functions gang has been busy while their HoloLens counterparts have been sunning themselves in Barcelona. Java workloads are now ready for production while TypeScript tools have seen an overhaul. We took both for a spin to see how they looked.…

They're ThinkPads, but a bit better than before MWC A bit like launching a new range of heavy-duty overalls at Paris Fashion Week, Lenovo has unveiled this year's T-series and X-series ThinkPads, its workhorse business laptops, at Mobile World Congress.…

Choose between 10 intensive training courses Promo However sophisticated computer systems become, skilled and determined cyber criminals manage to find endless new and more ingenious ways of breaking in to steal data or hold organisations to ransom.…

Boffins predict success rate of telescope's gravitational microlensing tech NASA’s in-development Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope could help scientists discover as many as 1,400 distant exoplanets, according to new estimates.…

Grids may be able to better juggle solar electricity supplies using machine-learning code A freshly developed AI system can predict the power generated by wind farms up to 36 hours in advance, helping electrical grid managers plan ahead in terms of availability, according to the latest collaboration between Google and its Alphabet stablemate DeepMind.…

Honey, I've shrunk the spyware and concealed it with speculative execution Spectre – the security vulnerabilities in modern CPUs' speculative execution engines that can be exploited to steal sensitive data – just won't quietly die in the IT world.…

It's a time of long goodbyes Western Digital (WD) has started to replace its SATA and SAS SSDs with faster NVMe drives.…

Well, that's one way to attempt to avoid future legal action In a remarkable effort to avoid future lawsuits, Apple will close two of its retail stores in east Texas and reopen them at a new location a few miles down the road – where they will no longer be subject to a patent-friendly court.…

Open memory defenses allow mischief from connected kit Analysis Computers have enough trouble defending sensitive data in memory from prying eyes that you might think it would be unwise to provide connected peripherals with direct memory access (DMA).…

National security, sanctions allegations, pfft, you don't understand the art of the deal Efforts to pressure the White House into banning Huawei hardware from America's networks may have backfired.…

Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, EFF, and more want lower court ruling scrapped The US Supreme Court has been urged to hear Google out in its long-running copyright battle with Oracle over the search giant’s use of Java technology in Android.…

Needs manpower, bags of time, full knowledge of target Analysis A group of infosec researchers have uncovered neat ways to track a phone's location via 4G or 5G. However, the mechanics of the surveillance, while fascinating, are difficult to pull off for all but the most determined foe.…

Businesses as well as ordinary punters hit by viral nasties Antisocial media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube aren't merely inciting hatred, enabling discrimination, driving content moderators to the brink, and showing kids how to commit suicide. They're also making cybercrime more practical and profitable, at the expense of law-abiding internet users.…

And it makes you look silly MWC Hands On There are a couple of reasons why air gesture interfaces haven't taken off – they make you look silly, and they're hard for phone makers to get right.…

Yep, they look at that data, and the fix is in the hands of another company Windows Insiders chief Dona Sarkar has taken to Twitter to explain what's taking the Slow Ring version of Windows 10 so long: It's all about the gamers, apparently.…

Just one tier of cheap deduped accelerated flash Startup VAST Data lifted the lid on its secret storage sauce today, revealing cheap, exabyte-level scale out flash arrays sped by Optane SSDs – which it hopes will persuade users to load up their on-premises spinning rust in the 'barrow and wheel it to the tip.…

UK.gov agency dangles £120k salary to rid itself of legacy tech The UK's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is on the lookout for a new CTO to pick up the reins of its modernisatiom agenda.…

Billionaire investor says he was burnt by IBM – but is 'amazed' at Amazon's rise Warren Buffett has told the world he was behind Berkshire Hathaway's decision to ditch its £2.1bn Oracle stake – just a quarter after buying it – because he felt he didn't understand where cloud computing is headed.…

Regulator says 'inaccurate' claims go against 2018 settlement Elon Musk should be held in contempt of court, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has told a New York federal court after Tesla's mouthy CEO tweeted about the number of cars the company will roll out this year.…

It looks like you want to increase your lethality. Do you want some help with that? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to employees' concerns over the company's decision to flog its HoloLens tech to the US military.…

This one gets everything right MWC Hands On Five years ago, LG, Sony and HTC roamed the Earth like all-conquering warlords. But then the engines of the Chinese manufacturing economy cranked up, and thanks to the gift of Android that Google gave them, Huawei and OnePlus stole much of their thunder. And market share.…

Direct-to-memory attacks now account for 57 per cent of hacks, apparently A company's internal network, once compromised, is now more likely to be ransacked by automated scripts than a piece of malware.…

Reg sees reports on IT chief investigation Exclusive The UN's patent body has finally fired chief information officer and one-time whistleblower Wei Lei after claiming a probe found evidence of criminal misconduct, a point still contested by the ex-staffer.…

NAND great. It's going to get worse this quarter DRAM supplier revenues plunged in the final quarter of 2018, as have those of NAND suppliers, with both quantity shipped and prices paid dropping, industry analyst DRAMeXChange said.…

Firm 'sought to abuse privileges limited liability offers' – insolvency bod A Leicester-based IT supplier has been closed down after it carried on the work of two companies that courts said had traded in an improper manner.…