The Register

Bill Gates' bridge chum's firm buys Red Hat stock Oracle's share prices took a buffeting last night after it was revealed billionaire Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway had ditched its $2.1bn stake in Big Red.…

TITSUP* bank gets thumbs up from personal banking users In a baffling turn of events, more than half of IT chaos bank TSB's customers said they would recommend its online and mobile banking services – y'know, the ones that were crippled for huge chunks of last year – to friends and family.…

Not because he has anything to do with Newhaven British council halls are about the least hip places on the planet, full of fusty old folks umming and erring over whether the introduction of a Lidl branch will forever shatter the "street scene".…

Do you have a funky makeover horror story? We'd like to know Reg Appeal Design director Christie Lenneville tells a story that may be familiar to Reg readers. A design expert was called in to modernise some XP-era enterprise software used by call centre staff: their control panel.…

Countries urged to consider regulating subliminal tech evil Human rights org the Council of Europe has warned that, without member states taking action, people may not be able to make decisions independently of automated systems because of sophisticated micro-targeting techniques.…

Revs down 25% y-o-y, op profit sinks 79%. Miners? Gamers? Hyperscalers? Anyone? Guys? Bueller? You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, so found Nvidia's management team last night as they reported a pig of a quarter that saw revenues and profit crash.…

Lovely screen, shame about the price Hands On El Reg has spent some time talking Surface Studio with Mark Rowland, Microsoft's category lead for Surface UK, and we also pawed at the pricey box of tricks itself so we could give you the real skinny on what's under the hood.…

Stop making 'sexy noises' and 'get real', conference told Blockchain-fanciers have been told to stop the "sexy noises" about its use in fintech and get real – though others remain hopeful the tech can hitch its cart to the techlash bandwagon.…

Windows 10 Insiders sent screaming into a future where, er, nothing much has changed right now Microsoft fired up the speculation machine last night by issuing a fresh build of Windows 10 to lucky skip-ahead testers: and it contains code from 2020s Windows.…

JR Hartley is my bitch Something for the Weekend, Sir? The Ripper has returned.…

It was an easy solve, says techie, once we put our heads together On Call Well done, Reg readers, you’ve once again triumphed in the battle with the 9-5 and made it to Friday.…

Execs, experts hope this cooperation continues to hold for the next big bug A panel of eggheads from Intel, the US government, and academia held court this week to figure how they can keep the likes of El Reg from spoiling their next major bug reveal.…

Ex-Googler reveals study and, yes, we're lookin' at you, WordAds If the web seems slow, blame third-party advertising and analytics scripts.…

There's only been one so far, so 49 more to go Cosmologists need gravitational wave measurements from 50 binary neutron star mergers to work out just how fast our universe is really expanding, according to new research.…

They're dropping like flies: First Opportunity, now NASA's Van Allen craft NASA’s twin probes studying Earth’s radiation belts are in the last stages of their mission – and will end their lives by nosediving into our planet’s atmosphere, the US space agency announced Thursday.…

Antisocial network may shell out billions to end watchdog's privacy probe, it is reported Facebook is reportedly close to breaking out its checkbook to settle the FTC's legal rumblings over the antisocial network's unique approach to netizens' privacy.…

Why fight an oligopoly when you can subsidize it? The White House and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have both announced big plans to expand broadband internet access across the United States.…

CorrectHorseBatteryStaple once again more secure and memorable than ff3sd21n HashCat, an open source password recovery tool, can now crack an eight-character Windows NTLM password hash in less time than it will take to watch Avengers: Endgame.…

Online retailer just wants to be loved. And by loved, it means given lots of subsidies no questions asked Amazon has ditched its plans to open a headquarters in New York City after growing opposition to its plans by local officials and unions.…

Enterprise punters shut wallets amid 'deteriorating outlooks' and trade tariff blitz The old saying goes that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. According to NetApp boss George Kurian, some large businesses are already reaching for the tissues.…

UK watchdog denies project distracted from day-to-day enforcement The millions spent on investigating the Facebook data harvesting scandal was worth it because it allowed the Information Commissioner's Office to secure greater powers, Elizabeth Denham has said.…

When in America, STFU and get a lawyer. Even if you're innocent Marcus Hutchins, the Brit white-hat hacker who halted 2017's WannaCry ransomware outbreak, has failed to stop the American legal system using statements he made while recovering from the effects of holidaying in Las Vegas.…

Microsoft prez Brad Smith talks AI and ethics with the Pope The head of an organisation noted for being a bit unpleasant over the years, and is now trying to rehabilitate its image for a new generation, met the Pope this week.…

'Not safe on database server!' it screamed back as its makers fear it could be abused for dodgy purposes Analysis Most neural networks are like people with savant syndrome: they have extraordinary capabilities in a very narrow range of tasks.…

Commission fumes at 'fake' campaign The EU has finally settled on the wording of its Digital Single Market copyright reform package, a three-years-in-the-making effort, greeting the agreement with a sizzling rebuke of the "misinformation campaigns" around the measures.…

Comms giant bared all to Brit security services, says chief Eric Xu, one of three rotating chairmen at Huawei, has said the company is "naked" before the British security services with whom it shares its most intimate secrets: its source code.…

No new superjumbos after that date, confirms CEO Airbus has declared it will shut down the A380 superjumbo production line in 2021, after demand from airlines for the double-decker aircraft all but collapsed.…

Sales of Jesus mobe slump by double digits in Middle Kingdom Apple's iPhone sales volumes in the strategic Chinese market slumped by double digits in Q4 – the firm's seasonally biggest quarter – as buyers opted for homegrown hardware makers' handsets.…

Self-hammering spike to see what weather's like 5m down Unfazed by the outpouring of grief over NASA's admission that its teenaged Opportunity rover had likely trundled its last, the agency's lander, InSight, managed to position its second instrument on the surface of the Red Planet.…

Neon-style tech pumps Helium balloon in future gadgets Processor designer Arm will, we're told, today pull the wraps off its Armv8.1-M architecture for crafting next-gen 32-bit microcontrollers.…

Roses are reddish, don't cry into your beer... but Hoonigan.com is better than Top Gear A 20-year-old American man who allegedly used the Twitter handle @WantedByFeds has been charged with DDoSing, sending bomb threats and more along with a British teenager who is already in prison.…

Bank CIO Chaos explains Santander is locked, loaded and ready to fire the cash gun at IBM in an effort to speed the bank's jaunt towards the cloud.…

A dubious slider and a bargain midranger. Forgotten the chocolates? We'll warn you now: Danger! BBK Electronics brings its Oppo phones to Blighty today, meaning all three Chinese phone giants are now officially competing for Brits' affections.…

Big Red is red, underpaid staffers are blue. No angry counter-claims can stop that being true The Department of Labor has hit back at Oracle's "inflammatory" accusations that it set up a "secret" pact with plaintiffs in a civil case, saying the company is trying to deflect from serious issues of bias.…

Cheap Google mobes this year, at least according to Nikkei Long-rumoured cheaper Google phones will make their debut this year, according to Nikkei, which claims to have an idea of how much (or how little) they'll cost.…

Roses are red, gave Violet pick 'n' mix. She didn't like the milk bottles. Now back to ethics The UK's advisory body for biometrics and forensics ethics has had another chunk of oversight added to its already laden basket – instructing the Home Office on ethical issues in large, complex data sets.…

CLL 19 early bird tickets disappear in two weeks If you want to accelerate your software development and deployment operation, and stay within budget, get your skates on to grab a handful of tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London before our early bird offer expires in two weeks.…

Urgh, you're infuriating! Three years ago, internet memelords united under the clarion call "Dicks out for Harambe". The 17-year-old gorilla was shot and killed on 29 May 2016 after snatching a toddler at Cincinnati Zoo.…

Anti-antivirus root-rooting weirdness just gets deeper Taiwanese NAS maker QNAP has admitted its devices are affected by mysterious malware that alters hosts files on infected boxen following The Register's report.…

Battery could be improved, we charge Long Term Test Clearing out the attic recently, I was astonished to discover an ancient bit of PC kit that had failed to be recycled with family, friends, eBay, the vicar, or a random homeless person. This was a rarity: a laptop with a desktop class Intel chip: the Thinkpad A31, from Big Blue itself, around 2002.…

Get an update, or risk giving a dodgy user or malware an upgrade Canonical has issued an update for Ubuntu to address a security vulnerability that can be exploited by malware and rogue users to gain root access.…

Switchzilla shakes off economic worries, turns tidy profit Little news is good news for networking giant Cisco.…

Prosecutors accuse Monica Witt of helping Tehran target her former colleagues US prosecutors on Wednesday announced the indictment of a former US counterintelligence agent on charges of helping Iran conduct cyberattacks on her former colleagues.…

Amazing what you can achieve on unforgiving dust world over 15 years with a 20MHz RISC CPU and a bunch of probes NASA’s beloved Mars rover, Opportunity, has been officially laid to rest more than seven months after it was engulfed by a gigantic dust storm and fell silent.…

Federal court shoots down attempt to reveal Feds' decryption demands A US federal judge has refused to unseal court paperwork that would show how the FBI tried to force Facebook to snoop on calls made through its instant-messaging app.…

Board of directors sued for 'failing to protect investors' Two Oracle shareholders on Tuesday sued the database giant and its board of directors for allegedly misleading investors about the potential of its cloud business.…

Redmond opens up the .NET Core 3.0 big box of preview toys Microsoft emitted an Azure Pipelines app for Slack today while also reminding devs of the tweaks made to breakpoints in the upcoming combo of Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Core 3.0.…

We won't just suddenly break our evidence rules for HP, says Blighty's High Court A British judge has rejected the FBI's request for legal documents submitted to London's High Court by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's lawyers just weeks before his civil lawsuit is heard in Britain.…

US financial watchdog, prosecutors overdose on irony The top boss of Apple's insider trading compliance program has been accused of insider trading by the feds.…

Hapless bank goes into lockdown mode, vanishes from the internet Malta's Bank of Valetta (BOV) has pulled the plug on its entire internet access, including shutting down cashpoints and branch offices, after detecting a "cyber intrusion" by crims that tried to steal nearly €13m.…