The Register

Secret-keeping screw-ups bedevil amorous appliances Hewing to its pubic public service mission, Mozilla has published a privacy and security evaluation of sex toys and other connected goods in preparation for Valentine's Day next week.…

OK, you, yes, you: You need to read this the most Nest has urged its customers to not reuse passwords between their smart home gizmos and other websites and services.…

Malicious acts would 'destroy' us, exec insists Huawei has admitted "room for improvement" in its product design processes in an open letter to the UK Parliament – but strongly refuted allegations of spying.…

Microsoft turns the screws on those living in the past The Bad News Bus has paid a visit to enterprises still prevaricating over what to do about their fleet of Windows 7 PCs as the end of support inches closer.…

Using Police Property Act 1897 to get PCs, storage devices back, representing himself in court Lauri Love, the Brit who beat US attempts to extradite him over accusations of hacking, is suing the National Crime Agency (NCA) to get back computing gear seized in 2013 as part of the case against him.…

If yer name's not on Azure's list, you ain't coming in Microsoft has said it is killing off Azure Party Clusters, the software giant’s free trial for Service Fabric workloads, so engineers can concentrate on stopping the rest of the stack from toppling.…

It's all voluntary, the human overseer could be miles away. What could go wrong? Experts have said the UK's guidelines for testing self-driving cars, published today by the Department for Transport, could put lives at risk.…

Thank heavens it doesn't need to be, er, renegotiated ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) The UK government spent £45,637 printing copies of the 600-page Withdrawal Agreement it now has to renegotiate – but did our political masters get their money's worth? Trust El Reg's readers to do the maths.…

Force will run 1 more full-day rollout after snow stopped play London cops' use of facial recognition tech last week resulted in only one person being charged, while another was handed a £90 on-the-spot fine after trying to avoid the cams.…

Deirdre O'Brien to take reins from Angela Ahrendts Apple has entrusted consumer sales as well as the horcrux that contains its "soul" to company veteran Deirdre O'Brien, who adds the retail and online division to a job sheet that already included heading up global HR.…

More talks, workshops added as clock ticks on early bird tickets Events We've announced another tranche of speakers and workshops for Continuous Lifecycle London, giving you even more reasons to snap up our early bird tickets before they disappear at the end of the month.…

Me n tha bois gona smuggle loads 2nite lol #catchmeifucan In the UK's quest to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, Fujitsu has reportedly pitched an artificial intelligence-driven process that analyses drivers' journeys and even social media posts.…

How many people are on your cloud platform again? It earns how much? Oh right, you're not saying Analysis So much for the "Big Tech backlash". The "surveillance" model of data slurping used by behavioural ad giants Google and Facebook has never been under such focus as it is today. And they've never made as much money.…

Brussels court (no, not that one) comes up trumps for US biz Viasat, US arch-rival of British satellite comms biz Inmarsat, has claimed victory in a Belgian court during a bitter continent-wide legal row over the proposed EU Aviation Network for in-flight phone signal.…

10% off £3k! Great! Wait, now it's £3,300? No, £4k. What? As if Dixons Carphone didn't have bigger fish to fry, the UK's ads watchdog has given the company a stern talking to over a misleading promotion for an exceedingly pricey Samsung fridge.…

Researchers claim Iconary will slowly teach machines sense What’s the latest game artificially intelligent software can play, you ask? Well, it’s Pictionary.…

Briefcase-sized spacecraft will continue to float in space peacefully around the Sun NASA has said goodnight to its two experimental CubeSats, sent into space to monitor America's InSight probe as it landed on Mars, after failing to communicate with the gizmo duo since January.…

YesYesYes.org ended up No! No! No dotcom! A senior exec at British biz that makes and sells sex aids was sacked after he shifted the company's website from a .org to a .com, an employment tribunal heard this week.…

Come comrades, join the coding collective Enterprise Linux biz Red Hat, plated for consumption by IBM later this year, said on Tuesday that its containerized cloud development environment, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, has ripened to the point of general availability.…

Software and cache acceleration ramps restore rapidity remarkably Dell is claiming a 2.5 to 4x increase in restore speed for software and cache updates to its Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance products, and has added extended public cloud support.…

It's 2019. Should billion-dollar corps do better than offer swag for vulns? Analysis Hunting for exploitable security bugs in software is not an easy way to make a living, and vulnerability researchers say vendors who don't pay out for reports are making life even harder while putting their own products at risk.…

The hits, misses, and axings by the newish CEO Stepping into the sweaty shoes of Steve Ballmer was never going to be an easy task. Satya Nadella’s first five years as third CEO of the software giant has brought pain to fans of Microsoft's consumer tech but delight to investors.…

And I'm OK with this, says chief of HaveIBeenPwned During its incessant web crawling, Google's search engine constantly encounters credentials dumped by hackers or left exposed by the careless. And because it can, the ad confectionery copies and encrypts these spilled usernames and passwords.…

QuadrigaCX granted 30-day legal protection by judge A Canadian court today granted legal protections to a Great White North cryptocurrency exchange that is holding some $190m that can't be accessed – allegedly because its founder, the only person with the passwords to the digital vaults, died.…

Think we may just get away with this one, eh mes amies? Apple has agreed to pay France an estimated €500m ($570m, £440m) in back taxes following several years of protests – and a decision by the French government to pass a new tax aimed at US tech giants.…

Copyright leak prompts Big Tech angst Analysis The EU's copyright reform is being watched globally as an experiment in taming Big Tech – but fears grow that it may make Silicon Valley even stronger. The Register has seen a draft law dated 4 February that gives some credence to this.…

Series E funding round values company at $2.75bn Analytics biz Databricks has doubled its total funding with a $250m investment, valuing the company at $2.75bn.…

Case referred up to the Grand Chamber The UK's mass surveillance regime is to be ruled upon by Europe's highest human rights court after civil liberties groups pushed back against a previous decision.…

Join Carbon Black at livestreamed event based on global independent research Promo As cyber attackers evolve their techniques, businesses are exposed to a relentless stream of worrying data security breaches. The latest big one hit hotel group Marriott International in November 2018, and may have led to the personal information of up to 500 million guests being compromised.…

Slack: Cute Series A. Check out our proposed public listing... Slack-for-engineers Mattermost has said it plans to plough its $20m Series-A funding into privacy and security.…

Chairman tells MPs its budget may need revising upwards in future The UK government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation has £2.5m for its first year of work, in which it will probe microtargeting and algorithmic bias – but its chair has warned it might need more cash in future.…

Hosting outfit wants to get up close and personal Manchester-based hosting outfit UKFast has squeezed out a developer platform in the hopes of fending off the relentless march of cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft.…

25 bugs, three apps – endless pwnage Security firm Check Point has found some 25 security vulnerabilities in three of the most popular remote desktop protocol (RDP) tools for Windows and Linux.…

Colossal intercepts are just the Bombe Bletchley Park's National Museum of Computing will be exhibiting original, freshly discovered decrypted WWII messages to coincide with the 75th anniversary of D-Day this June – messages that were broken by the Colossus machines based on the museum's site.…

I really neeeeed to learn. 'Cos buyers aren't draining high-cap drive pools Seagate was caught out by an unexpectedly deep drop in disk drive demand and saw its revenues fall 7 per cent. Along with the rest of the tech world, it talked about a recovery mid-year, and promised world+dog at least one more lousy quarter.…

Grey area in comms law needs a tad more black and white Can the UK Home Secretary order Ofcom to ignore its own legal duties? A court case that effectively began with the trial of a GSM gateway operator will soon decide the answer to that difficult, and potentially expensive, question.…

Plus: Lucy in the sky with Trojans, and ISS 'nauts splash around in a water party Roundup Over the past week in space, SpaceX pressed go on the first flight Raptor, the Lucy mission inched closer, and the ISS crew battled with some dodgy plumbing.…

Predictive plod practices bake bias into systems people don't understand, says Liberty Human right group Liberty is urging UK cops to stop using predictive policing programs that put a "technological veneer of legitimacy" on existing biased practices.…

Lots of unanswered questions remain – and nobody's talking Retro Computers Ltd, which absorbed £513,000 of backers' money to produce ZX Spectrum-themed game consoles it then failed to deliver, has been wound up – by Private Planet.…

Boffins scrape together a dataset to aid in the fight against modern day slavery AI is the latest recruit in the ongoing efforts to stamp out the scourge of human trafficking – by helping police figure out which hotels victims are being held.…

Seismometer looking for whole lot of shakin' going on Pic NASA’s InSight lander has been revamped to let scientists study the interior of Mars for the first time.…

Costs on the rise but still added $99m a day to its bottom line in Q4 2018 Google parent company Alphabet says it logged a 23 per cent jump in revenues in the final quarter of 2018, even as losses from its various side projects continue to mount.…

E-waste partly to blame for proliferation of deceptively marketed silicon Rogelio Vasquez, the owner of California-based PRB Logics Corporation, has pleaded guilty to selling fake branded semiconductor chips from China, some of which made their way into US military systems.…

Vuln exposing intimate snaps left open for 'months' – you may want to delete your pics Dating-slash-hook-up app Jack'd is exposing to the public internet intimate snaps privately swapped between its users, allowing miscreants to download countless X-rated selfies without permission.…

Snotagram accuses comms regulator chief of being a Useful Ajit for telcos The chairs of the US House of Reps' commerce and technology committees have picked a fight with FCC boss Ajit Pai, accusing him of being a corporate stooge.…

Prof asks: What good comes from letting everyone know a vulnerability exists? A computer engineering professor has an interesting idea for how to handle the public disclosure of serious vulnerabilities: don't.…

Just use manual control, says biz. Then why did we buy 'smart' controls, ask customers Honeywell's remote-control "smart" thermostat platform has been down for a week, leaving thousands of customers fuming.…

Remote scripting flaw in open-source productivity suites is at least partly fixed A security flaw affecting LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice has been fixed in one of the two open-source office suites. The other still appears to be vulnerable.…

Thanks to whip-round from WD investment arm and co Data management startup Komprise has more than doubled its funding, collecting a $24m third round to grow its file-moving and managing tech.…

Hackers can talk to and locate the wearer, warns notice The European Commission has ordered the recall of a smartwatch aimed at kids that allows miscreants to pinpoint the wearer's location, posing a potentially "serious risk".…