The Register

Group says search giant hasn't changed its ways – and wants the public to know Googlers are launching a public campaign in a bid to end forced arbitration as part of the battle over harassment allegations levelled against the corporation.…

Blames 'internal pressures' rather than a software giant getting stroppy about foldables As Windows 7 tipped over into its 12-month march to oblivion, the popular Windows tracking site, BuildFeed, issued its final update.…

You just need to tell us who you are... Events If you’re heading down the path of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Containers and all the rest, we’re guessing part of your plan is to save money, or at least spend it as efficiently as possible. But let’s face it, nothing beats free, does it?…

Also: US Commerce Dept blocks export of tech developed by Silicon Valley subsidiary It's only the third week of January, but 2019 is turning into a horror year for Huawei: the company's phones have now been reportedly banned from a major research institute in Taiwan.…

Unfortunate SpaceX workers start a different sort of countdown Roundup While China's rover kept on trundling, the news was not so cheery for workers in the US space sector or radio telescope fans over the past week.…

Plenty of Python news emitted from Redmond in this week's round-up The gang at Microsoft continued their busy start to 2019, dodging falling masonry, wobbly updates and toppling cloud services.…

Only 45 parsecs away if you fancy a look up close Astronomers have found the first example of a protoplanetary disk forming at a right angle to its parent stars, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy this week.…

Sounds fishy, yet it works for fruit flies, too. So take that, fish/fly-spotting humans AI systems excel in pattern recognition, so much so that they can stalk individual zebrafish and fruit flies even when the animals are in groups of up to a hundred.…

Before you outsource security to strangers, try boosting internal cybersecurity skills Security researchers looking to earn a living as bug bounty hunters would to do better to pursue actual insects.…

Silicon Valley box slinger clams it's first on the block with Intel processor... which isn't out yet In brief Supermicro is touting what's said to be the "first to market" Intel Cascade Lake AP Xeon server – and it's fitted with Optane DIMM modules to make in-memory apps, particularly the AI ones, run faster.…

Data transfer tools caught not checking what exactly they're downloading A decades-old oversight in the design of Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) tools can be exploited by malicious servers to unexpectedly alter victims' files on their client machines, it has emerged.…

Executives held to account? And three underlings thanked for their work? What is this madness? The Singaporean government-owned biz responsible for that country's patient database has fined senior executives, including the CEO, and dismissed two managers, after blunders allowed hackers to siphon off private records.…

Is the chip company an abusive monopolist – or tough negotiator? The chip industry's strong-arm tactics have been laid bare this month in the anti-trust legal battle brought by America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Qualcomm.…

Judge rules compelled use of biometrics runs into Fifth Amendment protections A US judge last week denied police a warrant to unlock a number of devices using biometrics identifiers like fingerprints and faces, extending more privacy to device owners than previous recent cases.…

Chipzilla adds to Windows IT admins security update load While admins were busy wrangling with the mass of security patches from Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP last week, Intel slipped out a fix for a potentially serious flaw in its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology.…

EFF slams bad eggs for trying to censor instructions on how to unlock gizmos from app Bird has apologized for sending a legal threat to a blogger who outlined how its scooters-for-hire – those electric gizmos littering city streets – can have their motherboards replaced to unlock them from their app, and driven away.…

Small biz raises doubts over value of social network's ad tech Analysis Imagine a store where you go in, pay money, and sometimes leave empty-handed. That's digital advertising on social media in a nutshell because it's seemingly full of fraud.…

Fresh plastic comes six months after ticket flogger fessed up to Magecart malware infection The Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest have issued customers with replacement cards as a result of last year’s Ticketmaster breach that hit around 40,000 Brits.…

Lord, he'll leave your mind to scream - if you don't renew on time Nominet has thrown out an attempt at reverse domain name hijacking after some, er, pushy Brits tried seizing their old web address from a fast-fingered fellow in Romania.…

As legal storm over weather app location data brews, its new year's resolution is: 3km IBM's embattled Weather Company subsidiary has said it is building a GPU-tastic supercomputer to model global weather conditions faster and more accurately.…

Chinese hardware biz faces more push-back in Western nations A Polish official has said he couldn’t rule out “legislative changes” to allow the nation to ban the use of a company’s products, following the local arrest of a Huawei staffer.…

Final decision expected in long-running antitrust case within weeks – reports Germany's competition authority is reportedly poised to ban a chunk of Facebook's user data collection activities.…

Looks like a functionality fail rather than a data breach, though Nervous Nissan UK drivers were today assured by the car maker that Connect EV app log-in failures are related to a migration of data onto a new platform rather than anything more nefarious.…

Enough to build a Wall.... of Windows consultants around Washington The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced a contract worth an estimated $1.76bn for Microsoft Enterprise Services.…

Also: AT&T inks open source pact with Nokia, ZTE 5G pass, Equinix expands Networks roundup Is it any surprise that Cisco remained the dominant force in enterprise infrastructure during 2018?…

Real or satire? Teaching machines to tell apart 'BP ready to resume oil drilling' and 'BP ready to resume oil spilling' Looking for a laugh? You should seek out the ends of satirical headlines and phrases with nouns in them, according to a pair of computer boffins.…

Javascript boo-boo pinned on server switcheroo Who, Me? Welcome Reg readers, to this week's Who, Me?, in which we gather round to share in another person's painful memories of technical cockups.…

Bloke binned at Blackfriars for blasting botnet to bork broadband A Surrey man has been jailed for 32 months after admitting to launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against an African telco.…

Plus: More info on Intel's NNP chip Roundup Hello, welcome back to the AI roundup. Here’s a short list of what’s been happening so far since the Christmas and New Year break.…

Plus, Vita boot ROM caper, TCL caught slinging Android malware, etc Roundup This week we saw a Huawei official cuffed (again), telcos caught selling tracking data (again) and Microsoft patching dozens of bugs (again).…

Not much fun back in the West for SpaceX, tho: Staff decimated Pics and vid China's Chang’e lunar lander has beamed back its first pictures of the far side of the Moon.…

Could someone slide a note on identity-theft protection under the door? Helloooo? With the partial US government shutdown showing no signs of letting up any time soon, senators are pressing treasury and tax officials on cybersecurity.…

Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again, OK US cellphone networks have promised – again – that they will stop selling records of their subscribers' whereabouts to anyone willing to cough up cash.…

Watch this game of moist mechanical musical chairs Vid Picture a massive robotic arm gloved with a damp, arse-shaped cushion twerking into a chair for three days straight. That's how automaker Ford tests the durability of its car seats, at least in Europe.…

Sour Krauts aren't wrong: Tap-to-order gizmo is really dumb Germany has banned Amazon's tap-to-order-a-thing Dash buttons, with a court deciding they break ecommerce laws.…

The 1930s called. They'd like their silver Starship back SpaceX launched its first mission of 2019, fulfilling its Iridium contract, while the Falcon 9 due to loft the company's Crew Dragon demo mission remained resolutely attached to Florida.…

Q3 '18 it hit 50.9% of of total IT turnover, according to analyst Abacus-strummer IDC has clocked that quarterly revenues of IT infrastructure (that's servers, storage, and Ethernet switches) for the cloud have officially squeezed past sales into traditional environments.…

Juliet Bauer to join Livi in April NHS England's chief digital officer has reportedly told staff she is leaving the organisation just days after the government launched its tech-focused long-term plan for the body.…

Virty OS's latest version rolls up the best bits of 2018 Invisible Things Lab pushed out a point release of Qubes OS this week in the form of version 4.0.1…

Did he really blow the whistle on security fears? tribunal asked A former vice president of medical app Your.MD has claimed "false information could be fed into the diagnostic system" as a result of security failings in the software's backend.…

Former Polish security agency exec also under arrest Polish authorities have reportedly arrested Huawei's sales director and an ex-security agency staffer on allegations of spying.…

Or Jillin' off, for the ladies UK-based smut viewers seem to be filling their boots before the government's age check kicks in as traffic to xHamster rose 6 per cent in 2018.…

Activation server fiddling on day of monthly update... really? Microsoft has said that activation errors seen by Windows 7 users should not be chalked up to Tuesday's patch, but rather were an entirely different cockup.…

Shareholders' suit alleges there was a 'pattern' Another day, another anti-Google lawsuit – this time over claims Alphabet, adtech monolith Google's holding company, "failed to take meaningful steps to address a pervasive culture of harassment and discrimination".…

It was still going? Exclusive Vodafone has confirmed it will shutter Demon Broadband, the pioneering Iron Age ISP, as part of its network upgrade plans.…

It's not the messiah, it's just very naughty metadata Something for the Weekend, Sir? Withdrawal at the last moment isn't the most reliable method of avoiding trouble or embarrassment. This was certainly the experience at CES this year when judges very suddenly rescinded an Innovation Award it had given for Lora DiCarlo's Osé Robotic Massager.…

Healthcare networks pummeled amid drama over teen girl's custody Five months after he was found guilty of orchestrating a distributed denial-of-service attack against US healthcare providers, the self-styled Anonymous hacker Martin Gottesfeld has been sentenced to 121 months in prison.…

Why? For science! Within hours of announcing that he and his wife are divorcing, what's alleged to be Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos' steamy texts to his new girlfriend were leaked online.…

Because this comp is counting down to something... On Call Friday has come around, reliable as ever, to mark the end of that most dreaded thing, the first full week after New Year.…

50-year theory finally confirmed by European space craft A scan of the heavens has shown space is littered with the crystallized remains of stars, and our own sun is expected to go the same way, too. Yes, turning into a crystal ball.…