The Register

Mandatory registration and on-the-spot fines for fliers New British drone laws being introduced in the wake of the London Gatwick airport drone fiasco will give police greater powers – but would not have stopped the chaos that shut the airport down for days during peak holiday season.…

That's 2.91 Brontosauruses to you As if Brexit chaos wasn't enough to bring us down after the festive season's indulgence, South West Water has brought word of a new fatberg in town.…

MPs told long negotiations, lack of know-how hinders SME spending UK government spending risks slipping back into the bad old days of legacy lock-in, MPs have been warned.…

Chaebol warns operating profit to fall 29% Smartphones are experiencing their first ever recession, and Samsung is feeling the pain too.…

New and tested training courses cover every angle Promo As data thieves and hackers become more numerous, more inventive and more destructive, learning to protect themselves against cybercrime is ever higher on the list of companies' priorities.…

Case not linked to international spying, reckon sources. Hmmm German police said a 20-year-old German man had "confessed" to leaks in connection what the country's media is calling "the Hacker Attack", a years-long data exfiltration campaign against politicians and other public figures.…

Buying a new PC in 2019? You may have a bit less disk space than you were expecting Microsoft has announced that it is formalising the arrangement whereby Windows 10 inexplicably swipes a chunk of disk space for its own purposes in the form of Reserved Storage.…

Nine-platter beast serves up high-capacity spinning rust Toshiba has promised January sample shipments for its MG08 helium-filled disk drive, which inflates current disk recording technology to a record 16TB capacity.…

It stands for 10 gigabits per second connections, so at least it means something CES 2019 America's cable cabal has used CES to fire up interest in 10Gbps access networks, and in a snipe at the mobile 5G market, the Internet & Television Association (NCTA) has applied to trademark "10G" with the tagline "The Next Great Leap for Broadband".…

Common Platform Programme to 'reuse' the 'legacy' prosecutors' case wrangling system Exclusive Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service has halted one of the core workstreams of its £280m Common Platform Programme, putting three years' of development work on ice in favour of keeping an "end-of-life legacy system" in use.…

Plus: SpaceX gets back to some Falcon work Roundup In the week that New Horizons snapped its snowman, China took its rover out for a spin on the lunar surface and SpaceX fired up another Falcon 9.…

And he did it without swearing... folks with broken programs may act otherwise The Linux kernel will be tweaked to mitigate data-stealing attacks that exploit system page caches.…

Old tweets betray sensitive data under new tools Analysis Researchers have demonstrated yet again that location metadata from Twitter posts can be used to infer private information like users' home addresses, workplaces, and sensitive locations they've visited.…

Software performance tweaks have opposite effect Microsoft has taken down its latest update for Office 2010 following reports the tweak was causing some versions of Excel to crash.…

Your handy guide to processor-related bits and bytes Roundup To coincide with CES 2019 kicking off, here's some chip-related news bytes, from consumer-grade up to enterprise level, to nibble on, getting to the core – OK, enough puns.…

More moron-crime than serious cyber-crime, your data is safe The operator of an Australian emergency warning service has denied that user information was breached after someone accessed its system to post “you've been hacked” messages.…

Will there be a deal or no deal? The first of three major trials this spring involving Qualcomm has opened in Silicon Valley, with phone makers chipping in... no pun intended.…

Judge quashes hopes of big comm tech payday WiLAN has been told by a US judge it can either walk away with $10m in patent-infringement damages from Apple – somewhat lower than the $145m set by a jury – or go to trial again to set the figure.…

Job numbers, coverage ... is there anything US telco giant hasn't been accused of inflating? AT&T has rolled out a new branding for its LTE mobile broadband network, calling the current-gen system 5G, or 5G.…

Tax-funded bureaucrats can't cut off people just because they disagree with them In what may prove to be a significant precedent, a US appeals court has ruled that Facebook represents a public forum and the First Amendment on freedom of expression applies.…

She'll make you live her crazy life, but she'll take away your pain like a bullet to your wallet A newly spotted piece of hybrid malware steals copies of victims' files and then encrypts said data, demanding a ransom to unscramble it.…

Brexit just gets better British citizens with a .eu domain should buy a dotcom replacement and lawyer up, the UK government has formally advised.…

First Redmond takes over code hotel, now it's telling us: You will, er, won't pay for this GitHub, the code storage and developer data gold mine acquired by Microsoft last year, has lowered the price it charges for private repositories from $7 per month to zero.…

Even filing a patent didn't save Terry Keebaugh from the old tin tack An award-winning former IBM saleswoman who tried to patent a system that slurped fired graybeards’ mainframe knowledge before they departed is now suing IBM for age discrimination – and squarely blames CEO Ginny Rometty for Big Blue’s “morally bankrupt” actions.…

Almost half the team to be reassigned before closure Taiwanese chip-maker UMC, under legal siege from the US Department of Justice, has reportedly pared down its DRAM project team by nearly one half, signalling victory for rival Micron.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before NHS England has once again pledged to improve the state of digital services to benefit patients and staff in its Long Term Plan, with a fully digital secondary care and access to digital consultations promised by 2024.…

Alles ist gut DXC Technology has negotiated terms to buy fellow New York Stock Exchange-listed tech services and consulting group Luxoft for $2bn.…

Slow, small and quick, or big and speedy? SSDs for mini-NAS, thin laptops and gamers Seagate has tossed three SSDs into the CES arena, looking to please small NAS users, thin laptoppers and gamers.…

Fancy that – dumb is the new smart CES 2019 The most eye-catching debuts at CES 2019 are more analogue than digital, and dumber rather than smarter.…

Torvalds has run out of fingers and toes, so version 5.0 RC1 is here Penguinistas, take heed. The kernel of your beloved OS has rung in the new year with a brand spanking new version number because... Linus felt like it.…

Have enterprise networking portfolio, will travel Cisco could reap the benefits of the Western world's security crackdown on Huawei enterprise networking equipment, analysts from JP Morgan have said.…

New-look firm turns attention to PR offensive Former Hadoop rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks have completed their merger after shareholders approved the plans at the end of 2018.…

Sir, remove your pants meow Singaporean border officials were taken aback at just how happy one gent was to see them – particularly when the bulge in his trousers started mewling.…

Actifio, Exagrid, IBM, WANdisco, WekaIO, and more Roundup 2019 kicked off with storage action from Actifio, Exagrid, IBM, WANdisco and WekaIO, as well as some musical chairs at Mellanox, Weka and Virtuozzo.…

Microsoft had a busy first week of the year. How about you? Roundup It wasn't just the Windows Insider team celebrating 2019 with a fresh emission, the rest of Microsoft joined in too.…

Too much iPhone, and not enough innovation Comment Apple "has never been stronger financially, but is plainly already living on past glories," The Telegraph's Jeremy Warner wrote in 2013.…

TMP is for 'temporary', though. Right? Who, Me? Congratulations on making it through the first week of 2019, and welcome to the first Who, Me? of the year.…

Plus, London Gatwick drone comedy quiets down Welcome to 2019, just a few days into the year and we already have Chromecast chaos, Skype backdoors, and a Weather Channel privacy suit.…

Novel data-siphoning attack is hardware agnostic Some of the computer security boffins who revealed last year's data-leaking speculative-execution holes have identified yet another side-channel attack that can bypass security protections in modern systems.…

fg xjc dua ihut vyfq, xjc uih jci sfat jg mjggfa A new phishing campaign that uses a custom font to hide its tracks and evade detection has been uncovered.…

'Privacy in the digital age is one of the most fundamental issues' says city attorney The Weather Channel app duped users into providing location data that the company then sold for advertising and other commercial purposes, according to a lawsuit brought by Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.…

Plus an extra 20m passport digits and 8.6m payment card details, though encrypted Hotel megachain Marriott International has gone into further detail on the cyber-raid on its reservation database, including the number of payment cards and passport details siphoned off by hackers.…

Mystery material 'a cold, collisionless fluid' apparently Dark matter may be even more elusive than previously thought, as researchers believe the mysterious material hidden at the heart of galaxies can be moved around with the power of heat.…

Oh, and Cortana? STFU Having quietly admitted that an Internet Explorer update had taken an almighty dump in the Windows Sandbox, Microsoft emitted a fresh build of Windows 10 to fix the problem last night.…

Data protector Acronis luring customers with virty storage Swiss roll Seemingly not content with muscling in on Eugene Kaspersky's territory last year, data protector Acronis said it plans to announce a software-defined data centre product later this month.…

Ooo, that pesky firewall! Huawei has slapped two employees on the wrist for making promotional tweets using a rival Apple's iPhone.…

Politicians, journalists and other public figures targeted German politicians, journalists and other prominent public figures have been doxxed by hackers who distributed their personal data on Twitter, according to local reports.…

Musk's mighty missile erected but not yet engorged with fuel as engineers check it all fits SpaceX took another step toward sticking humans atop its Falcon 9 rocket as one of the units, equipped with a crew version of the Dragon spacecraft, was erected at pad 39A at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.…

This time it's an auditor who literally can't say no A government-sponsored committee has rubberstamped the UK's online porn age verification plans despite poking holes in the China-style surveillance plan.…

A generation that tried the PGP plugin weeps Those who remember trying to configure the Thunderbird of old to work with PGP – an effort akin to learning how to run an Enigma machine while blindfolded – will be watching with interest: the project's coders promise that 2019 will be the year of easy encryption.…