The Register

Simply the best! Worse than all the rest! Something for the Weekend, Sir? Don't you just love it at this time of the year when Some Experts predict the new technologies most likely to catch on over the next 12 months? Me neither.…

Start the New Year with a spot of feng shui On Call Welcome to the first Friday, and the first On Call of the new year – we hope your celebrations haven't left you too worse for wear.…

Welcome back, can't wait to crack on, oh, it's Friday already Happy new year. As you read this, we hope you're well past any New Year's Day hangovers, that you've caught up on your post-Chrimbo email backlog, and are fully limbered up for the first meetings of the year... all just in time to tiptoe off into the weekend.…

Dutch consumer club names 42 easy-to-fool cameras Smartphones have boasted facial recognition for some time, but tests in the Netherlands suggest it still falls short of properly securing many devices.…

Some mobes off the shelves pending appeal in international patent battle drama Apple's iPhone 7 and 8 will remain off the shelves in Germany – after Qualcomm posted a €1.3bn (£1.17bn, $1.5bn) bond in case the December court ban is overturned on appeal.…

Yes, taxi app biz has managed the impossible – angering the good folks of Canada Uber's legal campaign to maintain the classification of its drivers as contractors rather than employees suffered a setback in Canada on Wednesday when the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that the company's arbitration requirement is illegal and unconscionable.…

And by soon, we mean, two billion years It has long been known that our Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, with the epic prang to take place in four to eight billion years' time. New data suggests we'll hit another galaxy well before that, though, and the super-smash could send our Solar System headfirst on a path out of the Milky Way.…

Neat trick for spying spouses, bad bosses, other miscreants with hands on your mobe. A fix is available A newly disclosed vulnerability in Skype for Android could be exploited by miscreants to bypass an Android phone's passcode screen to view photos, contacts, and even launch browser windows.…

Inspur, FusionStack and TTA undercut, outperform Chinese behemoth An SPC-1 benchmark (PDF) run by Huawei shows it unable to answer lower-cost competition from three other Far East suppliers.…

The Damn Vulnerable Serverless Application ships expletive-ready To help those deploying serverless applications do so without stumbling into vulnerabilities, security biz Protego Labs has released crappy code in the hope there's something to be learned from studying the bugs.…

Pair of critical flaws cleaned up in Acrobat, Reader Adobe has issued its first patch of the year, emitting fixes for a pair of high-risk vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader.…

Somebody call the waaaaaambulance The prankster who hijacked printers and smart TV gizmos to promote YouTube star Pewdiepie has shut down their website, citing "the constant pressure of being afraid of being caught and prosecuted." No sh*t, Sherlock.…

Our sales are up (though they'd have to be, right?) Bankrupted and rescued array shipper Tintri's new parent, DDN, has said the unit will soon be announcing new enterprise storage products and features including "project Mystic" – a feature teased before the firm's very public collapse.…

Processor thrashed by GIMPS The largest known prime number, made up over 24 million digits, has been discovered by a lone IT professional quietly crunching numbers with an Intel-powered computer in December.…

Airline told me it can't fix fat-fingered email confusion, says NJ bloke Infamous no-frills Irish airline Ryanair has been accused by a tormented man from New Jersey in the US of bombarding him with flight itinerary emails intended for an actual passenger.…

We were wrong about the chicken drumstick, OK? More detailed images have emerged showing 2014 MU69 (aka Ultima Thule) is actually two distinct bodies, held together by the processes that form planets.…

New hotness turned to old and busted in record time thanks to Internet Explorer update No, Windows Insiders, that isn't your New Year's hangover kicking in. After unveiling Windows Sandbox to much fanfare, Microsoft promptly broke it with a cheeky cumulative update.…

Company 'will never present a threat', claims letter to staff Increasingly in the crosshairs of government paranoia and beset by its place in the US-China trade war, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping has come out swinging in a letter to staff.…

Code's up on Github and Google's fine with that University of Maryland researchers have given Google a "welcome to 2019" gift by breaking its latest reCaptcha audio challenge.…

Developers warned not to overindulge in personal data China's Internet Society chapter has warned local internet app-makers to tone down their collection of personal information.…

Version 8 of Amiga Forever arrives to save the gadget drawer from yet more junk Looking glumly at that hunk of retrocomputing-esque plastic you got for Christmas? Realised that the keys on that mini Commodore 64 were just there for decoration? Fear not, for classic Commodore botherers, Cloanto, have just the thing.…

Roll up, roll up for an end-of-holiday storage roundup Three (and a half) storage newsbytes rounded off 2018 with Acronis donating malware detection to a free Google service, Panzura talking about hybrid cloud file indexing services, and CTERA using AWS's S3 tiering.…

Defective kit caused oxygen mask conflagration, court told Apple used to sell its MagSafe technology as a way to prevent accidents. Now the iGiant faces a $75,000 lawsuit over claims its discontinued power adapter connector set a woman ablaze.…

Chang'e 4 makes history with 'soft landing' on lunar surface China's Chang'e 4 spacecraft has touched down on the Moon, state media reports, making it the first-ever probe to set down on the far side of Earth's natural satellite.…

Who could have guessed the $1,100 phone and $800 watch wouldn't sell? Peak Apple Apple shares were temporarily pulled from trading on Wednesday as the Cupertino idiot-tax operation warned of lousy sales numbers on the horizon.…

Comms watchdog lets Chocolate Factory power up with special waiver Three and a half years after debuting Project Soli radar-based gesture input system, Google has received an exemption from the Federal Communication Commission that will allow the ad biz to run the system at higher power levels than regulations currently allow.…

Law firm computers raided, siphoned of info – and companies can pay to redact files, it is claimed The hackers who claim to have breached a British insurer last year say their cache of pilfered files include confidential documents on the September 11 terrorist attacks.…

ESET sheds new light on 'Lojax' firmware infection ESET eggheads have shed more light on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) rootkit being used by the Kremlin's Fancy Bear hacking crew.…

TITSUP network card fingered for dropped calls (that's a Total Inability To Send Usable Packets) Wyoming is the latest US state to formally probe CenturyLink's network outage, which black-holed 911 calls over Christmas.…

Licensing red-tape violate First Amendment, says court in battle over timing algorithm Oregon's regulations stopping people in the US state from referring to themselves as engineers are unconstitutional, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.…

Doesn't sound very long, but it could have big implications for quantum computing Physicists have formed qubits – quantum bits – from graphene for the first time, according to research published in Nature Nanotechnology.…

El Reg namechecked as lawyers claim investors 'misled' El Reg's revelations of layoffs at DXC Technologies over the last year were mentioned as US lawyers attempt to launch a class-action lawsuit against the slash-happy tech biz.…

Tripartite monopoly cuts bit output production growth as China-US trade war threatens The three DRAM suppliers are scaling back production growth as memory demand falters with no sign of recovery.…

Ten intensive courses promise to cover every angle Promo As new and ever more inventive threats keep crowding over the IT horizon, the security professional is under constant pressure to stay ahead of the cybercriminals.…

Sprinkle some 'crying toddler' in there for maximum horror You have to hand it to the passerby who called the cops after hearing a chap yelling "why don't you die?" along with the cries of a toddler.…

We'll have a better idea when fresh 2014 MU69 snaps look less like Minecraft NASA's teenage New Horizons probe has successfully passed within 2,200 miles of 2014 MU69, some four billion miles from the Sun, three years after taking a close look at Pluto and nearly 13 years after launch.…

At last! The pretender to the throne swipes the crown The party poppers have gone off in Redmond, not to usher in 2019, but to celebrate another market share-watcher declaring that yes, Windows 10 has finally crept past Windows 7.…

ARPANET handler helped lay foundations of the internet Obit One of the internet's founding fathers, ARPANET packet-switching pioneer Larry Roberts, has died aged 81.…

New year, new CVE Happy New Year! Oh, and if you include GNU's wget utility in software you write, pull down the new version released on Boxing Day and push out updates to your users.…

Plus: Your vulture clocked the Northern Lights from the Arctic Circle Boatnotes What's it like aboard a warship? Aside from the glamorous bits when Russian jets are whizzing past and there's lots to do? El Reg not only went aboard HMS Enterprise to find out – we scored a trip to the Arctic Circle courtesy of the Royal Navy.…

UK's exit from the EU and ePrivacy regs: contingency planning and confusion At the dawn of 2018, GDPR was a dead cert. The four letters were on everyone's lips and, with a helpful nudge from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, set the privacy world aflame.…

Yesterday's sci-fi has become today's crappy kit, apart from space colonies and AI Feature Welcome to 2019, the year in which Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film masterpiece Blade Runner is set. And as predicted in this loose adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick story, we have flying cars.…

Happy New Year from the Who, Me? Vultures Who, Me? Happy New Year! Because you'll all be feeling delicate, El Reg thought we’d ease your pain with some of our other readers' more technical errors – distraction is the best cure for embarrassment, we're sure.…

Yes, while half-sauced yourself... Post-Pub Neckfiller The late and much-missed Lester Haines wrote a series called Post-Pub Nosh Neckfiller, high calorie food you can cook when drunk, or hungover. These veered into sophisticated recipes hard to rustle up when sober, let alone drunk - like home made polenta Eggs Benny with home made hollandaise sauce.…

'I was given a promotion for slacking off' Who, Me? It's New Year's Eve and for many of you this will mean celebrating – but for some the prospect of manning the support lines or working overtime looms.…

The best of readers' tech trouble one-liners On Call Over the months, On Call and Who, Me? – El Reg's weekly columns of tech support cock-ups – stack up quite a few submissions that are too short to whip into a single piece.…

Remains of the year laid bare as we flay July to December Where were we? Ah yes... it was the summer of GitHub committers' discontent – as many looked on in horror as Redmond swallowed it for $7.5bn in June. But things were about to heat up further...…

From fried chips to stuffed elections, a look back at the year that was The 2018 calendar year saw an interesting mix of both technical and strategic questions, as engineers were met with new problems and execs were forced to cope with stark new realities.…

...And reveals rather too much to the staffer in the room On Call Everyone has had an embarrassing moment, when you wish the floor would just swallow you up. Perhaps yours was at the office Christmas party. But at On Call we like to go one better.…

It won't, not without its tentacles stuck into all manner of nicotine alternatives Comment The world just might not be ready for a major tobacco company unveiling a campaign to get all its customers to quit smoking. "Staggering hypocrisy," cried Cancer Research UK responding to Philip Morris International's four-page ad in the UK's Daily Mirror in October. "If Philip Morris really want to help people stop smoking, the best thing they could do is stop making cigarettes. But that's not going to happen."…