The Register

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."…

Data protection has never had a higher profile If dictionaries awarded an acronym of the year as well as a word, we'd put our money on it being GDPR.…

Compiling lists of dodgy browsing is all fun and games until the audit team comes along Who, Me? As your Vultures are off fighting over the remains of the Christmas dinner, we've lined up a feast of a different nature: a bonus instalment of Who, Me?…

The Vulture picks over the remnants of January to June It seems a lifetime (or two Windows 10 releases) ago, but 2018 started with Microsoft, and other software vendors, staring down the twin barrels of Spectre and Meltdown.…

We won't need security experts when there's no security left Something for the Weekend, Sir? I want to be your backdoor man. Or so asserted Robert Plant at the end of Whole Lotta Love. Hey ho.…

It is 50 years since Apollo 8 took the first humans to the moon Fifty years ago today, Apollo 8 carried the first humans into orbit around the Moon, ushering in a short-lived period of crewed lunar exploration.…

And no one will ever know... until now, that is Who, Me? Ho ho ho! It may be Christmas Eve but Who, Me? stops for no festive season.…

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight... Walking in a storage wonderland Roundup 2018 wasn't too shabby for storage as the three-pronged attack of IoT edge, AI and multi-cloud defeated notions of the public cloud eating on-premises storage. Revenues also rose, capacities increased and latencies dived to boot.…

Some last-minute wrapping of security-related tips from this week Roundup If you're reading this while on-call for IT support, network security, or what have you, then we salute you. If you're reading this to avoid Christmas present wrapping or hobnobbing with awkward relatives, or similar, then, well, let us shake your hand.…

It was The Reg wot won it? Logitech has backed down from screwing over its smart home Harmony Hub loyalists after an outpouring of anger from customers.…

Yes, apparently, that can actually happen The CEO of a Silicon Valley startup has been jailed for three years, and fined $1.5m, for defrauding investors in his gift-card app business.…

No phones for the sans-culottes? It's an interesting strategy Comment People participating in the so-called gilets jaunes* populist protests in France looted an Apple Store in Bordeaux earlier this month – taking care to snaffle the high-tech bling before trashing the place.…

O2 presses on with Chinese supplier Mobile network operators have reportedly said that tearing up their contracts with Huawei would set Britain's 5G back "by nine months to a year" – so they're ploughing on despite pressure.…

Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo together shipped more in 2018 Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo collectively shipped more servers this year than either Dell or HPE, according to research outfit DRAMeXchange.…

Hands off our 'leccy cars The EU yesterday escalated its complaint to the World Trade Organization that China "forces" Western companies to surrender valuable intellectual property (IP) as part of doing business there.…

Let them eat cache Dell EMC wants us to understand that it's going to provide PowerMax with its idea of storage-class memory (SCM), and that means more than a fast cache.…

Grab your pitchfork, the Breunion Boys are headed for a pub near you If UK MPs hoped to get through Christmas recess without mention of the "B" word, they're shit out of luck because a Dutch boyband has dropped the hottest and only pro-EU earworm of the year.…

Strange tale leaves 120k bods displaced during Xmas rush London Gatwick Airport has reopened after closing for more than a day due to a seemingly deliberate drone disruption ploy – but police still haven't caught the perpetrators.…

The previous Saturn V didn't go so well, but you guys will be fine. Trust us Fifty years ago today, the third Apollo crew were strapped into a capsule perched atop the third Saturn V to undertake a journey to the Moon.…

Ofcom proposes shakeup of spectrum bidding process Some technologies lurking under the 5G umbrella promise to reshape the entire communications sector, creating new uses and businesses we can't imagine today. Ofcom showed it was hip to a few of these this week with a radical new way of opening up the airwaves.…

Moral of the story: It's never going to be 'fine' On Call Welcome back to On Call, where you get to take a breather and enjoy tales of tech support adversity from your peers.…

Art software maker snaps up virtualization tool for people who hate Qemu, Oracle VirtualBox that much When Corel CEO Patrick Nichols asked for Parallels for Christmas, we hope he meant the whole company rather than a copy of the desktop virtualization tool. Because that's what he got. The whole thing.…

Export ban compliance turns into geo-location gaffe fest Following changes in the way it figures out where people are located, US-based Slack informed an undisclosed number of individuals this week that they're no longer welcome on the chat app, due to America's export controls and sanctions.…

Just human error, internet giant shrugs after GDPR request went wrong. No sh!t, Sherlock A German man was very confused when he received, at his request, all the information that Amazon possessed on him.…

Courts crack down on Cupertino idiot-tax operation as tech patent war explodes The iPhone has been removed from sale in Germany after a Munich court issued an injunction against Apple amid its ongoing patent fight with Qualcomm.…

Pair on cyber-espionage rap, HPE, IBM and their clients said to be among those hit Two men, linked to the Chinese government, stand accused of hacking cloud giants, aerospace and defense companies, chip designers, US government agencies – including the Navy – and other organizations globally.…

Risk of causing even more embuggerance is high, we repeat: high Comment As the Gatwick drones chaos rolls on, with the airport now set to reopen at 8pm UK time at the earliest*, many people have been asking a simple question: why the hell can't the authorities just shoot down the offending drones?…

Adtech monolith had won previous High Court fight against NT1 Google has settled a legal case brought against it by a convicted criminal who wanted the adtech company to delete embarrassing search results about his criminal past.…

Dell tech (EMC and VMware) utterly dominate with Nutanix following HPE, Cisco, and NetApp are grabbing at the tail end of a fast-growing converged-slash-hyper-converged market that is utterly dominated by Dell's EMC and VMware businesses and HCI specialist Nutanix.…

Dara and pals told to hand over yet another cash wodge for hack it spent $100k covering up Uber has been slapped with a €400,000 fine by the French data protection agency for the hack that exposed the data of 57 million users.…

Almost a third spent on outsourcing digital, legal skills The UK Information Commissioner's Office has spent almost £2.5m on its probe into the use of data analytics for political purposes – but has just two staff from its tech division working on the case.…

Suit claims Facebook misrepresented data-sharing, misled users with confusing privacy settings US capital Washington DC has sued Facebook, slamming the biz for lax oversight, misleading privacy settings and taking two years to 'fess up to mass data harvesting.…

Save now, learn later Events If you’re the forward thinking sort, you’ll be considering what machine learning and artificial intelligence can do for you in the next couple of years - and what it’s all going to cost.…

Sightings continue to be reported as airport cites 'deliberate attempt to disrupt flights' Updated No flights have arrived or left London's Gatwick Airport since just before 21:00 UTC last night after drones were apparently spotted over the airspace.…

Euro court mulls whether site operators should share compliance responsibility with info-slurping giants In a case being considered by the European Court of Justice (CJEU), Advocate General Michal Bobek argued on Wednesday that website operators should share some responsibility with providers of embedded web widgets for ensuring that any data collection complies with legal requirements.…

Windows giant mulls gobbling up network kit maker, according to anon insiders Microsoft is considering buying Mellanox, according to a report on Wednesday by an Israeli financial newspaper.…

No one likes a lying asshole Comment Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and its COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its public relations people, and its engineers have lied. They have lied repeatedly. They have lied exhaustively. They have lied so much they've lost track of their lies, and then lied about them.…

You know that Hub that we forced you to buy? Yeah, we've messed with that one, too Pity the poor users of Logitech's Harmony smart home system: last year they were told the manufacturer was going to brick its Link hub and forced them to buy the latest version. This year, just in time for Christmas, it has effectively bricked that new hub for anyone using it to connect to other devices.…

If 2019 is the year you try AWS Lambda et al, then here are pitfalls to look out for Serverless computing, which does actually involve servers, has been touted as a way to reduce computing costs though its pay-per-use model and to free developers from operational concerns.…

Update Internet Explorer now after Google detects attacks in the wild Microsoft today emitted an emergency security patch for a flaw in Internet Explorer that hackers are exploiting in the wild to hijack computers.…

If there isn't a name by 28 February – ooo, just you wait The US has been told once again to appoint a permanent ombudsperson to oversee the deal governing transatlantic data flows, but this time has been given a deadline.…

Spotted by infosec startup Area 1, according to NYT The New York Times has published what it says are excerpts from hacked EU diplomatic cables that a cybersecurity company apparently made available to reporters.…

Facebook blasted by claims 150+ firms had special access to user data Facebook has found itself the subject of yet more shouty headlines as details of deals that gave more than 150 companies special access to user data were spilled.…

Someone get the Information Commissioner on the line Distracting and nagging text messages help smokers stop smoking, Chinese researchers have found.…

DRAM and NAND output to take a hit as demand slides Chip maker Micron has slammed the brakes on production and expenses entering calendar 2019 in anticipation of falling demand.…

We've got buckets, spades and isolated apps Ever felt a bit sick when Windows whinges about a suspicious application, but you really need to run it? Worry no more, because Windows Sandbox is inbound.…

UK competition bods threaten action against 'loyalty penalty' The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has issued an urgent call for action against mobile providers that rip off loyal customers with high prices even once handsets are paid off.…