The Register

Faster Android builds, more space, but don't expect to find a Windows Phone emulator The first public preview of Visual Studio 2019 was tossed to developers on Tuesday at Microsoft's Connect(); 2018 event. The Register took it for a spin to see what was up.…

Sorry suits, PC sales set to slide this year despite OS excuse to refresh computer tin The PC industry is trapped in a battle between the immovable objects that are Intel shortages and crap consumer demand, versus the unstoppable force of enterprises upgrading to Windows 10.…

Hey, you forgot to build in some obsolescence Comment In the late '90s, Eric Schmidt was an accessible tech CEO with a problem. Novell's product was so good and so reliable nobody needed to upgrade it. If one day people decided to stop using their current version, they wouldn't switch to another version of Novell, the one that Eric was trying to sell, but something else entirely. I thought this was the worst job in the world and Eric probably did too, washing up as the adult supervision at Google in 2001.…

100,000 Genomes Project is secure, insists chair An ambitious project to map the DNA of a million Brits has experienced such sustained hack attacks that officials have had to shift the data to a Ministry of Defence (MoD) facility in Wiltshire.…

Uncle Sam says it has no clue when the complex tech will arrive in a useful form The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report this week on the state of quantum computing. It's a subject of some concern given speculation that such devices could render current encryption schemes worthless.…

Paper's safer, says parliamentary committee An Australian parliamentary committee has nixed the idea of internet voting for federal elections Down Under, for now.…

Meet AlphaFold, an artificially intelligent system to predict crucial biochemical structures Researchers at DeepMind are using AI software to study how proteins fold, with the hope that it will help scientists design new drugs more quickly.…

Exec could face trial in the US for 'cutting deals' with White House's Middle East bête noire The chief financial officer and deputy chairwoman of Huawei has been arrested in Canada – and could face extradition to the US on charges of violating trade sanctions against Iran.…

iOS, macOS, tvOS, Safari, and anyone for some reason using iTunes on Windows – get patching Apple has released a fresh set of security updates for its Mac and iOS software.…

US watchdog says it's about spam, but really it's about profits The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been criticized as "arbitrary and reckless" for pushing a plan to change how text messages are regulated without looking at the impact it may have.…

An NE555 this is not Yesterday, Qualcomm teased its Snapdragon 855 processor, which is aimed at next year's top-end 5G Android phones. Today, we've got hold of more details of its insides.…

You ain't seen nothing like it. Except every day of your life In a groundbreaking leap into the future, self-driving car specialist Waymo has launched its first truly driverless taxi service, in Phoenix, Arizona – complete with a driver.…

Code to defeat letter-based I'm-a-human tests revealed, major sites left wide open If you're one of those people who hates picking out cars, street signs and other objects in CAPTCHA image grids, then get used to it because the days of text-based alternatives are numbered.…

Brit parliamentarians dump documents on the internet Analysis Emails released today reveal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing how to squeeze more cash from companies that want to tap into the platform's goldmine of personal data on a billion-plus people.…

It's like a greatest hits album of terrible security policies Stop us if you've heard this one before: An Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability is being actively targeted in the wild to hijack victims' Windows PCs.…

Come on in, the water's lovely, urges cloudy database team Sandwiched between the open source excitement of Microsoft’s Connect(); 2018 event was news to set the hearts of database fans a-quiver. As well as a slew of new toys, the cost of entry and scaling of its globally distributed database service, Cosmos DB, was lowered considerably.…

It came with the package when we swallowed EE BT and Huawei said today that reports the Chinese kit-maker's products would not be used on EE's 3G and 4G core mobile ops – and that it was out of the running for any bids for the 5G core – should surprise no one.…

Watchdog's report damning amid calls for 'firewall' for immigration data sharing The Home Office is under pressure to scrap data-sharing deals set up as part of efforts to hit immigration targets as its governance of such transfers have been slammed by the UK’s spending watchdog.…

Facebook not even in survey's top 50, while Goldman Sachs lords it over tech's big-hitters It would appear that the kickback against big tech continues apace as Facebook has dropped out of a list of the top 50 best places to work in the UK and Google has been knocked off its top spot... by a water company.…

Why? Er, 'professional reasons' A former headteacher has landed himself in hot water with the UK's data watchdog for downloading personal information on children he previously taught and uploading it to servers at his new school.…

Just kidding, no one deserves that. But you'd be right Microsoft's Slack-alike, Teams, has taken a beating from the stick of instability, and was still wobbling at the time of publication.…

Operating, net losses deepen in Q3, mLab revenues to stumble after buyout NoSQL database slinger MongoDB bragged about winning conservative customers from legacy vendors as it reported another quarter of increasing revenues – but also saw operating and net losses increase.…

Marina Kaljurand thinks the days of going it alone are over Black Hat Governments need to "turn from public private partnership slogans to real partnerships" on cybersecurity, former Estonian foreign minister Marina Kaljurand told the Black Hat infosec conference in London this morning.…

Just 8 telcos applied, most didn't meet critera BT will likely remain the sole broadband universal service provider for most of the UK because smaller ISPs didn't meet Ofcom's qualification criteria and Hyperoptic pulled out of the running.…

Crypto-boffins' paper shows AKA protocol still broken A protocol meant to protect smartphone users' privacy is vulnerable to fake base station attacks all the way from 3G to 5G, according to a group of international researchers. All the baddies need is a little over €1,100 worth of kit and a laptop.…

External Canvio drive leads the way in capacity upgrade Toshiba has pulled the covers off a 4TB portable 2.5-inch disk drive using 1TB/platter technology.…

IDC looks at stagnant US market ... and sees only joy Last week it was Gartner's turn to look for diamonds in the ashes of the wearable market. This week another tech analyst, IDC, has expressed hope that wearables can flourish - despite the evidence.…

How much for scrawl from the hand of Jobs? A nice mid-range Audi It is official: Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, the marketing demigod, the dream weaver that captured the hearts and wallets of a planet, has the priciest signature around.…

Dart-based dev tool aspires to allow the creation of software that runs everywhere Google's cross-platform mobile Flutter SDK reached its 1.0 milestone on Tuesday, an event marked at the Flutter Live conference in London.…

Don't worry, NASA's not skimping on astronauts - the food is for mice El Reg has never noticed that rodents were too fussy to turn down food because of mold – but that's what's just put a 24-hour delay to the latest SpaceX mission to the International Space Station.…

Aussies demand backdoor to encrypted apps. Good luck with that says tech industry A backroom deal between two of Australia's government and opposition parties should mean local law enforcement can force firms to backdoor their communications by Christmas.…

Cavium acquisition will pay off soon, says CEO Matt Murphy In spite of weakness in the storage market, Marvell Technology is optimistic about the future, and has given itself a pass-mark for the acquisition of rival Cavium, which completed in July this year.…

CEO sees questions in the coming months, however HPE boss Antonio Neri put the wraps on his first year as CEO with another solid fiscal quarter.…

New York attorney general takes Oath of office Owner of defunct former giants AOL and Yahoo, Oath, has been fined $5m for illegally selling ads to kids.…

But sorting out the good boobs from bad boobs isn't easy Tumblr is hoping to automatically cleanse its social media platform of explicit pornographic content containing genitals and female nipples using machine learning algorithms.…

NRCC says it was hit in run-up to 2018 elections The National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican Party's campaigning arm, has confirmed it has fallen victim to a major compromise of its email system.…

Apple CEO decries the sins and moral turpitude of all tech companies but his own Comment It was on the third day of December in the year two thousand and eighteen that He arose and led the masses against the corruption and moral turpitude of the tech giants. For when He spoke, they heard. Yea, Tim Cook had come and cleansed us of our digital sins.…

DevOps can look forward to packaging their distributed apps Write once, run anywhere. You've perhaps heard that before in the context of Java, Flash, or Xamarin, among other cross-platform technologies. It's been more or less possible for a while, though seldom to everyone's satisfaction. But with the widespread adoption of cloud services and containers, operating across platforms has become more complicated.…

AI acceleration, 5G next-gen mobe broadband, all the usual boxes ticked The next top-end addition to Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor family, which powers millions upon millions of Android smartphones, will be the 855.…

Redmond warns that the malware tool doesn't play nice with the latest upgrade Companies relying on Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) software will have to hold off on installing the latest edition of Windows 10.…

And AI, DevOps and, of course, the edge Connect(); Because it wouldn't be a Microsoft event without the Azure drum being banged loudly and often, there were a slew of reveals related to Redmond's cloudy product line at today's Connect();.…

Plus: Visual Studio 2019 gets collaborative and IntelliCode gets smarter Connect(); With weeks to spare, Microsoft has emitted preview versions of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and PC as well as its open-sourced .NET Core 3.0.…

Dr Shifro pays ransom, gets discount and adds its own margin, says Check Point A ransomware decryption service has turned out to be – quelle surprise – a Belarusian middleman who simply pays the ransom and adds his own profit margin to the hapless victim's bill.…

First look at drive controller core after firm moves to open chip spec Western Digital today finally flashed the results of its vow to move a billion controller cores to RISC-V designs.…

.NET Foundation to become engorged, ONNX for all, and check out our bundles Connect(); Microsoft today continued its efforts to show that it really has bought into the whole open-source thing by flinging much of its client user experience tech at the GitHub wall and seeing what sticks.…

Contractor lobby seizes on report as indictment of IR35 HMRC was today slammed for failing to distinguish between genuine tax avoidance and innocent mistakes when wielding "broad, disproportionate powers" like the retrospective loan charges devastating some tech freelancers.…

Chocolate Factory starts chasing Apple Last week Google took its virtual global MVNO, formerly known as Project Fi, out of beta and began supporting the service on third-party handsets, even Apple's iPhone. It's now called Google Fi.…

'We won't go too close with the chainsaws and whatnot' Lazy perverts of all genders, get in here. Australia has the household service for you.…

Users locked out of emails for almost a day due to data centre upgrade – reports Accenture is reportedly facing major financial penalties after a failed upgrade took down the email system used by about 1.2 million staffers at the UK's National Health Service this weekend.…

Court of Appeal nixes telco's £14bn deficit reduction effort Updated BT has lost its legal bid to cut its £14bn pension deficit by slashing interest rates for 83,000 members of its post-privatisation pension scheme.…