The Register

'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.…

Former Which? man Richard Lloyd takes case to Court of Appeal after High Court refusal Brit consumer rights advocates have appealed against the High Court's decision to block a multibillion-pound lawsuit aimed at Google over iPhone tracking.…

MESO tech uses magnetic spin for ones and zeroes, instead of olde-worlde electrons With silicon near its development headroom, Intel has been putting its boffins to work on replacements, and one potential technology revealed in a Nature paper uses room-temperature quantum materials.…

When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you. Or is that just Windows Hello? Microsoft could be preparing to ditch the EdgeHTML layout engine of its unloved Edge browser in Windows 10 in favour of Chromium, according to reports surfacing on the eve of the company's developer event Connect();.…

Back in 2021 with even more inverse femtobarns* Upgrade time already? It would seem so: three years since its last refit, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is taking a two-year break so boffins can embark on another.…

Is this copyright battle worth it? Members of the European Parliament have condemned Google's role in encouraging children to pester their parents about EU copyright legislation that the corporation fears will hurt its profits.…

Tune in to our Reg webinar for tips from infosec experts Promo Better, faster, cheaper… these are the promises of DevOps. The future of software development and operations is all about speeding up development and deployment through cloud-based infrastructure and open source software.…

'I have my doubts' says Lord Chief Justice The Lord Chief Justice (LCJ) of England and Wales thinks there is a place for articifial intelligence in the judicial process but isn't losing any sleep over the security of his job just yet.…

Help on minding your PowerPoint language in this week's MS round-up As its services tottered once more last week, the gang at Redmond kept themselves busy tinkering with Office while Intel announced some changes to graphics drivers in the post Windows 10 October 2018 Update world.…

How to work on encrypted data without having to decrypt it first Microsoft wants to accelerate the standardisation of homomorphic encryption, so it's open sourced its “Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library” under an MIT licence.…

Passwords should be safe, but reset just in case Someone's taken a wander through the systems of question-and-answer website Quora, pilfering account details of 100 million users.…

Startling news: Users find sticking a smartphone over their eyes a bit rubbish Wearable watchers, CCS Insight, had good news and bad news for the virtual and augmented reality industry today. Sales are tanking but look! New hardware!…

Russia's back in the crewed spaceflight game with a bang Russia returned to crewed spaceflight today, sending a fresh complement of crew to the International Space Station (ISS) following a successful launch of the venerable Soyuz-FG booster.…

Meanwhile: Another kernel dev is 'unfscking' the source code, with predictable results Linus Torvalds has stuck to his “no swearing” resolution with his regular Sunday night Linux kernel release candidate announcement.…

And a ten-grand fine after bribing city official for tech deals with cash-stuffed envelopes The CEO of a Detroit-area IT firm will be spending the next 12 months behind bars for bribery.…

GPU biz also open sources PhysX and teases beefy graphics card In conjunction with opening of AI conference NeurIPS, until recently known as NIPS, chip biz Nvidia has demonstrated a system that generates 3D environments using neural networks, open sourced its PhysX physics engine, and announced its Titan RTX GPU.…

Off-planet manic miner reaches orbit around its prey: Bennu NASA's mission to send a probe to an asteroid, dig up a chunk, and send the material back to Earth is now half-way complete. The agency says its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has reached its hunk-of-rock target after a trip lasting two years and two billion miles.…

No reason to panic, apparently: Redoing login details to become a regular thing Citrix says there is no reason to panic after it asked customers to reset their passwords on its Sharefile service.…

Jury hears biz pressured ASML staff to hand over blueprints Silicon Valley semiconductor outfit XTAL has been ordered by a court to fork out $223m in damages for stealing trade secrets from rival ASML.…

Critical bug brings bevy of patches The keepers of Kubernetes, the rather popular software container orchestration system, have pushed out three new releases that patch a critical flaw.…

Cops trick Autopilot into letting them make arrest, save lives In an exciting first, the autopilot feature in a Tesla car managed to save rather than kill its occupant.…

Report claims that from 2016-2017 the FSB was reading agency's emails The Czech Republic says that Russian government hackers were intercepting and snooping on communications for one of its agencies for more than a year.…

Not so mysterious, say users, it was the update wot dunnit If you’re running a Surface Book 2, you might want to hold off on the latest cumulative update that is making some in the line quite poorly and their owners quite irate.…

Cash to be splashed over 10 years on software sporting a Microsoft badge The US Department of Defense has signed up for an estimated $3.17bn worth of Microsoft software via a classic procurement framework.…

Plans to drop it like it's hot in 2019... Seagate has been testing a 16TB HAMR hot bit writing disk drive, with 20TB models in its sights.…

Plus: Boffins find kit struggles in low light, crowds The UK's data protection watchdog is investigating cops' use of facial recognition technology amid growing concerns about efficacy and ethics.…

As OECD strikes positive note on prospect of global consensus Hopes that European countries will imminently agree on measures for a digital services tax are foundering – but G20 nations have been told a global consensus is still possible by 2020.…

Data centre, edge computing: yep – business applications IBM has said it is possible to train deep learning models with 8-bit precision rather than 16-bit with no loss in model accuracy for image classification, speech recognition and language translation. The firm claimed today this work will help "hardware to rapidly train and deploy broad AI at the data center and the edge".…

D!ck the halls with 'offensive' symbols, fa-lala-lala-la-la-la-la You've heard of the e-penis – the measure of an individual's power and stance on the internet – but have you considered the street penis? Yes, 'tis the season to overcompensate by spewing the most garish Chrimbo lights display possible all over your home to let your neighbours know that you are indeed the big man.…

NCC Group discovers network-saving quirk during worm tests An infosec firm has unleashed a NotPetya-style worm onto a customer’s network – and discovered that a simple Windows Active Directory tweak has a surprising effect on self-spreading malware.…

If you think you have a full-fibre connection, you probably don't The UK's fibre industry wants European regulators, who meet in Brussels today, to get tougher on misleading broadband claims. Topping its complaints is "fake fibre" – the practice of calling broadband connections digital "fibre" when they contain plain old copper.…

Too late Xi cried, waving dead semiconductor deal in the air President Trump's White House has said China would be "open to approving the previously unapproved" deal for US chipmaker Qualcomm to acquire Dutch semiconductor maker NXP "should it again be presented" – but the firm reportedly said it "considers the matter closed".…

'Twas 3 nights after Xmas and all through the house, shareholders mulled sending the deal south Cloudera and Hortonworks shareholders will be asked to sign off on the companies' uneven merger on 28 December.…

You need spectrum – and find something better to spend £92m on, will ya? Interview Space policy expert Dr Bleddyn Bowen, of the University of Leicester, has told The Register that the UK faces considerably more hurdles replacing Galileo than just coughing £92m of "Brexit readiness" readies for a feasibility study on a homegrown version.…

Beancounter scores partial victory in employment case Offering disgruntled workers a fat cheque to quit is not blackmail, a court has told Capita.…

Escapes from wrath of the boss with ingenious fix Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me?, the column for Reg readers to get their worst deeds off their chest.…

Oxford uni gets a wad of cash to study AI and law, Qualcomm invests in startups, etc Roundup Hello, welcome back to The Register's weekly AI roundup. There is news who is funding who for AI projects, but things have also got a little weird as popstars start making AI-inspired hits. Listen below!…

Plus, South Carolina convicts go catfishing Roundup November ended with a week of medical mishaps, near disaster at Dell, and the introduction of Pesky Pepper.…

Malicious code can spy on OpenSSL, Apple CoreTLS, etc Crypto boffins have found a way to exploit side-channel information to downgrade most of the current TLS implementations, thanks to ongoing support for outmoded RSA key exchanges.…

Boffins promise to return 'nauts to the lunar surface, too. No, really NASA adminstrator Jim Bridenstine on Friday announced the companies the US space agency plans to pay to send its next science experiments to the Moon.…

Yeah, we don’t know WTF is going on either Did your work printer produce a strange call to action this week, urging you to follow a tasteless twerp on YouTube, and then offer you a "bro fist" made up of punctuation marks?…

Japanese boffins argue for a new spin on astrophysics Black holes aren’t shaped like donuts after all, and actually look like water fountains instead, according to new research.…

Googlers sought patent on tech described during job chat Jie Qi, cofounder of edu-tech electronics biz Chibitronics, marked the launch of patent education site PatentPandas.org with her account of how Google tried to patent her research after inviting her to meet with company executives.…

Appeals judges shoot down Russian vendor's plea Kaspersky Lab won't be getting its day in court after all, as the Washington DC Court of Appeals rejected its case against Uncle Sam.…

Researchers find head-slapping backdoors in lab equipment Administrators overseeing lab environments would be well advised to double-check their network setups following the disclosure of serious flaws in a line of oscilloscopes.…

Strike fund hits $200K as engineers prepare for action Internal employee revolt at Google over its secretive plans to rollout a censored search engine in China continues to grow, with one employee publicly building a strike fund to support those opposed to the plan.…

Takes second place in IO-500 10 Node Challenge WekaIO has served up 95 per cent of the Summit supercomputer's 40 storage racks IO using just half a rack's worth of its Matrix scale-out fast filer software.…

BigInt and .NET Core 2.2 support? Oh Microsoft, you spoil us! On the eve of Microsoft's big developer shindig, or rather virtual developer shindig, Connect(); a fresh version of TypeScript has been released, along with an update for Visual Studio users who like their OS Apple-flavoured.…