The Register

Chipzilla joins strangely controversial movement to encourage civility, inclusion Chip maker Intel has embraced guidelines to make its open-source software projects more open-minded and inviting.…

First it was the Kepler telescope, and now Dawnie has kicked the bucket too NASA’s Dawn space probe, our visitor to the Solar System’s protoplanets Vesta and Ceres, is cold and dead.…

Uncle Sam's snoops got sloppy with online chat, it seems Iran apparently infiltrated the communications network of CIA agents who allowed their secret websites, used to exchange messages with informants, to be crawled by Google.…

Malware already on machines can exploit SMT using side-channel techniques to snatch private info Brainiacs in Cuba and Finland have found a new side-channel vulnerability in Intel x64 processors that could allow an attacker to sniff out cryptographic keys and other privileged information.…

Freeze on renewal, base costs lifted so we all pay a bit more The planet's 138 million dot-com addresses are going to get significantly more expensive to renew over the next decade thanks to a contract signed between dot-com operator Verisign and the US government.…

Registrar apologies as punters wait for spam tsunami Domain name registrar EasyDNS has 'fessed up to accidentally leaking cloaked contact details for about 1,500 domain owners in Whois query results for just over 24 hours.…

Microsoft hammers the final nail into 7's coffin It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Skype Classic née 7, which tottered into the sunset on 1 November 2018.…

Phone makers banking more revenue – but for how long? The smartphone biz is now in a slump, according to two number-crunching outfits.…

Suffice to say, it's not quite Tupac or Freddie Mercury Higher education has become a commercial market as students paying extortionate tuition fees demand more bang for their buck – so Imperial College London has decided to throw some holograms at them.…

China is 'remaking the world in its techno-dystopian image' Internet freedoms have taken a nose dive for the eighth year running, according to a report warning that authoritarian countries and populist leaders are exporting harmful attitudes and ideas around the world.…

So we're ok to launch a crew in December, right? Er, guys? The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has completed its investigation into October’s Soyuz mishap in record time, pointing the finger of blame at problems during assembly.…

100TB by 2025/26? Bring it on Seagate has set a course to deliver a 48TB disk drive in 2023 using its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, doubling areal density every 30 months, meaning 100TB could be possible by 2025/26.…

Just 11.52% on pretax profit. Virtualization juggernaut doing well in the distie stakes Trendy social media firms and ad slingers often come under attack for hiring beanies to minimise their tax contribution, something they see as sensible commercial practice. VMware UK may fall into that bracket too.…

Thanks, Apple. Seriously Well, that didn't take long. Owners of new iPhones can now download an app and stick some data and minutes on the second SIM that Apple has thoughtfully included, allowing cheap calls and roaming data that your main SIM provider might not include.…

Will arrival of Hare accelerate tortoise-like performance? With its year-end results looming, Sage Group has confirmed the ascension of chief bean-counter, Steve Hare, to the lofty heights of chief executive officer.…

Carl takes his chances in Delaware chancery In a move that probably caught nobody by surprise, corporate raider Carl Icahn has launched a lawsuit to block Dell's proposed purchase of V-class shares – stock known by the ticker DVMT.…

Wherever you’re at, we’ve got you covered Events Serverless computing can mean anything from triggering simple functions to deal with sudden spikes in demand to building complex applications which are core to the whole business.…

IETF hackathoners point the 'die-die-die' gun at another buggy cipher A hackathon next week will see 'net developers get to work consigning more insecure cryptography to the /dev/null of history.…

As department names Simon McKinnon acting CIO, external competition coming soon Departing digital boss at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions Mayank Prakash is moving to energy giant Centrica.…

And hey – where's that new CEO? It's been 5 months ... Data protection and management biz Commvault squeezed out just 1 per cent revenue growth in its second quarter of fiscal 2019 as it transitions to subscription pricing as part of the Elliott Management driven makeover.…

Fear not, IT support will bust that problem in this Halloween On Call special On Call Welcome to the latest issue of On Call, where readers share their tech support crises and triumphs. And, since it's Día de Muertos and we've just passed Halloween, El Reg thought we'd pick out a few tales for a spooky special.…

We're one of 7,000 victims here, firm insists Educational electronics outlet Kitronik has suffered a data breach which its data controller suspects was caused by the same strain of malware that ransacked British Airways' website.…

A scientist on a banknote? Stick that up your Darcy Something for the Weekend, Sir? There is a house in old Belgrade that has male and female private parts. If you were tempted to sing that last sentence, I suppose you could call it the House of the Rising Bum.…

Its creators see this shape-shifter droid as more like Big Hero 6 than cheesy Autobots Mechanical engineering brainiacs at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania in the US have demonstrated how autonomous, modular robots can reconfigure themselves to accomplish specific tasks in an unknown place.…

The pros and cons of using internal and external talent, or a mix of both Comment You’re a small or mid-sized business and have a growing sense of unease that you aren’t doing enough on cyber security. Must be all those headlines about ransomware infections and databases ransacked. Or – perhaps – you’re experiencing an upsurge in phishing attempts.…

Chrome Labs experiment adds another option for building website-ish applications Developers looking for a way to write JavaScript apps without the Electron framework or NW.js now have another option called Carlo.…

Screening system would scan faces, flag 'suspicious' reactions for immigration cops The EU is readying an AI-based screening system designed to catch travelers who lie about their reasons for visiting the Continent.…

Popular desktop Linux environment due for deprecation in RHEL - by 2024 While everyone was distracted by IBM's $34bn takeover bid, Red Hat quietly wrote a death-note for KDE – within Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be precise.…

But it has nothing to do with shipments being down. Honest Cupertino tastemaker Apple Inc has logged yet another record quarter, though investors are worried that sales may be starting to slow.…

Denial-of-service flaw exploited by miscreants in the wild, networking kit giant warns Cisco says miscreants are actively exploiting a SIP vulnerability in its networking gear that it disclosed on Wednesday.…

A Chen, a Ho, and a Wang walk into a bar... or so prosecutors allege The US Department of Justice has unveiled charges against two companies and three individuals it says have been stealing trade secrets from American memory chipmaker Micron.…

We went along to CEO-approved demo in San Francisco Pics Thousands of Google employees across the globe marched out of their offices today upset that the advertising giant has paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of sexual harassment.…

Reinforcement learning toolkit open-sourced for devs Facebook has unveiled a software toolkit to help programmers plug AI – in the form of reinforcement-learning models – into their applications.…

The firm everyone loves to fear sets new all-flash record Chinese array and IT systems supplier Huawei has set a new SPC-1 performance record, snagging it five out of the top six results.…

Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, bashed by Sir Timothy OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS Worldwide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has had enough of internet giants Google, Facebook and friends, and reckons the time has come to look at breaking them up.…

It's a triple A-rated keynote: Azure, AI and Accessibility Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the stage at Microsoft's Future Decoded shindig today in London. As has become the norm these days in events when the chief is not dispensing bonzer financials, much was made of the three As: Azure, AI and Accessibility.…

Kids can be so cruel when you're a racist homophobe There's no question that fatherhood brings immense responsibility. From the moment they come into the world, children think you are immortal, an aeons-old genius – nay, a god.…

Need to up dem data rates Hutchison's UK network Three has upgraded 2,700 urban sites to support faster 4G data.…

Labour minister slams attitude that reaching an adequacy agreement is assured The UK has reportedly moved closer to agreeing the terms for data transfers with the European Union post-Brexit amid concerns about the impact it will have on business.…

Tech giants do urbanism? Of course they're watching you Locals have objected to Apple building a store in Stockholm's Kungsträdgården (Kungsan) park. Protestors said the intrusion of a tasteful glass temple of overpriced consumer electronics encroaches into the public space, ruining the character of the park.…

Firmware security patches hit to fix critical holes in enterprise network access points On Thursday, network equipment makers Aruba, Cisco, and Cisco-owned Meraki plan to patch two flaws in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips made by Texas Instruments (TI) that power their respective enterprise Wi-Fi access points.…

Storage news and views website ready for the coming zettabyte era Several years ago, The Register absorbed the storage-focused Blocks and Files website because storage news was becoming mainstream IT industry news. The bits and bytes making up blocks, files and objects were becoming so large in number that developing storage arrays to hold them was a complex business and getting more so.…

'Internal issue' blamed for morning's outage Clydesdale and Yorkshire bank users have been unable to log in to their accounts or see transactions today, thanks to a non-specific “technical issue”.…

Oh, and look at our lovely figures! No, ignore the cost cutting, sales declines. Shareholders are happy! BT has got Brexit licked, it told the stock market today – the former state telco said it has modelled for the worst outcome and is stockpiling products in case the UK exits with no trade deal in place and supply chains falter.…

Firm plans to stuff a sizeable chunk into AI, naturally Graph database-flinger Neo4J has doubled its total funding after bagging $80m in E-round funding.…

Thales boldly goes where, er, NASA went in the 1960s Thales Alenia Space has bucked the Brexit blues by announcing the first all-electric satellite propulsion module to be designed and built in the UK.…

We'll just take this one away Apple has withdrawn a faulty update that has left Apple Watch 4 owners with bricked bling.…

Kernel-level ICMP buffer overrun quietly fixed as all eyes on this week's launchfest When Apple took to the stage for its latest slew of product announcements, there were a bunch of security fixes disclosed at the same time with far less fanfare.…

And competition regulator sees 5G clouds on the horizon The company building Australia's National Broadband Network turned in what was mostly a dull but worthy set of financials, and it's put something of a squeeze on its executive bonuses.…

Phew, someone didn't get the plug-all-useful-holes memo Analysis The world's fourth biggest PC company sells three desktop PC lines, but it hadn't updated one of those three for four years. Maybe Apple had forgotten that the humble and unassuming Mac mini was there at all. But it fixed that this week.…