The Register

We've all got a little, er, Richardinsonia in our animal family tree, it appears Video A fossil of the earliest known animal on Earth has been discovered in cliffs along the White Sea on the northwest coast of Russia.…

Internet outrage mobile insists year-long API bug would have been super-hard to exploit Twitter is in full damage control mode after disclosing that it may have inappropriately exposed some unlucky twits' private tweets and direct messages to strangers.…

Fiends use vulns to lure victims into tech support scams Website admins are urged to update their WordPress installations as soon as possible to the latest version following a rash of attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities in the web publishing software.…

But then again, it doesn't actually exist, so... Analysis Amid the enormous bundle of digital-assistant devices and technology Amazon super-hyped this week, one particular component has the potential to change the future of the smart home market.…

Who wouldn't like a Honolulu holiday? Legacy Windows admins, that's who Microsoft has released Windows Admin Center 1809 and its SDK, with a variety of tweaks and enhancements to Redmond’s latest take on managing a Windows environment.…

Stung punters seek compo for 'security feature' update HP Inc customers in the US have asked a California court to sign off on a $1.5m settlement over a firmware update that bricked printers using third-party ink cartridges.…

Battery has a weird shape, power is down but hey, it has a hidden Notch! The screwdriver fiddlers at iFixit have inflicted their usual brand of affection upon Apple’s pricey new phones and found a battery of a most unusual shape.…

Slices, dices and merges people, ops into Shoreditch enclave Hewlett Packard Enterprise UK is grouping its disparate cloud businesses, scrapping the brands of services outfits it has bought and moving the whole thing to a hipster village in East London.…

Plus: The Reg chats to wartime Bombe operator Ruth Bourne The Bombe team at The National Museum Of Computing (TNMOC) has succeeded in breaking an Enigma-encrypted message in a live Poland-to-England demo.…

Trouble ferments after hackers lock system and Arran with it Staff at Arran Brewery were locked out of its computer systems this week following a ransomware attack.…

Plus: New passive aggressive 'Quiet Mode' Microsoft has tweaked the presence model of its chat platform, Skype, in an effort to calm users still shrieking about lost features in the version 8 "upgrade".…

Safety first, folks. *Go on. Insert your joke about defending our borders below* The UK Independence Party is flogging multi-packs of rubber johnnies bearing the mug of former leader Nigel Farage. It is also unloading single packs for those more realistic about their chances of bedding someone this weekend or beyond.…

Deal puts pressure on competitors Adobe has forked out $4.75bn for cloudy software-as-a-service biz Marketo, in one of the largest marketing tech buys to date.…

Worst Crystal Maze Challenge ever Imagine you’ve just returned to work from a lengthy sabbatical and found, among the thousands of increasingly shrill and unanswered emails in your mailbox, one telling you that you are now the proud product owner of a bunch of Windows OS apps. What would you do?…

RUSI: How about some codes of practice, transparency, for starters? The use of machine learning algorithms by UK police forces is unregulated, with little research or evidence that new systems work, a report has said.…

Mindlessly self-indulgent app developers have a laugh at our expense Something for the Weekend, Sir? I can't get it up. Give me a few moments and I'll try again. Yes, I have tried rubbing it but thanks for the suggestion. What's that? I'm grasping it too firmly? Or I'm flashing in the wrong direction? Tell you what, I'll keep fiddling with it while you satisfy one of your other customers.…

Robot is 'responsive' but for some reason it can't transmit science data Since last weekend, an as-yet-undiagnosed glitch in the Mars Curiosity Rover has baffled boffins at NASA.…

Biz decides it's cheaper to bring in minimum wage jockey than fix database On-Call Friday has rolled around, regular as clockwork, and we celebrate the end of the week in the time-honoured way: On-Call, our regular column for techies to vent about frustrations from days gone by.…

British banking public biffed again just a day after Barclays blunder Online and mobile banking services from NatWest and its subsidiaries Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank crashed at around 5am this morning and remain down.…

New boats, decommissioning old ones, skills shortage... The Ministry of Defence has too many bigshots and not enough grunts – or cash – to reliably keep Britain’s nuclear deterrent hiding beneath the ocean waves, according to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.…

DevOps World | Jenkins World makes its European debut Promo A survey by analyst firm Forrester found last year that half of its developer respondents had already rolled out DevOps practices, and a further 27 percent plan to do so.…

Reach for the lasers, with all eight arms! Humans and octopuses may have drastically different brains, but both react in a surprisingly similar way when under the effects of the drug MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy.…

Second time lucky for Japan after first try proved a bust The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has landed a pair of tiny drum-like hopping robots on the surface of asteroid Ryugu.…

Infosec bod claims he glimpsed sensitive personal info left on unwiped servers Servers that once belonged to defunct Canadian gadget retailer NCIX turned up on the second-hand market without being wiped – and their customer data sold overseas – it is claimed.…

Mediocre malware operator 'fesses up to DC infection A Romanian woman has admitted running a ransomware operation from infected Washington DC's CCTV systems just days before President Trump was sworn into office in the US capital.…

Don't click on the link, people – well, people using the database on a vulnerable installation The Zero Day Initiative has gone public with an unpatched remote-code execution bug in Microsoft's Jet database engine, after giving Redmond 120 days to fix it. The Windows giant did not address the security blunder in time, so now everyone knows about the flaw, and no official patch is available.…

Don't click on the link, people – well, people using the database on a vulnerable installation The Zero Day Initiative has gone public with an unpatched remote-code execution bug in Microsoft's Jet database engine, after giving Redmond 120 days to fix it. The Windows giant did not address the security blunder in time, so now everyone knows about the flaw, and no official patch is available.…

Gunman dead and now named by cops, one worker in critical condition, two serious Cops have named the programmer who went on a gun rampage at WTS Paradigm – a US maker of enterprise resource planning software – this week. He shot four colleagues, leaving one in a critical condition.…

China tit-for-tat tariff tiff a terrible thing, warns FCC Commissioner Comment President Donald Trump's trade war with China may come with a serious cost to America's next-generation cellular networks, a federal regulator has warned.…

Class-action lawsuit over iOS 6 snafu allowed to move ahead Apple is accused of deliberately shafting people who didn't upgrade their iPhones and iOS, in a class action lawsuit over its FaceTime video-conferencing software.…

Alleges CrowdStrike, Symantec, ESET, Anti-Malware Testing Standards Org collusion NSS Labs has thrown a hand grenade into the always fractious but slightly obscure world of security product testing – by suing multiple vendors as well as an industry standards organisation.…

Janitor nabbed over child porn images, facility re-opens On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico was evacuated and sealed off without explanation, sparking wild conspiracy theories as to why.…

Janitor probed over child sex abuse image allegations, facility reopens On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico, USA, was evacuated and sealed off without explanation, sparking wild conspiracy theories as to why.…

If the networked kit needs to work for 10 years, you need to think policy Comment Cybersecurity has become an increasing priority in operations technology thanks to the growing appetite for the industrial internet of things.…

As Finnish DB biz bags fellow MySQL drop-in firm Clustrix Platform-as-a-service pusher ServiceNow is backing MySQL upstart MariaDB, injecting cash into its coffers and staffers onto its board, partly to protect its own investment as a customer of the database biz.…

We're secure, says bank A pair of IT workers have criticised banks within the Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) for sub-standard security. The group denies anything is amiss, maintaining it follows industry best practice on cyber-security.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before... The UK’s post-Brexit customs arrangements have today come under even greater pressure, as peers warned the tech doesn’t exist to back up the plans.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before... The UK’s post-Brexit customs arrangements have today come under even greater pressure, as peers warned the tech doesn’t exist to back up the plans.…

Fresh fruit, fresh batteries stuck on Japanese launchpad as HTV-7 hopes to catch a break International Space Station astronauts looking forward to feasting on some fresh food have a little longer to wait as Japan’s cargo ship has suffered yet another launch delay.…

Includes vineyard, a separate guest house and Chipzilla history A California home once owned by Intel founder Robert Noyce where the dining room served as Chipzilla’s boardroom in its early days is up for sale.…

Our Serverless Computing early bird offer finishes in 36 hours If you’re not already using AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or FaaS it’s highly likely they’ll be appearing on your project schedule soon.…

Waiting in line for hours and fancy some avocado on toast? Pathetic! The most shameless press release of the week award goes to Deliveroo for trying to share the limelight with Apple by offering to bike food to fanbois queuing for the latest iPhones released tomorrow.…

Middle Kingdom calls for international AI arm linkage Alibaba has created a subsidiary to design and build silicon for artificial intelligence.…

Extended Security Maintenance is here to save the day again (for a price) Ubuntu-slinger Canonical has assured us that 14.04 LTS users need not fear the impending end of life of the OS next year, and confirmed it will keep security fixes flowing a little while longer.…

Not yet an investigation, Margrethe Vestager says The European Commission is asking whether Amazon's role as a platform that merchants can use to sell products and its role as the merchants' competitor raises antitrust concerns.…

Take last year's funding. Multiply it by 5. DevOps ain't cheap Code repository and DevOps outfit, GitLab, has tipped into the $1bn club thanks to a $100m injection of funding from ICONIQ Capital.…

Happy anniversary, readers, from the original Git it girl Stob It's 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its pearl Perl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example:…

Staff tell El Reg to expect another wave of deck chair rearranging Exclusive The exit of three senior executives at the top of Fujitsu's Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (EMEIA) management stack has unsettled the workforce who are braced for yet more restructuring.…

When Irish-made drives are migrating Exclusive Dell EMC is terminating the contract it had with electronics manufacturer Celestica to take production in-house at its Cork-based facility in Ireland, with hundreds of jobs said to be at risk.…

And you're doing it in real time, yes? Is that a no? Comment It's exasperating how each high-profile computer security breach reveals similar patterns of failure, no matter the organization involved.…