The Register

Reverse ferret by reassuringly expensive consultant Blockchain companies are upset with management consultant McKinsey for pointing out the technology is stubbornly stuck at base camp after years of hype.…

Want some more cash? Get some more skills. And perhaps a moving truck DevOps darlings Puppet has emitted some juicy salary data from its annual DevOps survey, showing that the US is still the place to go for an impressive IT paycheck.…

Future Circular Collider hopes to rack up 100 tera electron Volts to probe physics CERN, the European research hub in Geneva, is already home to the world’s largest particle accelerator – and it’s hungry for another one that’s bigger and better.…

Living in a box, living in a faraway box, I'm living in a box Pic A tiny cotton seed brought to the Moon's surface by a Chinese spacecraft has apparently just sprouted, quite possibly making it the first Earth-based plant to start growing on our rocky satellite.…

Evidence-based policy? What a novel idea... Analysis President Trump on Monday signed legislation that attempts to make US government data more accessible for people and machines, though his predecessor deserves much of the credit.…

2011 ban on interstate, foreign sports betting extended to online lotteries, poker, casinos Last November, US Justice Department officials, having reviewed the nation's laws, quietly concluded that, oops, interstate and international internet gambling is actually illegal. For some reason, that view was only made public on Monday. And for now, this hot take is not being enforced across the country.…

Crooks banked $270,000 in just one move, it is claimed A pair of Ukranian hackers broke into America's financial watchdog to swipe insider info for stock traders, it is claimed.…

Yes, it plans to appeal again Apple has, for the fourth time now, lost an appeal against a $440m patent-infringement damages award, payable to VirnetX – and pledged to appeal the decision.…

Security hole can still be exploited to tamper with journeys, warn infosec bods Exclusive A security hole in a widely used airline reservation system remains open to exploit, allowing miscreants to edit strangers' travel details online, The Register has learned. A fix to close the vulnerability was incomplete, and thus ineffective, it is claimed.…

Government facial surveillance harms civil liberties, advocacy groups warn The campaign against Uncle Sam's use of facial recognition stepped up a notch this week: scores of rights-warriors have urged Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to cease selling the panopticon tech to the US government.…

'We take access to sensitive data and permissions very seriously...' No giggling, please Paul Bankhead, director of product management at Google, has told programmers that apps in the Play Store that want access to SMS or Call Logs will start being removed unless the ad-slinger has OK'd the given developer's justification.…

Congressman warns telco regulator: Must Pai harder America's comms watchdog, the FCC, is under fire for refusing to brief Congressional staffers on what exactly it is doing about cellular networks selling citizens' location data to dodgy characters.…

'You're fired' Rise of the Machines™ The world’s first hotel “staffed by robots” has culled half of its steely eyed employees, because they’re rubbish and annoy the guests.…

Controller tech precedes NAND-tastic summer An SSD controller company has demonstrated faster SSD access with a gen 4 PCIe controller that was twice as fast as gen 3 PCIe.…

Top US justices hear oral arguments in copyright battle Rimini Street and Oracle were once again at odds in the courtroom yesterday, as the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the pair's long-running copyright battle.…

Lucky few get Chocolate Factory's endorsement as Enterprise Mobility Management Google is extending its Android Enterprise Recommended program to mobile device management.…

Authentication is simply AWOL for remote RF control equipment, says Trend Micro Did you know that the manufacturing and construction industries use radio-frequency remote controllers to operate cranes, drilling rigs, and other heavy machinery? Doesn't matter: they're alarmingly vulnerable to being hacked, according to Trend Micro.…

Have fewer phones, less internet access, says report Disabled people are being left behind by the technology industry - both in terms of services and an understanding of what technology can do, a new Ofcom study has claimed.…

Half a billion dollars plus of funding, and counting Palo Alto storage software startup Rubrik has inhaled $261m in an E-round of funding, taking its total funding to north of $553m and giving it a $3.3bn valuation.…

£26m 'deducted' from payments but Public Accounts Committee remains sceptical Senior British Army generals have defended Capita's disastrous Recruiting Partnership Project (RPP) IT contract – despite confessing that the military will miss this year's recruiting targets by 40 per cent.…

Subject to German competition authority approval, natch IBM is to buy Deutsche Telekom's ailing maniframe unit, according to multiple sources.…

Chipzilla says it has 'options' to source Optane 3D XPoint, 3D NAND production elsewhere Micron has confirmed it will indeed buy Chipzilla’s interest in their IMFT flash foundry joint-venture based in Lehi, Utah.…

Says it used tech to settle 3 million forex transactions, $250k in payments last year HSBC claims to have settled three million foreign exchange (FX) transactions and made payments worth $250,000 using distributed ledger technology (DLT).…

Group says search giant hasn't changed its ways – and wants the public to know Googlers are launching a public campaign in a bid to end forced arbitration as part of the battle over harassment allegations levelled against the corporation.…

Blames 'internal pressures' rather than a software giant getting stroppy about foldables As Windows 7 tipped over into its 12-month march to oblivion, the popular Windows tracking site, BuildFeed, issued its final update.…

You just need to tell us who you are... Events If you’re heading down the path of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Containers and all the rest, we’re guessing part of your plan is to save money, or at least spend it as efficiently as possible. But let’s face it, nothing beats free, does it?…

Also: US Commerce Dept blocks export of tech developed by Silicon Valley subsidiary It's only the third week of January, but 2019 is turning into a horror year for Huawei: the company's phones have now been reportedly banned from a major research institute in Taiwan.…

Unfortunate SpaceX workers start a different sort of countdown Roundup While China's rover kept on trundling, the news was not so cheery for workers in the US space sector or radio telescope fans over the past week.…

Plenty of Python news emitted from Redmond in this week's round-up The gang at Microsoft continued their busy start to 2019, dodging falling masonry, wobbly updates and toppling cloud services.…

Only 45 parsecs away if you fancy a look up close Astronomers have found the first example of a protoplanetary disk forming at a right angle to its parent stars, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy this week.…

Sounds fishy, yet it works for fruit flies, too. So take that, fish/fly-spotting humans AI systems excel in pattern recognition, so much so that they can stalk individual zebrafish and fruit flies even when the animals are in groups of up to a hundred.…

Before you outsource security to strangers, try boosting internal cybersecurity skills Security researchers looking to earn a living as bug bounty hunters would to do better to pursue actual insects.…

Silicon Valley box slinger clams it's first on the block with Intel processor... which isn't out yet In brief Supermicro is touting what's said to be the "first to market" Intel Cascade Lake AP Xeon server – and it's fitted with Optane DIMM modules to make in-memory apps, particularly the AI ones, run faster.…

Data transfer tools caught not checking what exactly they're downloading A decades-old oversight in the design of Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) tools can be exploited by malicious servers to unexpectedly alter victims' files on their client machines, it has emerged.…

Executives held to account? And three underlings thanked for their work? What is this madness? The Singaporean government-owned biz responsible for that country's patient database has fined senior executives, including the CEO, and dismissed two managers, after blunders allowed hackers to siphon off private records.…

Is the chip company an abusive monopolist – or tough negotiator? The chip industry's strong-arm tactics have been laid bare this month in the anti-trust legal battle brought by America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Qualcomm.…

Judge rules compelled use of biometrics runs into Fifth Amendment protections A US judge last week denied police a warrant to unlock a number of devices using biometrics identifiers like fingerprints and faces, extending more privacy to device owners than previous recent cases.…

Chipzilla adds to Windows IT admins security update load While admins were busy wrangling with the mass of security patches from Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP last week, Intel slipped out a fix for a potentially serious flaw in its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology.…

EFF slams bad eggs for trying to censor instructions on how to unlock gizmos from app Bird has apologized for sending a legal threat to a blogger who outlined how its scooters-for-hire – those electric gizmos littering city streets – can have their motherboards replaced to unlock them from their app, and driven away.…

Small biz raises doubts over value of social network's ad tech Analysis Imagine a store where you go in, pay money, and sometimes leave empty-handed. That's digital advertising on social media in a nutshell because it's seemingly full of fraud.…

Fresh plastic comes six months after ticket flogger fessed up to Magecart malware infection The Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest have issued customers with replacement cards as a result of last year’s Ticketmaster breach that hit around 40,000 Brits.…

Lord, he'll leave your mind to scream - if you don't renew on time Nominet has thrown out an attempt at reverse domain name hijacking after some, er, pushy Brits tried seizing their old web address from a fast-fingered fellow in Romania.…

As legal storm over weather app location data brews, its new year's resolution is: 3km IBM's embattled Weather Company subsidiary has said it is building a GPU-tastic supercomputer to model global weather conditions faster and more accurately.…

Chinese hardware biz faces more push-back in Western nations A Polish official has said he couldn’t rule out “legislative changes” to allow the nation to ban the use of a company’s products, following the local arrest of a Huawei staffer.…

Final decision expected in long-running antitrust case within weeks – reports Germany's competition authority is reportedly poised to ban a chunk of Facebook's user data collection activities.…

Looks like a functionality fail rather than a data breach, though Nervous Nissan UK drivers were today assured by the car maker that Connect EV app log-in failures are related to a migration of data onto a new platform rather than anything more nefarious.…

Enough to build a Wall.... of Windows consultants around Washington The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced a contract worth an estimated $1.76bn for Microsoft Enterprise Services.…

Also: AT&T inks open source pact with Nokia, ZTE 5G pass, Equinix expands Networks roundup Is it any surprise that Cisco remained the dominant force in enterprise infrastructure during 2018?…

Real or satire? Teaching machines to tell apart 'BP ready to resume oil drilling' and 'BP ready to resume oil spilling' Looking for a laugh? You should seek out the ends of satirical headlines and phrases with nouns in them, according to a pair of computer boffins.…

Javascript boo-boo pinned on server switcheroo Who, Me? Welcome Reg readers, to this week's Who, Me?, in which we gather round to share in another person's painful memories of technical cockups.…