The Register

Minister confirms how much UK spunked on system it can't use There were heated exchanges at the UK's Defence and European Scrutiny Committee this week as members attempted to get the Minister for Defence Procurement, Stuart Andrew, to put a figure on the cost of the Galileo project.…

Cash-only Thursday as soap seller's tills go TITSUP* Soapnotes Lush, high street peddler of lotions and potions for the pampered, lost the ability to perform card transactions yesterday due to a bath bomb dropped in the server room.…

Plus: PC, notebook hard drive ships set to be eclipsed by flash SSD market stats for calendar Q3 from DRAMeXchange, IDC and TrendForce and Wells Fargo have highlighted three things: Samsung remains the global undisputed sales heavyweight; the PC industry will suck up more SSDs than disk drives next year; and NVME is the enterprise SSD interface of choice.…

PLAIN TEXT passwords showed up on file-hosting site German chat platform Knuddels.de ("Cuddles") has been fined €20,000 for storing user passwords in plain text (no hash at all? Come on, people, it's 2018).…

Christmas soon, probably best you don't look anyway UK customers of HSBC hoping to check their balances before heading to the pub for a Friday beverage or eight found themselves out of luck today.…

*Terrible IT Threatens Services, Users, Pound MPs have stuck a probe in banking IT crises after an "astonishing" number of failures, saying "measly apologies and hollow words" aren't good enough.…

National Audit Office now says estimated saving for you and I is, er, just £18 a year Parliamentarians are set to haul civil servants in for a grilling after the National Audit Office (NAO) confirmed the UK will miss its 2020 smart meter rollout target, piling an extra £500m onto the cost of the £11bn project.…

Loose .zips sink chips 2: Electric Boogaloo The "Zip Slip" vulnerability that first emerged in June has claimed another victim – the Apache Hadoop YARN NodeManager daemon.…

Judging by all the emails I'm getting, I think it is already Something for the Weekend, Sir? This may come as a total surprise to you but today is Black Friday. Yes! It crept up on us unawares without anyone mentioning it once.…

Blighty's metrology experts define terms The National Physical Laboratory has quantified many fundamentals during its lifetime – SI units for the second and the metre, for example.…

As a sneaky fix flummoxes n00b Burroughs engineer On Call Black Friday Giveaway! We don't want you to think El Reg isn't jumping on the internet bandwagon as the frenzied hunt for "bargains" continues apace.…

Government now says it wants bill passed 'in its current form' The federal government's continuing media blitz to rush through its anti-encryption legislation has drawn push-back from eight industry bodies, led by the Communications Alliance.…

Outgoing comms chief post gets FB treatment Facebook's outgoing public policy chief, Elliot Schrage, appears to have fallen on his sword, taking the blame for smearing critics of the company.…

From main customer to owner Cisco is buying UK software house Ensoft for an undisclosed sum. The Harpenden-based outfit’s speciality is software for enterprise-grade routers and networking equipment.…

Original complainants say pay-to-play remedy has left them in the cold Fourteen price comparison sites have written to the EU in Google's longest-running competition case, asking the European Commission (PDF) to rip up the remedy it agreed with Google.…

The first rule of death club is not to be seen alive After faking one's own death to defraud a life insurance company, it's best to avoid being photographed alive and well, particularly when border agents may be reviewing those photos.…

What's that? You've installed 1809? No, sorry, can't hear you The Windows 10 October 2018 Update woes continued for Microsoft last night with the announcement that Redmond had slammed the brakes for users of certain Intel display drivers.…

Sweeping changes to VAT will hit small biz, says committee Updated HMRC's digital tax reforms to VAT – due to launch just three days after Brexit – will hit small businesses hard and should be delayed, peers have said.…

Flashing seriously Analysis It has been revealed that open source Ceph storage systems can move a little faster than you might expect. For those who need, er, references, it seems a four-node Ceph cluster can serve 2.277 million random read IOPS using Micron NVMe SSDs – high performance by any standard.…

RC1 is here for devs without their heads in the cloud Microsoft has emitted the first release candidate for the on-premises version of Azure DevOps in the form of Azure DevOps Server 2019.…

Gadget snapshot reveals tablet-weary, phone-mad Britain Comms regulator Ofcom has highlighted what devices and digital services Britons use ahead of the UK's annual shopping orgy. The data was actually released in its vast compendium of consumer habits, a tome so large details sometimes get lost.…

...sadly, and here's why it won't ever be Comment Private Eye has a running joke satirising a great British tabloid institution: the Reverse Ferret. "An apology to our readers…" it usually begins, explaining a sudden about-face in the newspaper's position.…

CLL19 Blind Bird offer expires soon Events We're just putting the finishing touches to the speaker lineup for Continuous Lifecycle London 2019, with 40 experts and practitioners spanning Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and more.…

Plus: Cloud file-sharing on desktop and mobile clients Microsoft announced this week that Skype calling had arrived on Amazon's Echo, but the rollout took a little while, finally arriving at Vulture Central yesterday, so we took it for a spin to see how it works.…

Don't put the Champagne on ice: English sparkling wine fizzes as French bubbles go flat Amid frenzied Brexit preparations in 2017-18, government-hosted parties slurped up 20 per cent more wine than the previous year – as European plonk purchases reached a bottleneck.…

Alice becomes Bob Germany has patched a key "e-government" service against possible impersonation attacks, and both private and public sector developers have been told to check their logs for evidence of exploits.…

Storage company's core project joins the GitHub undead Western Digital has taken software acquired with personal storage outfit Upthere in 2017, packed it gently in a wicker basket, and laid it at the door of a GitHub orphanage.…

Hadoop YARN is the attack vector, so lock it away Diligent hackers have decided routers and cameras aren't enough, and have reportedly crafted Mirai variants targeting Linux servers.…

2018: The year the US-imported shopping promo bonanza goes pffft? Black Friday may take on a different meaning in 2018 as the consumer shopping bonanza looks set to be an utter flop in the largest economies across Europe.…

No one fancied Salyut-style jaunt to Mir to grab some gear The International Space Station turned 20 this week as space agencies and 'nauts alike celebrated the anniversary of the launch of the first module of the ISS.…

A divided tech nation embraces, uncomfortably In a very American celebration of setting aside differences to sit at the same table, on the eve of Thanksgiving you can now use your iPhone to issue voice commands to Google's smart home systems. Well, sort of.…

Pah! Who didn't know that?! (It means they shouldn't have to pay non-taxable costs, apparently) The United States and linguistic experts have sided with Oracle-botherer Rimini Street in its Supreme Court battle to claw back $12m from its copyright settlement with Big Red.…

We dig in and find a surprising answer The rules over what companies selling internet access to folks are allowed to do are heading to America's law courts yet again.…

Pay no attention to the underpants. We ARE an internet company Analysis China's answer to the Grace Brothers department store*, Xiaomi, remains dependent on internet services for most of its profit, and smartphones for most of its revenue – and that's giving some analysts pause for thought.…

Transient use edge data collector and processor upgraded Amazon has slipped some extra compute options into its Snowball Edge data transfer box.…

And no, it's not simply return true;... Study finds language analysis is fairly good at detecting deception Boffins from the Netherlands and France claim that the word choices and sentence construction in President Donald Trump's tweets can be used more often than not for lie detection.…

Because watching a 'Genius' mope about the shop floor will inspire a generation While it may be having some difficulty shifting its latest iPhones, Apple has found time to fling open its stores and inflict hordes of excited schoolchildren on the "Geniuses" therein.…

But whatever, you can expect phones next year Roundup After years of interminable waffle, 5G is almost upon us, and Huawei wants to tell us what works – and what must wait. At this stage, the wrinkles are as valuable as the milestones, because 5G is a vast smorgasbord of different technologies and aspirations.…

Get Zucked, basically Facebook is to appeal the £500,000 fine handed down in October by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office over the data-harvesting scandal.…

FibreNation might exist but the expected sack of cash is yet to be announcned TalkTalk's 3 million-home fibre splurge now has a name – FibreNation – but can no longer say it has £1.5bn at its disposal for the venture.…

FY18 dogged by execution woes but, er, all sorted now The latest CEO to take the controls at Brit accountancy software maker Sage is intending to convert the laggards in its customer base to the cloud by spending £60m on R&D and product improvements.…

Dutch boffins prove it is possible to evade memory-busting attack mitigations Researchers in the Netherlands have confirmed that error-correcting code (ECC) protections can be thwarted to perform Rowhammer memory manipulation attacks.…

Chocolate Factory vows to fix camera glitch Google might make the best camera phone in the world – but that doesn't mean much if it can't take pictures.…

Password-less logins for Edge users with Windows Hello or a FIDO2 dongle. Like, 3 people It's taken a while, but it has finally arrived. You can sign into your Microsoft account with a suitable dongle or Windows Hello, with passwords consigned to history.…

$1tn biz doesn't answer very basic questions - like how or why it happened Updated Amazon has suffered a data snafu just days before Black Friday – and the company was tight-lipped about whether it had notified the British data protection authorities.…

Disguised as files about recent Lion Air crash, no less Russian state-backed hacking crew Fancy Bear (aka APT28) is distributing malware-riddled files with a suggested link to the recent Lion Air crash in order to dupe government workers into downloading software nasties – and has developed a new remote-access trojan called Cannon, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Dodgy dialling dons' dosh due to diminish in December Company bosses will be personally liable for nuisance calls made by their firms from 17 December, and could be forced to pay up to £500,000.…

Upcoming calendar change more than Office can handle Stop us if you've heard this one, but Microsoft has pulled a couple of buggy patches in Office. It also left a crash-worthy Outlook security fix in place.…

Warships don't only sink the nation's enemies, you know Boatnotes You may think of a warship as a vessel that sails the Seven Seas, bristling with missiles and guns, ready to deal out death and destruction to Her Majesty's enemies. In fact, warships do many other jobs too – such as HMS Enterprise's routine but vital task of seabed surveying.…

The irony meter is quivering Oh the irony. A channel account rep trying to drum up business for security awareness training scored an own goal this week when he pressed the send to all option on an email to prospective clients.…