The Register

Good thing too because Intel's planned chip changes may break Google's Retpoline A group of computer science researchers has proposed a way to overcome the security risk posed by speculative execution, the data processing technique behind the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.…

'You want a war? Well done, you've got one' replies China The Trump administration is moving forward with its plans to implement tariffs on Chinese goods coming into America. On Friday, it published a list of products totaling $34bn that will be subjected to a 25 per cent charge to importers, and another $16bn worth of goods that could be added to the list.…

Tapplock: Once, twice, three times a screwup Video It's never easy to crack into a market with an innovative new product but makers of the "world's first smart fingerprint padlock" have made one critical error: they forgot about the existence of screwdrivers.…

Staffers accused of swiping trade secrets face criminal charges Six former and current Fitbit staffers have been accused of stealing trade secrets from rival gizmo-slinger Jawbone.…

Crowdfunder asks to be reimbursed on behalf of backers Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo has revealed to The Register that it has set its lawyers on flailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd.…

US govt bans agencies from using Russian outfit's wares The US government issued an interim rule this morning prohibiting agencies from using products or services that have pretty much anything to do with Kaspersky Lab.…

Review panel: We don't think AI firm has a hidden agenda, but… Alphabet-owned AI company DeepMind Health needs to clarify its relationship with Google and explain how it plans to turn a profit, the firm's independent review panel has said.…

'I did not have an unclassified FBI connection at home that worked' Former FBI director James Comey was using Gmail for FBI business while overseeing the controversial probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as US Secretary of State.…

The land of the cuckoo clock brings you more endearingly cuckoo rules A Swiss police force has decreed that up to an hour of car-horn beeping during the football World Cup will be officially tolerated by the famously pernickety nation.…

Drop for Big Red shares as biz prepares to announce Q4 financial results Oracle stock has been downgraded by JP Morgan based on its CIO survey that didn't paint a rosy picture for Big Red's cloud services business.…

UK users waiting for emails to download ponder early start to weekend Office 365 is suffering a stuttering start to the weekend with UK users complaining this morning that the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.…

Public consultation for Blighty's skeletal law inches closer The UK's long-awaited Drones Bill will be out for public consultation "this summer" - though sources tell The Register that it has been stripped down in order to guarantee a smooth passage through Parliament.…

Quobyte, Pure Storage and Caringo all helping out Quobyte, FlashBlade and Caringo will all flower at JASMIN, the UK's environmental science supercomputer site, it has emerged.…

The dilithium crystals cannae take it, Captain Here's a surprise. William Shatner wants cryptocurrency miners to use a solar energy company he represents.…

Who needs DAS with RDMA? Analysis NVMe-over Fabrics arrays are performing as fast as servers fitted with the same storage media – Optane or Z-SSD drives for example. Because NVMe-oF uses RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) then the network latency involved in accessing external storage arrays effectively goes away.…

UK's National Audit Office slams delays, overestimation of Verify, attitude to claimants The UK government's embattled Universal Credit programme hasn't delivered value for money and has caused some claimants hardship but is now so embedded there is no alternative but to plough on, the National Audit Office has said.…

What open-sourcery is this? Interview Open source had a moral purpose when it was fighting "The Borg", Microsoft, in the 1990s, but then it fell from view. You could say it has found its mojo again, only this time it is about loosening the grip of companies built on ever more intrusive personal data processing: Google and Facebook. One of the biggest but most promising challenges is creating an Android free of Google's data-slurping.…

Just has to lose GDPR rulings in other courts first Domain name system overseer ICANN will spend millions of dollars arguing its GDPR case to the European Court of Justice rather than resolve its own internal disagreements.…

Citizen sysadmin saved the day after kids got lost without lasers On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which The Register brings you readers’ tales of tech support traumas.…

Google pours simple coding tools to deepen dev pool After a year and a half of gestation in its Early Adopter program, Google's low-code application development environment App Maker has been delivered into the hands of its corporate customers.…

Guest register states are readable, but the patch cavalry has arrived The Xen Project has revealed that its hypervisor is susceptible to the Lazy FPU flaw found in Intel’s x86 CPUs.…

Hint: health outspends finance outfits two to one, but all vertical IT is heading cloudy. Fast Healthcare providers are the top users of public clouds, says analyst firm IDC.…

Claims it’s the least complaint-generating Windows ever Microsoft’s decided that Windows 10 version 1803, aka the April Update, is now fit for consumption by business users or indeed anyone or anything capable of running Windows 10.…

According ot the American Medical Association at least The American Medical Association does not believe that using AI is essential in healthcare and will benefit all patients, according to a new report.…

Wants to move into the application business Cisco has opened up its network automation and analytics software, DNA Center, to all-comers.…

A bigger splash from big freaking box of a server, with up to 32 CPUs in a rack Huawei has unveiled a more powerful version of its top-end KunLun server at CeBIT, amongst a raft of other big iron-ish hardware and software announcements.…

Fake videos generated by AI models can be detected In the last year or so convincing fake videos known as DeepFakes – the product of deep learning-driven facial image manipulation – have been condemned as a threat to democracy, or what's left of it.…

Telefónica and Huawei shoot freakin' lasers down existing optical networks for QKD Telefónica and Huawei have carried out a successful field trial of quantum cryptography on commercial optical networks.…

Code good for passing the salt, but it won't win you the lottery A team of scientists at Universität Bonn in Germany has developed not-at-all-creepy software able to predict the future. A few minutes of it, at least.…

What, you didn't do this already? The Bank of England is expecting financial institutions to be a bit less rubbish when IT goes wrong, it said today.…

Bulk email error blabs 56 identities and email addresses Gloucestershire Police has been fined £80,000 for failing to blind-copy an email that contained the names and email addresses of victims of child abuse.…

Microsoft: Plz park your containers in our cloud K thx Container fans, rejoice! Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now generally available, having been in preview since October.…

Troubled surveillance craft has taken a shine to terra firma A British Army Watchkeeper drone has crashed near Aberporth, taking the number of crashes involving the unmanned aircraft to five.…

73-year-old taken in by counter-terror cops – report A former Rolls-Royce engineer has reportedly been arrested on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly handing British F-35 engine secrets to China.…

Cops unlikely to be the only grumblers Apple isn't backing down from a move to lock down the iPhone’s data port to increase security for users, even though it means thwarting some of the password-cracking tools used by forensics experts.…

Ron Coughlin will no longer doorstep fanbois outside Apple stores HP Inc exec Ron Coughlin is quitting the dog-eats-dog world of peddling PCs and heading into the more cuddly-sounding - but no doubt competitive - one of speciality pet retailing.…

UK.gov expected to take health workers off immigration limit Campaigners have welcomed reports that the UK government plans to remove doctors and nurses from an immigration cap – which could also make it easier for businesses to recruit IT workers from outside the EU.…

When we put up the schedule, we’ll put up the price Events We’re very close to publishing the agenda for Serverless Computing London, which means you don’t have long left to grab one of our super value blind bird tickets for just £500 plus VAT.…

Plus: Brit driver claims Autopilot almost took car off the road An update to Tesla's Autopilot software earlier this month has caused headaches for drivers of its electric cars – with one user alleging he was almost driven off the road by the robotic assistant.…

Civil servants get cheat sheet for procuring analytics The UK government has released a guide to help civil servants figure out how to use and procure data science tools ethically as public opinion on slurping continues to circle the drain.…

Big Blue's rig with Nvidia grunt looks to be first truly exascale system Comment IBM's 200 petaFLOPS (200,000 trillion calculations per second) Summit supercomputer was unveiled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last Friday and, scaled up, has proven itself capable of exascale computing in some applications.…

Desperate times at Downing Street The UK government has given itself a reassuring cuddle this week, asserting that – even if high-profile projects such as Galileo march overseas – international tech firms still love Blighty.…

Cord-cutters swung the court Analysis Across political divides in the United States there's a common appetite for reining in the country's plutocratic corporate overlords. The country that reveres Mom 'n' Pop businesses is wary when giant businesses combine. But the landmark decision in a US District Court permitting two legacy businesses to merge indicates how hard this is.…

Comets might have seeded the surface over millennia Ceres contains more carbon-based compounds - the chemical building blocks for life - than previously thought, according to a new study.…

Software-defined networks are getting serious, at scale Network function virtualization is moderately obscure stuff, seeing as it is mostly intended for the plumbing of carrier networks. But VMware’s new play in the field with what it reckons a proper, 5G-ready effort, is notable for a couple of reasons.…

Kromtech finds malicious code hiding in enterprise upstart's repositories of software At DockerCon in San Francisco on Wednesday, CEO Steve Singh highlighted security as one of Docker's core principles.…

Machine-learning suite ends its sloppy packaging ways after Debian dev roasts Redmond Microsoft had to emit a hasty update for its R Open analysis tool after developers found the open-source package was not playing nice with some Linux systems.…

We gotta put this in context, cos that's what Microsoft says matters these days Microsoft has revealed a plan for a slow-moving upgrade of its Office suite’s user interface, with three new elements to start appearing at Office.com and in Office apps in coming months.…

And discover it made a magnet that points 'up' How to measure a magnetic field that's very long way away, and is very, very weak. An international group of boffins have announced that they figured out how.…

Defence outfit Thales gets Azure Stack to drop and give it twenty for military use Microsoft’s Azure Stack cloud-in-a-box has been adapted for in-field use by the world’s militaries.…