The Register

Brings new meaning to try before you buy Anyone that’s ever had a penchant for using their buttocks to test the ripeness of a peach, plum or squash in a supermarket pre-purchase might have some sympathy for a US chap that was arrested for allegedly doing just that.…

Basically what UK.gov is selling as it moves to plug skills gap The UK government is expanding a programme that aims to get more Brits to consider careers in information security.…

4 million people keep paying for contracts that include handset charges Brits forked out £490m extra on their last mobile phone contract because of bundled handset charges that continued long after the device was paid for, Citizens Advice has said.…

It's WORM storage all round as Immutability goes to General Availability Microsoft has announced two more Azure availability zones and hit the red button on Immutable Storage in what must have been a breathless few days for its Azure team.…

Whatever you choose, you can learn more at MCubed Events Machine learning and artificial intelligence have moved out of the realms of academia into the world of real business – and the myriad applications and platforms that implies.…

We've got a $90bn run rate, never mind the debt Michael Dell has touted his behemoth's performance in a pitch supporting the company's return to the stock exchange.…

Funds to be held in escrow as govt appeals EU 'state aid' ruling Apple has paid the Irish government €14.3bn in back taxes after the European Commission ruled that arrangements between the pair had broken the state aid rules.…

Imanis Data bets data management farm on backupbot Machine learning data management company Imanis Data has introduced an autonomous backup product powered by machine learning.…

GDPR be praised, new product keeps personally identifiable information off the chain Dutch security firm Gemalto has said its blockchain product, slated to pilot later this year, will keep personal data off the blockchain.…

Catch up with new developments – plus get a reader discount on your ticket Promo Back for its 14th consecutive year, Arm TechCon is the essential event showcasing all the latest advances in the Arm architecture that underpins everything from silicon design to software development and internet of things (IoT) solutions.…

Report puts English capital ahead, Frankfurt close behind London will remain the most important European market for data, according to a report from data centre giant Equinix – even with Brexit looming and Frankfurt catching up.…

No doubt this'll be used to sell data to advertisers Video Wireless network gear can be used to estimate the number of people hidden behind walls, according to fresh research out of America.…

Can intelligent robots bribe govt officials for contracts? Asking for... a friend SAP has created an AI ethics panel to guide its use of machine-learning technology. If only it had a similar committee for fraud allegations: it might have avoided the corruption scandal engulfing it in South Africa.…

Thumbs up for integrated clipboard, the rest... er, well... Windows 10 users have yet another way to run Linux, thanks to tighter integration between Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.…

EE set it up, now Voda's shooting for goal Vodafone has taken UK comms watchdog Ofcom to the High Court in England to reclaim overpaid spectrum access charges imposed by the telecoms regulator in 2015.…

Surprise, surprise: Investigation finds Uber placed a load of bloke-only ads Facebook is under fire for allowing companies to allegedly unfairly post on the social network job ads specifically for men – and not women.…

With an election due in May, clock is ticking The Australian government has rushed forward its proposed anti-encryption legislation, a mere week after a public consultation into the rules closed.…

Yet it seems Tim Cook's kit is the Apple of the president's eye US President Donald Trump has slapped 10 per cent import tariffs on US$200bn of gear arriving in America from China.…

US court says no time to get paper ballots in place for November – eek! A US judge has OK'd the use of paperless electronic voting machines in Georgia – despite being "gravely concerned" about the state's ability to defend them from hackers.…

Meanwhile global key rollover is confirmed for October 11 Cloudflare is offering DNSSEC in a single click.…

Pompeo's peeps get free credit monitoring after some inboxes cracked open, data swiped The US State Department has confirmed one of its email systems was attacked, potentially exposing the personal information of some of its employees.…

Also in news that will shock no one: HoloLens headgear a must, says Redmond Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 got a tickling by AI on Tuesday as the software giant announced new applications aimed at sales and those at the pointy end of customer service, as well as mixed reality demoware creeping closer to reality.…

NAS boxes vulnerable to admin EoP via HTTPS packets An elevation of privilege flaw in the Western Digital My Cloud platform allows attackers to gain admin-level access to the device via an HTTP request.…

Western Digital NAS machines vulnerable to hijacking via HTTP cookies Miscreants can potentially gain admin-level control over Western Digital's My Cloud gear via an HTTP request over the network or internet.…

Game over for gaming strategy that seems to be on Fire, literally In a bold move, Amazon has ended support for its own games controllers on its own streaming box.…

What if someone else owns someone else's computer? Despite Google's claims that it isn't building a private cloud product, its partner Nutanix's shares took a 10 per cent dive when word got out.…

CEO to stay on as NetApp Kubernetes takes to the skies NetApp has snapped up Kubernetes botherer StackPointCloud for an undisclosed sum in a deal that heralds the creation of the inspiringly named NetApp Kubernetes.…

Didja think we'd get rid of the exclaims just 'cos you're Altaba now? The company formerly known as Yahoo! is close to settling cases related to the mammoth data security breach it covered up almost four years ago at a cost of around $47m.…

Old dog still has life in it yet Not to be outdone by its upstart open-source sibling, .NET Core, the team behind the venerable .NET Framework has put out an Early Access version of version 4.8 with toys aplenty for developers.…

Gov should ditch 'arbitrary' figure altogether – campaigners The number of overseas IT workers turned away from jobs they were offered in the UK fell 68 per cent in the month after the UK government removed nurses and doctors from an immigration cap.…

The anatomy of a privileged account hack Promo At 2pm UK we've got a live broadcast in which we speak to privileged access management vendor Thycotic about new research, showing how much of a challenge privileged account management is for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. We look at the anatomy of a privileged account hack, showing how cybercriminals target their victims.…

'No reason to believe' customer deets compromised The Brit limb of unfortunately named and reassuringly expensive domestic appliance maker Smeg is up on its feet again after being hacked.…

If you're resisting x86, Lenovo has some current deals for you Carlyle Group-backed Ampere Computing, run by ex-Intel president Renée James, says it is, at last, shipping its 64-bit Arm-compatible server processor.…

Feeling old yet? The first passenger Boeing 777 built is being flown to a museum today, having spent the last quarter of a century ferrying bods from A to B.…

... before black hats prove it There have never been more white-hat researchers hunting for vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems and yet barely any organisations provide a way for them to report the issues they find.…

Five billion pages on open-source project, just like the original World Wide Web Cloudflare has decided the four-year-old InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) project looks strong enough to warrant a little love, and has launched a gateway to allow the IPFS-curious to try out the "distributed web" protocol.…

Finally said yes to HTTPS The UK's TV Licensing agency has admitted that 25,000 viewers were induced into sending their bank details over an insecure connection.…

Dr Garry E Hunt tells us how the long-lived spacecraft took its remarkable pictures Interview It has been 41 years since the Voyager spacecraft left Earth to explore the outer solar system and, eventually, interstellar space. For the sole Brit on the Voyager imaging team, that journey began even earlier, in the 1960s, at Oxford University.…

Analyst wants a bigger slice of Bezos' $1tn pie Investor advice biz Citi Research has recommended that Amazon breaks itself in half to avoid antitrust accusations, according to reports.…

Conference a casualty of world's weirdest acquisition If you're one of the roughly 4,000 people planning to get a Miami-worth of frequent flyer points in November, think again: CA has binned CA World.…

Farewell, Patch Tuesday – and perhaps, farewell IT admins sucked into the big backend Microsoft hopes to assimilate traditional IT admin roles into its cloud with the launch of its Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) service.…

Please click on this story so at least you'll learn the identity from us and not one of the 1,000 other sites out there Video SpaceX today named its first paying passenger it will fly around the Moon and back to Earth – and it's Japanese biz baron Yusaku Maezawa. Yeah, him. You know. Him.…

Sales growth stalls, forecasts missed, stock price falls Oracle's stock price took a hit on Monday after the enterprise giant saw revenue growth come to a virtual crawl, crucial cloud segments stagnated, and overall performance fell short of forecasts.…

Unnamed third-party provider spaffed customer data A computer security breach at Perth Mint first thought to have affected just 13 customers turned out to be more widespread – with more than 3,000 punters now screwed over by hackers.…

Biz IT giant catches complaint alleging it lays off skilled older workers in favor of youngsters IBM once again finds itself the target of age discrimination complaints from workers who claim they were unfairly laid off just because of their age.…

Plus: Sysadmin sets up public shaming site for IPv4 laggards Microsoft has scrapped plans to go IPv6-only on one of its internal networks over fears its campus visitors would be unable to use their virtual private networks (VPNs).…

Owners told to lock down network access to panned surveillance kit Researchers have uncovered two flaws that leave more than 100,000 NUUO-branded internet-connected surveillance cameras open to remote takeover.…

Weiner unloads on American Pai over crony capitalism The head of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Ajit Pai, has slammed a net neutrality bill approved by California earlier this month, calling it "radical, anti-consumer" and "illegal."…

Thunderbolt and lightning, Azure outage frightening Microsoft has published the preliminary findings for what it calls “the South Central US incident”, but what many will call “the day the Azure cloud fell from the sky” and it doesn’t make for happy reading.…

A few lines of code that Apple's browser simply can't handle Apple iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers that stray onto websites with malicious CSS code, while using Safari, can crash or fall over – due to a flaw in the web browser.…