The Register

Watchdog says fellas made billions of automated calls Amid a broad federal effort to be seen looking busy in the battle against robocalls, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against two men and their respective companies for alleged involvement with billions of unlawful automated pitches.…

Furious netizens locked out of their business profiles all day Facebook is mysteriously and inexplicably locking people out of their Pages – the social network's profiles for businesses and organizations.…

I think I'm a clone now Video DeepMind has taught artificially intelligent programs to play classic Atari computer games by making them watch YouTube videos.…

Supply firm owner slipped boodles in envelopes to bag millions in contracts The owner of an IT supplier has admitted bunging a US city's tech boss cash bribes to bag lucrative service contracts worth millions of dollars.…

Pluto's not just a cold distant ball – it may have been geologically active early on Dunes of methane ice grains have been discovered on Pluto after scientists studied snaps taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. That's according to a paper published in the journal Science today.…

Apps, 32 or 64-bit, will continue to run just fine as design biz looks to ditch baggage Arm's latest top-end processor core design – the Cortex-A76 unveiled today – is its first CPU to only run kernel-level code that is 64-bit, according to its inventors.…

America('s lawsuits) First Chinese phone maker ZTE will have to face a patent infringement lawsuit in the US, despite its handsets being effectively barred from sale in America.…

GDPR hell to continue for unprepared DNS overseer Global domain name system overlord ICANN’s latest attempt to deal with compliance with European data protection law has been dealt a blow after a German court rejected its request to force a registrar to keep gathering people’s information.…

One (un)lucky guy shoved two workloads Scale-out storage firm Quantum has announced that CEO Patrick Dennis is stepping down to focus on family matters. CFO Fuad Ahmad has also left.…

A mere month after Sushovan Hussein was found guilty of fraud in the US The UK's Financial Reporting Council has announced that it will investigate "the conduct of Sushovan Hussein", a month after a US court found the former Autonomy chief financial officer guilty of fraud.…

Bad luck if you want to book an appointment online The latest version of the UK National Health Service's Patient Access app and website, used to book appointments and to order repeat prescriptions, has been down for many users over the past 24 hours.…

None of them got a sausage roll, though Food snobs have been tricked into saying they like Greggs after the British high-street pasty biz went undercover at a London festival.…

Nvidia-powered quadcopter 'sees' and follows road vehicles An American camera drone startup has come up with an eye-opening new feature for its products: automatic car following.…

We read Mary Meeker so you don't have to American venture capitalist Mary Meeker's annual "bible" of internet and macroeconomic trends has been a fixture since the dotcom heyday, and as you would expect from a tech VC, it emphasises the good news. But it's not such good news if you're a high street retailer, rely on desktop users, or make smartphones.…

Noooooo, my stickers! Telegram backer and self-proclaimed "global entrepreneur" Pavel Durov has blamed a lack of updates to his app on Apple "not siding with us" in the ongoing furore in Russia over the crypto-chat platform.…

All you need is access to 40Mbps and extreme masochistic tendencies Football fans will be able to watch England's World Cup disappointments in full 4K resolution and high dynamic range colour glory, thanks to a trial on the BBC's iPlayer.…

Russian Federation Council says CEO must have 'ideas to share' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing calls to appear in front of Russian lawmakers, who – clearly aware that the chances of him accepting are almost zero – insist the invitation alone is noteworthy.…

Four-in-a-box servers Are Not Blades. They're a scale-out-and-up density play, geddit? Cisco has decided its UCS server family needs a new member for dense data centres and edge deployments.…

Said to have viewed case file she had a personal interest in A Crown court judge stands accused of breaching the Computer Misuse Act after allegedly accessing a case file that she had a personal interest in.…

April is the cruellest month – and the quickest rollout of an update in the OS's history Tracking company AdDuplex has given the first real indication of how fast the latest Windows 10 update is being rolled out. The answer is fast. Really fast.…

Many still unclear how 'right to erasure' will work "The right to erasure is not absolute," the UK Information Commissioner's Office told us as the question of the backup tech industry's exposure to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation was raised in the week after it came into force.…

Comms sat to treat Asia Pacific to exciting new HD programming. Rejoice! After taking an extra day to look over the second-hand Falcon 9 following its static fire on 25 May, engineers plan to light the blue touch-paper and stand well back on 1 June.…

The North East's Zeppelin warning system is largely forgotten Geek's Guide to Britain Mention the development of air raid early warning systems in the UK and thoughts will most likely jump to the Chain Home radar network of the 1930s.…

Probe of extra search area again fails to find plane Further efforts to find MH370, the Malaysian airlines Boeing 777 missing since March 2014, have again failed to find the plane.…

Could this be the end of RDBMS? Comment Oracle is industry’s single largest database vendor, which was great during the days before cloud and open source.…

New owner signals M&A possibilities – could a CA acqui-merge be back on the table? Software house BMC has been bought and sold again and now might do some buying and selling of its own.…

Dutch court rules orphan kit doesn't endanger users The Dutch Consumers Association has lost a court case trying to force Samsung to ship security updates for older phones.…

How much can a koala bear? Aussies forced to shop in inferior Amazon AU Amazon has decided that rather than try to collect Australia's Goods and Services Tax (GST), it's going to force locals to shop only at its Australian store.…

128GB, 256GB and 512GB modules offered as new storage tier below RAM, above SSD Intel’s teased the arrival of its Optane storage-class RAM in DIMMs.…

Virtzilla's annual innovation rally sees it express admiration for Adobe's SaaS transformation At VMware's 14th Radio conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, CTO Ray O'Farrell presented two possible paths for corporate adaptation in the face of market changes: BlackBerry's exit from the mobile phone business and Adobe's transformation into a software-as-a-service firm.…

Ghostbusters in Chrome 67 stop Spectre sniffs across tabs, plenty more fixes too Enhanced Spectre-protectors will soon come to the Chrome browser, as its desktop stable channel hit version 67.0.3396.62 and upgrades for Windows, Mac and Linux have started to flow.…

Russian security house to stay locked out of Uncle Sam's networks, for now A US district court has upheld the American government's ban of Kaspersky Lab software from computers of federal agencies.…

House slips privacy rules into Senate's files, crosses fingers The US House of Representatives has once again advanced a law bill that would always require the FBI and cops to obtain a warrant from a judge before forcing email providers to hand over people's messages.…

Flawed beyond repair, utterly broken, critically endangers the web – and that's the good news A newly released draft of the United Nations' masterplan to transition the internet to IPv6 has met a furious and despairing response from internet engineers.…

Canadian avoids maximum stretch behind bars after doing FSB's bidding The Canadian mercenary hacker who helped Russian agents break into thousands of Yahoo! webmail accounts will be spending up to the next five years behind bars in America.…

Yes, even yours SpamCannibal – a defunct service that issued blacklists of known spam servers – was hijacked early on Wednesday morning, spewing its own unwanted crap in the process.…

Call the, er, us? Police in Laguna Beach, California, have said a Tesla car – which the driver claimed had been operating in "autopilot" mode – has crashed into one of the force's stationary cop cars.…

Best git patching y'all A new version of Git has been emitted to ward off attempts to exploit a potential arbitrary code execution vulnerability – which can be triggered by merely cloning a malicious repository.…

Startup has powerful backer to help it crack China GPU-accelerated analytics company SQream has won $26.4m in B-round funding with lead investor Chinese multinational Alibaba tossing in cash following its cloud collaboration deal earlier this year.…

Ad astra, Al Bean and Don Peterson Obit The world lost two astronauts this past weekend – one a moonwalker that you've likely heard of, the other a pioneering spacewalker you might not know about.…

I see the world + its govt are taking an interest in you. Would you like some help with that? Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith has issued a spectral antitrust warning from history for Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.…

400ft height limit will not apply to first-person-view fliers, says aviation regulator New drone laws will be brought forward by the British government today in Parliament – but we won't see the long-awaited Drones Bill.…

'Concerns' about cost and embarrassment fall flat Updated A US judge has given short shrift to Facebook's delaying tactics in its long-running legal battle over its use of facial recognition technology, saying the corporation's concerns about financial costs and reputation damage were thin and unconvincing.…

Meeellions could be spent extending Airwave until 'future date' for overhaul Exclusive The UK government is contemplating "a complete or a partial shutdown" of its ambitious programme to shift blue-light services off radio and on to 4G, The Register can reveal.…

UK.gov stiffens law after El Reg reveals low fine recovery rate The UK government is planning to make company directors personally liable for nuisance calls – two years after it first promised the powers to the data protection watchdog.…

Standing out from the crowd is getting difficult now Review Like a broken record, with every phone review we publish, some Reg readers insist that their ancient <insert brand here> is perfectly good and there's no need to buy a new one. But take a bow, dear curmudgeons, for you have been proved wise. A lot of people now think so too. The broken record is the hit of 2018.…

We're not saying the last one is connected, but.... Though there has been much handwringing and finger-pointing over what caused the last financial crash, one Reg reader experienced at first hand the type of muppetry that no doubt played a part.…

We're not saying the last one is connected, but.... Though there has been much handwringing and finger-pointing over what caused the last financial crash, one Reg reader experienced at first hand the type of muppetry that no doubt played a part.…

Cyber-insurance gig to be worth $14bn by 2022 Every industry has its collection of shocking stories, but Britain's cyber-insurance sector can always be relied on to top the lot.…

Benchmarks, startup drama, an array with 20 controllers... Argh! Beam me up, Scotty Huawei's flash arrays have done well in a SPEC filer benchmark, Pavilion has brought out an NVMe-oF array with 20, yes 20, controllers, Nutanix is growing, and OEMs are reportedly feeling the DRAM pressure. It's your week in storage.…