The Register

Hitches NHS cart to data, AI bandwagon, as medical groups urge patient choice The UK prime minister has been wooed by the promises made by proponents of artificial intelligence, today pledging more use of algorithms and data-crunching in the health service.…

Dan Dare has a think about Galileo in least interesting comic strip ever The Royal Air Force (RAF) is to take on command and control of UK military space operations, including a possible UK-based alternative to the EU's Galileo satellite constellation.…

Insecure 12-year old microsite handed attackers key The UK's Information Commissioner has slapped a £120,000 fine on the University of Greenwich after a security cockup by its computing and maths school compromised the data of almost 20,000 individuals.…

They've gone array The board at storage startup Reduxio has hired a shiny new CEO amid a wave of senior exec changes, sources have told El Reg.…

Revamped Antares booster lobs cargo freighter at ISS Orbital ATK's Cygnus freighter launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, this morning carrying supplies, spares and science to the International Space Station.…

Unclear if employees wanted to figure out shape of him Two UK hospital workers have reportedly been disciplined for accessing Ed Sheeran's personal details after he was admitted following a bicycle accident.…

Unclear if employees wanted to figure out shape of him Two hospital workers have reportedly been disciplined for accessing Ed Sheeran's personal details after he was admitted following a bicycle accident.…

We're no pushover Analysis Xiaomi's entry into Europe is as feared as it is anticipated. With its vow to keep profit margins on hardware below 5 per cent and make the rest up on services, er, somehow, the Chinese firm threatens a consumer electronics price war that goes way beyond phones. But it might be harder than pundits think.…

Bug behaviour in the wild Stob "Plastic-eating bugs [...] could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis," was the Guardian's rather chirpy take on this story, triggering the recollection of a childhood nightmare. I inhaled my mouthful of coffee. The office youngsters couldn't understand my panic. "It's the Doomwatch scenario!", I coughed. "The skies will soon be falling!"…

Cloudy tech seen in oversized suit holding temperature probe Hidden away among the interminably long keynote speeches at Microsoft's recent Build event was a project to delight the retro enthusiast.…

Microsoft slurps conversational-AI startup Semantic Machines Microsoft's decided its Cortana speech assistant needs a bit of buffing to survive in a world where Google AI can book restaurants and a parrot can turn the lights off with Alexa, so the company has acquired a conversational-AI startup called Semantic Machines.…

An incident that started with a lazy slave ended with a rousing recovery Who, me? If the thought of another week at work has you down, worry not: The Register has another instalment of “Who, me?” for you to read, so you can enjoy another tale of errors made by someone other than yourself!…

So ministers hit the airwaves to reveal looming ‘obligation’ for rapid abuse takedown and colossal fines for not doing it Just four of 14 social networks asked to consult with the UK government on regulation of social media attended the talks, so ministers have revealed plans to require rapid removal of abusive and objectionable material and substantial fines for not doing so.…

Retro computing fans wrap classic DEC fascia round world's fave hobby machine Always wanted a PDP-11, but don't have space for the iron? Good news: an obsolete computer enthusiast s offering beta tests of a kit designed to recreate the famous Digital Equipment Corporation box on a Raspberry Pi.…

Store-and-forward probe TESS warms up its cameras with a snap of 200,000 stars NASA’s exoplanet-spotting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has successfully manoeuvred around Earth’s moon.…

That's 'Total Outage Ends Support for Usual Performance', natch Updated Telstra's mobile network experienced a nationwide outage on Monday morning, May 21st, 2018.…

He turned LG into the global electronics brand we know today LG chairman Koo Bon-moo has died, aged 73.…

EFF wins another privacy battle, ICE chips off AI spy plan Roundup Here's your guide to this week's infosec news beyond what we've already covered.…

Plus: Classifying frogs can be hopping mad Roundup Hello, here's our weekly AI roundup. We have more information on how Google's sentence prediction in Smart Compose for Gmail works, as well as some questions about its Duplex robo-caller system. Also, decision trees to classify the mating calls of frogs and toads to study climate change.…

Classifying frogs with AI could be hopping mad AI roundup Hello, here's our weekly AI roundup. We have more information on how Google's sentence prediction in Smart Compose for Gmail works, as well as some questions about its Duplex robo-caller system. Also, decision trees to classify the mating calls of frogs and toads to study climate change.…

Literally the 12th time corporate revenue put ahead of society and culture The US Congress is looking to extend copyright on some sound recordings to a staggering 144 years – making it the twelfth time copyright rules have been extended since the 1970s.…

Pundits quick to erect straw man Comment Once again, a mass murderer has opened fire at a school in America – this one is Santa Fe High School in Texas – and video games are already being blamed. Rather than, oh, say, gun control, or the lack thereof.…

And what reason would you have not to trust Facebook with your personal data? Updated Social networking site and market-leading data broker Facebook is once again taking heat for playing fast and loose with its access to personal information.…

Seeing as you love moratoriums on following the rules so much, how 'bout we get one, too? Internet domain-name sellers have turned the tables on global DNS overseer ICANN by using its own tactics against the hapless organization.…

Privacy International gets another shot at shadowy Investigatory Powers Tribunal Privacy International's years-long challenge against UK government hacking is headed to the nation's final court of appeal at the end of the year.…

But case will go ahead as judge rejects bid for dismissal Apple has failed to get a class-action sueball over its allegedly "shoddy" headphones dismissed – but the plaintiffs have been told to amend their claims.…

Indiegogo debt collector deadline looms ever closer... Flailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has, once again, failed to meet yet another promised delivery deadline.…

'An industry-leading approach' The UK's first 3G network is to stop selling 3G-only devices, a move it says demonstrates how whizzy, modern and farsighted it is.…

Oops!... We did it again The US branches of Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm SCL have filed for bankruptcy as execs inch closer to ridding themselves of the toxic brand.…

UK Gov reckons it could lose up to £1.2bn due to IR35 non-compliance The UK government has opened its long-awaited (and dreaded) consultation (PDF) on proposals to extend IR35 off-payroll working in the private sector, which could affect 2 million contractors.…

Midmarket gamechanger let down by eccentric imaging Review Huawei is often accused of slavishly copying Apple a lot of the time – but that’s not entirely fair. Huawei can slavishly copy Samsung too.…

French outsourcer to handle applications process The Home Office has awarded Sopra Steria a £91m contract to develop a digital visa and immigration service in the UK.…

Oh dear, fewer than half of punters get what they paid for ISPs are scrambling to tweak advertised broadband speeds as the great unwashed continue to receive services that are on average 51 per cent slower than they were led to expect, according to a Which? report.…

Councillor urges action against rubbish hotspot Boatnotes The UK's battle with fly-tipped vessels reached new heights last night after a fishing boat was set ablaze in northern England.…

New approach to dealing with complaints working wonders TalkTalk's customers woke up this morning to find the UK broadband provider's email service was still fast asleep.…

You can learn a lot about a biz from its bogs Something for the Weekend, Sir? I like to hang out in company toilets.…

Vulture goes to tribunal and gets the law changed The Register has won a legal battle against Midlands-based reseller Aria Technology that will help open up tribunals across England and Wales to greater public scrutiny.…

Neat bit of kit, and all the UK needs now is the cash to (re)buy it Pics The Register was among the first news outlets to get a close-up look at Insitu's new Scaneagle 3 aerial surveillance drone during its first public demo at a naval test range in Spain.…

Do say: 'I need safe disposal advice'. Don't say 'These chemicals could blow!" On-Call By golly it’s Friday again! Which means a spot of R&R isn’t far off, once we get through On-Call, The Register’s weekly column recounting readers’ tales of terrible times in tech support.…

Robot arm to add 'percussive' force so we can drill, baby, drill NASA's top engineers think they've figured out a way to get the Curiosity rover's drill back to work holing the rock faces of Mars.…

Wake us up when things get more interesting than a 2.2GHz 4MB cache laptop chip, please Intel’s revealed the existence of a real, actual, coming-to-a-PC-near-you-real-soon-now, CPU built with a ten-nanometre manufacturing process.…

In other nets news Qualcomm secures Wi-Fi, and mesh nets get a spec Roundup Earlier this year, The Register observed that the less-lame replacement for WPA2, WPA3, should start landing in user devices this year.…

The glitches in your résumé might not be that worrying, people When John Sullivan worked at Facebook, Aleksandr Kogan created the infamous personality quiz app that, unbeknown to The Social Network™, eventually funnelled data to Cambridge Analytica. And when Sullivan worked for Uber, he was fired for his part in paying off hackers to conceal a breach of 57 million users’ records.…

SEC filing says still no decision on float, VMware acqui-merge or other fiscal gymnastics Dell still hasn’t decided what to do with itself, or VMware.…

Making resilient CICD pipelines requires careful planning If you open an AWS account in China, you don't get a root account; instead, one of Amazon's Chinese operating partners, Sinnet or NWCD, has root access and creates an IAM admin user for you.…

New pictures from LEGUS survey will help boffins understand how stars form Astronomers have published the largest ultra-violet survey of the local universe, showcasing 50 active galaxies in high resolution using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.…

Securus wasted its money: the data was just sitting there The parade of bad privacy news this week has managed to get even worse, as one of the companies associated with the selling of phone locations for cash scandal was subject to a publicly exploitable bug.…

Patent sought for honeycomb design that could massively lengthy battery life Laptop and phone batteries could last 100 times longer if boffins at the University of Missouri come good on a new honeycomb design that they say greatly reduces the amount of energy dissipated inside power packs.…

US financier will be allowed to acquire memory biz after all The government of China will not stand in the way of the Toshiba Memory Corporation's sale to US investment house Bain Capital.…

13 billion light years away, so no chance to have a huff Astrophysicists have detected the most distant signal of oxygen yet, in a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away, when the universe was less than 4 per cent of its current age.…