The Register

Data Protection Bill ping-pongs as MPs and peers battle over press regulations UK political parties have been urged not to use a "legal loophole" that would allow them to process personal data revealing people's opinions on politics.…

It's our fault the Facebooks and Googles run everything Comment In the same way it has become de rigueur to slag off Facebook for its many privacy sins while billions still dump their data into the service, it's also pretty trendy to pretend that blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions publicly and permanently, offers answers to a new and improved decentralised web that leaves individuals, not Facebook, in charge of their data.…

If you want your fave to survive, you'll need to dig deep If you're new to Linux you'd be forgiven for thinking there are only a half-dozen distributions – names like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux tend to get most of the headlines.…

For all its utility, serverless lacks unicorns and rainbows Continuous Lifecycle "You'll never go hungry if you know AWS," one of the workshop participants at the Continuous Lifecycle* devops-focused conference in London remarked.…

Skylab is 45, Mercury programme turns 55 Two NASA anniversaries rolled around this week, but you would be forgiven for missing them. The first was the 45th anniversary of the launch of the United States' only solo Space Station, Skylab, designed to host astronauts for months at a time.…

Games and alerts lost their voice to feature designed to hush auto-play vids Google has tweaked Chrome 66 to make the new feature that silences auto-playing videos less aggressive.…

Can anyone catch the big three (plus Oracle and IBM?) Amazon Web Services has announced a new and significant marquee customer: Verizon.…

Hand-sized quadrotor packs a neural network A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance.…

Better review for Snaps Store promised anyway after last week's crypto surprise Canonical has responded to last week's discovery that its Snap store carried apps containing embedded crypto-currency miners, by pledging to introduce a “verified developer” program.…

Before it amplifies DDoS attacks Universal Plug 'n' Play, that eternal feast of the black-hat, has been identified as helping to amplify denial-of-service attacks.…

Proof-of-concept fits in a Tweet and can take down all of RH's best bits Red Hat has announced a critical vulnerability in its DHCP client and while it doesn't have a brand name it does have a Tweetable proof-of-concept.…

That sound you can hear is laughter from Oracle HQ Two US senators have asked the nation's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take another look at Google's location harvesting.…

Babbles about subpoenas, corruption, corrupt pyramidal power structures and so much more Security personality John McAfee has “gone underground” in a convoy of armoured cars escorted by people claimed to be former members of the military, to escape what he says is persecution by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)…

Not even Zuckerberg can escape the tax man Facebook has lost its bid to throw out a tax bill on $7bn worth of income it had stashed overseas.…

There was a lot going in the Palm Desert heat Intel Capital If ever there was an analogy for how technology enables man to do extraordinary things, it came on Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon last week at the Intel Capital conference in Palm Desert, California.…

Report claims former intel worker behind data dump A former CIA employee has been named as the prime suspect in last year's dump of thousands of documents on the agency's hacking practices.…

Report claims former intel worker behind data dump A former CIA employee has been named as the prime suspect in last year's dump of thousands of documents on the agency's hacking practices.…

It farts out enough energy to irradiate all life on Earth Astronomers have spotted the greediest supermassive black hole going through the fastest growth spurt some 12 billion years ago.…

It farts out enough energy to irradiate all life on Earth Astronomers have spotted the greediest supermassive black hole going through the fastest growth spurt some 12 billion years ago.…

Democrats making a difference the only way they know how to After weeks of teasing, Senate Democrats will finally take decisive action on bringing back net neutrality to America on Wednesday – by holding a pointless vote.…

Democrats making a difference the only way they know how to After weeks of teasing, Senate Democrats will finally take decisive action on bringing back net neutrality to America on Wednesday – by holding a pointless vote.…

WikiLeaks vows to take action over libelous claims The government of Ecuador spent nearly $5m to provide protected internet access to asylum-seeker Julian Assange and he responded by hacking theur systems, an anonymously sourced report has claimed.…

WikiLeaks vows to take action over libelous claims The government of Ecuador spent nearly $5m to provide protected internet access to asylum-seeker Julian Assange and he responded by hacking theur systems, an anonymously sourced report has claimed.…

Committee rages at snub, says homework isn't good enough Mark Zuckerberg has once again rejected the advances of the UK parliamentary committee that are probing the misuse of Facebook data and how the firm slurps user info.…

Committee rages at snub, says homework isn't good enough Mark Zuckerberg has once again rejected the advances of the UK parliamentary committee that are probing the misuse of Facebook data and how the firm slurps user info.…

Plus an optional stinkin' Notch Huawei previously used its Primark brand, Honor, to bring high-priced tech to a much more affordable package. But this time it's using Honor to introduce a feature the industry insisted it wasn't ready for: an under-glass fingerprint sensor.…

Socks away £37m to consolidate claims-handling for compo scheme Capita's Customer Management tentacle is to consolidate claims-handling on behalf of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FCSC) in one of the few good pieces of news this year for the beleaguered tech biz.…

Too many disputes over how the tech and law work Facebook's attempt to push a US court to a quick ruling on a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology has been denied.…

Hoping to purge it of backup attack loops Backup software crew Asigra has put out a new version of its product which disinfects scanned backup files for ransomware to prevent restoration reloading code that screws with your data.…

Facebook's standalone VR headset at least has novelty value Review Earlier this month, I jotted down some initial impressions about the Oculus Go virtual reality headset I received at Facebook's F8 developer conference.…

Reg Lecture explores tractor beam tech... The benefits of tractor beam technology are well known - out-running delinquents on your hoverboard, hurling enemies around at a distance, and of course, capturing fleeing rebel spacecraft.…

Netherlands turns up the heat as transparency plans unveiled It has been a busy few days for beleaguered antivirus-flinger Kaspersky Lab. Today's confirmation of an infrastructure move to Switzerland comes hot on the heels of a comment from the Netherlands government that use of the Russian firm's software is a bit risky.…

Eat your fibre, it's good for you! BT’s Openreach has opened a consultation with communications providers (CPs) over preparations for the monumental task of shifting 16 million phone lines to voice over IP by 2025.…

Voda UK remains 'sick man of Europe', though – analyst Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao has confirmed he is quitting the telco just a week after agreeing to spend €18.4bn (£16.1bn) on Liberty Global’s European assets.…

Unless offerings 'become... seamlessly integrated' The Pentagon has doubled down on its plan to hand a megabucks cloud contract to a single vendor in the face of opposition from corners of the tech industry and military experts.…

Hey Google. How will we eat? Android developers are reluctantly considering putting Google ads on ice because of uncertainty over whether they'll be GDPR-compliant, cutting off what in many cases is their sole revenue source.…

False positive rate of 98% doesn't count, say police, because 'checks and balances' London cops' facial recognition kit has only correctly identified two people to date – neither of whom were criminals – and the UK capital's police force has made no arrests using it, figures published today revealed.…

The clockwork radio boffin deserved meeellions The late Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio and veteran fighter for the intellectual property rights of designers, spent three decades defending his IP and demanding the UK government do more to protect small businesses from the blatant, rampant copyright theft that then existed.…

Behind the looking glass in Storage-land "The time has come," the roundup read, "to talk of many things: Of caching tech – and Optane drives – of in-memory computings..."…

No more unpatched servers, but alternative is hardly watertight For hackers unpatched servers are the best thing since sliced bread. From Heartbleed to WannaCry, slow-to-update servers invite attackers in with a red carpet. Many of the most significant breaches were caused by unpatched servers, and analysts expect things to only get worse. Will we ever rid ourselves of the need to update these pesky servers?!…

Committee questions its ability to cope with Brexit (again) The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is "failing on multiple levels" with widespread concerns over errors from recent digital mapping updates and inaccurate payments.…

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi launches light-on-detail charm offensive Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has emerged at the head of a charm offensive that promises the infamously belligerent ride share company is “moving forward”.…

Analogue simulation a short-cut to faster computing Do you want to know what a quantum walk is? The reason we ask is that that’s what a group of Chinese researchers have demonstrated, and it’s being hailed as a big thing in the development of quantum computing.…

Harry and Meghan's guests to be ID'ed in real time by AWS vid-scrapers, pumped into apps The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will be brought to the world with the help of cloudy machine learning.…

Bits of flight deck sucked out of Sichuan Airlines A319, which landed safely with two injuries An Airbus A319 operated by China’s Sichuan Airlines lost one of its cockpit windshields at 32,000 feet on Monday, but was able to land safely.…

JavaScript just-in-time compilation and some memory meddling make a mess Back in February 2018, Google's Project Zero went public with a Microsoft Edge bug that Redmond couldn't fix in time for its next patch release. Now, the Google researcher - Ivan Fratric - has provided a detailed technical explanation of the problem and says Microsoft's fix might not be adequate.…

That sound you hear? Contracts being ripped up As expected, Xerox under its activist-investor-controlled board has decided to exit its deal with Fujifilm.…

Jobs, schmobs: ZTE's about national security, stupid, say Republicans United States president Donald Trump appears to have tried to get back to making America great again, rather than saving jobs in China, with a new Tweet about Chinese network kit-maker ZTE.…

Fastest-ever adoption and connection rate needed, but at least finances look decent nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network, last week released its third quarter results. And as is now our practice at Vulture South, we’ve shoved its numbers into our nbn™ scoreboard – the table we use to compare assumptions from the nbn™’s corporate plan (PDF) with its latest results.…

Sole admin on holiday as devs cross fingers and hope there's a backup <pOpen source WiFi firmware project OpenWrt says a hardware fault has taken down its forums, which appear not to be recoverable.…