The Register

Think tank calls for open standards, interoperability Government departments should mandate interoperability when procuring systems and establish audit trails to track data use in order to benefit from data sharing, a think tank has said.…

Time for cyber-security firm to pull up the baggywrinkle? Security slinger Symantec is facing a bruising battle with activist investor Starboard Value, which has nominated five directors to the security firm's board after having amassed a 5.8 per cent shareholding.…

It's turtles all the way down The British government this week unveiled plans for an ambitious AI simulator to be used to test self-driving cars. It's part of a stated mission to make the UK the world's leading destination for testing autonomous vehicles.…

You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you The TUC, a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, is lobbying to gain a legal right to be consulted on surveillance in the workplace, as it opened up on staffers’ growing concerns about their bosses snooping on them.…

Contract notice reveals yet another UK.gov systems migration to Bezos cloud The Home Office wants to dump all of Britain’s national-level police IT onto Amazon Web Services' public cloud.…

Just when you thought it was safe to hang out at the water cooler Just as DXC Technology workers thought they’d escaped a summer redundancy session the perennial cost-cutter has asked for volunteers to form an orderly queue to the exit door.…

The digital entropy of death BSides Manchester What happens to the numerous user logins you've accumulated after you die or become too infirm to manipulate a keyboard?…

At first they started out real cool... On-Call Friday is upon us once more, which can mean only one thing: it’s time for On Call, our weekly instalment of Reg readers’ tech support frustrations.…

Processes, Services, Installations: One UI to rule them all. Almost. An attempt to cure the headache of a Windows 10 desktop festooned with Linux distributions has arrived in the form of WSLTools from Opsview.…

Buy your tickets now and save hundreds Our early bird ticket offer for Minds Mastering Machines expires this evening, so act now if you want to enjoy three days of conference and workshops showing how real organisations can exploit machine learning and artificial intelligence.…

£100k to sort borders, immigration, biometrics systems by 2019. Did we mention it's in Croydon? The reality of the mammoth task facing the Home Office in preparing for Brexit appears to have sunk in – the department is seeking a technology lead for the UK’s exit from the European Union.…

Maybe its inhabitants are mostly harmless and ordinary too Earth appears to be unique and inhabited by living creatures, but the building blocks required for life to bloom are actually quite common, according to new research.…

Even Tor fails as cookie bakers get smart and pernicious Browsers stuck in HTTP aren't blocking the cookies they should…

Let there be light Telefonica’s O2 has confirmed that it is experimenting with transmitting high speed data using lightbulbs, the brainchild of an Edinburgh University professor Harald Haas.…

Chalk one up in court for the Social Network Facebook has prevailed in a suit over its iconic news feed and claims it ripped off the idea from a patent troll.…

Unbelievable that more wasn't made of this non-story Net neutrality advocates were left furious on Thursday that there wasn't more fury directed at the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at Congressional hearing despite, the fact he killed off net neutrality several months ago.…

Protip: don't label your folder of warez as "hacky hack hack" An overzealous Apple fanboy from Australia plead guilty to criminal charges after he allegedly cracked the Cupertino giant's systems in hopes of landing a job.…

Ruby shop turns to Go, Java, and Kubernetes for platform makeover Analysis GitHub invited a handful of journalists to its San Francisco headquarters to explain how the social code hosting biz is evolving from a website into a platform.…

It has potential, but don't expect anything useful too soon The world’s smallest transistor can be controlled by a single atom, according to a scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.…

Tsinghua University blamed for espionage attack An attack on US government facilities in Alaska has been traced back to China's Tsinghua University and a larger hacking effort.…

Social media shifts APIs, starts charging for some features Is Twitter broken? That's what many are asking today as their favorite apps for the social media service suddenly appeared to stop working.…

TCP slower but not by much and enables Ethernet use Analysis Pavilion Data says NVMe over Fabrics using TCP adds less than 100µs latency to RDMA RoCE and is usable at data centre scale.…

Chinese biz exploits PC upgrade cycle... for the moment Windows 10 PC refreshes in business land helped Lenovo report double digit sales growth for the first quarter of its fiscal 2019 earnings - the Chinese giant made hay while the sun shone.…

EMC, HP rationalising, while IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Oracle just defending installed base All flash arrays made up just 14 per cent of NetApp's installed base, up from 10 per cent last year, but the firm expects NAND price declines to push that number up higher.…

Sleeker, slimmer and now a bit greyer Hot on the heels of Slackware's quarter century comes the 25th anniversary of the announcement that Debian was incoming.…

Big Red awarded $30m legal fees as judge slams support biz's 'significant litigation misconduct' Oracle has won a permanent injunction against Rimini Street, banning it from controversial support practices that have been ruled a violation of copyright laws.…

Move reflects desire to develop in the open, says company not developing in the open Chip designer Arm for the first time in recent memory has presented a roadmap, sparsely detailed through it may be, covering future CPU plans for 5G always-on connected mobile and laptop devices.…

Locks out 3rd party DRaaS folk with VM-centric cloud stuff Datrium has introduced disaster-recovery-as-a-service to its existing on-premises DVX system.…

Even more impressively, thousands are passing it with good grades, too It’s that day again, the day when picture editors across the British news media drop everything to find fresh photos of teenagers suspended in mid-air. Yes, it’s A-level results day – and thousands more pupils are passing exams in computing rather than old school ICT.…

You will move to Intune on Azure. You have one year to comply Microsoft has warned customers managing mobile devices using hybrid MDM that the clock is now ticking for the service and gently reminded them to consider migrating to Intune on Azure?…

Tech collab could see Excelero support WD’s OpenFlex and Kingfish NVMe over Fabrics flash array supplier Excelero has received a strategic investment from Western Digital's capital-investment arm, taking total funding to $35m.…

Always believe in Go ... Google's "Poundland" Edition of Android – Go – has received an update to 9.0 Pie.…

First big test for GDPR looms Special Report Privacy campaigners say Google's obsessive collection of location markers violates Europe's privacy laws - potentially exposing the Californian giant to punitive fines.…

Perhaps TSB's total s*itshow wasn't in vain The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is enforcing new rules that obligate banks to publicly reveal the number and frequency of online outages – including whether these were caused by malicious actors.…

From data to delivery, and all points between Events We’ve got four workshops running on October 17, covering different technologies and approaches to getting machine learning to work for your organisation. And places for all of them are filling fast.…

Roll your sleeves up, standards peeps Comment European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has lost patience with phone makers insisting on using different connector designs for charging, and promised an impact study on the consumer pain that Lightning and USB causes.…

Hey...kids...yes order 10 of those and give me your parent's credit card details Children are more likely than adults to buckle under peer pressure from robots, according to a study published in Science on Wednesday.…

Web Security says there's nothing nefarious to its URL collection A security plug-in for the Firefox browser is under fire after users discovered it was collecting and uploading their online activity.…

10 users controlling the bulk of cryptocoin generator funds Mining internet currency on websites with Coinhive scripts is a lucrative endeavor, but only for a handful of people.…

But odd results and email impersonation raise eyebrows A pair of physicists have claimed to reach the holy grail in physics: room temperature superconductivity.…

Customer interest in hybrid cloud buoys networking biz Switch and comms kit biz Cisco reported $12.8bn revenue for its fiscal 2018 fourth quarter, a six per cent increase that is a bit more than than analysts expected.…

Shifting session identifiers into HTTP works, but Facebook and others won't be happy A key member of the Google Chrome security team has proposed the death of cookies to be replaced with secure HTTP tokens.…

Report points finger at North Korea for cyber-heist Cosmos Bank in India says that hackers made off with $13.4m in stolen funds over the weekend.…

Ancient issue causing new ones Security gaps have been identified in widely used implementations of the IPsec protocol, which is used in the set up of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).…

Michael Terpin not happy about funds-draining SIM swap fraud A bitcoin investor is suing AT&T for $240m after it allegedly ported his phone number to a hacker, allowing the criminal to steal $24m in cryptocurrency.…

In-house software to slash support costs by £200k a year, claims Met Police London police are scaling up their use of mobile fingerprint scanners, with 600 shiny new devices due to be doled out by early 2019.…

A year on, Alexa can look at your emails and Cortana can order groceries. World shrugs Updated It has taken the best part of a year, but from today Microsoft fans can talk to Cortana through the vaguely creepy ears of Amazon’s Echo devices and vice versa.…

Is it even worth counting tablet sales? Do they even exist? Sales of tablets fell 10 per cent in Western Europe during calendar Q2 to a mere 6.3m units, according to abacus stroker IDC…

F#, TypeScript 3.0 and more go from preview to release with 15.8 Microsoft has sent version 15.8 of Visual Studio out in the big wide world, and it looks to be a useful upgrade for those using Redmond’s development tools.…

Much tinkering across software board plus expanded capacity flash cards Not to be outdone by any storage niche players, IBM has emitted a veritable catalogue of storage software updates, plus one on the storage hardware front – a new all-flash array.…