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'Politicians are reluctant to disrupt the enormous wealth creation machine technology has turned out to be' RSA Politicians are, by and large, clueless about technology, and it's going to be up to engineers and other techies to rectify that, even if it means turning down big pay packets for a while.…

Because there's nothing that can be done and we have no moral compass Comment An Australian who murdered dozens in New Zealand on Friday livestreamed the deaths on Facebook, spinning a spotlight onto the abject failure of social media to control harmful content.…

'We need guardrails to ensure this technology is implemented responsibly' A pair of US Senators from across the aisle on Thursday introduced a bill to limit how facial recognition technology can be used.…

Commissioners still doing their best to ignore bounty hunter stalking scandal Analysis America's comms regulator has finally pinky-promised to at least consider people's privacy when it looks into how cellphone location data can be made more accurate.…

From O'Dork to O'Rourke: Dem golden boy's past as BBS-dwelling l33t teen revealed Newly minted US presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke says he was a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the most legendary hacking groups in cyber-history.…

Welcome to El Reg: Come for the video game references, stay for the open-source networking news US networking specialist Juniper is setting up its switches to support SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) – an open-source toolkit developed by Microsoft to run the plumbing of its Azure cloud platform.…

CA performing 'extremely well' under new management, says new management. As for wireless semiconductors... CA Technologies made an indelible mark on new parent Broadcom's latest set of quarterly financials – well, it did cost $19bn to buy – as software and not semiconductors accounted for all of the growth.…

Ways not to win in court, no.94: 'threatening dire consequences to national business' if you lose A High Court judge has blasted the Post Office in a long-running case over whether its Horizon IT system was to blame for alleged fraud by subpostmasters.…

Distro designed for Windows Subsystem for Linux gains a snappier moniker as 1.2 looms The team at Whitewater Foundry have waved the rebranding wand at WLinux. Behold – Pengwin.…

Pricey software suite with no real rivals thinks growth will slow Adobe, maker of pricey software for artsy types, is still growing like a weed but last night joined a list of tech titans to forecast a slowdown.…

Revenue and profitability pain gets cost-saving beancounters to cut jobs Western Digital will cut loose more than 300 people as part of its $800m/year cost-saving initiative starting in May.…

Plus: Another mayor defecates on floor at swearing-in ceremony, leaves Democracy, eh? It's all fun and games until your elected mayor allegedly opens fire on the SWAT team come to arrest him, which is precisely what cops accused him of doing in the Floridian city of Port Richey last month. And now the acting mayor has been cuffed too.…

Less hiding behind 'national security' to hush up failures, please Britain's Cabinet Office (CO) hasn’t quite bungled the National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP) but it could certainly be doing things a lot better, the National Audit Office said today.…

Zipline, George and Bungle: It's a Rainbow* of open-sourcing at Redmond Microsoft used the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit to announce the open-sourcing of the company's cloudy compression technology, Project Zipline.…

Hague, Ovchinin, Koch arrived at their new home this morning It was second time lucky for NASA astronaut Nick Hague as he and fellow crew members Aleksey Ovchinin and Christina Koch arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) this morning.…

Comarch offers all-in-one infrastructure monitoring Promo Today's businesses are so heavily dependent on their IT infrastructure that the slightest disruption in service can incur damaging losses.…

Foldable support too Google has released the first official cut of 2019's Android to developers, including a secret "desktop mode" for external displays, and support for pholdables*. Q is the 10th major platform release of the software that dominates the smartphone market (Android has a market share north of 85 per cent**).…

Victor Frankenstein would be impressed Networking software specialist Big Switch has launched a Network Operating System (NOS), cobbled together from freely available open source components.…

That's the sound of the men, working on the blockchain gang The UK's Department of Fun has gone public with plans to get prisoners skilled up for a world of code upon release rather than a life of, er, crime.…

'New technology baffles pissed old hack' (© Private Eye) Something for the Weekend, Sir? I became old this week.…

'He was definitely invoiced' On Call Have you got that Friday feeling? Well if not, there's only one way to get it: reading this week's instalment of On Call, where readers share tech support triumphs and frustrations.…

Yet another legal brouhaha for Chinese giant, this time nothing to do with equipment bans Huawei Technologies USA, the Plano, Texas-based arm of the Chinese telecom giant, was sued in Missouri on Thursday over an alleged phone explosion.…

It may have an asteroid belt, worlds similar to Earth and Neptune – and only 470 light years away If, like us, you're dying to get off this ridiculous little rock, here's some hope* to cling onto.…

It's a match made in heaven for erm, glucunobacter and phosphogypsum Bacteria could help scientists mine rare-earth elements, a critical component in modern electronic devices, from the chemical waste produced from the process of manufacturing fertilizers.…

Federal Trade Commission will turn Fault-finder, Tinker, Customize this summer America's trade watchdog says it will soon mull over and potentially propose rules to protect folks' right to repair their phones, tablets, and PCs, among other things, without voiding warranties or breaking the things.…

Ellison insists Oracle Cloud is less expensive, more secure than AWS – which is why, er, so many people are flocking to it Oracle on Thursday reported revenues of $9.6bn for fiscal Q3 2019 – which is about what analysts anticipated and prompted the stock to bounce up and down indecisively in after-hours trading.…

Just a plan B, claims Chinese giant, in case we get cut off from Android, Windows Huawei is building its own proprietary operating system platform in case the United States tries to isolate the manufacturer by cutting off access to Windows, Android, and other American-built software ecosystems.…

Get ready for handhelds with notebook-beating RAM chips Samsung has unveiled a 12GB cellphone DRAM module it hopes will be part of next-generation smartphones.…

Is a single tweet enough when millions of people's communications are affected? Facebook has said a "server configuration change" was to blame for an 14-hour outage of its services, which took down the Facebook social media service, its Messenger and WhatsApp apps, Instagram, and Oculus.…

Plans to squeeze out enterprise data cloud in next two quarters Cloudera and former open-source database rival Hortonworks may have merged in a defensive manoeuvre but CEO Tom Reilly seems to have spied a bigger existential threat – AWS.…

Not on 5.1.1? You should be A newly revealed vuln in the open-source CMS WordPress allows an unauthenticated website attacker to remotely execute code – potentially letting naughty folk delete or edit blog posts.…

Euro space agencies approve air-breathing engine testing Britain's Reaction Engines has been given the greenlight to press ahead with an ambitious testing programme for its SABRE air-breathing rocket engine.…

The technology's not ready – but they won't wait If anyone knows the state of play in 5G, it's Regius Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director and founder at the Institute of Communication Systems and 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey, and the government's go-to man for mobile technology. But he warned today that the industry was being too hasty in proclaiming the revolution.…

Pint-sized drive in quart bottle Toshiba has pushed out its 2.5-inch XD5, a physically smaller gumstick format with a waspy 7mm thickness slotted into a larger case so that it can slip into standard drive bays.…

What do you think A is for, staffers? Oh yeah, no one asked you... Capita today did what Capita does best: confirmed yet another round of "cost competitiveness initiatives" to chop out even more people, cut real estate, and squeeze suppliers. Predictably, the stock exchange loved them for it.…

Make smarter decisions about IoT Promo More and more organisations are realising it can make sense to process data and make decisions using smart devices at the edge rather than in the cloud.…

Compromised government website slurps buttload of data about applicants A Pakistani government website was compromised with a keylogger and other malware that hoovered up a whole host of information about people checking on their passport application status.…

Pesky JavaScript harvester malware strikes again Sportswear brand FILA is the latest outfit to fall victim to card-stealing JavaScript of the kind that menaced British Airways and Ticketmaster last year.…

Four months to arrive at 31,415,926,535,897 digits Emma Haruka Iwao, a developer advocate at Google Cloud, has celebrated Pi Day (3/14) by setting a new Guinness World Record for calculations of the beautiful mathematical constant, reaching a number with more than 31.4 trillion (ha!) digits.…

Meanwhile, Skip-Ahead testers glimpse Notepad of the future Some excited Windows Insiders, breathlessly awaiting the first 19H2 build of the operating system, instead found themselves booted off the programme after installing the latest Fast Ring emission.…

Bridenstine reckons the agency should try sticking to its dates Fresh from a budget that has deferred the future of NASA's mega-rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency's own administrator has hinted that the present is looking iffy as well.…

Last chance savings on 3 days of DevOps, containers and more Events The early bird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle, our three day dive into DevOps, Containers, Serverless, and Continuous Delivery, closes tonight, so if you want to save £100s on conference and workshop places, act now.…

2019 just a transition year, says French watchdog European data protection agencies have issued fines totalling €56m for GDPR breaches since it was enforced last May, from more than 200,000 reported cases – but watchdogs have said they're just warming up.…

Quantum solace: Encryption to die another day Special report Quantum computing has been portrayed as a threat to current encryption schemes, but the ability of finicky vaporware to overthrow the current security regime looks like it's massively overstated.…

Music's violent subject matter has little effect on the listener In a shocking turn of events, boffins have used the power of science to determine that, generally speaking, death metal fans don't actually want to rip off your head and shit down your neck.…

Boffins baffled by Bennu: We're due to visit asteroid but it's whirling faster and faster Bennu, the asteroid targeted by NASA for its OSIRIS-Rex mission, is spinning at increasing rate and scientists aren’t quite sure why.…

You do know just dragging stuff to the delete folder doesn't wipe stuff, right? Apparently not About two-thirds of USB memory sticks bought secondhand in the US and UK have recoverable and sometimes sensitive data, and in one-fifth of the devices studied, the past owner could be identified.…

It's quicker and easier than solving maths equations at least Boffins bored of time-consuming mathematics are turning to machine-learning code to predict the mass of exoplanets that aren't yet fully formed.…

It is easy to make itsy-bitsy tech without spaffing glue all over the place Having previously flung scorn at the Apple AirPods, the iFixit team has turned its spudgers on Samsung's wireless earpieces.…

Here comes Chipzilla with a big bunch of security fixes for graphics drivers, server and workstation firmware, and more Hot on the heels of this month's security updates from Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, Intel has kicked out a batch of its own bug patches.…