The Register

Calls for vote of no confidence in Afrinic board Special report The body responsible for allocating internet network addresses across Africa has been enveloped in yet another scandal, resulting in calls for the entire board to step down.…

The story of Frugal Dan, Flashy Dave and a $20,000 car budget If you're male, and splash your cash on fast cars and shiny things, then those around you likely think you're more interested in a short-term fling than something more romantic, according to a new study.…

Atlas Elektronik's ARCIMS demo vessel taken on by Her Maj's finest The Royal Navy has acquired a search-and-destroy robot boat intended for destroying mines.…

Punters want reliable calls most Interview If you can't measure something, does it actually exist?…

Waves SIAM-nara to Leidos Exclusive The Ministry of Justice is abandoning its experiment of breaking up big IT contracts into a so-called "tower model" and will instead bring tech management back in-house, The Register can reveal.…

First night nerves for Elon’s revamped rocket SpaceX has opted to spend a few more days checking out its new Falcon 9 following a successful test fire of the rocket on 5 May, but its latest cargo ship enjoyed an uneventful return to Earth.…

A week in storage mov(i)es... be happy we didn't name-check Failure To Launch It has been an eventful week in storage with the introduction of a "hardware-defined storage" platform, a blast of helium, another Gone Gartner moment and more. So slap on those 3D glasses, get your popcorn ready – and enjoy our rapid-fire shorts and entertaining trailers.…

End user privacy controls? We'll get back to you on that Adobe Summit Business success today is about "data required to understand each person's context in every moment", with the intelligence to take the right action, said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in the opening keynote of the company's EMEA Summit in London.…

No beer will be left unbothered British hip-hopsters The Streets memorably sang "It was supposed to be so easy", and that was our expectation when we approached the task of getting LESTER to "see" and trundle towards an object.…

CLL18 workshops also cover Agile, Serverless, Continuous Delivery If you want a steer on Kubernetes and containers, we've got three cracking workshops at Continuous Lifecycle later this month.…

Consultation responses reveal deep concerns about data, privacy and independent providers The UK's smut overlord has been told it isn't up to the mammoth challenge it faces in regulating age checks for online porn, and that its guidelines do little to offer users much-needed guarantees on privacy.…

App updates must use iOS 11 SDK and support iPhone X from July 2018 onwards iOS developers have a busy two months ahead of them after Apple announced a July deadline to build with the iOS 11 SDK and support the Super Retina display of iPhone X.…

It's made 11,111 of its Aibo 2.0 robot leg-lifters and can’t satisfy demand Here’s one for the “Robots taking over low-skilled jobs” file: Sony says it can’t handle demand for its second-generation robot dog.…

Closing off researchers’ access to APIs in the name of ‘safety’ means we’ll never know how we’re being screwed

Arm-for-servers is a good idea that keeps going nowhere Analysis Servers powered by CPUs based on Arm Holdings IP sound like a good idea.…

New experiment will look for the tiny vibrations made by Weakly Interacting Massive Particles By the 2020s, boffins hope, a hockey-puck-shaped silicon and germanium crystal 2,000 metres below Canada will show a brief, tiny vibration, meaning a dark matter particle has collided with it.…

You silly English k-niggits will probably flock to see Spamalot the musical movie When legendary comedy troupe Monty Python staged “Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go” in 2014, its surviving members filmed themselves taking what they promised would be their final bows together.…

Viber said to be next target of stop-terrorists-talking effort Russia's telecom regulator Roskomnadzor has taken a more granular approach to its battle with Telegram: instead of deep-sixing IP addresses by the millions, it says it's blocked 50 VPN providers from landing traffic in the country.…

146 million people, 99 million addresses, 209,000 payment cards, 38,000 drivers' licenses and 3,200 passports Equifax has published yet more details on the personal records and sensitive information stolen by miscreants after they hacked its databases in 2017.…

Soon-to-be-staunched Linux network process folder bleeds info about smartmobe use The forthcoming Android P release will protect the operating system's network processes against snoops and nasties.…

32 cores, 64-bit, no Intel, of course Microsoft loves this thing Pic Broadcom's axed Arm server processor project today rose from the grave – as Cavium's 64-bit 32-core two-socket Armv8-A ThunderX2 chip.…

Without a shadow of a doubt WASP-96b has the clearest atmosphere yet Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet completely devoid of clouds, according to a paper published on Monday in Nature.…

Yes, you read that right Build SQL Server running on Linux, with embedded R and Python, is Microsoft's most successful server product ever, said JG "John" Chirapurath, general manager of Azure Data, in an interview with The Register at Build 2018.…

Yes, you read that right Build SQL Server running on Linux, with embedded R and Python, is Microsoft's most successful server product ever, said JG "John" Chirapurath, general manager of Azure Data, in an interview with The Register at Build 2018.…

‘A number of enterprises’ escalated mystery storage problem to HPE HQ Defects in HPE 3PAR storage area networks caused “a series of abnormal outages” that resulted in systems to track prisoners on release from incarceration in the Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) becoming unavailable.…

Police opt to end charade over document download row Cops in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, will not pursue charges against a 19-year-old fella who had dared to download a cache of public documents.…

New study shows the Sun will turn into a planetary nebula after all The Sun will shed a large chunk of its mass to turn into a planetary nebula, a gigantic globe of luminous gas, as it nears the end of its life cycle.…

Not what you'd expect in industrial kit University researchers have developed a new method for rooting out recycled memory chips in industrial control devices.…

Planned dev deal tweak lets programmers keep 95 per cent of revenue Build Microsoft says it will take less money from Windows developers selling apps in its store, making its marketplace significantly more appealing than competing app stores in certain cases – assuming revenue share rather than market size is the primary consideration.…

Flash be Nimble, Flash be quick HPE has condensed, upgraded, future-proofed and guaranteed Nimble storage, both its all-flash and hybrid product lines.…

Beginning of the end for Win-only .NET Framework? Build At its Build developer event under way in Seattle, Microsoft announced .NET Core 3.0, coming in 2019, with support for Windows desktop applications.…

Cryptocoin malware outfit takes aim at 'Drupalgeddon' bug A set of high-severity vulnerabilities in Drupal that were disclosed last month are now the target of widespread attacks by a malware campaign.…

At Redmond's 2018 dev conference, it's all Azure and AI Build At its Build 2018 developer conference in Seattle, Washington, on Monday, Microsoft showered attention on artificial intelligence, as it did last year, leaving Windows chatter for later.…

Compared to 151 million in 2016, perhaps due to dupes rather than spy boom The United States’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its annual Intelligence Community Transparency Report last Friday, revealing the extent of America’s domestic intelligence-gathering efforts.…

Next-gen TXT offers rich messaging services, should make it onto most 'Droids soon ANALYSIS A couple of weeks ago, the world learned that Google's desire to gain more than a toehold in the world's messaging market had spawned a new "Chat" app.…

Stock-jocks disappointed that 40 per cent growth won't last Arista has turned in just over 40 per cent growth for Q1 2018 over the same quarter last year, recording US$472.5 million revenue for the quarter.…

Where did that smoke come from? What does the switch marked 120/240 do? Who, me? Welcome to another edition of “Who, me?”, The Register’s confessional in which readers explain how they broke things.…

UK Information Commissioner orders firm's founder to cough up professor's dossier The UK Information Commissioner's Office has told Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Elections to comply with an academic's data request, or else.…

Rates Amazon a ‘miracle’, regrets not backing Google and feels AI is overrated Famed investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have strongly criticised cryptocurrencies and machine intelligence at the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company they serve as chair and vice-chair respectively.…

If Facebook knows you use the same password on Twitter, both can hassle you to change Two comp-sci boffins have proposed that websites cooperate to block password re-use, even though they predict the idea will generate "contempt” among many end users, .…

Probe prepared for sandstorms and more when it makes tricky parachute plunge VID NASA’s successfully launched Mars InSight, the probe it hopes will help us to understand the interior of the Red Planet and therefore a little more about how rocky planets form.…

Little good news to increase your trust in machines here, to be honest Roundup This week's AI roundup includes an alarming report from California's Department of Motor Vehicles about how shoddy autonomous cars still are, a Waymo self-driving car crash, and some news from Facebook's F8 conference and its new job posting.…

Schools hacked, voters DDoSed, Apple's Linux fix, IBM Java patch, and more Roundup May is already upon us, and as usual it has been a busy week for security news. Here's a summary of what didn't make it into El Reg this week, well, until now.…

Ploy to plant malware in NPM's JavaScript registry foiled NPM, the biz responsible for the Node Package Manager for JavaScript and Node.js, has caught a miscreant trying to tamper with web cookie modules on Wednesday and managed to exile the individual and associated code before significant harm was done.…

Pai accused of reverse Robin Hood for business buddies Special report This week, one year after the US government's General Accountability Office (GAO) formally recommended that it do so, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved $8bn it held in a private bank to the US Treasury.…

GPU giant rails against rumors of stiffing sellers Nvidia has cancelled a partner program after just two months – just as regulators started taking an interest in complaints of anti-competitiveness.…

Begun, the laser wars have, it is claimed The US military has formally complained to China after blinding lasers were fired at Uncle Sam's aircraft coming in to land at the American airbase in Djibouti.…

Life in plastic, it's fantastic Comment Apple enabled payments in macOS Sierra in 2016, and it failed to set the world on fire. Will Google's move to support its own payment system on desktop web browsers fare any better?…

Mountain View's Empire Strikes Back against election meddling Google is overhauling its political advertising system in an effort to crack down on shady election ads.…

May the force of furious loyalists force an end to this farce The long-simmering dislike for the keyboard on recent Apple MacBook Pro computers has reached peak pique: A fed-up MacBook Pro owner identifying himself as Matthew Taylor has created a Change.org petition asking Apple to recall every MacBook Pro released since late 2016.…