The Register

Got electrodes in your head? Invest in a surge protector A report published in the Journal of Neurosurgery documented the alarming experience of a patient who got a little too close for comfort to a lightning storm while undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS).…

Kilopower experiment looks good for 10 kilowatts on the Moon, Mars or beyond NASA has announced successful tests of a small fission reactor capable of producing about 10 kilowatts of power, and hopes the technology will prove suitable for use on the Moon or Mars.…

The world needs fewer men like Amazon's CEO Comment Poor, poor Jeff Bezos.…

‘Dynamic Security Feature’ ruled Dodgy Sales FUD by Australian regulator HP Inc’s Australian tentacle will compensate Australian printer buyers for not disclosing that its products would not accept third-party ink supplies.…

Because devices on massive networks need services, says Linux Foundation orchestration guru Arpit Joshipura Over the next couple of quarters, a team of developers will start fleshing out the roadmap of a Linux Foundation effort A&T ignited in February, when the telco giant donated code to the Akraino project.…

'Hang on, we're selling what? In our stores? To our people? America's Department of Defense has banned all Huawei and ZTE devices from sale in all Defense Exchanges - the shops offered to military personnel and veterans.…

Private company conducting search says ocean survey looks great, just doesn’t show plane The probably-final attempt at finding MH370, the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 missing since March 2014, has commenced.…

Cisco's Prime and Secure Access Control also have critical-rated bugs to squash It's time for Cisco's Midweek Misery, netadmins, with four critical vulns to patch and a slew of others to look over if you have time.…

Life is not like the movies - you can’t plug in a tape and expect to see data ANALYSIS “Australia's Largest Bank Lost The Personal Financial Histories Of 12 Million Customers” screams the headline at Buzzfeed. It’s a great story: the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) can’t say with 100 per cent certainty that two tapes containing millions of unencrypted customer records were securely destroyed. The Bank told the relevant authorities about the leak in 2016, and they were okay for it to remain secret.…

Roll-up! Roll-up! You've never seen anything like this! Pay up front while you still can! You've played the PlayStation, you've crossed paths with the Xbox but now prepare yourselves for the world's greatest ever games console!…

Despite transparency push, the social network still scorns ad data aggregators Analysis Facebook says it intends to make its advertising more transparent, but its efforts to prevent other companies from doing as much is keeping its ad ecosystem opaque.…

Security tool can be gamed to let any old riffraff into data A security vulnerability in Oracle Access Manager leaves the network authentication tool leaning more toward "access" than "manager."…

Security tool can be gamed to let any old riffraff into data A security vulnerability in Oracle Access Manager leaves the network authentication tool leaning more toward "access" than "manager."…

The second most abundant element has proven surprisingly hard to detect Astronomers have detected helium floating around in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.…

New project to compare the dizzying number of AI chips and models available A new competition to set benchmarks to test the numerous hardware and software platforms used in AI has been backed by leading technology companies and universities.…

Shock shutdown – THE TRUTH The company formerly known as Cambridge Analytica shocked the media today when it announced an immediate shutdown and liquidation of its business.…

THE TRUTH: it's more like a rebrand for shady data dealer The company formerly known as Cambridge Analytica shocked the media Wednesday when it announced an immediate shutdown and liquidation of its business.…

'Bicoastal effort' adds to the mess that is internet rules New York has introduced net neutrality legislation copied directly from California in an effort to bypass a federal effort to kill America's net neutrality.…

Stolen PC locator plays double agent, say researchers LoJack for Laptops, a software tool designed to rat on computer thieves, appears to be serving a double purpose – by seemingly working with a Russian state-sponsored hacking team.…

Computer recovery code plays double agent on users LoJack software, designed to rat on computer thieves, appears to be serving a double purpose by also working with a Russian state-sponsored hacking team.…

Michael Kail's House of Cards tumbles, now Orange is his New Black, potentially A former vice-president at Netflix has been indicted for allegedly taking illegal kickbacks while making multimillion-dollar deals with the streaming giant's tech providers.…

Blah, blah, speed up neural networks, something, blah blah F8 Facebook announced Pytorch 1.0, an updated version of the popular AI framework Pytorch, that aims to make it easier for developers to use neural network systems in production.…

Bits of doomed Resource Prospector may survive on commercial moon buggies NASA has hinted that its Lunar Resource Prospector rover won’t be going to the Moon anytime soon. Not in one piece at any rate.…

UK stomps off in a sulk, mumbling something about its own satellite constellation Britain has warned it would attempt to stop the EU using its encryption tech on the Galileo project while launching its own satellites.…

Lost Weekend is over and done with Nokia has dispensed with fitness gear maker Withings, less than two years after acquiring it as part of a bold new strategic move into digital health.…

Let's nerd out with Greg Scherer again Interview OK, you think Fibre Channel-based NVMe fabric access is a good idea. How do you implement it? Where is the FC-NVMe cookbook?…

Judge: We had a 21-day hearing, why didn't you voice concerns about GDPR then? The Irish High Court has slapped down Facebook's bid to further delay the battle over the legality of its transatlantic data transfers in a critical judgment that questions the firm's previous conduct in court.…

Putin the patch, critical infrastructure firms warned Infosec researchers at Tenable Security have unearthed a remote code execution flaw in critical infrastructure software made by energy management multinational Schneider Electric.…

Getting fat off the NAND's just a flash in the pan... Seagate's top line number bounced and profits took off in its third quarter as it made the most of increased nearline disk drive demand.…

Chipzilla is doing a little aviating of its own, we see Intel has wheeled out an asset management system along with flight planning software at a US drone conference.…

Sneaky processors look to keep lid on sensitive IoT data Arm has released a new processor core design for Cortex-M-powered system-on-chips that will try to stop physical tampering and side-channel attacks by hackers.…

r/K selection theory Opinion There is a concept in biology known as r/K selection theory. An r-strategist produces lots of offspring, but is only able to invest a small amount in rearing each offspring.…

Swims hard in the direction of Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, etc Now that Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for overseeing software containers, it's all but obligatory for cloud platform vendors to offer the software as a managed service.…

Up to 270 women may have died of cancer as a result, admits Brit health minister Up to 270 women in the UK could have died of cancer due to a "computer algorithm failure" dating back to 2009 under the NHS' breast screening programme - British health secretary Jeremy Hunt said today.…

It's Notch what you're thinking For experienced Apple watchers, the arrival of John Gruber on the scene indicates Apple may have a problem. Perhaps a fire needs to be put out. Now where might that fire be?…

Industry calls on DoD to publish procurement report on single vendor award The Pentagon's decision to hand a multibillion-dollar cloud contract to one vendor has come under renewed scrutiny, after an industry group urged Congress to make public the department's reports on the proposals.…

Word on the street: it's getting far less than $5 beeellion it paid Cisco has kicked its video software business back to Permira, the owner of iconic Brit boot brand Dr Martens, having originally bought it off the private equity fund in 2012 for $5bn (£3.6bn).…

Calls on Microsoft to play nice with repairers DIY repair outfit iFixit has weighed in on the fate of PC reseller Eric Lundgren, who is due to spend up to 15 months in the clink following copyright infringement charges.…

Just 12 days to go .... The doors open at Continuous Lifecycle London in two weeks, but there's still time to secure a front row seat to hear from some of the finest brains in DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Serverless and Containers.…

US can't operate in 'splendid isolation' – Giovanni Buttarelli The US’s days of "splendid isolation" when it comes to privacy regulations are numbered, Europe’s top data protection watchdog has warned.…

'Precession' to make STT-MRAM better SRAM, DRAM, NAND and NOR replacement California-based Spin Transfer Technologies has claimed recent results of its "precessional spin current technology" – three years in the making – will make it easier to write data to spin transfer torque magnetic memory (STT-MRAM) and for that data to be retained more than 10,000 times longer.…

Pink hotpants cocktail, though? Oh, go on then New official drinking statistics confirm that millennials are more sober than their lush parents – and drink less than any other age group.…

Chillax, partners, and buyers beware - this modest effort is no Amazon or NewEgg Cisco’s quietly kicked off the trial of direct online sales that The Register revealed in March 2018.…

'SiliVaccine' uses ancient, stolen, Trend Micro AV engine and bad home-brew crypto North Korea’s very own antivirus software has been revealed as based on a 10-year-old application made by Trend Micro, but with added nasties.…

$199 Oculus Go is affordable and looks OK, but not the unreal deal First look Facebook today announced the availability of the Oculus Go, a US$199 virtual reality headset it revealed in October 2017. I had the chance to play around with the headset for a few minutes in the press room at the company's F8 conference on Tuesday, to get a sense of the device ahead of a proper assessment.…

Because they might save operational costs and improve security. If you do it right Don’t buy either desktop virtualization or desktop-as-a-service solely to save cash. Don’t assume that because server virtualization went well the same will happen for desktops. And don’t assume that the cloudy desktops are cheaper and easier than on-premises virtual PCs.…

Fujifilm deal in doubt as Carl Icahn and pals win big Activist investor Carl Icahn and his partner in litigation Darwin Deason have reached a settlement with Xerox in a proxy war and litigation arising out of the January Fujifilm-Xerox transaction.…

New accounting rules, slow service provider sales blamed for thinning profit Juniper turned in a loss for the first quarter of financial year 2018, but at least it performed ahead of its previous guidance for the quarter – and along with the usual explanations (customers replacing hardware with software, US service providers not spending, project delays and so on), a change of accounting standards was blamed for much of the result.…

Moxie Marlinspike bemoans Bezos' bit barns joining Google in Domain Fronting ban Amazon has followed Google's example by lowering the boom on a practice called “domain fronting” that organisations like Signal use to get around government censorship.…

Activist investor forces search for new chief exec, restructuring Activist investor Elliott Management has this week claimed the scalp of Commvault CEO Bob Hammer, as the storage biz accedes to its demands in the wake of disappointing financial results.…