The Register

We'll slice and dice you, for your own good, obviously. Promise +COMMENT The Australian government has published its formal response to proposals to turn its citizens into Facebook-like data points, promising AU$65 million to spread the Big Data love.…

Tim Cook: "I don't buy the view that the market's saturated." Apple reported healthy revenues, beating analyst estimates for its fiscal second quarter despite decreasing demand and production of its iPhone X smartphone.…

But minister quite likes the idea if it can find terrorists, kid vid horrors, has 'safeguards' On the weekend, Australian government figures denied a plan to give the country's signal-intelligence spooks power to spy on Australian citizens, but yesterday, Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton denied and endorsed the suggestion.…

Chocolate Factory's map service cuts commute times, URL lengths Scam sites have been abusing a little-known feature on Google Maps to redirect users to dodgy websites.…

Now it's a little more tricky to claim a worker isn't a staffer The business models of Uber, Lyft, Instacart, TaskRabbit, GrubHub and numerous other "gig economy" companies may need an overhaul following a decision by the California Supreme Court to redefine when someone is a contractor or an employee.…

Imagine the frustration of playing a game where the difficulty can constantly change AI researchers do love their games and two papers have shown that they can use general adversarial networks (GANs) to make old favorites a lot more interesting.…

Brit politicians up stakes after Facebook CEO snub UK lawmakers have threatened to have Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dragged kicking and screaming to Parliament if he doesn't attend a hearing about the social media giant's dodgy practices in the next month.…

We have all been trolled F8 Facebook on Tuesday kicked off its F8 developer conference in San Jose, California, only one month after dialing back the data available to developers and after nixing rumored plans to debut a smart speaker housing an AI assistant.…

Cable giant bribes cord-cutters to come back with speed hike Comcast will only bump some customers up to its fastest broadband connectivity if they subscribe to its cable television service.…

CloudHealth punts metadata sniffing stuff Analysis There are two kinds of technology: the sexy new stuff that creates a new product category and the ho-hum kind for beancounters to help manage things better.…

Union cries of mismanagement after £1.8bn tech cockup Plans by the Royal Bank of Scotland to shutter 162 branches and slash 800 jobs were today pulled apart by union Unite, which accused the bank of "shambolically poor management" after claiming it spent £1.8bn on a failed IT project.…

XtremIO, servers and HCI all thrown some extra grunt too This year's Dell Technologies World, held this week in Las Vegas, has laid boosted VMAX, XtremIO, and HCI offerings at the feet of the EMC faithful, punted two AI-focused, accelerated servers, and prepared its PowerEdge server hordes for composability.…

Bullish Bernstein bull Sacconaghi Jr eats his words The once-bullish Wall Street analyst who predicted a "supercycle" of renewed demand for the tenth anniversary iPhone admits Apple is in a funk.…

Cambridge boffins claim to have hit upon right production formula Paragraf, a Cambridge-based outfit claiming to have achieved the first commercial-scale graphene production technique, scored what would seem a relatively paltry £2.9m in seed funding today.…

Virtzilla's virtual cloud networking push is on and Switchzilla is in its sights Who do you trust to take you into the promised land of software-defined networking: a hardware company disaggregating its products as fast as it dares, or a software company trying to build a vast platform spanning any data centre, anywhere?…

GDP-argh! Trade groups say ad biz must clarify data use, take share of liability Publishers have slammed Google's updated ad policies, accusing it of passing the buck – and the liability for multimillion-pound fines – onto them, while offering insufficient detail on its plans for user data.…

You know those Ts&Cs you used to offer on your website? Yes that one. Customers of 123-Reg hit by the hosting business's recent web deletion woes are being asked to step forward and make a claim against the outfit by a legal tech ambulance chaser startup.…

Also wants journos to do gov info ops, but let's focus on sensible idea Defence secretary Gavin Williamson has called for "people with amazing cyber and IT skills" to join the Armed Forces, as Britain's National Security Adviser confirmed to Parliament today that Russia is the UK's main "strategic threat".…

Aims for simpler, cheaper backup with fewer clicks Unitrends said it has targeted SMB admins with a VM Backup Essentials product that competes with Veeam's offerings.…

New rules needed for an increasingly dubious aspect of American law Interview Ted Frank has hit the equivalent of a legal jackpot: a hearing in front of the US Supreme Court.…

The winch that saves Christmas, boffins hope The second generation of a deciwatt gravity-powered lamp designed by the British industrial designers behind the Psion computer keyboard was launched today.…

Bristol boffin joins The Register to talk acoustic levitation Name a sci-fi classic that doesn’t feature some sort of levitation or tractor beam tech...not much, is there. But the stalwart of Star Trek, Star Wars and Back to the Future is moving beyond fiction and into the real world.…

Or dance on their graves, whatever flips your pancake The Windows 10 April Update has begun seeping out from beneath the Redmond bathroom door. As an antidote to the excitement of the new, let us take a moment to mourn the passing of the old.…

Too lazy to get a meal deal? Ask for drone deliveries Robo-coolbox firm Starship Technologies is now touting its services to campus-based universities, businesses and other places where people might be too lazy to walk to the shops for a bite to eat.…

The cause of all this misery? Storage vendors poach key analysts CIOs may - or may not - be reeling from Gartner's admission that the Data Center Backup and Recovery Magic Quadrant will be put on ice after a number of its big hitting analysts upped sticks to work for vendors.…

Analysing Galileo's Jovian moon results NASA scientists have made some new discoveries about Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede, thanks to a dedicated team, an elderly VAX machine and 20-year-old data from the long-defunct Galileo probe.…

Analysing Galileo's Jovian moon results NASA scientists have made some new discoveries about Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede, thanks to a dedicated team, an elderly VAX machine and 20-year-old data from the long-defunct Galileo probe.…

Yet Filton display shows it's among the world's best-loved aircraft Geek's Guide to Britain For a generation that never heard the sonic boom as Concorde broke the sound barrier overhead, the iconic white arrow-shaped aircraft dubbed "The Rocket" by British Airways is just a story our parents told.…

Are you having a giraffe? I've been working in tech for nearly 25 years and I'm currently involved in DevOps – a mashup of operations and development that works well with cloud infrastructure.…

Much-feared magnetic field 'flip' not happening anytime soon Earth's magnetic field flips from time to time, but boffins are now confident it won't happen again any time soon.…

Spontaneous offer made during chat about vaccines (which - phew! - Trump seemed to like) Bill Gates reportedly turned down an offer to serve as President Donald Trump's science advisor.…

Mozilla thinks you won’t mind analytical action on the client The Mozilla Foundation has revealed that links to sponsored posts have started to appear in its Firefox browser and pledged to deliver them without invading users' privacy.…

Victim of 'FacexWorm' malware clicked on random link from Facebook Messenger Security researchers have caught a Bitcoin-hijacking Chrome extension that only managed to grab one BitCoin transaction before being exposed.…

And don’t forget it’s a cloud you can re-configure on a well-informed whim Thorough research into the nuances of Azure and AWS infrastructure-as-a-service will help you to avoid plenty of pain, according to Elias Khnaser, a research director at Gartner for Technical Professionals.…

User privacy rows rage on as Koum leaves to play Ultimate Frisbee, collect rare Porsches WhatsApp founder Jan Koum has left the company amid Facebook's ongoing privacy rows.…

new doc mostly mentions carbon fibre, natural fibre … not so much FTTP The Australian Labor Party (ALP) may be on the way to dropping its policy commitment to a fibre-to-the-premises national broadband network (NBN).…

It won't pass but hey, why pass up a partisan punch-up? Democrats in the US Senate are pushing for a measure that would, if passed, kill off efforts by America's communications watchdog, the FCC, to scrap the nation's net neutrality protections.…

Thousands refusing to submit, review, or edit for Nature Machine Intelligence journal Thousands of machine-learning wizards have signed an open statement boycotting a new AI-focused academic journal, disapproving of the paper’s policy of closed-access.…

Brit exec Sushovan to cough up $8m after US jury convicts him The former chief financial officer of British software shop Autonomy was today found guilty of fraud – after helping convince HP to splash out $11bn for the upstart back in 2011.…

Stop us if you've heard this one: Samsung, Micron, and Hynix walk into a courtroom... Updated The three semiconductor giants responsible for nearly all of the world's DRAM supply are being sued for allegedly working together to keep memory chip prices high.…

Another try...catch attempt to end tedious mansplaining Code Q&A site Stack Overflow has admitted its community can be hostile to women, people of color, and marginalized groups, and has promised to do better.…

Legal eagles funneled class-action windfall to favorites A dodgy deal cooked up between Google and the lawyers that successfully sued it for violating user privacy is heading to the US Supreme Court.…

Lawyers under fire for giving class-action funds to favorites A dodgy deal cooked up between Google and the lawyers that successful sued it for violating user privacy is heading to the US Supreme Court.…

Michigan man caught rifling through county IT systems A Michigan fella will spend up to seven years and three months behind bars – for trying to hack government IT systems in the US state to get a friend out of jail.…

Let's slow down the wheels of justice some more, eh, Zuck? Facebook today appealed the Irish High Court’s decision to pass the web giant's legal battle with Max Schrems over privacy rights to the European Union’s top court.…

Probably won't get anywhere, but let's slow down the wheels of justice, eh chaps? Facebook has today appealed the Irish High Court’s decision to refer its long-running legal battle with Max Schrems to the European Union’s top court.…

Cash splashed from £150m cyber resilience pot The UK government's Department of Health and Social Care has inked a deal with Microsoft to upgrade all NHS machines to Windows 10 – in a supposed attempt to boost resilience following the WannaCry incident last year.…

New amendments aim to stop NHS data-sharing, scrap immigration exemption Data Protection Bill The UK government wants to grant the Information Commissioner power to demand that data controllers and processors hand over information in just 24 hours – instead of a week – and plan to make destruction of such information an offence.…

Multicloud Platform builds virtual data centres Analysis Cloud startup RStor has dropped out of stealth and received $45m of A-round cash, led by Cisco Ventures, to develop its Multicloud Platform compute service.…

French-born man says country took his 24-yr-old domain name An expat in the US is suing the French government and Verisign after the Fifth Republic seized the domain name France.com.…