The Register

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.…

Both stats still pretty piss poor For the first time, the number of folk in the UK accessing speeds of 1Gbps is greater than those poor souls unable to get a meagre 10Mbps, according to an Ofcom report today.…

But it's public anyway so selling access is fine, cheeps network The Cambridge academic at the centre of the Facebook data-harvesting scandal also had access to Twitter data, the social network has confirmed.…

Blue Origin test flight reaches 107km apogee and lands safely Jeff Bezos-founded spaceflight firm Blue Origin set a company record yesterday by sending its capsule on a sub-orbital trajectory with an apogee of 351,000 feet (107km) before landing both booster and capsule safely in West Texas.…

Bye Amber Rudd. And hey, maybe it's time to talk about consent Comment Is there a lesson for politicians around the apparent destruction of disembarkation cards of citizens from Caribbean nations who arrived in the UK after the Second World War? Perhaps.…

'Necessary hashtags' Rudd replaced by local gov sec Amber Rudd threw in the towel late last night and resigned as Home Secretary over her mishandling of an immigration scandal.…

Eat it *shakes fist* Ah, the wide and deep and far-fetched wonders of storage – IBM researchers talking about chemically driven phase transformations, Backblaze looking at a Pelican, HPE setting up an Azure Stack and SQream going off to Thailand.…

Peer-to-peer patch distribution over the LAN, exile for email, S-mode and lots more fun Unless something goes very badly wrong, the April 2018 Update to Windows 10 lands today, April 30th, 2018, complete with a new way to handle updates called “Delivery Optimization”.…

That’s not a test machine? Well it was before I went on holidays Who, me? Welcome again to Who, me? The Register’s Monday column in which readers hang their heads in shame and admit to their past mistakes.…

McAfee spotted malware-machine on IP address used for the Sony Pictures hack A server hidden in a Thai university and allegedly used as part of a North Korean hacking operation has been seized by ThaiCERT.…

The data-slurpingest, ad-slingiest exec of them all says he’s on your side Google co-founder Sergey Brin has used his annual founder’s letter to raise the issue of ethics in AI.…

Security researcher says WebLogic fix can be bypassed, posts proof-of-concept Earlier this month, Oracle patched a critical vulnerability in its WebLogic server – but someone identifying himself as an Alibaba security researcher reckons Big Red botched the patch.…

Security researcher says WebLogic fix can be bypassed, posts proof-of-concept Earlier this month, Oracle patched a critical vulnerability in its WebLogic server – but someone identifying himself as an Alibaba security researcher reckons Big Red botched the patch.…

Get off your ASCII if you want seminal adventure game to stay alive on legacy platforms Roguelike ASCII adventure game NetHack has just received its second upgrade in 12 years.…

Unauthorised leak of non-proposal referred to the Feds. Wait, what? The Australian Federal Police (AFP) says it's investigating the leak of sensitive government documents outlining a plan the government says doesn't exist and won't be implemented.…

It's technically an acquisition, but the headline fit so perfectly we couldn't resist T-Mobile US will acquire rival Sprint for US$26.5 billion in stock, a transaction both mobile carriers hope will give them a lead in 5G.…

Technology Support Services has no global follow-the-sun support model, rates lack of one a ‘serious problem’ in Oz IBM’s Technology Support Services operation will “officially” end on-shore software support on June 30th in Australia and New Zealand, The Register has learned.…

Bill Morrow says what Australia's been thinking for about a decade On his way out the door, nbn™ CEO Bill Morrow has written that at least some of the problems plaguing the National Broadband Network (NBN) can be attributed to its use of copper wires as a connection medium.…

All we need now is a robo-news-reader (quick, bring back Ananova) Roundup Here's your roundup of machine-learning news from this week, beyond what we've already covered.…

Your weekend guide to computer security cockups Roundup Here's your summary of infosec news – from router holes to Windows crashes – beyond what we've already covered this week.…

Disks down overall and SSDs slide Western Digital shipped a whole load of spinning bits into enterprise and hyperscale data centres in its third fiscal 2018 quarter, although overall disk units sold dropped 15.5 per cent on the year.…

Isn't science wonderful? There was good news and bad news for interplanetary exploration today.…

It's a $460bn business with a free service… what did you think was going on? Facebook has confirmed what many of us have known for years: Cambridge Analytica was far from the only organization engaging in the wholesale hoarding of netizens' personal data via the social network.…

Lotus Notes man has a plan... and a patent Analysis Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, particularly if forgetfulness promises profit.…

Instead of booting out Brexit Britain, domain-name registry will be opened to everyone A plan to kill off 300,000 British-owned .eu web domains has itself been killed off by European bureaucrats in yet another baffling Brexit backtrack.…

Terminal. It's outta runway. We're winging it with these puns Apple is officially getting out of the home networking business.…

Not too dissimilar to lighting a firework indoors – and then legging it to the nearest exit Britain has finally signed up to Europe's unified patent court (UPC) – a long-planned simplification of the continent's patent system – but big questions still remain thanks to Brexit and a federal court challenge in Germany.…

Russia and China light blue touch-paper, stand well back Russia and China celebrated a pair of successful launches this week, with a Rockot booster placing Sentinel-3B into orbit while China's Long March 11 lobbed five imaging sats into space.…

Data breach cost biz $70m this quarter alone The Equifax mega-hack has cost the credit reporting agency well north of $200m to date, according to a financial filing for calendar Q1.…

Redmond kit has the bends Microsoft's work on "bendable or flexible" display technology is far more advanced than anyone realised. A new patent application from Redmond indicates it's inspired by a very familiar technology: the paperback book.…

Language tweak makes internet giants safer than ever, say rights groups Exclusive The European Union looks poised to strengthen large internet platforms' position against online liabilities, according to a leak of the latest copyright directive draft dated 23 April. The most recent publicly available draft (PDF) is dated 13 April.…

Releases two 32Gbit/s switches to boost AFA networking Cisco is releasing two auto-zoning 48 and 96-port Fibre Channel switches to speed up networking in data centres with all-flash arrays.…

Doesn't comply with EU rules, say judges, but you knew that The UK government's surveillance regime has been dealt another blow as the High Court in England today ruled the Snooper's Charter unlawful – and gave the government six months to fix it.…

It's really high profile, you know An exciting job advert has mysteriously appeared that is seeking a techie to head up infrastructure at TSB, just days after the bank's monumental and ongoing IT cockup began.…

Director Mark Collins on becoming a key challenger in full fibre Broadband minnow CityFibre's acquisition by Connect Infrastructure Bidco for a staggering £537m has positioned it centre stage to take on industry goliath BT/Openreach, company director Mark Collins has said.…

El Reg has a fiddle with new toys for the Psion-inspired PDA The plucky little PDA that could is getting some upgrades.…

While keeping things safe Sleuthing has revealed more details about Google's project to allow its locked-down Chrome OS to run Linux applications – and well-informed speculation on its architecture.…

What's new, Ubuntu? 18.04 has dropped and you may not like what you find Canonical has released Ubuntu 18.04, Bionic Beaver, as this one is nicknamed. The Beaver is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means it'll be supported until 2023.…

Just what are you measured on Ginni? Wall Street analysts says things gotta change IBM lost $28bn in revenues in the past six years but that made not one jot of difference the salary and bonuses the top execs got paid. The message from Wall Street? Ever-shrinking sales are not sustainable.…

Boardroom coup at where's-my-console biz Retro Computers Ltd A majority of shareholders in ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd – including Sir Clive Sinclair's corporate presence – are calling a shareholders' meeting to replace its current directors.…

Ten minutes of your life could be mine if you read this slooooowwwly Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am a time-waster. And I hate people who waste my time.…

Zuck's CTO adds to PR apologies in Parliament Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer was not British MPs' first choice of witness, but they certainly made the most of his appearance in Parliament, grilling him on why his firm is a "morality free zone".…

Dum dum dum dede dum dum, under pressure A team of physicists have attempted to recreate the internal conditions of a ‘super-Earth’ planet in a lab, by shooting laser beams at iron samples.…

How do we say this nicely? You need help Special report On March 26 – two months before new privacy protections come into effect in Europe – Goran Marby, CEO of DNS overlord ICANN, sent a letter [PDF] to each of Europe's 28 data protection authorities (DPAs) asking them to hold off punishing it over Whois.…

Nobody told me it needed electricity, honest ON-CALL Why look at that! The end of the working week is upon us, which means it’s time to dip into the mailbag to bring you another instalment of On-Call, The Register’s reader-contributed tales of tech support trauma.…

IXPs mind their MANRS, plus as much multicloud as you can handle It's roundup time again, with ISOC working to protect the routing infrastructure, and announcements from Big Switch, F5, and Juniper.…