The Register

Plenty of laser research already going on – but there's more than one way to melt a drone The EU is planning to build a laser cannon with double the power of Britain's under-construction Dragonfire zapper, according to reports – but the general state of the tech doesn't automatically mean Europe will be trying to snaffle Brit raygun smarts.…

What a time to be alive Wireless charging is becoming an ever more popular way to juice up consumer gadgets, but an international team of scientists may have figured out how to scrap the mat too.…

Still firmly in Big Mike's clutches despite IPO Pivotal has set its initial public offering share price at $15, with hopes of raising $555m and an anticipated $14-$16 price band. The shares are expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange from today.…

Ask for clear budgets, better training and yup, public engagement The state of the NHS's digital infrastructure and a lack of clear budgets risk holding back the UK’s efforts in genomic medicine and research, MPs have said.…

UK mobe network ups charges for sunshine selfie-takers, just in time for their hols Mobile operator Three UK is celebrating the approach of British summer by, er, hiking its charges for some of its services.…

At least 100 out at cloud data wrangling biz, sources claim Troubled private-equity-owned Veritas started making layoffs in the UK yesterday as its parent continues to implement cost-cutting measures.…

Just 23k requests in first half of 2017, says Windows giant Government requests for people's data from Microsoft fell to the all-time low of 23,000 in the last half of 2017, as Redmond's rate of rejecting the requests rose to a high of 17 per cent.…

Comparison shopping websites won't use Chocolate Factory fix Calls are mounting for the European Commission to issue a non-compliance notice against Google over attempts to address complaints about its market dominance.…

And garners industry attention Buoyed by the usual high quality feedback from readers, the office automated beer delivery service has taken a step towards reality with a suitable moniker.…

Bros gig, smellies, branded socks... Here are our tales. Tell us yours Some tickets to a Bros reunion gig in return for a favourable article? £1,500 to do a straight rewrite of a press release? Or some "free" man perfume from Kaspersky called Eau d'Eugene. Just what would you accept as a gift bribe to do someone's corporate bidding?…

Grumble grumble where's me suet pudding in Bovril etc Something for the Weekend, Sir? Blank faces abound. No, not all are blank: some are horrified, revolted even. What did I say?…

Secretive company talks up the need for open community Apple has open-sourced FoundationDB, a distributed ACID-compliant NoSQL datastore, three years after acquiring the company that developed the technology.…

When the dotcom bubble burst, the surviving techies learned the true meaning of just-in-time training ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday column in which readers share tales of tricky tech support tasks.…

We’ve done everything you asked - even implemented SAP - pleads Chinese vendor ZTE has hit back at the United States’ newly-imposed ban on American companies selling to the Chinese networking vendor.…

Oh no, wait, that is the news. Except the cheap part Pic Water that once flowed across the surface of Mars caused the formation of mud cracks that were spotted by NASA's Curiosity rover, scientists have confirmed.…

And a plan to have users of Sun hardware upgrade if they want Solaris 11.4 and proper patches Oracle will deliver “update releases” of Solaris every northern Summer, under a new plan it revealed this week along with news of the Solaris 11.4 beta and a hurry-along for users of old Sun hardware.…

Let’s get up to date on the crazy world of reverse mergers The “what will Dell do to/with/for/about VMware” rumour mill has started spinning again.…

Chip designer pushes hundreds out the door in cost-cutting drive Qualcomm says it is planning to eliminate more than 1,200 positions in an attempt to cut overhead costs.…

Java fixes lobbed out, Spectre Solaris patches issued Oracle this week emitted its April security update, addressing a total of 254 security vulnerabilities across dozens of products.…

Cloud tech tweaks end anti-censorship workaround Google has made technical changes to its cloud infrastructure that have caused collateral damage to an anti-censorship technique called domain fronting.…

.UK registry not entirely sure what all the fuss is about The operator of the .uk domain-name registry has outlined the changes it plans to make to its Whois domain registration system to bring it in line with incoming European privacy legislation.…

Closer to human beings than previously thought, clearly A new study reveals that male fruit flies enjoy the sensation of ejaculation, and are more likely to turn to alcohol when sexually frustrated. Sound familiar?…

Social media giant continues its loving embrace of GDPR privacy rules Facebook is quietly changing its terms of service to shift 1.5 billion users away from Europe to the US while continuing to claim it wants to offer greater privacy protections.…

Prosecutors ask judge to give Baratov 94 months for stealing accounts on behalf of FSB The Canadian hacker who helped Russian agents by breaking into more than 11,000 Yahoo email accounts could spend the next eight years behind bars, if American prosecutors get their way.…

Prosecutors ask judge to give Baratov 94 months for stealing accounts on behalf of FSB The Canadian hacker who helped Russian agents by breaking into more than 11,000 Yahoo email accounts could spend the next eight years behind bars, if American prosecutors get their way.…

I'm fsck-ed off it took this long, rages affected Reg reader Some of the 15 million Britons affected by the Equifax mega-hack are only now receiving letters notifying them that they were affected by the breach, eight months after the event.…

You can fake diagnoses with adversarial examples Medical AI systems are particularly vulnerable to attacks and have been overlooked in security research, a new study suggests.…

Nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and Auntie's Capita deals Capita's fortunes of late may be in general decline but the UK's much loved IT outsourcing biz can always rely on the British Broadcasting Corporation – propped up by license fee payers – to dish out cheques.…

Poorly configured cloud buckets strike again – this time, Localbox fingered US social network data aggregator LocalBlox has been caught leaving its AWS bucket of 48 million records – harvested in part from public Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles – available to be viewed by anyone who stopped by.…

NASA: Been there, done that While waiting for TESS to get off the launchpad on Monday, chief exec Elon Musk joked on Twitter about how SpaceX might set about recovering the second stage of the booster.…

Court hears Catherine Lesjak recall vicious infighting over doomed $11bn buyout Hewlett Packard's chief beancounter, Catherine Lesjak, was at "war" with former CEO Leo Apotheker, who tried to fire her immediately before he himself was defenestrated, a US court has heard.…

Consultation next month following plan to shift Brits over to VoIP BT is forging ahead with plans to shut its traditional telephone network in Britain, with the intention of shifting all customers over to IP telephony services by 2025.…

CTO Scott Gnau on open source, partnerships and simplifying Hadoop Hortonworks – once known simply as a Hadoop-flinger – is these days pushing itself as a modern data architecture company.…

Booster hurls probe, has nice sit-down on boat in the Atlantic NASA’s TESS spacecraft is in orbit following a successful launch from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40.…

Spark off questions from burny laptop, melty server and hot data centre havers Californian scientists have come up with a way of converting waste heat from electronics back into electricity with improved efficiency, according to a study in Nature Materials.…

High Court judge put boot into ad tech firm Comment Google's efforts to claim that it should be exempt from EU data protection laws because its search engine is "journalistic" really did not impress the judge in the Right To Be Forgotten trial.…

'Shatterproof', Mod-tastic, speedier stock Android – there's lots to like Released last autumn, and with this year’s range hoving into view, Motorola’s Z2 Force isn’t the newest kid on the block. But it still remains the only “shatterproof” phone on the market, and it has proved to be a great base from which to evaluate the latest Motorola Mods, which you’ll see in our forthcoming Mods roundup.…

Home Office admits national and local databases don't talk to each other, so everything is manual The UK government has admitted it can only delete custody images from its massive database through a complex manual process, and that it would cost too much to weed out all the images of innocent people by hand.…

And Huawei's given carriers a 14G network (it does 2G to 5G and we did the sums) Roundup Cisco leads the networking roundup this week, with news that there's one fewer way to avoid its WebEx brand: as part of a product reorganisation, what was Cisco Spark is to become WebEx Teams.…

Oi! Robots! Take this human job. PLEEEAASE take this job Singaporean scientists have asked the question “Can robots assemble an IKEA chair?” and come back with enough of a “Yes” that The Register feels it time to call for robots to take this job away from humans. Pleeeease, robots. Take this job away from us!…

Can you build an AI/ML FPGA? And could you tell your Mum you work for Zuck? Poll Facebook’s hinted it will join the ranks of hyperscalers that roll their own silicon, with a job ad for an “ASIC & FPGA Design Engineer”.…

First word on how card security for containers, VDI, SDN and web apps The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has issued a big update to its guidance on using payment cards with cloud computing services.…

Is it worth competing with SpaceX prices? Russia has dropped a broad hint that it might leave the space launch business to private operators.…

And AWS is closing in on $20bn a year, says nine-page letter to investor we read to spare you the new age derp Amazon has announced the yield from its money mine for the full year 2017: on full-year sales of US$178 billion, it generated an operating income of $4 billion and net income of $3 billion.…

Your security's only as good as your partners'. And some Facebook partners are rotten A security researcher has claimed it's possible to extract user information from Facebook's Login service, the tool that lets you sign into third-party sites with a Facebook ID.…

auDA bins plans for direct .au sales to focus on governance and not pissing off members The administrator of Australia’s top level .au domain, auDA, has been told to reform or be forcibly stripped of its role.…

Cisco issues critical patch to stop in-meeting attacks Cisco has patched a serious vulnerability in its WebEx software that lets an attacker remotely execute code on target machines via poisoned Flash files.…

Probe to see if Musk was up to something quite atrocious Updated California's workplace safety monitor is investigating Tesla over the conditions at its main assembly plant.…

Now for the last time, will you all please shift to IPv6?! You may have heard this one before, but we have now really run out of public IPv4 address blocks.…

Ordinary folk may be confused by title, takedown demand suggests Oracle, claims developer Zhongmin Steven Guo, has demanded that Apple remove an app he created because it contains the trademarked term "JavaScript."…