The Register

Ignorance of the giant radio antennae atop the office building was bliss On-Call Everybody’s working for the weekend, the song goes, but here at On-Call, The Register works to bring you a weekly story of a fellow reader’s tech support trauma.…

And pops the sound barrier for good measure VIDEO Virgin Galactic’s space tourism operation conducted its first rocket-powered flight on Thursday, and appears to have recorded a roaring success.…

Uber, have my calendar. And would you at least think about paying for it? Gartner thinks the Facebook data panic will subside as people start to realise the value of their information.…

Only for research, promise. Which was when things went-pear shaped before You’d think recent events might have dulled Facebook’s rapacious lust for data. But now comes news, from CNBC, that The Social Network™ tried to acquire access to patients’ medical records.…

No joke: another security SNAFU for Chipzilla, this time for a popular remote admin app Intel has made much of its NUC and Compute Stick mini-PCs as a way to place computers to out-of-the-way places like digital signage.…

It’s not new money and not a huge slab of Redmond's research budget Microsoft’s announced it will spend $US5 billion on internet of things research over the next four years. But don’t get too excited: they are diverted dollars rather than a new cash splash…

Alt-currency's value tumbles amid malicious mining mishaps The Verge cryptocurrency has seen its value drop by 25 per cent after hackers exploiting a bug in the alt-coin's software forced its developers to hit the reset button and hard-fork the currency.…

And quietly cancels plan to gobble hospital patient info In response to widespread concern about the misuse of Facebook user data, the social ad network on Wednesday hobbled its Graph API and Instagram API, breaking apps sustained by that data in the process.…

Sega golden oldie repackaged as a research testbed OpenAI has launched a new competition using classic Sonic the Hedgehog games as a testbed for transfer learning in AI.…

Who needs phones when you've got IP lawyers? BlackBerry has filed suit against Snap Inc alleging the Snapchat service copied half a dozen of its mobile app design patents.…

MIT eggheads craft creepy covert speech-to-text interface Pic At long last, the war against privacy-invading lip readers and Alexa eavesdroppers may finally be won.…

Silent speech interface turns talking to oneself into text At long last, the war against privacy-invading lip readers and Alexa eavesdroppers may finally be won.…

Hi! How may we pwn you today? Hackers are feared to have swiped sensitive personal information held by two of the best known companies in the US – after malware infected a customer support software maker.…

Mature-looking HCI market has Dell-VMware in lead with Nutanix second Cisco stumbled in the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) section of IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, for 2017's final quarter as HPE did a Falcon Heavy and took off.…

Satellite payloads ended up in wrong orbit French fingers will be crossed this evening as Arianespace attempts to loft the Superbird-8 and the less imaginatively named DSN-1 dual-use satellite atop the second Ariane 5 launch of 2018 from French Guiana.…

Just ignore the retrieval fees and relatively lower resilience AWS is letting punters store objects in S3 for $0.01 per GB per month. The catch? The data will be held in one availability zone, meaning there is less resiliency baked into the service in the event of an outage.…

Borked FTP, SMB, rsync, and S3 buckets fingered Security researchers have uncovered 1.5 billion business and consumer files exposed online – just a month before Europe's General Data Protection Regulation comes into force.…

Report on threat posed by rogue state demands more cash for government hackers North Korea maintains a hacking base in China, the UK Parliament's Defence Select Committee has been told, while government snooping body GCHQ struggles to retain "cyber-staff". Then there's the slightly greater concern that the communist nation could nuke Britain "within a few years".…

Does Brad Smith protesteth too much? Nah, it'll be fine. Honest! Big-hearted Microsoft has tried to make reassuring noises to calm the nerves of others who might be thinking of getting between the Intellectual Property (IP) sheets with the Seattle software giant.…

Trustwave report flags up the security flashpoints of 2017 Hackers have moved away from simple point-of-sale (POS) terminal attacks to more refined assaults on corporations' head offices.…

Boffins do give a fig about trig after all Boffins have combined NASA’s aging Hubble Space Telescope and some good old-fashioned trigonometry to measure the distance to a cluster of stars that were formed shortly after the big bang.…

Եկեք տեղափոխենք Երեւան: The UK’s average 4G speeds are slower than Armenia’s, according to network performance monitor OpenSignal.…

Storage biz wants to store a minnow in its bulging belly Pure Storage is trying to raise nearly half a billion dollars to fund its first corporate acquisition.…

UK mobe operators fling £1.3bn at Ofcom auction UK mobile operators have collectively forked out £1.3bn on boosting spectrum following regulator Ofcom's latest auction.…

According to these boffins, the similarities would surprise you King penguin colonies move and organise themselves in a way that is "astoundingly" similar to how liquids behave, according to research published today.…

Power outage and no Plan B – hilarity ensues This Damn War Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It's a law most IT people would understand and perhaps even fear.…

They're certainly difficult to make well The hype machine has been tuned to 11 for Steven Spielberg's metafest Ready Player One, which opened in time for Easter.…

Next Monday is a fine moment for bad bots to come back through time and change history The United Nations will next week consider just what kind of autonomous weapons should be banned.…

175 days from breach to action could prove very expensive when GDPR kicks in European organisations are taking longer to detect breaches than their counterparts in North America, according to a study by FireEye.…

Could be fined a couple of million bucks – that’ll show Zuck who’s boss Australia’s office of the information commissioner (OAIC) has opened a probe into Facebook after the Social Network™ revealed that some of the records that may or may not have ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica described Australians.…

Firm says it had 30 million records, not the 87 million Zuck’s copped to, and didn't use any in the US election Cambridge Analytica has disputed Facebook’s claim that it had access to 87 million records from The Social Network™.…

I told you I was sick Cisco’s Talos security limb has warned that specialist medical hardware has remote code execution and denial of service bugs.…

Is there nothing neural networks can't do? Wait, don't answer that A team of astroboffins have built artificial neural networks that estimate the probability of exoplanets harboring alien life.…

Shipping in June for diehard devs with a lust for IoT kit At the AWS Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday Amazon Web Services invited a handful of tech typers to see a demonstration of AWS DeepLens, its forthcoming camera tuned for deep learning tasks.…

And it's all your fault! With his company's ongoing privacy crisis reaching new, even more enraging heights, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced the press on Wednesday to apologize for letting data harvesters run rampant on his site.…

Teases research showing the NBN is creating jobs, especially for self-employed women The outgoing CEO of nbn™, the company building and operating Australia’s national broadband network (NBN), has implored the company’s staff to “keep our costs down” in the “note to employees” announcing his departure.…

Rar! That's a scary bug A remote-code execution vulnerability in Windows Defender – a flaw that can be exploited by malicious .rar files to run malware on PCs – has been traced back to an open-source archiving tool Microsoft adopted for its own use.…

Let CTO Werner Vogels guide you through the Amazon cloud maze, young Jedi The 2018 AWS Summit in San Francisco began on Wednesday with shock and awe, a chest-thumping bass beat accompanying a fusillade of testimonials from business customers that have cozied up to Amazon's cloud infrastructure.…

Thousands of them lie hidden in the dark secretly guzzling gas The Milky Way may be teeming with tens of thousands of black holes lurking at its centre, according to a new study published on Wednesday.…

In Cupertino, MDM stands for 'Managed Device Misery' Mobile device management (MDM) vendor Jamf is warning admins to hold off on installing the iOS 11.3 update on iPhones and iPads until it can fix a bug in its software that was causing devices to become unresponsive.…

You wanted an extension? You got one Our call for papers for MCubed was hit by a flood of excellent proposals over the long weekend, but this was accompanied by a steady stream of requests for extensions, so we’ve decided to push the final deadline back to April 13.…

Peter Madsen's explanation for death of Kim Wall contested A senior Royal Danish Navy officer has disputed Peter Madsen's claim that Swedish journalist Kim Wall's death was caused by exhaust fumes aboard his crowdfunded submarine.…

Maintained for 3 years since Brit supermarket quit the ISP game Brit supermarket giant Tesco is killing off the free email services offered to customers who bought its broadband package.…

I bless the rains down in Tunbridge Wells... England's Commonwealth Games team actually hail from Africa, according to none other than the tournament's organisers.…

No point in Blighty going its own way before tech hits 'market readiness' – minister The British government has declared it is waiting for industry and international regulators to start creating standards for autonomous vehicles.…

AWS bashing and cloud contracts on the menu? Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz was reportedly set to enjoy a slap-up meal with US president mop-haired windbag Donald Trump last night, giving the pair a chance to compare Amazon-bashing notes.…

Just about getting closer to customers, says hard pressed outsourcing biz DXC Technologies has helped pack the bags of another HPE old-timer with global sales honcho Larry Stack said to be leaving of his own volition, although his role will not be replaced.…

Alaskan skies cleared for Astra Space Inc's 12m craft Secretive Californian upstart Astra Space Inc. looks set to conduct the first test flight of its creatively named "Rocket 1" launcher from Alaska's Pacific Spaceport Complex in the next couple of days days.…

Why did this show up before a Thomas The Tank Engine clip? The UK advertising industry's watchdog has censured OnePlus over a horror spoof ad for its OnePlus 5 phone.…

Redmond backs down without actually backing down The four-year court battle between the US government and Microsoft over the release of emails held in the software giant's data centre in Ireland has come to an end – of sorts.…