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Actually probe expensive gear in real life? Pah. It's 2019. We're Boeing digital As the Boeing 737 Max controversy rolls on, the American planemaker has now been embroiled in a fresh row – after it was revealed it wants to shorten and replace some physical certification tests with software-powered processes.…

Claws out as slippery-pawed cameraman renders officials with cat ears and whiskers A political party in Pakistan is suffering the indignity of internet memedom after someone left the cat filter switched on while live-streaming a press conference.…

Toughen it up and reduce all that warrantless state surveillance, demands Liberty Human rights pressure group Liberty is taking the British government to court this week in its ongoing battle to have the most invasive parts of the so-called Snoopers' Charter struck down.…

Shasta minute: HPE purchase to provide 1 exabyte of ClusterStor for Oak Ridge National Laboratory Cray has won a $50m-plus contract to provide 1 exabyte of ClusterStor storage for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Frontier exascale supercomputer in the United States.…

George Gilder and Nicholas Negroponte join CEO for 2-hour 'Tea with Mr Ren' Huawei's public relations onslaught continued today with a "panel discussion" between the company's founder Ren Zhenfei, blockchain blowhard George Gilder and MIT Media Lab co-founder and non-stop tech panellist Nicholas Negroponte.…

League of Entropy is the superhero gang you may or may not need Like some kind of space-age Bingo hall caller, a cloud-based API that publicly streams random numbers arrives today, and is being touted by Cloudflare.…

20 GOTO 10 After just over 55 years, the birthplace of BASIC has been honoured with a memorial marker in New Hampshire, USA.…

Don't wanna be a security id-IoT: Trusted hardware extends beyond computers The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), a nonprofit developing hardware-based cybersecurity tools, has started work on the "world's tiniest" Trusted Platform Module (TPM).…

Also: storage migration, Mac development and The Trillion Dollar Man performs the dividend dance Roundup The Edge team subjected itself to the dubious mercies of keyboard warriors in a Reddit AMA, a new Mac Visual Studio and storage shenanigans – it's just another week at Microsoft.…

But don't get too excited, it can't do much at the moment A group of researchers at Florida State University have said they've crafted the world's strongest superconducting magnet.…

Don't tell Trump, OK? And it's not for Joe Bloggs, it's for the hedge funds Companies listed on the UK stock market will effectively be able to offer shares to Chinese investors from today.…

We said engineers made the API too powerful. We weren't wrong Analysis In a mild PR blitz, Google engineers this month insisted the ad giant's shake up of Chrome browser extensions won't kill advert blockers. Instead, we're told, Googlers are making the plugins safer. Those engineers have more work to do than it may seem.…

Take the right steps for a hassle-free deployment Sponsored webcast Office 365 is the solution many organisations gravitate towards when they are looking to move from legacy office applications to a more flexible, mobile-friendly solution for sharing documents and collaborating with colleagues and clients.…

Age verification needs a firm hand, sector warns Age-verification providers are privately calling for a compulsory certification scheme ahead of the UK government's controversial online porn laws due to come into force next month.…

Early responses from government consultation not happy with off taxman's plans Industry bodies are urging the British government to delay its plans to extend much-hated anti-avoidance tax law IR35 to the private sector, according to an analysis of responses to a government consultation by ContractorCalculator.…

Friends don't let friends use TRUNCATE Who, Me? Bid farewell to the festivities of the weekend with a story of self-inflicted pain in our weekly Who, Me? column.…

Your Monday morning catch-up on machine-learning tech Roundup Here's your latest dose of machine-learning news beyond what we've already published.…

Your quick guide to hacks, patches and scandal Roundup Here's a quick roundup of recent infosec news beyond what we've already reported.…

That's a wrap for the file-sharing skin flick shakedown It was a simple plan: obtain the rights to pornographic films, share copies of them online, then threaten to sue those downloading the skin flicks for copyright infringement unless they paid a $3,000 settlement fee.…

Hey, leave some room in orbit for the rest of us? One of the companies that hopes to beam internet access down to Earth from space has applied for permission to put an extraordinary one million mini-satellites into orbit.…

Big Blue hands over spare change to make allegations against subsidiary vanish IBM will cough up $15m to settle a major gripe over its development, or lack thereof, of software for a health insurance website for the US state of Maryland.…

You can now pre-order this underpowered, over-priced, untested, over-complicated toy. What are you waiting for? After two years of delays and missed deadlines, Atari has announced at the E3 games conference this week that its VCS games console is finally available. For pre-order. Again.…

Now you can do exactly what she didn't: Pore over it – download our obtained copy of the report Autonomy Trial Cathie Lesjak, HP’s former chief financial officer, told the High Court in London this week that she did not read a KPMG due diligence report on British software firm Autonomy before her company blew $11bn buying it.…

Armchair aviation geeks, assemble! Comment Earlier this week Microsoft announced that it was getting back into consumer flight simulation, nearly 15 years after abandoning the PC gaming field it largely pioneered in the public mind.…

Get thee down to the pub, fix out over the weekend maybe Docker botherer Quay.io's webhook integration with Bitbucket is looking a bit green around the gills.…

If it looks like a hyperscaler, swims like a hyperscaler... Akamai Edge World Content delivery network Akamai runs a distributed computing platform consisting of 250,000 servers. At this scale, every bit of IO and every Watt of power consumption matter – so instead of buying hardware off the shelf, the company designs its own.…

HMP Belmarsh resident preps for next legal fight WikiLeaks' Julian Assange will face a full extradition hearing on 24 February next year, Westminster Magistrates' Court ruled this morning.…

You lovely bunch of, um, brand strategists. We knew you'd treat them right El Reg this week asked readers to lean their e-bike against the Japanese maple that overlooks the strategy boutique to help Ed Ho, GM for the Build division at DXC Technology, determine what his employer's brand stands for.…

Splashes £78.9m on IP, space smarts and general boffinry Canadian IT consulting giant CGI has settled its crosshairs on Brexit-dodging SCISYS, ponying up £78.9m in cold, hard cash to acquire the Dublin-based software 'n' services outfit.…

Digitisation programme already at 'serious risk' of missing deadline Exclusive A raft of senior techies working on £1bn project to modernise Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) have stepped down amid concerns the flagship project is floundering.…

Click on the toothbrush, toggle the flange and press 'Harp'. It's obvious Something for the Weekend, Sir? Haha, what an idiot! He was clicking like mad and nothing was happening! Of course it wasn't because – haha – he was clicking in the wrong place! He looked utterly baffled!…

Book tickets now for our machine-learning conference this autumn Event You know that you could achieve great things if only you had time to get to grips with TensorFlow, or mine a vast pile of text, or simply introduce machine-learning into your existing workflow.…

Guys, your security hygiene stinks Akamai Edge World Players of games like Fortnite and Minecraft have emerged as juicy targets for cybercriminals.…

Yep, and two sets of bills VMWare's Rajiv Ramaswami, Cloud Services COO, has told investors that VMs (virtual machines) are here to stay, even as container-based applications grow in popularity. Well, he would, wouldn't he.…

Howz ur spelan? On Call Friday has arrived, and with it the promise of a weekend free of workplace distractions. It also brings another tale from one of the unfortunates who will be spending their Saturday and Sunday awaiting the dreaded phone call. Welcome to On Call.…

Wait, wut? Surviving in zero gravity takes its toll on the human body. Muscular atrophy sets in, and astronauts should not only exercise regularly but consider taking testosterone shots too, according to new research.…

Isn't that what we all want for our kids, after all? A descendant of the notorious Mirai Internet-of-Things botnet has apparently cast a wider net than its predecessors, potentially infecting systems normally found within enterprises.…

CEO speaks to The Reg as we dig into labor complaints, future of npm CLI Special report JavaScript package registry and aspiring enterprise service NPM Inc is planning to fight union-busting complaints brought to America's labor watchdog by fired staffers, rather than settle the claims.…

People will share anything scandalous, duh – El Reg might well be Exhibit A Analysis The US House of Reps' Intelligence Committee on Thursday held its first hearing into computer-fabricated videos dubbed deepfakes, quizzing experts from across worlds of AI, social policy, and law.…

For FIPS sake! Yubico is recalling one of its YubiKey lines after the authentication dongles were found to have a security weakness.…

No, of course not. It's all perfectly fine Comment The man heading up any potentially US government antitrust probes into tech giants like Apple and Google used to work for... Apple and Google.…

Lawmakers threaten to rewrite rules that shield sites from netizens' dodgy uploads US lawmakers have warned they may revisit American tech corporations' blanket legal protections – specifically, the ones that shield internet giants from the fallout of user-posted content – in order to tackle the rise of deepfakes.…

Uncle Sam sounds alarm after Windows CE SMB left wide open on hospital equipment Two security vulnerabilities in medical workstations can exploited by scumbags to hijack the devices and connected infusion pumps, potentially causing harm to patients, the US government revealed today.…

Customers didn't like how much data spare parts package was funnelling back to America The F-35 fighter jet project has been hit by yet another set of controversies including a kerfuffle over US data-slurping, flight control problems and its stealth coating melting at supersonic speeds.…

All the while more WPF source trickles into GitHub Microsoft has continued its quickfire pace of .NET Core 3 updates, flinging preview 6 at developers keen on the open-source platform.…

Have you appointed your designated droner? Everyone has a mate who won't stop droning after a few bevvies – and the Japanese government clearly thinks the activity is dangerous enough to be outlawed.…

That Guns N' Roses album* might be out soon... or not Chat app Telegram has reportedly been DDoS'd, with its downtime coinciding with protests in Hong Kong against repressive new Chinese laws.…

Immerse yourself in forensic training with autumn Promo If you work in digital forensics or incident response and would like to advance to a higher level, the annual Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) event staged by security training company SANS is a must.…

It's fun to trademark your brand in CA, it's fun to trademark your brand in SK...ay Huawei has been spotted nestling in datasets hosted by colourful UN patent body WIPO, but rather than having any sort of dispute, it has been filing a barrow-load of trademarks on the term "Hongmeng" – thought to be the preferred moniker for its homegrown Linux-based mobile OS.…

Huawei with you! It seems the rest of the world can't get enough of 5G – Germany has just raised €6.6bn (£5.8bn) in its spectrum auction, and more than a million folk in South Korea have subscribed to a 5G contract.…