The Register

Russian pro-propaganda accounts boosted, but posts remain in place so users can delete them or not A group of Russian “troll factory” operators indicted in February were tagged by Tumblr last year.…

$500m/year run rate fuelled by Cloud Foundry subscriptions, but big losses too Dell’s Pivotal Software subsidiary has filed for an initial public offering.…

Zuck takes out full-page ads to apologise as Tim Cook calls for 'well-crafted' privacy laws It was the weekend that had it all: promiscuous permissions dragged Google into the Facebook privacy row, Facebook apologised again while at the same time denying anything's wrong with its Android apps, and Tim Cook was totally not smug when he chimed into the privacy debate.…

Top tip: Switch on the VPN when doing naughty hacking, товарищ! Roundup Here's your easy-to-digest round up of information security news beyond everything we've already covered this week.…

Are we doomed? Roundup It’s been a grim week for AI. The deadly Uber crash and fallout from the scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are a reminder of the ways algorithms can fail, and how they can be used against us.…

Are we doomed? Roundup It’s been a grim week for AI. The deadly Uber crash and fallout from the scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are a reminder of the ways algorithms can fail, and how they can be used against us.…

Deteriorating web prompts browser maker to take a stand Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.…

Deteriorating web prompts browser maker to take a stand Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.…

Kuvee drowns its sorrows, blames Napa fires for demise The spit bucket of idiotic tech ideas has just grown a little lighter with the death of "smart wine" company Kuvee.…

Hipsters will have to go to iTunes now For the first time in seven years, Americans spent more on CDs and records than digital downloads.…

Forward-secrecy protocol comes with the 28th draft A much-needed update to internet security has finally passed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), after four years and 28 drafts.…

Forward-secrecy protocol comes with the 28th draft A much-needed update to internet security has finally passed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), after four years and 28 drafts.…

After weeks of stalling and delays, ICO wastes no time kicking down the doors Cambridge Analytica’s London offices will finally be searched by the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office, following a marathon week of arguing inside and outside court.…

Gang pilfered files from 320 colleges, 47 companies in 22 nations, Uncle Sam claims The US Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury on Friday charged nine Iranians with carrying out a series of internet attacks on more than 300 universities and 47 companies in the US and abroad, as well as federal and state agencies and the United Nations.…

Hookup hangout hangs up Craigslist has axed its personals ad section after US Congress passed an anti-sex-trafficking law.…

Hookup hangout hangs up Online classifieds board Craigslist says it can no longer host a personals section, thanks to the recently passed FOSTA bill.…

Hark, dear reader, the echoes of Enron Comment I've a special reason to remember Enron and the summers of 2000 and 2001. The mighty Enron was being lauded as a pioneer and an innovator. It was a Wall Street darling. IBM and AOL jumped into bed with Enron to create a new retail energy provider. The sun shone, and Californians had plenty of energy capacity.…

Oh. US President Donald Trump's signature. And he's threatening a veto Updated US Congress has approved a $1.3tr budget [PDF] that would see, among other science boosts, NASA's funding surpass $20bn.…

ICO gets search warrant... for firm accused of jamming up railway safety hotline A Scottish company suspected of making 200 million nuisance calls that may have blocked railway safety hotlines has been raided by the Information Commissioner's Office.…

For a while at least... spinning rust is going to stick around Analysis Flash chip bits cost eight times more than spinning rust and SSDs aren't going to get cheap enough to kill off disk entirely.…

Meanwhile, the company accounts are overdue Yet more financial claims are piling up against failing ZX Spectrum Vega Plus firm Retro Computers Ltd, with the company's former web fixer threatening to sue over allegedly unpaid invoices.…

Second quarter results up nearly 60% from last year Micron's latest quarter revenues were up 58 per cent year on year, its CEO told an earnings call full of analysts eager to nibble at the chip-fryer's plate.…

Jobseeker? You may have heard of it... UK data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, whose HQ is a stone's throw from the buzz of Covent Garden in London, England, is on the hunt for a data protection assistant.…

The answer may dismay and confuse you Software is not a good, the Court of Appeal in London, England, has ruled.…

The answer may dismay and confuse you Software is not a good, the Court of Appeal in London, England, has ruled.…

Top Gartner tips: Know what data you hold, be trustworthy Data-hungry organisations have been advised to get a better grip on the data they control and work on building trust.…

Meet the people who've been knee-deep in Agile and CD for years... When it comes to updating your software development and deployment operation, we’ve got some bad news... there’s no single silver bullet that will destroy that monolith you've inherited.…

The Dark Souls* of code-wrangling We all know, and have probably even coded, monolithic applications – software made of big old chunks of code. Supposedly these are giving way to microservices, smaller elements of functionality. But don't get too comfortable because it's time to shake things up again: now we have serverless.…

Zuckerberg, Gutenberg, let's call the whole thing off Something for the Weekend, Sir? Sudden infant wails finally brightened the delivery room late that night, a relief to everyone, not least the mother. After a quick wipe-down and weigh, the baby was swaddled and handed back to the parents to be comforted.…

Firm that found flaw says un-patched RDP clients face lockout Black Hat Asia Microsoft will soon prevent Windows from authenticating un-patched RDP clients to cap a March patch addressed a flaw that can allow lateral movement across a network from a compromised remote desktop protocol session.…

The Naked Gun was far funnier than this mess YouTube has changed its Policies on content featuring firearms to prohibit videos that try to sell guns or offer “instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories”.…

All that effort and they still aren't sure how it works Researchers trying to understand how neural networks work shouldn’t just focus on interpretable neurons, according to new research from DeepMind researchers.…

Dependency scanner turned up FOUR MEEELLION vulns from October to December 2017 Last year, GitHub added security scanning to its dependency graph and flicked the lid off a can absolutely crawling with bugs.…

It turns out that keyboards work best when they’re not under pressure On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday foray into readers’ recollections of tech support jobs that went janky.…

'Reactive Redundancy for Data Destruction Protection' stops the likes of Shamoon and Stonedrill before they hit 'erase' Purdue University researchers reckon they've cracked how to protect data against “disk-wipe” malware.…

GPS systems thrown out of whack by Elon's rocket A SpaceX rocket ripped a humongous hole in Earth’s ionosphere during a launch in California last year and may have impaired GPS satellites.…

UK advertisers' society has also fired a warning shot The Mozilla Foundation has expressed its discomfort at the Cambridge Analytica revelations by pulling its ads from Facebook.…

The future is finally getting into gear GDC Virtual reality reemerged in the past couple of years as a hot tech topic. However, the unfortunate truth – fiercely ignored by its passionate advocates – is that it hasn't been ready for primetime.…

Chinese researcher also cracked magnetic and sonic payments Black Hat Asia Paying for stuff with your smartphone is downright dangerous according to Zhe Zhou, a pre-tenure associate professor at Fudan University, who yesterday explained how three different payment methods can be cracked at Black Hat Asia in Singapore.…

Radar imaging shows Chinese space station is still intact Video Boffins have refined their estimates of when Chinese space station Tiangong-1 will return to Earth, with the big bird's impact now predicted to happen between March 30 and April 3.…

House OKs crippling email privacy, Senate stalled by Paul For months now, US Congress has mulled new laws to strengthen Feds' powers to access American citizens' private messages and files stored on computers overseas.…

Regulator secured refund/exit deals for 16,000 unhappy customers this week The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's push-back against internet service providers making over overly-optimistic download speed claims on the national broadband network has seen Dodo, iPrimus and Commander agree to refund their customers.…

Good thing we have all those chip fabs and assembly plants stateside US President Donald Trump's planned tariffs on goods imported into America from China could hit the tech industry – and ergo, you the customer – particularly hard.…

Data gone with the wind as attacker goes full Sherman Updated IT systems used by the City of Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, have succumbed to a ransomware attack, cutting off some online city services and potentially putting the personal information of employees and citizens at risk.…

Big Blue's five-year effort to weed out elders detailed after deep-dive investigation IBM for the past five years has been pushing older employees out of the company and replacing them with younger staffers in the US or moving the jobs overseas, it is claimed.…

It's like sleazebag Inception America's trade regulator the FTC has issued a warning over reports of a new data-harvesting operation that is targeting the victims of a previous scam.…

Westminster Abbey is noted atheist's final resting place The ashes of British physics ace Professor Stephen Hawking will be placed in Westminster Abbey after a special service of thanksgiving for his life.…

不好意思，我听不懂 Best Buy will no longer carry Huawei phones in its stores, marking yet another setback for the Chinese smartphone maker's efforts in America.…

A&E Adventures sues Oracle America for breach of contract over point-of-sale shenanigans Oracle has been sued in the US for allegedly engaging in a scheme to force owners of point-of-sale gear to switch to its subscription-based Simphony system in violation of contract and trade laws.…

Finding Robo: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… Researchers at MIT have developed a robotic fish that should allow scientists to spy on intimate fishy moments normally unseen by human eyes.…