The Register

Using wearable to get wrong kind of gains get Big House visit A US stock trader has been sentenced to two years in prison for running a pump and dump operation involving wearables vendor Fitbit, albeit one that earned him only a few thousand dollars.…

More posturing from presidential aide The Russian government has again intimated that it is prepared to cut itself off from the global internet, with a presidential aide telling a Russian news network that it is "ready for anything."…

Slacklike turns one Microsoft's Slack competitor Teams hit its first birthday this week, trumpeting some big numbers and a slew of new features.…

Yes, yeesss, give us lots of new things to do, say academics Giant US tech platforms are spreading misinformation and deliberately hiding their algorithms to evade scrutiny, according to a report for the European Commission.…

Report claims vuln-botherers share building with Ministry of State Security China has altered public vulnerability data to conceal the influence of its spy agency in the country's national information security bug reporting process.…

Sorry if this sounds a little… Xenu-phobic The Church of Scientology, founded by sci-fi author L Ron Hubbard, is set to start broadcasting its own TV programmes tonight.…

... even though the sound of it to Qualcomm's quite atrocious Broadcom plans to bring forward its redomiciliation to the US to 3 April in a move that, of course, has nothing to do with Qualcomm's delayed stockholder meeting happening two days later.…

'We need the families' assistance' says AAIB A British government agency has been downloading data from iPads and similar devices used by pilots of crashed aircraft, it has emerged.…

Outsourcer blames HMRC's new PAYE portal Troubled outsourcer Capita accidentally charged 17,000 former miners in the UK tens of thousands of pounds in extra tax, and has blamed the error on a change to HM Revenue & Customs' online PAYE portal.…

Ailing firm's appeal against court verdict binned Ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has had its appeal against a county court judgment in Luton, UK rejected, with the judge telling chairman Dr David Levy that his no-show in the dock over troll fears was unfounded.…

No, it's not a laundry detergent... it's a microservices flinger Nutanix is gobbling Netsil, a startup that develops tech for the discovery, mapping and management of microservices in distributed cloudy spaces.…

But it's underground! Elon Musk's audacious plans are usually met with acclaim, and sometimes even awe – but not this time. Fresh details of The Boring Company's urban transport plans have been lambasted on social media.…

April no longer deadline for compliance Smut gazers today breathed a sigh of collective relief as UK government delayed controversial age verification checks for online porn – because the new regulator set up to oversee them still hasn't issued guidance.…

Oh plus this GREAT idea... 14-and-ups should hand over their data UK Minister of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Matt Hancock said this weekend he wants to social media sites to enforce a cut-off for youngsters on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.…

Assures us his self-driving cars to be 200% safer than puny humans SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk assured the audience at Austin, Texas media 'n' tech megafest South by Southwest last night that his big rocket would fly next year.…

Execs tell earnings call how they will rescue unit Analysis Three top Dell execs told the earnings call that they were taking the fall in storage results seriously, were doing all they could to fix them, and that early signs were encouraging.…

There's a learning curve, but you too can be Mr Worldwide When companies started to build applications at web scale and needed services to scale to millions of requests across the globe, it quickly became apparent that relational databases just didn't work well enough.…

April Fools' Day deadline set HP Inc has terminated a mobile data service that bundled free data with select laptops, tablets and 2-in-1s.…

Social networks have too much power, says web daddy, and their profit motive means they won't act for the good of all Sir Timothy Berners-Lee has used the 29th anniversary of the publication of his proposal for an "information management" system that became the world-wide web to warn his creation is in peril.…

The right to be forgiven will soon be more important than the right to be forgotten A colleague recently excused himself from a meeting because he had to go and judge a robotics contest.…

Don't ask your staff to write scripts at beer O'clock on Friday afternoon Who, me? Welcome to the eighth edition of "Who, me?", the column in which Reg readers confess to moments at which they messed things up but good.…

Attacks tapering, as experts argue over 'kill switch' DDoS attacks taking advantage of ill-advised use of memcached have begun to decline, either because sysadmins are securing the process, or because people are using a potentially-troublesome “kill switch”.…

Rather than face a combined BroadQual, Chipzilla may break out the cheque book Intel is reportedly so discomfited by the prospect of a combined Broadcom and Qualcomm that it will consider buying Broadcom to stop the transaction.…

Researchers unmask trade in code-signing certs There's a flourishing trade in illicit code-signing certificates, and even extended validation certificates can be purchased for a few thousand dollars.…

Faster fibre will help networks cope with the Netflix effect Late last week, CableLabs launched another bandwidth-boosting project, this time designed to sweat more gigabits-per-second out of the optical leg of cable networks.…

Batteries suck, chargers suck, monitoring sucks: surely we can do better than this In February, developer and open source software advocate Eric S Raymond ranted that the Uninterruptible Power Supply market was overdue for open source disruption, and touched so many nerves around the world that the rant has become a project.…

Oh, and an amusing story about an AI medical chatbot Roundup Hello, here’s this week’s AI roundup. There is new code to play around with for those interested in machine learning and space, a model that predicts hilarious search trends for sex site YouPorn, and another funny story about an ostensibly intelligent medical chatbot in New Zealand.…

Bad news: It's only a patent filing and may never actually be made An Apple patent application has surfaced that should give hope to frustrated MacBook owners everywhere.…

And rising car thefts suggest the criminals are taking advantage Cars are getting smarter every year but their increasing computational power isn’t being backed up by good IT security practices – hacking them is child’s play.…

Shock revelation: criminals prove to be untrustworthy Paying off a ransomware demand is a great way to end up losing both your money and your files.…

Advanced router code has been in circulation for six years If you’re trying to hack an organization then pwning the sysadmin's machine gives you the keys to the kingdom, and an advanced malware writer has found a clever way to do just that.…

Federal regulator furious to discover untrackable mini-satellites in space The space-disaster movie Gravity – where an escalating wave of space debris wipes out a space station and shuttle – now looks like a slightly more plausible scenario.…

Sandvine insists report is inaccurate and misleading Internet users in Turkey, Egypt and Syria who attempted to download legitimate Windows applications have been redirected to nation-state spyware through deep-packet inspection boxes placed on telecom networks in Turkey and Egypt, according to a report issued Friday by security research group Citizen Lab.…

Finance troll gets seven years for securities fraud Former finance and pharmaceutical exec Martin Shkreli has been ordered to spend the next seven years in prison.…

Promised unveiling later this month could give form to vaporware console The reboot of the classic Atari games console is back on, with prototypes to be displayed at the Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco later this month.…

Rules created in isolation will drive AI makers to operate in areas without restraint European policymakers have asked for help unravelling the "patchwork" of ethical and societal challenges as the use of artificial intelligence increases.…

Continental electric clocks go TITSUP* Electric timekeepers in Europe have been losing minutes due to power frequency deviations arising from a dispute between Serbia and Kosovo.…

Branded vendors made hay while sun shone Gartner's Q4 server sales count has confirmed a shipment boom took place as hyperscalers, cloud buyers and on-premise all dug deep to freshen their infrastructure.…

Better LTE for bumpkins wedged into mobe operators' bids Ofcom has today proposed placing new coverage obligations on mobile operators for 4G services as part of their winning 5G spectrum bids.…

UK.gov gives in, publishes after 2-year legal spat After a two-year legal battle, the UK government's Department for Work and Pensions has capitulated – and released a series of embarrassing assessments of its disastrous Universal Credit programme.…

Fat lot of good an injunction will do against unknown cybercrims British shipping company Clarkson plc has obtained an injunction against hackers who broke into its IT systems, slurped a load of data and then tried to blackmail the business.…

Voulez-vous acheter le hotspot pour le shagging en plein air? The "world's first 100 per cent swingers camping ground" has been put up for sale because "we are tired", its pensioner owners have said.…

Risk of app's vid demo falls under spotlight Exclusive NHS Digital has opened an inquiry after patients' personal information was revealed during a live-streamed research session for a new app.…

Is the industry out of ideas? "Smartphone sales are starting to decline at an accelerating rate," a market analyst has declared. In a pessimistic note, Jeff Johnston of Arthur Wood Research blames feature ennui.…

Transparency doc on spooks data slurping released The Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office, the body tasked with watching UK spooks, has revealed how it will decide whether to approve snooping warrants authorised by government.…

PCI compliance? Yep, we've heard of it too A UK government agency has disputed complaints from security pros that its website involved in the processing of driving licence applications is insecure and otherwise unfit for purpose.…

First it giveth then it taketh away Big-hearted Microsoft has confirmed pending changes that will make it easier for charities to use its cloud services but will hike prices for anyone daring to use its on-premises wares.…

You’ve got a week to grab your CLL18 Earlybird tickets If you want to soak up the knowledge of 40 odd bona fide DevOps, Containers, Serverless and Agile experts - and save a packet - you’ve got a week left to take advantage of our extended early bird offer for Continuous Lifecycle London.…

Dr Frankenstein had it all sewn up, you know Something for the Weekend, Sir? "My pages have come alive!" accused one from my pod of guinea pigs, unfeasibly.…

That'll go down well with full-time Sir Humphreys.. The vast majority of IT contractors believe they should receive employment benefits, such as sick pay and holiday leave, if they are to be classed within the IR35 tax clampdown.…