The Register

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.…

What's new and what to expect Qcon "How you deploy Java, how you get access to updates and patches is all changing. Although Oracle has told people about this, they haven't been shouting about it," Azul Systems CTO Simon Ritter told attendees at QCon, a developer conference under way in London.…

Gateways to close on May 15th, leaving you almost ten whole weeks to rebuild integrations One of the virtues of cult messaging app Slack was its gateways allowing integration with the venerable IRC and XMPP messaging protocols.…

And the user believed him, too, for a while On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, our Friday rummage though readers' recollections of tech support jobs that produced odd endings.…

Why, yes, junior, now that Intel's released new models for mainstream PCs Intel's launched new and low-ish end versions of its Optane solid state disks based on 3D XPoint non-volatile memory.…

Which is just-about an admission Win 10 is a mess Microsoft has confirmed Windows 10 S will be a "mode" available in all versions of Windows, and added a prediction it'll be used by a "majority" of users.…

MAC randomisation, indoor location, TLS-by-default and more coming to next 'Droid Poll Google's revealed the stuff it's added to the next version of Android, which for now is known only as "P" while the world waits for it to earn a confectionery-related name.…

Chalk one up for the infosec nerds: Arbor founder takes top uni post Carnegie Mellon University has named computer science professor and Arbor Networks founder Farnam Jahanian as its new president.…

Gas giant's atmosphere is not for the faint hearted The stripy bands on Jupiter are made from roaring winds that penetrate deep below its surface and circle round the entire planet.…

Judge double taps class-action complaint against Google's vid emporium Google has had a class-action lawsuit in the US over last year's changes to its AdSense advertising system thrown out of court.…

Missouri attorney general Hawley hopes to tap into ire against Silicon Valley In another sign that anti-tech sentiment is rising in the United States, the Attorney General of Missouri is using his stance against Google as a platform to run for a Senate seat this November.…

EMC on naughty step as 4Q18 revenues slump 11 per cent in a year Dell had a reasonable fourth 2018 quarter in all areas but one – storage. Yes, EMC let the house down with an 11 per cent drop in revenues year-on-year.…

Presumably while singing 'takedowns from Amsterdam' The takedown of the Hansa dark web marketplace, done live on national TV by Dutch police, was possible because officers had been running the site themselves – and on Thursday they detailed how they did it.…

Australia the 'vanguard', perhaps with new smallbiz products to make it sensible Cisco's going to have a crack at direct sales online.…

Haptic feedback controllers promise to put people in touch with virtual worlds At least two crucial ingredients are missing from virtual and augmented reality: revenue and a sense of touch.…

Mormons miffed by mammary missive The Utah State Bar is investigating how a picture of a topless woman appeared in an email sent to all its members earlier this week.…

Right to Repair Act in case your phone becomes atrocious A California lawmaker is pushing a new law that would force electronics makers to allow customers to repair devices themselves.…

New paper explains why we can't handle the truth False news spreads faster and reaches more people than the truth on Twitter and humans are more to blame than bots, according to a paper published in Science on Thursday.…

Code creators worked hard to make it look like that, however A close analysis of the code that took down part of the 2018 Winter Olympics infrastructure appears to show a cunning plan to make it look as though the culprit was North Korea.…

Profits likely this year, unlike some competitors Analysis A look at Dropbox's IPO filing suggests a conservative company controlling costs and heading towards profitability this year.…

Computers and documents in the bag, please The Information Commissioner's Office has raided two companies thought to be behind 11 millions nuisance texts sent to the public.…

'Controlled store closure' process looms for retailer PwC has laid off a number of staff at Maplin Electronics as the future of the retail chain continues to look bleak with potential suitors unable to agree terms and a "controlled closure" process imminent.…

No wriggling out of regulation, snarls ICO chief UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has declared war on Google, urging the High Court to throw out the ad biz's defences in the Right To Be Forgotten trial because they are "impermissibly broad".…

Millions coughed up in commissions German ERP giant SAP has admitted irregularities and indications of misconduct in its South African business following a major corruption probe related to public sector deals worth almost $50m.…

Fullz and their money are soon parted Fraudsters operating on the dark web could buy a person's entire identity ("fullz" in the cybercrook lingo) for just £820.…

MCubed call for papers open now MCubed returns to London in October, and we want to hear how your organisation is using artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, deep learning, and predictive analytics to solve real world business and technology problems.…

Sales slide and tax repayments blamed Oracle's vital statistics in the UK have moved in the wrong direction – at least from Big Red's perspective – with sales and profits slumping in the year ended 31 May 2017, accounts filed at Companies House this week reveal.…

Astroboffin suggests scanning exoplanets for xenocrap in orbit A physicist at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in the Canary Islands has proposed a way by which planet hunters might detect advanced alien technology.…

Right To Be Forgotten trial reaches halfway mark "It's never been suggested that the public have some right to require the press to impart information to them," barrister Hugh Tomlinson QC told the Right To Be Forgotten trial in London's High Court yesterday.…

Tianhe-3 rig a year in front of stateside supers Analysis China is to take a clear lead in the exascale superdupercomputer race - its Tianhe-3 system looks to be a whole year ahead of the US's best efforts.…

Look, we're used to dealing with cock-ups The IT challenges posed by Brexit to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are "significantly less complex" than its woeful Common Agricultural Payments system, Defra's permanent secretary has told MPs.…

Limit 'undermines business confidence', groups tell UK.gov Forty industry bodies have called on UK government to rethink its cap on skilled workers' visas, which has been reached for the last three months running.…

Spectrum NAS overlaps with Spectrum Scale, but there are differences Analysis IBM already had a scale-out NAS (filer) when it announced Spectrum NAS last month: Spectrum Scale, which can grow to 16,000-plus nodes. Why does it need another?…

Workload isolation is niche, but they're rather good at it The container is doomed, killed by serverless. Containers are killing Virtual Machines (VM). Nobody uses bare metal servers. Oh, and tape is dead. These, and other clichés, are available for a limited time, printed on a coffee mug of your choice alongside a complimentary moon-on-a-stick for $24.99.…

As hardware goes soft, hardware revenues follow If you watch the fortunes of the big names in switching, you probably won't be surprised to hear that the market is only recording modest growth.…

Locked-down Windows to come to all Windows 10 editions, not just for kids When Microsoft launched Windows 10 S in May 2017, the company pitched it as a stripped-back version of Windows that would both run on hardware cheap enough for students around the world and make life easy for time-poor, cash-strapped school sysadmins.…

Saudi Arabia shows more optimism for AR tech than… well, everyone else Analysis Throwing caution to the wind, the investment arm of Saudi Arabia has sunk $400m into augmented-reality biz Magic Leap.…

New pics make the gas giant's poles look like portals to hell Jupiter has the strangest storm behavior observed to date, with formation patterns that have never been seen elsewhere.…

Dial-a-ride driving sucks less than previously thought The author behind a high-profile study on driver pay for ride-sharing services is revising his numbers to show the services pay more than was reported.…

Two critical vulnerabilities among 20 patches Cisco's security developers have served up a parcel of patches.…