The Register

You can't escape The Circle If you chose the Apple ecosystem because you don't, for whatever reason, trust Google – bad news. Apple has confirmed for the first time that it now uses Google servers to store chunks of people's iCloud data.…

Social code site will let vendors peek at online store analytics Community code site GitHub on Monday plans to illuminate its Marketplace, not with lights but with data.…

Yet more consolidation in networking world London-based fibre and cloud networks business Interoute has been acquired by US networking business GTT for $2.3bn (£1.65bn).…

Just get a room already Qualcomm has urged chip-slinger Broadcom to return to the negotiating table with a better deal than the $117bn on offer.…

No cool first-person-view flying unless you plan the flight like a real pilot The EU Aviation Safety Agency has formally opined that drone hobbyists should be banned from carrying out beyond visual-line-of-sight flights.…

Plus: Holey headsets Batman, I can hear a car coming MWC18 Sony launched the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 compact at an early morning press event as Mobile World Congress opened in Barcelona.…

Airbus, OneWeb partner up to bring airborne roaming to the masses MWC18 Folk soon need not look up from their screens when boarding aircraft and wandering the aisles thanks to an alliance formed by OneWeb and Airbus to bring 5G roaming to the skies.…

So much for the shift to streaming... for now UK comms infrastructure provider Arqiva has reported a bump in operating profits of 6.1 per cent to £158.7m for its half-year results – mainly thanks to a "cost-control" and "operating efficiency" programme.…

Treat us like the OTT providers, beg operators MWC18 5G could, er, bring an end to populism, said Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s chief executive during his keynote address at this year’s Mobile World Congress.…

Zombie apocalypse targets feature phone slab-shunners MWC18 Dead phone platforms are coming back to life at MWC in 2018 – like a zombie feature phone apocalypse.…

Can you play the slide that was in The Matrix? MWC18 Nokia tribute act HMD has revived another of the band's classics – the slider phone made famous by The Matrix.…

Just days left to snap up early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London If you’re smart enough to want to buff up your DevOps, Continuous Integration and Container knowledge, you’ll also be smart enough to want to do that as cheaply as possible.…

Bernd Heinrichs talks tech and cars with El Reg BCW18 Take risks, be first, launch something as the minimum viable product when it's 80 per cent ready – such is the philosophy of the head of Bosch's new Connected Mobility Services division, Bernd Heinrichs.…

It's your week in storage, kids It's been an eventful week in storage land, with contract wins, possible IPOs, biz unit sales and the inevitable poring over financial results. Let's have a look at the people, the product and the numbers...…

12 new data centres is too little, too late Comment If Larry Ellison earned a dollar for every cloud-hyped phrase he made, Oracle's market share in cloud infrastructure wouldn't be the miserly 0.3 per cent – by Gartner's calculations – that it is today.…

'Agile Ceremonies', Slack instead of email, but still some red tape to cut through Exclusive IBM has told its Services workers to get agile – as in the development practice, not as in yoga – by the end of the year.…

MIT researchers want web devs and sites to protect you. Good luck with that, chaps A group of boffins working at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory believe that “private” browsing modes aren't private, so have given developers a framework to fix it.…

We've given away our privacy for the wrong rewards If you saw someone being assaulted, you'd probably whip out your phone and dial for help.…

That's not a bug, that's the Queen's English Who, me? Welcome to the sixth instalment of "Who, me?", The Register's confessional for IT pros who managed to break stuff before it became the kind of user-generated mess story we run in On-Call.…

Database of possible configurations offers costs and performance possibilities Hyperconverged hopeful HyperGrid has pivoted again and now offers a service that assesses the properties of 100 million possible cloud configurations so you can send a workload to whichever one will suit it best.…

Flawed analogue-to-digital converter can turn a whole bunch of 1s into a cosmic joke Users of sixteen of the world's most prestigious optical telescopes - including the Hubble Space Telescope - are revisiting old data in case an analogue-to-digital converter design has polluted the instruments' measurements.…

'Open vRAN' snugglefest includes India's Tech Mahindra and Reliance Jio Cisco has used Mobile World Congress 2018 to tout a group of vendors working on open tech for the mobile radio access network.…

Fibre to the pole, then Facebook's well-behaved wireless brings signal to the great unwired Facebook hopes to get parts of its Terragraph wireless comms platform standardised by the IEEE, and has recruited Nokia to help.…

Don't even think about applying without revealing exactly what you'll do at work, where you'll work, who you'll really work for The United States Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services has released new and strict rules for H-1B visas, the permit used by many-a-tech-company to bring skilled workers to the USA from abroad.…

Critical patch lands for that, UCS Domain Manager flaw, dirty dozen lesser messes fixed Cisco's Elastic Services Controller's release 3.0.0 software has a critical vulnerability: it accepts an empty admin password.…

Critical patch lands for that, UCS Domain Manager flaw, dirty dozen lesser messes fixed Cisco's Elastic Services Controller's release 3.0.0 software has a critical vulnerability: it accepts an empty admin password.…

Emoji-selfies are the headline grabber, improved desktop experience might be the market-maker MWC Samsung has formally launched its next-generation Galaxy 9 flagship smartphones just ahead of 2018's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.…

NRA calls it 'a shameful display of political and civic cowardice' and some users agree Symantec has ended a promotion that saw if offer discounts on Norton-branded products to members of the US National Rifle Association (NRA).…

This one's more than a Cupertino clone Hands On Huawei won't unveil its new P20 flagship phone until the end of March, so it used MWC to showcase an envy-inducing laptop, the Matebook X.…

E: Syntax error at line 42 in journobot/article.py Roundup Welcome, friends. Here's your human-generated, totally not computer written, summary of this week's AI news, beyond what we've already covered. In short: Elon Musk steps down from OpenAI's board, Uber is looking to train new coders in machine learning, and there's a new AI conference.…

A busy and bonkers week in security Roundup Happy weekend, everyone. Here's a roundup of computer security news beyond everything we've already reported this week.…

Liability for artificial intelligence won't be easy Analysis On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, an officer in the Soviet Union's Air Defense Forces, heard an alarm and saw that the warning system he'd been assigned to monitor showed the US had launched five nuclear missiles.…

Playpen pervert fails to convince appeals court Analysis US judges have shut down an appeal from a convicted pedophile who claimed the FBI hacking of his computer was an illegal and unreasonable search.…

Decorum isn't even visible in the rear-view mirror at this point Ajit Pai – chairman of America's broadband watchdog, the FCC – is the proud new owner of a handmade Kentucky long gun from the US National Rifle Association (NRA) – thanks to his brave stance in favor of lining the pockets of billion-dollar telcos.…

Cloud file system upstart files for IPO DropBox today formally filed for its IPO – its initial public offering, its stock-market debut, whatever you want to call it.…

Stand up would you, please, Mr Paul Manafort They are potentially the two most popular file formats in the world – Microsoft Word's .DOC and Adobe's .PDF. And it's fair to say they have caused millions of people billions of hours of frustration.…

Sun cofounder Khosla continues fight to keep surfers off public pleasure spot Analysis Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is taking his legal battle to control access to a piece of California coastline to the US Supreme Court.…

Oracle cofounder Khosla continues fight to keep citizens off public surfing spot Analysis Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is taking his legal battle to control access to a piece of California coastline to the US Supreme Court.…

Mystery solved... behind closed doors For more than three months now, cops in Sacramento, California, have been baffled by a rash of false-alarm 911 emergency calls.…

Bot farming today An unknown Bulgarian has become the talk of the music industry after a sophisticated and apparently successful attempt to game Spotify.…

But don't throw away those physics books just yet, m'kay? Astronomers at the Space Telescope Institute and John Hopkins University have used NASA’s Hubble Telescope to show that the universe is expanding a little bit faster than expected.…

Spam and adverts? You bet Google has opened up a major new communications channel for businesses – sending multimedia messages to mobiles using interoperable standards.…

Church supports priests' professional development plans The Vatican cannot be accused of lack of interest in the continued professional development of its staff. Just look at the dedicated exorcism training course it set out this week for clergy interested in advancing their skills.…

Part of plans to boost country's woeful full-fibre investment Ofcom has slashed the price BT’s Openreach can charge operators for superfast broadband, in a package of measures BT said will hit its bottom line to the tune of £120m next year.…

No, your snooping boss did not breach your human rights, Euro court tells sacked Frenchman A Frenchman who was fired after his bosses discovered porn stored on his work computer has been told his human rights were not violated by his employers' snooping.…

Drafts in corp restructuring biz Alix Partners to cut costs, improve margins Veritas Technologies has hired a corporate restructuring specialist in the face of business difficulties.…

Dips Zen toes into embedded world with hot new SoCs The "other" X86 mill-maker, AMD, has unveiled its efforts to position its Zen architecture kit as an embedded solution for networking, storage, edge and industrial devices: a brace of Epyc and Ryzen processors.…

Well, guess it's nearly the weekend Updated The keys Control, C and V are gathering dust around the world as Stack Overflow went for an uscheduled nap last night before going into full blown TITSUP* mode today.…

Paying people better matters just as much. Maybe more so Analysis Oh dear. If all this new technology is so amazing, why isn’t it translating into productivity gains?…

Rolling out (and scraping) the barrel of computing history Something for the Weekend, Sir? Telephone operator, please put me through to… What's that? You want me to address you by your first name? Well, that's jolly friendly. I'm (thinks quickly, decides to use Starbucks name) "Alex". And how should I call you? Right.…