The Register

13 billion light years away, so no chance to have a huff Astrophysicists have detected the most distant signal of oxygen yet, in a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away, when the universe was less than 4 per cent of its current age.…

Upcoming 5G storyline could make The FCC a ratings killer In a return to form following weeks of lagging ratings, government reality show The FCC returned to a familiar topic last night – net neutrality – and reaped the benefits.…

Government deal clears the way for a run at JEDI Microsoft has rolled its tanks onto Amazon’s lawn thanks to a multi-million dollar deal to bring its Azure Government product into 17 US intelligence agencies.…

Beccara says extortion scheme immoral and felonious The state of California has brought felony charges against the group behind a site that collected mugshots and police records, then charged those featured to take down the pictures.…

Marty McFly dangles extension lead as miners get busy The energy required by the Bitcoin fad has been forecast to hit half a per cent of the world's entire electricity supply by the end of 2018.…

Wake up, people! Around 1.5 million Brits are spending more than necessary by continuing to pay the same monthly fee for mobile phones after their contracts have expired.…

You better reel in that unsolicited backseat driving Shouting at your sat-nav may now result in something actually happening, whether or not you want it, thanks to Ford and navigation app Waze's inclusion of voice control.…

No margin for error Analysis According to industry watchers, below the surface of Microsoft's Surface business it's not a happy picture.…

Universal credit consultant takes on taxman over IR35 law A public sector IT contractor has won his appeal against Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to pay £26,000 in back taxes under IR35 legislation.…

The eyes have it Identity theft has hit record levels in the UK – the vast majority of incidents are online. The UK's largest cross-sector fraud sharing databases, Cifas recently logged 174,523 incidents finding eight out of 10 took place online.…

When it can be described, it can be automated "I'm about to make a change that will probably wipe out all of our systems."…

Poor users left manually fiddling with thermostats, fumbling locks Google's Nest went TITSUP* early this morning, causing headaches for users who have equipped their home with the expensive smart devices.…

It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under A report on open-source security management and licence compliance may make uncomfortable reading for those who maintain codebases that use the stuff.…

Body failed to protect data of victims of serious sex offences The Information Commissioner's Office has slapped a £325,000 fine on the Crown Prosecution Service for losing unencrypted recordings of highly sensitive police interviews.…

Shenzhen cult gathers the faithful As Chinese phone-maker OnePlus launched its latest phone, co-founder Carl Pei confessed that the company was inspired by cults.…

ISP fined £385k for cable-laying chaos in northern border city Virgin Media is facing a £385,000 fine after its cable expansion plans in the northwest of England wreaked havoc on the streets of Carlisle.…

Defence secretary compares them to... WW2 Lancasters. Just a sec there, Gav Britain's first permanently based F-35B fighter jets are due to arrive in our green and pleasant land in June.…

Outsourcing badboy staring at £3m compensation payout A botched £330m seven-year NHS contract with Capita to outsource back-office support for 39,000 GPs, dentists and opticians was today savaged by the UK government's spending watchdog over its "potential to seriously harm patients".…

Hickory dickory Docker, the containers ran on the clock... er Asteroid, a Linux-based open-source wearable OS, formally reached a big milestone this week, and it might give Tizen a run for Samsung's money.…

Vows customers will have constant online access, no downtime Analysis This month Dell EMC introduced a new technology and rebranded VMAX array called PowerMax. It's more than a software upgrade, though, meaning that you may need to replace a VMAX with a PowerMax array.…

True lies from SEC designed to educate - hang on, what's the interest rate on this thing? The United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) ongoing efforts to crimp dodgy cryptocurrency dealings has seen it create a fake initial coin offering that, ironically, lures the incredulous with an offer to replace one weird pseudo-currency – loyalty scheme points – with cryptocurrency.…

Brussels wants a ‘full and detailed explanation’ – good luck with that, folks! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will visit Brussels in the next week or two to meet with representatives of the European Parliament including “the leaders of the political groups and the Chair and the Rapporteur of the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.”…

Brussels wants a ‘full and detailed explanation’ – good luck with that, folks! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will visit Brussels in the next week or two to meet with representatives of the European Parliament including “the leaders of the political groups and the Chair and the Rapporteur of the Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.”…

Life's suite for hybrid infrastructure running under new RHV update Red Hat’s decided virtual servers ought not to be a standalone silo for much longer, so has created a “Virtualization Suite” that combines Red Hat Virtualization with the CloudForms tool it offers to manage OpenStack and cloud-native applications.…

Python pogrommer may have outed himself on YouTube Already under attack by Russia's telecommunications regulator, a new source of woe has emerged for crypto-chat app Telegram: malware.…

Switchzilla's switches outstripped by code Are you sick of hearing about Cisco's transformation yet? Bad news, then: with its Q3 results in, the company's waving its “we're a software company now” flag so high we may have to drop the “Switchzilla” nickname.…

No deal! No talks! Fake news! China bad! So much winning! United States president Donald Trump has again tried to clarify just what he meant when he Tweeted about protecting jobs at Chinese networking kit-maker ZTE.…

Send enough crafted packets to a NIC to put nasties into RAM, then the fun really starts Hard on the heels of the first network-based Rowhammer attack, some of the boffins involved in discovering Meltdown/Spectre have shown off their own technique for flipping bits using network requests.…

Scan scam? Scram The US Federal government has got its second conviction in the dismantling of a service that helped malware writers get around security software.…

DXC report is in but Tax Office won't say if it will ever see the light of day DXC’s report on the twin outages in HPE 3PAR storage arrays that disrupted web services at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has revealed nothing new about the incidents.…

Switchzilla scrambles out patches for trio of nasty flaws Cisco has issued updates to address a trio of critical vulnerabilities in its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center appliance.…

And seemingly just-about rebuilding it, too nbn™, the company building and operating Australia’s national broadband network (NBN), has revealed a little more about what it's doing to the hybrid fibre-coax networks it uses for some retail customers.…

Republicans at least argue for bipartisan legislation – so sort-of progress? The US Senate has voted to scrap an effort to get rid of net neutrality rules, providing a small but ultimately worthless victory in what has increasingly become a partisan topic in Washington DC.…

See kids, your parents were right - smoking is bad for you A forensics report has reported the first known death from the use of electronic cigarettes after a Florida man was killed when his device exploded and drove itself into his cranium.…

Lawyers want researcher's jailhouse phone transcript removed from case Security researcher Marcus Hutchins has moved to throw out phone transcripts and legal documents related to his hacking and fraud cases.…

Internet address industry given one week to introduce unfinished GDPR policy Thousands of internet registries and registrars will have just one week to overhaul their customer databases to fit with a policy that is still under development, or face ruinous fines.…

Continuous delivery, make way for continuous experimentation If you want a vision of the future of software creation, imagine a boot process spinning up a server, forever.…

Including ZTE? With the threat of Qualcomm litigation receding, Samsung is in talks with ZTE, among others, and ready to license its Exynos phone chips to anyone who wants them. This could lower the costs of high-end mobiles.…

Team hopes to head to South Africa in May 2019 The team behind the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car (SSC) announced plans today to take a crack at the 1,228kmph (763mph) land-speed record at the end of 2019.…

Keep your friends close and your enemas closer… Leaving parties can be an opportunity for more anally retentive colleagues to loosen up and go with the flow. But one woman took that to an extreme by bringing laxative brownies to a send-off bash.…

Calls to scrap 'arbitrary' cap as MPs launch bid to draft reforms Thousands of skilled workers – including IT specialists and engineers – have been refused visas this year due to the British government's much-maligned immigration cap.…

Explore the far frontiers of supercomputing PROMO The annual ISC High Performance conference always draws speakers, exhibitors and researchers from all over the world, and this year’s event promises to be a bumper edition.…

Try fast, frequent and frugal experiments instead At DevOps-focused London conference Continuous Lifecycle* today, Linda Rising challenged the superstition of tech professionals, a group that ought to have some affinity for science.…

Speaks of automation, move into copy data management Veeam customers have been hit by a wave of "hyper-availability" hyperbole.…

Plexxi hoovered up for an undisclosed sum Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to slurp software-defined data fabric networking maker Plexxi for an undisclosed sum.…

'How do I charge my car?' 'No idea, but would you like one of these pills instead?' Owners and fans of Tesla cars seeking support on the company's forums are instead being offered love in all the wrong places.…

Coming to a meeting room near you in 2019 Microsoft confirmed a refresh for its Surface Hub line last night, with new hardware likely to ship sometime in 2019.…

The bloodbath begins Analysis Huawei's decision to cannibalise its own sales with cheaper Primark versions of its own products (branded "Honor") is perhaps the only interesting thing in the phone business right now.…

CEO awaits technical report Updated Manchester-based hosting outfit UKFast has fingered a Cisco switch as the root cause of a service wobble that has caused grief for some customers.…

Puts best face on user biz after miserable results in enterprise Still smarting from last week's dismal annual results, BT today made a raft of announcements for its consumer group, including a converged broadband and mobile network.…