The Register

Gov’s bid to keep cash in data protection watchdog’s coffers The UK government has revealed plans to increase the top tier of annual fees for data controllers from £500 to £2,900 in an attempt to ensure the Brit privacy watchdog has enough cash to function.…

Cisco report: Smacked orgs forked out $500k due to attacks Cyber security breaches were twice as severe in the past year, with total financial losses reaching $500,000 (£356,00) per business, according to an extensive survey of CISOs across the globe.…

Cisco report: Smacked orgs forked out $500k due to attacks Cyber security breaches were twice as severe in the past year, with total financial losses reaching $500,000 (£356,00) per business, according to an extensive survey of CISOs across the globe.…

Hands on with the reborn Psion Exclusive It's here. They've really gone and done it, made a modern Psion: a brand new computer that fits in your pocket and that you can touch-type on and everything.…

Serious flaws found in Chinese family webcam – new claim More than 52,000 internet-connected Mi-Cam baby monitors are broadcasting sound and video to whoever comes looking, researchers have claimed.…

Do we mean methane? You're darn tootin' The European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is to conduct its final aerobraking manoeuvre this evening prior to starting its mission of sniffing for Martian methane.…

Cryptocurrency trend moves into publishing as Salon comes up with plan to make customers pay US website Salon.com has decided that if people want to block its ads, they should pay in another way - by allowing the biz to use their computing power to mine for cryptocurrency.…

Boffins' plan to prime the public against misinformation nice idea but misses mark Separating fact from fiction is a very different challenge in the fake news age, and there’s no end of people ready to opine on how to do it. Now boffins from famed Brit university Cambridge have decided to get in on the action by launching a game to "vaccinate" the public against it.…

The Blackwell says data can help capital cope with 1m more bods Cynics could be forgiven for seeing the Mayor of London’s newly created six-figure chief digital officer role as a policy wonk title. Speaking to The Register on a rainy morning at City Hall, Theo Blackwell describes it as "a digital leadership role".…

It can't be worse than RT - and isn't Comment Perhaps more by accident or design, Microsoft managed to lower expectations for Windows on Arm last week – but not set them so low it kills off interest in the platform.…

'Your data is waiting for the internet to download it' warning lights are now free Amazon Web Services has signalled it's still worried about poorly configured buckets in its Simple Storage Service (S3) by making one of the tools to manage them free.…

Cue virtual outrage and actual culture wars skirmishes The FreeBSD project completely updated its code-of-conduct in early February, complete with a definition of "harassment" that included "Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like "*hug*" or "*backrub*") without consent or after a request to stop." And as will happen these days, considerable controversy and vivid online debate as been the result.…

Raghunath Nambiar is also a player on the Transaction Processing Performance Council Exclusive AMD's push into servers has accelerated just a little after the chip-maker wooed Cisco's chief technology officer for UCS servers to join its ranks.…

Also bad: Unpatched systems, unsecured APIs, IoT gear, anthrax candy, bottomless pits An extraordinary 43 per cent of all attempted online account logins are malicious, Akamai claims in its latest internet security report.…

All right! Now let's get regula– uh, debating, study concludes AI experts have emitted a lengthy report spitballing how intelligent software may be turned against us humans in the near future.…

Booth manager claims she was stiffed on overtime, Redmond denies any wrongoing A former Microsoft retail manager is suing the software giant for making her work long hours without overtime and breaks.…

At least it only wants to break crypto after getting a warrant Australia's home affairs minister Peter Dutton has waded into the global crypto debate, uttering the familiar demand that the tech sector provide what the politicians want while adding that the government will protect Australians from cyber-threats.…

Switchzilla wants telcos to let it drive all their kit, regardless of who made it Cisco's extended its Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) and WAN Automation Engine in the hope that service providers will see them as a way to achieve automated management of all the kit in their networks, regardless of who made it.…

Eye see what you did, there, machine-learning boffins AI researchers at Google have developed algorithms that can assess the risk of heart attacks by analyzing retinal scans.…

When Australians buy apps on the Store, punters' sales taxes will come on shore Microsoft Australia's taken further steps to ensure that Australia's goods and services tax (GST) is collected on apps sold at the Microsoft Store.…

'We're Java experts' Index At the first IBM Index developer conference in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, I spent the morning at a Kubernetes workshop learning that when apps on the IBM Cloud Container Service fail to deploy, the reason may not be obvious.…

Tech recycler fights prison term for handing out recovery CDs A California electronics recycler is fighting to stay out of jail after he admitted copying thousands of Windows reinstallation discs for use with refurbished PCs.…

Trainees spent months prepping for web assessment... that fell over hours in Imagine you'd just spent 18 months of your life working towards a big certification exam that could make or break your career and, come the big day, the web-hosted test fell over.…

Refunds for missing bank account cash trickle through Customers of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase are still virtually in the dark regarding mysterious withdrawals made from their bank accounts that, in some cases, have apparently left some unlucky punters broke and facing overdraft fees.…

Let's do a quick reality check Reg reader survey The march of automation is unavoidable. This is as true in IT as it is in any other profession. From a jobs perspective, some people will win and some will lose. Either way, things will often get shaken up and the status quo threatened.…

Hold it right there, Charter Charter still has to answer for selling New Yorkers short on their internet packages, a judge has decided, rejecting the cable giant's argument that the repeal of net neutrality rules in the US means the case is moot.…

Watchdog steps in after box found fuzzing up signals America's comms watchdog, the FCC, has ordered a bloke in Brooklyn, New York, to turn off his cryptocurrency miner – after the box interfered with nearby T-Mobile US cellphone towers.…

Spectrum goes all NASty, FlashSystem base box getting NVMe fabric access IBM is adding filer software to its storage offerings, NVMe fabric access to its base all-flash array, and other features across its storage portfolio in a bumper Big Blue storage news day.…

And how is sir implementing that geofencing idea? Vodafone is working on an airborne drone detection system based on 4G M2M mobile phone technology, the Brit-based network operator said this morning.…

Increased offer gives shareholders food for thought While fending off unwanted advances from a determined suitor, chip-maker Qualcomm has had an increased bid for NXP Semiconductors accepted.…

There are now 30 million X-shaped holes in Apple's estimates. Ouch Samsung has provided confirmation that iPhone X sales are way below Apple's estimates for the much-hyped, tenth anniversary special. The miscalculation could end up benefitting Android owners.…

Campaigners blame gov bods' growing hunger for big data Britain's local governments were hit by almost 100 million cyber attacks in the last five years, while one in four councils’ systems were successfully breached, according to research.…

Tired travellers floored by perfectly poured pints Not content with wowing the world with the posterior polishing wizardry of their electronic toilet seats, the Japanese have turned their attention to that other first world problem: pouring of the perfect pint.…

It's another whopper: Fabulous capacity or blast radius nightmare Samsung has finally got its 31TB SSD into manufacturing, catching up with Toshiba's similarly well-endowed SAS flash package.…

Flight Sim Labs tips a bucket of fresh aviation fuel onto malware flames Virtual pilots were excited to download the latest update from Microsoft's Flight Simulator Add-On wrangler, Flight Sim Labs, featuring updates to the Airbus A320 model, but their delight was then tempered with anger.…

'We didn't strictly need a marketing chief or a president/ COO' More details have emerged of C-suite axe swinging at Scality with chief marketing officer Paul Turner getting the chop - still he lasted longer than his predecessor.…

Pre-pack administration looms if retailer can't find a new parent Ailing gadget souk Maplin is locked in eleventh-hour talks with a potential buyer of the chain but the company may be placed into the hands of an administrator if an agreement cannot be reached.…

'60 is not a high number,' says press handler. O rly? Exclusive Hard pressed outsourcing titan Capita wrestled with almost sxity separate outages at its data centres in the space of just half a year, The Register can exclusively reveal.…

Come, Morlocks, and step into the world of the design Eloi With all our attention on the Morlocks – down there with the whirring gears of Kubernetes and steaming clouds – it's easy to lose track of the Eloi: those concierges of productivity that smooth out the rough, upper crust of The Stack to make sure your software is actually usable.…

The path to all-IP calls is not smooth. Just ask EE EE has improved the reliability of its voice calls after a bumpy transition to an all-IP mobile network, according to network sleuth RootMetrics.…

Warm wine and sarnies to be served up at 'local' Solutions Days instead Veritas has canned its annual Veritas Vision marketing extravaganza in preference of smaller, regional get togethers for channel and end-user customers.…

Webcam shields, security integration, USB-C and micro-desktops are the moderately hot spots for the PC industry The PC market may be in decline but someone is going to buy about 300 million of them this year. And because The Register knows that plenty of our readers are responsible for PC purchasing, deployment and maintenance … here we are with our annual guide to what's new and notable among the new models from HP, Lenovo and Dell, the top three PC vendors.…

Add Macs, iPads and iPhones to Devices-as-a-service offering HP Ink is probably the world's top PC-maker measured by devices shipped, but has nonetheless started to offer and support Apple devices for its customers.…

There may be some vulnerable cores in switches, but getting to them is hard In the seven weeks since The Register broke the news of the Meltdown/Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities, nearly every corner of the industry has scrambled to patch, re-patch, and work out how to Spectre-proof the world.…

Self-driving cars mistake the Colonel for a Stop sign, which is cruel given a software SNAFU's emptied UK eateries Brits suffering through the nationwide KFC famine can enjoy with wry amusement the fact that an AI can be fooled into thinking an image of Colonel Sanders and the restaurant's logo are a stop sign.…

Israel decides Bitcoin and pals are property, not currency, and attract biblical levels of tax The idea that Bitcoin and its ilk create uncontrollable and un-taxable instruments no government can control has been dealt a blow in Israel, where the local Tax Authority has ruled cryptocurrencies are boring old property.…

The hip world of continuous integration meets the dark world of crypto-jacking Here's a salutary reminder why it pays to patch promptly: a Jenkins bug patched last year became the vector for a multi-million-dollar cryptocurrency mining hijack.…

Sorry to spoil the fun for both of our readers still running them, but support's ended too Microsoft's all-but-euthanized Windows Phone 7.5 and 8.0.…

Oh great - because Google's explained how to make Edge run dodgy code Google has again decided to disclose a flaw in Microsoft software before the latter company could deliver a fix. Indeed, Microsoft has struggled to fix this problem.…

Court of Appeal: Can't kick this out, let's have a trial LG and Samsung may be getting hot under the collar after an English court agreed that the long-running liquid crystal display (LCD) price-fixing cartel case can be reopened.…