The Register

Review of job ads pins average salary at £47k The average salary offered to data scientists in the past year was £47,000, with Python being the most desirable programming language, according to an analysis of job ads.…

NHS most trusted with our info, survey says, social media isn't The British public are much more likely to hand over personal data to an organisation they know than one they don't, and are willing to accept a trade-off if it will help science – or themselves.…

(In)Essential device shipped just 88,000 units last year Essential's much-hyped debut phone failed to reach six-figure sales last year, despite heavy discounts.…

Brought to you by those who 'understand necessary hashtags' UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced a tool that purports to detect and block jihadist content online, and tech companies may end up being legally required to use it.…

Selfie-satisfied to augment reality with their mugs On the November 3, 2017, Brad Dwyer set to work unearthing the mysteries of Apple’s released-that-day iPhone X and its strange new TrueDepth camera. The engineer and entrepreneur wanted to create an app to leverage that new forward-facing face-scanning camera - to build one of the in a first generation of "face-driven games - but how?…

Campaign to move a Bombe into historic Block H The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) has organised a whip-round to move a historic code-breaking computer into a new location at Bletchley Park.…

ScaleFlux and NGD aim to wrangle data at drive-level Part 2 Bringing compute to data aims to knock stored data access latency on its head by not moving masses of data across networks to host servers. Bringing compute to disk drives is facing an uphill struggle, but flash drives, with their much faster access, might have an easier time of it.…

Your security is only as good as your partners' ability to fix messes and flush caches A couple of weeks ago Jeff quit his job at the Singaporean branch of a major enterprise technology vendor that is, if not quite a household name, certainly known to most IT professionals.…

Don't touch that AI – model fiddling can skew algorithm output, study shows Bit boffins from universities in China and the US have devised a way to tamper with deep learning models so they produce misleading results.…

Even with a representative data set to learn from, software gets worse the darker your skin Commercial AI is great at recognising the gender of white men, but not so good at doing the same job for black women.…

Welcome to Planet Frustration, which sounds lovely but won't play nice with others A teardown of Apple's HomePod, the company's answer to Amazon’s Echo and Google's Home devices, confirms suggestions that Cupertino was working on advanced audio technology before semi-sentient speakers took off.…

Flowering fleet will still leave trail Azure and AWS Oracle has announced plans to build a dozen new cloud data centres.…

Seeks $4bn to build glorious workers palaces and diversify beyond boring old iPhones Foxconn wants to spin out part of itself, perhaps including a facilities used to build either iPhones or chips for smartmobes, so it can diversify into cloudy and 5G products.…

Microsoft hired her, but Big Blue sues to stop her exporting its succession planning secrets Microsoft has named Lindsay-Rae McIntyre as its Chief Diversity Officer and IBM has sued to stop it happening.…

Pwned credit-score biz quietly admits more info lost Last year, Equifax admitted hackers stole sensitive personal records on 145 million Americans and hundreds of thousands in the UK and Canada.…

Sleepless in Seattle after shakeup Amazon has confirmed a round of job cuts are taking place at its headquarters in Seattle, USA.…

The numbers, not the spin, from nbn™'s half-year presentation and corporate plan nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network, is the subject of endless controversy.…

Demands blanket rather than specific repo shutdowns Apple's fruitless attempts to remove its leaked iBoot source code from the internet have escalated into requests to have community code site GitHub disable all downstream forks made from identified infringing repositories.…

Cheer up – by 2030, we'll have flying cars, too President Trump's administration has handed down a budget for 2019 to NASA – and it effectively kills off key projects in exchange for a vague promise to go back to the Moon.…

Chocolate Factory overhauls search engine to end brouhaha Google's deal this month with stock-photo agency Getty to end their legal spat carries one very noticeable provision: an overhaul of the "View image" button in Google Images search results.…

Sigh with relief, fellow geeks, if you're using them on your home or business network You will never be able to own an official .home, .mail or .corp domain name or email address on the public internet.…

TensorFlow math accelerators available to rent Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips are now available to rent on its cloud platform as a beta-grade service.…

Redmond extends ATP to older builds, adds third-party links Microsoft has back-ported its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) antivirus tool from Windows 10 to Windows 7 and 8.1.…

Huge advertiser threatens to turn off Zuck's money tap In a highly unusual public rebuke, monster-company Unilever gave Facebook both barrels over its "toxic content" – and threatened to pull its advertising from the antisocial network.…

Court favours consumer group in long-running dispute A German court has ruled that Facebook has not done enough to alert people to the pre-ticked privacy settings on its mobile app.…

Chinese firm blows past costly Cisco and Lenovo Analysis Behind the numbers in Gartner's third 2017 quarter server tracker are some startling revelations concerning Cisco's server pricing and Inspur's arrival as a top-three supplier.…

Tweak VFAT volume to execute arbitrary code A recently resolved flaw in the KDE Linux desktop environment meant that files held on a USB stick could be executed as soon as they were plugged into a vulnerable device.…

If you can fly bombs through there, you can fly parcels, too Military efforts to approve the flying of Predator military drones through Britain’s skies could pave the way for point-to-point drone deliveries, newly disclosed correspondence has revealed.…

Firm in mega cloud tech push Oracle has announced plans to roll out its self-described autonomous technology to all of its Platform-as-a-Service products.…

Short-term greed risks long-term irrelevance Analysis Rarely has a phone been as widely trailed as Samsung's 2018 Galaxy flagship. When the S9 is formally unveiled in Barcelona in a fortnight there will be few surprises – not only are the design and specs widely leaked but so are the carrier variants. But what does Samsung want from its phone range – and what does the world actually need?…

Don't pay the miscreants – don't even fix a price Free decryption keys for the Cryakl ransomware were released last Friday – the fruit of an ongoing cybercrime investigation.…

More kit to boost connectivity in rural UK Vodafone has unveiled an eight-metre high "telescopic" 4G mast, intended to boost speeds in rural areas to 200Mpbs, following a trial in Porthcurno, Cornwall, UK.…

Civil rights groups slam trial as 'breathtakingly invasive' A police force in Yorkshire has been kitted out with fingerprint scanners to run identity checks in the street.…

Cambridge comes to Clerkenwell to talk Existential Risk A sneaking fear that the machines might turn on us is just not good enough - we need to be able to quantify that risk if we want to avoid it, or at least manage it. Or we could just push on regardless and see how things work out.…

Quickly now, before the suits show up Open Source Insider The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit that advocates for open-source software and coined the term, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It's difficult to conceive of where the internet, indeed the world, would be today were it not for open-source software and, perhaps more importantly, the free software movement that preceded it and continues to promote free software today.…

Magic quadrant shows HPE has its work cut out Analysis What a difference a year makes: just 12 little months ago HPE was ruling the integrated systems roost, but fast forward and it has slipped behind as Nutanix and Dell EMC streak ahead - the latter with help from its VSAN gear.…

That's 'I hit the power button my mistake, SIR!' Do you understand? Who, Me? Welcome to the fourth edition of Who, Me?, The Register's new column in which techies share their shameful secrets.…

Voice assistants get samples of our voice that can be remixed and faked In the middle of the night, the 83-year-old woman received a call. A caller identifying himself as a policeman angrily reported that her grandson – identified by name – had landed in jail. He'd hit a policeman while driving and TXTing.…

Netflix chap and predicts streamer will cop slowdown between 0.1% and 6% Netflix engineer, dTrace Daddy and famed shouter at hard disk drives Brendan Gregg has cooked up a "microbenchmark" to assess the Linux kernel page table isolation (KPTI) patch for the Meltdown CPU design flaw and come up with predictions of significant-but-manageable performance degradation.…

Nematode only has 300 neurons - a snack to simulate Boffins from the Technische Universität Wien have created a simulated brain, run it in a computer and taught it a trick.…

That's if the ITU can get telcos talking standards, and it looks like it can There's a race to apply machine learning to networking applications (especially for 5G), and as so often happens in periods of frenzied development, there's an emerging standardisation gap the International Telecommunications Union hopes to fix.…

Also: Big Blue's Meltdown, Spectre status updated, and a mystery bug in AIX IBM has warned that bugs in its Notes auto-updater mean the service can be tricked into running malicious code.…

Global government affairs Veep wants trade rules to apply Huawei has told an Australian parliamentary committee it believes national security is sometimes being used to hide protectionist trade policies.…

There was nothing to see here, but please move along, nothing to see here, say authorities The Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics' website went down just before the event's Friday opening ceremony, thanks to a cyber-attack, and stayed down for about 12 hours.…

Biz scrambles to shut down crafty coin crafting operation Thousands of websites around the world – from the UK's NHS and ICO to the US government's court system – were today secretly mining crypto-coins on netizens' web browsers for miscreants unknown.…

Lax policies, coder laziness don't mix well Analysis The sudden departure of a developer from GitHub, along with the Go code packages he maintained, has underscored a potential security issue with the way some developers rely on code distributed through the community site.…

But it's not all good news! Roundup Here's a roundup of this week's security news, beyond what we've already covered, to kickstart your weekend.…

Bloke claims expensive audio kit detonated mid-workout A Florida man claims one of his Apple AirPods blew up as he worked out at the gym.…

Funds to prop up critical service diverted to bankroll other stuff, watchdog not impressed The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has warned that multiple US states are using money designated for emergency services to fund other unrelated projects.…

Don't mean to harsh your buzz: Hackers weed out access hole The US state of Washington says a miscreant was able to access the system it uses to track the manufacturing and sale of marijuana.…