The Register

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.…

Cops frustrated by lack of movement in the case A suspected drug dealer accused of swallowing his stash has become internet famous – after refusing to take a dump, and thus provide the cops their evidence, for 22 DAYS and counting.…

Nor C-- or Should Have Used Go or Screw Ellison... Unable to convince Oracle to allow the use of its trademarked term "Java" to refer to the open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the Eclipse Foundation is asking those who care about such things to vote on proposed names for the software project.…

Travis: A pain in the ASCII right to the end Comment The man responsible for dragging the reputation of one of the tech world's biggest names through the mud, into the gutter, and in circles around raw sewage has claimed today's out-of-court Waymo-Uber settlement vindicates him.…

Kremlin goes nuclear on sly digi-cash-crafting eggheads Engineers at Russia's top nuclear weapons lab have been arrested – after the eggheads were caught using one of the supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency.…

Taxi app biz expresses 'regret' for being scumbag outfit Analysis It was just one more twist in an extraordinary story: this morning Uber settled its San Francisco court battle with rival Waymo for $245m in stock.…

Waving bye to some execs, 3% of grunts + real estate helped too Tax reforms in the US helped shore up the bottom line of cost hurling Frankenfirm DXC Technologies, but the top line slid at the company for third straight quarter since it came into being.…

Bitter legal brouhaha ends with smiles... from Uber, anyway Uber and Google-owned self-driving car biz Waymo have reached a settlement in the infamous lawsuit between the two.…

Who else will dish the storage dish? What went on in storageland this week, you ask? Keep your saucer level, but we had Cisco saying its kit will be needed because the cloud is spreading, Delphix snuggling up to SAP, Zerto going even more multi-cloud, plus a good few smaller items.…

CEO stresses biz is more than just a Hadoop-flinger now Data biz Hortonworks shaved $50m off its operating losses in 2017, describing the year as "pivotal", as it continues efforts to rebrand itself as more than just Hadoop.…

'Pon their Oath, they're not having this Should a court-appointed lawyer be allowed to rifle through your email account after you die? The artist formerly known as Yahoo! has asked the US Supreme Court to answer that question for users in the United States.…

Problem? It's, er, only 60 calls per UK resident UK communications regulator Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office have awarded themselves a pat on the back for reducing the amount of nuisance calls in the islands to a mere 3.9 billion last year.…

Social media titans take heat over kremlebots and fake news No matter their protestations, the big tech firms will always be asked to do more to tackle the manifestations of society's problems on their platforms. And yesterday's four-hour evidence session in front of British parliamentarians was no different.…

Top suggestion: eat the thing! Giveaway The winner of our “what would you do with a terrible Morrisons Yorkshire Pudding Pizza concoction” competition can, at long last, be announced to Reg readers of the Great British Public and beyond.…

Speeds of 100Mbps to reach rural areas – for a fee EE is launching a "shoebox"-sized 4G antenna, which it claims could bring coverage to 580,000 UK homes in rural areas.…

4bit/cell SSDs coming soon to attack nearline disk drive sales Later this year Micron plans to release quad-level cell flash drives that encroach on the nearline disk drive market.…

Comms providers dodge bills for six years of customer entries BT has quietly withdrawn its threat to charge communications providers millions in six years' worth of back bills for special-entry listings in its phone book.…

A blinga, a blanga, a bippety bop, I'm going down to the record shop YEAH! Something for the Weekend, Sir? I once tried to do it standing on one leg, arms pressed against the wall for stability.…

Are you going to power and cool the lot? For all of its advances, the IT sector’s first five decades could be characterised as the electronic storing of systems of record.…

And somehow the goofball sci-fi franchise is still going strong On a cold, dry evening of February 9, 1968, cinemagoers at New York's venerable Capitol Theatre were the first members of the public to be taken to a new but worryingly familiar world.…

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will write and produce series set in bits of the Lucasverse Game of Thrones fans hoping that show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss might spend more time in Westeros will have to visit a galaxy far, far away instead after Disney signed the pair for a series of Star Wars flicks.…

Don't blame AI, blame the creeps who put famous heads onpr0n actors' bodies Fake AI-generated pornography has been banned by sites including Reddit and Pornhub, but others operations say they're fine with the practice of putting celerities' faces on porn actresses' bodies.…

Whois and ICANN – the Sonny and Cher of internet policy Incoming European privacy laws which carry a global impact for anyone doing business in the Union are continuing to cause an epic policy meltdown at internet overseer ICANN.…

You drained the air-conditioner where, exactly? And now I've stepped in it ... On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, in which The Register celebrates users' many, many failures by sharing your stories of being asked to clean up behind them.…

But cryptocurrency not growing for the GPU giants Nvidia’s grip on the GPU market continues to strengthen as it reported its excellent quarterly and full year revenues compared to last year.…

Chefs scramble after mistake turns 1,500 into 15,000 A group of Norwegian chefs blames Google Translate after the applications improperly ordered 1500 eggs to 15.000.…

Brushes off latest $121bn bid as too low, too risky, but is willing to discuss deal Qualcomm's rejected Broadcom's latest attempt to buy it, but has also said it is willing to discuss doing a deal.…

Proper patches under way, but for now - to your command lines, vAdmins! VMware's advised on how to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre chip design flaws in several of its products.…

First Semi-Annual release lands with lots of fun for Windows admins and the hybrid cloud crowd Microsoft's delivered the first Semi-Annual Chanel version of System Centre.…

Container storage tech gets adopted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation The organization overseeing container juggling system Kubernetes has decided to befriend a storage project.…

Get patching – there's this auth bypass and loads of other bugs If you're using a Netgear router at home, it's time to get patching. The networking hardware maker has just released a tsunami of patches for a couple of dozen models of its kit.…

Open Source Security balks at 'outrageous' lawyer rates Having defeated a defamation claim for speculating that using Grsecurity's Linux kernel hardening code may expose you to legal risk under the terms of the GPLv2 license, Bruce Perens is back in court.…

Now both halves of Congress consider banning Chinese goliaths' tech within govt Both halves of the US Congress are now mulling draft laws that would ban American government workers from using phones, network switches and other gear built by Chinese communications giants ZTE and Huawei.…

AGs cry foul over Google's $8.5m class-action settlement A group of 16 US state attorneys general are urging America's Supreme Court to tear up an $8.5m legal settlement from Google – because none of the cash will go to the folks the class-action lawsuit was brought on behalf of.…

Mining Monero on SCADA networks? Why can't you kids be normal and just DDoS Updated Infosec bods say they have uncovered what's thought to be the first case of a major industrial control system network infected with cryptocurrency-mining malware.…

139 months. How fitting for an originally 140-character blog biz After 11 years and seven months in operation, and billions and billions of dollars in losses, Twitter today said it is, at long last, a profitable business.…

Shame! Shame! says carrot-dangling Google Three years ago, Google's search engine began favoring in its results websites that use encrypted HTTPS connections.…

Google Chrome will warn HTTP websites are 'not secure' this summer Three years ago, Google began weighing whether websites implemented HTTPS security as a signal in its search ranking algorithm.…

$250k went into orbit with that Roadster Elon Musk may be entertaining world+dog with his impressive space invasion but back on terra firma his electric car biz Tesla has just reported its fattest ever quarterly loss.…

Thousands of personal details taken unlawfully, court finds A staffer at an accident repair biz has had to pay almost £1,000 after he sold customers' personal data to cold-calling firms.…

There was supposed to be more to 'hyper-connected' standard than that A European commissioner raised concerns in a private letter to mobile operators and the network infrastructure industry – seen by The Register – that the 5G project is not working out according to plan.…

Cyberlibertarian and Grateful Dead lyricist passes away at 70 Obit John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation, and also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died aged 70.…

Too many staff, too few claimants, in-house ID system with 50% success rate... Many Brits are still unable to access the "digital-only" version of Universal Credit, the delayed and much-derided welfare reform intended to roll six benefits into one single payment – according to MPs.…

Arbitration in ongoing age bias battle can be fought together, says judge A group of ex-HP staffers who claim they were discriminated against due to their age have been granted the right to together keep fighting an arbitration case against the IT giant.…

Welcomes new CFO too It's boom time in Micron flash and DRAM land with increased revenue expectations for the current quarter. And it has hired a new CFO.…

New event for infosec pros Promo Are you confident you could defend your IT systems against an unexpected attack? Could you spot the early signs of an incursion coming from any direction, as roving bands of hackers, data thieves and other miscreants grow ever more ingenious and determined?…

So laggy, no likey Part 1 Bringing compute to data sounds like a great way to bypass storage access bottlenecks but progress is difficult because of software issues, the need to develop special hardware and a non-x86 environment.…

Shares drop 12% as biz slashes dividends to raise capital TalkTalk plans to bring full fibre speeds of 1Gbps to three million premises, by creating an independent company with a total investment of around £1.5bn.…

Joe Public has gone off smart machines, but biz is mad for it When British Prime Minister Theresa May bigged up AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, it was as if she had nothing better to talk about.…