The Register

Fidelity wanted to 'tell the other side of the story' with astroturfing dot-com Analysis Cable biz Fidelity Communications has been forced to admit it was behind an astroturfing campaign against a city-run fiber network in America's Midwest.…

El Reg says: Ignore the Big Red Planet lobby, get your ASCII to Europa SpaceX today parked Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster in Earth's orbit, using a Falcon Heavy lifter, with a rocket strapped to the flash motor to take it on to Mars.…

Part may be rattling inside 5th-gen machines, can cause fires Lenovo has recalled its flagship Thinkpad X1 Carbon laptops because some may literally have a screw loose.…

Falcon Heavy blasts off, 2 boosters return, 1 destroyed Video After years of setbacks, SpaceX today successfully launched its Falcon Heavy three-in-one rocket and delivered into orbit its cherry-red payload – Elon Musk's very own Tesla Roadster.…

Emergency patch lands, shuts pair of remote exploitable holes, one used by Norks Adobe has issued an emergency security patch for two bugs in its Flash player – after North Korea's hackers were spotted exploiting one of the flaws to spy on people investigating the creepy hermit nation.…

Startup CEO admits he lied about education, wealth It turns out bullshitting your way to fame and fortune is illegal in California's playground of tech startups, rather than a viable business model. Who knew?…

L-F-R-U-D-L-R-U-F: Welcome to the cube Extremely well-funded startup Rubrik has bought distributed database backer-up and fellow startup Datos IO.…

Bad luck, Ecuador. Your cleaners must really want their cupboard back by now "Mr Assange is not present at court today," said the judge who denied the cupboard-dwelling WikiLeaker's latest bid to make legal proceedings against him go away.…

Rackmount server competition for PowerEdge 14G Xeon SP rackers Dell is producing one- and two-socket rackmount servers using AMD Epyc processors alongside its Xeon SP server family.…

Minister promises strategy in June – just six years late, then Brit Home Office bods have denied that retaining millions of custody images of people who were never charged falls foul of case law, while asserting that automatic deletion is not technically possible.…

£36m sunk on developing proprietary software Middle-class Brit online supermarket nirvana Ocado posted losses of £500,000 for 2017, down from £12m profit the previous year – largely thanks to its "transformation" into a technology provider flogging robot-operated warehouses.…

Ampere Computing serving against reigning champ using reheated X-Gene tech Carlyle Group-backed Ampere Computing, run by ex-Intel president Renée James, has launched a server-grade Arm system-on-a-chip to take on Chipzilla.…

It's enough to send UK staff on 'mental wellbeing days'. Done that? Talk about Big Blue! IBM's latest redundancy programme for Global Technology Services staff in the UK and Ireland "descended into near farce" after it reopened the voluntary element and told those it had previously agreed to let leave that they now are not going anywhere.…

And social media giants will be the ones to clean it up UK Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered a review of British laws governing online communications in her latest shot at big tech firms.…

Don't panic, Captain Mainwaring! Every single one of the 200 NHS trusts in the UK so far assessed for cyber security resilience has failed an onsite assessment, MPs on the Public Accounts Committee were told yesterday.…

Promises lower prices and faster shipping HPE has taken on Dell and the white boxers in the desktop and tower server space with promises of special, low-priced deals and faster ships.…

Not long left to save £100s You’ve got just one month left to save a bundle of cash on conference and workshop tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London 2018.…

Toil no more, ye 40-year-old DevOps Someone's been kicking up the "NoOps" ant pile again. There it was, sitting there finally rebuilt after the annual upturning, and The Lord of Cartography, Simon Wardley says: "I think you'll find that the new legacy is going to be DevOps." That said, it is winter, so the ants are moving a bit slower than usual.…

Amazon and Huawei did okay, but overall shipments dipped between six and twelve per cent The tablet computer market took a steep dip in 2017 according to analyst firms IDC and Strategy Analytics.…

Sat's battery is full and stuff thought to be broken in 2005 is working again NASA has updated the status of its once-was-lost, now-is-found IMAGE satellite and revealed the bird's power supplies are operational. The space agency will therefore attempt to revive the mission – if it can can money to fund the effort.…

Cisco and Apple kit eligible for better cyber insurance from Allianz Analysis Global mega-insurers Allianz and Aon have just given IT buyers and the security industry plenty to ponder by cooking up a deal with Apple and Cisco that makes users of those companies’ kit eligible for a special class of cyber insurance.…

Patches available, bug affects Alpha and Itanic mainframes Forget Meltdown and Spectre. Someone's found a local privilege escalation in the operating system world's elderly statesman OpenVMS when running it on VAX and Alpha processors.…

Two cuffed on suspicion of US ATM Jackpotting plague US authorities have arrested a pair suspected of being involved in a recent wave of Automatic Teller Machine "Jackpotting" heists.…

The future is female – or at least female friendly While the world worries about savvy computers taking people's jobs, it may want to focus more on how to retrain its men, who are evidently ill-equipped for work that's increasingly social.…

Certificate exchange used as a side-channel before the certs get to work Video A security researcher who last year demonstrated that X.509 certificate exchanges could carry malicious traffic has now published his proof-of-concept code.…

Staff told there’s nothing to see here, get back to work and stop worrying about our debt Dell’s revelation it may reverse-merge with its subsidiary VMware or perform other financial contortions has been dismissed as mere compliance-grade paperwork, by … Dell itself.…

Probing last week's ASA and Firepower flaws found another DDOS to deter Cisco's again asked owners of Adaptive Security Appliances or Firepower Threat Defense Software to patch, after it turned up a new DDOS problem that last patches didn't address.…

New roadmap for Teams does everything but name Skype's death date Microsoft appears to have edged Skype for Business closer to the edge of a cliff.…

PIN 'ignored' – no wonder T-Mob has put out an alert A bloke from Washington is suing T-Mobile USA after miscreants were able to steal his phone number and take all his crypto-coins.…

There's a problem with America's internet? La la la can't hear you, la la la Analysis Fifteen million Americans don't have access to broadband internet. For those that do, the United States has close to the slowest speeds among advanced economies. And for that, Americans pay more than almost anyone else.…

Coders want more than merely moolah, poll finds Analysis Technology platform companies depend on third-party developers to such an extent that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously turned his company's codependence into a mantra, repeating "Developers! Developers! Developers!" as a sign of appreciation.…

Now we've cashed out, here's why everything is terrible A group of ex-Facebook and Google workers, along with venture capital execs, are campaigning to stop their former employers from further screwing up humanity.…

'Mad' Mike living up to his nickname Video An American bloke, who reckons Earth is flat as a frisbee, is on a quest to send himself into space to verify his theory. And on Sunday, he failed to even launch a rocket to a few hundred feet.…

More like Ohsh-itcoin China has become the latest nation to attempt to cripple crypto-coin trading within its borders.…

Language tool maker scrambles to patch info leak flaw A critical flaw in the Chrome extension of Grammarly – the grammar-checking software with online ads second only to Geico in terms of their ability to annoy – has left all 22 million users' personal records available to all.…

Because girls don't like to lick their fingers or drink the crumbs Poll The boss of PepsiCo – the parent company of Doritos – has suggested women need their own lady crisps, apparently so they can keep their mouths quiet and their fingers clean.…

Brit, US prosecutors aren't out of options yet Analysis Accused hacker Lauri Love will not be extradited from the UK to America to stand trial on accusations that he hacked into a number of American government agencies, the High Court ruled this morning.…

'Active defence' strategy review says all is peachy one year on GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre claims that its strategy of "actively defending" the UK against high-volume commodity attacks is working.…

Refreshes SMB-sized deduping backup-to-disk box Down in the Dell there is a new Data Domain box – a smallish, entry-level one – the DD3300.…

Where do you start? The IT department's transition from being an on-premises owner and manager of an IT equipment stack which provisions and plans data compute, storage and networking to being a responsive services provider is a 2018 priority for many.…

B-b-b.. is that the sound of a bubble bursting? Lloyds bank has stopped credit card customers from buying bitcoin, amid concerns of a credit risk surrounding the cryptocurrency's rapidly falling value.…

Korean flasher poised to enter enterprise SSD market SK Hynix, currently focused on client SSDs, is posed to enter the enterprise SSD market with 72-layer 3D NAND tech.…

Reports say it wants to slap $120bn-$145bn big ones on table Chip slinger Broadcom has turned up the heat on its hostile bid to take over rival Qualcomm today, with the semiconductor biz expected to raise its offer by between $15bn-$40bn (£10.7bn-£28bn).…

Cams on in Cardiff as activists decry 'infringement' of rights South Wales Police deployed facial recognition technology in Cardiff this weekend, making multiple arrests using the controversial kit.…

High Court nixes earlier legal order that would have sent him abroad Accused hacker Lauri Love will not be extradited to United States to stand trial, the High Court of England and Wales ruled today.…

Lee Jae-yong to challenge remaining corruption allegations The heir to Samsung, Lee Jae-yong, has been freed with a suspended sentence after spending a year in jail on charges of offering bribes to the disgraced former president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye.…

Data wrangler seeks injunctions for 'breaches of duty' Hortonworks is suing a former sales manager accused of taking contracts for himself and his next employer, according to court documents seen by The Register.…

How'd data leave country? Yep, control-V'd into a rando app the user set up Once upon a time, you’d go into the office, do your work during the day at your desk, then leave everything behind and go home. Well, end users would - IT workers have been lugging home the on-call laptop since the dial-up modem was invented.…

£10m revamp warms up Cold War site – but chunks of it are still a holiday lodge The Royal Air Force has moved one of its air defence radars onto the northern tip of the Shetland Islands as Cold War-era fears about Russian military movements start warming up again.…

Calls to iron out age-verification method and appeals process Peers have rubber-stamped the British Board of Film Classification as the regulator for age checks on porn websites, but voiced concerns over delays in issuing guidance.…