The Register

Telco gives 5% to staff, 5% for capex, windfall for shareholders AT&T lobbied hard for tax cuts in the US – and that effort has rather paid off. Thanks to the President-Trump-championed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the telco revealed this week it rounded out 2017 with some stonking financial figures.…

We'll buy the J/V from you so you can use the cash to buy us, goddit? Fujifilm has announced a $US6.1 billion deal to take control of troubled Xerox.…

Redmond remains upbeat despite quarterly loss Microsoft Surface Pro 4 owners are up in arms over what they claim is an ongoing epidemic of screen failures blighting their expensive fondleslabs.…

Even the bribery scandals are depressing in that city The boss of an IT services provider bribed a top Detroit city official to win lucrative contracts for his biz, prosecutors in the US have claimed.…

Screw asking for digi-coins. Just craft 'em on victims' computers For the past few years, ransomware has been a bane of computer users. These software nasties infect PCs, scramble files, and demand payment in cryptocurrency to restore the documents.…

Doomed: Junkware claiming it can rid PCs of viruses, clean up the Registry, etc Microsoft will tighten the screws on scummy developers who use scare tactics to frighten people – particularly non-tech savvy folks – into paying for unnecessary software.…

Partisan nonsense engulfs law enforcement Analysis The FBI has slammed a still-secret memo that claims the bureau was politically motivated when it requested a wiretap on a key advisor of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.…

Auto-pwn code glues device search engine Shodan to Metasploit weapons cache Python code has emerged that automatically searches for vulnerable devices online using Shodan.io – and then uses Metasploit's database of exploits to potentially hijack the computers and gadgets.…

We leave huge digital paper trails, but biz can still do more Secure end-to-end encrypted comms is a desirable technology that governments should stop trying to break, especially as there's other information to slurp up on crims, UK politicians were told this week.…

Yep, vulns of WannaCry infamy. Why haven't you patched yet? Hackers* have improved the reliability and potency of Server Message Block (SMB) exploits used to carry out the hard-hitting NotPetya ransomware attack last year.…

Array with you! Biz still fixing failed drives A number of Heart Internet customers remain unable to get online for three days thanks to a hosting failure.…

86 per cent leap attributed to memory chip biz Korean tech titan Samsung has posted bumper annual results on the back of high memory chip demand, with yearly operating profit up 83 per cent to 53.7 trillion won (£35.4bn).…

Contract of sale formed between company and backer, not Indiegogo, rules judge A crowdfunding backer of Retro Computers Ltd has won his court claim for a refund against the Brit company for failing to deliver its promised product.…

MPs debate amendments, talk Schwarzenegger in bill's 3rd reading AEV Bill Britain's new network of charging points for battery operated cars should be "iconic and beautiful" just like the telephone box, according the ex-minister in charge of working out their place in the Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill.…

Health committee calls for immediate ban on use of 'unacceptable' agreement NHS Digital must put an immediate stop to patient data-sharing deal with the UK Home Office for immigration enforcement, MPs have said.…

Angry bird: Artist's idea fails to take off An artist was left spitting feathers after United Airlines told her she couldn't board a plane with her "emotional support" peacock.…

Please, Oracle. Seriously? A vulnerability has been unearthed in Oracle MICROS point-of-sale (POS) terminals that allowed hackers to read sensitive data from devices.…

CEO says biz 'too complex' in self-flagellating statement Capita's stock plunged more than 40 per cent today after the firm issued another profit warning, suspended dividends and issued £700m in new shares.…

Critical infrastructure and emergency services need a satellite back-up The UK must reduce the dependency of its critical infrastructure and emergency services on GPS technology to mitigate against the potentially disastrous impact of signal jamming, a government report has warned.…

BT and EE take it all the way to the top BT and EE have appealed to the Supreme Court of the UK against an earlier ruling that made ISPs liable for the costs of blocking copyright infringement websites.…

You better have both app dev and machine learning chops Late last year, Google announced a new mobile library for Tensorflow on mobile devices: Lite.…

Security specialists to command 7% salary hikes, survey finds Cybersecurity specialists will enjoy the highest salary increases among IT professionals with rises of 7 per cent – compared to 2 per cent for devs and 3 per cent for infrastructure experts – according to a survey by recruitment consultancy Robert Walters.…

Container Platform hooks Kubernetes to all the Borg's bits Cisco has decided to throw everything it has at containers by releasing its very own “Container Platform”.…

Developers, developers, developers – sigh – 100,000 of them were booted too! Google has revealed that it booted “more than 700,000 apps” and 100,000 developers out of its Play digital tat bazaar during 2017.…

At head height... don't annoy this bot Vid Researchers have taught a drone to fly autonomously through the streets of Zürich, Switzerland, by using a simple neural network.…

Cough up fat wad of cash – or be tagged for six months with jail hanging over you? Two bogus technical support operations have been shut down over the past two days – but the punishment dished out highlights eyebrow-raising differences between the US and UK in how they deal with these scumbags.…

Behold, the Assurance Engine to make sure networks are following the rules Cisco’s delivered the missing piece of its intent-based networking (IBN) vision and is therefore ready to stand its ground as software-defined networking upstarts try to paint it as a dinosaur.…

Gin Palace says cloud customers just aren't buying what it's selling Juniper Networks has announced a drop in revenue for Q4 2017 and predicted Q1 2018 will disappoint.…

Secret cabinet documents found in filing cabinet sold because someone lost the key The Australian government has suffered what must as one of the most ridiculously embarrassing security breach in its history: cabinet records from five successive governments were sent to a second-hand furniture store.…

Think of it as CORBA brought screaming into the 21st century and you'll begin to understand Microsoft's Azure Event Grid, a service launched as preview last August, has attracted enough fans for Redmond to push it into general availability.…

‘Many companies advertising ICOs and cryptocurrencies are not operating in good faith’ Facebook’s banned ads for cryptocurrencies from its platform, on suspicion that plenty of them will be placed by scammers.…

Open-source firms hook up for $250m Enterprise Linux biz Red Hat on Tuesday said it has reached an agreement to acquire CoreOS, a maker of open source container software, for $250 million.…

Chipmaker grows revenues 34 per cent, investors are meh AMD says it managed to boost revenues by 34 per cent as its Ryzen and Radeon chip lines rack up sales.…

Chipmaker grows revenues 34 per cent, investors are meh AMD says it managed to boost revenues by 34 per cent as its Ryzen and Radeon chip lines rack up sales.…

File under: 'Good luck with that' A handful of university professors are calling on the mayors of US cities to let common sense prevail and refrain from offering Amazon tax cuts and other incentives for its new campus.…

I'm gonna do to doctors what I did to bookstores! Stocks in US health companies are down sharply after Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett announced they want to get into the healthcare business.…

Sessions sets up task force for dopes' dope dope crack down The US Attorney General has set up a task force of FBI agents and tech nerds to further smoke out online peddlers of illegal opioids.…

Versions 56 through 58 need patching, pronto Mozilla has patched a nasty security bug in Firefox, affecting versions 56, 57 and 58, and their point updates.…

Kept heist secret until cops cuffed bloke. Now suggests – gulp – super-pwned Equifax for the afflicted Australian car sharing company GoGet today admitted to a June 2017 data breach that includes drivers licence details, payment card numbers and other personal data, but said it did not disclose the matter until now on the advice of Police.…

F U FCC say lawmakers as bill passes to Assembly California has moved one step closer to passing net neutrality legislation in defiance of a decision by America's telecoms regulator, the FCC, to scrap the protections nationwide.…

SEC goes to court to freeze upstart to protect investors America's financial watchdog today suspended an initial coin offering (ICO) from AriseBank, claiming it's a scam.…

False text probe reveals screw up after screw up The individual who sent an emergency text to everyone in Hawaii warning them of an imminent missile attack did not hit the wrong button as first claimed – and was actually convinced a real attack was happening.…

They'll have to show volcanic growth, though Some $15m has just been shoveled into Igneous Systems by venture capitalists to further develop the upstart's Arm-powered petabyte-scale unstructured data backup, archive and storage box that has a public cloud backend.…

дураки вы западники, ничего не знаете The effect of Russian trolls influencing opinion through social media is far more minor than commonly supposed, according to a new study.…

Bijou robo-courier powered by electricity and $92m in VC cash Self-driving startup Nuro has unveiled its autonomous delivery vehicle today – as well as $92m (£65.17m) in funding.…

*Cough* Bulk of sales still licences and support *cough* SAP has reported a boost in cloud bookings in its full-year results and announced a $2.4bn deal to buy cloudy sales tracking biz Callidus Software.…

Of course this does nothing for victims' encrypted files Cybercriminals are using Tor proxies to divert ransomware payments to their own Bitcoin wallets.…

Altitude Angel to use cash to swoop on Europe, N America Drone safety biz Altitude Angel has swept up $4.5m (£3.19m) in series-A funding, it has announced today.…

The Morissette meter! It's off the scale! A Norwegian airline flight carrying scores of plumbers was forced to make an unplanned break because of a persistent problem with the onboard water closet.…