The Register

Calls to scrap 'arbitrary' cap as MPs launch bid to draft reforms Thousands of skilled workers – including IT specialists and engineers – have been refused visas this year due to the British government's much-maligned immigration cap.…

Explore the far frontiers of supercomputing PROMO The annual ISC High Performance conference always draws speakers, exhibitors and researchers from all over the world, and this year’s event promises to be a bumper edition.…

Try fast, frequent and frugal experiments instead At DevOps-focused London conference Continuous Lifecycle* today, Linda Rising challenged the superstition of tech professionals, a group that ought to have some affinity for science.…

Speaks of automation, move into copy data management Veeam customers have been hit by a wave of "hyper-availability" hyperbole.…

Plexxi hoovered up for an undisclosed sum Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to slurp software-defined data fabric networking maker Plexxi for an undisclosed sum.…

'How do I charge my car?' 'No idea, but would you like one of these pills instead?' Owners and fans of Tesla cars seeking support on the company's forums are instead being offered love in all the wrong places.…

Coming to a meeting room near you in 2019 Microsoft confirmed a refresh for its Surface Hub line last night, with new hardware likely to ship sometime in 2019.…

The bloodbath begins Analysis Huawei's decision to cannibalise its own sales with cheaper Primark versions of its own products (branded "Honor") is perhaps the only interesting thing in the phone business right now.…

CEO awaits technical report Updated Manchester-based hosting outfit UKFast has fingered a Cisco switch as the root cause of a service wobble that has caused grief for some customers.…

Puts best face on user biz after miserable results in enterprise Still smarting from last week's dismal annual results, BT today made a raft of announcements for its consumer group, including a converged broadband and mobile network.…

Unmanned fliers' techies chat to El Reg Balancing military and civilian standards for data-crunching and software development for surveillance drones is an interesting challenge, according to unmanned aircraft company Insitu.…

Data Protection Bill ping-pongs as MPs and peers battle over press regulations UK political parties have been urged not to use a "legal loophole" that would allow them to process personal data revealing people's opinions on politics.…

It's our fault the Facebooks and Googles run everything Comment In the same way it has become de rigueur to slag off Facebook for its many privacy sins while billions still dump their data into the service, it's also pretty trendy to pretend that blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions publicly and permanently, offers answers to a new and improved decentralised web that leaves individuals, not Facebook, in charge of their data.…

If you want your fave to survive, you'll need to dig deep If you're new to Linux you'd be forgiven for thinking there are only a half-dozen distributions – names like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux tend to get most of the headlines.…

For all its utility, serverless lacks unicorns and rainbows Continuous Lifecycle "You'll never go hungry if you know AWS," one of the workshop participants at the Continuous Lifecycle* devops-focused conference in London remarked.…

Skylab is 45, Mercury programme turns 55 Two NASA anniversaries rolled around this week, but you would be forgiven for missing them. The first was the 45th anniversary of the launch of the United States' only solo Space Station, Skylab, designed to host astronauts for months at a time.…

Games and alerts lost their voice to feature designed to hush auto-play vids Google has tweaked Chrome 66 to make the new feature that silences auto-playing videos less aggressive.…

Can anyone catch the big three (plus Oracle and IBM?) Amazon Web Services has announced a new and significant marquee customer: Verizon.…

Hand-sized quadrotor packs a neural network A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance.…

Better review for Snaps Store promised anyway after last week's crypto surprise Canonical has responded to last week's discovery that its Snap store carried apps containing embedded crypto-currency miners, by pledging to introduce a “verified developer” program.…

Before it amplifies DDoS attacks Universal Plug 'n' Play, that eternal feast of the black-hat, has been identified as helping to amplify denial-of-service attacks.…

Proof-of-concept fits in a Tweet and can take down all of RH's best bits Red Hat has announced a critical vulnerability in its DHCP client and while it doesn't have a brand name it does have a Tweetable proof-of-concept.…

That sound you can hear is laughter from Oracle HQ Two US senators have asked the nation's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take another look at Google's location harvesting.…

Babbles about subpoenas, corruption, corrupt pyramidal power structures and so much more Security personality John McAfee has “gone underground” in a convoy of armoured cars escorted by people claimed to be former members of the military, to escape what he says is persecution by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)…

Not even Zuckerberg can escape the tax man Facebook has lost its bid to throw out a tax bill on $7bn worth of income it had stashed overseas.…

There was a lot going in the Palm Desert heat Intel Capital If ever there was an analogy for how technology enables man to do extraordinary things, it came on Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon last week at the Intel Capital conference in Palm Desert, California.…

Report claims former intel worker behind data dump A former CIA employee has been named as the prime suspect in last year's dump of thousands of documents on the agency's hacking practices.…

Report claims former intel worker behind data dump A former CIA employee has been named as the prime suspect in last year's dump of thousands of documents on the agency's hacking practices.…

It farts out enough energy to irradiate all life on Earth Astronomers have spotted the greediest supermassive black hole going through the fastest growth spurt some 12 billion years ago.…

It farts out enough energy to irradiate all life on Earth Astronomers have spotted the greediest supermassive black hole going through the fastest growth spurt some 12 billion years ago.…

Democrats making a difference the only way they know how to After weeks of teasing, Senate Democrats will finally take decisive action on bringing back net neutrality to America on Wednesday – by holding a pointless vote.…

Democrats making a difference the only way they know how to After weeks of teasing, Senate Democrats will finally take decisive action on bringing back net neutrality to America on Wednesday – by holding a pointless vote.…

WikiLeaks vows to take action over libelous claims The government of Ecuador spent nearly $5m to provide protected internet access to asylum-seeker Julian Assange and he responded by hacking theur systems, an anonymously sourced report has claimed.…

WikiLeaks vows to take action over libelous claims The government of Ecuador spent nearly $5m to provide protected internet access to asylum-seeker Julian Assange and he responded by hacking theur systems, an anonymously sourced report has claimed.…

Committee rages at snub, says homework isn't good enough Mark Zuckerberg has once again rejected the advances of the UK parliamentary committee that are probing the misuse of Facebook data and how the firm slurps user info.…

Committee rages at snub, says homework isn't good enough Mark Zuckerberg has once again rejected the advances of the UK parliamentary committee that are probing the misuse of Facebook data and how the firm slurps user info.…

Plus an optional stinkin' Notch Huawei previously used its Primark brand, Honor, to bring high-priced tech to a much more affordable package. But this time it's using Honor to introduce a feature the industry insisted it wasn't ready for: an under-glass fingerprint sensor.…

Socks away £37m to consolidate claims-handling for compo scheme Capita's Customer Management tentacle is to consolidate claims-handling on behalf of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FCSC) in one of the few good pieces of news this year for the beleaguered tech biz.…

Too many disputes over how the tech and law work Facebook's attempt to push a US court to a quick ruling on a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology has been denied.…

Hoping to purge it of backup attack loops Backup software crew Asigra has put out a new version of its product which disinfects scanned backup files for ransomware to prevent restoration reloading code that screws with your data.…

Facebook's standalone VR headset at least has novelty value Review Earlier this month, I jotted down some initial impressions about the Oculus Go virtual reality headset I received at Facebook's F8 developer conference.…

Reg Lecture explores tractor beam tech... The benefits of tractor beam technology are well known - out-running delinquents on your hoverboard, hurling enemies around at a distance, and of course, capturing fleeing rebel spacecraft.…

Netherlands turns up the heat as transparency plans unveiled It has been a busy few days for beleaguered antivirus-flinger Kaspersky Lab. Today's confirmation of an infrastructure move to Switzerland comes hot on the heels of a comment from the Netherlands government that use of the Russian firm's software is a bit risky.…

Eat your fibre, it's good for you! BT’s Openreach has opened a consultation with communications providers (CPs) over preparations for the monumental task of shifting 16 million phone lines to voice over IP by 2025.…

Voda UK remains 'sick man of Europe', though – analyst Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao has confirmed he is quitting the telco just a week after agreeing to spend €18.4bn (£16.1bn) on Liberty Global’s European assets.…

Unless offerings 'become... seamlessly integrated' The Pentagon has doubled down on its plan to hand a megabucks cloud contract to a single vendor in the face of opposition from corners of the tech industry and military experts.…

Hey Google. How will we eat? Android developers are reluctantly considering putting Google ads on ice because of uncertainty over whether they'll be GDPR-compliant, cutting off what in many cases is their sole revenue source.…

False positive rate of 98% doesn't count, say police, because 'checks and balances' London cops' facial recognition kit has only correctly identified two people to date – neither of whom were criminals – and the UK capital's police force has made no arrests using it, figures published today revealed.…

The clockwork radio boffin deserved meeellions The late Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio and veteran fighter for the intellectual property rights of designers, spent three decades defending his IP and demanding the UK government do more to protect small businesses from the blatant, rampant copyright theft that then existed.…

Behind the looking glass in Storage-land "The time has come," the roundup read, "to talk of many things: Of caching tech – and Optane drives – of in-memory computings..."…