The Register

Here comes the great defender of journalism – and he wants Facebook to pay for news News Corp executive chairman and internationally despised publisher Rupert Murdoch has waded into the fake news debate – and demanded that internet giants pay journalists for their work.…

Patches slammed as 'complete and utter garbage' as Chipzilla U-turns on microcode Intel's fix for Spectre variant 2 – the branch target injection design flaw affecting most of its processor chips – is not to fix it.…

Mr Zuckerberg, are we the baddies? Facebook has admitted it was "far too slow" to recognize that its systems were being used to "spread misinformation and corrode democracy."…

Maiden flight faces delay as Congress squabbles over budgets SpaceX's Falcon Heavy maiden launch, pencilled in for the end of this month, is set to be delayed due to the ongoing US government shutdown.…

Court has been asked to toss out 'mystifying' sueball Iconic lads' mag Playboy is suing oddball internet culture website Boing Boing for linking to an Imgur archive featuring scans of centrefold models from over the years – a move described by the US Electronic Frontier Foundation as "frankly mystifying".…

Cash and trophy up for grabs A biennial award backed by the National Museum of Computing for "achievements in computer conservation or restoration" has opened its nominations.…

Newsflash from Microsoft: Future of learning will be supported by teachers and technology Hold on to your hats, Reg readers - Microsoft has some ground-breaking news to offer you: kids of the future are going to need collaboration, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity skills for work.…

Shares only double in value this time Another company has discovered the secret of how to send shares soaring overnight: simply add "Blockchain" to your name.…

It's up to you but the fluffy stuff is awesome, beams guidance The UK's National Health Service has said that Brits' patient data can be stored in the cloud – and has given US data centres party to Privacy Shield the thumbs-up.…

The rise and rise of flash How close to reality is the all-flash enterprise data centre?…

Speech to think tank will warn of Brit weaknesses in key areas The UK needs to invest in up-to-date army tech, including protection from cyber attacks, the Ministry of Defence's chief of general staff will warn today.…

If you want more public interest journalism, you need a Big Gov IT Project™ Comment As British politicians are urged to target Facebook and Google with a new tax and pour the profits into a scheme for funding public interest journalism, it’s worth taking a close look at the vested interests demanding this course of action.…

It woz Brexit and 'cautious consumers' wot done it Dixons Carphone has slashed full-year profit estimates amid continued downward pressure on mobile phone margins over the Christmas quarter and "more cautious consumer" spending in the UK.…

Developers find out who else is testing HMRC's tools Almost 1,500 software developers registered to use HMRC's sandbox or API platform have had their email addresses blabbed in a mass email.…

Met lab tour throws up issues around storage, encryption and privacy versus security More than 90 per cent of crime has "a digital element," we were told as The Reg was welcomed into London Metropolitan Police's Central Communications Command Centre, near Lambeth Bridge on the Thames.…

Price rises led to fewer shipments but..... PC makers - ones that use middlemen to reach customers - are selling fewer boxes in the UK but generating more cash from them because of post-Brexit vote price rises and demand shifting to higher-end gear.…

Figures are growing but still puny compared to profits Over the next few weeks Facebook, Amazon and Google’s owner Alphabet report full-year results. Inevitably, this will reopen debate on whether big technology companies pay enough tax in countries outside the US bases, something that's been discussed for several years. The difference is that now politicians in several countries are talking about and implementing changes that could mean such companies pay significantly more in future.…

Legal - promise! - but completely mad Christmas lights, that's what ShmooCon The news that Rob Joyce, former head of the NSA's hacking squad and now White House cybersecurity coordinator, was giving a talk at the ShmooCon hacking conference raised hopes he would offer up some juicy insights into the surveillance state or Donald Trump's cyber policies.…

Venerable malware is back for another round of phishing phun Keep your eyes open for yet-another Dridex-based malware attack.…

In 'On-Call' techies blame users for messes. In 'Who, me?' it's all your own fault Who, me? Welcome to the very first edition of “Who, me?” a new Reg column we hope will prove as entertaining as our Friday On-Call tales of tech support gigs gone wrong.…

Bad news for the FCC because the site has 55 staff and doesn't hand out email addresses SHMOOCON 2018 A new analysis of the comments made on the United States Federal Communications Commission's consultation on the future of net neutrality has shown the whole process of public comments was fatally flawed.…

It’s the visual equivalent of "10 PRINT 'Developer Wanted'" The City of Los Angeles has sparked plenty of chuckles with a job ad for a “Graphics Designer” that shows how desperately a new hire is needed by apparently using Microsoft Paint to illustrate the opportunity.…

And years away from safety It is now almost three weeks since The Register revealed the chip design flaws that Google later confirmed and the world still awaits certainty about what the mistakes mean and what it will take to fix them.…

Satellite carries keys to Graz China has revealed more detail of its much-hyped satellite quantum key distribution network.…

It needs a ninth release candidate, thanks in part to Meltdown and Spectre Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux 4.15 needs a ninth release candidate, making it the first kernel release to need that much work since 2011.…

Chip-maker promises to play nice with others to secure deal Qualcomm's NXP Semiconductor has been cleared by European Commission regulators, which makes it pretty much a done deal.…

Sunday success for local launchers Rocket Labs New Zealand has joined the list of spacefaring nations, courtesy of a US-Kiwi startup called Rocket Lab.…

NIST delays advice and is very, very sorry about 2013 crypto SNAFU ShmooCon 2018 The political maneuvering that has shut much of the US government has delayed the National Institute of Standards and Technology's planned release of guidance about the risks and rewards of blockchain technology.…

BAAAB AABBB AAAAA BAAAA AABAA ABBAB ABBAA BAAAA AABAA AAABB AAABB ABAAA BAABA Shmoocon Among the 400,000 graves at the Arlington National Cemetery – a solemn US military graveyard in Virginia – lies the final resting place of cryptography pioneers William and Elizebeth Friedman.…

Crikey! The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is the latest financial watchdog to haul into court companies in the virtual currency space.…

Election manipulation wasn't as bad as feared – it was worse Twitter says it will warn hundreds of thousands of tweeters who deliberately or inadvertently interacted with Kremlin bots during the 2016 US presidential election.…

US regulator won't pretend that mobile networks are equivalent to landlines Analysis America's favorite government watchdog – the Federal Communications Commission – has backtracked on plans to downgrade the entire country's internet, agreeing to maintain its current definition of what is broadband speed.…

We're not sure why but maybe it will become a thing While commuter buses ferrying Apple and Google employees have been rerouted to avoid being shot at – reportedly with a pellet gun – GM Cruise has had less success keeping one of its self-driving cars out of harm's way.…

There is literally nothing decent in this story Analysis The US Senate reauthorized a controversial NSA spying program on Thursday – and then, because it's 2018 and nothing matters any more, embarked on a partisan battle over a confidential memo that outlines Uncle Sam's alleged abuse of surveillance powers.…

Chinese biz scrambles to tear down injected theft script OnePlus today confirmed thieves siphoned tens of thousands of people's credit card numbers from its online store.…

Revitalises midrange nearline air-filled tech Western Digital Corp's HGST unit has brought out 4 and 6TB nearline platter-reduced disk drives with an 8TB drive on the way.…

But we might still drum up some new regs, so keep it up Tech firms are removing more hate speech faster than before – so now EU lawmakers want them to improve their feedback to users.…

Suppliers, time to consider that SaaS and/or public cloud angle Research outfit 451 has run a survey that should get the pulses of on-premises IT suppliers beating faster.…

White plastic? No Space Grey? Word reaches us of an, er, AI-driven revolution taking place in dentistry but you’ll only be able to get you hands on Colgate’s Smart Electronic E1 Toothbrush from Apple as it is the exclusive sales channel.…

Redmond finds allies in Irish data centre spat Allowing Uncle Sam to seize emails stored in Microsoft's Irish data centre would violate foreign data protection laws and risk setting a damaging precedent, the US Supreme Court has been told.…

UKSA and CNES buddy up on climate science, Mars missions The British and French space agencies have agreed to team up on more missions together.…

Hello children, fancy a chat about muck-raking tech rags? The meltdown in corporate spin at IBM was apparent last week after the flames of publicity were fanned by The Register's report on the firm's proposals to redeploy tens of thousands of Global Technology Services staff.…

Back to drawing board on £14bn pensions deficit Plans by BT to cut its huge pension deficit have been thrown out by the High Court in England. The UK's incumbent telco had wanted to shift the rate used to calculate final salary pension payments.…

Four quarters of growth in a row ain't too shabby Analysis Diving into IBM's fourth-quarter and full-year results show its storage surge has now run a whole year and possibly pushed Dell EMC into a "Refuse to Lose" channel campaign to regain sales momentum.…

Regulator figures show Sky, Tesco users as most content TalkTalk, Post Office and Vodafone were the most-complained-about telecoms service providers between July and September 2017, according to an Ofcom report released today.…

Keys in hands of highly borkable ID gateway The UK government is cracking on with plans for a digital mortgage service to be launched this year, which will allow borrowers to sign mortgage deeds online via the Government Digital Service's deeply flawed Verify identity programme.…

Stuffs portfolio with CI, flash and converged solutions NetApp is setting up a Cloud Infrastructure business unit, giving it FlexPod, SolidFire and StorageGRID, and hiring a cloud services hotshot to run it.…

Just put it under the desk along with all the others Something for the Weekend, Sir? It could get steamy in here. I have stripped off the layers and am now looking to turn up the heat. I’m looking forward to an afternoon of delightful tenderness with plenty of oohs and aahs.…

New event set to infiltrate QEII Promo If you are a cybersecurity practitioner who feels on top of the latest developments in your field, CyberThreat18 may make you want to think again.…

If pizza delivery, coffee joints and banks can do it, so can you I don't begrudge organisations who want us to start calling them "software companies". People are free to do whatever they like with such trivial labels, I guess. But the tick of such labelling has always been an annoyance to me.…