The Register

Little good news to increase your trust in machines here, to be honest Roundup This week's AI roundup includes an alarming report from California's Department of Motor Vehicles about how shoddy autonomous cars still are, a Waymo self-driving car crash, and some news from Facebook's F8 conference and its new job posting.…

Schools hacked, voters DDoSed, Apple's Linux fix, IBM Java patch, and more Roundup May is already upon us, and as usual it has been a busy week for security news. Here's a summary of what didn't make it into El Reg this week, well, until now.…

Ploy to plant malware in NPM's JavaScript registry foiled NPM, the biz responsible for the Node Package Manager for JavaScript and Node.js, has caught a miscreant trying to tamper with web cookie modules on Wednesday and managed to exile the individual and associated code before significant harm was done.…

Pai accused of reverse Robin Hood for business buddies Special report This week, one year after the US government's General Accountability Office (GAO) formally recommended that it do so, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved $8bn it held in a private bank to the US Treasury.…

GPU giant rails against rumors of stiffing sellers Nvidia has cancelled a partner program after just two months – just as regulators started taking an interest in complaints of anti-competitiveness.…

Begun, the laser wars have, it is claimed The US military has formally complained to China after blinding lasers were fired at Uncle Sam's aircraft coming in to land at the American airbase in Djibouti.…

Life in plastic, it's fantastic Comment Apple enabled payments in macOS Sierra in 2016, and it failed to set the world on fire. Will Google's move to support its own payment system on desktop web browsers fare any better?…

Mountain View's Empire Strikes Back against election meddling Google is overhauling its political advertising system in an effort to crack down on shady election ads.…

May the force of furious loyalists force an end to this farce The long-simmering dislike for the keyboard on recent Apple MacBook Pro computers has reached peak pique: A fed-up MacBook Pro owner identifying himself as Matthew Taylor has created a Change.org petition asking Apple to recall every MacBook Pro released since late 2016.…

Semiconductor microparticles: Assemble! Scientists have demonstrated a method of corralling micron-sized silicon particles to allow the construction and reconfiguration of new hardware, which has the potential to revolutionize chip design.…

Semiconductor microparticles: Assemble! Scientists have demonstrated a method of corralling micron-sized silicon particles to allow the construction and reconfiguration of new hardware, which has the potential to revolutionize chip design.…

80% chance you won’t see an Atlas V through the California fog NASA's Mars InSight will launch from California’s Vandenberg airbase tomorrow morning, with the aim of discovering how rocky planets form.…

Too stool for school as log jogger gets case of the runs A phantom plopper was literally caught with his pants down after New Jersey cops arrested a top education chief in the act of dropping the kids off... just not at the pool.…

Mercurial imaging detracts from a solid advance Review The launch of the Huawei P20 Pro has prompted much debate over its camera: is it great or an over-hyped fraud?…

Ongoing beancounter ballsup spoils second ruler server launch Supermicro has estimated revenue growth in its Q3 of fiscal '18 ended 31 March but the final audited numbers are still being worked out as part of a multi-quarter dispute with NASDAQ over reported transactions.…

UAV arms race with drug lords is upon us An American government employee has publicly claimed that a criminal gang used a swarm of drones to fend off an FBI raid.…

Act 1 of real estate consolidation play Virgin Media is axing nearly 800 jobs from its Swansea call centre, with the site expected to be shut down by autumn next year.…

What's the plan, guys? The two UK government departments most exposed to Brexit have yet to show progress on how their IT systems will cope with the "unprecedented" challenge of leaving the EU – Parliament's Public Accounts Committee today warned.…

Tug of war over corporate tentacle pulls '80s entrepreneur into fray A fresh war of words has erupted over at ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd – this time over the corporate involvement of legendary British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair himself.…

How The Social Network and its partners use that info is a total black box Comment Mark Zuckerberg recently endured a grilling from the US Congress over Facebook's inability to stop bleeding user data. A week later, investors rewarded his company with a $50bn increase in its market capitalisation on news that – surprise! – a massive userbase pays big dividends.…

Sharpen your defensive skills Promo As the security landscape constantly changes, keeping your data and systems safe from a growing variety of attacks becomes more challenging than ever.…

Sorry I slept in but my computer didn't make me go to bed early Something for the Weekend, Sir? Please pass on my regards to Mrs Cromwell for selling me her fig.…

Version 28 brings non-free third-party repos for some reason The Fedora Project has released Fedora 28, a significant update which includes something shunned for years – an official repository for non-free third-party apps.…

Watery remains of meteorites could be trapped in craters A team of physicists have uncovered evidence that the Moon may have had liquid water on its surface at one point.…

Anger and frustration went both ways on an outsourced vendor help desk ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column in which we tease out tales from the trenches of tech support.…

Dust off your definitions of free speech and censorship in the digital age, people GoDaddy has decided it will have no part in keeping a site called altright.com on the web. The site promoted white supremacist views.…

Shifts Hadoop clusters and their 300PB of data, not the stuff that lets you Tweet Twitter’s announced that it’s moving a lot of stuff to Google’s cloud, but it’s not all good news for Google.…

Cisco's buys real-time CEO profiler, OPNFV advances and thin client fun ROUNDUP What happened in networking this week? One of the more interesting happenings concerns Cisco buying some data.…

Redmond, Google and Intel are desperately hunting for a fix Microsoft says it's looking into reports that apps including "Hey Cortana" and Google Chrome hang or freeze for those who have installed the recent Windows 10 April 2018 Update.…

Chipzilla checking fresh set of CVEs in chip side-channel flaw Researchers have unearthed a fresh new set of ways attackers could potentially exploit data-leaking Spectre CPU vulnerabilities in Intel chips.…

Frequently change your one random password – that's the ticket It's World Password Day! And you know what that means: all the effort you've put into trying to persuade people to rethink how they do passwords turns to mush because some company sees a PR opportunity and floods social media with terrible advice.…

US Justice Department seeks to punish diesel deceivers Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG, has been indicted on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud by the US Department of Justice.…

US Justice Department seeks to punish diesel deceivers Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG, has been indicted on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud by the US Department of Justice.…

[Insert peals of laughter and guffawing here] In a further sign that punching your way out of a paper bag is much harder than people assume, America's consumer rights watchdog the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ended up with one commissioner too many.…

[Insert peals of laughter and guffawing here] In a further sign that punching your way out of a paper bag is much harder than people assume, America's consumer rights watchdog the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ended up with one commissioner too many.…

It's fun to kick entangled photons into spaaaace The European Space Agency is looking to build a communications satellite to send data securely using quantum key distribution.…

Biz does a GitHub, downplays security blunder as log file of credentials left unencrypted Twitter is ringing in World Password Day by notifying its users, all 330 million of them, that their login credentials were left unencrypted in an internal log file and should be changed.…

Honeypots swarmed on within three hours of patch release Security experts are advising administrators to hurry up installing Oracle patches after finding that attackers are quick to target their vulnerabilities.…

Discrimination is unethical, developer declares Rafael Avila de Espindola, one of the top contributors to the LLVM compiler toolset, has cut ties with the open source project over what he perceives as code of conduct hypocrisy and support for ethnic favoritism.…

Cheech and Chong wouldn't bother, though Budget supermarket chain Lidl, best known for giving shoppers greater bhang for their buck, is offering a more... high-end product.…

Bigger and slightly faster, but not yet ready for mainstream Intel has tuned its Optane gaming drives with the 905P upgrade on the 900P, broadly doubling capacity and slightly boosting topline performance.…

Off the mortuary Fondleslab Few people remarked on it this week, but Apple has reversed the declining fortunes of the iPad, achieving modest growth for the fourth successive quarter in a market that continues to slide.…

BAE-backed Brit upstart makes eye-catching UAV claim Defence kit megalith BAE Systems is working on a drone that "has the potential to fly for up to a year before needing maintenance", in a challenge to Airbus' Zephyr being trialled by the Ministry of Defence.…

Learn about the AWS Well-Architected Framework Promo Here's a fact we cannot doubt: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has spent years working with thousands of companies across all industries to create the most comprehensive collection of best-practices and guidance known as the Well-Architected Framework.…

Remote code execution vuln found lurking in Microsoft's open-sourced shim Microsoft has emitted a patch to fix a critical vulnerability in a wrapper used to launch Windows Server Containers from Go.…

Costs mount, SpaceX boss cuts off analysts' questions Tesla CEO Elon Musk flamed Wall St analysts last night that dared to question his firm's finances, after his leccy car biz reported another set of record quarterly losses, burning through more of the cash pile.…

Waterway to have a good time The good folk of Houston, Texas have started naming their adopted drains, as part of a community project seeking sponsorship of the city's water discharge system.…

Didn't you know it's panacea to all corporate woes, bro?! Blockchain is overhyped, CIOs aren't using it and many don't plan to either, according to the latest research from Gartner.…

G7ThinQ. You don't make it easy to get an audiophile treat, LG It's a sign of the times that of the big four UK operators, only O2 will stock LG's flagship, which launches this week: the "G7 ThinQ".…

FaaS? Lambda? Functions? Tell us all about it The call for papers for Serverless Computing Conference London shuts tonight, so you need to act FaaSt if you want to share your experiences with us.…