The Register

No word on demo bird's range or speed, but the carrying capacity looks decent Boeing’s revealed it hastily-cobbled-together a cargo drone.…

Doing business in China means keeping everything in Chinese hands behind the great firewall Apple has announced it will hand over iCloud operations in China to government-owned local partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry (GBCD) on February 28.…

Citrix and VMware are both close to allowing live migration of GPU-powered VMs The wonderful world of x86 server virtualization is so settled that analyst firm Gartner last year decided it no longer needed to bother with a magic quadrant comparing the handful of remaining suppliers. But the big players are still finding a few ways to advance their wares and niggle each other at the same time, and 2018’s kicked off with a little battle around moving VMs that use GPUs.…

Ten bug-berries fall from the bush, including the return of 2003's Etherleak Juniper Networks, come on down: you have won the dubious honour of being responsible for CVE-2018-0001.…

Alleged Fruitfly creator faces decades in prison if guilty A computer programmer has been accused of hacking, committing identity theft, and creating child pornography after allegedly developing custom malware to take control of thousands of computers.…

I think you ought to know why I’m feeling very depressed Two research papers argue that the risk of AI-driven automation isn't so much the destruction of jobs as the amplification of wealth inequality.…

Developers (again) find preferences hole (again) that bypasses login box (again) It just works. For anyone.…

But a big question remains: how fast will it actually be? Analysis President Donald Trump has signed two executive orders aimed at pushing broadband internet into more remote parts of the US, capping a multi-year effort to get America online.…

White men complain they're held back by 'reverse discrimination' A bunch of blokes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – STEM – jobs reckon they are the victim of "reverse discrimination" from efforts to diversify the ranks in tech companies.…

That Equifax hack would have cost the outfit $1.5bn New legislation introduced in the US Senate by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) would result in credit reporting agencies being slapped with stiff fines if they play fast and loose with data security.…

Hard to remain neutral on this one In an inadvertent homage to Samsung's combustible Galaxy Note 7, an Apple iPhone battery overheated in an Apple Store in Zurich, Switzerland, on Tuesday morning, resulting in minor injury and prompting customers and employees to step outside while the smoke cleared.…

Difference in opinion over what constitutes an 'update' The chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee and the French government want answers from Apple about its software "update" that slows older iPhones.…

The rest? Well... y'know, they store digital information Toshiba, Western Digital, Kingston and Micron's Crucial unit have all introduced drives in time for CES – the standout being WDC announcing voice-activated media streaming features via Smart Home devices.…

What comes in a box, but doesn’t rhyme with tragic squad plant? Research firm IDC has rated and ranked the all-flash array players, placing Pure Storage in the lead of its Marketscape, ahead of Dell, HPE, NetApp and IBM.…

The speech recogniser that coulda Analysis Somewhat harshly, Microsoft's Cortana was pronounced dead this week.…

This is not just cost-cutting, this is M&S cost-cutting Middle-class nirvana Marks & Spencer – the British purveyor of classy date-night grub and frumpy clothes – is slashing its tech supplier base and sending 250 staff to Tata Consultancy Services under an IT outsourcing accord.…

Good luck with that one, internet dwellers A petition calling for "an end to hate speech laws" has passed 10,000 signatures – requiring a formal response from the UK government.…

Also: UK viewers like to take a break for Bake Off and Strictly PornHub's annual deep dive into user stats and searches has revealed that, in 2017, people decided to take the fidget spinner trend to new levels.…

The European regulator cometh I’ve spent many hundreds of hours listening to sales pitches from technology vendors but it’s only during the last year I’ve started to find them rather depressing. That’s been thanks to the arrival in 2018 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.…

Responsibilities unclear amid leadership shake-up Responsibility for broadband delivery in the UK has been handed to Margot James following Matt Hancock's promotion to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in prime minister Theresa May's reshuffle of the top jobs this week.…

Storage layer issues slow code access Atlassian's code version control system Bitbucket has been suffering an ongoing failure in its storage layer, affecting developers across the globe.…

Details of HMRC deal remain behind closed doors Apple has agreed to cough up £136m in back taxes to HMRC following an "extensive audit" by the tax man.…

Employment Tribunal hears sex discrimination and wrongful dismissal case A sacked former Intel senior sales head has accused the company’s global IoT partner director of perjury – and was told to “not put the spin on” by the judge.…

Don't mention not mentioning the war A pub in County Durham has been rapped by the Advertising Standards Agency after three complaints about its "German Night" advert were upheld.…

ICO: Seriously insecure system allowed unauthorised access to DB Carphone Warehouse has been handed one of the largest ever fines – a whopping £400,000 – from the UK’s data protection watchdog after exposing the details of millions of its customers.…

Austrian activist on funding his privacy NGO and retiring from the front line Interview "The problem we have in the privacy bubble is that we're great at saying how evil and bad everything is... but we're not that great at getting shit done."…

No need to Nikola cables, though The inductive charging standards battle of the past few years is formally over, only weeks after Apple entered the fray. But don't be thinking the wireless charging war is over. Things might be just hotting up.…

When instrumentation goes too far Good developers instrument their applications. Good ops teams monitor everything. This near-fetishisation of telemetry has been extended to DevOps, where it now risks becoming something of a problem.…

Exoplanets are neat and uniform. In our 'hood Jupiter and Saturn messed things up Our solar system may be a cosmic misfit, say astroboffins who've analysed systems where we've spotted exoplanets.…

Re-identification of data will not be a crime, as long as you warn the authorities The United Kingdom has revealed amendments to its Data Protection Bill to de-criminalise research into whether anonymised data sets are sufficiently anonymous.…

What was second prize? We think we'd rather have that Winners of a security quiz staged by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau may be wondering why they tried so hard to do well after some of the USB drives handed out as prizes turned out to be wretched hives of malware and villainy.…

13 explosively armed but cobbled-together drones swarmed airbase The Russian Defense Ministry has reported that its forces in Syria have been attacked by a swarm of GPS-guided drones carrying improvised explosives.…

5,000 officials blocked from accessing billion-plus-records Aadhaar systen The government authority in charge of India's billion-records-and-counting Aadhaar biometric identity database, the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI), has suspended 5,000 officials from accessing the system.…

POWER CPU patches available now or next week, AIX and i OS fixes are more than a month off IBM’s started to release its own patches for the Meltdown mess and the Spectre SNAFU, which it’s half-confirmed impact its hardware and operating systems, but won’t have a complete fix until mid-February.…

It's getting hard to deny all the new and sluggish benchmarks Analysis After spending last week insisting that the performance impact of fixing the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities "should not be significant," Intel on Tuesday tried to maintain that stance even as it acknowledged SYSmark tests assessing post-patch slowdowns ranging from two per cent to 14 per cent.…

Secrets dealer may be nearing end of asylum stay, on humane grounds The Ecuadorian government has reportedly sought a plan to end Julian Assange's world's longest couch surfing stint record attempt at its London embassy.…

Governments hate encrypted chat tools on social media, so brace for outrage in 3 ... 2 ... Facebook has responded to governments' criticism of cryptography by giving the world an open source encrypted group chat tool.…

You're fondling our kernel wrong, grumbles Microsoft Microsoft's workaround to protect Windows computers from the Intel processor security flaw dubbed Meltdown has revealed the rootkit-like nature of modern security tools.…

Sigh, 2018. Sigh Camera film relic Kodak is trying to reinvent itself in the most 2018 way possible: by launching its own cryptocurrency.…

It's 2018 and a Word doc can still pwn your Windows computer Patch Tuesday In case you've been hiding under a rock for the entirety of this new year (and we don't blame you if you have) there are a handful of major security flaws that have been dominating the news, and feature prominently in this month's Patch Tuesday update load.…

Govt also worried about IPv6's impact on online security The US Department of Commerce (DoC) and Department of Homeland Security have put out a draft cybersecurity report that recommends, among other things, that the American government fund a public awareness campaign on IoT security, and make cybersecurity a compulsory part of future engineering degrees.…

Careless cloud customers neglect patch, allowing crypto miners to move in An Oracle WebLogic vulnerability fixed in October last year is being exploited on unpatched machines to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency, and other lesser-known imaginary coins.…

Where there's a will, there's a Wray FBI Director Christopher Wray has picked up where he left off last year with a new call for backdoors in encryption exclusively for law enforcement.…

Is there anything Senators won't try to turn into votes? The number of US senators supporting an effort to overturn the repeal of America net neutrality rules has jumped to 40, setting up a Congressional vote on the issue in early spring.…

There's always a bigger phish Backup and security biz Barracuda made the largest profit it has seen in more than three and a half years in its third fiscal 2018 quarter, its last as a public company.…

ERP giant overstated cloudy SuccessFactor's success SAP has revealed it is working on a new on-premises human capital management system, admitting that many of its customers are still not ready for the cloud.…

The future is cloudy... Greg Hughes has been hired as head honcho at the private equity-owned storage spin-off from Symantec, Veritas.…

Jesus, you're not relying on government tech, are you? MPs have slammed government's approach of touting tech "as its magic solution to customs post Brexit" in a Parliamentary debate.…

BB's QNX already used by Ford, Apple and Aptiv Chinese web search emperor Baidu is to join forces with deposed king of phones BlackBerry, adding its embedded QNX operating system to the Chinese firm's open-source self-driving platform.…

Don't worry, Chipzilla is 'working tirelessly' to resolve the issue Intel's boss has finally admitted software fixes to address the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in most modern CPUs will incur a performance hit.…