The Register

Zuck says The Social Network™ knows nothing about anything important If the weekend’s excesses suggest that your New Year’s resolutions aren’t going to happen, spare a thought for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg because he’s given himself 365 days to fix The Social Network™.…

Is that incriminating data in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Over the holidays I bought Apple’s newest, shiniest face scanner. For the first fortnight - and periodically since then, that constant lift-and-scan felt weird. As though my smartphone had suddenly become too intimate, too familiar.…

KB4056892 is not your friend if you run an Athlon Microsoft’s fix for the Meltdown and Spectre bugs may be crocking AMD-powered PCs.…

Birds have figured out how to light fires to scare their prey into the open Already replete with sharks, crocodiles, snakes and poisonous jellyfish galore, Australia may also be home to arsonist birds that spread fire so they can feed on animals as they flee.…

'ARTEMIS' spots bad deliberately rotten routes and sets things to rights The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the Internet's basic pieces of plumbing technologies, but it's also so old it was designed before the security needs of a multi-billion-user network were understood.…

This is how Azure just hit 30Gbps of throughput – and how clouds are being built now Microsoft’s switched on new network interface cards packing field-programmable gate arrays and announced that doing so has let it hit 30Gbps of throughput for servers in Azure.…

This is serious: some of the messed-up machines can host VMs and databases If you have a Western Digital My Cloud network attached storage device, it's time to learn how to update its OS because researcher James Bercegay has discovered a dozen models possess a hard-coded backdoor.…

Newly re-merged open router project goes live The OpenWRT and LEDE open router projects have merged and promised a major release in the coming months.…

Software couldn't tell when its own arse was on fire The South Australian State government has announced it will end its contract with Victorian company Ripe Intelligence after an app intended to provide "real-time, relevant and personalised event and warning information" repeatedly failed to do so.…

Googler drops bug bomb in public – but don't panic Cfir Cohen, a security researcher from Google's cloud security team, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability in the fTMP of AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), which resides on its 64-bit x86 processors and provides administrative functions similar to the Management Engine in Intel chipsets.…

Just in time for Friday night Qualcomm has confirmed its processors have the same security vulnerabilities disclosed this week in Intel, Arm, AMD and IBM CPU cores.…

Customs officials will at least need 'reasonable suspicion' to slurp device contents With device searches at American border crossings reaching an all-time high, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) this week tightened its rules for when agents can pull data from phones and computers.…

Class-actions start piling up after El Reg blows lid on CPU security cockup Just days after The Register revealed a serious security hole in its CPU designs, Intel is the target of three different class-action lawsuits in America.…

Turn cafe punters into unwitting coin crafters Thanks to the ridiculous valuation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cryptomining code has become a common mechanism for converting authorized and stolen computing cycles into potential cash.…

Turn cafe punters into unwitting coin crafters Thanks to the ridiculous valuation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cryptomining code has become a common mechanism for converting authorized and stolen computing cycles into potential cash.…

Aliens and sinister AIs from the mind behind the greatest TV show ever? Colour me aroused HBO's epic Game of Thrones cycle may be coming to a close, but fans of the books the show is based on can take heart that author George R R Martin (GRRM) is sending another of his works to the tellybox.…

Could combine to 'fully compromise' virtual appliance, researchers warn Three vulns in Dell EMC’s Data Protection Suite product that can combine to fully compromise a virtual appliance have been patched by the vendor.…

Services down and out for seven hours and counting Yahoo! Mail – yes, amazingly it is still a thing – is today taking a break from business as usual norms with the service down for almost the past seven hours.…

New year, new recall – like the one in 2017, 2016, 2013, 20... HP Inc has issued a "worldwide voluntary safety recall" of its laptop models due to potentially fiery batteries, with over 50,000 affected machines in the US and Canada alone.…

Taking a look at the firm's New Year's hardware spring-cleaning Analysis Nutanix wants be seen as a sexy software business and not a hardware appliance biz stuck with crap commodity hardware margins. So it is changing its business mode to position itself as a software-focused company.…

Date has changed – beer and snacks policy remains the same Events If you've bought tickets for our January Register Lecture "What will drive our cars when the combustion engine dies?", we're sorry to have to inform you that the event has been moved back 24 hours.…

23 million-digit figure revealed after six days of non-stop calculations The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has announced the discovery of a new largest Mersenne prime number, 2 -1.…

Help us help you With the start of a new year, we're encouraged to set big goals for our personal and professional lives.…

Switchzilla is investigating a whole bunch of products Cisco is the latest company to prepare patches to tackle the serious security vulnerabilities affecting the majority of CPUs, Meltdown and Spectre.…

Illinois team says cell tech great for mobes and 'leccy cars A band of boffins from Illinois have published a paper detailing a new battery design for mobile devices and electric vehicles that could increase capacity up to eight times while reducing costs.…

My computer's crashed! I've lost everythi… oh, never mind, it's working again Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I have something to show you," she purrs, reclining suggestively across the sofa. "Come and have a peek."…

It’s happening, but here are the problems it could cause Enforcing age verification checks for online porn sites could be detrimental to smaller ISPs and significantly increase online fraud, the government has admitted.…

Sorry, we just couldn't resist A freak galaxy is teeming with gigantic stars, say scientists who now reckon these cosmic heavyweights may not be so rare after all.…

Countermeasures to protect apps from attack Analysis Intel has borne the brunt of the damage from the revelation of two novel attack techniques, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, that affect the majority of modern CPUs in various ways.…

Chocolate Factory hit with ex-Googlers' revised pay-gap complaint The class-action lawsuit accusing Google of deliberately paying women less than men has been revised and brought back to a US court.…

Sysadmins notice performance dip amid security fix rollout. Not everyone hit hard. YMMV etc Amazon AWS customers have complained of noticeable slowdowns on their cloud server instances – following the deployment of a security patch to counter the Intel processor design flaw dubbed Meltdown.…

Check your anti-malware tool unless you like BSoDs Microsoft has released updates for Windows to block attempts by hackers and malware to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability in Intel x86-64 processors – but you will want to check your antivirus software before applying the fixes.…

'Brain-to-Vehicle' driving tech wheeled out RotM Nissan reckons it has developed technology that will allow you to control cars of the future with your brainwaves.…

That'll show Putin who's boss! NATO, the military alliance originally formed to defend Europe against Soviet Russia, has formally adopted its own national anthem-style hymn.…

No ETA yet for West Europe machines Microsoft Azure customers are reporting problems with their virtual machines, which are struggling to come back online after being updated with the Meltdown processor patch.…

Full report obtained by El Reg casts doubt on public test conclusions Exclusive A British drone collision study used as evidence for the government’s flagship drone pilot registration law found UAVs pose less of a risk to airliners than government officials and trade unions have claimed.…

All-time high for industry The temperature is rising in the hot aisle for data centre businesses – $20bn was spent on mergers and acquisitions last year.…

Neural networks sort stuff – they can't reason or infer Deep learning and neural networks may have benefited from the huge quantities of data and computing power, but they won't take us all the way to artificial general intelligence, according to a recent academic assessment.…

Sure about that? Gartner beancounters say price rises driven by memory shortages propelled Samsung into the lead based on semiconductor vendor revenue, vaulting past Intel and its CPUs.…

DHS 'fesses up 8 months after finding ex-staffer had copy of investigations database More than 240,000 current and former employees of the US Department of Homeland Security have had their personal details exposed in a data breach.…

They may take our lives, but they will never take our fizzy drink Angry Scots are protesting against plans to slash the sugar content of their beloved national soft drink Irn-Bru and folk have begun stockpiling the beverage said to be a hangover cure.…

And expresses some anxiety about ex-staff leaving for upstart Citrix has launched a patent suit against rival Avi Networks accusing it of patent infringement and of spreading "false claims" about Citrix's NetScaler networking products.…

Bristol man ordered to pay over £600 for data protection offence A man from Bristol lied to a government agency to get his hands on a private number plate reading "W1 DOW", a court has heard.…

Oliver Meakin quits Maplin CEO Oliver Meakin has quit the troubled geek emporium to run the Gaucho Group, a chain of Argentinean steak houses.…

Why are you doing this? Munich City officials could waste €100m reversing a 15-year process that replaced proprietary software with open source following an official vote last year.…

Full platter access parallelism performance-doubling... we ask around Analysis As we've previously written about here, Seagate has the technology to split a disk drives read-write heads into two independent sets, an upper and lower half, which increases the drive’s IO performance by having the upper and lower platter sets do IO in parallel.…

No bearded desktops with pointy hats to be seen here The Linux Mint project turned out to be an early Christmas present, as it usually does, but this release is perhaps more important than usual given that Mint is much more alone in the Linux distro world than it was just one year ago.…

AMD, Arm also affected by data-leak design blunders, Chipzilla hit hardest Summary The severe design flaw in Intel microprocessors that allows sensitive data, such as passwords and crypto-keys, to be stolen from memory is real – and its details have been revealed.…

As Linus Torvalds lets rip on Chipzilla Analysis In the wake of The Register's report on Tuesday about the vulnerabilities affecting Intel chips, Chipzilla on Wednesday issued a press release to address the problems disclosed by Google's security researchers that afternoon.…

As Linus Torvalds lets rip on Chipzilla Analysis In the wake of The Register's report on Tuesday about the vulnerabilities affecting Intel chips, Chipzilla on Wednesday issued a press release to address the problems disclosed by Google's security researchers that afternoon.…