The Register

Wireless guard dog Secure has many plus points – but they come at a cost Review Not that long ago, a thermostat was just a thermostat. It was a beige box that was often installed by someone who came out to your house or office. It did what it did. Turned the heat on, turned the heat off. Had a schedule.…

Or perhaps you're an 'OTAKE' – an Opinionated Tw*t who Always Knows Everything On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, which we are running daily this week because lots of you have sent submissions that deserve an airing and also because there's SFA news to write this week.…

If there was life on the Red Planet, it hit the rocks – literally Mars is dry, frozen and arid because its water reserves dried up. A large chunk of that water was lost when the planet’s magnetic field collapsed and it could no longer shield itself from the energetic solar rays.…

Shift in focus spikes drink biz Logowatch This special edition of El Reg's Logowatch isn't strictly about logos, rather it's a rebrand, but since today is Friday and this news is – and this is a technical term here – batshit mad, we couldn't pass it up.…

Only beeping took 10 beeping days to admit it was been beep-beeping beep pwned Nissan Canada's vehicle-financing wing has been hacked, putting personal information on as many as 1.13 million customers in the hands of miscreants.…

Admission of deliberate battery-saving CPU speed limiting in iOS chums water for sharks One day after Apple acknowledged that it has been downclocking the CPUs in older iPhones to prevent sudden shutdowns from battery exhaustion, the first lawsuit has arrived.…

AE1 missing for 103 years After years of searching, the wreck of World War I submarine AE1 has been found in waters off New Guinea.…

Charges filed against pair coincide with arrests abroad Two of the five unnamed individuals cuffed this month in Romania on suspicion of spreading ransomware face US computer crime charges – for their alleged role in taking over 123 out of 187 networked computers that control Washington DC's CCTV cameras earlier this year.…

If you are without phone coverage over the holidays, we are to blame... possibly We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the residents of Puerto Rico, and especially those who will not have cell phone coverage over Christmas.…

No Schmidt, Sherlock! Former CEO steps down, will take on technical advisor role Eric Schmidt has quit as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's post-restructuring parent.…

Predictions are like armpits, everybody has at least two and they often stink The technology industry loves to claim that the leaders of its Australian outposts are sages worthy of delivering prognostications from on high, rather than glorified territory managers with a continent to cover. So at this time of year they send El Reg predictions for what will happen on the local tech scene during the next trip around the Sun.…

Free software as in thank God I'm not paying for this Canonical has halted downloads of Ubuntu Linux 17.10, aka Artful Aardvark, from its website after punters complained installing the open-source OS on laptops knackered the machines.…

DXC to appeal verdict after court heard biz giant deliberately shortchanged staff Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) “willfully” misclassified 1,000 of its system administrators to avoid paying the techies overtime.…

App maker wanted to keep 'inaccurate' review private Digital health outfit Babylon has withdrawn a legal challenge against the UK's Care Quality Commission (CQC) concerning a report into its practice's operations.…

Bob Quick, Neil Lewis referred to UK data watchdog by 'disappointed' Met Police The cops who blabbed to the press about the UK's disgraced former First Secretary of State's alleged porn stash are to be investigated by Blighty's privacy watchdog.…

Got cash, must buy BlackBerry's stock rose to a 2017 high despite widening losses and lower revenues than a year ago. This indicates that against a backdrop of pain from shedding those lovely handset sales, the market is betting the sickly Canadian business has turned a corner.…

Analysts predict 400 million users by 2022 The first standards for 5G have been agreed, meaning industry can press ahead with next-gen speeds.…

Availability suite 9.5, update 3 Veeam has extended its backup product (Veeam Availability Suite or VAS) coverage with update 3 to v9.5.…

I have a good... er, I mean a bad feeling about this... Purveyor of, er, marital aids Geeky Sex Toys this month released a "Star Toys" range, a series of intimate tools for him and her brought lovingly to life in the shape of characters from the Star Wars franchise.…

'Free flow of data, free flow of data, free flow of data' Digital minister Matt Hancock has been doing his best to help silly season live up to its name, injecting quips about sport and theatre among prosaic data protection questions.…

NAND thanks for memory, folks... we don't need you any more Industry researchers have reported that three players in China are currently building flash and memory fabs and appear to be working to make China self-sufficient in NAND and DRAM.…

As if London commuters don't have enough to put up with... Transport for London has inked an £80m deal with outsourcing giant Capita to provide Wide Area Network services across all TfL sites.…

Meanwhile, class action sueball flung Public interest publisher ProPublica has once again accused Facebook of misbehaviour, but this time Mark Zuckerberg's ad-farm is pushing back.…

Says X86 doesn't mark the spot... but won't flash its latency numbers +Comment IBM has claimed its POWER9 gear is better placed to help AIs doing "cognitive" work than your common-or-garden X86 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) kit after tests in New York earlier this month.…

No flowers for 'Disputed' tag's grave. No dancers either. Nobody noticed really A year after deciding to fight fake news with a "Disputed" flag – backed, we were assured, by an army of fact-checkers – Facebook has decided it doesn't work, and will instead apply tweaks to how "Related Content" is handled.…

UK councils warned of thin line between overt and covert snooping Authorities need to have rules in place to ensure that lawful social media snooping doesn’t slip into covert ops, the UK’s chief surveillance commissioner has said.…

Plus: Naval overstretch means the flag isn't flying overseas for Christmas The British government has refused to say how much new F-35 fighter jets will cost the nation – as it emerges that no fighting ships of the Royal Navy will be in foreign waters during the festive period.…

Plus the farmer who had mastered phone cameras, but wasn't yet good at email On-Call Welcome again to another edition of On-Call, which we run daily during the news drought that is the week before Christmas to share the tech support stories that readers sent in earlier in the year.…

Administrative Council underlines real concerns with European patent regime The Administrative Council of the European Patent Office (EPO) has inflamed already heightened tensions within the organization by failing to properly address an important accountability test case.…

Imaginary server biz gets super salty, outs Cisco, NetApp VMware is making clear it is not on board with Microsoft's plan to offer its software on bare-metal Azure servers.…

Alleged extortionists wielded CTB-Locker aka Critroni and Cerber file-scrambling nasties Five people suspected of infecting Windows PCs with ransomware – and extorting money from more than 170 victims in Europe and the US – have been arrested.…

Because we haven't set fired SMBv1 into the Sun Dell EMC has patched an SMBv1 bug in its Data Domain Deduplication and Data Protection software.…

A welcome dash of perspective Without much fanfare, negotiators crafting the Wassenaar Agreement earlier this month moved to make things easier for infosec white-hats.…

Trying to stop snoops stalling page loads When Mozilla lobbed Firefox 57 over the fence last month, it introduced an anti-tracking feature without saying anything much about it.…

Can we, can we hitch a ride? NASA is drawing up plans to send a robot out into space to either drill into the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – or checking out Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.…

100 Mbps? Tell 'em they're dreaming, son TPG has joined Telstra and Optus in agreeing to refund customers who couldn't get the National Broadband Network speeds they expected.…

Dodged a bit of a bullet this time Yet another misconfigured Amazon-hosted cloud storage bucket has been discovered – this one flashing the personal information of roughly 123 million American households to anyone passing by on the internet.…

You're not going crazy – Apple really does this (and wants you to upgrade) Analysis When Apple's iOS 11.2 update arrived on December 2, the release notes touted faster wireless charging support, among other enhancements, but made no mention of a necessary but less appealing augmentation: retarded apps for aging iPhone models.…

Wow, who'd have thought it? US cable giant Comcast has been accused of strong-arming smaller carriers into paying too much for some of its TV channels.…

Here's what $6bn of vaporware looks like Comment It has kept everyone waiting but Magic Leap has finally revealed that… there are still publications stupid enough to keep printing its bullshit.…

Marijuana of unknown origin sent up in smoke A power station in Olching, Bavaria, blazed like it was 4/20 yesterday after German authorities used it to burn around 550kg of marijuana.…

El Reg asks why; they magically reappear. Fancy that! Updated A government legal aid eligibility checker has been without Javascript and CSS for a fortnight, sources told The Register – causing a visible dip in the number of people using the service.…

Member of vDos booter 'taken advantage of' by vDos crew Brit teen Jack Chappell has avoided being sent to prison after pleading guilty to helping launch DDoS attacks against NatWest, Amazon and Netflix, among others.…

Don't expect the adpocalypse From February 15, Google's Chrome browser will begin zapping ads that don't conform with new taste guidelines. But what those guidelines mean exactly is anyone's guess.…

When IP address resolution cock-ups = cuffing wrong people The UK's public authorities slurped up more than 750,000 items of communications data during 2016, with more than 1,000 reported errors – of which 29 were deemed serious.…

Biz is DRAM happy for now – though 3D XPoint not as perky Memory and flash maker Micron posted great quarterly results following booming demand for its mobile, server and SSD products – a sign of what it is hoping is an enduring market change.…

Fined £11k and banished from Chartered Accountants facilities A former financial controller for Tech Data faces a rap on the knuckles and the temporary exclusion from the Chartered Accountants golf club* after admitting his role in a costly number-crunching scandal.…

Installer merely redirected to the official source Microsoft has bounced a Google Chrome Installer out of its Windows Store, just hours after making it available for download.…

While you're at it, let's have some specifics on what you tell police about facial recog tech The UK government has been told to get its act together and explain why its biometrics strategy still hasn't seen the light of day.…

Three says it is 'disappointed' and plans to appeal Ofcom has seen off a legal challenge to its spectrum auction by BT's EE and Three today.…