The Register

Push to boost supplier diversity after Carillion – but no plans to ditch private sector entirely The UK government has revealed plans to rate outsourcers on "social value", require them to publish KPIs and meet higher cybersecurity standards to tackle the fallout caused by the collapse of Carillion.…

Neil Muller leaves corner office, chairman takes controls again Hot on the heels of the latest acquisitions, Daisy Group CEO Neil Muller has told employees he is exiting as the business, which had been in the frame to IPO or sell up, initiates a refinancing deal.…

Big Brother Watch questions legal basis for data retention Campaign group Big Brother Watch has accused HMRC of creating ID cards by stealth after it was revealed the UK taxman has amassed a database of 5.1 million people's voiceprints.…

UK taxman urges tribunal to throw out reseller's appeal Reseller Aria PC's managing director "must have known" that 11 disputed deals his company made a decade ago had a "connection to fraud", an HMRC barrister has told a tax tribunal.…

Overheating data centres, Bing Visual Search, acquisitions – it's the week at Redmond Microsoft had a week of acquisitions, almost-apologies and Azure absenteeism as 2018 ground to its halfway point.…

And for heaven's sake, don't fall in love with the data The Internet of Things is going to solve climate change, fix our political system, and ensure that you can always find a parking spot. Some see a future of 15 billion connected devices.…

Double up or quit, double stake or split – the storage roundup If we've played our cards right, you'll be up to date on the storage goings-on of the week. Otherwise you'll be lost in the shuffle. Here's a hand full of aces, kings and queens – and don't forget the joker.…

Chipzilla offloads devs, support teams and contracts HPC storage supplier DDN has bought Intel's Lustre file system business, including its dev teams and support contracts.…

WTF were they thinking? Review "There will be no HTC U12," the man from HTC told journalists in briefings ahead of the launch of this year's flagship. "And no U12++." Company executives stressed that, for 2018, there would be just one flagship, and the HTC U12+ was it.…

… and we still aren’t accepting EU users A month after the enforcement date of the General Data Protection Regulation – a law that businesses had two years to prepare for – many websites are still locking out users in the European Union as a method of compliance.…

Brief didn't call for two-digit dates. What to blame? Bad brief or lousy testing? Who, me? Welcome again to Monday, and therefore to a new edition of “Who, me?”, The Register’s confessional column in which readers own their errors.…

Dev kit leak seemingly backed by techies' job descriptions Qualcomm is seemingly working on another high-end 64-bit Arm-compatible system-on-chip for Windows 10 PCs – the Snapdragon 1000.…

Power trace sniffing, a badly-designed API and some cloudy AI spell potential trouble A group of researchers has demonstrated that smartphone batteries can offer a side-channel attack vector by revealing what users do with their devices through analysis of power consumption.…

Big Red wants ‘very viable server/cloud platform for Arm’ so adds MySQL, Docker, Java efforts under way too Oracle’s announced that the version of its GNU/Linux for Arm processors is now generally available and signalled its intentions to help “build out a very viable server/cloud platform for Arm.”…

This matters because right now there's no formal structure, which makes things tenuous The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken another step on its road to independence, publishing a for-discussion proposal covering its likely administrative arrangements.…

Early data reveals most users run a single CPU, 4GB of RAM, one 1080P monitor Ubuntu has reported on data collected using the new user-profiling “feature” in version 18.04 of its GNU/Linux distribution.…

Carrier will still control customers and offer colo services in 29 bit barns AT&T has followed the emerging trend of carriers getting out of the data centre infrastructure business by offloading 31 colocation assets to Brookfield Infrastructure for US$1.1 billion.…

And get their timing right so that fixes aren't features Linus Torvalds has given the Linux kernel development community a bit of a touch-up, after finding some contributions to Linux 4.18 complicated the kernel development process.…

And do some pretty basic security hygiene before then The Reserve Bank of India has given that country's banking sector a hard deadline to get Windows XP out of its ATMs: June 2019.…

Aruba gets the SD-WAN bug, Huawei patches slowly and so much more Roundup Nokia has claimed a first by demonstrating a cloud-based radio access network (RAN) running on an operational carrier network.…

Including: Microsoft hoovers up Bonsai startup Roundup Hi, here are a few announcements in the AI world from this week. Read on to find out what's happening with PyTorch, which startup Microsoft just bought, and who won OpenAI's Sonic challenge.…

Had the board just had enough of Krzanich? Comment The sudden and shocking resignation of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich this week over a long-ago affair with a subordinate – banned under company rules – has led to much mirth among Register readers.…

Plus: Crypto-cash and keeping up with McAfee Roundup This week you had to deal with AI security panic, fake Fortnite, and, if you use OpenBSD, the end of Intel HyperThread support…

FYI: This article was typed o a roken Apple quirky keyoard – ad it loody well shows Apple has finally admitted the utterfly-mechanism keyoards in its Macook ad Macook Pro laptops are diaolical, and has offered free repairs and replacemets.…

Microsoft data center went sideways this week for hours with cooling issue Amid forecasts of heat and fears of water shortage in Ireland on Monday, Microsoft was about to confront a drought of a different kind: an Azure service outage.…

How to extract 256-bit signing keys with 99.8% success Intel has, for now, no plans to specifically address a side-channel vulnerability in its processors that can be potentially exploited by malware to extract encryption keys and other sensitive info from applications.…

HAL 9000 is here – and it's plugged into your HR system It was only a matter of time before the machines started fighting back. And let's be honest, we all knew the software engineers would be the first to fall.…

HAL 9000 is here and he's plugged into your HR system It was only a matter of time before the machines started fighting back. And let's be honest, we all knew the software engineers would be the first to fall.…

Clients of online abuse-fighting upstart cry foul over being 'royally screwed' Updated Twitter, known for its rather rocky relationship with developers, cemented its reputation for missteps on Thursday – by announcing the acquisition of content cleansing and security biz Smyte and almost immediately disconnecting the firm's existing customers.…

Brit booze barons worry they will have to go carbon dry-oxide A carbon-dioxide shortage in Blighty may rid bars and pubs of that fizzy nonsense taking up the tap space of proper cask beer. [Oy! Some of us like a good lager – ed.]…

A digital era defining decision In a decision that will define privacy in the digital age, the US Supreme Court decided 5-4 on Friday that the government needs a warrant to access its citizens' mobile phone location data.…

We wanted actual C-suiters, growls EU committee Facebook has once again irked EU politicos by failing to send sufficiently senior staffers to face another grilling on the data-harvesting saga.…

Strong showing for that and services in Q1 '19 results BlackBerry's Q1 FY19 revenues are down 9 per cent year-on-year, though nearly 90 per cent of that came from software and services sales.…

No claps for you: Marketing director slams condom ad An ad campaign branding Norway the "Land of Chlamydia" has been slapped down by tourist bosses.…

Rather than break up Google, can we try owning our data? Interview Competition watchdogs need to move faster and consider the bigger picture to deal effectively with transnational tech behemoths like Google, says BT's former chief lawyer.…

Wot? No Lightning? Apple prompted complaints when it removed the 3.5mm audio port from iPhones in 2016. Expect future models to be even more radical.…

Letter to Bezos: 'We refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights' Amazon workers have reportedly called on their bosses to stop selling facial recognition kit to cops and spies, and slammed its links to data analytics biz Palantir.…

Reports say she was watching reality TV at time of fatal impact A woman in the driving seat of an autonomous Uber that hit and killed a pedestrian was likely streaming an episode of telly show The Voice on her phone immediately before the collision, according to reports.…

But customers believe days of problems go deeper than that Updated Sainsbury's Bank has insisted to The Register that it is not experiencing an IT outage, despite lots of enraged customers asking why their money isn't moving.…

And don't even ask about Brexit The UK government doesn't know what science and tech skills the economy needs or how Brexit will affect firms' ability to recruit staff, MPs have warned.…

Join tech luminaries and Jenny Agutter for a night on the tiles The Register is partnering with Byte Night, the annual tech-heavy sleepout fundraiser for Action for Children, the UK charity which has been caring and sticking up for vulnerable young people for 150 years.…

Tel Aviv treated to Brucey's bonus views Israel Cyber Week With insecure computers in charge, the healthcare and transportation sectors have become a nexus of security problems, infosec veteran Bruce Schneier warned delegates at Israel Cyber Week.…

Study of Americans shows light drinking is still better than none A major study of Americans has punched another hole in the official British government medical advice that there's no "safe level" of drinking.…

But for real, this kit is great for fooling kids into liking STEM There's a scene in Showtime's Billions where a forward-thinking hedge fund manager is interviewing prospective quantitative analysts and gives them a flat-packed cardboard box. The candidates come and go until one finally correctly supposes that the box is impossible to put together, and recognition of this apparently shows the ability to "think outside the box".…

Blockchain might actually prove helpful for a change In an effort to demonstrate there are actual uses for blockchain technology, global professional services biz EY and Microsoft have teamed up to offer companies a way to manage rights and royalties.…

He was young, eager to please and forgot that size matters On-Call Thank the Valar it’s Friday, because that means the weekend beckons and a new instalment of On-Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support tangles.…

Researchers confirm hardware vulnerable to remote attacks Security researchers say they can back up a mother's claim that her baby monitor had been remotely hacked and used to spy on her family.…

Q1 2019 beat guidance, but FY 19 forecasts were cut and investors bit back Red Hat has posted a fine set of results for the first quarter of its 2019 financial year, but offered reduced guidance for the rest of the year and been punished by investors as a result.…

Which is just what you’d do if you planned to compete with Microsoft, perhaps? Earlier this week we reported that Amazon Web Services appears to be planning the launch of a new end-user computing service that we speculated could be a competitor for Office 365.…

Prepare for audit after inevitable change, says Oracle licensing consultant POLL Oracle’s put a price on Java SE and support: US$25/server/month and $2.50/user/month on the desktop, or less if you buy lots for a long time.…